The City in Darkness Read online

  Stefan knew now what ‘I’m sure you won’t mind’ meant. The lights were up and he was on the receiving end of laughter, glaring looks of disapproval, and hissed and whispered explanations of who he was.

  ‘To talk about the real reason might see me incarcerated in Dublin Castle under the Emergency Powers Act, and my liberty is precious, almost as precious as the money the Gate is about to lose for the sake of the nation. If by chance the issue of neutrality enters your minds, not apropos of these events you understand, I believe passionately it is the only way for Ireland in the face of this war. But does neutrality mean we have decided there is no pain, no disease, no pleasure, no health, no desire, no war, no song, no women, and very little wine? Will we live in a waiting room for passengers to heaven, airless, claustrophobic, where we sit self-centred, refusing all news, all ideas, all perilous things from the outside world, denying freedom to protect freedom? If even the light in our head offends, is our only course to sit in the dark? But God forbid it has anything to do with Roly Poly!’

  Stefan Gillespie stood outside the Gate Theatre. The audience was moving away, still full of the evening’s events rather than the play itself. It was bitterly cold. There were flakes of snow in the air. Stefan had his collar pulled up and his hat pulled down, but it was more about the attention that had been drawn to him inside than about the weather. There were only a few stragglers coming out as Kate O’Donnell appeared. She looked at him, shaking her head. It wasn’t about him; she knew that, but it still hurt.

  ‘Everyone’s very upset and very angry.’

  ‘I’m sure they are.’

  ‘You’ll be writing a report about us all.’

  ‘Hardly a report,’ he laughed, ‘it’ll only be what’s in the papers.’

  It wasn’t true; the papers wouldn’t mention the German ambassador or what Micheál Mac Liammóir had said. Stefan was conscious not only that there were things he didn’t tell Kate now, but that he was starting to learn to tell her lies as if they were simply their normal conversation.

  ‘Most people are going for a drink,’ she said.

  ‘I wouldn’t blame them,’ said Stefan, smiling.

  She took his arm and pulled herself against him. He kissed her.

  ‘Go and have that drink with your friends.’

  ‘I won’t stay long. And I’ll come back to Wellington Quay.’

  ‘Yes, I think we both need that,’ said Stefan.

  A black Austin 10 pulled up. Dessie MacMahon got out. For a man who had made a career out of never being flustered, he looked flustered.

  ‘The boss’s called everyone in.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Dessie hesitated. He wasn’t going to say it with Kate there.

  ‘He’s all yours, Dessie.’ She kissed Stefan and walked away.

  Dessie got back into the car; Stefan sat in beside him.

  ‘So where are we going?’

  ‘The Phoenix Park.’ Dessie took out a Sweet Afton and lit it as he drove. ‘The IRA raided the Magazine Fort tonight. Explosives, weapons, ammo. They got a dozen lorries in and out before the alarm was raised.’

  Stefan nodded. As he looked through the windscreen snow was starting to fall quite heavily. Dessie talked and chain-smoked. Stefan said very little. At one point Dessie turned round, lighting another cigarette.

  ‘You don’t sound very surprised!’

  He hadn’t been surprised since Dessie’s first words. He now knew what Terry Gregory and Cathal McCallister had been talking about in the Police Yard. He was on his way to investigate an IRA raid the head of Special Branch was instrumental in planning. It was possible his boss knew he knew that. The parting words in Gregory’s office seemed suddenly bigger.

  5

  The Magazine Fort

  As the black Austin pulled out of Capel Street and along the Quays, the snow was already lighter. The streets were muffled in that clear, clean silence that even a dusting of snow brings to a city at night.

  The black and white stillness was broken as they approached the gates of the Phoenix Park. The four pillars that marked the main road through the 400 acres of grass and water and woodland were blocked on one side by a military Bedford truck and a police car. Next to the lodge a Rolls-Royce armoured car closed one gate so that anything coming in or going out had to go round it. A dozen soldiers stood with rifles slung on their backs. There was a huddle of uniformed Gardaí. Dessie steered round the armoured car. The Guards moved forward. Stefan wound down the window, but they had been recognized already. The uniformed sergeant grinned at them; someone else’s mess was always entertaining.

  ‘Here to see the stable door’s properly shut, Inspector?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Stefan’s enjoyment didn’t come so easily.

  ‘Can’t be much to see. They cleared the place out. Still, there’s dozens of your lot up there, along with assorted military brass. They don’t stop, the army fellers. In and out. You can’t blame them. There is a sweep of the Park, though. They think there’s a couple of IRA men left behind.’

  The Guards stepped back and Dessie drove on.

  ‘This is going to be a fucking waste of time.’

  ‘Yes, it probably is,’ said Stefan quietly.

  The scattering of snow gave the Park a kind of luminosity, spreading undisturbed across the swathes of open grass. The obelisk of the Wellington Monument rose up out of the whiteness into the grey sky. As they approached the roundabout into Wellington Road there were soldiers ahead, walking in a line away from the unseen Magazine Fort, rifles unslung, some with torches. A Military Policeman waited by the roundabout, watching.

  ‘Jesus, if we keep going we’ll see the Marx Brothers next.’

  Dessie was getting his money’s worth out of this cock-up.

  ‘Give the fags a rest, Dessie, for God’s sake!’

  ‘You’re back with us then, Stevie?’

  Dessie glanced round, still grinning, then slammed his foot on the brake. Across the windscreen shot the shovel-shaped antlers and mottled flanks of a fallow deer buck. They missed it by inches. Two smaller bucks, in a blur of speed, followed close beside. The car kept going, skidding across the road in the slush that had been churned up along the road to the Magazine Fort. It slid on to the grass, narrowly missing the trunk of a tree.

  ‘Mother of God! They came out of nowhere!’

  ‘Too busy lighting up to see where you’re going, Dessie?’

  Stefan looked back towards the Wellington Monument. He could see the white rumps of the bucks, disembodied in the darkness, still racing hard.

  Dessie turned the key. The engine turned over once then stopped.

  ‘I’ll need the handle. This one’s a bastard when it stalls.’

  ‘Turn off the lights.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Turn them off.’

  Dessie switched off the headlamps. Stefan wound down the window.

  ‘Not much sends deer running like that at night,’ said Stefan. ‘People, that’s all they’re afraid of. But they’re used to people here. And they’d have been bedded down. Someone’s stumbled right on to them.’

  ‘The army’s all over the place. They might not frighten the IRA much, but I’d say they could just scare the shite out of a bunch of deer.’

  ‘You in a hurry to see Terry Gregory, Sergeant?’

  ‘I’m in a hurry to get home.’

  ‘Let’s give it a couple of minutes.’

  They sat in the darkness. The occasional snort from Sergeant MacMahon told what he thought of the exercise. But he was the one who saw the movement first. He touched Stefan’s arm. Where Wellington Road turned up towards the Magazine Fort there was a patch of trees, thick from the pines that were scattered in among the leafless beeches and sycamores.

  It was the snow at the edge of the thicket that showed up a man walking slowly towards the road. He stopped, looking up and down. The black Austin, hidden by the tree, was not in his line of sight. Two more men emerged behind
him. They all crossed the road, heading for some more trees and the wall of the Park that ran along Conyngham Road. Stefan opened the glove compartment; he took out the Webley. As Dessie opened his door, Stefan methodically broke the revolver and checked the cylinder.

  They looked across at the thicket the three men had entered. Beyond it lay a patch of tussocky grass and a sprawl of bushes abutting the Park’s stone wall. That’s where they would climb over. He handed Dessie the gun.

  ‘I’ll do the beating, you do the picking up.’

  Dessie set off, almost noiselessly, at a pace that would have surprised anyone taking only a cursory glance at his size. Over the years he had surprised many people, a considerable number of them still in Irish prisons.

  Stefan moved over the snow-covered grass more slowly. He took a silver police whistle from his pocket. He could hear the light crunch of his own footsteps on snow. There was the rumble of heavy vehicles on the Conyngham Road, army trucks from the barracks at Islandbridge. He turned his head back into the Park; there was a shout and an indistinct reply from the hill that hid the Magazine Fort; a sweep of lights showed a vehicle turning on to Wellington Road. He stopped as he reached the trees. Behind him the car passed, heading to the main gate. Then it slowed; he heard car doors, voices. They had seen the Austin 10. Now he heard movement among the trees. He put the whistle to his mouth and blew three blasts.

  Bodies crashed through the undergrowth as the IRA men ran for the wall. Stefan walked at an even pace behind them, blowing rhythmically. As he came out of the trees he saw them, stumbling through the scrub and bushes. One tripped and fell. Two kept going; they were almost at the wall.

  A shot rang out. The men stopped, unsure where it had come from. The whistle still sounded behind them. There were voices, coming closer, and torches as the soldiers from the car moved in. The fugitives made one more run; they were only yards from the wall. Another shot was fired in the air, but in their direction. They halted. Dessie MacMahon was in front of them, crouching behind a pile of cut timber, but they could see him now.

  ‘I’m waiting for you lads!’

  One of the men pulled a pistol from his pocket.

  ‘Now is that a good idea with Christmas coming?’

  Dessie blocked the men’s way to the wall. They could see Stefan behind them. And there were three soldiers running across the clearing towards them too. The IRA man dropped the gun.

  On the ground in front of Stefan Gillespie was the third man, crawling forward, in pain; a twisted ankle, maybe a break.

  ‘Get up!’

  The man stopped; he didn’t turn his head. He was shaking; there was a choking noise, a sob he wanted to hide. Stefan squatted down beside him.

  ‘I said get up!’

  He saw the face of a boy who was no more than fifteen years old.

  ‘Don’t shoot, mister. Mother of God, you won’t kill me, will you?’

  The Magazine Fort sat on a low rise to the south-east of the Phoenix Park, hidden from Islandbridge and the Liffey by a belt of woodland. It had been built in 1735 by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to store gunpowder. The slope up to the fort was an artificial glacis constructed to protect the walls from artillery and keep attackers under the defenders’ fire. The grey-rendered walls were thick and clumsy, fronting the wide ditch that enclosed them, barely visible until you reached them; all that stood out, rising from the hillside, were the tall chimneys of the barrack blocks. Inside, the fort was a small courtyard of stone and brick buildings, and beyond that the cavernous underground stores that were the magazine. It had never been clear what it guarded; its storerooms had rarely held explosives. Its defences had never been put to the test; no shot had been fired at them in anger. Even when it was built it had been looked on as a kind of absurdity. Jonathan Swift watched its construction and saw a demonstration of the special folly that characterized Irish affairs in general and Irish military matters in particular. The British had gone; not much else had changed.

  It was occupied on Easter Monday, 1916, when Republican Volunteers and Boy Scouts approached the sentry outside, kicking a football back and forth between them. Only when they reached the entrance did they produce a revolver. They walked through the otherwise unguarded gates and took the fort before anyone could pick up a rifle. The aim was to blow up the magazines as a spectacular beginning to the Easter Rising and a signal for an insurrection that had already been cancelled, but the storerooms contained no high explosives and barely any ammunition. Twenty-three years on, faced with the Magazine Fort’s impregnable walls, the IRA had successfully re-run the same plan.

  Superintendent Gregory sat on an upturned ammunition box in the artificial hill that was the business-end of the Magazine Fort. The lights that hung from the barrel-arched ceiling shone brightly, though not so brightly as to illuminate every dark corner of the great empty space beneath. And empty it was. Of the hundreds of wooden crates and ammunition boxes that had been stacked in the magazine only a few remained. A score or so of rifles, brand new and still heavily greased, lay on the ground; there were odd heaps of spilled cartridges. Two long-faced quartermaster sergeants turned sheets of paper on clipboards, still totting up what had been taken.

  Terry Gregory’s wry smile was especially broad. He looked at the two older IRA men in front of him with satisfaction. Behind them were Stefan Gillespie, Dessie MacMahon and two other Special Branch men.

  ‘Did they forget you then, Anto?’

  The man he spoke to didn’t answer. He turned to the other man.

  ‘And Gerry Rowe. Must be three, four years. I heard you were in England. Leeds was it? You’re probably better out of that. I’m surprised they didn’t get you. Haven’t they picked most of the Boys up over there?’

  ‘You’d be the one to know. You’ll have enough friends there.’

  ‘Whatever kind of pig’s arse you made of it across the water, it’s some job tonight. A dozen lorries, right? In and out and away before anyone noticed. And they say there’s no Santy. You’ll all believe in him now, even if he has changed that old red and white yoke for an Irish Army uniform.’

  Gerry Rowe did smile now.

  ‘That’s the trouble with us, Gerry. Give us a fecking magazine fort and we put stuff in it. It’s asking for trouble. The English had better sense.’

  He turned to the fifteen year old, holding on to the man called Anto.

  ‘I was going to say that at least the army didn’t have to suffer the indignity of having the Boy Scouts unleashed on them. No such luck.’

  ‘He’s just a kid, Mr Gregory.’

  ‘He is, Anto, you’re right.’

  The boy glared at Gregory. He had to make up for the fear he had shown. The superintendent watched him with kindness, but it lasted only a second.

  ‘Just a kid. That’s what pisses me off.’ Terry Gregory turned to his officers. ‘Take them back to the Castle. See what you can get. It won’t be much, but I doubt we’ll need much. Tomorrow’s another day altogether.’

  Stefan looked at his boss. It was as if the superintendent had suddenly lost interest. As the Special Branch detectives escorted the IRA men out to the yard, Superintendent Gregory followed them.

  ‘You may go home, lads. There’s sod all to do here. We’ve shown our faces so. But I’ll want everyone in at six. We may sort it out then.’

  Stefan didn’t know what the reaction of a man who knew about all this before it happened ought to be, but surely it wasn’t this. Even for public consumption there should be some concern. It was an arms’ raid on an unprecedented scale. Apart from the quantities of weapons and ammunition in the hands of the IRA, the incompetence of the Irish Army was more than a joke. Yet Gregory couldn’t even pretend to get past the joke.

  He laughed, slapping Stefan on the back with an odd familiarity.

  ‘Ah, come on! Where the fuck are they going to put it all?’

  Stefan walked into the courtyard of the Magazine Fort, brightly lit by its own harsh sodium lights and the headlam
ps of cars and lorries; engines were running, filling the yard with smoke as exhaust fumes pumped into the freezing air. Soldiers, Guards and Special Branch detectives stood in the slush of snow adding a haze of cigarette smoke. A line of shamefaced soldiers filed from the barrack block into the back of a Bedford truck. Each man gave his name and rank to a Military Policeman; each name was ticked off. It was the garrison. The last man was the commanding officer, Joseph Curran, his eyes down, avoiding any of the eyes that were fixed on him.

  A senior army officer and a man in civvies were watching the truck as Superintendent Gregory passed them, heading towards his car.

  ‘There’ll be a court martial then, Jack?’ said Gregory.

  The two men turned. Colonel Jack Rowe was the commander of An Cór Póilini Airm, the Military Police. Stefan didn’t know the colonel, but he recognized the other man immediately as Commandant Geróid de Paor of G2, Military Intelligence. De Paor nodded a stiff greeting at him.

  ‘In due course,’ said Colonel Rowe.

  ‘And you’re a bit late, Geróid,’ said the superintendent.

  ‘No point saying it didn’t take us by surprise, Terry. You too?’

  Gregory shrugged and looked back at the colonel.

  ‘I hear it couldn’t have been Captain Curran’s fault. Wasn’t he away at confession when the Boys went in? I wish a few of my lads had more acquaintance with confessions than beating them out of fellers, but you can’t always pick your men, can you? So was it an inside job then, Jack?’

  ‘They certainly knew what was here.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be a pub either side of the river where there’s not a feller could tell you where you keep your reserve ammo, Jack. Am I right the IRA man walked up to the gate with a parcel for Captain Curran, and your man on sentry said, “Jesus, it’s good of you to deliver this time of night!” and let him in, along with the fifteen lads with the Thompsons?’