A Winter of Spies

by Gerard Whelan

  ‘Which is why I’m so surprised,’ he said, ‘to find him in the wars again.’

  ‘So am I,’ Sarah said. She told him how she’d been kept in ignorance about Da’s work for Collins.

  ‘So what made him tell you in the end?’ Moore asked casually. Sarah was going to tell him about her adventure with Simon Hughes’s gun, but something about the way he was looking at her made her hesitate.

  ‘It was when I got suspicious of you,’ she said instead. ‘He had to tell me then.’

  Moore thought about this. It didn’t really make sense, Sarah knew, but somehow she didn’t like the idea of mentioning Simon and his friends.

  ‘Your father is mad to get mixed up in all this,’ Moore said. ‘These men he mixes with are criminals! Killers!’

  ‘What does that make the Tans?’ Sarah asked tartly.

  Moore scowled. ‘If Collins and his cronies hadn’t been assaulting the police,’ he said, ‘then there would have been no need for the Black and Tans at all.’

  ‘They’re not “assaulting the police”,’ Sarah said. ‘They’re fighting a war.’

  Moore laughed scornfully. ‘A war?’ he said. ‘Hiding behind hedges on country roads, taking potshots at soldiers and running away? Sneaking up on men in city alleys and shooting them? That’s not war! That’s anarchy!’

  He led the way over to a park bench and sat down. Sarah sat beside him.

  ‘The British Empire,’ Moore said, ‘is the greatest the world has ever known. Michael Collins can’t defeat it with a handful of young thugs.’

  ‘They’re not doing a bad job so far,’ Sarah said.

  ‘So far the government hasn’t exerted itself.’

  ‘The government hangs people, Mr Moore. Isn’t that “exerting” itself?’

  ‘It hangs traitors and murderers, and long may it do so. If I had my way I’d hang them all.’

  Sarah thought of Kevin Barry, who’d been hanged only weeks ago. She thought of his thin, serious young face in the pictures that had started circulating even before the hanging. Crowds had gathered outside the jail to pray for him, kneeling in the street. People said the British had tortured him for information, but he hadn’t broken.

  ‘Would you hang my Da, Mr Moore?’ she asked softly.

  Moore had been getting excited by his own words. He looked flustered by Sarah’s question.

  ‘Your father is keeping very bad company,’ he said. ‘He’s in great danger. The way Fowles feels now, he’d shoot him out of hand.’

  ‘But Da had nothing to do with that detective getting shot! I’m sure it wasn’t even done on orders!’

  Moore looked at her very sharply. ‘You know about that shooting, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You know who did it.’

  Sarah said nothing. She realised she’d said too much already.

  Moore swore. ‘You really don’t see how serious this is,’ he said. ‘Fowles is a killer, and he’s in the mood to kill someone now. We haven’t been here long enough to know the enemies we’re fighting. But Fowles does know that your father and uncle are under suspicion. He knows suspicious characters come and go in your house. He has a target for his malice, and it’s right next door to where he lives.’

  Sarah felt cold listening to him. Was Da, after all, so innocent of all involvement? Oh, he’d had nothing to do with the death of Fowles’s uncle, but surely the information he carried had led to other deaths.

  ‘Listen to me carefully, Sarah,’ Moore said quietly. ‘When I got back to Ryans’ on Sunday Fowles was sitting looking out the window. He had his pistol on the table in front of him. His pistol and a bottle of whiskey. It’s a bad sign with Fowles when he drinks. It maddens him. I’ve seen him do terrible things when he’s been drinking, things I wouldn’t even repeat to you. That night I asked him why the gun was there. He said he was waiting. I asked what he was waiting for. Do you know what he told me? He said he was waiting to kill someone. I was afraid. I sat with him until we saw the two of you come back. When Fowles saw your father he reached for the pistol. I put my hand on his and stopped him from picking it up. “There’s a child with him,” I said. It was all I could think of.’

  Sarah pictured the scene, the two hands on the pistol. She thought of herself and Da coming home in the rain.

  ‘Do you know what Fowles said to that, Sarah?’ Moore asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He looked up at me with those cold eyes of his. “Cromwell had the right attitude to these people,” he said. “He told his soldiers to kill the children as well as the adults. Nits, he said, bred lice.”’

  Sarah felt icy. She pictured the look on Fowles’s face that night in Sackville Street. She imagined his eyes fixed on herself and Da.

  ‘Help me, Sarah,’ Moore said. ‘Help your father. Tell me who shot Detective Reed.’

  Sarah’s mind churned. What was Hugh Byrne to her? Let him and Fowles settle this between them. They sounded like they were made for one another. She pictured her Da walking home from work some night – maybe tonight. She imagined a shot coming from a window, and a bright red fountain of blood spurting from her father’s neck. She gritted her teeth.

  ‘I know nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing at all.’

  Moore looked exasperated. ‘For your father’s sake,’ he pleaded.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ Sarah said, ‘what I don’t know.’

  Moore still held the branch he’d used to rescue Emily’s doll. He’d been idly twitching twigs off it as they talked. Now, angrily, he snapped the branch in two and threw it on the ground. In the distance little Emily herself could be seen stalking along, her nurse walking behind her with the wet doll still dripping in her hand. Moore nodded towards them.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘That’s Ireland: a spoiled child demanding what it can’t have. There will be no independent Ireland, Sarah. There will only be lonely graves and scaffolds, and men dying by the sides of roads. I can’t understand why a sensible man like your father can’t see that. If he doesn’t see sense, and soon, then one of those graves is going to be his. I’m trying to help him, but he has to help himself. And you have to help him too.’

  ‘I think I’d like to go home now,’ Sarah said. Moore looked at her closely again for a while. Then he nodded.

  17

  HEAVY WEATHER

  MOORE DROPPED SARAH OFF IN FRONT OF HER GATE, saying he had to go into town.

  ‘You’ll think about what I said?’ he asked her.

  ‘How can I help thinking about it?’

  ‘We have to help your father, Sarah, even if it’s in spite of himself.’

  Sarah stood halfway out of the motor car, with one foot on the path. ‘Are you asking me to betray my Da, Mr Moore?’ she asked him coldly.

  ‘I’m asking you to help him – whatever that takes.’

  Sarah closed the car door and walked up the path without saying goodbye. Behind her she heard the car leave. The drive home had had none of the thrill of the ride to the park. Sarah had kept picturing the scene in Ryans’ last night, the two men’s hands on Fowles’s pistol. She stopped for a moment now and looked up at her neighbours’ windows. Was there someone there now, watching? Someone with a pistol in his hand? But all she saw were blank lace curtains.

  She knocked at her own door. No-one answered for a while. Inside she could hear movement. There was something flustered about the sound. Someone was rushing around in there. Something was wrong.

  When the door opened Sarah got a fresh surprise. Da was standing there. He ought to be in work still. He looked very serious.

  ‘Da?’ she said, frightened. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Quick.’

  As she passed him he leaned out, looking up and down the street.

  Ma came downstairs as Sarah stood puzzled in the hall. She was carrying a Gladstone bag.

  ‘Sarah!’ she said. ‘What are you doing home from school?’

  ‘Miss Heffernan sent me home. She thought I was sick.’


  ‘And are you?’

  ‘Of course not. But I wasn’t pretending or anything. I told her there was nothing wrong with me, honest.’

  But Ma didn’t seem interested. ‘Get upstairs,’ she said. ‘Find a bag and pack a few days’ clothes in it. We’re going to stay with the Doyles.’

  ‘Ma, what’s happened?’

  Da had closed the door. He came over and put his hand on Sarah’s shoulder. ‘Sal,’ he said, ‘things don’t look good. Keane’s was raided last night, and this morning in work Mick was arrested.’

  Sarah felt as though her blood had frozen. ‘Arrested?’ she said. ‘But why? By who? Was there anyone caught in the raid?’

  ‘Mick was taken in for questioning by the Auxiliaries,’ Da said. ‘They didn’t give any reason. And no, there was no-one in Keane’s except the family. They searched the place, but there’s never anything kept there. The important thing now is that we have to expect a raid here. I want all of you out – all of you, understand?’

  Sarah wanted to object, but something in Da’s eyes stopped her. There was a side of Da you didn’t argue with, and that side was in control now.

  ‘I’ve sent Ella to fetch Jimmy from work,’ Da said. ‘I want you all ready to leave.’

  ‘James,’ Ma said, ‘I was just thinking. There won’t be room for all of us in Doyles’. Their house is full up as it is. They’ll never fit all six of us in.’

  ‘Maybe Jimmy can stay here with me.’

  ‘With you?’ Ma stared at him as though he were mad. ‘But sure you above all can’t stay here,’ she said. ‘It’s you they’ll be after.’

  ‘I can’t just disappear, Lil,’ Da said. ‘I have to go to work. And they can prove nothing against me.’

  Ma put down the Gladstone bag.

  ‘Prove?’ she said angrily. ‘How often have you said yourself that they can make up any proof they like?’

  Sarah had been wondering whether to tell them about her conversation with Moore. ‘Da,’ she said. ‘There’s something you should know.’

  She told them what Moore had said to her in Herbert Park. As she spoke Da’s eyes narrowed. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘He’s trying to turn my own daughter into an informer. Are you sure you told him nothing?’

  ‘Sure. But I don’t understand him. He said he’d protect you.’

  Da shook his head uncertainly. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said. ‘He may want to protect me, but he’s a British agent. He’ll have his own ideas about what protecting me means.’

  ‘But my God, James,’ Ma said, ‘you saved that man’s life!’

  ‘And the man is a spy. A spy, Lily. Spies are not loyal to people; they can’t afford to be.’

  Lily Conway slumped back against the wall. She looked as if she were about to burst out crying.

  ‘I don’t ask for much in this world,’ she said. ‘I want my husband beside me, my children healthy, and a few bits of food on the table for all of them. It don’t seem so very much to ask, it really don’t.’

  Da went over and put his arms around her. ‘Sure, you have all that, Lil,’ he said.

  Ma threw his arms off her. ‘Have I?’ she asked furiously. ‘Have I, when them animals have my brother? When my daughter and husband have madmen pointing guns out of windows at them? When the Black and Tans might kick in that door any minute?’

  She pointed furiously at the closed front door, and she spoke so intensely that for one second Sarah expected it to come crashing in. Don’t get carried away, she told herself.

  But just then, as if on cue, there was a thunderous knocking at the door. Sarah almost jumped out of her shoes.

  ‘Sacred heart of Jesus,’ Ma said. ‘They’re here.’

  Da pushed her towards the parlour door. ‘Sarah,’ he hissed, ‘open up.’

  The knocking kept on.

  ‘But what if it’s Tans?’ Sarah said.

  ‘Then don’t give them an excuse to kick the door down,’ Da said. ‘Open it.’

  Sarah went and stood in front of the closed front door. Someone was still pounding on it. She’d heard awful stories about raids. She imagined the front steps filled with rifle-bearing Tommies or Tans, just waiting to shoot someone. It didn’t occur to her to worry about herself. It was Da’s fate she feared for. She must open the door and be as nice as pie, just a sweet little girl trying to be helpful. And maybe, in spite of the furious knocking, it was only Jimmy or Mr Breen or someone like that, not some thug in a uniform. Sarah rested her hand on the latch and breathed deeply. ‘It’s just someone we know,’ she told herself. She nearly believed it as she turned the knob.

  Then she opened the door and looked out, almost whimpering in sudden terror, at a monstrous face above a dark uniform. Behind her, from the doorway of the parlour, she heard her Ma scream.

  18

  A NEW SIMON

  ‘MICK!’ MA SHRIEKED. ‘Oh Mick! What have they done to you?’

  Sarah had to shake her head and look again at the figure on the front step. It was indeed Mick, capless but still wearing his porter’s uniform. Mick’s face, though, was nearly unrecognisable. It was cut and bruised, smeared with blood, puffed out to nearly twice its normal size. Both eyes were swollen and blackening, and his hair was stiff with dried blood. The coat of his railway porter’s uniform was torn open, with some of its buttons missing. He nursed one hand under the pit of the other arm.

  ‘It’s not too bad,’ he said. His voice was thick and hardly sounded like his own. You could barely make out the words.

  Sarah stood frozen in the doorway until Da pulled her aside. He took hold of Mick’s shoulders and led him in. Ma ran over and took her brother in her arms. She was crying.

  ‘Mind your blouse, Lil,’ Mick said through his swollen lips. ‘I’m all bloody.’

  It was only when Mick was inside that Sarah noticed Simon Hughes standing on the step. His face was hard, his eyes as cold as Hugh Byrne’s had ever been. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he said to Da. ‘A bad beating, but no worse.’

  Da nodded.

  ‘Your mate Moore rang Vaughan’s hotel,’ Simon said. ‘He told the porter there that Mick was being released from Beggar’s Bush barracks and would need help. I drove down and found him in Haddington Road. Once they’d done with him the Auxies just threw him out in the street. Two coppers found him staggering along and were questioning him.’

  ‘How did you get him away from them?’ Da asked.

  Simon had both hands in the pockets of his overcoat. He drew out the right one and gave them a glimpse of his pistol. The sight of its dull metal surface made Sarah’s stomach lurch. She’d handled that gun little more than a week ago, and been proud of it. Now the sight of it made her want to get sick.

  ‘Peter the Painter here,’ Simon said, ‘has a way of persuading blokes to see reason.’

  ‘You drew it in broad daylight? Down by the army barracks?’ Da sounded shocked.

  Simon Hughes’s face looked even colder. ‘I was in jail with Mick,’ he said. ‘He’s my chum. They broke his hand, James. They didn’t even ask him any questions. They just beat him. I’m surprised they didn’t kill him. He wouldn’t be the first.’

  Sarah could hear the frustrated fury in Simon’s voice.

  ‘You’d better go,’ Da said. ‘Thanks for bringing him, but you’d better go. They might be watching us right now.’

  ‘It’s us that’s been doing the watching, James.’

  Da looked dubiously up at the lace curtains in Ryans’ windows. ‘There might still be someone there,’ he said.

  Simon Hughes followed his gaze. ‘Let them come out, so,’ he said quietly. ‘Let them come out and finish this business now.’

  Sarah had never seen Simon like this. He frightened her.

  ‘Have sense, man,’ Da said. ‘That would spoil everything. A plan is a plan. Let me get the women and children out of here.’

  Simon nodded. ‘There’s a doctor on the way,’ he said. ‘Mahon, from Ballsbridge. He’s a friend of t
he Big Fellow’s – very respectable.’

  ‘Good. Jimmy’s on his way home. After he gets here I’m getting them all out.’

  Simon nodded. He turned to go, and Da went to help Ma bring Mick up the stairs. Sarah stood looking after Simon Hughes. She called out to him. Simon turned, his hands still in his coat pockets.

  ‘That call from Moore,’ Sarah said. ‘When did he make it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he just left me home in his car. I met him in Haddington Road nearly an hour ago, and I was with him all the time since.’

  Moore had called Vaughan’s hotel. The message had got to Simon, and he had had to find a car and drive to find Mick. Sarah realised that all of this couldn’t have happened in the short time since Moore left her.

  Simon looked coolly up at her from the path. ‘He called,’ he said, ‘just over an hour ago. He gave a time for Mick’s release.’

  Sarah felt sick. Moore had known about this all the time, and had said nothing to her.

  ‘What were you doing with Moore for nearly an hour?’ Simon asked.

  ‘He took me for a drive. We went to Herbert Park.’

  ‘And he said nothing?’

  ‘Not about Mick. But, Simon, he tried to get information out of me. To help Da in spite of himself, he said.’

  ‘What kind of information?’

  ‘He wanted to know who killed that detective, Reed.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you told him, did you?’

  Sarah let her glare answer that one. Even people who scared her didn’t get away with things like that.

  ‘When I met Moore,’ she said, ‘he was driving up from Beggars’ Bush. From the direction of the barracks.’

  Simon thought about that. ‘He phoned from there,’ he said. ‘Maybe while they were still beating Mick. A couple of the men who beat him wore hoods to hide their faces. Maybe Moore was one of them.’

  Sarah thought of Moore’s smooth hands on that steering wheel. Simon Hughes came back up the steps. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. His face relaxed.