There was blood on the road—blood melding with the grey of scant limestone gravel and the black centuries of spilled peat. Parker … Parker lay across the hump in its middle, his left leg thrown out, the right one bent up and in towards the stomach. His face had been smashed to pieces; his hands were broken. The stomach had been ripped open, his intestines protruded.
‘Mary, he ran.’
Her voice when it came was shrill. ‘Why shouldn’t he have? You jumped him! He had nothing to do with anything. He wasn’t one of them. He was just a friend. Just someone I could talk to.’
Kneeling in the road, she reached out to take Parker by the shoulder, to try to awaken him. Turning, she angrily looked up and Allanby heard her saying, ‘What happened, Jimmy? Did you panic? Is that why the army sent you to Tralane?’
There was only hatred in her, no thought of compromise. ‘Sergeant Stewart, see that Mrs. Fraser is shown the others, then take her to the cowshed and stable.’
Jimmy had been wounded and was holding his left shoulder. ‘You broke under fire. You shouted at your men and they opened up on a poor old defenceless man.’
‘Sergeant, I gave you an order. See to it.’
They took her out into the pasture and she saw the Lee Enfield rifle that had been pitched aside as the man had fallen.
‘Thomas O’Grady, m’am.’
Mary had never seen him before. He was just a life expending its last moments twitching in the grass. ‘Can’t you help him?’
He wasn’t old, wasn’t young: a man with a parched throat, stubble on his sunken cheeks and wearing a black frieze stovepipe suit that had seen poteen and cigarette ashes and egg or colcannon and porter dribbled and spilled with lashings of pork dripping and all other such things including jam roll-up and milk too, for he must have been a farmer at one time.
They left that body and went over to another.
‘Janet Duffy. Age twenty-two years, seven months and four days.’
This one was lying by the hedgerow that ran alongside the road. The girl’s ash-blonde hair moved gently in the wind. She was on her back, and the whole of her blue pullover where the grey tweed jacket lay open, was soaked with blood.
There was a revolver lying not far from her left hand, and Mary had the thought then that the girl had been the last of them and that Jimmy hadn’t felt she’d try to shoot him, that she’d been trapped against the furze and had lifted the gun after all.
It was mad; it was insane.
‘A student, m’am, of divinity at the university in Dublin.’
There were still two bodies to come. Had Fay Darcy and Liam Nolan been caught? If they hadn’t, she was in for it …
They were lying on the other side of the cottage, one of them in the chicken run, the other over by the cowshed. Two brothers—the red hair was the same, the freckles, too, the build, the height, the chubbiness, even the way they had clutched their rifles to the last and hadn’t let go of them.
Questions would be of no use with them, torture neither, but then she was taken to the cowshed to see the reason why Jimmy had wanted her to view the others first. It wasn’t Kevin O’Bannion but a haunting similarity was there in fast-fading eyes that squinted up into the half-light. The short, crinkly black hair was the same as were the facial clefts, which now drew in as a spasm came.
He’d been shot in the groin, was sitting slumped against a post, mired in cow shit. A Thompson submachine gun, obviously a gun of many killings, leaned against the far wall, having been picked up by one of Jimmy’s men. Spent cartridge casings lay about.
‘Brian Doherty,’ said Sergeant Stewart. ‘A cousin of Kevin O’Bannion’s and one of the ringleaders of the Belfast organization.’
‘Go fuck yourself, you tommy bastard.’ Doherty winced but when the spasm passed, he swept stern grey, searching eyes over her just as his cousin would have done.
It was Stewart who, nudging Doherty’s left boot with his own, snorted and said, ‘You’ll not be playing stud to the girls anymore, Brian. Tough luck.’
‘Give me a gun and let me kill myself!’
His scream was shattering. Sunlight played on the hand that clutched the bloodied crotch.
‘In the name of Jesus, have some compassion,’ he cried. ‘The pain’s fair killing me.’
‘Then suffer.’
Stewart turned away but Mary remained, for Doherty was begging her now yet could so easily have watched another die if the situation had been reversed. ‘Let him die as he wants,’ she heard herself say.
But that, of course, would not have done, and she was taken from the stables. Jimmy had had his shoulder bandaged. Four cases of dynamite had been dug out of the manure along with some sacks of fuse and things that had been wrapped in oilcloth. Fay Darcy and Liam Nolan had got clean away—that was all there was to it and she had best get used to it, but had they gone from the house last night to Parker’s farm or had it been the other way around and had that been why Nolan had been so anxious, the rest of them waiting here for him and Fay to return? Certainly at some point, Fay and Liam had noticed that they weren’t alone. Somehow they had slipped away because there was no sign of them and no one here was saying anything of them.
They would have muffled the hooves of their horses and muzzled them, would have led each one across the fields and back through Jimmy’s line of men because that was the way Liam Nolan was.
He’d have let the others take the rap. Fay would have wanted to warn them at least, but in the end Fay would have had to tag along.
Of the five cases of dynamite that had been stolen from that quarry, one remained. There’d be fuse and caps enough and electrical wire, too, and the blasting machine.
As on the road at dawn, Mary had no memory of riding home, of putting the bike away, or even of going into the house to numbly tell them what had happened. Hamish had rushed off in anger at the stupidity of mankind but by then an hour or two had elapsed since Brian Doherty had been wounded. There would be no hope of saving him, the delay deliberate—a plan to crush the IRA in the North as well and drive the whole lot of them into the grave or the sea, but would Nolan and Kevin O’Bannion be forced to flee the country as the Earls of Tyronne and Tyrconnel had done, though in a German submarine?
Mrs. Haney, who hadn’t had two good words for her half-brother, had keened like a wild banshee at the news. She and Bridget and William had rushed off home to attend to their grief and the grieving. Caithleen and herself had been left alone in the house, the girl not speaking, just sitting in her room as Parker’s words kept coming back, ‘Ah, and sure, isn’t death an Irish pastime?’
Six lives in an instant and tears that came of their own in sudden rushes. Think, said Mary to herself. You must.
Out at the back of the garden, some of the windfalls had been crushed beneath the horses’ hooves. Following their trail, she went after them, a hoofprint here, another there, a broken stem of grass. More by luck than skill she found the place where Jimmy and some of his men had waited. One of them had urinated close in and high up against the trunk of a tree so as to make no sound. Because of the shade and the damp, the stain had not yet dried.
They’d have been nervous, jittery—afraid for themselves, would have known that Fay Darcy and Liam Nolan had come to the house but for what reason?
To see her, of course.
There could now be no longer any doubt of it. Trant and Jimmy and the colonel must know the IRA had been blackmailing her, but did they know for certain that she’d been helping Erich to escape?
Caithleen was still in her room with the door closed and locked. Mary knew she ought to tell her she’d get her safely away before it was too late, but knew the girl would only turn her back on her and say nothing.
Putting on her gumboots, she went out to the stables to stand before the piles of manure that were heaped against the barn-board fence in the yard. Nolan an
d Fay Darcy wouldn’t have had time to hide the rest of the dynamite here. They wouldn’t have dared. Even so, she had to be certain. Taking up the pitchfork, she went to work—the fresh, of course, but then the not-so-fresh and well rotted. If anyone should come along, she’d have to tell them: Throwing the one into the other. Turning the bloody stuff over because … why because she’d had to do something, couldn’t have stood or sat still a moment longer, was having enough trouble just stopping the tears. Parker had been her friend, her friend!
There was, of course, no sign of the dynamite. Nolan and the Darcy woman really wouldn’t have had the time, yet they’d been in the stable.
Setting the pitchfork down, Mary glanced into the yard and along the drive, cleaned off her boots and, crossing to the loft ladder, removed them just in case.
The wooden powder box, looking not unlike a butter box, was under the hay at the very back against the wall. Its lid had been opened and then nailed loosely, and when pried off, there was a hollow in the regimented rows of waxed, stiff, brown paper-covered cartridge sticks, each of one inch in diameter and eight in length.
A label had been stencilled on the lid: GELIGNITE. NOBEL NUMBER ONE, 50 LBS, 110, 40%. One hundred and ten sticks, less the eighteen, all with 40 percent active ingredient, i.e., nitroglycerine, the words dynamite and gelignite often being used interchangeably, though there were differences.
There were blasting caps enough and fuses and coils of thin electrical wire and the plunger thing, all in three canvas sacks. Nolan was a bloody fool! The dogs, those tracking dogs …
Taking four sticks out, she gingerly brought them up to her nose, the smell rocketing sharply to her head as before, making her instantly dizzy and sick and lightheaded all at once, a smell like no other: aromatically clinging, heavily cloying and of ammonia yet still so hard to define. Not quite of bitter almonds but very much of them. Not sweet, but then of a sweetness.
Her head began to fiercely ache. The stiff paper covering wasn’t sticky, so none of the nitroglycerine could have leaked through, but Nolan mustn’t find out that she had discovered them. Putting the sticks back, she carefully refitted the lid, but couldn’t remember exactly how it had been and had to hunt for the nail holes.
The lid had been banged on, then, with the heel of a hand—the nails had been loose. Yes, yes, that’s how it had been. But she couldn’t do that, not with her hand.
Finding a bit of wood, she wrapped it in a sleeve and gently tapped the nails back in so that the lid was still loose and could easily be pried off.
One thing seemed all but certain. Since Fay Darcy and Nolan had been busy up here, they might not know she had buried those six sticks in the garden, yet she hadn’t heard them when she’d first come to get the spade, only when she’d brought it back, a worry.
‘Fay would have had to keep watch while Nolan hid things here,’ she muttered to herself. They’d been on the run from Parker’s, with Jimmy probably close on their tail, but if Fay had seen her up to something, was she now planning to ask her about it later?
Knowing that she shouldn’t, that they might well have counted the blasting caps but that there could be more than they’d ever need, Mary crawled over to the sacks.
The blasting caps were of two types just as Parker had said—pencil-thick cylinders an inch and a half long and of either aluminium or of copper. The type for the black-powder fuse was of aluminium and had a hole in one end into which the fuse was inserted. A row of tiny dents encircled the metal where the crimper was to be squeezed to bend the metal in and hold the fuse securely.
The copper fuses had two brown-covered electrical wires protruding from one end. The wires for each cap were looped over several times and secured with tape. Delays were of thirty ms, whatever that meant. It was dangerous to handle them, or so the labelling on the packets stated, but how many would she need and would they be missed?
It was a chance she’d have to take. Fortunately two of the packets had already been broken open, at the quarry probably, so the gamble wasn’t all that much. Parker had said, ‘In bundles of six, with the primer in the middle.’
Pocketing two of each type of blasting cap, Mary climbed back down to the stable floor and from there went into the shed to find both a small set of pliers and the pocketknife Hamish used to cut twine for the garden. With this last, she cut off two lengths of fuse, one of twelve feet, the other of twice that—delays, then, of eight and sixteen minutes according to the label on the roll. ‘I mustn’t let the black powder run out on to the floor,’ she muttered, ‘must blow away what has.’
Taking two coils of electrical wire as well, she covered up the sacks. With Bridget and Mrs. Haney absent, there was little chance of them discovering anything. Even so, she hid everything at the bottom of the cedar chest in her room, broke open a new box of mothballs and scattered them before locking the chest and hanging the key around her neck from a bit of string.
An hour passed, sitting by the window staring emptily into the garden—no chance of seeing the red ramblers, though, no chance of keeping an eye on the bomb—she’d have to call it that now, would need a dry-cell battery large enough to give a good, strong current, would need a packet of matches too.
No chance of knowing really what she’d do with the thing, once she had it assembled, nor of knowing yet exactly how to make it or even what method to use.
When Hamish didn’t come back at noon, Mary told Caithleen that she would have to come with her to Tralane. ‘I can’t leave you here alone.’ It would be best this way. Confronted by the girl, the colonel or Trant or both might just let her take Caithleen to Dublin, especially as she’d have to tell them about the rest of the dynamite—that hadn’t been an easy thing to decide, but she’d win their confidence and cut down on the loss of life.
Besides, Jimmy would have figured out where the stuff was anyway. Better, then, to tell them than to have the stables and the shed torn apart and the garden all dug up.
Of course they’d want to leave it right where it was in hopes of catching Fay and Nolan, but there was a chance they’d let her take Caithleen to Dublin. After that, nothing else really mattered except for Hamish.
The dress was white, the hair shorn, and when Caithleen O’Neill was brought before his desk, Bannerman saw that she was comely.
So this was the girl who’d been stripped and tarred, this was the girl Jimmy had threatened to set alight for withholding information. He’d take his time mentally undressing her, for there was such hatred in those sea-green eyes, such fear it gave one pleasure. There had been a time when he’d have thought of indulging in such a pretty thing should the chance have allowed at Gwen’s house in the Midlands, but that was now out. Both of the boys had been engaged to decent, lovable girls, one not quite five years older than this Irish wench. Big-breasted, high-breasted—did they breed them that way as they tried to breed their damned cows? She’d have screamed—by God, she would have shrieked that pretty head of hers off as they’d ripped the clothes from her.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ he asked.
‘Colonel, I …’
‘Mrs. Fraser, when I wish you to address me further, I will say so. For the moment, I want to hear what this one has to say about things.’
‘Nothing, sir. The army will kill me, like she says, if I stay here much longer.’
The army … ‘Caithleen, I have lost my two sons to German panzers. That is war, and I can stand it for I’ve been a soldier all my life, but what I cannot stand is this …’
‘It’s not my army, Colonel, sir. I was never a part of anything of theirs nor did I ever wish to be.’
‘But you were born to it, girl. I daresay you were suckled on it, so I’ll not have you interrupting me either.’
That lesson would never be learned. He could see it in the way the little thing tossed her head in defiance and straightened those shoulders of hers.
‘Now
as I was saying, what I cannot stand is the heartless meddling of this “army” of yours with the death notices of my two sons. I don’t make deals, as Mrs. Fraser has had the gall to ask, nor does the British Army I represent.’
‘You’ve informants, Colonel,’ said Mary. ‘Aren’t deals made with them; doesn’t money change hands?’
‘By damn, how dare you interrupt me again?’
‘Caithleen can tell you nothing. I’ve a far better reason than her for Liam Nolan and Fay Darcy coming to our house.’
‘And what, pray tell, is that?’ He’d say nothing of the fact that the O’Neill girl had been, and still was being used by the rebels to twist her arm!
‘Colonel, on humanitarian grounds, if on no others …’
‘Like bloody hell I will! They invade the sanctity of my house and terrify my good wife. You warn no one of the bomb they’ve planted until after you’ve carted it off and had a look? They steal enough explosive materiel to level a good portion of this castle and release all of our …’
Trant leapt to his feet. ‘Colonel … Colonel, if I might intercede. Mrs. Fraser has come forward with an offer. Given the circumstances, would it not be wise of us to make some sort of an accommodation?’
Bannerman’s look revealed doubt and the fear of having said too much, that they’d been afraid Nolan would, indeed, blast through the walls and let everyone escape, Erich especially.
‘Are you quite done with the girl, Major?’ he asked.
‘She has served her usefulness, Colonel. We’ll get nothing out of her, will we, Caithleen, even though Liam Nolan could just as easily murder you in your sleep as he did the two women who sheltered him in London when he killed that child?’
Trant had always had a way with him, sighed Bannerman. The O’Neill girl was shattered by the news, as was her guardian. ‘Well, Mrs. Fraser, since the major thinks it best, I’ll defer to him.’
It was now or never. ‘Your promise first, in writing.’
‘Mrs. Fraser, surely the colonel’s word will be sufficient?’
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