‘Look I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t important.’
‘Of course you didn’t.’
Water pouring from the peak of his cap, Allanby reached for her passport and held it just inside the window so as to shelter it from the rain, but as the backs of his fingers touched her, she stiffened in alarm and moved away a fraction.
‘Sorry,’ was all he’d say, she staring straight ahead now but catching sight of the corporals with their Lee Enfield rifles and their bayonets.
‘Has something happened to your sergeant?’ she asked tightly, not turning to look at him, for he’d lowered the passport.
‘Sergeant Stuart’s inside the hut. Would you care to see him?’
‘Not really. Is it necessary? I’ve only been to …’
‘To Dublin and back. Look, I don’t make the custom’s rules, do I, Mrs. Fraser?’
‘And I’m not carrying contraband or IRA fugitives, am I?’
‘No one said you were.’
‘Stuart’s not the one I should see then, is he?’
Jimmy opened the door for her and waited. The rain came down, the droplets breaking on the shiny black toes of his boots. Water ran from the creases in his khaki trousers. It clung to the Sam Brown belt, the pistol in its holster, the brass buttons of his tunic and the medals.
Allanby saw her defiantly swing one stockinged leg out of the car and then the other. Always neat as a pin, he’d be thinking. Good legs, nice ankles, that soft woollen frock coming well below her knees, he giving her a hand now, for one had to do that sort of thing, especially if one wanted to. …
She standing at last in the rain, no hat, just getting drenched because … why because it would be better that way.
A tall woman with dark reddish brown hair worn shoulder length, and greenish brown eyes, which were wide and searching, sad and distant but saw only the bayonets and the rain.
Jimmy let go of her and stooped to duck his head and shoulders inside the front seat of the car. Mary waited. She wouldn’t run, wouldn’t lower herself to that. Not yet. Not now.
He swept his hands and eyes over everything—looked under the seat, opened the glove compartment—rummaged about the side pockets, found nothing but the maps … Oh God, the maps.
Now it was the ashtray. ‘I didn’t know you’d taken to using tobacco,’ he said, wondering why she was still hanging about.
‘I don’t,’ she answered tensely.
‘Then whose are these? That husband of yours swears by his pipe.’
He dumped the ashes into a palm and closed his fist about the three cigarette butts that had been forgotten, she remembering them too late, remembering a lonely road in the South with the sound of the sea not far, some ruins, an old abbey, the wreck of a castle …
‘I … I don’t know whose those are. You’ll have to ask my husband.’
‘Inside, I think,’ he said, taking her by the elbow. ‘Sergeant!’
‘Sir?’
‘See that Mrs. Fraser’s bags are fetched and check the boot and spare tyre for contraband. Oh, and bring me those maps from the pocket of the right front door.’
Trapped, that’s what she was. Trapped inside this bloody hut with the rain hammering on the tin roof and the water dripping off the hem and sleeves of her coat and from her nose and eyelashes. ‘Look, I can explain. Jimmy, I wasn’t doing anything I shouldn’t have been.’
He unsnapped his rain cape and hung it up. Then he walked around behind the counter on which the sergeant would all too soon have one of the corporals place her bags. Jimmy was a strong man—fit in the body now that the wounds of the flesh had healed. Square-shouldered, the ramrod stance made him only a little taller than herself. He was clean-shaven, too, with dark brown eyes, a hard-cleaved nose, hard wide brow, bony cheeks and a belligerent chin. What more could one have expected, but the slicked down, dark brown hair that was parted on the left and cut too short?
‘First these,’ she heard him say, he tumbling the cigarette butts onto the counter while ignoring completely the constables and the custom’s men who’d taken momentary shelter by the stove.
Mary looked at the cigarette butts that now lay on the polished brown linoleum of the counter, the scent of prewar lemon oil coming faintly to her on the stuffy, smoke-filled air. ‘I … I gave someone a lift into Dublin. He … he was a farmer. He used the ashtray, I guess. I can’t remember.’
‘Going in to market, was he?’
‘Jimmy, please! You know how it is. A bit of company. I …’
Allanby found a blank sheet of typing paper on the nearby desk. Still ignoring the Ulstermen, he rolled the cigarette butts into a tidy packet and put them away in the left breast pocket of his tunic.
One of the corporals brought her two suitcases and slung them on to the counter. The sergeant brought the maps, Jimmy nodding to one of the custom’s men and curtly saying, ‘You may do the necessary, Mr. O’Toole.’
That sandy-haired, portly individual flipped quickly through her things, ignoring the plain cotton step-ins as if they were poison but lingering lightly on a half-slip and the white flannel of her nightgown. She could almost hear him saying, ‘Was it cold in them parts, m’am?’ ‘Them parts’ being the South, along the coast road and not far from Kinsale late on Sunday before heading back to Dublin on Monday, but he wouldn’t have known any of this.
The maps were being sorted. She signed the declaration papers—two bottles of Bushmills—it was so hard to get whiskey in the North even though the Bushmills distillery was there; and yes, silk stockings hadn’t been seen in Dublin either since before the war.
Reluctantly Mary paid up the duty. ‘There’s nothing else but the motorcar to settle, Mr. O’Toole. My husband has posted the bond on a more-or-less permanent basis, as you know.’
One third the cost of the Austin. Each time a person entered the North behind the wheel of a car, the bond was handed over in trust; the same when entering the South. You’d think they might have at least got together on this. You’d think that every car owner who had passed through here had been in the used-car business. You’d think that by now they’d know her well enough, but oh no. Every time it was the same.
Every time but this.
Jimmy ran a smoothing hand over one of the county maps. ‘Been down to Kinsale, have you, Mrs. Fraser?’ he asked, suddenly looking up at her with nothing in those dark brown eyes of his but the emptiness of a military man in a time of war.
‘Kinsale?’ he asked, reminding her of it.
‘Of course not,’ she heard herself answering. ‘Hamish and I did want to take a little holiday this past summer, but …’
Again her shoulders lifted in that shrug of hers. ‘But what?’ he asked.
He wasn’t going to leave it. ‘But work at the castle didn’t allow for it. That map’s from summer. That’s why the Old Head of Kinsale and Roaring Water Bay have been circled in pencil.’
She’d remembered it from summer—perhaps. She’d forgotten about the cigarette butts. Allanby thought then that he’d best let her forget about them. Mrs. Mary Ellen Fraser was thirty-two. There were amber flecks in the large brown eyes with their touches of green—one noticed them when she was at one of the staff do’s in the common room. One noticed her, one had to, but did lying make the amber come out? She had the blush of windburn about her, the cold of the rain against her cheeks, but was it also from the salt spray of some hidden little cove? She liked the sea, liked it a lot, liked being alone, too, the young wife of a Scottish country doctor—not a good one, not really. One who had messed up his life some place down the line and had been ditched by the first wife because of the drink only to find a niche in which to sit out the war. Bloody old Ireland and all that it entailed.
‘Are you done with me?’ she asked tightly.
‘No, I’m not quite done with you.’ She wasn’t beautiful, but handso
me. Yes, that’s the word he wanted, but defiantly proud of what? Her body, her mind, her place in things, or what she’d been up to?
Something, by God. Something!
The rain had plastered the hair to her brow and made its thickness cling to the whiteness of a slender neck and the broad collar of her coat. Her chest rose and fell quite easily enough. Calm now, was it? he wondered, even with all the others stealing little glances at her. What the blazes had she been up to?
‘This farmer you gave a lift to. Describe him for me.’
So he’d decided to press on with it regardless. Yet again then, she would shrug, thought Mary, but this time would pull off her gloves as if they were soiled. ‘About seventy-five, I should think, and speaking Erse in spite of my telling him I couldn’t understand a blessed word. Blue eyes—lots of the Irish have those, don’t they, Jimmy? Wrinkles—he’d have had those too, wouldn’t he, Captain? You see, I wouldn’t really know, now would I, my eyes being on the road?’
Allanby waited. At some hidden thought her lips curved gently upwards in a faint and hesitant smile, then she said, ‘Sheep. He was into sheep and potatoes, this much I do know.’
‘And he was over seventy,’ he muttered, exhaling the words and wondering why she had bothered to taunt him.
‘He also smoked cigarettes without a filter. Hand-rolled—I’m sure if you look, you’ll find a few stray shreds of tobacco on the seat or the floor.’
‘Sergeant, have a look, will you?’
‘Sir.’
‘Check the odometer, too.’
‘Sir.’
‘Jimmy, I haven’t done anything wrong. I didn’t go to Kinsale and I didn’t pick up this … this IRA bomber. How could I have?’
‘But you did do something, Mrs. Fraser.’ He’d abruptly turn from her now. ‘Mr. O’Toole, what was the odometer reading of the motorcar when it left here three days ago on Saturday early?’
O’Toole found the form, but played magistrate with his eyeglasses and tone of voice. ‘The odometer read 7,263 miles, sir.’
He did lisp the sir but one had best ignore it for the moment, thought Allanby. It was near enough to twenty-one miles from the village and the castle to the border here. Another three and a half to Dundalk, then twenty-one to Drogheda and another twenty-five to Dublin. Close on seventy miles, then, and one hundred and forty on the round trip with another twenty thrown in to bugger about. That would make it one hundred and sixty, a goodly distance these days but petrol wasn’t rationed in the South, not yet, just damned expensive.
The sergeant came back to give another salute and another crashing of his heels. Must he? cringed Mary.
‘Tobacco flakes as the lady has said, sir. Odometer reads 7,434 miles.’
Allanby watched as the softness of another smile grew to sharpen the windburn, and he realized then that it was at moments like this that the handsomeness passed into beauty.
‘Are you satisfied?’ asked Mary, seeing a hardness she didn’t like enter his gaze. Was he still offended that she’d no time for him socially? Of course he was.
‘Mr. O’Toole, have you any reason to detain Mrs. Fraser? If not, she’s free to proceed.’
O’Toole closed and fastened the catches on her bags. As he handed them to her, his puffy eyelids lifted in feigned distress. ‘We’ll be seeing you again, Mrs. Fraser. Say hello to the doctor, will you? Tell him October’s best in the second week, with a passable in the third. I’m away to fish the Blackwater then myself. Sure and it would be grand if the two of us could …’
He left it unsaid in shyness perhaps, or in feeling out of place, and suddenly she felt a rush of warmth and sympathy for him and answered, ‘Thanks, I will. Everything all right about the motor?’
‘As right as rain, m’am. Now be off with you while I hold the troops at bay.’
She chucked the cases into the backseat but paused before getting into the car. Allanby watched her through the window of the custom’s shed. He noted straightness, the defiance, the determination and wondered why she’d taken it upon herself to let him see her this way.
The rain came down the glass, blurring his image of her. A fine young woman—heady, the Irish would have said, as of a filly that needed to be trained for the course.
Corporal Donaldson raised the barrier and she drove on through without a second look or wave, knowing she’d be followed by their eyes. Until the car was out of sight, Allanby watched it. She’d stop some place down the road to dry her hair a bit and shake the water from her coat, would try to calm herself.
Unknown to him, Mary nipped into the bracken round a bend and had a pee. Then she stood out in the rain, gazing steadily back towards the frontier which could no longer be seen.
London’s underground station at Charing Cross was a shambles. Blood-spattered bits of charred clothing seemed everywhere. One of the child’s shoes was broken at the heel, the shoes no doubt second-hand and either purchased at a church jumble or picked up from one of the collections for those who’d lost their homes. A lisle stocking had caught on the shoe’s buckle and had been dragged off—Churchill knew it had, the force of the explosion being such that the poor thing had been thrown some distance.
A button lay beneath the shoe—had it been from her overcoat? he wondered. She would only have had the one coat, such were the restrictions on what could and could not be taken by evacuees, so as to limit the amount of baggage to a single suitcase.
As he picked at the debris with the end of his walking stick, Winston Spencer Churchill let his moist blue eyes sift over the carnage. The fire had fortunately been quickly extinguished but even now pools of water still lay in the shallowest of hollows and the stench of wet, charred wood and wool and smouldering rubber stung the nostrils.
‘Prime Minister …’
‘Yes, yes, what is it?’
‘MI5’s Listeners have reported renewed clandestine wireless transmission from Dublin.’
Unfortunately only snatches of an earlier message, sent on Sunday, had been intercepted. ‘Well, where is it?’ he demanded.
Detective Inspector Franklin handed Mr. Churchill the thin brown envelope on which had been stamped, ULTRA, the Prime Minister ripping it open.
Silently those lips with their clenched cigar moved as the blessed thing was read:
0417 hours 9 September 1941 signal from VV-77 Dublin reads: Contact made. Heidi in motion.
Involuntarily Churchill closed a fist about the thing, crumpling it and the envelope before letting sentiment return. ‘Ireland,’ he said, though Franklin could not know precisely what he was on about. ‘Dear old Ireland again. Find this IRA bomber for us, Inspector. Stop him before he gets across the Irish Sea, and if you cannot manage that, then get him afterwards.’
Again he returned to the damage, to a mass of splintered wood and the scattered possessions of a nation whose people had been forced to be constantly on the move.
Running from the Blitz was one thing; from the IRA another. Southern Ireland had steadfastly remained neutral. Britain had been denied naval and air bases it desperately needed, especially in the battle for the Atlantic. Always there had been talk of the Nazis opening a second front in the Republic; always he had tried to preach caution lest too swift and injudicious an intervention set the Irish aflame.
They’d never succeed in taming them, of course, but there were those in Whitehall and the War Office who would be only too willing to bomb the daylights out of Dublin.
Contact made. Heidi in motion—what were they up to now? ‘Confound it, Inspector, must we stand like ruminants before the ashes of our haystack while they play elsewhere at fire? See to this, and see that the child’s mother—I gather the father is abroad with our forces so she must bear the pain alone—see that she has both the best of comfort and support in her hour of need.’
With the recovery, on 7 May 1941, of codebooks from the tr
awler München and then on the ninth of that same month, the capture of U-110’s Enigma machine and its codebooks, the decoders at Bletchley Park had been hard at work deciphering the wireless traffic of the German Navy. Not every attempt was successful. There were delays—changes in the Enigma settings. None of it was easy.
The codes of the Abwehr, the counterintelligence service of the German military, had also been broken, and sometimes Abwehr Hamburg’s listening post would re-encode a message using an Enigma cipher machine before transmitting it to Berlin.
Perhaps a double dose of salts in this case. In any event, a tiny break that could well mean much. From an IRA bomb attack in Charing Cross Station to a second front in Southern Ireland was not impossible, given the nature of some of the Irish, but since the darkest days of 1940, de Valera, their prime minister, had taken the hint, never officially stated, and had all but wiped out the IRA in the South. It could be that the rebels wished a last-ditch attempt or that the Nazis wished to embarrass the British government and force the Americans into a firmer neutrality should dear old Ireland fall under the bombs of the RAF.
It could be the Nazis and the IRA had something planned for Northern Ireland whose air and naval bases in Londonderry and Belfast were crucial to the U-boat war.
It could be anything.
Striking a match, feeling security paramount and things hastily tucked into a pocket subject to loss, he held it to the Ultra signal and waited as it burned until thumb and forefinger could wait no longer. ‘They are insidious, Inspector. Insidious! Get them before it’s too late!’
Get this Heidi for us.
It was on the 6.00 p.m. news. Mary heard it clearly from the foyer, a repeat notice. The bomb had gone off at 11.00 a.m. killing Nora Fergus and maiming thirteen others. Scotland Yard were asking members of the public to come forward of their own volition if they had any knowledge of this tragic event.
To attack the tube stations was horrid—the Blitz was still on; well, the bombing anyway. It had been terrible in May of this year, five hundred bombers in one night alone, waves of them. People used those stations during the raids. They slept in them, made tea, had singsongs to cheer themselves on.
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