by Joe Joyce
‘Piggy wiggy code still impenetrable?’ Sullivan said. ‘If you’ll excuse the pun.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve been sighing away over that page for ages now,’ Sullivan laughed. ‘Like a lovesick girl.’
‘Maybe it’s catching,’ Duggan said. ‘Why does he never write back to her?’
‘Doesn’t want to encourage her. Doesn’t want to know her anymore.’
‘So why does he bother picking up her letters?’
‘For a laugh. Wouldn’t you?’
No, Duggan thought, and said aloud, ‘And why does she keep on writing letters to which she never gets a reply? As far as we know.’
‘Because she’s besotted,’ Sullivan giggled at the word, as if it was funny.
Maybe. A phrase in one of the letters caught his eye: ‘always and ever will I wait for your comeback to our haven in the hillsides.’ You could turn it into more recognisable English. I’ll always wait for you in our country retreat. Hideout. Love nest. Whatever. But what’d be the point of that? Hans was German, the woman, if she was a woman, maybe Dutch. But the Dutch didn’t have hillsides, did they? Either way, they wouldn’t be playing word games in English. Wouldn’t make any sense.
‘That Coffey woman who was hiding Brandy was on my list,’ Sullivan was saying. ‘From trawling through the files.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Far down it, but there. Among the remnants of the widows and childers party.’
‘The what?’
‘You never heard of the widows and childers party?’ Sullivan gave him a doubting look that suggested that Duggan was not what he had thought he was.
‘No.’
‘The widows and sisters of the dead heroes of the republic and Erskine Childers. The madames and countesses and all them. And Childers. All the irreconcilables.’
‘Ah, right. She’s one of them?’
‘On the edges.’
Duggan rooted in the drawer of the table and found a large used envelope with Saorstát Éireann printed on it. ‘Are many of them still around?’
‘Not many. But a good few followers. Daughters of the widows and childers, I suppose.’ Sullivan laughed. ‘We’re widening the list. These Germans seem to like shacking up with women.’
‘Hey, you might get the Brandy medal yet,’ Duggan laughed and slipped a couple of pages from the Harbusch file into the envelope as Sullivan bent down to pick up a sheet of paper that had slipped off the table. He knew this was a step too far. Removing secret documents, deliberately disobeying orders. But in for a penny, in for a pound. If he could crack the Harbusch case, he’d be well set up. He closed the file and stood up and left with the envelope.
‘Curious,’ Gifford said with an air of professional detachment as he turned over the last page.
Duggan stood in the window, looking at the windows of Harbusch’s flat. They were as bland and unenlightening as usual.
‘Very curious indeed,’ Gifford said, as he finished reading the letter.
Duggan turned from the window and gave him an inquiring look.
‘Foot fetishists,’ Gifford said. ‘They’re an obscure offshoot of the original Balkan anarchists. Very dangerous. Their aim is to blow …’
‘Seriously.’ Duggan held out his hand and Gifford gave him back the pages. He had hoped that Gifford might see something that he hadn’t seen himself.
‘Seriously. We will take a closer look at Hansi’s feet the next time we are privileged with his presence.’
Duggan put the pages back into the envelope, careful not to bend them.
‘Feet to me are things for walking,’ Gifford said. ‘Or marching, in your case. My thoughts tend to hover around higher things.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We could ask Sinéad’s advice on our way out. See what she thinks of them.’
‘Jesus,’ Duggan said with a touch of irritation. ‘I could be court-martialled for showing these to you.’
‘Never fear,’ Gifford clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Your secret will go with me to the grave. After they’ve extracted all my fingernails and toenails.’
They walked down the stairs and Gifford blew a kiss to Sinéad as they went by the reception desk. Outside the hall door Duggan stopped and looked over towards Harbusch’s flat, hidden now by the corner of the park. ‘We’re taking a big chance,’ he said. ‘We could miss something important.’
Gifford shook his head. ‘Or we could sit here till kingdom come and nothing will happen. Come on.’
They set off towards Leinster House, doors opening in many of the houses as people left work and the numbers of passing cars and bicycles increased. ‘Could there be a connection between the house Hans is in and the others on either side?’ Duggan mused.
‘Apart from the fact that they’re holding each other up?’
‘Apart from that,’ Duggan smiled at the image of them all falling like dominoes. ‘A door from one to the other. Something like that.’
‘No. That was checked out too. The owners and occupants are different. There are no connecting doors from one to the other. Not officially anyway.’
They went down the other side of the square and along Clare Street and Nassau Street, walking with purpose and skipping around the office and shop workers filling the footpaths. They turned into Dawson Street and Gifford stopped before an insurance company and took up position against a wall.
‘How will we know him?’ Duggan asked.
Gifford reached into his inside pocket and took out a photograph.
‘How’d you get that?’ Duggan looked at it and tried to memorise the unmemorable features.
Gifford took his eyes off the main door of the building as a group of girls came out and winked at him. They watched people emerge from the insurance company in dribs and drabs, young men singly, young women in groups. All the men looked much the same to Duggan, all dressed in dark suits that seemed too big for them, their only distinguishing feature an occasional red or blond head among the shades of brown and black.
‘There he is,’ Gifford muttered as a thin young man emerged and turned left up the street. Duggan had no idea how or why Gifford was so sure but fell into step beside him as they followed the man up the street, across Molesworth Street, and on up to Stephen’s Green. The man stopped at the corner by Alys Glennon’s dress shop and seemed undecided.
‘Please cross to the park,’ Gifford muttered.
As if he had heard him, the man looked both ways and sped across the road to the path beside the park. ‘Good lad,’ Gifford said as they hurried after him, dodged through the two-way traffic and ignored the curses of an old cyclist after forcing him to brake and wobble. Gifford kept pace with the man for a few strides then hurried to catch up with him as they approached a gate into the park.
‘Richie Cummins,’ he said, stepping slightly in front of him at the gate and holding out his warrant card in front of his face. ‘We want to talk to you for a moment.’ Duggan stood behind Cummins, leaving him nowhere to go but into the park.
They stopped inside on the park’s perimeter path. Whatever colour had been in Cummins’s face had gone and his dark eyes flicked back and forth from one of them to the other, his fear flashing like a beacon.
‘Nuala Monaghan,’ Gifford said.
‘I don’t know where she is,’ Cummins shot back. Duggan glanced at Gifford.
‘How do you know she’s missing?’ Gifford held Cummins’s stare.
‘That’s what the other fellows told me.’
‘What other fellows?’
‘Two fellows. I don’t know who they were. Stopped me the other night. Like you.’
‘Police?’
‘They didn’t say.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They asked me’ – Cummins gulped air through his mouth – ‘where Nuala Monaghan was.’
‘And?’
‘And I told them I didn’t know.’
‘And what’d they say?’
‘They, they … One of them took out a
gun and pointed it at my knee.’
‘And?’ Gifford glanced at Duggan.
‘They told me to tell the truth,’ Cummins started talking faster. ‘And I told them I was telling the truth. I didn’t know where she was. And he said he’d ask me one more time and he pulled back the hammer on the gun and put it against my knee and I said I couldn’t tell them where she was because I didn’t know where she was and …’ He stopped and looked like he was about to cry.
‘What happened then?’ Duggan asked, for the first time.
‘They went away,’ Cummins wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘They said that if they found out I was lying they’d come back and … finish the job.’
‘And were you lying?’ Gifford demanded.
‘No,’ Cummins raised his voice. ‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘You were going out with her?’
‘No, I wasn’t. I only went out with her once. And that was a blind date. It wasn’t even a date.’
‘The dance in the Metropole?’ Duggan asked.
Cummins nodded, like it was the worst experience in his life. ‘She was supposed to go with someone else but he stood her up at the last minute. And my sister asked me to go with her. And I did.’
‘Your sister is a friend of hers?’ Gifford shot back.
‘Not really. They worked in Clery’s together.’
‘You never went out with her again?’
‘I never saw her before or after that night,’ Cummins said plaintively. ‘And she hardly said a word to me the whole time.’
‘Did you fancy her?’
Cummins looked as if Gifford was mad and shook his head.
‘Your picture was in the paper with her,’ Duggan said. ‘With another couple. Who’re they?
‘I don’t know,’ Cummins looked at Duggan for the first time, relaxing a little. ‘They were just at the dance too. A photographer asked us to stand together and smile. That was it.’
‘These fellows who accosted you,’ Gifford said. ‘Who were they?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you think they were policemen?’
Cummins shook his head cautiously, as if it might be a trick question.
‘Who then?’ Gifford asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Have you seen them again?’
‘No.’
‘Could you describe them?’
‘They were just,’ Cummins shrugged, ‘fellows. In their twenties.’
‘Like us?’
‘No, no. Rough types.’
‘Are you a member of any illegal organisation?’
‘No.’ Cummins looked shocked at the thought.
‘You should call the guards if you see them again,’ Gifford said.
‘Oh, I will, I will,’ Cummins lied.
‘Thank you for your assistance,’ Gifford said to him and stepped back from the path onto the grass. ‘We won’t be troubling you again.’
‘Thanks.’ Cummins lowered his eyes and walked away quickly.
They watched him go, his dark suit looking like it had become another size too large for him. ‘Another innocent bystander,’ Gifford said, as if there were too many of them in the world. ‘Fuck.’
Duggan lit a Sweet Afton and blew a stream of smoke onto the calm evening air. Across the grass from them lay the pond, its surface cut by the perfect bow wave of a stately duck. Two people were silhouetted against the water, sitting on a bench, their heads together.
Seven
Duggan was on his second cigarette by the time Timmy drove up outside the barracks, half an hour late. He dropped it on the path and ground it out with his foot as Timmy hauled himself out of the driver’s seat and went around to the passenger side. He lifted a copy of the Irish Press off the seat before settling in. ‘Home, James. And don’t spare the horses,’ he said, as Duggan eased up the clutch and they moved off.
Timmy opened up the newspaper as they went down Conyngham Road alongside the Phoenix Park, Duggan speeding up through the gears to almost sixty miles an hour. Timmy didn’t seem to notice the speed, or didn’t care. Unlike his own father, Duggan smiled to himself, who’d never let him drive like this. He slowed as they came to Chapelizod and crawled around the sharp bend of the Liffey bridge. Timmy chortled at something in the paper as Duggan accelerated up the hill on the other side in second gear.
‘Have you heard the latest about Frank Aiken and the newspapers?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘He’s having the time of his life fucking them around. Being in charge of censorship is much better than being chief of staff of the army,’ Timmy explained, not needing to specify in which army Aiken had been chief of staff. ‘Anyway, his latest one was over something in the Kingstown Presbyterian Hall, a bridge meeting or something. There’s no such place, he said. There is no Kingstown any more. So there can’t be a Kingstown Presbyterian Hall. And, of course, that Protestant rag, the Irish Times, wouldn’t rename it the Dun Laoghaire Presbyterian Hall. They said there’s no such place as Dun Laoghaire Presbyterian Hall.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ Timmy said. ‘Still up in the air, I think.’ He gave a short belly laugh. ‘Like his other one about the lifeboats. The RNLI. He wouldn’t let the papers use its name or initials. It couldn’t be royal and national at the same time, he told them. Had to be one or the other. And, of course, if it was royal it might be encouraging one of the belligerents and a breach of neutrality. So it had to be national if it wanted to get into the papers.’
‘Did they change it?’
‘No,’ Timmy said with a touch of regret. ‘Someone told Frank to back off, stop being silly. Must’ve been the Chief. You couldn’t imagine anyone else telling Frank what to do.’
Duggan glanced at Timmy as they came up the hill out of Lucan, past the Spa Hotel, wondering if he was becoming disillusioned with de Valera. That’d be some turnabout. But it was the second time in the last week that he’d heard Timmy being critical, however obliquely, of the Chief. As if he was reading his mind, Timmy said, ‘That was a great stroke of the Chief’s, creating a Defence Council and getting the Opposition into it.’
‘Yeah?’ Duggan increased speed again as the land levelled out and they headed for Maynooth.
‘It’s just a talking shop. No power at all. Get them in there, tell them nothing, and let them talk their heads off. Which they’re doing. And compromising themselves with every word from their mouths.’
‘How are they doing that?’
‘You haven’t heard the latest Fine Gael plan?’ Timmy sounded disappointed with him. ‘They’ve gone into a total funk over the collapse of the French. Afraid we’re going to be next. And suggested that we put our army and the Brits in the North under the command of a French general so we can all fight the Germans together if they invade.’
‘Interesting idea,’ Duggan offered.
‘Interesting, my arse,’ Timmy retorted. ‘In the first place, the Germans are not going to invade. We’re not their enemy. It’s just a way of getting us onto the losing side. But it shows clearly which side those lads are on. Never mind what they say in public.’
‘Has this been in the papers?’
‘Of course not,’ Timmy sounded outraged. ‘The Chief’s just storing it up for a rainy day. When it’ll be of maximum use.’ He paused and then gave another of his chuckles. ‘There’s no shortage of French generals hanging around with nothing to do, I suppose. But I wouldn’t want any of them on my side.’
Timmy folded his paper and tossed it onto the back seat. He tipped his hat forward, its brim shading his eyes, and he settled back in his seat, arms folded over his stomach. ‘I’ll have a little nap. Prepare myself for the constituents.’
Duggan drove on, enjoying the car. It responded well, more powerful than anything he was used to. He’d have liked to floor the accelerator but there were few stretches of road straight enough for long enough to do so. And he wasn’t at ease yet with its
handling in the bends and the varying height of the camber of the road. There were few other cars on the road, some horses and carts, and an occasional hay cart.
The countryside was a bright green, the hedges and trees broken up with golden stretches of ripening corn. The hay fields were few and far between, the result of the tillage orders, and there were men in some of them, tossing the hay into cocks. Farm dogs darted out of gateways to bark furiously at the passing car and race beside it until it out-paced them. Duggan held his course, ignoring them; they knew when to turn away to avoid colliding with the car.
He went through Kinnegad and turned off onto the Galway road and continued through villages, sleepy and silent in the midday sun. Timmy slept in silence too, if he was sleeping at all – Duggan had expected him to be as loud asleep as he was awake – and only stirred himself when they eventually crawled through the narrow main street of Athlone. He straightened up, pushed his hat back on his head, and looked out at the shops as they went by. They crossed the bridge over the Shannon, by a line of men with their backs to it, watching the passing parade, and went along the other side of the river, past the military barracks.
‘They’re going to lock up the spies in there,’ Timmy nodded at the barracks. ‘If they ever find any.’
‘But there are no German spies. You said.’
‘English spies.’ Timmy took out his cigarette case and held up one for Duggan. Duggan took it and Timmy lit his and his own.
‘Do you know a fellow called McClure, a captain in your place?’
Duggan coughed over the smoke, masking his surprise. ‘Yeah,’ he said, as neutral as possible.
‘What’s he like?’
‘He seems very straight. Good at what he does.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Intelligence work.’ Duggan stated the obvious, unsure of what Timmy knew about McClure or why he was asking these questions. It wasn’t beyond him to try and trap him into lying or holding back something. Timmy liked to test people.
‘Hmm,’ Timmy said, opening his window and tipping the ash out as they passed the last straggling houses on the western edge of the town. ‘Is he trustworthy?’
‘What do you mean?’ Duggan glanced at him.