Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “What?” Julie and Carr said the word simultaneously.

  “You, Mrs. Hayes. You became the focus of that lot’s hope for survival.”

  FORTY-TWO

  “YOU WERE MADE SECURE—a room where you were bound to stay the night,” the Special Branch man want on. “That seems important to me. Then he went out and placed his New York call. It would be very useful to know if the contents of his report to Kevin Bourke differed from those he had made previously. Is it possible, Mrs. Hayes, for you to be in touch with your benefactor?”

  “No!” Julie cried before he could go further. “I cannot and I will not.”

  “I’m not sure about the cannot.” Costello said, “although if the circumstances had been slightly altered, that might well have been the case. I suspect that when the ONI broke him down that night, they discovered you the perfect kidnap subject. Let’s look at our ‘givens’: the ONI are desperate for funds, indeed desperate on all counts. You are a columnist for a well-known New York newspaper. The first thing you do, arriving in Sligo, is visit the relative of a famous American actor. More notoriety. You are under the security care of a man whom the ONI may have themselves hand-picked for the assignment. In any case they took his own log of the case from him. Some among them likely knew the power and the wealth, if not the name, of Sweets Romano. If he was willing to pay so well for your protection, would he not pay a king’s ransom for you?”

  “I don’t know,” Julie said. “Maybe not. Inspector, let’s say you’re right on all counts. Why didn’t it come off? Why wasn’t I kidnapped?”

  “That’s the question of the moment, certainly,” Costello said. “I would hazard a guess that they had to get in touch with their commandant. They may have been instructed to await a better place, a better time.”

  “Or would they have found out my real mission in Ireland, looking for someone they knew as Aengus?”

  “That’s a possibility, but I doubt it. Aengus was IRA. It’s true, this lot is a breakaway from the Provos, but they are young and hard, and they identify with international terrorism. The only dead heroes they honor are those they can avenge: I’ve heard that was said of them in the meeting before Roger Casey’s funeral.”

  “Do you know who said it?”

  “I do. Joseph Quinlan. Which has its own touch of irony; if you remember, he closed his oration with Padraic Pierce’s famous rally cry of 1915 at the grave of O’Donovan Rossa. How does it go? ‘… The fools, the fools—they have left us our Fenian dead …’”

  Sergeant Carr said the rest with him: “‘… And while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’”

  The two men were looking at each other across the table. It was a fleeting instant, but in it Julie sensed the sorrow of men who identified with the cause and despised its most passionate advocates.

  They were all silent and thoughtful until Sergeant Carr said, “In your scheme of things, Inspector, could Donavan have had in mind to warn or protect Mrs. Hayes? Might he have gone to her room for that purpose?”

  “In that case his captors would have first had to release him. They had but two options if the kidnap plan was to go forward: they had to kill him or take him with them.”

  “The plan didn’t go forward, and they killed him anyway,” Julie said.

  “And tore into three parts a play by Seamus McNally to make sure it was known that they had been there.”

  “My God!” Julie said. “Is the cave where Seamus and I—could they have taken it over? Could I have gone on my own to the very place they might have hidden me?”

  “I have been waiting for you to make that suggestion, Mrs. Hayes,” the Special Branch man said. “It is a distinct possibility.”

  FORTY-THREE

  “HERE I WAS THINKING to be trussed up like a Christmas goose,” Seamus said, “and they’re not even feeding me from the bottle anymore. I feel like a fool. ‘Let me pass out in the backseat’: did I say that?”

  Julie grinned and nodded.

  “And all I’ve got is a hairline fracture in the vicinity of where I’d have a tail if they hadn’t cut it off some billion years ago. Did you go to the Gardai?”

  “Yes, and then last night men from the Special Branch and the Murder Team came to me.”

  It was getting on toward noon when she finished telling him everything there was to tell, this time holding back nothing, but touching very lightly on Costello’s theory of a kidnap plan.

  What exercised McNally most was the presence in Ireland of Kincaid. “You could have told me you saw the bastard that night,” he said when she was done. “It would have saved me some frivolous thoughts about why you’d changed your mind about you and me.”

  “Something very interesting, Seamus: the police last night didn’t ask me a single question about them after they learned Joseph Quinlan was their lawyer. I think they’re counting on him to take them out as quietly as he brought them in.”

  He gave a grunt of pain as he tried to change positions. Then: “Doesn’t it make you feel you’ve been had in some way?”

  “Yeah,” she snapped.

  “Ah, love, I don’t mean that way: I was thinking of the tender care the justice system lavishes on monsters.”

  “It’s better this way. I want them safe until their trial. I just don’t want to have to see them until then. When can you go home?”

  “Tomorrow if I let them convey me in something called an ambulette.”

  “They don’t trust me to drive you!” Julie cried.

  “It’s the car they don’t trust. Will you take it in hand and follow the ambulette? What an obscene word. It sounds American.”

  Julie laughed.

  Then he said earnestly, “You didn’t take seriously the idea of their trying to kidnap you?”

  “I think the danger of that is past—if it ever existed. There’s been plenty of opportunity, here in Donegal—in Ballymahon.”

  “Does Special Branch actually think the cave was taken over by the ONI?”

  “They’ll try to find out in the cave this morning.”

  “Ach, that’ll be the last you or I ever hear of it,” Seamus said. “But then, it might have been the last ever heard of us, come to think of it. A bloody round-robin, isn’t it?”

  “Seamus, could I borrow the Nissan this afternoon? I want to go to Rossnowlagh. Is that how you say it?” She had stumbled over the word.

  “The friary?” He gave the name Rossnowlagh its Gaelic pronunciation. “It’s desolate in winter, rough winds now, but grand in summer. Lovely gardens, and a glorious view of the ocean and the strand.”

  “I’ve had that,” Julie said. “It was a priest from there who went to Ballymahon and said Mass for my father when he disappeared.”

  “You like saying the words my father, don’t you?”

  Julie nodded.

  “Take the car and come back safe. I’ll need the both of you.”

  AS SEAMUS HAD FORETOLD, she found the Franciscan friary high on a windswept plateau overlooking the Atlantic. The gnarled trees along the entrance drive bent away from the sea like old rheumatics.

  A Brother Charles came to talk with her, both of them sitting in a back pew of the very modern, very chilly chapel. In his brown robe and with bare, sandaled feet, tonsured, he looked out of place—or time—but in manner he was at ease with her. A young face, yet deeply creased, weathered. His cheeks were very red. “It would be Father Daniel, if he said Mass, and if as you say he was tubercular, he’d likely have come from a city—Dublin or Derry or Belfast—where they still make room for the old diseases. I was in Derry last winter and I couldn’t hear my own voice at the altar for the hacking and coughing in the congregation. I could smell the sickness. It was called consumption in my mother’s time, and I grew up with the strains of it still running through the family.

  “We’re chiefly a convalescent home here for overextended Franciscans,” he went on with a smile that creased his whole face. “We send an occasional parish su
bstitute, if called upon. Even Ireland is running short of priests these days. Now I do remember Father Daniel O’Meara. I knew if I talked on, it would come to me. Very devious the ways of the mind: if you wait for a thought, it may never come, and if you run on without it, there’s a good chance it’ll catch up with you.

  “Father Daniel was a fine man and a great teacher, but it was said of him by the higher-ups that he was more political than Holy Orders required of him. And when he developed the trouble in his chest, they were glad to pasture him in the clear air of Rossnowlagh. And if the truth be told, he wasn’t a day past recovery when the directors here cheerfully shipped him back to Dublin.”

  “Adam and Eve?” Julie said.

  “Saint Mary’s. Aye, that’s Adam and Eve.”

  “That’s where my father went to school.”

  “To Daniel O’Meara, I shouldn’t wonder. He’s getting on—if he’s still alive, and I think he is. And you’re wanting to know if your father is still alive. What was it again Father Daniel was supposed to have said?”

  “That he might have beached the boat himself and vanished.”

  “And you’re wanting to know why he said it?”

  Julie nodded.

  “The best I can suggest, then, is that when you’re in Dublin, you go and ask him yourself.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  THE CAR SPED PAST HER as she followed the ambulette at a safe distance. They were all going north on the main highway and had reached midway in the ascent to the bridge over Barnsmore Gap. The Blue Stack Mountains were falling out of sight, blurring in the rearview mirror. She paid little attention to the speeding car: the ambulette driver had set a leisurely pace. She was turning phrases in her mind that might freshly describe the wild beauty around her. Stay simple, Jeff would say, let the event set the scene for you. She could do with fewer events. Or could she? If the reporting of events was to be her business. From items to events: could she make a transition? Her father had tried to write, tried and tried. The afternoon Edna O’Shea left her with his notebooks, she had closed them after numerous attempts to read a few pages consecutively, not wanting the sadness of it. Or afraid of contagion? Or of claiming an inherited disability by way of escape? Escape to what? Back to items? And were items so bad? Some of the best writers were gossipmongers. It became the stuff of fiction. Come on, Julie: it is fiction.

  The ambulette braked suddenly, and Julie slammed her foot on the Nissan’s pedal. The shoulder belt sawed at her neck. She stopped within a couple of feet of the forward vehicle. It picked up speed again. Ahead of it the same car that had passed her raced over the hill and out of sight. She was fairly sure it was the same car. It would have pulled to the side of the road and then, as the ambulette was about to pass, darted out again. From then on she left more space between her and the hospital vehicle. It was some three miles on, well past the Gap, that the ambulette disappeared from her sight around a curve. She started to speed up and came near to colliding with a car that shot out from behind a thicket and drove parallel within inches of sideswiping her. When she accelerated, so did the other car. Two men. Then she saw that they were masked, the driver hunched over the wheel, peering ahead. The one nearest her, in the passenger seat, rolled down the window and motioned for her to pull off the road. She tried to pick up speed; then she thought to pull toward the shoulder and veer back at them, but they wouldn’t give any space between the cars. She clung to the road. An oncoming car gave her hope, but the driver blasted his horn and swerved off to avoid the car driving in tandem with her. Surely he’d stop or give an alarm? Wouldn’t the masks be noticed? The tandem car edged closer until contact occurred; they bounced apart; the steering wheel shimmied in her grasp, and she careened toward another smack. When it came, the other car slightly ahead, Julie gave way and jolted off the pavement. The Nissan struck the guard rail. The motor died, and the car bucked to a halt. The attack car stopped long enough to discharge the passenger, then streaked ahead and U-turned. Julie just managed to lock the door. She put her foot on the starter. The motor didn’t catch. The man pulled at the door handle, then pounded on the window. He would soon find something to smash it with. But what he did was pull off the mask and shout at her, “We’re not going to hurt you! I swear to God!”

  Kincaid.

  She trod again on the starter: a grinding whirr. Even as the other car crossed the road and parked in front, bumper to bumper. There was no sign of the ambulette. It had not turned back. Seamus would not have seen what happened. She had watched them strap him into place before they left the hospital. Julie reached across to lock the other door, but the shoulder belt delayed her until the man yanked open the door, pulled off his mask and climbed in beside her. Donahue.

  “Unlock your door or he’ll smash it in. We’re not going to hurt you.”

  “Go to hell,” Julie said and again trod on the starter. Again a futile whirr. And how far would she go with him beside her? A car approached. Donahue grabbed her hand when she was about to lean it on the horn. Kincaid waved at the passing car in neighborly fashion.

  Donahue thrust himself across her and flicked open the door lock. There was something sickeningly familiar in the unwashed smell of him. His lank, dark hair fell in a clump across his forehead like a dead mouse. “For Christ’s sake, Frankie, open the door. Can’t you do anything for yourself?”

  Kincaid opened the door and started talking at once. “All we want is to tell you something. We never wanted to hurt you,” Kincaid pleaded. “Never.” He was sweating, and yet the wind was cold. He was still running scared, Julie realized, quite as wildly as he had been the night she saw him at the Wolfe Tones concert.

  And he spoke the truth, small honor to them. Poor old Missy Glass was meant to be their prey. She could not look at either of them, but her panic fell away. “What do you want to say to me?”

  “Not here. A place people won’t be gaping at us. And where they won’t be coming back right away to look for you.”

  “Where?”

  Donahue gave an order: “Bring the Ford, Frankie. I’ll turn this job around for her.” To Julie: “It’s not far. You can even phone your friend on the way and tell him what happened. I swear you’ll be all right.”

  Kincaid added, “I swear it, too. I want you to see my mother when you get home.”

  Oh, God. Julie glanced at Kincaid and thought of how he resembled a Cabbage Patch Doll—he who had played ticktacktoe on her naked body with his switchblade. She turned her head to look full at him: watery eyes, a slithering tongue over wet lips, and a growth of beard to match the new red crop on the top of his head. She could taste her loathing. “And if I won’t go with you?”

  “Christian charity: that’s all we’re asking of you.”

  “No kidding.” Then: “If you can start the car for me, Mr. Donahue, okay. But I’m going to drive.”

  There was no conversation between them, only his directions and not many of them, for the dirt road was crossed but once, with a public house, the Fox and the Hart, at the intersection. She declined the offer of a phone call from there. She did not want to enter the building, to give Seamus’s number aloud, to advertise her vulnerability.

  The cottage, some twenty miles’ drive from where they had left the highway, was thatched, newly whitewashed, and had but one door and two windows. Fire, the smoke wafting around it, glowed in the hearth like a red, rheumy eye. A very old woman was ladling water from a bucket into the kettle when they entered. Nothing was said to or by her. She had grown small in age, Julie thought. Kincaid explained that she did not speak English. A clothesline, hung with blankets, separated the room into two parts. The cottage would be where Kincaid and Donahue had been hidden away in Ireland. It smelled of smoke and damp clothes and human rot. Smoke-filtered sunlight shone through the front window. Donahue led the way to a scarred porcelain-topped table, around which were three crude chairs. He parted the heavy curtains over the back window, and the light seemed to focus attention on a bunch of artificial flowe
rs in a jug in the center of the table. “I bought her them when I was in Sligo,” Kincaid said.

  The sensitive type. Julie said nothing.

  The old woman shuffled to the fireplace with the kettle. There was an alcove alongside the fireplace and in it a bed. When the old one had hung the kettle on the bracket, she proceeded to the alcove, climbed up on the bed, and drew a curtain across to close herself in.

  “My God,” Julie said, “won’t she suffocate?”

  Kincaid said, “She goes in there all the time. Unless she’s sitting on the stool poking the fire and rocking and crying. Sometimes it gets weird, like she was trying to freak us out. She doesn’t mean nothing by it, but Jim and me, we sing when she starts in. We must’ve sung every song we ever heard—lullabyes, country, ‘Yankee Doodle,’ ‘God Bless America,’ oh boy, you better believe it. But she ain’t violent or anything, and we take good care of her. Jerry Devlin—he’s our …”

  When Kincaid paused, not having the word he wanted, Donahue provided one: “Our keeper.”

  “Anyway, he bought her a transistor radio once, you know? And what did she do with it? She took it outside and dug a hole and buried it. She wouldn’t believe it wasn’t a bomb.” He seemed unable to stop talking.

  Julie got her question in while he drew a deep breath. “Are you going to tell me what you want from me?”

  Both men were silent then. They looked from her to each other and then down. They were sitting, their shoulders sloped, their hands out of sight beneath the table. Kincaid’s were fidgeting: she could hear them rasping against one another, then she heard the wheeze of the old woman’s breathing behind the curtain. Shoes and all in there, Julie thought. Finally Donahue said, “You came looking for us, right?”