by Paul Reid
Once out to sea, Adam climbed below to the tiny galley and brewed some coffee. He sipped it out of a chipped mug, watched the rising green swell through a porthole, and hoped his stomach would behave itself. He thought of Liam’s body, bullet-punctured on the tiles of Victoria Station, the indignant whistles of the London coppers, the screams of womenfolk, the mad dash through Westminster’s backstreets.
The newspaper editors in London and Dublin would be fainting with moral outrage by now. Major Ripley would be chomping at the bit to get back to Ireland and teach its ingrates some manners. And Mick Collins would be swearing in Clonakiltish somewhere, bounding about a room, his fists clenched.
And all of them would be only too eager to get their hands on Adam, if they could find him.
It was a late afternoon when the voyage reached its end, and the Freya Angelica rounded Dalkey Island into the wind-whipped waters of Dublin Bay. Seagulls screeched and swooped over the fishing boats, wild for morsels of crab and herring, while a group of schoolgirls in hats and uniform sat around an iron fountain and watched an old dame fashion an oil painting of the harbour scene.
More ominously, there were also Crossley Tenders parked by the customs office and several units of soldiers patrolled the quayside. When Captain Jackson climbed ashore and presented his bill of lading to an official, one of the more curious soldiers sauntered across, a Lee-Enfield draped casually on his shoulder. He sniffed, glanced round at the boat and crew, and sniffed louder.
“Good catch out there, boys? Eh?”
Adam was by the rail, eager to disembark and disappear, but his jumpiness must have been evident, for now the soldier’s eyes fixed solely on him.
Have they got a likeness? he wondered. Have the newspapers printed my face?
The soldier wasn’t as young as Adam first thought. There were crude lines round his mouth and eyes, furrows etched by age, and the hand that touched the rifle butt was rough and gnarled. “Eh?” He lifted his upper lip a moment to display small, discoloured teeth. “Cat got your tongue, boy?”
Adam peered over the man’s shoulder to the teeming bustle of the dock. Myriad heads and faces mingled and greeted and argued. None was turned in his direction, however. He relaxed a little.
“Ah, sir, ’twasn’t fishing we were at, only deliverin’.” He laid on thick lashings of Irish brogue for effect. “Shippin’ the lot over to London we were, for to feed the poor wee childers in Wapping and the Ratcliffe Highway.”
“Christ, Paddy,” the soldier snapped, “I ain’t got a bloody clue what you just said, but you stink. Take a bath, eh?”
Adam knuckled his forehead. “Indeed, sir. With your lordship’s permission—”
“Oh, fuck off,” the man growled in disgust. “Go on, clear off.”
Once Adam was past the wharves and out onto the Queens Road, he ignored the warm lure of the taverns and instead went to find the train station. He wanted little else but to keep his head low until he was back inside his flat, where he would sleep for a month.
The roar of a motor engine distracted him.
Seemingly from nowhere, a motorcar lurched across his path, blocking him. The hood was up and the rear door was pushed open.
“You!” A brawny red-haired male clambered out and grabbed his arm. “Get in.”
Adam shook himself free. “What’s this? Hold on, boyo, who are you?”
The man took hold of his arm again, fiercely, and he hissed, “Get in.”
Glancing round, Adam could see there was no avenue of escape on the narrow street. “Who are you?”
“Best hurry up, lads.” The driver leaned his head over the door, an ancient fellow with a white, bald pate and pale eyes. “Your boat’s in early, Bowen. We could have missed you. And that would have been a crying shame.”
“I said, who are—” Adam began, but the brawny man grabbed his other arm and shoved him easily into the back of the car.
“And I said, get in!”
They pulled away from Kingstown, the driver honking horse coaches out of his way. There was silence for a time, and only when they were as far as Waterloo Road did Adam risk a question.
“I’m taking it, at a guess, that you two aren’t Dublin Castle?”
“Hah!” the redhead snorted. “You wish.”
“Oh?”
“We’re not Castle,” said the driver.
“So may I ask—”
“The big fellow,” Red told him with a smug grin, “sent us to get you.”
Michael Collins. It made sense. Collins had his finger on the pulse of every single thing that moved in this city. Adam felt a cold touch along his back.
“Is he—I mean, am I in some sort of trouble? For London?” He chuckled emptily. “I’m not going to be killed, am I?”
Neither of his captors answered.
“Come on, chaps. What’s it going to be, then? Not a medal and a backslap and all the pints I can piss for the night?”
Red turned his eyes slowly towards him. He was not smiling.
“No, Bowen. It’s not.”
The building had a plaque on the facade that said Towers Insurances. Fictitious, Adam presumed. When the car stopped, Red nudged him in the shoulder. “We’ll take you upstairs. He’s waiting.”
It was a cold room of blue, peeling wallpaper and russet carpet. Michael Collins was poking the hearth. Sparks glowed and soared up the chimney. He grunted.
“Damned stubborn turf, this is. It’ll only burn with a lash of coal.” He glanced back as though only just hearing them now, though of course his ears would have pricked up the moment the car’s engine sounded on the street.
Collins, while running a guerrilla campaign, was simultaneously acting as Finance Minister for Dáil Eireann, in charge of fundraising and financial administration. Next to him was a desk groaning under a monstrous pile of paperwork, all of which had to be upended and shifted at a moment’s notice whenever a raid descended. And there had been many. Collins now preferred upstairs bedrooms in friendly terraced rows, where the separating walls were knocked and a straight run through each house was possible if needs be, lackeys carrying his files. Legs and arms and briefcases tumbling into backyards and bundled into motorcars while swarms of coppers kicked through alley gates in chase.
“What was it that Jonathan Swift said? Burn everything British but their coal.” His eyes twinkled, and for a moment there was a schoolboy impishness in that hard face. “Alas, I can’t write if my fingers are frozen solid, and burn the Cardiff coal I must. How are you, boys? You can leave me with Bowen now.”
Adam’s escorts nodded and went back downstairs. Collins laid the poker in a brass bucket and retook his chair.
“Sit down, Bowen.”
Adam glanced round the bare room. There was no other seat.
“How were your holidays across the water, Bowen?” Collins leaned his elbow on the table, sighed, and crossed one long leg over the other. “I worked in London once, you know. At the Post Office Savings Bank in West Kensington. Cold this time of year. Aren’t you going to sit?”
“There’s, er, there’s no other chair, Mick.”
“Jesus, you’re a sharp one.” Collins turned a murderous glare upon one of the paper piles by his elbow before swatting it away. “A bloody pig’s ear. That’s what you made of it.” The eyes were not twinkling now. “They won’t release Liam’s body back to his family. Because he’s an enemy of the Crown, there’ll be a high-level investigation, a month long at least, while he lies rotting on the slab. After that, once he’s been officially damned to the devil, they’ll allow him back home, no doubt with maggots colonising his eye sockets.”
Adam swallowed hard, thinking of Liam, nervous-mannered but trying to appear cocky on the streets of London. “I’m sorry. For Liam.”
“Are you?” Collins barked. “No, you be sorry for the villages that Ripley’s going to tear up once he gets back to Ireland. And I’ll be sorry for Liam’s mother—me, having sent him to his death in the first place. It’s
Ripley who was supposed to end up on the slab, not . . . ” Collins lowered his head and his hands rose slowly to clasp his temples. “Christ, Bowen, there are many, many mothers in Ireland that I should be sorry for.”
The fire spat a few sparks, sullenly coming to life, the hairy lumps of turf breathing thick, silvery smoke. Collins turned his head away and gazed through the window. They were overlooking a bacon-curer’s yard, men with greasy arms hauling vats of pickle, bagging rind and bone.
“Tea?” When Collins looked back, he appeared once more the affable schoolboy.
“What?”
“I said, would you like some tea?”
Adam’s stomach was empty and unsettled. “Yes, I would, actually.”
“Grand. Make me one too while you’re at it.”
In the next room Adam found mugs of cheap china and a stove. He brought the tea back some minutes later, and Collins was bent over his desk, scanning notes.
“Tell me, what rank did you say you held in the army, Adam? Captain?”
“Lieutenant. Just below a captain.”
“You won’t get a crack at him again, you know. Ripley. You might as well have gone after Bismarck with a boxing glove. Didn’t I warn you to finish him? And a fortune it cost to send you boys over, Jackson’s boat, and the safehouse.”
Adam leaned his hand on the mantle of the hearth and blew on his tea. “I told you, I’m a soldier. But you sent me to do an assassin’s job. I’m not an assassin.”
“Toss another sod into the fire, will you?”
“Toss it yourself.”
“A lieutenant.”
“That’s right.”
“So you commanded in France, what, a company?”
“No. That’s a captain’s job. I commanded a platoon.”
“A platoon. Good lads?”
“The very finest.”
Collins rose up, lifted his arms, and stretched his back, releasing a groan. Then he sat again. “That tea’s poor. You owe me a debt, Bowen. A big debt. And I may have a job for you. A good, honest, soldiering job.”
Adam hesitated and sipped his tea, using the motion to gather his thoughts. He had no idea of what Collins was planning for him now. A cold-hearted butcher was how certain newspapers had described Collins. Other publications had said he was a brave defender of his people, a bright young talent, a light guiding the way towards the future.
“I want you to travel to County Cork, my own county,” Collins said. He had retrieved a sheet from the jumble and he tapped it. “The brigade commandants need help to train the volunteers down there. The Brits are shooting up a new village every night and the local lads are a pitiful match to ’em. We need men with experience to drill the gobshites and teach them how to fire straight.”
“You mean you want me to show them how to shoot?”
“More. I want you to make them into soldiers. Can you do that?”
“I’d rather it than ambushes in train stations,” Adam said truthfully. “I could.”
“God, but I miss the hills of West Cork.” Collins jabbed his boot at a strip of loose plaster on the wall. “It would mean a fair bit of time away from Dublin, mind. Could you manage that? With work and stuff.
“Of course.”
“And . . . sweethearts?”
Adam nodded gruffly. “I, em—that’s not a problem.”
“A monk, are you?”
“No. I’m not.”
Tara. There was no one else in the world that Adam would rather be with right now. He met Collin’s appraising gaze. “I’m sure she’ll understand.”
“So there is someone!” Collins slapped his knee and guffawed. “Well, I hope she’s one of us. I’ll let you to do the explaining to her. But anyway, young Bowen, the lads will drop you home for now. I’ll have to get word to Cork that you’re on your way, and they’ll find you a bed and so forth. You’re lucky, you know.”
“I am?”
“Aye.” Collins rose again, dusting himself off for his next round of meetings throughout the city. “I don’t normally give fellows second chances.”
Larry Mulligan stayed in Dublin.
Collins had dismissed him back to Wicklow, but still he stayed. He hadn’t finished his work in Dublin yet. Not by a long stretch.
He ordered one of the boys at Vaughan’s to drive him out to Dublin Castle, where they parked up across the street and Mulligan waited.
“How long, Larry?” the driver asked. “And who are you looking for?”
“Shut your trap, Coogan, and just stay put,” Mulligan ordered. He stared out to the gates of the Castle where a soft drizzle glimmered in the lamplight.
She’d made a fool of him. The only person who ever had—and a woman, to boot. He swore silently and touched the revolver inside his coat.
When she finally appeared, he thumped Coogan’s shoulder. “I’m getting out. You move on. Don’t lay about, or they’ll notice you.”
“But where are you going, Larry? Don’t you want a lift back to Vaughan’s?”
“No, you idiot. I’m on my own from here.”
“Aye, Larry.”
Coogan drove away as Larry moved back from the roadside and concealed himself behind a huckster’s stall. The traitoress smiled at the guards at the gate. Mulligan twitched with simmering fury. She stepped out to the road, and he waited for her to begin her walk home. He’d move quicker this time. A hundred yards down the street, that’s all, make it quiet and run. Job done once and for all.
But it wasn’t so simple.
A man emerged from the street and approached Tara. She gave a shiver of delight as he stooped to kiss her cheek.
Who the fuck?
Mulligan stared. They didn’t move in the direction of Kilmainham but instead began walking southeast in the direction of St. Stephen’s Green. He cursed and groaned, cursed again.
And followed them.
It had taken Tara three days to transcribe and correlate the London notes into an orderly record, which James would then rewrite into a comprehensive report in order to brief his subordinate district inspectors and head constables at their next meeting in Dublin. The RIC were bearing the brunt of IRA antagonism throughout the island, but that tide would be turned once the auxiliary forces arrived.
James appeared briefly each morning on the week of their return, giving her some additional notes, inquiring stiffly after her health, before shuffling off again. The mood between them remained sour.
On Friday she finished a little before six, turned off the lamps, and closed the door to the tiny office that James had commandeered for her while she served out her term as his secretary. His own, more elaborate quarters, had an adjoining door to hers, but it remained closed unless he wished to use it, and a separate door served as her access to and from the outer corridor.
The cold Dublin sky was sprinkled with starlight as she crossed the cobbled courtyard of the Castle and exited the gates. The sentries touched their caps and winked at her. On Dame Street, before looking for a hackney, she did a cautious sweep of the area, something she’d had to do ever since the night Mulligan had followed her.
“Well, you’re the prettier side of government, that’s for sure.” A figure emerged from the street and fixed his eyes on her. Hands in pockets, looking debonair in his suit and hat, Adam smiled.
“Adam!” She could have cried with relief and wild joy. “Adam!”
He strolled across. “I thought that was you.”
“Why? I mean, where did you come from? You said you were away.”
“On business? Yeah, but back now. God, it’s good to be home.”
Her worries lifted miraculously. “Adam, oh, I’m so glad!
He removed his hat, bent down, and kissed her cheek. “Would you believe me if I said I just happened to be in the area?”
“I would not.” Then she hesitated. “Were you?”
“No, silly. I’ve been waiting here since five. I didn’t want to miss you.”
Oh, but I’ve missed you, sh
e thought. “Adam, I’ll admit you’ve caught me by surprise. Let me take you for a cup of tea?” My hair is not brushed. I should have brushed it before I left the office.
He stared ahead at the Castle gates. “Tell you what, I’d rather as anything to be away from this place. I’ll skip the tea, but fancy a glass of wine?”
“That sounds lovely.”
“Good. I have something I must tell you about.” He glanced round, and she detected a nervous air in his manner.
“Well, we can find somewhere quiet, but are you all right?”
“Yes.” He squeezed her hand reassuringly. “I just need to have a little talk with you. Okay?”
“Sounds intriguing now.” She smiled and linked her arm to his. “Let’s go, and you can tell me all about it.”
Adam took her to O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street, which he knew to be a clean, cosy establishment with a well-stocked fire always blazing at the back. They sat on stools in a narrow little alcove off the bar, panels of oak and stained glass on each side. The landlord delivered a glass of white wine and a pint of stout through a sliding hatch, and Tara nudged Adam’s shoulder.
“So tell me, what’s this exciting news you have?”
God, but she’s stunning!
In the soft firelight her hair shone like spun gold, her eyes glittering sapphires in their flawless setting. She must have become aware of his appraisal, for she lowered her gaze modestly after a moment and said, “You seem distracted.”
“I am.” He grinned and reached for her hand. “I really missed you.”
“Me too. But you’re avoiding the question. What is it you wanted to tell me?”