The City in Darkness

by Michael Russell

  There was a rifle shot. Something had made Alex shoot; he wouldn’t give himself away so casually. Stefan thought of the stag by the pool. It would be enough, moving among the trees. It told him Alex was close but it also said he was on edge. He stepped forward slightly and almost fell. He rocked back and forward, pushing the blood back into his limbs. He gazed out through the curtain of water. The shot had been close, very close.

  The sun was still shining. He could see movement across the pool, through the cascade, the shape of a man. He would let him pass. Alex would take the track up the side of the gorge. In a few minutes Stefan would be behind him. He had to make a choice. Did he try to escape, knowing his pursuer would follow the gorge uphill for a time, or did he go after him and try to end it? His ankle would slow him if he ran. And Alex would soon come back.

  Stefan stayed where he was for a few minutes more. The cold was biting, the numbness returning; it killed the pain in his ankle but froze his limbs. He could wait no longer. He stepped out through the monsoon of water. As he reached the edge he fell. He made no sound, but the pain was fierce. The choice was made: to face Alex Sinclair.

  He looked up at the track his pursuer had just taken. Alex would not know he wasn’t ahead of him, yet. Stefan had to get closer, into the narrowness of the gorge, and take him from behind. Alex was moving slowly; he could catch him. He unfolded the jacket that held the revolver. He took out the gun and opened the barrel. It seemed dry but he couldn’t know for certain. He closed the chamber. Something made him look up; a shadow, a sound. He saw Alex above him, close to the top of the waterfall. His back was to Stefan but he was retracing his steps, searching for what he realized he had missed. He knew Stefan had slipped past.

  Then Alex Sinclair looked down. He saw Stefan Gillespie below. He smiled. There was no urgency now. He had his quarry. It was the only thought in his head as he raised the rifle. At the same moment, holding the Webley in both hands, Stefan fired. Five shots, one after another. Perhaps Alex had forgotten the revolver; perhaps he simply had his superiority in this stalk so firmly in his head that it didn’t occur to him to worry about it. But a bullet hit him, the second or the third, faster than a rifle could fire. The one bullet Alex fired off shot into the air. The rifle tumbled over the edge of the rock, down to the pool below.

  Stefan’s ammunition was gone. That was it. He peered at the black rock and the falling water above him. He could see nothing. Alex was no longer there.

  He started up the path at the side of Poulanass, carrying the revolver by the barrel; it was some kind of weapon. At the top he saw his pursuer, lying on his back above the waterfall. His eyes were open. Stefan crouched beside him. He thought Alex could see him. The look on the dying man’s face was odd. All Stefan could register was an expression of faint surprise. Probably it was not much more. Even in his last moment Alex Sinclair was puzzled that he could not do whatever he wanted; it wasn’t how it should be. Briefly the two men looked into each other’s eyes. Then Alex Sinclair was dead. Now it was finished.

  27

  Keadeen

  At Dublin Castle there was a degree of satisfaction. The previous evening, coming home from Mass to a safe house in Kilmainham, the IRA Quartermaster, Cathal McCallister, had been approached by two men on bicycles. They produced revolvers and shot him several times. Although the killers had nothing to do with Special Branch, ‘theirs not ours’ as Superintendent Gregory put it, a senior member of the Army Council was ticked off the list and out of action. The fact that Terry Gregory had, not long ago, implied that McCallister was providing him with information didn’t count for much; double-agents were the necessary currency of the business they were in, but a traitor, on either side, was a traitor.

  The news greeted Stefan as he arrived at work. He had not gone straight back to Dublin Castle after Glendalough. He left Alex Sinclair’s body where it fell at Poulanass and returned to Wellington Quay. He spent the night wondering what he was supposed to do. He reached no conclusion. Now he sat in Terry Gregory’s office and explained. Gregory’s expression was the same as ever, simultaneously intrigued, amused, irritated, and unsurprised.

  ‘A fucking mess, Inspector.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You left him where he was?’

  ‘At the top of the waterfall.’

  ‘Very picturesque.’

  ‘There wasn’t much else I could do.’

  ‘You weren’t daft enough to tell the Guards in Laragh?’

  It wasn’t the response Stefan expected.

  ‘They must be looking for him by now,’ said Gregory. ‘Will they find him? We won’t have a Missing Airman to join the Missing Postman?’

  ‘It’s not far from Mullacor House. He’ll be found.’

  The superintendent took a cigarette and lit it.

  ‘Who saw you?’

  ‘I don’t know. There was no one at the house.’

  ‘You got the car started?’

  ‘He had the rotor arm in his pocket.’

  ‘On the road?’

  ‘I passed a couple of cars, a tractor.’

  ‘What about here? The leg?’

  ‘I said I fell on the stairs.’

  ‘You’re a better liar than you were, Inspector.’

  ‘I know it’s all true, sir. Alex Sinclair didn’t even deny it.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. You can’t prove a thing.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go back to Baltinglass. You’re due leave after the trip to Spain. Say nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘You know how to say nothing, Gillespie, I know that.’

  Stefan could not quite believe Gregory thought it was this simple.

  ‘The other options aren’t attractive. Your word against a dead man who apparently never did a wrong thing in his life. You’ve fucked up accusing his brother. Who’s your witnesses – Billy Byrne, Albert Neale?’

  ‘And when they find him, sir?’

  ‘Wasn’t your man up there shooting? Hunting accidents happen.’

  ‘And if there’s a post-mortem, and the bullet that killed him—’

  ‘You can sit on anything if you keep it simple. A British serviceman and Irish landowner gets himself shot by an unknown pistol in the mountains. Special Branch is not the place you’d be looking for the gun.’

  Terry Gregory got up. He took a shoulder holster on his desk and put it on. He pushed a revolver into the holster and then pulled on his jacket.

  ‘Go home. Get rid of it.’ He tapped his head. ‘I’ll walk up to Kingsbridge with you. I’ve got to go across and see Ned Broy.’

  ‘About this?’

  ‘Jesus, he won’t want to know about this! There’s an Emergency!’

  Detective Inspector Gillespie and Detective Superintendent Gregory walked along the Quays towards Kingsbridge Station. Stefan was using a stick, but the ankle wasn’t badly hurt. For a while they walked in silence. Stefan had expected something very different. He knew the consequences of Alex Sinclair’s death could have seen him in court; he knew that his job and his liberty were at risk. There was only his word that Sinclair had been trying to kill him. And now it was over. He had to act as if nothing had happened.

  ‘You’re a hard man to satisfy, Gillespie,’ said Gregory eventually. ‘You look like you’re desperate to be sacked or hauled away into court.’

  ‘It’s hard to shut the door on it, any of it, maybe that’s all it is.’

  ‘I can understand that. It’s the way it needs to be. Not just for you.’

  Stefan didn’t know what he meant. ‘The Sinclairs?’

  ‘I don’t know about them. I mean your own family, your wife’s family. What happens when they all find out she was murdered? What do they do with that? She’s got a mother, a father, brothers and sisters?’

  Stefan nodded.

  ‘And she has a son,’ continued the superintendent. ‘Is that what you want him to carry through life with him? I wouldn’t want it for my lad.’

&
nbsp; Stefan took this in. They walked on.

  ‘Do we trust each other enough to clear the air, Stefan?’

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Christmas, the Magazine Fort. I know you saw something, before. I don’t know how much, but something. You saw who was in the yard.’

  ‘Cathal McCallister, yes.’

  ‘Well, you had the sense to leave that alone.’

  ‘Did I have a choice?’

  ‘You did, and you made the right one.’

  ‘It makes no odds now he’s dead, does it?’

  ‘What do you think my job is, Inspector?’

  ‘I’m not always sure, sir.’

  ‘It’s not to keep an eye on the Boys in Sinn Féin and the IRA and make sure they don’t get too many guns, or do bed and breakfast for too many German agents, or shoot more than a few Guards, or blow up anything that matters. I’m here so they mean fuck all to anything going on in this country. To make them as much of a threat as the fellers in Oh, Mr Porter! And with half of them in the Curragh now, I’m well on my way.’

  They crossed the road towards Kingsbridge Station.

  ‘Before the arms’ raid Leinster House was full of bleeding hearts who didn’t want any IRA men arrested, not till the feckers killed someone important maybe. Then they got the wind up. Now they couldn’t care less.’

  ‘So you set it up?’

  ‘No, Hayes and his Army Council don’t need me to come up with daft ideas. But I helped them along the way. I used McCallister to do it.’

  ‘Is that why the IRA shot him?’

  ‘I imagine they shot him for giving me information.’

  ‘And when you told us all he was feeding you information, what was that? If the IRA have someone in Special Branch, it was a death sentence.’

  ‘You think they do? Have someone inside?’

  ‘I’ve heard it said.’

  ‘By who?’

  Stefan didn’t reply; Terry Gregory grinned.

  ‘The reason I left the IRA General Staff out there is because they’re incompetent gobshites. Stephen Hayes doesn’t know what time of day it is unless the pubs are open. And the less they trust each other, the more they squabble and fight, the easier our job will be. Why would I lock them up?’

  They stopped outside the railway station.

  ‘I didn’t know they’d kill Cathal, but it’s the business he was in.’

  ‘Isn’t it the business we’re all in,’ said Stefan, ‘the family business?’

  ‘You shot a man yesterday.’

  ‘A man who was trying to kill me.’

  ‘Is that all? There wasn’t any more?’

  Stefan couldn’t answer that as easily as he wanted to.

  ‘There’s always more,’ said Superintendent Gregory, ‘don’t think there isn’t. And there endeth the first and last lesson. I know you’re a bit of a reader, unlike me, so you will understand it when I say, the rest is bollocks.’

  For a moment Stefan watched Terry Gregory walk away. It all sounded like the truth. It probably was the truth. But something in his boss’s face, in the bland impenetrability of his smile, suggested that if you didn’t much like that truth, or if circumstances changed, he had other truths.

  Two days later Stefan and Tom sat on the long ridge of Keadeen Mountain, looking west to the flat lands of Carlow and Kildare below. It was a clear day; they could see a long way. They had climbed all morning and ate their picnic halfway along the ridge. At first they talked of what was below, starting with the tiny buildings of Tom’s school at Talbotstown and the line of the Slaney River, moving west and south past places Stefan could identify, until all that remained was the rest of Ireland.

  It was a long time since the earth beneath Stefan had felt so solid. And then he spoke of Maeve and a day, when Tom was still inside her, when they had taken the same climb up Keadeen and sat close to the same place, talking about the name they would give their child. More stories followed, easier, happier stories than Stefan had told his son before. He was conscious how close he had kept those things to himself; he could see how much it mattered to Tom that he shared them now, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. In sharing her with Tom, Stefan was finding his own way back to the woman he had loved so much, away from the body by the Upper Lake that had filled his mind again. Finding his way back to her; finally letting her go.

  When father and son walked back along Keadeen, home to help David Gillespie with the afternoon milking, Tom raced ahead, his arms outstretched. A low buzz sounded as he ran, broken by the staccato that was his fighter’s machine gun. He gave no thought to whether his plane was Luftwaffe or RAF; he was flying. Stefan came behind him, rehearsing in his head the letter he would write to Kate that evening. It hadn’t been easy to decide what to tell her; in the end he knew it must be the truth, all of it. It wasn’t only that he owed her the truth after she had been dragged so brutally into his past; it was the place they needed to be, to begin again.

  28

  53°N 10°W

  Sea Area Shannon, August 1940

  The U-boat had surfaced at dawn. It sat in a quiet sea-swell on the edge of the Atlantic, thirty miles from the west coast of Ireland. A wet mist cloaked the entrance to Galway Bay, but the low hills of the Aran Islands, rising out of the sea only a few miles away, were sharp in the morning light. Four seamen stood on U-65’s deck, smoking; rifles were slung on their shoulders. Below the conning tower, the Oberbootsmann crouched over an irregular, lumpy piece of sacking, draping it in the red and black flag of the Kriegsmarine. The roughly sewn bag was about the size of man. It contained the body of Seán Russell, exiled Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army, along with iron ballast to carry him into the darkness.

  ‘Der Kapitän!’ snapped the bosun, standing to attention.

  The seamen took the rifles and formed a line behind the body.

  Kapitänleutnant Hans-Gerrit von Stockhausen was followed by another Irishman. Frank Ryan was the only mourner. He stared down at the flag and the sacking bag. A thin, rolled cigarette stuck to his lips; the leather overcoat he wore dwarfed him. As von Stockhausen spoke to the Oberbootsmann, Ryan pulled the flag from Seán Russell’s shroud. The bosun looked indignant, but von Stockhausen only turned and smiled.

  ‘We don’t carry a tricolour, Herr Ryan.’

  ‘Take it as you like, I don’t think he wants a swastika to see him off.’

  Von Stockhausen shrugged. ‘Well, as an Irishman, at least he has a choice in that.’ He nodded to the bosun who stepped forward, still disgruntled, and took the flag, making a point of carefully refolding it.

  U-65 had left the Wilhelmshaven U-boat pens five days earlier. It travelled north of Scotland and down to Ireland’s west coast. This was the day Seán Russell and Frank Ryan were to land on Irish soil. Ashore, IRA men had been waiting for them all night. But they wouldn’t come; there would be no landing. Seán Russell became ill barely a day out of Wilhelmshaven. It started with the stomach pains his ulcers had long inured him to, but the pains intensified as the journey continued. There was no doctor; the medical orderly could only offer painkillers that seemed to make things worse and, as the agony became constant and unbearable, give him as much morphine as he could without killing him. It might as well have killed him. By day three everyone on the U-boat knew Russell was dying.

  Frank Ryan stayed with Seán Russell day and night. The two men had never been friends, and they no longer trusted one another as once they had. But during the time in Berlin they were bound together not by the fight for their country, which they had once fought together, but only by their love of it.

  For Russell, Germany and the Nazis were a way finally to free Ireland and unite it; for Ryan, who spoke little and fell back continually on how hard of hearing he had become, and how bad his German was, there was not only an Old Enemy now, but a new one he could not embrace as Ireland’s saviour. They chose not to discuss what divided them. Seán Russell chose not to betray his doubts about Ryan to
the Abwehr handlers.

  For the last twenty-four hours Seán Russell drifted in and out of a fitful, nightmarish sleep. When the pain cut through both morphine and unconsciousness his screams filled the U-boat’s tin-can hull. He stared into Frank Ryan’s eyes as he roared in agony; each time he became conscious he held his comrade’s hand so tightly that even as Ryan stood on the deck, gazing down at the shroud, he could still feel Russell’s despairing grip.

  Kapitänleutnant von Stockhausen held up a small book and read. ‘Das Volk das in Finstern wandelt, sieht ein grosses Licht; und über die da wohnen in finstern Lande, scheint es hell.’ He looked at Ryan. ‘Isaiah.’

  Frank Ryan nodded and repeated the verse he knew so well.

  ‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.’

  Moments later the four seamen raised their rifles and fired. Frank Ryan and the bosun pushed Seán Russell’s body to the side of the hull. It slid down into the grey Irish waters with hardly a sound. And it was gone.

  The Oberbootsmann and the sailors went below.

  ‘My orders are that I can’t land you, Herr Ryan. Back to Germany.’

  ‘I know. I could only be trusted with Seán to watch over me.’

  Von Stockhausen shrugged; the reasons were not his business.

  Frank Ryan looked out over the sea to the Aran Islands.

  ‘Árainn Mhór, Inis Meáin, Inis Thia. I know people there.’ He corrected himself. ‘I knew people there. You could almost swim it.’

  ‘Few men could swim it. One dead Irishman is all I can afford.’

  Ryan didn’t move; his eyes were still fixed on the islands.