There was a long silence. Kant snatched a glance at the general, who had closed his eyes and was breathing heavily. He eyed him closely, and wondered had the general consumed too much drink? In fact, everyone at the table looked as though they had drunk too much. He took in the emptiness of their glaring eyes, the snow swirling in the darkness of the bay windows behind them.
The general roused himself with a growl and ordered more gin. ‘I want you to investigate what happened to these women, Mr Kant. Use your journalistic contacts and dig deep. Find out how they disappeared from prison.’
Isham leaned towards the general with a sardonic grin. ‘There’s more to this. You haven’t dragged Mr Kant here out of concern for a few fugitive IRA women.’
The general cleared his throat. ‘Of course, there’s more.’ He raised his glass to his mouth and a little gin accidentally sloshed over the rim. ‘There’s another name I must add to the list.’ He hesitated. ‘A young woman called Lily Merrin. She was one of my secretaries at Dublin Castle. She went missing a week ago during her lunch break. And hasn’t been spotted since.’
‘Have you reported this to the police?’ asked Isham.
Again, the general’s brow appeared to tremble. ‘The local constabulary is not equipped to carry out such a sensitive investigation. They’re Irish and stupid and riddled with informers.’ He sighed. ‘Their main talents appear to be collecting gossip and burning down houses.’ He turned to Kant. ‘I want you to find out what is happening to these missing women, and in particular Merrin. Quietly. Without drawing too much attention.’
Kant’s neck and cheeks were itching. ‘Anything could have happened to these women, sir,’ he suggested. ‘They may have emigrated to America, or eloped with someone. Perhaps they had a domestic or family problem.’
‘I still want to know.’
‘Merrin had access to intelligence files in Dublin Castle,’ said Thornton. ‘Perhaps she’s another IRA spy on the run.’
The general’s face coloured with anger. ‘I order you to keep a decent tongue in your mouth when speaking about this woman. Her loyalty is beyond doubt; she is from the very best Anglo-Irish stock. Her father was a general in the British Army, and her husband died at the Somme.’
Kant felt another urge to scratch his neck.
Isham grinned and winked at the others. ‘Army men always worry more about their mistresses than their wives. If you only knew the number of times I’ve wondered what my Poppy is up to.’
The alcohol began to do its work, and the conversation strayed onto the subject of Irish girls. Kant stared at the circle of faces boasting of the women they had enjoyed. His head ached and the smell of gin and whiskey crawled up his nose. He was struck by the flushed ugliness of his drinking companions, the coarseness of their conversation, their spurious tales of lust and conquest. Their gloating eyes alienated him. God damn them for their boasting and lying, he thought. They made Dublin sound like the most whorish city in the world where the laws of supply and demand governed every encounter with its female inhabitants.
His chief problem was how to tell the general that he had shared a hansom cab with his missing secretary on the day she had disappeared, that he had seen her inconsolable with fear. He looked at his hands, one gripping his glass, the other the hat on his knee. His tale would go against him very badly, he realised, since he could offer no innocent explanation as to why he had been trailing her that afternoon.
The part of the day he preferred to recall was that moment of unexpected intimacy in the darkened cab. It had a dramatic quality that foreshadowed the rest of the afternoon, the two of them safe and enclosed in the silence with just a crack of winter light creeping under the curtained windows, his neck and scalp tingling where she had just touched him, and then the lingering precision of her lips on his cheek, her breath sweet and clean. He tried to seal the moment up in that hushed chamber, keep it intact forever. He felt a strange happiness flood through him. Their encounter had been something to treasure, a jewel in the casket of the cab, and he felt an urgent need to reveal it to the general, but his caution held him back. He knew he ought to have warned Merrin, revealed who he was and why he was following her, but he had been unable to say a word. He passed his hand over his face, still feeling the astonishment at being kissed by a frightened, dangerous woman. He might have bartered everything to be the man she thought he was, cast his subterfuge to one side, risked his safety, warned her that Dublin Castle reacted with ruthless justice to betrayal, especially when the traitor was one of their own.
Thornton elbowed him. ‘What’s bothering you, Kant? You look out of sorts.’
He smiled and tried to keep a prudent control of his tongue.
‘I haven’t seen you at the boarding house for days. The landlady thought you’d returned to London.’
Riley chipped in. ‘He must have a woman hidden away in a hotel room somewhere. I recognise that look in his eyes.’
‘You know very well that I couldn’t afford to keep any woman in a hotel room,’ replied Kant.
‘Then it’s a girl locked up in a back-street boarding house.’
‘What we all need is a big house like Corporal Isham’s,’ whispered Thornton. ‘One that has no prying landladies, only subservient Irish maids and lots of empty rooms.’
They looked at Isham’s bored-looking face, colder and calmer than the general’s but somehow less civilised. Kant had heard reports of how the corporal had requisitioned Park House, a seventeenth-century mansion with private grounds in the Wicklow Mountains. Every weekend, he organised hunts and parties for Dublin’s ruling classes and its military commanders so that they could wallow in the luxury and glory of the Protestant Ascendancy, shooting pheasants and deer, while IRA guerrillas ambushed their foot soldiers in the city’s back streets.
‘Mr Kant is uncomfortable with all this talk of women,’ said Riley. ‘He must be married with a little wife in suburban London who knows nothing of his secret life in Dublin.’
The reporter shuddered at their line of questioning.
‘My relationship with women changed during the Great War,’ he said. A spasm twitching his lips. Still that memory of Lily Merrin’s kiss, a furtive little pleasure.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can no longer ignore the fact that I am an ill man. And that instinctive love is beyond my reach.’
‘Are you saying all you feel is lust?’
‘I am not an animal.’
‘Neither am I, but I would like to be an animal. Just for tonight. To revert to nature, to prowl through these bars and take what I want.’
Perhaps we are all animals, thought Kant, we survivors of the Great War, damaged creatures with the minds of monsters, without any hope of refuge from our base instincts.
‘We are here because of work,’ Thornton reminded them. ‘Let’s not mix it with pleasure.’
‘I’ve had enough of work,’ replied Riley, with vehemence. ‘When do we enjoy the pleasure?’
Kant broke into a racking coughing fit. When he had finished, he looked across and saw the general’s drunken eyes staring at him.
‘You work for the Daily Mirror, is that correct?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Their war correspondent, yes.’
‘War.’ Stapleton pronounced the word without irony or sadness. He lifted his chin, as though the last glass of gin had revived him. ‘Did you enjoy reporting on the carnage at Ypres?’ he asked.
‘It was my job.’
‘Your Daily Mirror sketches were very popular with readers. People tend to be drawn to accounts of suffering. Especially when perused from the safety of their own homes. Your reports fascinated and repelled them.’ Stapleton took another sip of gin and his eyes moistened. He gave a sour laugh. ‘We tried to censor reporters like you, but somehow the truth trickled out, like water from a poisoned well.’
From th
e bar below, a drunken woman gave a ludicrous high-pitched laugh.
When Stapleton began to speak again, he did so with the exaggerated speech of a drunken man disguising his slur.
‘They tell me that you are one of the most tenacious reporters in England, Mr Kant. If there is a lust murderer on the loose, I want you to bring me a sketch of the beast.’
Kant nodded. It was past midnight and Dublin’s dimensions were changing under the falling snow, swelling and leaning closer to the bay windows, like a familiar face in a suffocating dream.
Isham turned to him. ‘Mr Kant is one of those reporters who hide themselves very well. I believe he might just be the very man we need.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Kant.
‘You’re easily overlooked. Like a shadow that blends into the greyness.’
‘It’s something I’ve learned to use to my advantage.’
Isham waited until the general returned to his gin. He leaned closer with a more serious expression on his face.
‘You must meet me tomorrow morning at 6 Victoria Way,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve some important information that will assist your search. I can reveal a secret the general doesn’t know about his treacherous little secretary.’
Kant felt a strong desire to confess that he knew the significance of the house number, that he had seen Merrin hurry from it on the day she disappeared. It was unwise, but he had a passion to unburden himself to someone, to disclose that he knew Merrin, and that he had spent a very private moment with her, but at the last moment, something in Isham’s eyes discouraged him.
Kant grabbed his hat and stood up. Rather than saluting, he nodded with professional courtesy at the two military men and took his leave from the Crow Club. Gripping his cane for assistance, he left the hotel and set off into streets paved in white, lengthening into the night. The impulse that drove him into the dark heart of the city wasn’t patriotic duty: it was desire leading him on, the hope of recovering the warm memory of Merrin’s touch and kiss, the hunger in her searching fingers and lips, the sensation of a strange and frightened woman seeking his protection, a refuge that was not his to give.
FOUR
Corporal Isham’s face usually wore a sardonic expression, but the next morning his eyes were glistening with excitement. ‘I enjoy chasing women myself, but only for sport, you understand,’ he told Kant. ‘However, I don’t think I’ve ever pursued a woman quite as intriguing as the general’s Lily Merrin.’
Dressed in a short coat and black riding boots, he opened the door at Number 6, Victoria Way. He drew Kant up the unlit stairs to a room that was empty apart from a desk, a typewriter, a chair and a notice board covered in faded newspaper clippings and letters.
‘Do you ever watch women, Kant? I mean steadily watch them day and night. There are many things you can learn from watching women go about their secret business.’
Kant felt uneasy, but stood still, wary of Isham and the little room beckoning before him. He closed his eyes for a moment. There was no sound, no smell, nothing that might bring him back to the hushed hansom cab and his memory of Merrin’s caress, just a sense of danger radiating from the direction of the desk and the black typewriter.
‘A month ago, we began to suspect the IRA might have a mole in Dublin Castle,’ explained Isham. ‘So we began to follow the movements of all the staff who had access to intelligence information.’
Kant opened his eyes and watched the corporal glide across the floor, quick and fluid as a shadow.
‘We discovered that Stapleton’s secretary was spending her lunchtimes grabbing as many secret documents as she could from Dublin Castle’s intelligence files. Then she’d dash up to this room where she typed out copies, sealed them in an envelope and left them for the IRA to collect.’ Isham hovered over the desk.
‘What sort of material did she give them?’
‘Enough to break our network of spies and send good men to their deaths. From now on we’re restricting security clearance and placing the most sensitive documents in crypto-code.’
Isham bent over the typewriter, blew on the dusty keys, and used his handkerchief to lift a long dark hair. ‘We’ve interrogated the landlady. Her instructions were to lock the door once Merrin began typing. Then, ten minutes before two, unlock it. Her lunchtime caller was her only guest. All the rooms were kept empty of lodgers.’
He waved Kant over to the desk. The reporter almost crept towards it, feeling the presence of Merrin. The typewriter floated before him, a metal nest with its litter of keys, not just a machine to print correspondence but an instrument of treachery and death.
Isham laughed in a cold way. ‘The general’s little secretary was the IRA’s most motivated spy. Devoted to betrayal. I imagine she would have filled this entire room with pages of freshly typed intelligence until they spilled down the stairs and out the front door. A house full of secrets. Enough to destroy Dublin Castle for good.’ He struck a key of the typewriter and its prong snapped upon the empty roller.
‘What makes you say that?’ It wasn’t that Kant hadn’t suspected the full truth about Merrin, but part of him was still propped in a corner of the hansom cab, cramped and fumbling, weak to her caress and kiss. He needed Isham to fill in the spaces in his understanding, clear away the discrepancies.
Isham stared straight at him. ‘Very few people are suited to the life of a secret agent. Most recruits turn out to be little more than foolish amateurs, or cowards and scatterbrains who think spying is like playing a game of cards or reading a suspense novel. In reality, it is a form of death. An entire life led in the shadows. The most successful agents like Merrin are those who develop an inner sense of purpose, whose souls are nourished by their spymasters.’
‘And what was Merrin’s nourishment?’
Isham pointed to the notice board. ‘Newspaper clippings describing the IRA’s abduction of her son. Letters in the boy’s handwriting describing how his captors were looking after him. The only sustenance a desperate mother required.’
For the first time, Kant took in the contents of the board. The press reports told the story of how an eight-year-old boy called Isaac Merrin had gone missing whilst visiting his grandparents in England. Kant read about the initial police investigation, the sighting of two men with strong Irish accents in the vicinity of the grandparents’ home, the growing fear that he had been murdered, detectives assigned to the case, and possible sightings along the length and breadth of Britain. He scanned the blue-coloured pages of the letters, a few smudged sentences in childish longhand describing the boy’s captivity in a damp cottage somewhere by the sea. The wretched spelling moved him. Merrin’s betrayal took on a responsibility, a moral force, which quickened his breath and made the blood in his head pound. A vulnerable child was involved, the victim of a kidnap plot. The IRA had used the most compelling motivation possible to turn Merrin into a spy. They had emotionally blackmailed her with her son’s letters, this mess of words scrawled across blue writing paper.
‘The board was positioned so that the typist was forced to look directly at the letters,’ continued Isham. ‘Those IRA bastards kept the story of her boy’s kidnap inches away from her nose. For an hour every day, they sealed her up with her grief. It must have been worse than physical torture.’
Kant saw that Collins did not need guns or bombs. He did not need ammunition to win his war. His was a silent struggle fought by spies like Lily Merrin. Women who carried a quiet desperation and determination in their daily lives, women typing their secrets in anonymous boarding house rooms, locked into a process, an underground intelligence system. The question was how long could Merrin’s soul have survived on such meagre nourishment? How long before her maternal drive was whittled away by the constant betrayal and subterfuge? She was just one woman, surrounded by people who might expose her secret life at any moment, her nerve constantly tested.
‘What would the IRA
have done if she refused to give away intelligence?’ asked Kant.
‘Knowing Collins and his men, her son’s letters would immediately stop. Instead she’d get a cut-off toe or finger.’
The door tugged open slightly, letting in a draught, and then slid shut again. They both listened to the house creaking back into silence.
‘Then we cannot judge her by normal standards of right or wrong,’ said Kant. ‘A mother’s longing for her son can sweep aside everything else, loyalty, the proud history of a family, even one’s duty to the King. Whatever she did, it was done out of desperation. She wasn’t a traitor. Just a mother in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘At least she’s no longer a threat we have to worry about.’ Isham seemed unconcerned about her current whereabouts or safety.
Kant stared at the typewriter. He thought of Merrin hunched over the machine, fingers striking the keys, the prongs rising and falling, spelling out a life and death terrain of secrets, her fingers driving deeper into the keyboard, the prongs hammering quicker and quicker. He saw that the typewriter had been her only source of protection, a place to hide from her grief and anxiety, but one letter out of place and she might slip into the void forever.
‘The puzzle for you, Mr Kant, is working out what happened to her that afternoon.’
‘Perhaps instead of returning to Dublin Castle she thought it better to disappear. Before she could betray any more of her people.’
Isham shook his head. ‘I believe someone at Dublin Castle let slip we were watching her. I had my men positioned that day to arrest her when she left the boarding house, but at the last moment, an accomplice turned up in a hansom cab and whisked her to safety. The general doesn’t know this, but I’ve launched an internal investigation to uncover the suspected infiltrator.’
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