Betrayal

by J. Robert Janes

  2

  Ballylurgen held its market day three times a week, ‘for want of something better to do,’ Mrs. Haney would always say, though the thought didn’t bring a smile to Mary. Halfway between the house and the village, an old road took off into the woods and hills to Newtonhamilton some ten or twelve miles to the southwest, if one was foolish enough to attempt such a thing. Once over the first of the hills, this road began to peter out among the whin before passing through crowding blackberry canes, elderberry, stunted hawthorn and apple trees that had gone to ruin. At the Loughie there was a small wooden bridge now half rotted through and so overgrown one couldn’t see the rot at first.

  Stopping on this bridge, she got off her bike. Instinct warned that she wasn’t alone—instinct and that emptiness the land could bring, the silence through which the trickle of the Loughie came as it made its way between the green grass of the banks.

  Yes, she wasn’t alone. Her heart began to race, she to regret ever having suggested that if it were best, she might be contacted here on the first of the week’s market days, held each Tuesday. Another lie to everyone else—Hamish included but Mrs. Haney in particular. She would have to say she’d had a puncture—an excuse for not having gone into the village.

  The rotten, sometimes fallen-in timbers at her feet came into view, she not budging. Around a half-sunken log, the water, always dark, gurgled, the smell of peat and rotting vegetation joining that of forgotten apples, but then there was the warm scent of blackberry leaves.

  Nearly two weeks had passed since she’d come back from the South. There had been no chance whatsoever of getting into the castle. Determined to find the man or men responsible for the hanging of the Leutnant zur See Bachmann, Jimmy Allanby, Major Trant and Colonel Bannerman were equally determined, as were the High Command in Belfast and Derry, to find and kill or bring to justice one Liam Nolan, now dubbed by the press as ‘The Mad Bomber of London.’

  The British Army would turn the whole of Northern Ireland upside down if necessary. Nolan’s photographs hadn’t been complimentary. Jimmy had thrown them down on the coffee table in the main living room at the house and had demanded, ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what?’ she had asked, sitting on one of the sofas with her knees clasped.

  ‘Is that the man you gave a lift to?’

  ‘Certainly not. I’ve never seen him before.’ But why had he suspected her? Why?

  As if in answer, Nolan stepped onto the road at the other end of the bridge. The grey tweed cap, open-collared blue work shirt and blue-black jacket of heavy serge, the boldness of stovepipe trousers and black boots were like those of a dockworker. The arms hung loosely at his sides, the hands thin and long-fingered, the wildness of a grin lighting up swift blue eyes that taunted, took her in, stripped her naked, no doubt, and laughed at her predicament while coldly assessing her.

  The face was narrow and thin, the features sharp, the hair that washed-out shade flax has after it’s been beaten and the sun has yet to come out.

  ‘Mrs. Fraser, it is. Mary, I believe.’

  The shock was not that the photographs had told her so little, but that the voice hadn’t been what one would have expected. The accent was soft and that of a man with an education and a very good one. But a man of what? she wondered, not moving a muscle.

  Thirty-two—was he that old? Six feet, two inches or so in height and weighing perhaps 160 pounds, but all arms and legs, he not moving a muscle either, the cheeks pinched, the nose thin and long, the end of it tilted up and to his left, the imp, the eyes beneath and well back of the brows as if looking out from a cave.

  One would never know what to expect from him, and at once this was the thought that frightened most and would, she knew, linger with her. Nolan … Liam Nolan.

  Unseen, except out of the corners of her eyes, two others stepped onto the road, one on either side of her, another man and a woman. ‘What is it you want with me?’ she asked, her voice leaping as she tried to be calm and not betray herself.

  Nolan touched the peak of his cap in deference. ‘A word, that’s all, m’am,’ the all so soft and melodious it went with the A of his m’am and was like the spilling of flour on a pastry cutting table.

  ‘But not here,’ said the woman sharply. Grinning swiftly, darkly, this one clamped a cold, moist, pudgy hand firmly over her own right which held the bike pulled in tightly against a hip.

  It wasn’t Brenda Darcy but a suggestion of her, both in the coarseness of the face and lankness of the reddish brown hair. Sisters, then?

  The woman was probably four years younger than Nolan and there was a hardness to her sea-green eyes that could not be avoided. A chipped, upper left front tooth automatically drew a second glance for the whole half-corner had been knocked away at an angle of forty-five degrees and it lay next to a gap no woman would have wanted.

  ‘Enough of this hanging about,’ said the other one who was at Mary’s left, he crowding her so closely she could smell the stale tobacco smoke on him.

  They rushed her into the woods—there was no time to object, only for Brenda Darcy’s words to come back. ‘You’re in it now, Mrs. Fraser. Don’t ever think you can get out!’

  Nolan, having leapt nimbly from the end of the bridge, was in the lead, then came the woman and lastly the other one who had a revolver jammed into the waistband of his trousers and had his hand on the seat of the bike, he pushing her and it along so that she was forced to run.

  The path only appeared at the crest of the first hill, she out of breath and feeling the ache in her chest, her heart hammering. They went down across a valley where the bracken and the gorse gave evidence of a former pasture. All too soon, though, they were climbing again, each of them looking back to make sure they’d not been followed; Mary looking back, too, to catch in the eyes of the man behind her the thought: You’re dead if you’ve betrayed us.

  Numbed by this thought, and still rushing along with the bike, they drove her up a steep rise and into another bit of woods only to take off suddenly at an angle to the left, Nolan turning aside so quickly the woman stepped on his heels and stumbled in her haste to follow. Again and again it was woods and hollows, dips and hills—once, though, a clear stretch of fields that were dotted with sheep, the perspiration streaming from her until at last, at another change of direction, they came to the edge of a clearing and the track of an even older road.

  ‘You’re to go ahead now, Mrs. Fraser,’ said Nolan, turning at last to step back the few paces that had separated them.

  What was there in that look of his? An emptiness …

  ‘You’ll find Padrick Darcy’s smithy but don’t be afraid. Just go inside with the bicycle and close the door. We’ll be along soon enough.’

  ‘Don’t try anything funny,’ said the woman.

  ‘How could I? I don’t even know where I am!’

  Nolan flashed her the grin of a towheaded urchin who had just got away with something, then nodded to the others and they were gone.

  Gone, leaving her here all alone in the middle of nowhere.

  A red squirrel scolded fiercely from among the limbs of a nearby oak, driving her away from the hill and down to the road. Water mint, bog cotton and lady’s tresses, now gone to seed, grew in the ditches among the holy grass. A jackdaw didn’t like the intrusion. A wren flitted nervously away, flying straight into the sweeping grey beard of an ancient hawthorn.

  Padrick Darcy’s cottage and shop had lain empty and abandoned for at least two decades. Both buildings were of that rough, flagged stone typical of the Irish countryside but had, however, been roofed with slate and had withstood the weather and the wasting better than most.

  The door to the cottage, seen some distance from the smithy and uphill from it, was of coral pink but faded and with that horizontal cut across the middle that broke it into halves but could only have let in the wind.

  A horsesh
oe, rusty and nailed upside down to the flaking whitewash of the smithy door, met her gaze. The smell of autumn was strongly in the air but never like that of Canada, never the scent of the maples. Masses of tiny white daisies were everywhere and of waist height so, too, the bees.

  The black iron latch, high on the door, came open easily enough. With a nudge from the front wheel of the bike, and a last hesitant look thrown anxiously over her left shoulder, Mary pushed on into the place. At once the stench of old horse piss rushed at her, and then more gradually, the smells of charcoal and the sulphur of cherry-red or white-hot iron whose sparks would have flown about as the iron was beaten flat or hammered into shape.

  Among the clutter there was space enough to lean the bike out of the way and light enough coming in through the windows and through gaps in the roof above for her to see quite well enough.

  A litter of discarded horseshoes lay strewn about the massive anvil. A forgotten wagon wheel, its rim newly fitted back then, leaned against a heap of bolt boxes, lengths of iron strapping and bars of the same as if, in waiting so long, the owner of the wheel had simply departed and the blacksmith had been taken away to be hanged.

  All of it should have gone for scrap metal, of course. All of it, but no one would dare to touch it.

  The brick hearth of the forge held only soot and cold ashes, and the nubby droplets of once-molten iron and slag.

  Mary stood in the silence fighting off childhood memories of Orillia, of Alliston and points thereabouts, of a river Boyne that was not in Ireland at all, but had once been a very fine trout stream, lying as it did under the high, bleak crown of Sharp’s Hill in Ontario, Canada.

  She touched the sooty brick and saw, chalked on the bricks of the chimney, the dates and accounts of bills owing, Padrick Darcy having kept things straight that way. His leather apron and heavy leather gauntlets were mouldy and next to the filthy dark remains of a woollen, cable-stitched pullover whose left sleeve, having often been yanked at, was the longer, for the blacksmith would have gathered it into his fist to keep the heat of the tongs from his hand.

  So much for gauntlets. Big and cumbersome they were, and had been, she remembering a moment, a flash in time when the blacksmith at home had flung his off in disgust.

  ‘You’ve been in such a place before.’

  Startled, for she hadn’t heard anyone come in, Mary turned to search the door, finding nothing. Anxiously she ran her eyes over the clutter, saw the dust, the cobwebs, the ruins of a lifetime of labour and poverty, but saw no one at first.

  Then only the one called Liam Nolan.

  Like a scarecrow cut out of blue-black serge, he was standing in the shadows of a far corner, framed by the upright shafts of a pony trap and backed by a clutter of harness. ‘How did you …’ she began, breaking off the question to ask, ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Keeping a watch, so it’s only myself you have to contend with.’

  He hadn’t moved an inch. ‘Did you really do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Is it so important to you?’

  A shaft of light from the roof had fallen on her. ‘Yes … Yes, I think it does matter. You see, I once had a little girl of my own but had to give her up before I came to England.’

  Nolan drew in a breath and held it before saying, ‘Then it’s sorry I am to have troubled you. Tell your friend it’s off.’

  ‘She’s seen too much of us, Liam.’

  ‘Fay, I told you to keep a watch.’

  ‘Kevin’s looking after things. His cousin’s come to join us.’

  Nolan swore softly under his breath, his voice rising to, ‘That’s all we need.’

  ‘Oh, and is it now? And who was it that saw you into Eire? Who was it, I’m asking?’

  Fay Darcy had spoken through the gap that had been left by a missing pane of glass in one of the windows. The round, chubby cheeks and chin appeared jaundiced in the half-light.

  The woman turned away suddenly and gave a low whistle. In no time the one called Kevin had joined her and they crowded inside.

  ‘The coast is clear enough, Liam,’ he said. ‘Let’s settle this and be away.’

  ‘I wasn’t followed to that bridge where you met me. No one has any reason to do that.’

  ‘Oh?’ It was the woman who had asked this. ‘A “You”-boat captain is it, Mrs. Fraser? Handsome, I take it?’

  ‘Fay …’

  ‘Liam, you shut yours. Why’re you doin’ this, Mrs. Fraser? For love, is it? It can’t be for patriotism, now can it?’

  ‘It’s all a mistake. Look, I didn’t know anyone would be involved other than Erich’s cousin. I simply delivered a letter for him in an envelope to which I had attached a postage stamp. I was to mail it to a German address if she wasn’t at the White Horse Inn.’

  ‘Taken past the sentries at the castle, was it? That’s treason, I should …’

  ‘Fay …’

  ‘Kevin, be quiet. She’s got jam on her fingers.’

  Fay plucked at a sleeve of Mary Fraser’s brown velvet jacket. She took in the soft yellow mohair pullover and the plain white cotton blouse with its tidy little Peter Pan collar that was buttoned up close and tight around that milk-white slender throat. Everything she saw spelled ‘kept woman,’ including the green tartan skirt which was not of the Fraser Clan at all and therefore must spell ignorance of such things.

  ‘D’ you know what an Orangeman is, Mrs. Fraser?’ she asked, forcing her way round the one called Kevin to stand behind her now.

  Again Mary found herself looking at Nolan whose eyes flashed mischief as they flicked back and forth between her and the Darcy woman.

  ‘An Orangeman’s a Protestant,’ she said at last, swallowing tightly at the intended humiliation.

  ‘A Prod she says, boys. A blackhearted booger with murder in his heart, Mrs. Fraser, and the blood of his manliness in his hands. And me with his knackers to show for it!’

  ‘Fay, cut it out!’ swore Nolan angrily.

  ‘Why should I?’ she shot back, baiting him.

  ‘Because this is getting us nowhere.’

  ‘Then she’s all yours, Your Eminence, and only the more so if you were to bed her.’

  ‘Liam, pay her no mind.’ The one called Kevin stepped closer to Nolan. Offering a cigarette, he held the match for him, then lit his own.

  Kevin had the wiry, short, curly jet black hair of some of the Irish, but his dark grey eyes squinted out from under dark, thick brows that slanted away and down. A man of forty or so. A man who kept himself back a bit. Stocky and of shoulder height to Nolan, the expression one of, Well, what are we to do with you now?

  The hairline was receding at the sides. The mouth was wide, the lips slightly parted. Sharp cleavages cut across the corners of the lips, slanting in towards the nose while two strong troughs shot up the middle of the weather-beaten cheeks to meet the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes.

  Did he have to wear glasses, and by not doing so, was he trying to hide this from her? she wondered.

  Kevin … Kevin who?

  The ears stuck out a little more than they should have, and the chin was cleanly shaven and round.

  ‘Give us an answer then, Mrs. Fraser,’ he said at last, knowing that she had memorized the look of him. ‘Tell us why you’re willing to help a German U-boat captain.’

  Was he the leader after all?

  Nolan frugally pinched his cigarette between thumb and forefinger as he drew on it, cupping the hand over the glowing end to protect it from rain and wind out of habit perhaps or from the darkness here out of common sense but was it not also a sign of someone who had spent time in prison? she wondered, glancing quickly from one to the other of them.

  The Darcy woman still hadn’t moved from behind her.

  ‘We’re waiting,’ said Nolan softly. ‘We can’t wait much longer.’

 
‘I … I think I’m pregnant—carrying his child.’ It was to Nolan that she’d chosen to say this.

  ‘Another mistake?’ asked the Darcy woman with a sharp snicker.

  Mary refused to answer.

  Kevin O’Bannion noted the pride. She was like a queen of old at the end of a battle that had been lost. ‘Will you betray us?’ he asked suddenly, and she found then that he, too, had a look that could not be avoided.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt my husband. He doesn’t know about the …’

  ‘The baby,’ breathed Fay with just the right amount of excitement and wickedness.

  ‘The baby, yes. I …’

  ‘You’ve been cheating on your husband, have you?’ taunted the woman. ‘Answer me!’ she shouted.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’ve been … been cheating on him.’

  ‘Then she’ll do as we ask,’ sighed Nolan, ‘or the husband will be told of it and there’ll be more than one body to bury.’

  They’d kill Hamish, not just herself and the child.

  O’Bannion took her by the hand and, wrenching the palm upwards, pressed the cold, gun metal of his revolver into it. ‘You’ll carry this into Tralane, Mrs. Fraser, and you’ll pass it on to your friend as a token of our interest. You can tell him he’ll get cartridges enough when we’re satisfied.’

  ‘The castle’s closed and off limits,’ she blurted, tearing her gaze from that thing only to see him squinting at her all the more.

  Then he said, ‘That business will soon pass, though we can’t wait long. Liam, here, must get away. Germany would suit him fine. Tell your friend we’ll pry him loose of Tralane and get him out of Eire for a price. Tell him, too, that we’ve been in wireless contact with his people and that they’ve asked us to give him this.’

  ‘The gun?’ she blurted. Wireless contact … Was Mrs. Tulford of the White Horse Inn a German spy?

  ‘No, this,’ said O’Bannion, handing her a small, torn slip of paper. ‘Latitude north, sixty-five degrees, thirty-two minutes, eighteen seconds; west longitude, seventeen degrees, twenty-four minutes, nine seconds. That’s where they’ve said his U-boat is supposed to have gone down. U-121,1 Mrs. Fraser. You can tell him that, too. No doubt your friend has something he desperately has to tell his people in Berlin. No doubt he hasn’t let you in on the fact that he’s the one who’s been chosen to escape. He’s used you, and I’m wondering if that submarine of his really did go down or if the British didn’t capture it and his codes and encoding-and-decoding machine?’