"That was wrong of me," she burst out, "I said I was wrong. I was sorry -"
"Sorry! Again you use that word. You were so sorry that when I told you about the man who killed our parents you didn't want to know. I even described him to you -"
"It wasn't that. I was upset. I couldn't see the good of dwelling on the past."
"Couldn't you! Well by God you soon will!"
She stared, without comprehension.
"You know most of the story after that," he shrugged, "some of it better than I do. For instance I don't know when you first became a whore, but it was early on, you and that - that Jenny person. But she was less clever than you. She got pregnant didn't she?"
Kate was shocked, "How did you know?"
"He told me. That Christmas. He came home for a couple of days, remember? When I asked about you he said you were upset about Jenny getting into trouble with some man - so he was giving you a special Christmas treat. Ha, and to think I believed it! Good God, he guessed what you were like even then."
Kate flushed bright red. "It... it wasn't like that at all -"
"Not much! And all the time he was screwing you I was up to my eyes in work. I worked like a dog to save the Averdale business - but all he wanted was money for his bloody art collection, and to take his fancy whore all over Europe -"
She jumped up and started across the room. He sprang from his chair and reached her at the door, gripping her wrist and pulling her round to face him.
"Damn you!" he shouted. "You stay and listen to me!"
They were both trembling. His grip was a vice. She tried to pull away, but he laughed - "What will you do? Scream rape? Nobody will believe you."
She slapped his face with every ounce of her strength.
"All right," he panted, "forget your past. I'll just tell you the secret, then you can go."
"I don't want to hear!"
"It's the face. I've seen it! The murderer. He's in Belfast."
"I don't understand," he said weakly "I don't know what you mean."
"The man who killed our parents is here. He knows you and you know him."
He released her arm. She rubbed her wrist, still staring at him. "Well ... hadn't you better tell someone ... the police -"
"All I had was a face, remember. When I saw it in the papers last week I could hardly believe it. I had to make sure it was the same as I saw from the train, all those years ago. I called Buckley in London and told him to dig back through the archives in Fleet Street. And he found it, the exact picture. This man, with his arm in a sling, being helped down some hospital steps."
He grinned triumphantly. "Buckley even got a copy of the photograph. Would you like to see it? The man who made you an orphan, all those years ago."
She hesitated ... distracted by his gloating manner.
Tim crossed the room to his desk. She followed, her legs quaking, a sick dread numbing her mind. Tim waved a newspaper in front of her. She saw the headline - "The rise and rise of Sean Connors." The wartime photograph of Sean had been outlined in red ink. Clipped next to it was another photograph - Sean with his arm in a sling, being helped down some steps.
Tim was laughing, "Judge yourself, that's what I said when you challenged my insults. Well - what do you call a woman who sleeps with the murderer of her parents?"
"It can't be," she said weakly. "You must be wrong -"
"You'd remember. That's what you said. And I did. I even described that face to you at Glossops. Square jaw, black hair and - it doesn't show it here - but his eyes are vivid blue."
Kate clutched the desk for support.
"A murderer's whore!" Tim shouted. "Whore ... whore ... whore
"It's a mistake," she whimpered, "some kind of terrible mistake."
"No! He was at Keady, in the lane, I saw him!"
She turned blindly for the door.
"Justice," Tim screamed, "don't you see. Justice. I've settled with you both."
The door was jammed. Or locked. She fought and struggled with the handle.
"Whore ... whore ... whore ..."
The door gave way. She stumbled into the hall. The passage stretched before her. He followed her, screaming all the time - "Whore ... bloody whore."
She reached the front door. Street noises erupted as she stood on the steps. A troop carrier rumbled past - some soldiers whistled at her. She stumbled on the pavement and almost fell. Her legs walked with a will of their own. Her mind was still in that house, with Tim leering and gibbering. She stepped into the road. A car squealed to a halt. Someone shouted. People looked and stared. She kept telling herself it can't be true. It was more of Tim's lies ... spiteful, horrible lies ...
She came upon a taxi-rank. Dazed and shocked, she gave the man her London address - and was baffled by his blank face. He asked if she were ill. Finally she understood - and told him to take her to the hotel.
The ride only took five minutes - but years of her life passed through her mind. Sean? Could it have been Sean ... all those years ago? Sean ... did you make me an orphan?
Something was happening at the hotel.
Men with cameras were all over the front steps ... and policemen ... and soldiers.
Jimmy Cross was pushing everyone aside to open the door of her cab. Poor Jimmy looked sick. As white as she was; as if he were in shock.
He took one look at her face and said, "My God, you know."
"Know? No I don't. Not until I see Sean. It's all a mistake. Tim is telling lies. Sean will sort it all out, Sean always does."
She was blinded by flashbulbs. Jimmy was steering her through the mob at the entrance. The lobby was crowded too, a great crush of people centred round that RUC Inspector who was so difficult with Sean ... Carstairs or something... he was reading out a statement... others were writing it down, she heard snatches as Jimmy shouldered ahead of her through the throng.
"... abducted at approximately nine-thirty by a man posing as a chauffeur... taken to a house in Ballymurphy ... was shot in both knees, then killed by a bullet in the back of the head ... the IRA have already claimed responsibility ..."
Kate closed her eyes in horror. Someone had been killed. How awful. Oh God, what a terrible place.
Two British soldiers craned their necks above the crowd. Jimmy pushed past them, and as Kate squeezed along one soldier asked the other - "Who they got this time?"
"Some bloke called Connors by the sound of it... Sean Connors."
The other one groaned, "Christ - when will these stupid Irish bastards stop killing each other."
Epilogue
We buried my father in London. Jimmy Cross took the decision after calling Freddie Mallon in New York. Michael O'Hara had a say in it too, but whoever decided I am sure it was right, because as Freddie said at the funeral - "During the war Sean Connors was London for millions of people." It was meant as a tribute but the IRA used it for their own ends - the label "British stooge" followed my father to his grave, which was ironic when hardline Prods were boycotting him as an IRA sympathiser at the very time of his death. Yet somehow that kind of misunderstanding is symbolic of the whole Irish tragedy.
I was young at the time and not much help to anyone. In fact the reverse. The problems started when Freddie and Margaret flew in for the funeral, complete with my mother. Of course, it was all they could do - after all she had a right to be there - but her presence automatically excluded Kate, and that upset me. Kate had given my father so much happiness that for her to be displaced by someone who had looked on him as a meal ticket seemed wrong to me - and being young I said so. Not only that, but I refused to attend the ceremony without Kate, which caused a hell of a row. Finally Kate persuaded me to go to the service without her. I am glad I went, and sorry about the scene I caused beforehand ... but of course it is too late to do anything about that now. The day after the funeral I took Kate to the graveside and left her to say her goodbyes - but in truth she no more said goodbye then than she has now.
We simply had to try to pick u
p the pieces and get on with our lives. I finished school and went on to university - and Kate lived in Paris with her friend Yvette for a while. I ought to have explained that my father left Kate a wealthy woman. (My mother was well provided for too, I hasten to add.) Not that money could compensate for the loss of my father. Kate's behaviour was strained to the point of being positively strange after that awful day in Belfast. Of course I put it down to my father's death ... which it was ... but something else plagued her, of which I knew nothing at the time.
Anyway, I spent most holidays in Paris with Kate, and thankfully the special closeness between us remained as firm as ever. Kate has been a combination of mother and big sister and "the kind of woman I would like to marry" for as long as I can remember. I love her very much, so I was worried sick when she showed no signs of recovering from the death of my father. She nursed Yvette and took an interest in me - but apart from us she shut out the rest of the world. Not only that but when we talked of my father something more than love showed in her eyes a guarded, almost haunted look which made no sense at all - as if she kept a secret about him from everyone, but especially from me.
Well when Yvette died Kate came back to England to live. Not in London, she bought a small house in Cornwall, on the coast near St Ives, where she lived quite alone save for her dog. I had started on Seven Days by then, but I went down to see Kate every third weekend. I was the only company she had, apart from her dog - but we were all she wanted, because she firmly rejected any suggestion of living in London or seeing any of her old friends.
Then Paul Thompson published a book about my father called The Power in the Back Room. We all hated it. Freddie Mallon even issued a writ. According to Thompson (who had once worked on Seven Days as a junior reporter) Sean Connors was nothing more than a glib Irishman with friends in high places. Much was made of "the Kennedy connection" in the States and Sir George Hamilton's influence in London. What was worse, he had an awful lot to say about Kate being my father's mistress. He even suggested that my mother had been left abandoned in New York. Generally it was a hatchet job. As soon as I calmed down I was determined to write the real story of my father's life. Freddie Mallon and Tubby Reynolds urged me on, and since they were both on the verge of retirement they wanted me to start right away.
Kate was the problem.
I had expected The Power in the Back Room to upset her as much as it had everyone else - but to my surprise she seemed quite unmoved about the book. "It doesn't matter what they say about me," she said, then she laughed. "Funny that. Once upon a time other people's opinions were all I cared about."
She wasn't even too upset by what Thompson wrote about my father. "Sean wasn't anything like that. We knew what he was really like, and we loved him."
But when I told her about my book she became very agitated, even frightened. I had planned to ask her to help with research. She not only refused, but when I persisted she burst into tears. I said - "Kate, my father adored you and so do I, nothing in my book will hurt you, I promise."
It was then that I learned of her meeting with Tim, on the morning of my father's death. I was horrified. Poor Kate. She had tried to reject her brother's story but had never been able to discuss it with anyone else. For years she had lived with that awful secret, in constant fear that someone would accuse my dead father of having murdered her parents.
Yet - amazingly - her concern was more for me than herself - "I didn't want anything to spoil your memory of him."
No wonder she had taken Thompson's book in her stride - she had expected Sean Connors to be accused of much worse.
I made her tell me the whole story then, everything that Tim had told her. I certainly did not believe it, and I don't think she did, but by then she had tortured herself with the story for so long that she didn't know what to believe. She kept insisting that Tim had been so sure - "He carried that face in his mind every day of his life."
It upset her to tell me, but I've no doubt it helped her to share her burden. So much so that when she had calmed down the following day she agreed that I should do the book - she would even help on condition that if I discovered any truth in Tim O'Brien's allegations I would not publish a word. I accepted the proviso to humour her as much as anything, for I never could believe anything bad of my father.
The following day I telephoned Michael O'Hara and asked him point blank - "Where was my grandfather killed?"
After a while he remembered. "Keady," he said, "it's a little place just over the border."
I felt sick. Keady was where Kate's parents were murdered.
I flew over to Dublin and started digging from there. It did not take long. The National Library has copies of newspapers back to the year dot. And I found out the truth - that my grandfather was killed in the Killing at Keady - in the very same "incident" in which Kate's parents were shot. Not only that but my father was there when it happened. I nearly abandoned the project - but I was trapped by then - to quit would almost be an admission of my father's guilt. I could never live with that, and it would destroy Kate. So I had to go on.
Well, you know most of the rest. The last link - that of Matt Riordan - might have remained hidden but for a friend who knew I was doing research for this book. One day he phoned me from Belfast to say that the Ulster Volunteer Force had killed a man known as Matt Lambert. I had never heard of Lambert. "Well I hadn't either," said my friend, "but the RUC seem to think he was the man who killed your father." So I flew to Belfast and started again.
All told the project has been exhausting. When my father was killed everyone thought it was just another IRA killing. No one guessed at the truth - of those strands in my father's life which had become so tangled with the Riordans and the O'Briens and even Lord Averdale. Now it is finished I am glad the full story can be told at last ... sad and terrible though it is, but then so is the history of Ireland.
Kate agrees with everything I have written - in fact the most important aspect of this book is what it has done for Kate. Proving my father's innocence lifted a shadow from her eyes. Her reaction was one of overwhelming relief - "Now nobody can ever tarnish Sean's name."
I hope that is true. Certainly Kate remains untarnished. She is still beautiful. Her life in St Ives is less solitary these days. Some time ago, when we finally established what happened at the Killing at Keady, she took up painting - and these days she paints well enough for London galleries to take her work. It brings her up to town once a month and of course we meet for dinner. There is no man in her life, unless you count me, but at least she mixes with people again and has come to terms with her life.
The remarkable Maeve Tully is still alive although no longer living in Dublin. Molly Oakes too is thriving, married now, with a grown up family in Australia. May I take this opportunity of thanking them both for their generous help with their parts of this story.
Tim O'Brien died last year, so Kate is not merely the only survivor of the Killing at Keady, but the sole survivor of that terrible day in Belfast when the paths of Sean Connors and Matt Riordan crossed for the last time - the day Kate and I will always remember as the killing anniversary. Now, as the violence in Northern Ireland makes headlines every day, we often wonder how many old feuds are being settled, or even worse - how many new ones are being started. And we pray for peace to come to the troubled land of our fathers.
Patrick Connors. 1984.
END
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Ian St James Compendium - Volume 1 Page 162