The City in Darkness Read online

  ‘The Mulcahys are Old IRA,’ said Gregory. ‘She’s not in the country. And she’s not so close to the IRA now. I’d put her more in the romantic school than the bombing school. Clissmann was a German agent here.’

  ‘He’s in the Brandenburg Regiment now,’ replied de Paor, ‘which means for all practical purposes Military Intelligence, an Abwehr officer.’

  ‘I see,’ laughed Gregory. ‘Frank goes to Spain to fight the good fight against the fascists and the Germans want to save him from a fascist gaol.’

  ‘All we know is the Germans are prepared to help. Mr Kerney is authorized to pursue it. It’s unlikely there’s any other way to get Ryan out.’

  ‘And what does our ambassador think the Germans want?’

  ‘He believes Clissmann’s motives are all about friendship.’

  ‘That’s not an answer, is it, Geróid?’ said Gregory.

  ‘Honestly, he doesn’t know.’

  ‘And it may be he doesn’t want to find out,’ interrupted Colonel Archer. ‘He may not be giving the department all the details either. Kerney knows people in German Intelligence quite well, because they’ve been based at the Irish College in Salamanca through most of the Civil War.’

  Stefan registered the word Salamanca. He caught Geróid de Paor’s eye. The commandant nodded. This was the place their interests met.

  ‘They’re still there,’ continued the colonel. ‘Kerney often stays at the college. It’s difficult to believe he hasn’t discussed this with people besides the Clissmanns and de Chambourcin. He has grown to like Ryan and his determination to free him has taken a very personal slant. To be blunt, he feels the government hasn’t done enough, in particular that Dev hasn’t done enough, personally, with Franco. He won’t be looking for any complications. Under the circumstances we feel we need to know more.’

  ‘More than the ambassador is likely to tell you?’ said Broy.

  ‘It was Geróid who suggested Inspector Gillespie. A policeman is a sensible escort under these circumstances. The ambassador has money to safeguard, some potentially difficult travelling and, in terms of Ryan, dealings that won’t be the usual run of diplomacy. He would be suspicious of anyone from the army or the Department. If you’ll excuse the insult, he won’t think much of an ordinary Guard.’ Colonel Archer smiled at Terry Gregory, then turned to Stefan. ‘Special Branch doesn’t have to come into it. You’re a detective. You’ve been on this Missing Postman business, which even Mr Kerney will have read about. As it happens that’s true.’

  ‘But my real job is to spy on our ambassador?’ said Stefan.

  ‘It is. But he’s a diplomat, he’ll take it in the spirit it’s intended.’

  Terry Gregory drove Stefan to Kingsbridge Station. He was still taking in what had happened and working out where his own advantage lay. Stefan had more to take in; a convergence of interests he couldn’t have anticipated.

  ‘One thing straight, Inspector. Mr Kerney might not have much of a nose but the rest of us have. Whatever the Germans are up to, the IRA is in there. When you get back you talk to me, not Archer. You tell me what you know and I tell you what you give G2. You don’t even speak to Ned Broy.’

  Stefan saw the steel in the superintendent’s face. It was the look he always had when he felt he was on the scent of something useful. But Stefan still remembered the night in the Police Yard, Terry Gregory and Cathal McCallister, the IRA Quartermaster. He remembered that Gregory had been trying to find out where he was that night. He remembered that he must have had him followed to the Clarence before Christmas. He remembered the contradiction between the ease with which the stolen arms’ caches had been found and the way Terry Gregory let the IRA General Staff slip through his fingers. He remembered Geróid de Paor’s belief that someone high up in Special Branch was passing information to the IRA.

  ‘You know the rules,’ said Gregory, ‘it’s called droit de seigneur.’

  16

  The Avenida Palace

  Stefan spent his last night in Ireland with Kate at the flat on Wellington Quay. The next evening a car from the Department of External Affairs, carrying Leopold Kerney, the ambassador to Spain, took him to Dún Laoghaire for the mail boat. He had met Kerney briefly two days earlier. The ambassador was polite but reserved. As anticipated, Kerney viewed him as a very ordinary policeman with an ordinary job to do, which was entirely about his own security. The sense of hierarchy was strong in the civil service and the tiny Irish diplomatic corps. Leopold Kerney called Stefan ‘Gillespie’ or ‘Inspector’, while Stefan addressed him ‘Mr Kerney’ or ‘sir’.

  On the mail boat Kerney had a cabin and kept to it most of the way across the Irish Sea, leaving Stefan to sit in the saloon. At Holyhead they had separate sleepers on the train to London. They didn’t see each other until they reached Euston next morning. They took a taxi to Waterloo and an early train to Poole harbour in Dorset. On the train, Kerney read the newspapers he had asked Stefan to buy for him and passed them on as he finished. Apart from a few words about barrage balloons over London and the sandbagged buildings in Tavistock Square and Southampton Row, little was said. The ambassador’s occasional comments on the war he was reading about in much more detail than Ireland’s press allowed, were mostly of the ‘not much is happening’ variety. He seemed to take satisfaction in this, and Stefan had a sense he believed the war would not last. The idea that ‘reason’ would bring it to a halt before things got too serious was nothing that needed hiding in Britain where many felt the same. Stefan’s own experience of the New Germany, which he had seen first-hand, gave him a less complacent view. A German family and the German blood in his veins sharpened that view.

  In Poole they hardly had time to reach the harbour and board the Imperial Airways flying boat that would take them to Lisbon, en route to British colonies in West Africa. The ambassador knew people on the flight. Although all the passengers looked like civilians it wasn’t hard to see that most were connected to the war in one way or another. Diplomats, politicians, colonial officials, army officers in mufti, and businessmen whose business was likely to be the business of war in one way or another. Stefan spent some time trying to guess what they all did from scraps of conversation, but he felt apart from it in a way that Leopold Kerney didn’t seem to. For most of the journey he stared down at the grey Atlantic, which on his side of the plane was all he could see. He had his own battle to fight.

  Two days before he left Dublin Stefan had gone to Iveagh House in Stephen’s Green for a briefing at the Department of External Affairs. He was given a diplomatic passport, and a civil servant who knew far less about what was going on than he did talked about travel, accommodation, the security of papers and money, and the modest expenses to be drawn. He met Leopold Kerney over a slightly awkward cup of coffee and then walked across the Green to meet Dessie MacMahon at Neary’s in Chatham Street. Dessie had got a message to him at Iveagh House. It simply told Stefan where he was. That was enough to indicate there was something to say that was better not known about in Special Branch. Dessie knew what was going on; he knew about Glendalough and Spain. But he also had something of his own now.

  ‘I had a message from your man Chisholm.’

  Stefan was surprised.

  ‘He said he wanted to talk to you. No one else.’

  ‘So who knows?’

  ‘Nobody,’ said Dessie, getting up, ‘he’ll be here any time.’

  Dessie paused to light a cigarette.

  ‘Take it easy in Spain, Stevie.’ He walked out.

  Stefan waited, listening to the unintelligible buzz of conversation, breathing in the haze of smoke. He saw Sergeant Chisholm enter and go to the bar. The policeman, in the suit he had worn in court, came over and sat down.

  ‘This is unexpected, George.’

  ‘You can maybe guess what I’m in Dublin for, Inspector.’

  ‘The commissioner?’

  ‘Dear old Ned.’

  ‘But you’re free. The case has been dropped.’
r />   ‘I’ve been at HQ this morning. First round of a disciplinary hearing. McCoy’s on tomorrow. They’ll have us sacked so. Not much doubt now.’

  ‘But they’re not going to get you for murder, are they?’

  ‘There’s a new man up from Waterford, Superintendent Herlihy.’

  ‘What happened to Laurel and Hardy?

  ‘Still around, just, but I’d say Pat Halloran will be destined for Donegal or the Islands before long. Either way he’ll be waiting a long time for his next promotion.’

  ‘He’s got you to thank for that.’

  ‘He’s got himself to thank. He got a whiff of someone who’d talk and he thought he was in Special Branch. I heard Fintan Grace was there loading a revolver and leaving it on the table through the interrogation. It’s an old RIC job, that one. Anyone else would have told the gobshite to shove it up his arse, but Paul’s a born eejit. He robbed a couple of houses in Arklow with his brother, that’s the thing. Halloran got that from somewhere. So along with the gun was the stolen goods to be planted on him if he didn’t cough.’

  ‘But your threats came out on top. Still, what he said was true.’

  ‘Close enough.’

  ‘So why do you want to tell me about it?’

  ‘Close enough till Billy went down. The rest is bollocks. Halloran’s bollocks. No body, no trip to the mountains to drop him in a mineshaft. Billy hit his head. He’d a lump the size of a duck’s egg and a spatter of blood. He came round cursing and swearing and we said we’d get him to the post office in Charlie Hignett’s car. He wouldn’t have it, roaring and shouting about what he knew and how he’d get every one of us. So I did take him outside with Aidan McCoy, and we did put him on his bike. He rode off to Glendalough with a “God fuck all here”. That’s the truth, and the end of the tale we thought. It was the last we saw of him. Next thing was the bike in the road by the Seven Churches and Billy disappeared.’

  ‘It’s a pity you didn’t say all that.’

  ‘Starting with me in Whelan’s drinking all afternoon?’

  ‘You might have got away with that, without the rest.’

  ‘We did think he must have wandered off. But time went on and there was no forgetting what happened in the pub. We thought maybe it was hitting his head must have done it. That he fell off the bike and walked off, and dropped dead, or drowned in a ditch, whatever you like. The idea he wouldn’t be found alive came quick enough. But it never occurred to us there’d be no body. We just thought he’d be there somewhere, with the blow to his head, and Shamie would be up for murder so, or maybe we’d all be up for something.’

  ‘So no fight, no fall, and most of you were never in the pub?’

  ‘We thought if the lot of us kept our mouths shut . . .’

  ‘So you fiddled the station diary then?’

  ‘That was a mistake, but it happens everywhere.’

  ‘It’ll still do for you, George, as a Guard. But it’s not just that. You might get away with murder, but when you walked out of that courtroom a free man you made Ned Broy look like an arse. That’s the cardinal sin.’

  ‘Billy wasn’t badly hurt, Inspector. The more I think about it . . .’

  ‘So what happened to him, George?’

  ‘That’s what no one can understand. How did he disappear?’

  Stefan listened and said nothing. Whatever George Chisholm had come here to say to him, he could see that this was where it really started.

  ‘If Billy came off his bike, if he was pissed, if he was concussed – whatever it was – how far could the eejit have gone? How could he vanish? No one hid that body, Mr Gillespie. None of us did anyway, I swear it.’

  ‘But somebody did,’ said Stefan, ‘is that what you mean?’

  ‘Whatever happens we all have to live with it. This is going to go on and on. They’re still at it, questioning us, over and over. Now they’re digging up new graves, looking for Billy. No one believes we didn’t do it, even in the valley. People will keep their mouths shut, but it’s still there.’

  ‘If you’re looking for me to solve it, George, I’ve got nothing.’

  ‘But you thought there was someone else who could have done it.’

  ‘No one else does, believe me.’

  ‘You’re still looking, you’d have to be, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I’d have to be,’ said Stefan quietly.

  ‘I’ve had a lot of time to think about that night. Mostly how to get out of the mess we made and keep out of gaol for what none of us did. But some of what you said, that day at the barracks, has been going round too. Nothing that puts flesh on it. But there is something – about Miss Gort.’

  The sergeant had Stefan’s attention; this was new.

  ‘It was a few months before she died. I hadn’t long been in Laragh. I was going with a girl who worked at Reverend Gort’s, Elsie Gantley. One night she came to the barracks, hysterical. She said Miss Gort had been assaulted. She found her in the garden at the vicarage, crying, hardly knowing where she was. I went up, and there she was. The vicar and Mrs Gort were away. She was in a fierce state, covered in mud and bruised, her clothes torn. She wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t look at me. Elsie was hollering about a man attacking her. She kept screaming. “He assaulted Miss Gort, George, assaulted her!” You know what she was telling me. She didn’t want to say it outright. So I said, who was this? Elsie had no idea and Miss Gort wouldn’t answer. Then she stood up and she turned to me and she says, “My horse threw me. Elsie, don’t make up absurd stories.” I didn’t think about it in years, but that was it. That was the story, and it didn’t change. But I don’t have a doubt Elsie wasn’t making up stories.’

  ‘She’d been molested?

  ‘More than molested, Elsie knew that.’

  ‘And you didn’t follow it up?’

  ‘You don’t go around saying things like that about a woman. Not when she’s who she is. It’s not so strange. Best left alone as often as not. It’s how people deal with it.’

  ‘And you never had any idea who did it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’d have to wonder if Billy Byrne knew.’

  ‘Billy wasn’t even there then, Mr Gillespie.’

  ‘No,’ said Stefan, but he knew this meant something.

  ‘If you were looking at suicide,’ continued Chisholm, ‘a lot of people would say there’s your explanation. She wouldn’t be the first. It did have something to do with her engagement breaking up, I think. That’s the only other thing Elsie ever told me about that night. It’s what she thought anyway.’

  ‘And what happened to Elsie?’

  ‘It wasn’t long before she left. She had a sister in New Zealand.’

  ‘Not just round the corner then.’

  ‘I think the Gorts helped her out with the fare.’

  ‘Did they make a habit of that sort of thing?’

  ‘No, the old feller was as mean as buggery.’

  ‘When was the last time you had a rape to investigate, George?’

  ‘Never. It would have been the first in the valley.’

  ‘Except for Charlotte Moore. That’s a long way from never, and not so long ago as far as Billy Byrne was concerned. That was what the RIC came up with, wasn’t it? Albert Neale, remember? He raped Charlotte Moore and then he killed her, to shut her up. If Marian Gort was raped in Glendalough, it’s something they have in common. Apart from being dead.’

  That evening Stefan Gillespie and Kate O’Donnell ate a meal at Jammet’s in Nassau Street. The restaurant claimed to offer more of what was real French haute cuisine than you could find between Dublin and Paris, dismissing London as if it wasn’t there. It wasn’t true, but Dublin liked to think it was. It was more money than Stefan had ever spent on a meal. It was a gesture he wanted to make, but like any gesture born out of something close to guilt, it wasn’t the right one. He knew it was a mistake; so did Kate. Through the meal they spoke about not very much, with Stefan talking of travel arrangements and Kate
of not finding a job. It was only as they walked down from Trinity to the river that she said what she felt.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t spent all that money.’

  ‘I wanted to do something special.’

  ‘It would be special if you told me what the matter is.’

  It came more easily than he expected. Having avoided talk of Laragh and Glendalough for more than two months he needed to say something; he needed Kate to understand. He told the story of the Missing Postman and the room above the post office. He didn’t tell her everything. The car crash was still an accident. But he told her what he thought he might find in Spain, at least what he was looking for. By the time they got back to the flat he had said most of what he could. Kate had been very quiet. She felt the weight he was carrying, and she understood how much harder it was than his words seemed to suggest.

  ‘I wish you’d said before. It would have been easier. For you too.’

  ‘I didn’t know how to start.’

  ‘I could feel you were somewhere else. It wasn’t great before Christmas but I knew what that was about. I knew you hated what you were doing. I knew you had to work that out. And I thought you would. We would. But then it all got ten times worse. At least it makes sense now. I can’t imagine how you feel. But I know you have to try to do something.’

  ‘I don’t know what, if I get nothing in Spain . . .’

  ‘You need time, you need to be free to do this.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to affect us, Kate.’

  ‘Time,’ she said again, putting her finger to his lips. ‘I have been thinking about going to England, to see my sister. I’m still not working and I don’t see anything coming up. I haven’t been over there since Niamh left Ireland. It might be a good time. You won’t be here for a few weeks. When you come back you’ll need to find a way to resolve all this – or to let it go.’

  This wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but he knew it was right.