England's Janissary

by Peter Cottrell

  ‘But Dublin’s full of eejits with guns!’ she shrieked.

  Flynn woke with a start. He was afraid, his face slick with sweat; his wet shirt stuck to him. His temples throbbed painfully as he sat up and he was momentarily disorientated by the stink of flatulence mixed with stale sweat that seemed to pervade every barracks he had ever lived in.

  ‘I don’t want to go to Dublin!’ Mary McLain shrieked through the thin plasterboard wall, sending daggers lancing through Flynn’s hungover brain and making him nauseous. He knew he drank too much but sometimes it felt like the only way to blot out the memories that stalked the shadows of his mind whenever he tried to sleep, whenever it was quiet; the only way to curb his fear.

  ‘There’s no talking to you, woman!’ McLain shouted, slamming the door and stomping into the duty room below. Flynn’s hobnails scraped on the bare floorboards as he fumbled open the top drawer of his bedside cabinet. As he pulled out a worn, leather-bound hip flask, bedsprings groaned from across the room and Constable Jim O’Leary poked his ashen face out from a mass of grey blankets to peer through the gloom at Flynn.

  ‘The usual?’ O’Leary muttered and Flynn nodded. ‘You know, Kevin, my boy, you look like shit,’ O’Leary added, before disappearing back beneath the blankets. Flynn shook his head and smiled and unscrewed the flask’s cap, sniffing the contents. His nose hairs tingled. It was good stuff; you could always count on policemen to get the best poteen – illegal potato whiskey. He sighed and replaced the cap, tossing the flask back into the drawer.

  Downstairs, Constable Gary O’Neill’s dark, watchful eyes followed Sergeant McLain as he stomped about, his greying moustache bristling, his worn, round face red with impotent rage. O’Neill’s sharp, weathered features broke into a sympathetic smile as he handed McLain a mug of tea. ‘Will you be having a brew, Sarge?’ The Ulsterman’s harsh Antrim accent seemed oddly out of place in County Longford.

  ‘Do they not teach you Prods to make tea?’ McLain grimaced as he sipped the mug of tea and calmed slightly as he raked his thinning hair.

  ‘Mrs McLain doesn’t want to go to Dublin then, Sarge?’ O’Neill asked quietly.

  ‘She’s got it into her head that I’ll get shot if I go to the depot. She says she likes it here and to tell the truth, O’Neill, so do I, but orders are orders and you’ll be in good hands with your man Sergeant Willson when he gets here. He’s a proper peeler. Not like some I could name!’

  O’Neill rolled his eyes theatrically, ignoring McLain’s dig at him for having served in the Irish Guards during the war. ‘At least it’s not to Cork they’re sending you,’ O’Neill added.

  ‘Aye, so they’re not, thank God,’ McLain said, as he strolled over to the barracks’ front door and opened it, silhouetting himself perfectly in the light. ‘I knew Jim McDonell, you know, and Paddy O’Connell, the two lads the Shinners murdered in Soloheadbeg when all this bloody nonsense kicked off. They were proper peelers too. Thank God nothing like that will happen here, eh?’

  A lone figure loomed out of the gloom, hunched against the damp chill, his collar up and his cap down, casting deep shadows. His hands were stuffed deep in his pockets and McLain tensed. In some parts of Ireland it was an offence to put your hands in your pockets just in case you were hiding a gun but McLain thought that was all nonsense; anyway, even in the dark he knew the man’s gait. ‘Good evening to you, Sergeant McLain,’ the shadowy figure called through a haze of pipe smoke.

  ‘Good evening yourself, Mr Kelly,’ he replied in a ritual that they repeated at the same time every day.

  The tip of the rifle’s foresight hovered neatly over McLain’s round chest. The sight alignment was perfect and as he lay in the dark field opposite, the rifleman’s breathing was controlled, serene even. Slowly, unthinking, he clicked off the safety catch and took up the pressure of the trigger.

  ‘Not yet,’ a voice hissed in his ear.

  ‘But I’ve a clean shot,’ the rifleman stated quietly.

  ‘Not yet!’ Joe Maguire repeated and the rifleman reluctantly reapplied the safety catch with a gentle click, slumping out of his fire position with a disappointed sigh. Maguire, the local IRA commander, patted his shoulder; he could sense the man’s frustration even in the dark. ‘There will be plenty of time to get him later,’ he whispered reassuringly and the silent rifleman nodded, the moonlight glinting in his cold, hard eyes. Maguire was on tenterhooks. His boss was tucked away in an alleyway further up the street and the last thing he wanted was for everything to go wrong with him watching.

  Waiting until Mr Kelly had disappeared around a corner, Maguire slowly inched his way closer to the barracks through the damp meadow. The shutters were still open. He could see the policemen talking inside, a clear shot, whilst fifty yards behind him half a dozen nervous young gunmen lay concealed in the cold, wet grass, clutching an odds-and-sods collection of firearms, awaiting his command.

  Maguire’s stomach churned with that familiar sensation of anxiety and excitement, just like it always did, before the feeling surged into his chest and groin. Unthinking, he slid his pistol from his coat pocket and cocked it as he watched a young policeman pull on his coat. The weapon was cold in his hand, like death. It was intoxicating, frighteningly so. His skin tingled.

  McLain stepped back into the barracks, abruptly cutting out the light, and O’Neill looked up, releasing his pen from his slender hand. ‘It’ll be a beautiful night for paperwork, Sarge. I suppose you’ll be out on your rounds soon, Sarge.’ It sounded more of a statement than a question. ‘Shall I come with you?’ O’Neill asked hopefully.

  ‘It’s not like you to be wanting out and about,’ McLain replied, plucking his overcoat from its peg.

  O’Neill licked his lips. ‘Ach, it’s this bloody paperwork! It’s just such a shame that HQ doesn’t have more forms for us to fill in, eh?’ McLain shook his head and, sighing, O’Neill slumped in disappointment.

  ‘I’ll take the new fella, Flynn, with me. He needs to get to know the place, especially as I’m away soon,’ McLain said.

  O’Neill glanced down at the pile of papers on the desk and, resigned, picked up his pen. An off-white enamel mug sat steaming in front of him, thick with the red-brown tea that generation after generation of policemen seemed to be able to make but never managed to explain how.

  ‘Evening, Sergeant, Constable O’Neill,’ Flynn said on the stair, buttoning his tunic and feeling better for a wash and the smell of tea.

  ‘Get yourself to the armoury, Flynn, we’ll be off out in a minute,’ McLain said gruffly. It amused Flynn that the backroom could be graced with the epithet ‘armoury’. It was farcical, a bit like calling their police station – a substantial detached house – a barracks!

  Flynn smoothed his dishevelled brown curls and scratched his chin. The armoury smelt of gun oil as he squatted over the strongbox, rhythmically sliding cartridges into the drum of his revolver. He felt like he had been around guns all his life and had grown to hate them with a passion. They were a means to an end, a necessary evil, nothing more, nothing less.

  As he entered the duty room, O’Neill looked up and smiled. ‘There’s a brew on if you want one,’ he said, nodding towards the brown china teapot squatting on the stove, and Flynn helped himself to a cupful.

  Watching the two men, their medal ribbons adding a splash of colour to their rifle-green uniforms, McLain thought they were an odd couple, an Ulster Protestant and a middle-class Dubliner, both in their own way outsiders in the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary, but he sensed that the shared experience of the war had created an invisible bond between the two ex-soldiers.

  Flynn looked older than his twenty-five years. A thin scar tugged across his face from the tip of his right ear to the corner of his eye, giving him what some girls may have thought was a rakish, swashbuckling look, yet his pale grey eyes looked tired, like a man who had done too much too soon, and whilst McLain guessed he was about six foot tall it was hard to tell because Flynn stooped when he relax
ed, making him look shorter than he was.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ O’Neill asked Flynn, nodding at the pale scar, and McLain noticed Flynn’s eye twitched when deep in thought.

  ‘Opening a tin of bully beef,’ Flynn finally quipped, making O’Neill laugh. When McLain finally got round to asking Flynn where he’d won his Military Medal, the reply was brief, one word – Ginchy – betraying nothing of the turmoil behind his eyes. Ginchy meant nothing to McLain but O’Neill’s reaction showed that it meant something to him, another shared rite of passage.

  ‘Here you are, Sergeant, you’ll be wanting this on a night like this,’ Flynn said, as he shrugged on his greatcoat. There was a distinct nip in the damp air and the coat felt warm and dry. ‘You know, Sergeant, there was a time I’d’ve killed for a coat like this!’

  ‘You’re not wrong there, Flynn, my lad,’ said O’Neill, smirking, barely looking up. ‘In fact I think I did!’ McLain paused momentarily as he buttoned his coat around his thickening middle, unable to tell whether O’Neill was joking or not.

  ‘What I need is a decent pair of gloves to go with it,’ Flynn mused as his aching joints anticipated the damp night air. At least the cold would clear his head and if he had to go out he may as well be snug, he thought. After all, any fool can be uncomfortable. McLain felt uneasy watching the fluid motion of Flynn’s hands as he tugged his .38 Webley revolver from its holster, checked the cylinder and slipped it into his greatcoat pocket in one swift, practised motion. ‘Better to be safe than sorry, eh, Sergeant?’ Flynn stated flatly.

  Flynn could tell that McLain disapproved of guns, but back in training he’d been told never to go out at night without a weapon and he had no intention of becoming another statistic on the Inspector General’s monthly report. Times had changed, even in Drumlish, whatever McLain may have thought. ‘Let’s go then,’ McLain said, straightening his cap and nodding towards the door.

  ‘After you, Sergeant,’ replied Flynn, as he smoothed back his brown curls, plonking on his own cap and bowing slightly in mock deference. It struck McLain that Flynn always called him Sergeant, not the more familiar Sarge like O’Neill and Constable O’Leary, but then they were old constabulary hands, whilst Flynn still had much to learn.

  McLain gave a brief cursory glance around the room before both he and Flynn flipped up their overcoat collars in unison against the night. Flynn patted his pockets, as if to reassure himself that he had his electric torch and his revolver, and as McLain yanked open the door a shaft of light slashed through the darkness, like a knife scarring the night.

  CHAPTER 2

  Tuesday, 6 January 1920, Drumlish, County Longford, Ireland

  MAGUIRE FROZE AS the two policemen strolled down the barracks path chatting. He felt light-headed and painfully exposed, he could hear himself breathing and his grip tightened on the pistol in his coat pocket but the two policemen, as yet unaccustomed to the dark, didn’t notice him.

  ‘You see them flower beds there,’ he heard McLain say. ‘A neat garden works wonders to give any nosey head constable or visiting district inspector a warm fluffy feeling and not poke their nose into my barracks. The first bite of every meal is with the eye they say!’

  Flynn laughed. ‘So the constabulary’s not much different to the army then, Sergeant!’ It was obvious from McLain’s look that he did not approve of such comparisons.

  ‘We’ll take ourselves up to St Mary’s,’ McLain continued, rubbing his hands together against the cold. ‘Who knows, we may be fortunate enough to be treated to one of Father Keville’s rants about the evils of the British Empire, God save us!’

  ‘Now there’s a thing – a churchman with a political opinion. And there was I thinking that we didn’t have enough of those!’ Flynn chortled, as he followed the sergeant towards the church.

  As their voices faded into the dark, Maguire could hear McLain muttering about the state of Irish politics and, relaxing slightly, he steeled himself to dash across the road towards the open barracks door. Somewhere a dog barked and he thought that he could hear the thud, thud, thud of a football being kicked against a wall.

  ‘Get ready,’ Maguire whispered to the rifleman behind him, but as he rose silently to his feet, the barracks door slammed shut with a loud thud, plunging the street into darkness once more. Maguire instantly flopped back down onto his knees, ignoring the sharp pain that shot up his thighs as he landed on the cold, hard ground.

  ‘What now?’ the rifleman asked. Maguire looked up the street and then back at the barracks, the shadows obscuring his expression, his eyes two points of light in the starlight.

  ‘Work your way around the back. Take Doyle with you and see if you can get at the back door. Don’t do anything until you hear the signal, though.’ The rifleman nodded and melted into the darkness as Maguire loped off up the street. The dog barked again.

  Something moved in one of the barracks’ upstairs windows and MacEoin waved frantically at Maguire. ‘Get back!’ he hissed from the shadows. Maguire stopped and looked back at the barracks and, to his horror, straight into the eyes of a middle-aged woman watching him from the window. Maguire forced himself to glance casually at his watch before continuing on up the street. When he reached MacEoin he could see the anger etched on his face. ‘I told you to go back!’ MacEoin hissed.

  ‘McLain’s wife saw me from the window.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I don’t think she suspects anything.’

  The upstairs light went out and MacEoin relaxed slightly. ‘Go back to your lads, quick! We’ll jump McLain and his other fella as they get back,’ MacEoin ordered, before turning to his stocky bodyguard, Brendan Fitzgerald. ‘Stick with them, Brendan, but don’t get too close, mind. I don’t want them to see you.’

  Fitzgerald nodded and padded soundlessly away, masked by the strains of an old rebel song drifting from a nearby drinking den melding with the thud of a football. Maguire tried to look as casual as possible as he strolled back towards his men, fighting to control his anxiety. He would be a long time on the toilet when this was all over, when the adrenalin wore off and the stress kicked in. As he reached the edge of the field, a faceless voice hissed, ‘Quick, boss, they’re here!’ The two policemen had just rounded the corner. Thud! Thud! Thud! The sound of the football was beginning to grate. Then it stopped.

  It was only when the thudding stopped that Flynn noticed the footsteps and did his best to look behind without making it too obvious. The hairs prickled on the back of his neck and his mouth suddenly felt bitter and dry as he thought he caught a movement in his peripheral vision. He felt sick. ‘Don’t look back, Sergeant, but I think we’re being followed.’

  ‘That we are, Flynn, my boy, that we are. Yon fella’s been dicking us for the last five minutes at least,’ McLain replied, as he strolled casually along with his hands clasped behind his back, as if all was well.

  Sensing that there were others skulking nearby, Flynn carefully slid his hand into his coat pocket, feeling for the handle of his pistol, slipping it into his palm before easing back the hammer in the muffled depths of his overcoat pocket. He fought back the urge to run and as they reached the barracks’ gate, a shadowy figure slipped into the light, its face hidden by a cap pulled low and his hands thrust deep into trenchcoat pockets.

  They stopped and, hooking his thumbs behind his lapels, McLain studied the stranger with a detached air of professional curiosity, whilst Flynn gently slid back his left foot so that he stood at a slight angle to the stranger, making a narrower target. His pulse raced, his hangover completely gone. Like an echo from his past, the queasiness in his gut told him what was coming. Instinct kicked in and a quick glance down the street confirmed that at least three others were making their way up out of the shadows behind them.

  ‘Evening, gentlemen, a terrible night for it.’ The stranger spoke softly in a calm Longford accent, dark eyes glinting in the moonlight. ‘If you would be so kind, please put your hands in the air, both of you. You are now pri
soners of the Irish Republican Army. Now, Sergeant, tell the others inside to come out with their hands up and no harm will come to any of you….’

  Maguire slowly extracted his right hand from his pocket, betraying no urgency. After all, his rats were well and truly trapped. Flynn tugged at his own revolver, catching the hammer on his pocket and accidentally discharging it into the ground at Maguire’s feet. Maguire skipped, snatching off an unaimed shot in the direction of the policemen. There was a soprano yelp of terror. Maguire stood rooted to the spot, staring in horror at the rapidly deflating football in the hands of a trembling, dumbfounded boy. ‘Ma!’ the boy screamed, wailing into the night.

  Flynn shouted as he shoved McLain towards the barracks, cursing his sloppy weapons handling. He snapped off another two shots before a fusillade rippled from the dark in reply, kicking up dirt around his feet, spurring him on. Somewhere, a window shattered and a dog joined in the cacophony as McLain crashed into the barracks’ door, bowling O’Neill backwards, followed by Flynn who banged off his last two rounds into the dark. ‘Get that bloody door shut!’ McLain barked, as he slumped against the main desk.

  His backside was numb; his pants felt sodden and for an awful moment McLain thought that he had wet himself. In fact, he almost felt relieved when he heard O’Neill shout, ‘Sarge, you’ve been shot in the arse!’

  ‘Never mind that!’ McLain winced through gritted teeth. ‘Get the bloody door shut!’ There was a flurry of footsteps on the stair and O’Leary, all dishevelled blond hair and bleary eyed, stumbled down, buttoning his tunic.

  ‘Get the shutters closed as well!’ snapped McLain as another window shattered. A bullet thudded into the front door. ‘It’s the bloody Shinners, they’re attacking the barracks!’ O’Leary blanched, the blood visibly draining from his face. ‘Mary!’ McLain bellowed towards the door to his private quarters and, moments later, a frightened middle-aged brunette, her hair shot with slivers of grey, poked her head out. McLain’s backside was beginning to sting like hell and he did his best to hide the fact from his wife, as warm blood trickled down the backs of his legs.