by W. C. Ryan
‘Sean Driscoll was the only person apart from the Prendevilles who knew I was there.’
‘And what time was this?’
‘Two in the morning or so.’
Egan takes a long pull on his cigarette and looks out at a cow that stands, watching them, in the adjoining field.
‘That’s interesting,’ Egan says. ‘Because Sean Driscoll didn’t show up for a meeting with the brigade quartermaster in town last night at ten o’clock. I’m told they found his horse, still with the saddle on, in a field beside the road first thing this morning. Make of that what you will.’
CHAPTER 35
T
here is not much conversation between Harkin and Bourke on the drive back to Kilcolgan. Every now and then Bourke looks across at him and shakes his head, and eventually Harkin can’t ignore the silent reproofs any longer.
‘Leave me at the back gates and head back to Dublin. Egan can look after me if I need to go to ground.’
‘It’s not Egan’s job to look after you, it’s mine. I only wish you’d make it easy for me.’
‘There’s an ironmonger’s in town called Lanigan’s. I’ll tell you what the password is and the man to talk to. You can send a message to GHQ from there. Ask for instructions – for both of us. You’ll have an answer on the morning train. If we’re ordered to leave, we’ll leave.’
‘If we make it to the morning.’
Harkin opens his cigarette case, lights one and hands it to Bourke, then lights another for himself.
‘There are four possibilities, as I see it, for where Driscoll has disappeared to. First, he was lying drunk in a ditch or in someone’s house when they found the horse, and he’s back at Kilcolgan by now.’
‘That’s a possibility I like.’
‘Second, he panicked, maybe because he killed Father Dillon, and has gone on the run. In which case, he isn’t a danger to us. We’re a danger to him.’
‘Go on.’
‘Third, he was picked up by the police. If they know he’s an intelligence officer, things will have gone hard for him, but he’s tougher than he looks. And then again, they may not even have questioned him. He could be sitting in a police cell now, waiting for his cup of tea.’
‘Or be in a bog with a bagful of bullets in him.’
‘Indeed. The fourth possibility is the one I don’t like.’
‘Nor me. If he’s been working with Abercrombie all along then we’re in trouble.’
‘Except that Driscoll knows who I am and I’m still walking around. Do you think, if Driscoll had told him, that Abercrombie wouldn’t have taken me away last night? He may have let Abercrombie know where I was, but he can’t have told him who I was. On top of which, if he did know about the Abercrombie ambush, and told Abercrombie, why was it allowed to go ahead?’
‘Maybe Abercrombie wanted Teevan dead for some reason? Or Maud Prendeville. Or maybe the English fella.’
Harkin looks across at him, but Bourke isn’t being serious. Harkin settles himself into the seat, watching Bourke think the situation through. Eventually the big man nods.
‘All right, then. I’ll take you to your back gate and leave you there, and then I’ll go into town to this place Lanigan’s and send a message through. I warn you, I’m not holding anything back.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to,’ Harkin says.
‘You can be sure I’ll be waiting to meet the morning train to see what he says.’
‘That’s all right with me.’
‘Very good, then. Is there anything else you need me to do?’
Harkin thinks for a moment, then looks across.
‘Your contact is Peter Lanigan. Your password is Excelsior. Ask him if he knows where Sergeant Kelly lives.’
‘Are you joking me?’
‘The chances are he lives in the barracks, but he might still live in the town. He is Mrs Driscoll’s first cousin. I don’t see any reason I shouldn’t visit him, given Driscoll is missing. If he is the source, then we will know where we stand on that, at least.’
‘I’ll ask.’ Bourke’s unhappiness is more than apparent. ‘Afterwards, I’ll be at Mrs Wilson’s and you are to call me if there is even a hint of trouble. Or if you need me to drive you into town.’
‘Thank you, Vincent.’
‘You’re very welcome.’
Harkin’s eyes are heavy and he allows himself to slip forwards so that he can rest his head on the back of the seat. Soon the rhythmic thrum of the engine begins to take effect and he feels sleep dragging him under.
His view of his surroundings is framed by the glass eyepieces of a gas mask, fogged by his own breath, like twin portholes looking out on to a storm-struck sea of mud.
Everything is brown; the ground is brown, pockmarked with ragged holes torn from it by the shells. He looks down at the rifle he is holding. The stock and strap are thick with mud; the bayonet and the strap are caked with it, and he cannot even see the skin of his hands. Everything is the same: the scraps and fragments of abandoned kit and shattered wood; the tangles and twists of barbed wire and metal. Even the dead are brown, almost indistinguishable from the ground into which they slowly sink.
The only sound is the rasp of his breathing through the respirator. He sounds like a steam engine on its last legs. His breath wheezes and sucks and there is an irregular rhythm to it, as though it is about to come to a juddering halt at any moment. He can taste the mud; it must have been inside the mask and now it is in his mouth. Outside the mask there must be noise. He can see the slow fountains where shells are exploding and he watches as a line of small splashes comes towards him – machine-gun bullets losing themselves in the soft mud one after another, stitching a seam across the liquid earth. He knows he cannot avoid them but they stop three feet away and he stumbles past them, tasting his own vomit.
He picks his way forwards, moving from tuft of seemingly solid ground to half-submerged duckboard to sandbag, and onwards. Some of the fog is outside the mask, he realises – a low-lying bank of thick yellow gas about thirty yards ahead of him. Not much of it, though, and it turns slowly in the breeze and the wake of the other men who are advancing through it. Up ahead he can see the flash of the machine gun as it starts up again, and he watches men tumble, one after another, to his left.
And then a hand takes his elbow, shaking him hard, and he hears someone speaking to him urgently.
‘Wake up now. Slowly now. There’s a checkpoint a couple of hundred yards ahead.’
The voice is Bourke’s. Harkin struggles up in his seat, the taste of mud and vomit still in his mouth. He looks across to Bourke, who smiles back at him, fortifying him with his own confidence.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ Harkin says, and hears the thickness in the word. ‘Never better.’
In the distance a line of men stands in front of an armoured car, wearing a jumble sale of military and police uniforms. Auxiliaries. The car moves slowly towards them, Bourke keeping their pace steady.
‘I’ll do the talking,’ Harkin says.
He rolls down the window to turn his head away from the Auxies and spit away the taste of the dream, grateful for the cold haze of misty rain that clings to his face.
Ten yards from the checkpoint, a tall, thin man in the glengarry cap of a Scottish regiment, the red and white check bright above his pale face, holds up his hand to stop them. Harkin leans his elbow out to greet him.
‘Everything all right?’ he says, in his best officer’s drawl, arranging his mouth into a stiff smile.
‘Your papers, please.’ The thin man doesn’t sound Scottish, but then there’s no reason he should. Nearly half the Dublin Fusiliers in the last year of the war had never set foot in Ireland, let alone Dublin.
Harkin hands his papers over and watches as the Auxie examines them carefully, looking up first at Bourke, then at Harkin.
‘Mr Harkin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have business up ahead?’
‘I’m staying wit
h Lord Kilcolgan. I served with his son in France.’
The Auxie looks down at the papers again, and then at Bourke.
‘Is Mr Bourke staying at Kilcolgan House also?’
‘A colleague. I work in insurance these days. He’s staying elsewhere.’
‘Where would that be?’
‘Mrs Wilson’s, out the other side of the town. Is there something the matter?’
‘There’s been some trouble in the town. Nothing to worry about. It’s under control now. Where are you coming from?’
For a moment, Harkin’s mind is blank, then he mentions a town some twenty miles away, the other side of the hills.
‘Did you see anything suspicious on your journey? There is an active column of rebels in the area.’
‘Nothing, I’m afraid. Is this the same group who ambushed Miss Prendeville and Inspector Teevan?’
The Auxie doesn’t reply at first, handing back the papers. He holds up his hand and there is a burst of noise from the armoured car as it reverses with a series of jerks into a gap in the hedge.
‘Yes. Some of them have been dealt with already. It won’t take us long to catch up with those who remain. Have a safe journey.’
Bourke drives slowly forwards and Harkin runs his gaze over the Auxies – men hardened by years of war, with blank faces and dark, fatalistic expressions. They likely weren’t much bothered with taking prisoners in France and he doubts they see much need to change that policy in Ireland.
‘I fucking hate checkpoints,’ Bourke says, when they are through.
Harkin nods. Then a question occurs to him.
‘Do you think Sean Driscoll was one of those they dealt with?’
CHAPTER 36
I
t’s a short walk from Kilcolgan’s back gate, where Bourke drops him off, to the main house, although not one that Harkin has taken since his last visit, over seven years before. Whereas the home meadow and the drive to the front of the house are maintained to some extent, here Kilcolgan’s decline is clearer. As Harkin makes his way past the stables, he finds the cobblestones in the yard are almost invisible under the grass, and many of the doors of the individual stalls stand open or hang from their hinges. The only sign of life is in the corner, where three horses look out at him without much curiosity. They have cleared with their hooves a path that leads out to the arched gate that still supports a rusting bell. He stands beneath it for a moment, looking around him, remembering the crisp whitewash on the walls of the main block before the war, now stained by rain and damp to a pale yellow, darkening to charcoal where the water drips from a broken gutter.
Past the stables, the rows of vegetables in the once neat walled kitchen garden are weed-strewn and barren. The trees of the small orchard are surrounded by the brown husks of rotted fruit. There is an air of desolation about the place.
It is a similar story when he approaches the rear of the house. The walls are slick with damp in places, and the windows ivy-choked and frosted by grime. His feet crunch across the grass-hidden gravel and climb the granite steps that lead to the small stone portico that guards the back door, his footsteps seeming to echo in the silence. When he lifts the knocker, the door opens before his hand; somewhere within, a dog barks.
‘Hello?’ he calls out and, when no one answers, he steps inside the small hallway.
The room smells of damp wool, old leather and salt, and his presence disturbs a mouse that runs out from underneath the skeleton of an umbrella. The room is hung with long-abandoned coats and scarves while the floor swarms with cracked riding boots, stringless tennis rackets, fishing tackle and a shattered box containing an ancient croquet set, the balls so faded by use and age that their colours are mere suggestions.
‘Hello?’ he calls out again.
He walks through to find himself standing at one end of the long hall that runs along the middle of the house. The only light comes from the smudged gallery windows far above, and he makes his way along the hall like a ship proceeding through a fog: pictures, furniture and dead animals looming out at him like landmarks he does not recognise.
‘Tom.’
The voice is quiet, barely a whisper, and he turns to find Billy standing in the doorway to the dining room. He is wearing a tweed jacket, the lapels turned in so that it is buttoned up around a roll neck jumper; his jodhpurs are tucked into mud-flecked riding boots. His pallor gives him the look of a corpse.
‘Sean didn’t come back last night.’
‘So I heard. There’s still no sign of him?’
‘None. A man found his horse in a field near the mountain turn. I’ve ridden every field and lane near it but there’s no sign of him.’
‘Could he have fallen?’
‘He could, but the horse didn’t open the gate to the field itself.’
Harkin reaches out to place an arm on Billy’s shoulder, surprised by how upset his friend is.
‘I’m sure there is an explanation,’ Harkin says.
Billy turns away, taking three or four steps to stand in the middle of the long hall, a pool of light around his feet from the windows high above.
‘I think the Auxiliaries must have taken him.’ Billy looks over his shoulder at Harkin with a hunted expression. ‘To go through the war, all of that, and then to come back to your home . . .’
‘Has he anything to fear from them?’ Harkin chooses his words with precision.
When Billy speaks, it is as much a sigh as a sentence.
‘Jesus, Tom. Of course he does. I’m surprised they haven’t picked him up before.’
Harkin looks at his friend and wonders if his anguish is as much for himself as for Driscoll.
‘Might he have been involved in the ambush, do you think? Is that why they’ve taken him?’
‘The Auxies might think it, but he wasn’t. I know that for a fact. That won’t bother them, though. They snatch a man and that’s the end of it. They’re not from here and they don’t care if they make a mistake or the damage they cause. One of them told me if the fellow they shoot didn’t do the crime they suspect him of, then he likely did another. That all the Irish were disloyal. The thing is, though, Tom. I’m Irish, too.’
‘You’re certain he had nothing to do with it?’ Harkin presses. ‘He would have had time.’
Billy looks at him as though seeing him for the first time. Harkin wonders if he has pushed too hard.
‘I mean, there was time for him to be with the ambushers.’
Billy shakes his head.
‘Your timings are wrong. He couldn’t have shot Maud and nor could he have been present at the ambush. There is no possibility of it. I know where he was before the shooting started and I saw him after.’
‘Where was he?’
Billy gives him another long look and it is difficult to make out what it signifies. Then Billy shakes his head.
‘I saw him leaving his mother’s cottage and I saw him go in as well.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?’
‘You asked me when he came into the house, not whether I saw him before that. Anyway, he grew up with Maud. He has always been a part of the family. He’d never do anything to put any of us at risk. On top of which, he was cute about his involvement. He keeps the IRA away from here. We have never even been raided for guns, and there’s barely another big house for fifty miles can say that.’
Harkin remembers Driscoll’s consciousness of the divide between the family and those that work for them and wonders, if he were desperate, what he might and might not have done. The mathematics of fear – what a man is capable of doing for his own survival – are much clearer to those who have lived with them on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps Billy has forgotten this. The Prendevilles and their kind have always struggled to understand that loyalty springing from economic dependence is not something that survives much testing.
‘Have you telephoned Abercrombie?’ Harkin asks. ‘If he has him, a word from you or your father would surely give him some protectio
n.’
‘We’ve tried. The major is unavailable, or so they say. Mrs Driscoll has a cousin in the station, Sergeant Kelly, and he swore on his mother’s grave they hadn’t Sean, but that means nothing. It will be the Auxiliaries who’ve taken him, if anyone, and they’re accountable to no one but Abercrombie, what with Teevan dead and his replacement not yet arrived. Charlie is trying the army barracks in case they can help, but it’s a long shot.’
‘What about your uncle?’ Harkin asks.
‘He’s on his way over.’
As if summoned by the mention of her name, Charlie emerges from a door further along the hallway.
‘Any luck?’ Billy asks.
‘The captain says it is a police matter and that Abercrombie is unco-operative at the best of times. He’ll see what he can do, however.’
‘A police matter?’ Billy says. ‘And isn’t that the whole problem? Abercrombie and his crew are as bad as the rebels.’
A silence falls. Billy paces back and forth.
‘What about your cousin, Major Vane?’ Harkin asks. ‘Have you called him?’
Charlie shakes her head.
‘He’s in Dublin.’
‘He’d be no use to us anyway,’ Billy says. ‘He only buys horses for the army. He has no influence over the likes of Abercrombie.’
‘That isn’t all he does, Billy.’
Charlie glances at him, a question on her lips. Harkin indicates the door she has just come out of.
‘Call him in Dublin, if you have a number for him. Try the Castle if you haven’t. If they don’t recognise Vane, ask for Mr Tomkins. But they’ll know who he is all right. If anyone can help you, he can.’
Charlie gives him one final look of puzzlement, before turning to follow his instructions. Harkin turns to Billy.
‘Does his mother know he’s missing?’
Billy nods, his puzzlement about Vane still apparent. It’s not, however, the moment to explain how he knows about Vane’s alias.
‘Where is she?’
Harkin follows Billy down the narrow dining room staircase to the kitchen. It is a long, low-beamed room with two wooden tables running most of its length. Like the exterior of the house, it seems largely unused and uncared for, except for the area around the large enamel stove, where Mrs Driscoll sits in a black dress, her face composed, a line of jute buttons rising to a crisp white collar. Murphy the butler sits alongside her, holding a glass of whiskey out in his large, bony hand. It isn’t clear if the whiskey is for Murphy or the housekeeper. Harkin decides, from Murphy’s rosy cheeks and wet eyes, that it is probably the former. When they enter, Mrs Driscoll looks up, her anxiety momentarily apparent, before she composes herself once again, her shoulders stiff and her back straight. Harkin notices how her gaze slides past Billy, as though avoiding him, before coming to a rest on Harkin.
