‘Were they good friends, Arnie and Joe Dabs?.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he really liked him either. They were in the same unit, that’s all. He sort of latched on to Arnie.’ She gave me the photograph back. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance it wasn’t Arnie’s body in the carrier is there?’
‘No, not really Ida. Sorry.’
‘I just...’ she stopped and sighed. ‘I’ve thought him dead all this time so...’ she shrugged and smiled at me.
‘Any luck with a job?’ I asked.
‘Not yet.’
Thinking of Julia, I said, ‘I know someone who might need help around the house once or twice a week——cleaning and dusting, that sort of thing...I could ask if you’d like?’
‘Would you?’ she said eagerly. ‘I’d be ever so grateful.’
‘I can’t promise anything.’
I remembered the letter I’d had from the landlord about the building being demolished. Ida wouldn’t have got one, of course. The owner never showed his face from one month to the next and would have no idea she was there. The rent was always collected by an agent and I’d told her to keep her door closed when he came around on Friday evenings. Now, no sooner than she’d settled in, they’d decided to tear the place down. Not any time soon, perhaps, but I thought she’d better hear the news from me rather than read it from some notice posted on the front door.
‘Knock it down?’ she said, her pretty face falling as if in concert with the flats. ‘Where will you go?’
The threat had been hanging over the place so long it had ceased to hold much meaning for me. I hadn’t given any thought as to where I’d go and was quite touched that Ida’s first concern was for my welfare.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said.
She looked so despondent that to cheer her up I said I’d make enquiries about the work right away and left her standing in the middle of the shabby room like a condemned prisoner in an already condemned cell.
I went downstairs and telephoned Julia.
‘Harry,’ she said tonelessly when she answered.
I told her I’d had a letter from Penny and asked when she expected her to come up to town.
‘This evening. Didn’t she say in her letter?’
‘No, only that she wanted to see me. Well,’ I amended, ‘needed to see me, to be exact,’ still wrestling with the semantics of the thing.
‘She didn’t tell me what it was about, Harry, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘That’s all right, Julia. I suppose I’ll find out. Another reason I called though...’ and I told her about Ida who was looking for work if she still needed help in the house.
‘Who is she?’ Julia asked rather tartly, as if she thought Ida might be some girl I’d just picked up in Soho.
‘She’s a nice young kid,’ I assured her. ‘She was doing war work but lost her job now the men are coming back.’
‘Does she have references?’
I sighed loudly enough for her to hear me. ‘Only those I give her, Julia.’
‘Well,’ she said grudgingly, ‘if you’re recommending her...,’
‘I’m not an employment agency, Julia,’ I replied just as tartly. ‘She’s looking for work and you said you couldn’t get staff... I was just putting two and two together.’
‘There’s no need to snap my head off, Harry! I’ll be in tomorrow morning if she can come at ten for an interview. I’m not promising anything.’
I told her Ida would be there then went back upstairs to let her know.
‘Just look presentable,’ I said, giving her Julia’s name and address, ‘and be yourself.’
Ida fetched the two dresses she’d brought with her from Blackburn and held them up for me to choose. Neither was likely to threaten Julia’s idea of the natural social order so I pointed at the green one. It matched Ida’s eyes.
*
Back in the flat I looked for something to eat. My bread was stale although with the news of rationing I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. Cutting a couple of slices, I fried it in some dripping that didn’t look particularly mouldy and chucked in the few other bits and pieces I had handy.
Gifford had said he wanted to see me in the morning. He hadn’t told me why, but when I said I had a photograph of William O’Connell, he asked me to bring it with me so I assumed he’d dug up some Fenian connection. Or perhaps something on Dermot Kavanaugh. I was to be at a café in King’s Cross at nine.
That left me with a free evening. Having had no shortage of these since getting home, one might have thought I’d have developed some strategy to deal with them. But I hadn’t. So, as usual, I turned on the radio to see what the BBC had to offer.
The All-England tennis championship at Wimbledon had started at the beginning of the week——the first time it had been staged since the war——and I caught the tail end of the day’s results. I used to play a bit when I was in the police but hadn’t kept it up. I was still interested although none of the competitors’ names were familiar from those I recalled from before the war. After the tennis results there was a piano recital followed by a choice of comedians——Arthur Askey on the Home Service or Eric Barker on the Light programme. In the mood I was in I doubted if either would amuse me. Later though, after nine, there was a programme about the atomic bomb that seemed more likely to strike a chord.
*
It rained again overnight, and at dawn as I lay half asleep I could hear the faint roll of thunder like distant artillery. I began drifting through an unpleasant dream that I was back in North Africa and, when I finally woke up, found I was late for my meeting. By the time I eventually located the café down one of those narrow side streets off the lower Caledonian Road, Gifford was waiting for me.
He was sitting at a table by the grimy window with a white enamel mug in front of him, one of the kind that are always chipped. The colour of the tea in it was a deep muddy brown and reminded me of the River Po where we crossed it moving north during the Italian campaign. A glance at the chalk board behind the counter offered few options so I asked for a cup myself and took the chair opposite him. He watched me without speaking, a lugubrious expression pulling at his face like gravity.
Feeling chirpy, I asked, ‘How’s tricks in the secret police?’
He sipped his tea, looked as if he was going to reply, then didn’t. I passed the photograph of Kearney and Rose in front of the columned building across the greasy table. Gifford glanced at it.
‘That’s Kearney,’ I said. ‘Or rather, William O’Connell. The woman is the one who posed as his sister.’
Gifford brought it closer to his face.
‘Probably Rose O’Shaughnessy,’ he said.
‘Her name is Rose then. Not a complete liar.’
‘I did say probably.’ He turned the photo over and saw what had been written on the back. ‘Yeats.’
‘The poem is “Easter 1916”,’ I said.
‘Appropriate enough. They’re standing in front of the Post Office in Dublin.’
‘Is it?’ I took the photo back and studied the ionic column behind O’Connell and O’Shaughnessy. ‘That was the centre of the rising, wasn’t it?’
‘The building was gutted,’ Gifford said. ‘They rebuilt it in the twenties.’
‘So, when do you think this might have been taken?’
‘Difficult to say. Certainly before January thirty-nine. Seán Russell became IRA chief of staff in thirty-eight. He began planning a bombing campaign here. They made several raids on munitions stores both north and south of the border, then the IRA Army Council declared war against Britain. That was in January of thirty-nine. The campaign began a few days later. O’Connell and Dermot Kavanaugh were involved in one of the Belfast munitions’ raids about eighteen months earlier. They got a tip-off though, and the police and troops were waiting for them. One man was shot dead and the two others were caught. O’Connell and Kavanaugh——or Diamaid Caomhánach as he was calling himself then. Kavanaugh wa
s convicted and got twelve years.’
‘What about O’Connell?’
‘He was the man who provided the tip-off. He turned King’s Evidence.’
Astonished, I could think of nothing to say.
‘Kavanaugh was lucky,’ Gifford said. ‘In a raid on the Magazine Fort in Dublin in December thirty-nine, the IRA stole the reserve ammunition of the Irish Army. The RUC found two and a half tons of it a month later in County Armagh. After that the Irish parliament introduced the Emergency Powers bill, reinstated internment and military tribunals and executions for IRA members. If they’d sent Kavanaugh back south he’d have been shot.’
‘And O’Connell?’
‘Part of the deal for his giving evidence against Kavanaugh was that he only got three months. He served that in the Scrubs. If this is your man Kearney then he changed his name when he got out and enlisted.’
‘Would they have taken him if they’d known who he was?’
Gifford shrugged. ‘We were conscripting everyone. But if they had known a nod from us would have been good enough.’
‘Where does Rose O’Shaughnessy fit in?’
‘She was born in Londonderry. Went to the university in Dublin and presumably met O’Connell and Kavanaugh there. She wasn’t on the raid, though how much she knew about it is another matter. Her name came up in court as a known associate of Kavanaugh and O’Connell but she has never been charged with anything.’
‘How long did Kavanaugh serve? A friend of his I spoke to said he saw him a few months ago.’
Gifford’s nose twitched. ‘Did he? And where was that?’
‘Ballydrum in the republic. Where he grew up.’
Gifford grunted and his lips pursed sourly. ‘He did five years. Down the road in Pentonville. He escaped on VE-day. They probably forgot to lock the doors while they were out dancing in the street. There’s been no word of him until now.’
He reached into an inside pocket and took out an envelope. He passed it across the table.
‘That’s Kavanaugh. Or Diamaid Caomhánach, as he likes to call himself.’
I slipped the photo out of the envelope. It was the usual police mug shot, the kind that could make Errol Flynn look surly. Kavanaugh may not have been born with Flynn’s advantages but it didn’t seem possible he looked as desperate in real life as the photograph suggested. A snub nose like a lump of putty lay in the centre of a small round face. He was clean-shaven and had bad skin below wavy hair that stood upright off his head as if he’d just had a fright. I remembered what Dónol Casey had said about him——how as a boy Kavanaugh had fallen under the spell of their schoolmaster and the supposed romance of the Easter Rising. Now, no longer a schoolboy, there was a vindictive look in his eyes, as if he’d just been roughed up by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and was staring at several years in prison without benefit of poetry.
‘Seen him before?’ Gifford asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t know him. Can I keep it though? I want to show it to someone.’
‘Rose O’Shaughnessy?’
I put the photograph back in the envelope along with the one of Rose and Willy O’Connell.
‘She’s gone,’ I said. ‘What do you think? Were they looking for O’Connell to dispense a little IRA justice?’
‘Kavanaugh certainly. Who knows about O’Shaughnessy? O’Connell and her used to be an item, as the newspapers are fond of putting it.’
‘Is that right?’
‘And he gave evidence against Kavanaugh, not against O’Shaughnessy, remember.’
*
When I got home I picked up the phone and started to dial Julia’s number to see if Penny had arrived, then changed my mind. While I hesitated I looked at the numbers that had been scribbled on the wall by the phone, several of them by me. They reminded me of the phone at the house where Rose had stayed in Claremont Street. It seemed to me that, together with Kavanaugh, she must have been plotting revenge for some time. Dónol Casey had told Kavanaugh that O’Connell had joined the British Army and somehow, despite his change of name, they had managed to track him down. Perhaps they had done it through the army lists, managing to persuade someone at Kearney’s battalion to give them the names and home details of the rest of the carrier crew. Given that Kavanaugh had escaped from prison and was in hiding, I presumed, it must have been Rose who had done the leg work. I was impressed by how far she had got. I would have co-opted her into my section any day.
I went upstairs and knocked on Ida’s door but there was no reply. I wanted to show her the photo of Kavanaugh. It seemed too improbable that a third person was also looking for Kearney.
Apart from Ida and Rose, the only other person who had met Hendrix was Edna Burleigh. The market in Deptford High Street was in full swing when I got there. Stalls and barrows lined the length of the road, crowds bustling between them. There were vegetables and fruit from the fields of Kent on offer as well as a bewildering variety of other goods: pots, pans, plates and cutlery; bicycles and car accessories and, on one stall, faded bolts of material that looked as if they had lain like the contents of Ali Baba’s cave undisturbed since the beginning of the war in some forgotten lock-up.
Edna Burleigh lived south of the market in a part of Deptford which like the rest of Lewisham had suffered badly in the Blitz. Gutted buildings, stark against the sky like fleshless fingers, stood as a reminder of the Luftwaffe raids. And, once they had been beaten back, of the V1 had V2 rockets that had followed. The overnight rain had coated everything with a gritty film of grime. Weeds and shrubs had taken hold amid the rubble and greened the slopes and valleys of pulverized masonry. Bees, like ragged formations of aircraft, buzzed among the dandelions and buddleia; butterflies fluttered from bloom to pendulous bloom.
Some kids were playing amid the rubble, excavating holes with long sticks and looking for what they could find. They swarmed over ruins like the residents of Berlin had when battered household goods were still to be found amid the devastation.
The terrace of grimy back-to-backs all looked the same to me as I walked up and down trying to find Edna Burleigh’s door. I knocked on one that looked familiar and waited and suddenly Edna Burleigh’s snotty-nosed little girl appeared as if I had just rubbed Aladdin’s lamp.
‘Mum’s not in,’ she said, looking up and squinting at me.
I bent towards her. ‘Do you know where she is?’
‘Yeah, cos I do.’
‘Are you going to tell me?’
‘Are you my Dad?’
Her open mouth showed some missing teeth. A patch of something sticky on one of her cheeks was smeared with dirt. She was frowning, waiting for an answer.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not your Dad.’
‘Johnny says he dead.’
‘You’d better ask your Mum,’ I told her.
‘She’s not here.’
‘Where is she?’
She pointed to the next house. The front door was open and she darted inside. A moment later Edna Burleigh emerged and looked at me vacantly until I reminded her who I was.
‘You told me when I came last that a Major Hendrix had visited you. From the Graves Commission?’
‘That’s right,’ she said warily.
I took Gifford’s photograph of Dermot Kavanaugh out the envelope and showed it to her.
‘Is this him?’
She peered at the photo, then at me and scowled.
‘What’s the game? This looks like a police mug shot. What you playin’ at?’
‘Is this the man who called himself Major Hendrix?’ I asked again.
‘Looks a bit like ‘im,’ she decided. ‘The nose mostly. This one’s younger and ‘e’s got more ‘air.’
‘But it could be him?’ I persisted.
‘Could be. But I ain’t sayin’ it is.’
I thanked her and took back the photograph.
‘He wasn’t an army officer. He was someone who used to know your husband’s sergeant, William Kearney.’
‘I thought he was killed along with my Bob,’ she said.
‘Missing,’ I said. I thanked her again and turned to go.
‘Is that it?’ she called. ‘Why did ‘e say ‘e was an officer if ‘e wasn’t? That looked like a police photograph. What if ‘e comes back?’
‘I don’t think that’s likely,’ I assured her.
‘Oh yeah? What if ‘e does?’
I took out a piece of paper and wrote down the office phone number. ‘Ring this number and ask for me. My name’s Tennant.’
Walking down the street I wondered if I should have given her some more money; if she had been expecting it. I was conscious all the while of her watching me go, her little girl gathered close as if now there were new dangers to consider.
I rang Julia from a call box, expecting her or Penny to answer. Instead a vaguely familiar northern accent announced:
‘Miss Julia Parker’s residence. Who’s speaking please?’
‘Ida? Is that you?’
‘Captain Tennant,’ she squealed. ‘It’s me, Ida. I got the job.’
‘So I see,’ I said. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘It’s ever so nice here,’ she said. ‘And Miss Parker has been very kind to me. She said I could start straight away and even gave me some clothes to wear.’
I imagined Ida in a French maid’s costume like a character out of a west-end farce. But somehow I doubted even Julia would be that crass.
‘Is Julia there? Or Mrs Tennant?’
‘Please hold the line,’ Ida said, sounding as if Julia had spent the morning teaching her what to say when people called. A moment later Julia came on the line.
‘Harry?’
‘Hello Julia? Is Penny with you?’
‘Here, yes, but she can’t come to the phone just now. She’ll see you this evening if you’re free.’
I wondered if she was being sarcastic.
‘Shall I come round?’
‘Ben Tuchman will be here. You met him the other evening?’
‘I remember.’
‘We thought it would be fun if we all went out together. There’s a new place just opened, near Wardour Street. We could have dinner and go on somewhere afterwards. What do you think, Harry?’
The Unquiet Grave Page 20