A Winter of Spies

by Gerard Whelan

  ‘Connolly was talking about the men who’d missed the fight,’ Collins said. ‘About the ones that poverty had forced into a foreign army, to go and fight a foreign war, to keep their families from starving in front of their eyes. Some of the bravest of men had gone, he said – the ones who’d be most missed in the Rising. And your Da’s was the first name he named. The first of the brave.’

  Sarah could feel her chest swelling with pride. Collins looked back up at Da.

  ‘Oddly enough,’ he said, ‘this very night I heard someone else talking about your bravery. Only it was no trade-union man. Far from it. You won a medal in the war, didn’t you?’

  ‘A lot of men won medals,’ Da said. ‘I came home with me arms and me legs and me eyes. That’s worth more nor any bit of tin. They were giving them out fairly easy by the end, anyway. All you had to do was stay alive long enough and you were nearly bound to get something.’

  Collins shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘From what I hear, you did a bit more than that.’

  ‘Mick …’ Da began. There was a knock on the door. Collins held up a hand.

  ‘Whisht,’ he said. ‘I think this is someone who wants to meet you, James.’

  ‘To meet me?’ Da said, but Collins ignored him.

  ‘Come in,’ he called out instead. The door opened. Harry Harte, Tommy’s Da, looked in. Sarah had seen him sometimes with Tommy in the street. Harry Harte was a clerk. Sarah had had no idea that he was still involved in the fight.

  ‘All right to bring him in, Mick?’ Harry Harte asked. Collins nodded. Harte withdrew and a man walked in. Sarah felt as though the ground had opened under her feet. She heard Da gasp beside her. She herself nearly fainted with shock. It was Mr Rory Moore.

  Moore smiled almost shyly at Da. ‘How are you, Private Conway?’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’

  13

  OLD SOLDIERS

  ‘CAPTAIN GRACE!’ DA SAID.

  The man Sarah knew as Moore held up a warning hand. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘My name these days is Moore.’

  ‘Moore? But not …’

  ‘Your new neighbour. I’m afraid so.’

  Da was silent. He looked from Moore to Collins and back again. Collins gave a delighted little laugh. It was such an unexpected sound that Sarah stared at him.

  ‘The look on your face, James, is priceless,’ Collins said. Catching Sarah’s look, he winked at her again. ‘Close your mouth, girl,’ he grinned. ‘You’re too pretty to look so foolish.’

  Sarah hadn’t even noticed that her mouth was hanging open. She closed it with a snap. She was feeling giddy. What was going on?

  Collins stood up and rubbed his hands, obviously relishing a joke that Sarah simply didn’t get.

  Da seemed as confused as Sarah. She’d never seen him look so mixed-up.

  ‘But why …?’ he said. ‘What?’ He gestured feebly to-words Moore or Grace or whatever the man’s name was.

  ‘James,’ Collins said, ‘this is Mr Rory Moore of British Intelligence. He’s in Dublin to elicit information which will lead – among other things – to my capture.’

  ‘Or death,’ Moore said in a conversational tone.

  ‘It’s much of a muchness,’ Collins said blithely.

  Death, death, death, Sarah thought. Was that what this always came down to?

  ‘Mr Moore,’ Collins said, ‘is spying on people suspected of having contacts with my intelligence network. To be specific, James, he and his partner are spying on your household.’

  ‘Well!’ Da said. He sounded suddenly almost relieved. Moore was looking at him in a peculiar way. There was something like amusement in his eyes. Sarah didn’t understand any of this.

  ‘Mr Moore,’ Collins said, ‘young Sarah here looks flabbergasted. Could you explain?’

  Moore nodded at Sarah. ‘Hello again, Sarah,’ he said. ‘Have you recovered yet from Mrs Breen’s hospitality?’

  ‘I … I’m nearly used to it by now,’ Sarah said. She could think of nothing more sensible to say.

  ‘Sarah,’ Moore said, ‘you know your father won a medal in the war, don’t you?’

  ‘For conspicuous gallantry,’ said Sarah, who’d often read the citation in the box. Da kept his old medal safe, though he never wore it. ‘He saved his comrades and his commanding officer by destroying a German machine-gun which had them pinned down …’ She stammered. ‘Or something like that,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember it all. The language is very fancy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Moore said. ‘It does tend to be fancy in those things. But there was nothing fancy about the situation. The Germans had the squad cornered, all right. They were on the spot and no mistake. If it hadn’t been for your father not a man would have come out of there alive.’

  ‘Not many came out anyway,’ Da said.

  ‘No,’ Moore said. ‘They didn’t. But there’s a big difference between not many and none.’

  ‘Not if you’re one of the dead ones,’ Da said.

  ‘No, but the fact that any lived at all was due to you, James. And you know, Sarah, after your father finished off that machine-gun, things turned to hand-to-hand fighting – the ugliest fighting of all. Your father’s captain was being carved up by two German bayonets at the bottom of a trench – six bayonet wounds he had. And then along came your father, wounded twice himself, and rescued him.’

  ‘Them were no-good times,’ Da said.

  ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ said Sarah. ‘What are you telling me?’

  Moore tapped his own chest. ‘That was me, Sarah,’ he said. ‘The captain. I still have the bayonet scars. Your father saved my life. I’m the one put him in for that medal.’

  There was silence in the room, and then Collins laughed again.

  ‘Oh it’s rich!’ he said. ‘Rich!’

  ‘I’ve stayed too long,’ Moore said. ‘I’ve had an interesting chat with Mr Collins, but I really wanted to say hello to you, James. To let you know personally how things stand.’

  ‘And how exactly is that?’ Da demanded. His voice was a mixture of pleasure and suspicion.

  ‘Basically,’ Moore said, ‘my masters have done a very stupid thing. Do you really think I’m likely to find any evidence that will implicate you in anything?’

  ‘That depends,’ Da said. ‘They don’t need much by way of evidence these days to kill a man. And it’s easy enough to produce any evidence you like when you have a man in custody. Most men will confess to anything, faced with a hot poker.’

  ‘Indeed they will. And it’s unspeakable that such things should be going on in my own country.’

  ‘It’s not your country,’ Collins snapped. ‘And it’s unspeakable that such things should be going on anywhere.’

  Moore looked at him and shrugged. ‘Maybe so, Mr Collins,’ he said. ‘At any rate it isn’t me that James needs to worry about. It’s Fowles.’

  ‘You keep faith with me, Mr Moore, and James will have no worries on that score either,’ Collins replied.

  The two men looked at each other in silence. It was as though they’d forgotten that Da and Sarah were in the room.

  ‘I’ll keep my word,’ Moore said then. ‘I always do once I’ve given it.’

  ‘An unusual man, so,’ Collins said.

  ‘An unusual Englishman, do you mean?’

  ‘I meant no slur on Englishmen. I lived in England for a long time, you know. Every country has its dirt, and you’ll find as much of it at the top as in the sewer. I only meant that men who keep their word are a rarity.’

  Da said nothing. Moore and Collins looked in silence at each other for another while. Then Moore nodded and turned to Da.

  ‘I’ll look out for you as best I can, James,’ he said. ‘They trust me, you know. I’ve done good work for them before, in other places. But be careful. That man Fowles is very dangerous.’

  Sarah thought about the cold face she’d seen standing over the dying policeman tonight. Her family seemed to have lost one enemy now,
and found, in however strange a way, a friend. But their troubles weren’t over.

  Moore held a hand out to Da. ‘It’s good to see you again, James,’ he said. ‘Will you shake hands with me?’

  Da didn’t hesitate. ‘I will, and gladly,’ he said, taking Moore’s hand.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said to his old captain, ‘there are times I think we had it better in the trenches. It was a more honest class of a war.’

  ‘It was someone else’s war,’ Collins said. ‘This one is ours.’

  Da gave a rueful little laugh. ‘Oh aye,’ he said. ‘Just what I always wanted – a war of our very own.’

  Rory Moore left. Collins saw him partway down the stairs. When he came back he said to Da: ‘Well?’

  Da looked closely at him. ‘Is Grace – I mean Moore … is he one of your men?’ he asked.

  ‘No. He said he came here to warn me.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the danger to you from this man Fowles.’

  ‘How did he find you?’

  ‘He asked around. I heard he was asking, and I was curious.’

  ‘Curiosity will be the death of you, Mick. What does he say about Fowles?’

  ‘According to Moore, Fowles was doing intelligence work in Egypt for years, but he was sent from there for excessive behaviour – which is saying a lot. Moore says he’s a madman. Literally. He’s been on at Moore to raid your house and arrest you and Mick and your boy.’

  ‘Jimmy? Sure Jimmy have nothing to do with this!’

  Collins said nothing, just looked at him. Da sighed. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I should know better nor to think that matters. But he’s only seventeen.’

  ‘Kevin Barry was only eighteen when they hanged him, James. Hugh Byrne is only twenty. Would you trust Moore?’

  ‘I don’t know. I done him some good in my time.’

  ‘Well, he says Fowles is fed up waiting. He wants to arrest you, and then he wants to force you to talk. And then he wants to kill you.’

  Sarah felt her blood grow cold.

  ‘Moore claims that so far he’s been able to hold Fowles off,’ Collins said. ‘But there’s them at the very top who believe in assassination. We all know that. And now Moore thinks Fowles is just out of control. That detective who was killed tonight – his name was Reed. He was from Mullingar. According to Moore he was Fowles’s uncle.’

  ‘Fowles is Irish?’

  ‘He is. They’re the worst, you know – they have more to prove. Anyway Fowles was very close to his uncle, Moore says. He thinks the killing will drive Fowles over the edge – he’s afraid he’ll be after you, orders or no orders.’

  Da looked at the floor. He thought for a while. Sarah saw beads of sweat form on his forehead. What he said then almost made her burst out crying.

  ‘In that case,’ Da said to Michael Collins, ‘I suppose you’d better find me a gun.’

  14

  COGS AND WHEELS

  SARAH COULD NEVER REMEMBER much about their walk home that night. She was so locked in her own thoughts that she could have been struck by lightning and not noticed. She was thinking about things she’d never thought of before – big things, with capital letters, like Death, and Freedom, and Honour.

  Death was the main thing. They might all speak of freedom and honour, but what it seemed to come down to in the end was always death. She could feel Da’s arm enclosing hers as she walked along saying the word to herself under her breath: ‘Death.’ She realised that death had never been real to her before. It had only been a sort of idea. Now the word had a new and deeper sound when she said it. It was no longer so easy to say. Before this it had only been a word. Now it was a spray of bright red blood, fountaining out of a man’s neck, from a hole put there by someone she’d sat and talked with.

  Sarah had been to a wake once. The corpse was an old woman. She’d died in her sleep. They’d washed her and fixed her hair. She lay in her coffin, pale but almost smiling, her hair neatly combed and two copper pennies on her eyes. Her shroud was clean and white and smelled of starch. Her old hands had held a pair of rosary beads. It hadn’t exactly looked like fun being dead, but at least it had looked peaceful. But death wasn’t that. That spray of blood, that was death.

  There’d been plenty of dead in Dublin after the 1916 Rising, of course. But Sarah hadn’t seen any of them – they’d been cleared up very quickly. She’d seen the ruins of Sackville Street, but that was different. Buildings were only stones. A bullet hole in a building didn’t bleed. Even as she felt Da’s arm cosily enclosing hers, Sarah realised that at the end of that arm, nestled now in the pocket of Da’s overcoat, was a hand that had held a rifle. Held it and fired it, because that had been his job. Fired it at buildings, and fired it at people. Foreigners, of course, but still people.

  She wondered whether Michael Collins had ever killed. She thought of people she knew who most certainly had – Mick said he’d killed a man. Mr Doyle in Ringsend had been out in the Rising too – he’d probably shot at people. Hugh Byrne had no doubt killed several before this evening. Martin Ford and nice Simon Hughes had killed too; and Mr Moore, she didn’t doubt.

  Thinking of Moore made her think again of Da, who’d ‘finished off’ a machine-gun nest and then no doubt killed the Germans attacking his captain. How many dead men was that? And that was one small attack, in a war Da had fought in for over three years. An enormous war – millions and millions had died. British and Irish and Germans, French and Belgians and Austrians … even the list of countries was endless. So many fountains of blood, so many dead, not to mention the maimed that you saw in the street, the legless and armless, and the men who wore masks to hide the faces they no longer had. The ‘lucky’ ones – the ones who hadn’t died.

  Sarah had seen pictures of the big artillery guns both sides had used in that war. What sort of a hole would things like that put in you? Hole? Why, they’d obliterate you, and everyone around you! And people had been firing guns like that at Da, and his side had been firing such guns back.

  ‘Da?’ she said. But Da was lost in his own thoughts. Collins had refused to give him a pistol. ‘With a gun,’ he’d pointed out, ‘you’ll be a dead man if you’re raided.’

  ‘It sounds like I’ll be a dead man without one,’ Da had said. ‘I can take a few of them with me at least.’

  ‘That’s pride talking. Be practical, James. What about your family? If you start shooting then they’re likely to get shot too. Is your pride worth that?’

  Da had had no answer to that. But he would have felt better with a gun.

  ‘For pity’s sake, man!’ Collins had said. ‘You could be stopped and searched on the way home. You could set off the very thing you want to avoid!’

  Da had had no answer to that either. Sarah had seen Collins’s point, and obviously Da had seen it too. But he was still brooding on it. Sarah had to call him twice more before he answered her.

  ‘What is it, Sal?’

  ‘Do you know how many men you killed in the war?’

  He showed no surprise at the question. He was still distracted. He answered her almost dreamily. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t. I wouldn’t want to. I couldn’t sleep at night if I did. But I never killed anyone who wouldn’t have done the same to me. Sometimes that’s all that does let me sleep.’

  He’d had nightmares for a long time after he came home. He used to wake the whole family up with his shouts and groans. The nightmares – at least those he had in his sleep – had passed. For some ex-soldiers, Sarah had heard, they didn’t. For some they continued both night and day. The war hadn’t just destroyed lives by physical maiming and death – it had left a lot of men mad. Those men hadn’t died either: Sarah supposed they were ‘lucky’ too.

  Yet even after all that, tonight you could see Da was yearning for a pistol, senseless though it would have been. What did men find so comforting about guns? She thought of her brother Jimmy’s attitude to them: there was a badness in them, he said. But a gun was just
a lump of metal, the same way that a poker was. A poker could kill someone too, but it took a human hand to make it do it. It was the same with a gun.

  She said nothing more. They just walked on, preoccupied again by their own thoughts. Sarah was still counting up people she knew who had probably killed. Da knew a lot of old soldiers. She’d always thought of men basically as fathers and brothers, as people who went out and worked in places and came home. But killing was another thing that linked many of the men she knew.

  She pictured the smile she’d seen on Hugh Byrne’s face in Sackville Street. Not the cold smile she knew, but a warm, happy smile. Was that what it took to make him human, then – a murder? Maybe all that killing had driven him funny, like the madmen from the war.

  Sarah felt that a very big thing had happened to her in the past two days, though she had no words to give the thing a name. She’d been a rebel supporter, proud of everything the rebels did. It had all been very simple. Now she’d seen something of the workings of that army and that war, and it wasn’t simple at all. She’d imagined Michael Collins in a uniform at the head of his men, even though she knew that was unrealistic. Instead she’d seen a young businessman in a suit, meeting his men in an upstairs room in a huckster’s shop. This was how this war worked, she realised now: men met in back rooms and made decisions. Other men carried out the decisions. Still others, the objects of the decisions, ended up dead in the street.

  It was all so hidden and furtive – and so deceptive too. Everyone was lying, everyone was something other than what they pretended to be. It was as though almost every adult she knew had been wearing a mask, hiding their true features, like the faceless men left over from the war. Now those masks had slipped, and under them she’d seen their other faces. Da, so publicly against this war, was deeply involved in it. Mick too. Her whole family had lied to her all along – for her own protection, and for theirs, but still they’d lied.