England's Janissary

by Peter Cottrell

  A hard-faced sergeant stamped crisply to attention in front of Crawford. ‘Farm’s clear, sir. There’s a body out back. Old fella. Some sort of execution by the look of it, sir.’

  Crawford nodded, the information confirming Flynn’s story. ‘Thank you, Sar’nt Eastbury. Start getting the men back in and get some tea on.’ The sergeant nodded, saluted and doubled off smartly – every inch the professional he undoubtedly was.

  Flynn felt his hands beginning to tremble as he fumbled his revolver back into its holster and walked after Crawford towards the skewed body lying in the field. A red-faced corporal was riffling through the corpse’s pockets when they arrived. ‘Dead, sir,’ the corporal said matter-of-factly, a statement of the obvious. ‘No ID on him, sir. Sar’nt Eastbury told Purton and Buscott to guard the other body. One of the lads told me he saw two blokes legging it but he couldn’t get a clear shot.’

  ‘Thank you, Corporal Wyatt. No matter, one of the other patrols will get them.’ Crawford sighed and ran his fingers through his tousled blond hair. Flynn looked down at the corpse, trying to work out if he’d seen the man before.

  ‘Sar’nt Eastbury!’ Crawford shouted.

  ‘Sir!’ Eastbury replied sharply.

  ‘Get Purton and Buscott to bring the body down here, please!’ Crawford commanded.

  ‘Sir!’ Eastbury shouted in affirmation.

  Grimacing with obvious distaste, Crawford jabbed the corpse with the toe of his boot. It rocked and blood slopped from its shattered skull onto the grass. ‘Know him?’ Crawford asked. Flynn shook his head; he had never seen the man before in his life.

  ‘Maybe his mucker over there can tell us,’ Flynn said, sliding back into military slang.

  The officer nodded. ‘Let’s hope so, eh?’

  CHAPTER 6

  The Muldoon farm near Drumlish, County Longford

  MICK MCNAMARA LOOKED down at his brother’s shattered head and felt sick, shuddering involuntarily. His face was bruised and ached like a bad day at the dentists, his mouth was bitter, awash with blood, and cold drizzle seeped through his clothing. He felt miserable, wretched, trapped, alone … betrayed.

  Nearby a tight huddle of squaddies hunched around a reeking kerosene stove brewing up tea, leaching its heat. McNamara’s eyes burned with cold, homicidal fury as he watched the officer and the grey-eyed policeman approach. A young soldier leapt up, proffering a tin mug full of orange-brown tea to the officer.

  ‘Constable, tea? The lads have brewed up. I’m sure there’s plenty, there usually is,’ Crawford added nonchalantly, before gingerly sipping the scalding liquid from the metal mug. It was a chipped white enamel mug, a typical army tin mug, the sort Flynn had slurped from a thousand times before, the sort that made drinking tea some sort of macho endurance test.

  The thin pressed metal almost scalded him and in the chill damp it was perversely comforting to feel the searing heat, teetering on the brink of being painful, taking his mind away from what had almost happened. What was it his army instructors had told him in training – pain was God’s way of letting you know that you were still alive! It was a sensation, and all sensations were made to be enjoyed!

  ‘So what about this one?’ Crawford asked, pointing at McNamara. ‘Recognize him then?’

  Flynn sipped his tea and looked at him thoughtfully, his head cocked to one side. ‘Nope. He looks a bit like the other bugger though. Rebellion seems to be a family affair hereabouts, sir. My sergeant would probably be able to place him.’

  Crawford slid his swagger stick under McNamara’s chin and shoved his bruised, swollen head up. ‘Well, who are you?’ McNamara pulled away and hawked a gobbet of blood onto the floor, desperately trying not to look as scared as he felt, and glared with ill-concealed contempt at Flynn. He was furious with Maguire. He felt let down, betrayed.

  Images of interrogation, torture and the gallows swirled around McNamara’s head as he fought to retain control. He wrapped his arms around himself, partly in an attempt to comfort and partly to keep out the rain as he watched the policeman and the British officer chatting casually as they sipped their tea. He could murder a mug of tea; his mouth felt dry and gritty. All in all, Mick McNamara was thoroughly miserable; he was having a bad day.

  ‘Well, say something,’ Crawford said quietly, his cut-glass English public-school accent grating on McNamara. McNamara spat again.

  ‘Oi, you bloody Shinner git, answer when an officer speaks to you!’ Eastbury bellowed as he slammed his fist into McNamara’s head with a meaty thwack. White-hot pain shot through McNamara’s skull as his knees collapsed beneath him like a puppet whose strings had been cut. An ammo boot cracked into his ribs followed by another. His ears were ringing, blood pounding. Flynn winced; his eye twitched.

  ‘Now, now, no need for that, Sar’nt,’ Crawford rebuked quietly. ‘Now, pick him up, please.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ Eastbury responded with ill-concealed disappointment and jerked McNamara back to his feet by his scalp. ‘Answer the officer when he addresses you!’ Eastbury snarled as he wrapped his scarred fist around the man’s lapels but still McNamara said nothing.

  ‘Refusing to speak isn’t going to help you, you know, my man,’ Crawford continued. ‘You were caught running away from here. My men saw you throw away your gun and this constable saw you trying to shoot both his colleague and himself. Even worse, a man has been murdered here and if you cannot or will not explain why you were here, then I am afraid that you are in serious trouble….’

  ‘I am a soldier of the Irish republic. I’m not afraid of you or your murdering thugs …’ McNamara snarled.

  Crawford cut him short. ‘Murdering thugs, eh? Captured under arms against the Crown and out of uniform, all the rules of war say that I can shoot you right here, right now. Rebel, traitor, soldier, common bloody criminal – it’s all the same to me, old chap. If you think gunning down unarmed old men is soldiering, then you are much mistaken. You’ll be lucky if you don’t end up at the end of a rope. If I had my way we’d do it right now but sadly …’ He left the rest unsaid. McNamara’s face paled. ‘Now tell me, who else was here with you and who is this fellow?’ Crawford enquired, pointing his stick at the corpse at his feet and prodding it disdainfully.

  McNamara tried not to betray his feelings as he stared down at his brother’s corpse, its matted blood and brains seeping into the grass. He clenched his mouth shut; he hugged himself and stared defiantly at the officer. ‘Very well,’ said the young officer in a measured tone, shaking his head with feigned disappointment, like an adult speaking to a miscreant child. ‘Sergeant, put this … er … gentleman in the wagon, if you please. We’ll let the intelligence boys have a word with him when we get back to base.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ Eastbury replied sternly and, nodding towards the two Tommies flanking the IRA man, barked, ‘You heard Mr Crawford – put the prisoner in the wagon! Jump to it!’

  Flynn knew that the sergeant was playing a part, doing what the lads expected, being what the lads wanted – a quintessential British NCO, just like Flynn had done when he was in the same situation. The soldiers seized McNamara roughly by the arms and ankle-tapped him all the way to the lead vehicle. Flynn knew that the soldiers would probably give their prisoner a good kicking in the back of the lorry, out of sight of the officer. Intelligence officers euphemistically called it pre-interrogation conditioning but to a layman like him it just seemed to be kicking the crap out of someone to make them shit scared of what was coming.

  ‘Excuse me, sir? But this man belongs in police custody. He’s a suspect in a murder enquiry,’ Flynn said to Crawford.

  The officer looked at Flynn in feigned surprise. ‘I’m sorry, Constable, but he’s army property for the moment. When our chaps have had a chat I’m sure that he’ll be handed over,’ he replied.

  Who was responsible for what, and who had jurisdiction where, had become a real pig’s-ear since the government had given the army emergency powers, and whilst they were supposed
to help support the police, it was never that clear cut. The politicians called the IRA common criminals but they refused to let the police treat them as such. Flynn shrugged, there was nothing he could do and he knew that in this case possession was nine tenths of the law. ‘You do realize, sir, that by not handing prisoners to the police you just help encourage these bastards to think that they are soldiers, not just a bunch of bloody gangsters and crooks.’

  Crawford shrugged. ‘Sorry, old chap, but I have my orders.’ Jerry McNamara’s body was rolled into a gas cape and then slung unceremoniously into the back of a truck with a thud, sprawling carelessly at his brother’s feet. The officer strolled over to the lead vehicle and, glancing back, shouted, ‘Come on, Flynn, we’ll give you a lift back to Drumlish,’ before hopping into the cab and banging the door shut. Flynn sighed; he had a feeling that an already long day was about to get longer.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Muldoon farm near Drumlish, County Longford

  MAGUIRE LAY PRESSED into the shadows of a patch of wind-blown gorse scrub peering at the soldiers through a chipped pair of Zeiss field glasses, concealing his silhouette behind a straggling gorse bush, fully aware that he had got away just in time. It was a good position; he could see and shoot at any approach route. Only a determined hunter would find him.

  Doyle sprawled in the grass nearby, wet and miserable, cradling his obsolete 1871 pattern Mauser as groundwater seeped into his jacket, soaking his shirt, trembling like a frightened cornered animal. Doyle’s guts churned and he felt like he needed to defecate. He farted. Maguire groaned. Doyle had never been so afraid in his life and now he was terrified. He felt like his bladder was on the verge of giving out as well. He licked his lips in a pathetic attempt to moisten his bitter-tasting mouth and looked at Maguire. ‘What do we do now, Joe?’

  ‘Shut up!’ Maguire hissed. He could see that Doyle was close to cracking.

  ‘What’s happening, Joe?’ he asked, almost pleading, cursing the fact that he too didn’t have a pair of binoculars to spy on the Brits. ‘Joe, what’s happening?’

  Maguire sniffed contemptuously. ‘For Christ’s sake, shut up, will ye, Paddy!’ He made an exaggerated show of adjusting his field glasses. Doyle glowered sulkily at him but said nothing. From his vantage point he could see the soldiers climb back onto the lorries and Jerry’s body being slung onto the back of one. ‘Let’s hope that Mick doesn’t blab,’ Maguire said, almost to himself.

  ‘He’d not do that, would he?’ Doyle protested. ‘He’s a good fella. He’d not grass on us!’

  Maguire shook his head. ‘Sure, they all talk in the end, they all do. That you’ll learn, so you will.’

  Doyle blanched. In his inexperience he had imagined that everyone else was the hard man and that he was the weak link. It had all seemed so different when he had joined the Volunteers, the IRA, with all its fighting talk and heroic songs. Somehow the reality of war seemed squalid, shabby, utterly devoid of glory.

  Without looking, Maguire heard Doyle’s sharp inhalation of breath as he prepared to speak again. ‘For Christ’s sake, will you shut it! Right, who else knew about today’s job? It’s bloody obvious that either someone shot their mouth off in the pub or we’ve got a tout on our hands.’ Doyle could see that Maguire was furious – yet another operation had gone wrong and he was desperately trying to think who could have grassed them up. Informers were the bane of the republican cause.

  ‘Why do you think someone grassed?’ Doyle asked.

  Maguire shot him a glance. ‘Something I heard at HQ and now I’m minded to think that there is something in it!’ Doyle’s pathetic blank stare reminded Maguire of a wet sheep and he could see that the boy was terrified. Doyle was trying to think how they had been compromised. He was an ordinary Volunteer and knew almost nothing of the army’s plans. He’d been collected the night before, he’d had his tea and said goodbye to his parents and told them nothing about why he was going out. They had not asked, but they knew. His republicanism had come to him in his mother’s milk and he knew that his parents were sound.

  ‘Do you think that is why the peelers were here? Do you think they heard Mick shooting that informer?’ Doyle asked.

  ‘Jakers, it’s not the peelers that worry me, you eejit, it’s them fecking Brit soldiers. If they hadn’t shown up we’d’ve seen to the peelers easy enough,’ Maguire spluttered. ‘Besides, the peelers’d never have heard the shots away in Drumlish on a wet day like this. No, they were on their way here anyway.’

  ‘If Mick talks, what do you think he’ll tell them?’ Doyle was worried.

  ‘Everything, I guess. We’d best get away from here. I need to let HQ know what has happened,’ Maguire said quietly.

  Suddenly, a terrible thought began to shape in Doyle’s mind: maybe someone would think he’d betrayed the others, that he was a tout. Worse still, maybe someone would believe it and his short life would suddenly become shorter, ended in some dank cellar or country lane with his trousers full of excrement and a placard around his neck declaring that he had sold his country for English gold.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Maguire whispered, as he stuffed the binoculars into his jacket and, still on his knees and elbows, shuffled away from the edge of the shrub before rising slowly into a crouching squat. Rainwater dripping from the peak of his flat cap, he cast a quick glance around himself before rising to his feet in the dead ground.

  Doyle loitered a few moments longer before following. He drew some comfort from Maguire’s apparent calm but was still more afraid than he had ever been before in his life. His legs were like jelly and despite himself he couldn’t help glancing behind, half expecting to see a crowd of British soldiers come charging over the horizon, all bayonets and blazing guns.

  ‘Wait up, will you!’ he called after Maguire. He regretted not bringing an overcoat as the drizzle thickened into a steady rain and more filthy water seeped into his boots, soaking his socks and chafing his feet. He just knew that his feet would be raw with blisters by the time they got to wherever Maguire was leading him. Doyle had no idea where they were going and part of him dreaded finding out. Even if he had asked, he doubted that Maguire would or could be bothered to tell him anyway and every step sucked Doyle further and further into his own little bleak, miserable world.

  Every now and then the rain eased up and once or twice the sun feebly probed through the cloud, taunting Doyle as he stumbled along, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He fell into Maguire, who staggered and gave him an angry, pregnant, sidelong glance. ‘Watch how you go, you!’ Maguire rebuked and then turned back towards what had made him draw up short in the first place.

  Part obscured by mist, a low, rambling, shambolic grey-stone croft squatted in a shallow depression. Here and there, ancient slates had fallen from its rickety roof and a battered weather-blistered door hung precariously from dark rusty hinges. The door, like the shuttered windows, was firmly shut whilst nearby a lively, peat-brown, rain-swollen burn frothed angrily past the dismal cottage. The place looked like it had seen better days and save for the lazy wisps of grey turf-smoke struggling from its single crooked chimney, it looked deserted. ‘We’re here,’ muttered Maguire. ‘Stay there, cover me. I’ll call you over when I know it’s safe.’

  Doyle slumped down on one knee, grimacing as muddy water instantly soaked through his damp trousers, compounding his cold, wet misery. Ignoring him, Maguire stepped off towards the cottage, cap low, hands thrust deep into his pockets, looking for all the world like a petulant child, huffily paying scant attention to any semblance of a tactical approach and making no attempt to conceal his disgust at what had transpired back at the farm.

  Despondently, Doyle watched Maguire reach the front door and rap on it with his fist. After a brief pause the door opened and Maguire gave a quick, almost furtive glance around before he disappeared inside like a man entering a brothel. Doyle felt miserable. Soon the entire company, if not the entire battalion, would know that he’d been found wanting.
Worse still, he had an awful feeling that Maguire thought that he was an informer to boot!

  The rain thickened and without a watch Doyle couldn’t tell how long he knelt against the crumbling dyke. It could have been a few minutes but it was probably longer; it seemed like an age. He was sodden, water cascading down his back when the door swung open and Maguire shouted, ‘Paddy, get yourself in here, will you!’ Despondently Doyle struggled to his feet and trotted towards the croft, his thoughts giving way to tea and a fag, maybe even something to eat.

  Inside the croft was dark and as he pushed his way through the door it reeked of burning turf, tobacco smoke and tea. He salivated. A copper kettle steamed on an iron stove and a rough wooden table dominated the main living space. Around it sat a couple of shadowy figures. ‘Fetch the lad some tea,’ a strange voice stated authoritatively and moments later a chipped china mug of strong, sweet tea found its way into Doyle’s cold, numb hands. The warmth was comforting and he noticed his clothes beginning to steam, adding to the gloomy fug around him.

  ‘Sit down, Paddy,’ the friendly reassuring voice continued. Doyle plonked himself down on the nearest chair and looked around. Maguire was there, sipping tea, looking thoroughly pissed off. There was another man opposite, his features barely perceptible in the shadowy room, whilst one more stood by the stove, warming his backside. Above them the rain rattled off the roof slates like dried peas in a tin.

  ‘Paddy, this is Commandant Sean MacEoin,’ Maguire said, gesturing at the shadow opposite. Overawed, Doyle gulped. The legendary blacksmith of Balinalee, the IRA’s main man in the county! Flustered, Doyle plonked his mug down on the table with an audible thud. MacEoin smiled reassuringly and sat back in his chair.