by Paul Reid
James listened attentively, having dropped the ready quips and flirtatious smiles. Now his face mirrored his genuine concern. There was a glass of wine each in front of them, barely touched.
“An awful story.” He shook his head. “Truly awful. To have lost your entire family in one go—it doesn’t bear thinking of.”
She dabbed her eyes and took a sip from the glass. “One gets up. One goes on.”
“Yes. But there’s something you should probably know, Tara. This Mulligan fellow, the man you say murdered your family, well, he was involved in an incident last Friday night. So my sources report.”
“Oh?”
“He was found on a roadside with a serious gunshot wound. We don’t know who was behind it. He managed to survive, however.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, I heard you speaking earlier. In the kitchen.”
“Oh dear, my apologies. I didn’t mean you to find out like that. His local henchmen looked after him that night and spirited him away, but we’ll smoke him out, I can assure you. And deal with him too.”
“Then I hope you’ll do a better job than I did,” she murmured.
“What’s that?”
“How is your aim with a gun, Detective? Mine is not so great.”
He frowned. “You have me on the back foot, I’m afraid. I don’t understand your meaning.”
“You were wrong to assume that it was a man who shot Larry Mulligan.” Why am I telling a policeman this, she thought in alarm. And yet the urge to was overwhelming. James was the first person she had ever felt ready to confide in.
He stared at her. After a long moment, her words hit home. “Oh. Good God. I see.”
She wiped her eyes again and forced a smile. “Aren’t you going to arrest me?”
“Am I—goodness. Arrest you—I—not quite. Though I’m a little shocked, I must admit. I am a policeman, after all.”
“And I’m a criminal.”
He sighed. “You’re a victim. I’ll say that much.”
“I’ll be a dead victim soon enough, once Mulligan is fit to come after me.”
“Certainly not.” James shook his head. “I wouldn’t let that happen. I’ll put a stop to old Larry’s gallop.”
“How?”
“Tara, there are dark elements at work on this island. They’ve reemerged out of the hills and bogs where they began, and Larry Mulligan is typical of the ilk. That’s why I’m here, and my colleagues.”
“The Larry Mulligans have always been here, Detective Bryant. I know my country.”
“And so do I. There are two Irelands. There is the loyal, industrious Ireland, and there is the shadowy, ill-bent Ireland. But we’re here to help. And we’ll defeat the Larry Mulligans, too. It’s a fact. Every last one of them will end up in gaol or facing down a firing squad.”
“I’m not looking to put men in front of firing squads, Detective. Certainly not my own countrymen. Only Mulligan, and anyone else who would make war on innocents.”
“The Irish rebels are all the same, Tara. They’ll destroy this country, drag it back down into the swamps of its own history. We’ve seen it all over the empire.” He paused to take a swallow of wine. “God, but I’m famished. Have you eaten?”
She realised she was starving. “No, not much. But I’ll cook when I’m home.”
“Well, if you’re interested, they do a delightful minestrone here, and their steak is probably the best in Dublin.”
The sound of it made the juices run in her mouth. She smiled. “Dear me, Detective, I think my rumbling tummy has just answered for itself.”
“Excellent.” He patted her hand in appreciation. “I’ll put the orders in, and then we can talk some more. And, Tara, I really do need to learn a little more about you and Mulligan. As I said, I want to help.”
Tara was relieved to find that her earlier disquiet was easing. “There is something, actually.”
“Yes?”
She hesitated. “Something I overheard when I was waiting for him outside the pub. They’re planning a raid. You should probably hear all about it.”
The packet ship steamed into Kingstown on a gentle tide. Ahead, Adam could see a seaside promenade and granite piers and a church steeple. The wind tousled his hair and he breathed in deeply. His first sight of Ireland in what seemed like a lifetime.
Union Jacks fluttered on strings of bunting arranged on the dock, for he wasn’t the only soldier returning home. Anxious parents and wives and excited children gathered quayside. Adam cared little.
Months of recovery in the hospital at Brighton had blighted his mind almost as badly as the war had done. The wards were forever stuffed to the brim with half-mad men, groaning in throes of physical and mental agony, the air rank with their sweat and soiled bedsheets, and no end to their cursing, fighting, and wailing. At night, just as he finally fell asleep, there would be a roar and he’d awake to see a figure charging down the ward, attacking an imaginary enemy as three or four nurses tried to pin him down. The youngster next to him would periodically jerk back and forth in his bed, arms working furiously, trying to pull loose a bayonet that he had jabbed in the chest of a German. His face white with panic, he used to plead with Adam, “Help me, please. I can’t get it out!” Adam would roll on his other side and shut his eyes, desperate for the release of oblivion.
They kept him for several months while his limbs mended and his sight returned to normal, and but for a few hidden scars, he could now lean on the ship’s rail and appear as though he’d never seen a gun in his life. It was a past worth turning his back on, and Dublin waited for him beyond the shoreline, calm and soft and familiar.
Courtesy of the British government he’d been given a civilian suit, a few months’ wages, and his medals, in acknowledgement of his services to the Crown. He was wearing the clothes now—white shirt and grey flannel jacket and trousers, black shoes grimy with deck water. The bundle of money was in his back pocket, a little lighter for having caroused his way round London for several weeks until they fixed him a passage home. And the medals . . .
He groped in his pocket and fished them out. The British War Medal, the Victory Medal, and the Silver War Badge, inscribed with Georgivs V Britt : Omn : Rex Et Ind : Imp :—George V, King of all the British Isles and Emperor of India. They’d proved useful trinkets in London when trying to impress fawning women or win a free drink, but that was also the past, and he had want of them no more. Turning to the rail, he hurled them high over the waves. Three separate splashes and they sank beneath the waters of Dublin Bay.
Once docked, the soldiers filed one by one off a gangplank and were embraced on the quay. Adam said goodbyes to a few, shook hands, clapped backs—sure, we’ll definitely meet up for a pint soon and all that. Then he strode alone up a set of stone steps, passed a bandstand on the pier, and headed for the village. He was thirsty, and a decent pint of stout might help him establish what on earth he was supposed to do now. Aye, and perhaps a second one to keep it company.
“Adam!”
He stopped and twisted round.
A man hurried over the boardwalk, pink-faced with exertion. He was middle-aged, tall and thin with finely crimped hair. When he reached Adam he doubled over and wheezed for breath. “Goodness, my lad. What a devil you were to find!”
Adam finally recognised him. “Quentin? Where the hell did you come from?”
The man straightened up, still panting, and smiled. “Come now, lad, you didn’t think I’d miss my stepson’s return from the war, did you?”
“But how did you know?”
“Oh, it wasn’t easy, I assure you,” Quentin chuckled. “I’ve had a contact in London the past few months, scouring the records for your name. We finally pinned you down to Brighton, and then after to London. I received a telegram only last week to say the War Office was putting you on a packet to Dublin on the seventeenth. And so here I am.” He erupted into another fit of coughing.
“Calm
down there, Quentin.” Adam grinned and took his arm. “You’re all right? It’s good to see you.” He’d always liked his stepfather. An Englishman and a professor at Trinity College, Quentin Aubrey had married Adam’s mother ten years before.
“Your mother,” Quentin recovered his breath, “will want to see you. I was told to take the motorcar here and fetch you back to Dalkey.”
“Mother’s still giving the orders then, is she?” Adam smiled without enthusiasm. “Nothing’s changed.”
“Now, Adam, she loves you. She’s only seen you a handful of times in five years, and she misses her son.”
Adam glanced towards the dockside taverns a little farther on. He’d planned on returning home, of course, but . . . “It’s just that I wasn’t quite ready to go yet.”
Quentin saw the direction of his gaze, and he shook his head in alarm. “Oh, dear me, no! You know she wouldn’t like that. You must arrive home sober.”
“I wasn’t planning on getting drunk. Just a little something to rinse out the sea salt.”
“I promised I’d have you home by afternoon.” Quentin pouted unhappily.
“An hour, that’s all. I promise. Tell you what,” Adam clasped his shoulder, “I’ll even let you buy the war hero a drink.”
The Bowen familial home was situated south of the bay, a few miles outside Dublin City, on a narrow spit of land in Dalkey where they owned a three-storey Georgian house on a partially wooded acre with an orchard and a terraced garden sloping downwards to the beach. In summer the view stretched right over the harbour, a vista of sunlit waves and bobbing pleasure boats, though in winter, when storms came howling across the Irish Sea, it could be a vastly different experience.
The Bowens were of Anglo-Irish stock, having been in Ireland ever since their ancestor Phineas Bowen travelled with his family from Cornwall to Dublin in 1753 to set up an import-export concern, back when Ireland had been a decent place to do business in—peaceful, prosperous, and Protestant. Phineas Bowen’s original residence still stood in Wicklow, still in Bowen ownership, but it became a ruin after it was burned by Fenians in the rebellion of 1867, and subsequent generations of Bowens had turned their backs on it. Before that, in the good times, it was called Bowen Hall.
Phineas’s enterprises had thrived with the wars against the French and Indians in America. His sons and grandsons diversified into manufacturing, shipbuilding, and whaling in the North Sea. Their progeny in turn became amongst the most powerful of Ireland’s merchant classes. Adam’s father, Hunter Bowen, had been a solicitor before his death, and likewise his three sons were despatched to Trinity College to study law, though the onset of Boche belligerence led to Adam—gladly—abandoning his exams.
Quentin drove the Ford Model T carefully up the gravel driveway, laurel hedging on one side and the cliffs on the other. A freshening breeze drove white-capped rollers onto the beach below, and as Adam watched a seal appeared momentarily on the rocks, craning its neck, before sliding back beneath the foamy surface.
“So how does it feel?” Quentin asked him, manoeuvring the car into a narrow space beside the rockery. “Nervous, eh? Not to worry, you’re back with family now.”
“I know,” Adam chuckled. “That’s what has me nervous.”
“Nonsense. You’re where you belong. We ought to celebrate.”
“Well, keep it civil. I know how violent you get after a glass of sherry.”
Quentin ignored the sarcasm and retrieved his door key. Two grandiose Grecian pillars led through a porch filled with potted crocus, pansies, and viola. The foyer had recently been re-floored with oak and smelled of wood polish, and their shoes made a disproportionate noise in the silence.
“Your brothers won’t have arrived yet,” Quentin told him. “But your mother’s probably in the drawing room. Shall we go through?”
“No time like the present.” Adam brushed off his jacket and straightened his tie.
The drawing room faced north over the bay and was something of a shrine to old Victorian tastes. A plethora of tapestries, oil paintings, and ornamental furniture lined the walls and cluttered the floor, and beyond by the hearth, where a well-stacked fire blazed, Adam’s mother sat on an embroidered armchair with her hands on her lap.
At fifty-one years of age, Marjorie Bowen was as slim as a dancer but aged in face, though her high cheekbones and strawberry blond hair still hinted at the beauty that she must once have possessed. The eyes retained their haughtiness, however, that air of supercilious disdain that she always seemed to project towards anyone who crossed her path, including family. When she saw her husband and son enter the room, she tilted an eyebrow ever so slightly and murmured, “You’re late, Quentin. I had expected you an hour ago.”
Quentin coughed sheepishly. “Ahem, slight delay encountered, m’dear. But look who I found.”
Adam stepped into the light and smiled. “Hello, Mother. Good to see you.”
Rising from the chair, she seemed to float in her lace and muslin. “Adam.” She presented her hand to be kissed, for Marjorie Bowen did not embrace. “Dear me, but you look dreadful. Truly you do. As thin as a rake.”
To be greeted in this fashion after such a long absence was not in the least bit surprising to Adam. It was in fact proof that life had gone on as normal. He stooped to kiss her hand. “I know, Mother. But it wasn’t exactly haute cuisine in the trenches.”
“How do you feel?”
“Excellent,” he said truthfully, three pints of Guinness in his belly.
“Hmm.” She cast her eyes over his frame. “We shall have to feed you up again. Can’t have you returning to society like a half-starved beggar.”
“Certainly not, Mother.”
“You must rest now and recover. You will be tired after your boat journey.” Marjorie was naturally ready with instruction, chronically short on affection. “Once you’re rested, our other guests will come.”
“Other guests?”
“Your brothers, of course. Duncan and Allister will be most anxious to see you.” Only Marjorie could have described her children as the other guests.
Adam sighed. “Today? I mean, I really am quite tired.” A stiff, formal family occasion was about the most unpalatable thing he could think of right now.
“As I said, you will rest first.” She sat back on her chair. “Quentin, tell Lizzie to see that Adam’s old room is made up. You may while away a few hours, Adam, and later we’ll sit down to dinner. The whole family.”
He nodded in resignation. “When you put it like that, how can I refuse?”
Sleep was not forthcoming, lying in the warm afternoon light on silken pillows and a feather mattress. The quietness and comfort was utterly unnatural; he almost wished for frozen duckboards and the whistling of artillery shells overhead to set him at ease.
A little before six, Quentin knocked gently and suggested that he might like to wash and dress before dinner. Lizzie, the housemaid, had filled the bathtub with hot water, and while he attended to his toiletries she laid out a new suit, shirt, and waistcoat on his bed.
There was a hum of chatter from the drawing room. With his cheeks freshly shaven he slapped on some Old Spice aftershave—it was like rubbing flames into his skin—and ran oil through his hair to tame the unruly spikes. Lastly he put on his tie and fastened the laces on his shoes.
They were waiting for him.
Lizzie had lit candles round the room and was serving predinner aperitifs. A pleasant smell of roast beef, herbs, and onions wafted from the kitchen.
“Adam!” The big man in the centre of the room, his mouth stuffed with cheese, turned in delight. “Adam, by God—come here, boyo!”
Duncan, the eldest son, was almost the same height as Adam but considerably heavier, a paunch bulging shamelessly below his waistcoat. He grabbed Adam in a bear hug, until Adam almost choked, before releasing him and thumping his shoulder. “Look at you, the Hun slayer. You look good, brother. Grand suit—a nice change from the army issue khakis, eh?”
“Yes.” Adam wiped his chin clear of the food morsels spattering from Duncan’s lips. “Quite a change all right. How’s everything with you, Duncan? Business good? I can see you’re not starving anyway.”
Duncan guffawed and patted his belly. “All my wife’s fault. She’s such a damned good cook. Where’s Sarah? Sarah! Come say hello to your brother-in-law returned from the war.”
Sarah was a dainty creature, red-haired and narrow-waisted. She rose on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek and smiled. “Welcome home, Adam. We’re all very glad you’re safe.”
“Thank you, Sarah.”
There was one more person left.
Allister approached slowly, pinched his nose, and then shook Adam’s hand. “So, you’re back, then.” Though only a year younger than Adam, he was much smaller and slighter of build, with freckled skin and red rims of hay fever round his nostrils. “You’ve been missed.”
They had never been close. Allister, perhaps because of his being born last, had grown up jealous and distrustful, a manipulator who devoted his ample powers of intellect always towards furthering his own position. If Duncan was the undisputed heir and natural successor to their father, Allister could not accept why he shouldn’t be second in command.
“Thanks, Allister. So how have you been?” Adam asked.
“Good, good. And you? How were your travels?”
My travels? Adam blinked. “Oh, just fine. So I hear you’re working for Duncan now, Quentin tells me.” Duncan had taken over Bowen & Associates some years before, the law firm founded by Hunter Bowen.
“Working with Duncan, I should say,” Allister corrected. “It’s a family firm, after all. We make a good team too. Me and Duncan.”
There it was. The first warning shot fired across his bows. A subtle reminder of the order of things.
“I don’t doubt it. Well, I wish you every success,” Adam said. “Say, Quentin, any more of that fine claret going round?”
They went into dinner at six, the mahogany table set with a fine array of crystal and candelabra, everything polished and glittering. Quentin moved about with nervous energy, trying to ensure that everybody was having a good time. He pulled back Marjorie’s chair, and she lowered herself imperiously into it. He went to sit himself but then hopped up in embarrassment, realising that he had forgotten Sarah. Once Sarah was seated he again went for his own seat, but Duncan, the official head of the family, was still standing. Quentin hesitated, managing to frown, smile, and blush all in one go.