Ian St James Compendium - Volume 1

by Ian St. James

  Sheila O'Brien was far from relaxed. She had heard Timothy's scream of pain and terror from the brook. Now she was running down the lane from the wrought-iron gates. The four B Specials raced ahead of her, two had already left the road and were half-hidden by brambles as they crashed through the undergrowth.

  "Timothy!" Sheila O'Brien screamed as she ran.

  The caravan bucked and swayed round the bend. Liam Riordan saw the figures running towards him. Ferdy Malloy was already twisting round with a rifle in his hands. The mare's hooves beat on the road, the mongrel yapped, the woman screamed - but the loudest noise was the revving engine of the pursuing Wolseley. Ferdy swung front and pointed - "Liam, take us off the road. They'll be on us in a minute."

  Liam lashed the mare and drove desperately for the break in the trees. The Wolseley rounded the bend. Ferdy raised the rifle and fired. The shot went wide and high. Lurching from the buckboard Ferdy fired again. The car was almost on top of them. The driver wrenched the wheel. The car skidded past, righted itself, then skidded again to straddle the lane in front of the caravan. The terrified mare reared back, struggling to escape the shafts, but the momentum of the caravan drove her straight into the motor-car. Her forelocks smashed like matchsticks. The alsatian snarled and struggled to free itself at the back of the caravan.

  At the stream Matt dropped the screaming boy into the water. Next to him Dougan pulled a revolver from his jacket. Matt cursed the pain of his blistered hands, then cursed even more his lack of a weapon. Even as he swore the bushes parted to reveal Cullen with a rifle in each hand. Matt winced as his ruined hands closed around the metal. Ten yards to his left another IRA man opened fire at the police car.

  Just at that instant the Alvis rounded the bend and ran into the caravan. O'Brien clawed the wheel and missed the alsatian by an inch as the Alvis span through 180 degrees. O'Brien was flung forward into the windscreen. A four-inch gash opened his forehead. His hands rose to his hairline sticky with blood. He caught a fleeting glimpse of his wife running towards him. Yet when his eyes opened the lane was empty. It took Eoin O'Brien a minute to realise that his car had turned full circle and was facing back towards the crossroads.

  Pat Connors was on the running board of the Wolseley when it was shunted by the caravan rammed by the Alvis. He had been shooting at Ferdy Malloy, who was returning fire as he backed into the trees. The impact of the collision sent Pat reeling into the lane, his revolver spinning from his hand.

  Liam Riordan had been hit. Clutching his shoulder he jumped from the buckboard and ran for the clearing twenty yards away. It was a mistake. Had he followed Ferdy into the trees Liam Riordan might have lived - but as it was he had seen his son, and was running to meet him.

  Matt Riordan, with Dougan beside him, ran into the road to provide covering fire as Liam Riordan stumbled towards them.

  Sheila O'Brien was in the centre of the lane when gunfire erupted. She veered left towards the verge, heading for her son screaming in the brook. A yard from cover she was hit by a stray bullet. It pierced her temple to shatter her face and spray blood-covered pieces of bone in every direction.

  Two B Specials gave covering fire to their colleagues as they dragged eight-year-old Timothy O'Brien from the stream. The boy, out of his mind with pain and terror, writhed like an eel. As they reached the side of the lane one man stumbled and fell. Timothy O'Brien was thrown to the ground, less than five yards from his dead mother.

  Sean Connors was trying to drag his father back to the car. Hampered by his stiff leg Pat had fallen awkwardly. His head had struck the road with a sickening crack. Semi-conscious he rose to one knee. "The gun," he gasped to his son. "Sean, get the gun."

  Paddy Cullen ran into the road with the single objective of capturing the Alvis for use as an escape car. A blood-stained driver staggered from the vehicle. Paddy squeezed the trigger of the Thompson sub-machine gun and red blotches shot across Eoin O'Brien's jacket. He was flung five yards backwards by the force of the bullets.

  Thirty yards away young Timothy O'Brien lay writhing in agony. He screamed as bullets tore his father apart. He screamed unceasingly as hysteria took over. Mistakenly - in a snatched glimpse - he saw his father's killer as a young man with black hair who waved a revolver as he pulled a man towards the Wolseley. Meanwhile other hands dragged Timothy backwards towards the gates of Keady Manor. Gibbering he pointed to the dark-haired man near the police car - but he pointed in vain because B Specials on either side of him blazed a volley of shots at the trees.

  After retrieving the revolver from the road Sean struggled to get his father into the relative safety of the Wolseley. Behind him the police driver opened fire. His second shot caught Liam Riordan in the back, the third smashed Riordan's head as he started to fall.

  Matt Riordan had almost reached his father when the bullet split Liam Riordan's head open. Matt shot the policeman and watched him tumble backwards into the Wolseley. Then Matt fell to his knees and tried to turn his father over - but Ferdy Malloy was pulling him away. Matt looked up to shout at Ferdy, then froze, words still on his lips. Connors! The Connors were here - both of them - father and son!

  The Alvis slammed to a halt, with Paddy Cullen at the wheel. Hands were pulling Matt into the car. "No!" he screamed. "Take the Da!" Ferdy's rifle clubbed into Matt's head. They heaved him into the back seat. Dougan snatched the Thompson and leapt in next to Cullen. Liam Riordan and two other IRA men were left dead on the ground.

  Tyres squealed as the Alvis swerved across the road. Dougan blazed away with the Thompson to smash the windscreen of the other car to a million shards of glass. Then the Alvis lurched past towards the crossroads.

  Sean was already in the Wolseley with his father. The dead policeman was slumped next to the driver in the front. The driver screamed as the windscreen burst. Sean cried out as splinters cut his face - and cried, out again as his father fell forward - "Da! Are you all right?" Bright red blood fell warm onto Sean's hands. "Dear God. Da. Da!"

  The car leapt forward as the driver slipped the clutch. In the back Sean hugged his father. "Da! Don't die Da. Please don't die!"

  They rounded the bend in time to see the Alvis turn north towards Keady. The Wolseley did not give chase. Instead the driver turned south and roared up the hill.

  Pat Connors squeezed his son's hand and tried to talk - but his voice died in a gargle of blood.

  Behind them - in the lane at Keady - the sounds of the departing engines were barely audible above the howls of the tethered alsatian and the yapping of the mongrel as it emerged from the wood. The crippled mare whinnied piteously.

  In an incident which had lasted five minutes, three men and one woman lay dead. And ten minutes later, Pat Connors, Irish patriot and hero of the 1916 Rising, died also, clutched to his son's chest as the Wolseley raced towards Monaghan.

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter One

  Sean was devastated by the death of his father. Of course friends rallied round - Dinny, Michael, the Widow O'Flynn - and Dev himself attended the funeral. Ambassador Kennedy wrote from London. Newspapers published eulogies, hundreds of people lavished praise on Pat Connors, but their words failed to comfort his son. Sean was torn first by grief, then the need for revenge. "That bastard Matt Riordan," he roared at Dinny one day, "I'll kill that sod with my bare hands. I'll murder him, Dinny, you see if I don't."

  He would have searched Belfast, had his friends not dissuaded him. "You'll never find Riordan in a hundred years," Dinny said, "let the police hunt him down."

  But the police showed no signs of catching Matt Riordan. Sean mourned and raged and took little interest in anything else, until - some, weeks after the Killing at Keady - a group of friends met secretly in Dinny's office. They had kept Sean from Belfast, but his behaviour still worried them. "If he stays in Dublin he'll drive himself mad," said Michael.

  Senator O'Keefe frowned, Jim Tully sighed, and the Widow O'Flynn dabbed her eyes. It was left to Dinny to resolve matters. "Wasn't he going to Lo
ndon anyway, before this terrible business. Can you think of anything better? A new place and different faces - wouldn't that be best for the boy?"

  It was the best they could think of - so they embarked upon a campaign of hints and suggestions. If Sean guessed, he said nothing about it. Dublin was driving him mad. Wherever he looked he saw signs of his father. Eventually he allowed himself to be persuaded to go to London for a few months.

  Arrangements were made and early one morning in October, Sean left for London. The Widow O'Flynn thought he was going for good. She clutched his arm as they walked down the quay. "Will you stand still and give me a good look at you? Besides, wouldn't you think I'm entitled to be kissed goodbye properly?" Her arms encircled his neck and her lips clung to his for such a long time that the true nature of their past relationship must have been obvious to everyone there. Not that she cared. "You'll write, won't you?" she sobbed. "Will you promise me that?"

  Sean himself was close to tears as the mail-boat pulled away from the dock - especially when Maeve O'Flynn collapsed in Jim Tully's arms. Senator O'Keefe doffed his hat, Dinny raised both arms in salute, and Michael waved and waved from the end of the pier.

  The journey was nothing like Sean imagined, but he had always dreamt of his home-coming too, to be greeted by his father as well as his friends. Now his father was dead, killed by the Riordans and the IRA. Sean swore his revenge, knowing as he did so that he would need to become powerful in order to kill Riordan. And power meant assets. He had to find assets in London. Harmsworth had. If he equalled Harmsworth he would be rich and powerful enough to come back and destroy the IRA and Matt Riordan with it. The prospect of that kept him going, bolstered his determination when it wavered, as waver it did during that journey. He wondered what London would be like. Dinny had talked non-stop about Fleet Street, yet London was more than that - London was fame and wealth and power and so many things. But he felt lonely, more alone than at any time in his life.

  He travelled light, just one suitcase and a battered copy of The Life and Times of Alfred Harmsworth - together with the rules of course, his father's notebooks and his own - along with Dinny's letters of introduction, mere reinforcements to those already posted to pave the way for the new London correspondent of the Dublin Gazette. Dinny had said, "Every Irishman in London will be waiting to buy you a drink in Mooney's Bar by the time you get there."

  But nobody met Sean's train at Paddington. No messages awaited him at his hotel. London seemed vast and unfriendly. He ate dinner alone and went early to bed, his thoughts back in Dublin with the Widow O'Flynn.

  The following morning he went directly to the Daily Mirror, nervous about meeting the editor who, as a favour to Dinny, had agreed to provide Sean with a desk and a telephone - "until he sorts himself out." Geraldine House looked bigger than Christchurch Cathedral, and "Bart's" reputation was equally daunting. "The Mirror nearly folded three years ago," Dinny had said, "then Bart took over as editor and circulation has never stopped rising. The best men in Fleet Street work there now."

  As things turned out, Sean's anxiety about meeting Mr Bartholomew was needless - the encounter was too fleeting to be painful. Bart had time only for a handshake and a pat on the back, before pushing Sean towards a waiting assistant - "Harry, take care of this young man, he's a friend of a friend. Give him a desk in the League of Nations."

  Which turned out to be a corner of the newsroom used by half a dozen overseas correspondents, all sharing the Mirror's facilities until they "sorted themselves out". Sean met an Australian and a Frenchman, and heard mention of others, including an American named Mallon - "but we only see him once a week."

  It was a bewildering morning. Sean was left to his own devices. People rushed in and out, busy with a hundred things, none of which concerned him - he was not on the Mirror's payroll, he had nothing to do with the paper - Bart had kept his promise about the desk and the telephone, the rest was up to Sean. The implications were terrifying. At the Gazette assignments were allocated by Dinny, reporters were told what to do, but correspondents miles from home created their own work schedules. Sean wondered where on earth to begin.

  After sitting there all morning, plagued by doubts and shrouded in loneliness, he took himself off to lunch, not because he was hungry but just to escape. He found a pub on the corner, full of animated talk and laughing faces. The atmosphere took him straight back to Mulligan's Bar. He wished he had stayed in Dublin. At that moment he would have given his right arm to be back at the Gazette. He drank a glass of beer and ate a sandwich, listened to loud English voices, and felt more unhappy by the minute. Finally he left, wondering whether to return to Geraldine House or to walk right past, perhaps to go down to the river to think things over.

  It was then that the accident happened. It was all over in a split second. He was outside Geraldine House when the man in front stepped into the road, looking the wrong way. Sean shouted and grabbed the man's coat. A taxi skidded, mounted the pavement, and almost ran them down. Sean pulled the man clear just in time. They were all shaken - the man in Sean's grasp, the taxi-driver, and Sean himself. Luckily little harm was done - the man's trousers were torn and his knee was bleeding. He clung to Sean while testing his left foot on the ground. "Ouch," he grinned, white-faced, "when will I remember you folks drive on the wrong side of the road?"

  Which was how Sean met Freddie Mallon. Not that he knew that immediately. What he saw then was a smartly dressed man with wavy brown hair, making light of his pain while coping with an accident. The taxi-driver was quickly dealt with - profound apologies and a one pound note from the American.

  "As for you," the American said shakily to Sean, "you about saved my life. I wouldn't know how to pay you for that."

  Sean was more concerned with the man's ability to walk.

  "That's okay," the American jerked his head at Geraldine House, "I was making for here anyway."

  After which came the introductions, and when Sean helped Mallon upstairs they found they were at adjoining desks. "That's fate," Mallon said cheerfully. "You must be good news, my new lucky charm." They exchanged grins, then Mallon busied himself with his mail and some messages. Half an hour later, however, he rose with a groan. "If I don't soak in a hot tub I'll never move again. I'm going home. What are your plans for the rest of the day?"

  The truth was that Sean had no plans, none whatsoever. Mallon grinned. "Tell you what. Come back to my place and tell me about yourself. I owe you a favour, young Connors, and I hate being beholden."

  Sean learned a lot that afternoon, all of it fascinating. Freddie had worked on several New York papers and some on the West Coast. Now he was a thirty-five-year-old success story, writing a weekly column on Europe for syndication to over one hundred American papers. He filed stories from Berlin and Rome, Paris and Vienna. Sean listened with awed respect, then asked, "But how do you start, making contacts, I mean? Don't you have to get to know a place first, before writing about it?"

  Freddie blinked up from his bath-tub, "What am I - foreign correspondent or travel writer? I report political and social news - not how Venice looks in the moonlight."

  Later, when Freddie was dressed and they were in the sitting-room, each with a glass in his hand, it was Sean's turn to talk. He began diffidently, conscious of his inexperience - but Freddie was a practised interviewer and two hours later Sean was shocked to realise that he had related most of his life history. He had stopped short of his affair with the Widow O'Flynn, and omitted to say he was the Gazette's owner - yet he had talked about everything else, even the Killing at Keady. Of course there were reasons, including three unaccustomed whiskies, but the drink merely helped ease his nervousness. What made him talk was mostly homesickness and self-doubt; he was still mourning his father, he was a stranger in a strange land, unsure of himself - and Freddie Mallon led the conversation with such sympathetic encouragement that at the end of two hours they were laughing like old friends.

  They got on so well that Sean was delighted by th
e suggestion of dinner. He had planned to go in search of Mooney's Bar, but dinner with this sophisticated American seemed a much better idea. Freddie took him to a tiny restaurant in Soho where he made a fuss of introducing Sean to the proprietor - "Mario, come and meet Sean Connors. He saved my life today. Do me a favour, if he ever comes in here by himself give him the best, will you do that for me?"

  After which they dined well. Sean enjoyed every mouthful, even though he was unsure what he was eating. He liked the atmosphere too. The place was full of Freddie's friends. During the evening at least seven people stopped at their table. Sean was introduced to everyone - "This young man saved my life today." For the second time in twelve hours "League of Nations" proved an apt description. Sean met correspondents from four different countries, all of whom wanted Freddie's opinion on the same subject - the possibility of war.

  Sean was fascinated, yet he felt miserably out of place. These men were far removed from Dublin reporters. Sean's tweeds looked clumsy next to their smart worsteds. He shuddered as he contrasted his Irish brogue with their cultured voices. What pained him most was his hopeless ignorance. Maybe Alfred Harmsworth had conquered those men, but they were too much for Sean Connors. London, he decided, was not for him. Even the food he was eating carried some fancy Italian name that he could never pronounce.

  Yet, self-conscious or not, he tried to follow their conversation. Where yesterday's statesmen had lived in Sean's books, the statesmen of today were part of these men's lives - they spoke of Hitler and Mussolini, and Roosevelt and Stalin as men they had studied. Mein Kampf and Das Kapital and Roosevelt's New Deal were referred to with a casual fluency which took Sean's breath away. He could only listen and learn - and try to hang on. He had to hang on. Too many people would feel let down if he ran away. Maeve O'Flynn and Dinny expected him to conquer the world. Besides, what would his father have said?