The City in Darkness

by Michael Russell

  After a successful career as a television writer and producer, working on such series as A Touch of Frost, Midsomer Murders and Between the Lines, Michael Russell decided to write what he had always wanted to: books. The City in Darkness is the third of his Stefan Gillespie stories of historical crime fiction, taking a sideways look at the Second World War through Irish eyes, and exploring some unexpected corners of the conflict, such as Danzig, New York and, in The City in Darkness, the cities of Franco’s Spain. The first two Stefan Gillespie novels, The City of Shadows and The City of Strangers were both shortlisted for Crime Writers’ Association awards. Michael lives with his family in West Wicklow, in Ireland, not a million miles from Stefan Gillespie’s home.

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  The City In Darkness

  A Stefan Gillespie Novel

  Michael Russell

  CONSTABLE • LONDON

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Constable Copyright © Michael Russell, 2016

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than

  those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious

  and any resemblance to real persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-47212-193-6

  Constable

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  For my grandmother

  Sarah Josephine Harvey

  Moville, Donegal

  1898

  Still south I went and west and south again,

  Through Wicklow from the morning till the night,

  And far from cities, and the sights of men,

  Lived with the sunshine and the moon’s delight.

  I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,

  The gray and wintry sides of many glens,

  And did but half remember human words,

  In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.

  ‘Prelude’ by J. M. Synge

  Contents

  Part One: Hibernia Sancta

  1 The Upper Lake

  2 El Río Jarama

  3 Crane Lane

  4 Roly Poly

  5 The Magazine Fort

  6 The Clarence

  7 Kilranelagh Graveyard

  8 La Prisión Central

  9 The Seven Churches

  10 St Kevin’s Road

  11 Laragh

  12 The Spinc

  13 Los Tres Reyes Magos

  14 The Round Tower

  Part Two: Iberia

  15 Wicklow Town

  16 The Avenida Palace

  17 O Elevador da Glória

  18 O Trem Noturno

  19 El Colegio de los Irlandeses

  20 Burgos

  21 El Camín de Santiago

  22 El Río Tormes

  Part Three: Hibernia Quieta

  23 The Dove

  24 Mullacor

  25 The Central Asylum

  26 Poulanass

  27 Keadeen

  28 53°N 10°W

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  HIBERNIA SANCTA

  On Christmas Eve, in the season of peace and good-will, a postman goes about his works in a village in the Wicklow Mountains. He is seen in the afternoon in the company of a number of men and women, and is never seen again. His bicycle is found some miles away the next day, but the man might have vanished into thin air for all the trace there is of him. Now comes one of the strangest aspects of this remarkable case. Everyone knows the secretiveness of the Irish countryside, but surely the inhabitants of this village surpass all others in this respect. A man has vanished as if the earth had opened and swallowed him up, a phrase grimly suggestive of the subsequent suspicion, and not a word is said. Life goes on normally, there are brief paragraphs in the newspapers, and then everything is quiet again.

  Irish Independent

  1

  The Upper Lake

  Wicklow, August 1932

  There was barely a whisper of mist on the Upper Lake, a softness in the air where the water rippled among reeds and lapped at the pebble beach at the eastern end. The sun was low in the sky, but the brightness of the morning gave the grey waters an unaccustomed tint of blue. It would be a fine day in the mountains. They rose on either side of the lake, a great amphitheatre folding round it. The tree-lined slopes climbed steeply out of the water, heavy with leaves, a hint of the turning year in the oaks and the yellowing needles of the Scots pines. Higher up heather and bare rock caught the sunlight more keenly. The mountains held the lake tightly on three sides; Camaderry and Turlough Hill to the north and west, Lugduff and Mullacor to the west and south. To the east, through the woods, were the ruins of the thousand-year-old monastery of St Kevin, the Round Tower and the tumbled stones of ancient churches and monastic cells. As morning wore on the buses and cars would come from Dublin to fill the valley with visitors. But for a few hours the only sounds would be the rooks and the chattering sparrows and, somewhere above, the high shriek of a peregrine hunting.

  Back from the pebble shore a small green tent was pitched. Beside it were the ashes of a fire from the night before. Inside a woman and a man in their mid-twenties lay close together; between them a boy, not yet three. The man and boy were asleep. The woman lay on her back, looking up at the ridge of the tent. She had not slept well; in all the peace around her, in the slow breathing of her husband and son, and in the morning birdsong outside, she was not at peace. She sat up slowly. Her yellow hair fell over her shoulders. She pushed the blanket away from her and shivered.

  She looked at the man and the boy, smiling. Troubled as she was, she felt her contentment; it was deeper and more solid than she had ever anticipated such things could be. What was wrong had nothing to do with this. It was something else and part of her simply wanted to walk away from it. What it would mean for people she cared about, people she had grown up with, was already hard to bear. But she had no choice. What she had discovered, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, could not be ignored. She looked down at her husband again. He would know what to do. He would help her find the strength she needed. And when it was done he would help her leave it behind. Only strong light would clear away the darkness.

  She would tell him tonight, at his parents’ farm across the mountains. She needed to be somewhere else to say it. But for now she wanted to fill her head with the new morning. She stretched across to a duffle bag and took a swimming costume, inching down the tent to the flaps, pulling it on with as little movement as possible. The man slowly opened his eyes.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘A swim. It’s a beautiful morning.’

  ‘Jesus, it’ll be cold enough in that water.’

  ‘I’ve swum in that lake since I was four years old, summer and winter,’ she laughed. ‘My father always said, if you’re cold swim faster!’

&nb
sp; ‘Have you forgotten the day you begged me to take you away from your mad father and a lifetime’s sentence of healthy exercise?’

  She leant forward, her face over his and kissed him. As she did he could smell the scent of her body on her skin from the night before.

  ‘There are better ways to warm up than swimming, Maeve.’

  ‘I need to clear my head. Go back to sleep.’

  As she got up he saw, momentarily, that her smile had gone.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I need to talk to you, that’s all. When I have, I’ll be grand.’

  She smiled once more, then crawled out into the morning. He lay back. There was something wrong. She had been quiet the day before, for no real reason. It was only now it struck him. And last night, as they sat looking at the Upper Lake after making love, she had been tearful for a moment, in a way that was unlike her. Still, it couldn’t be serious. It was only two days ago that she had talked long into the night about her happiness and about their simple, ordinary plans for the future. Stefan yawned, looking across at the face of the sleeping boy. He closed his eyes. He listened to the rooks, a blackbird singing overhead, the rhythmic, easy breathing of his son. And then almost immediately, he was asleep again.

  The woman walked through the trees to the lake. She stood, looking up at the mountain slopes that enclosed this space she knew so well. It had seemed a simple idea; driving down from Dublin for a week with his parents at the farm outside Baltinglass; outings in the hired car they couldn’t quite afford; a few quiet days by the Upper Lake where, until her marriage and her son, she had known her happiest times. Now it could never be the same again. Everything would change; everything in her childhood would be different. It could never be the refuge it was. But perhaps there had always been questions. She was already wondering if the happiness she remembered had been real. And what she had discovered had somehow shocked her less than it should have done. It wasn’t that she knew, even remotely, but she felt as if something had opened up in her that she should have sensed. There were uneasy things, uncomfortable things now, crowding in on her. She knew the darkness had been there all along.

  ‘Shite!’

  Her voice echoed back from the mountains. She waded into the water, wanting its coldness to drive it all from her mind. Then she swam. She swam hard, unaware how far she was going, pushing forward, stroke after stroke. She stopped and bobbed up, treading water. She felt the sun, warmer now, higher overhead. She was close to the craggy face below the sheer Spinc on the south side of the lake, where steep steps led up to the cave and the ruins that were called St Kevin’s Bed. She lay on her back, kicking her legs very slowly, letting herself drift on towards the rock.

  The legend came back into her head. She remembered the game they played as children. She was Kathleen of the Unholy Blue Eyes, trying to make the saint fall in love and forsake his sacred vows; Kevin and his monks had to chase her from the cave, throwing bunches of stinging nettles at her. In the gang of friends she spent her summers with the boys were Kevin’s monks, the girls Kathleen’s witches, stealing the saint’s gold along with his virtue. The gold had been their own addition to a tale that was really no more than chasing and catching. But as they grew older the price the girls paid for capture turned from dodging the stinging nettles to forfeiting a kiss; it wasn’t quite in accord with the triumph of St Kevin’s sacred celibacy over the wiles of Kathleen and those unholy blue eyes.

  She laughed, but somehow it seemed less innocent now; the cave in which those kisses were given felt blacker. She kept on treading water. She had to work it out, every detail of what she would tell her husband. If he didn’t believe her, then who would? It was then that she saw the dinghy.

  The boat had pulled out from the landing place below the steps to St Kevin’s Bed. She knew it, old and battered now, the paint bleached and peeling; she knew it when it was new, fifteen years ago. It was the companion of a hundred lake adventures. And she knew the rower. He would have been fishing in the early morning when he had the lake to himself. She watched him row towards her, his back arched over the oars. He looked round, grinning, calling out with the voice of old familiarity.

  ‘Long time since I caught a mermaid here!’

  She smiled, still treading water. He must have seen her swimming towards the rock. But her smile stopped. She had forgotten, just forgotten, what was going to happen. He didn’t know. None of them knew. How could she have an ordinary conversation? How could she laugh, joke, lie?

  The man swung the boat round to face her and shipped the oars. She swam up to the boat and grabbed the side. She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I thought I’d row over and see was any bacon frying, Maeve.’

  ‘There’s maybe a cup of tea and some bread and jam,’ she said.

  ‘They say a woman who puts a plate of bacon in front of her man every day need never fear he’ll wander. A vaguely risqué metaphor trying to get out there, I guess. But anyway, beware of too much bread and jam!’

  ‘I think we’ll cope, with or without bacon.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t go without.’

  She looked at him, more puzzled than offended. It was unfunny in a way she never remembered him being unfunny; it felt unpleasant. Maybe he was trying too hard to make a joke. He grinned the warm, rather empty grin he always did. It had never before occurred to her it was empty, but that’s what it was. There was nothing behind it. And it wasn’t warm, in any way whatsoever; even as the word formed in her head she replaced it with cold.

  ‘You’re going back today?’

  ‘To Baltinglass, but Stefan has to be in Dublin on Saturday.’

  ‘Ah, a policeman’s lot!’

  She felt the sneer in his voice.

  ‘Get in. I’ll row you back across. If it’s only tea and bread and jam, I’ll take what’s going, even if it does sound a bit like a prison breakfast.’

  She realized how tired she was. She had swum a long way. She wanted to be with her husband and her son. She wanted to pack up and go.

  ‘All right, can you pull me in so?’

  She started to heave herself up into the boat. He didn’t budge.

  ‘I do need a hand.’

  Her voice was sharper; she was no longer concerned about him. And maybe this was what would happen, she thought. This was the start. No one would come out of it unchanged or undamaged. Where there had been friendship and fond memory there would be guilt, accusation, anger. They would feel they should have known; they’d see faults, weaknesses, dislike.

  He was staring at her quizzically, as if he knew what she was thinking. He leant forward, and suddenly his hands were on her, one holding her right arm, the other clasping her hard between her neck and shoulder. And he was pushing her, pushing her down, back into the water.

  For a few seconds she thought it was a bad joke. He was strong; he had been even as a boy. She was struggling, fighting to get out of his grip. But his hands held her tightly. He wouldn’t let go. As she thrashed in the water he was still bearing down on her. Her head went under, gasping, choking. All she could try to do was break away, but his grip never faltered.

  Water filled her mouth and her nose. She pushed up, desperately trying to hit out. She tried to scream. Her cries barely echoed across the lake. She was already weak. He pushed down again, his arms in the water as she flailed and kicked and struggled. But in all that movement he was still, his eyes fixed on her. And then abruptly she stopped moving. He held her under the water. Strands of her fair hair floated delicately on the swell.

  The lake was calm again. Finally, he let go. Her body sank. The last wisps of hair disappeared into the blackness. He gazed down into the depths. She was there, not far beneath the surface, but despite the blue sheen the day had given the water, it was too dark to see her now.

  He moved back into the centre of the boat. He put out the oars and pulled back towards the Spinc and St Kevin’s Bed. He felt a sense of satisfaction. It
had worked better than he had imagined. He had been watching the tent since the previous afternoon, unsure what she knew, unsure if he was at risk, but knowing he could not let it go. He came closer after dark. He heard the two of them. Fucking. He hadn’t expected that. It was unpleasant to listen to, unpleasant to think about. By morning he knew he must act. He remembered she swam every morning as a child; he thought she would still, as if this place still belonged to her somehow. As for what she did or didn’t know, death resolved all doubt, all risk; that was the simple truth. And it had been so easy, so very easy, that he knew it was meant to be, like so many things in his life. Yet he would remember her more fondly now. In an odd way it was almost as if she had come home.

  2

  El Río Jarama

  Jarama, Spain, February 1937

  The guns stopped at almost the same time along the valley of low hills on either side of the Jarama River. All day the noise of battle had sounded; the roar and thud of artillery and tanks, the whine of aircraft, the rattle of machine guns, the staccato crack of rifles, and behind that the cries and the screams of men in all the various stages of fighting and killing and dying.

  For the fifth day Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s army had flung itself across the muddy, sluggish river at the soldiers of the Spanish Republic, battling its way up over parched earth and cracked stone, through the groves of shrapnel-splintered olives, over the bodies of the five days’ dead. If the road through the valley was taken, Madrid would fall, and what remained of the hated Republic would be pushed into the Mediterranean.