The City in Darkness

by Michael Russell

  Dear Jim,

  Hoping this finds you as it leaves me in Ireland. It is looking up in Spain from what the papers say, with the Commies run out, and all over bar the shooting, eh! I have meant to send you cash, like I said, but I am saving to do it right. A promise is a promise. I won’t let you down. But our chum in Glendalough is not clever at paying dues, though what I have now means them dues must see you and me in easy street. There is more to it now, but a letter is not safe to tell. He knows I have him by the throat. He needs to remember you are there, that is the thing. It is hard to keep that in his head. I don’t know if he forgets or is after codding me, but I don’t let him get away with shite. After all we know our friend ‘Bert Neale’ never touched her! Write him a letter. That is the business for you. Anonymous is the thing, but if it comes from Spain he will have no doubt. Give ‘fond’ regards. Say you will come home to talk ‘old times’! There is money, I promise, and not shillings. Do it square, Jim. I will see you right.

  Your old comrade, Billy

  Detective Chief Inspector Halloran turned the pages of the short report Inspector Gillespie had put in front of him. They sat in the sergeant’s office in Laragh. On the desk was a pile of Manila folders and box files Stefan had brought from the post office. Halloran had a pipe in his mouth. He chewed it but it had gone out ten minutes earlier. It was dark outside now. Again the day’s search was done. There was nothing. Billy Byrne remained invisible.

  ‘Apart from the fact that it’s thorough, what do I say?’

  ‘I’m not sure what I’ve got to say myself yet, sir.’

  ‘Let’s divide it in two. The first part. No one’s ever going to make head nor tail of that. God knows how many rings round God knows how many bits in newspapers. Names, addresses, dates. Half of it has nothing to do with Glendalough or Laragh. Maybe it might if we understood it. But what would it tell us? If we spent a month at this we might put some dates next to what – someone’s spell inside, a bigamous marriage in England, an inheritance someone else should have got, an illegitimate birth? Is that it?’

  ‘I’d imagine it’s that kind of thing, yes, sir.’

  ‘Do I need to know? It doesn’t give me the names of more fuckers in Whelan’s on Christmas Eve. It doesn’t tell me who took the body into the mountains and dumped it. None of this is going to do anything but confirm Billy Byrne was a nasty gobshite. The second part – about these women?’

  ‘Yes, about these women.’

  Halloran put the pipe to his lips and relit it.

  ‘That’s how I have to look at it. There’s no disrespect to your wife.’

  Stefan nodded. Halloran turned the pages of the report again.

  ‘Billy Byrne thought three women who died here, years apart, were killed by someone, and he knew who. We’ve got hundreds of pieces of paper about things he found out or thought he did. So was everything he suspected true? The man was a chancer! How many times did he get two and two to make five? Look at what you’ve got. Yes, one of those women was murdered. There’ll be an RIC file on the girl in Dublin Castle. They had clear evidence to hang a man if he hadn’t hopped it. The other two died in accidents that were never questioned by anybody, even by you as a husband mourning his wife and as a policeman. I have to put it that way.’

  ‘I understand that, sir.’

  ‘What else? Someone puts some flowers on the graves. Someone remembers these women. You don’t know who. And Billy writes to a feller in Spain and he says what? That he’s trying to get money out of people.’

  ‘Out of the man he believed murdered . . . these women.’

  Pat Halloran shook his head.

  ‘On Christmas Eve in Whelan’s Seamus Tyrrell hit Billy Byrne so hard he fell and cracked his skull. Either he died then or soon after. Then whoever it was, because Tyrrell didn’t do it on his own, put him where no bugger would find him. And “whoever” included Sergeant Chisholm.’

  ‘What if he wasn’t killed?’

  ‘Are you telling me he’s not dead?’

  ‘What if the rest of it’s true? The authorized version. He cracked his head and passed out, then he came to and left, with a hand from George Chisholm and Garda McCoy, more or less the way they tell it. But when they all knew he’d disappeared, no one wanted to admit what happened.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re not a man for making life easy, Inspector!’

  ‘Someone had a reason to kill him, someone who’s already killed.’

  ‘You don’t really have any of that, just Billy’s ramblings.’

  ‘And what if I get it? What if I find more?’

  The chief inspector frowned. He had the man he believed killed the Missing Postman, whether intentionally or not. He knew some of the people who conspired to dispose of the body. He simply had to make those people crack. But Stefan had opened something else up. Halloran wasn’t convinced by it but it was there, on paper; he couldn’t shut the lid. He was still being watched. He had to demonstrate all the ground had been covered. He didn’t want to waste his time on it, but he had a man who would dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s, and then some. There was always the possibility something might go wrong with the case. George Chisholm worried him; too cocky when he shouldn’t be. If something did go wrong, the more shite and confusion he could throw about the better. Inspector Gillespie’s shite might do no harm. But it wasn’t only that. Somewhere there was the recognition that ‘these women’ really did include Stefan Gillespie’s dead wife. It would do the man no harm to know that what he had got in his head wasn’t true.

  ‘I told you to keep out of my way before. Keep doing that and don’t expect my men to have time to waste on it. But I won’t stop you looking.’

  Outside the Garda Barracks a dozen men stood in the road, talking quietly. The conversation was whispered but as Stefan came out from the police station it didn’t take much decoding. It was the conversation Dessie MacMahon had recognized no one wanted to have in public the night before. It would be a conversation that was everywhere up and down the Vale of Glendalough, everywhere there were no outsiders to hear.

  Stefan stood in the light from the blue lamp. He knew Pat Halloran had been questioning the customers who were in Whelan’s on Christmas Eve again on the basis of the one statement that contradicted their stories. The Bray detectives would be pushing hard to find anyone whose name wasn’t yet on that list of customers. He could guess the interrogations were still getting nowhere, that nothing was forthcoming, lips were becoming ever tighter. But everyone knew there would be more now. There would be charges. Yet the Guards couldn’t stop people comparing notes. No one could stop them cementing their stories. Stefan walked past the villagers to the Austin 10. As he passed them the conversation stopped. He smiled.

  ‘Safe home, lads!’

  ‘Safe home, Mr Gillespie.’

  Some people knew him; some remembered him.

  He didn’t notice a big man at the edge of the group, watching him.

  The man stared as Stefan walked on and got into the car. He kept staring as the car pulled away. He moved out from the crowd, following in the car’s wake while Stefan drove over the bridge. The man recognized him now. He had heard that the Guard who married Maeve Joyce was there, the woman who drowned in the Upper Lake. He had seen Stefan before, but a long time ago. It was strange he was here. The man didn’t like it. There was no reason another detective wouldn’t come. But why this one? He couldn’t feel easy. It shouldn’t matter. He was no different to the other Guards. It wasn’t as if they would find Billy’s body. And if they did it wouldn’t tell them anything. He was dead. He needn’t have been. The man had told the postman to stop; it’s all he had to do. But Billy wouldn’t. Now he was gone. The man hadn’t wanted him dead, but he did feel relief. It was a sin, he knew, but he needed to be quiet again, in his head. He needed it to be over. It had been over once. Then it started afresh, when Billy Byrne got back from Spain. He couldn’t let that happen again.

  The red tail lights of the car had gon
e. The man had watched till darkness swallowed them. It wasn’t right. How could he clear his head with Stefan there? He told himself it was only about the postman. He told himself it would stop as it did before. But there was too much of it in his head. It wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop at all.

  13

  Los Tres Reyes Magos

  It was Epiphany at the Central Prison in Burgos. It was not a day like other days. The Three Wise Kings of the East were coming to the gaol; the prisoners were allowed into the outer courtyard to see their wives, their mothers, their children. The courtyard was full as it never was. On one side, beneath the cloister-like arches surrounding the stone-flagged plaza, warders and Civil Guards looked on, but the atmosphere was relaxed. They talked and laughed with the children, looking at the toys they had brought to show their fathers and grandfathers: drums, trumpets, toy soldiers, dolls, pictures, coloured crayons, books. There were parcels of food and cigarettes and today they would reach the men they were intended for. But the real gift of the Three Kings was something more precious, to be able to touch, to kiss, to hold, to speak without being watched, even if only for an hour.

  Expectation was building. The prisoners were coming. A brass band started to play, slightly out of time and tune. People began to sing quietly.

  Ya vienen los Reyes Magos,

  Ya vienen los Reyes Magos, Caminito de Belén,

  Olé, olé, Holanda y olé,

  Holanda ya se ve, ya se ve.

  Then more were singing, louder, and the children’s voices loudest of all.

  See the Wise Men, riding, riding,

  See the Wise Men riding, riding,

  On the road to Bethlehem,

  Riding to the Holy Land,

  Oh, you can see it close at hand.

  There was a round of applause. For a moment the children had forgotten where they were as the Three Kings walked out from the arches of the colonnade, bearded and turbaned, in flowing robes; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar, each with a sack. The children gathered round and the Three Kings gave out the gifts they had brought. The gifts were all the same; a single postcard. On it a picture of Generalissimo Franco with a stern but benevolent face. He wore the pale brown uniform of Spanish Africa, decorated with stars and a sash in yellow and red; on his shoulders was the wolfskin cape of the warrior. Behind him were soldiers in the uniforms of the Nationalist Army, brandishing weapons, on horseback, wounded but proud, draped in the flags of Spain and all its provinces and colonies. At the bottom a golden plaque said: La Guerra Ha Terminado; The War is Over.

  The singing stopped abruptly. The chapel doors opened; through them came the prisoners. As they emerged, some stumbling, they halted. When they walked on they were marching, slowly, line abreast, their heads up, until the crowd in front of them rushed forward. Then the lines broke. Prisoners and their families flung themselves into each other’s arms.

  One of the Three Kings, Balthazar, heavily bearded and turbaned, stood to one side anxiously. This king was María Fernández Duarte, waiting for Frank Ryan. Everything was ready. But he wasn’t there. She was under the colonnade now, close to the chapel doors, surrounded by people. It was here that Frank Ryan would put on the robe and the turban and the beard. María had her own clothes underneath. Today there was no scrutiny of papers. Women and children had come into the courtyard uncounted. When they left María would be one of them. But Three Kings had entered and Three Kings would leave. Frank Ryan would walk out of the Prisión Central. His escape was planned. The way out of the prison, the car to take him from Burgos, the clothes of an Irish priest on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the road to the Portuguese border. People were ready, waiting. But he had to be in the courtyard. He had to be there now.

  Frank Ryan walked from his cell into the quadrangle with the other men. He was calm. There had been other plans. They had all failed. Some had been too complex. Some depended on finding a prison guard to turn a blind eye and in the end no one could be trusted. Other prisoners had made other plans. They had died, every one of them, in front of a firing squad. This plan had the benefit of simplicity. That’s what gave Ryan hope. The more complicated things were the more to go wrong. But it wasn’t only hope that had persuaded him to listen to María; it was, finally, desperation.

  He had been a prisoner in Burgos since his capture in 1938 when, after a court martial lasting five minutes, he had been sentenced to death. At intervals he was taken out with other prisoners to be shot. He would stand in front of a firing squad as others died and then be returned, spattered in their blood, to his cell. It was a long game, designed to break him, but the game had saved his life. And it had stopped. There was a new governor who let him have food parcels from the Red Cross and letters from Ireland; he had been allowed to write home. There was an Irish ambassador in Spain now, who had finally been allowed see him. After Leopold Kerney’s first visit the food had improved. He had received treatment for the medical conditions that were part of the prison’s regime. His death sentence was commuted, though it was still a death sentence: thirty more years in the Prisión Central.

  The feeling that he would die in gaol was often with him. He held it at bay, both for himself and for the other prisoners. He was the last of the International Brigade officers. All they had left him was to be undefeated.

  Yet while other prisoners were released, while a campaign was fought in Ireland, Britain, America, for his freedom, nothing happened. No one knew why he had been singled out. It seemed as arbitrary as the beatings and executions that were daily life in Burgos. The visits of the Irish ambassador kept hope alive, but he had started to feel a new certainty about what was going to happen. He would die in the Central Prison, this year, next year. He had never wanted María to put herself at risk for him. But he wanted to live. That was the one hope they had not yet taken away.

  On the far side of the quadrangle two warders watched the line of prisoners. One of them stepped in front of Frank Ryan and stopped him.

  ‘Come on, lads, I’ve a visitor waiting.’

  ‘The governor wants to see you.’

  ‘Couldn’t he find a better time?’

  There was no point arguing. To argue was to draw attention.

  The governor sat behind a huge black desk in a high white room that contained nothing else except an armchair, a chaise longue and a dark oak cupboard. As Ryan entered the governor stood up, which was unusual. He reached across the desk to pick up a bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey.

  ‘Your ambassador, Señor Kerney, brought this when he last came to see you.’ The governor’s English was better than Frank Ryan’s Spanish, and he liked to show he could speak it. ‘So, with your permission, Ryan, I thought we would share a little bit of Ireland and toast the Three Kings!’

  ‘I can’t refuse my own whiskey, Señor Escovedo.’

  The governor waved at the chair on the other side of the desk. Frank Ryan sat down. Escovedo opened the bottle and poured two full tumblers.

  ‘Strong stuff!’

  ‘I’ll drink to that!’ said the Irishman, lifting his glass.

  ‘What do you hear about the war, Ryan?’

  ‘Not much, only what the warders say.’

  ‘Nothing from Mr Kerney?’

  ‘Ireland is neutral. Not a bad thing.’

  He was unconvinced the governor was interested in the conversation. It was something to say, but whether to accompany a glass of whiskey or to keep him there, he had no idea. He could not show he wanted to get out.

  ‘And Spain is neutral too. A very good thing,’ said the governor.

  ‘Then here’s to neutrality! Sláinte!’

  ‘It can make no difference, of course,’ continued Escovedo. ‘The French will collapse when Hitler bombs Paris. The English don’t want war at all. For what? Poland! The solution is simple. The future of Europe is the new way, Hitler’s way, Mussolini’s way, Franco’s way. Britain should join the war against communism. But they will see sense one way or another.’

  �
��I don’t know if the English have ever been very strong on sense.’

  ‘And when they see that Hitler won’t be stopped?’

  ‘They would have to see it first.’

  ‘Even the Russians have seen it, even the communists!’

  The governor delivered this with satisfaction. He knew what the Russian pact with Germany meant to the Republicans in his prison, a pact with the country that had armed Franco and bombed their cities. It was an act of betrayal they could not understand. Frank Ryan felt it as deeply as anyone else. Escovedo picked up the bottle of whiskey and poured more.

  It was an hour later that Frank Ryan left the prison governor’s office. The whiskey was gone. The governor gave no sign that he wanted anything from him. The Irishman in turn revealed nothing of his anxiety. Half a bottle later he felt none of the effects. He had no idea what was happening in the main courtyard. When he returned to his cell block with the other prisoners he couldn’t ask. No one else knew anything of the escape. He could only pray María had left with everyone else. His concern for her was too great to let him feel the despair of their failure. That would come tomorrow.

  María Duarte had realized that Frank Ryan wouldn’t come. She whispered it to the other two kings, then waited as darkness fell and the clock on the tower ticked away the time. It was quieter now. The last embraces were being exchanged and the last kisses. The prisoners came together in front of the chapel without any orders. The women and children watched them go, and as the great doors shut they turned in silence to leave, along with the Three Kings. Beyond the prison was the long walk back to Burgos. María stood by a small bus with the other two kings. She slipped off her robe, her turban, the black beard. It should have been Frank Ryan taking them off.