The Lambs

  ‘We’re late,’ he suddenly announced, their recent frolic seemingly forgotten.

  ‘Late for what?’ she asked

  ‘You’ll see,’ was all he said in reply. It was what he always said whenever they went out, especially if they were off on an operation. At first he’d been reluctant to get her too involved but she’d persuaded him that the police were less likely to stop a courting couple out for a drive than a man or men in a car on their own. He knew she was right, especially after Easter, and so far the police always waved them on with a smile and a polite ‘good day’. He sometimes wondered how on earth the British had managed to build an empire in the first place with such naïve servants to police it.

  They dressed quickly and in silence. He slipped the revolver into his pocket.

  ‘Just in case.’

  He was wearing the same worn tweed suit he’d been wearing when they first met. She’d asked for a gun too but he’d drawn the line at that. He didn’t approve of women and guns, not after watching Countess Constance Markievicz waving one around like a toy during the Rising. He’d later heard that she’d begged for her life during her trial, wailing from the dock that ‘you cannot shoot a woman’. He had no idea if it was true, but it fitted with his low opinion of an aristocrat playing at revolutionary. Besides, if the peelers lifted them it would go better for Mary if she was unarmed. She watched him take a map from an old biscuit box and stuff it in his other pocket before slipping into a voluminous beige gabardine riding coat. A flat cap finished the ensemble, shading his eyes, obscuring the details of his face. She took longer to dress but he didn’t complain, merely thumbing through a hefty-looking book with the curious title ‘Capital’ emblazoned on its spine. She assumed it was about Dublin.

  Thankfully, the car started easily, despite the damp.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked as Sweeney crunched the Riley into gear.

  ‘To meet a man in Aghavannagh,’ he replied as the car lurched into life, fighting for traction on the muddy yard before bouncing up a narrow track between the trees that led to the main road.

  ‘Now doesn’t that sound like a song if ever there was,’ Mary quipped light-heartedly, but Sweeney ignored her. He seemed preoccupied. ‘So what man will we be meeting?’ she asked more seriously, hoping he would open up. He didn’t; not even when they finally swung out onto the county’s old military road. Sweeney clunked the car into third gear, putting his foot down, and Mary couldn’t help but enjoy the sensation of cool mountain air ruffling her hair. There were sheep on the hills and hazy rain in the distance. It’d be a soft day, after all; typically Irish, neither wet nor dry despite the early promise of sunshine.

  She caught her breath as they rounded a wooded bend, squeezing Sweeney’s thigh involuntarily. There were policemen by the side of the road. Three of them with bicycles and stubby carbines, their rifle-green uniforms almost black in the shade of the trees. They looked unconcerned, probably taking a breather mid-patrol. Sweeney seemed unperturbed. Cool and collected as usual. He honked the horn, waving cheerily. They looked up, waving back.

  ‘Bunch of bloody traitors,’ he muttered through his forced grin as they passed them. She relaxed her grip, releasing his thigh but leaving her hand lingering on his leg. Sweeney spared her a sidelong glance but made no effort to remove it.

  ‘You’re a cool one,’ she said.

  ‘Now, a wise fella once told me that if you act suspicious people will get suspicious, so I don’t see any point in upsetting the peelers for no reason by creeping about,’ he said by way of explanation. She laughed. He didn’t and after a few moments they lapsed once more into awkward silence. He seemed on edge.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, afraid that she’d done something wrong.

  ‘Mary, darling, everything’s just grand,’ he replied without conviction. Something was obviously on his mind. Ever since the Rising, Sweeney had been running around trying to keep the revolution going, keeping men together, resurrecting the cause from the ashes of failure. It was a heavy burden and she wanted to share it but he wasn’t much for sharing. She squeezed his thigh once more, less urgently this time, and laid her head on his shoulder.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ she asked almost dreamily as they passed beneath the shadow of Lugnaquilla, the largest mountain in eastern Ireland. She could see crofts, like Sweeney’s, littering the glens.

  ‘Aye, this’ll be Aghavannagh,’ replied Sweeney.

  ‘What’s the big house?’ asked Mary, pointing at a large, imposing granite building that squatted ominously on the edge of the hamlet.

  ‘That’ll be the barracks,’ he replied almost casually and he couldn’t help but laugh when he saw the colour wash from Mary’s face.

  ‘Will there be soldiers there?’ she asked.

  ‘They say there were fifty peelers living there when old Charlie Parnell owned the place.’ Mary frowned. ‘Your man Redmond bought it back in ’91 when Parnell snuffed it.’

  ‘So this place is crawling with peelers, then?’ she said before adding, ‘How come a politician owns a barracks?’

  ‘Because Redmond owns the land round here, but you don’t need to worry, the peelers are long gone. It’s just a house now, though it’s a terrible waste leaving it empty most of the time. They say your man Redmond uses it at the weekends to go blasting the bejaysus out of the local wildlife.’

  It was Mary’s turn to relax.

  Then the house was gone, lost behind a thick screen of trees and hedges as they swung around an open bend past a small country school. Beyond it stood a man in a shabby dark-brown suit, grey collarless shirt and cap. He was reading a newspaper, or at least pretending to. The headline was about the Somme. The headlines were always about the Somme, Mary thought. The man looked up, deftly folded the paper and tucked it under his arm before grinding out the cigarette he was smoking beneath his foot.

  ‘Yer feckin’ late,’ the man snapped irritably, casting a disapproving glance at Mary. ‘What’d you bring her for?’ She thought he had a look about him of a man who wanted people to think he was more than he was and she quickly decided she didn’t like him. She had no doubt that the feeling was mutual.

  ‘Will you stop your whining, Danny,’ replied Sweeney tersely. ‘Mary’s sound and I’m here now so can we get on with it?’ The man Sweeney had called Danny scowled, his lupine eyes reminding Mary of a wolf she’d once seen in Dublin zoo. He climbed onto the running board. ‘So?’ It was Sweeney’s turn to sound angry. ‘I assume you’ve dragged me all the way out here for a purpose?’ Danny squeezed into the car next to Mary. He stank of tea, tobacco and sweat. She shuffled closer to Sweeney, trying to avoid Danny’s touch, which was difficult: it was a tight fit. Sweeney clunked the car into gear and they were off.

  ‘Take a left at the next junction,’ said Danny, waving vaguely off into the middle distance. ‘It’s up there,’ he added as they approached a break in the hedges lining the old military road. Sweeney swung left and the car bounced awkwardly into a waterlogged pothole, hurling up a sheet of filth as they climbed a gently sloping track towards a scattering of low grey buildings in the lee of an overgrown rath. It was a farm; or used to be. Beyond it, yellow gorse speckled the rolling peat bog.

  The track was hard going, making the car’s suspension groan as it lurched from pothole to pothole. Mary used the jolting as an excuse to snuggle closer to Sweeney; Danny used it as an excuse to frot himself against her thigh. The man kept looking over his shoulder, like he was expecting to be followed; Sweeney kept glancing at Danny like he’d found a dog turd on his car seat. As the car jolted, Danny’s jacket fell open revealing the grip of a pistol thrust in his inside pocket. Both men were armed. She wasn’t sure why it was a surprise, but it was.

  The air was heavy now with the stink of something faecal and as the car slewed to a halt she felt a wave of relief as the last few hundred yards had felt as if some invisible giant had given her a shaking. Danny leapt out, his boots slurping in the viscous dark goo
around them. Sweeney looked less keen to get his feet dirty. He always cleaned his shoes. There were pens at the far side of the yard: pigsties, she guessed.

  ‘You stay here,’ Danny ordered Mary. She looked up. It was cloudy and a scree of rain was idling its way steadily down the hill-side towards them. Sweeney tossed Danny an angry glance that could have felled an ox. Danny made a brief bid to meet Sweeney’s gaze but baulked, staring awkwardly at his feet.

  ‘Tell you what, Mary darling, why don’t you get inside and make me and the fellas some tea?’ Sweeney said. He said fellas. There were more, thought Mary. He flashed her an indulgent smile although his eyes were hard, far from happy. Something was worrying him. She toyed with asking him outright but thought better of it. He held out his hand, ever the gentleman, and led her through the filth to the farmhouse. There was a low iron bracket, weathered brown by rust and rain, by the door. He scraped the filth from his shoes on it, adding to its distemper. Ducking her head, Mary went inside. A turf fire blazed in the fireplace but the air was damp, betraying the fact that the building was rarely used.

  ‘This way,’ Danny said, flicking his head towards a door in the back wall that Mary assumed led to the back of the building. There was a dark wooden crucifix nailed to the wall above it. Sweeney nodded. He paused at the door, almost as an afterthought.

  ‘Best you stay here, Mary darling,’ he said, his voice unnaturally flat. She started fussing by the stove, filling the brass kettle, overwatched by a gaudy picture of the Virgin Mary.

  Danny led Sweeney through a labyrinth of passages and across another muddy yard to a lone, thick-stonewalled outbuilding some distance from the main farmhouse. Sweeney noticed another grey man in a nondescript suit standing slightly in the shadows, cradling an old-fashioned muzzle-loading shotgun in the crook of his arm. It had been sawn off short, like a bank robber’s. They exchanged nods before trooping inside where the air was cool and it took a few seconds for Sweeney’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. A shape sat in the middle of the dirt-floored byre; a man tied to a chair. He was hooded with an old potato sack; rocking slightly and keening pathetically. Sweeney walked closer. He was shabbily dressed and stank of urine. It was obvious he’d soiled himself.

  ‘Jaysus, the bastard’s shat himself,’ jibed Danny with a stupid grin. The man with the shotgun was grinning too, following Danny’s lead. Sweeney ignored them, circling the tethered man. He understood ruthlessness, that was inevitable in revolution, but he’d never understood cruelty; wallowing in other men’s suffering. All he wanted was for the suffering to end – one day. ‘The shite says his name is Michael Grogan though the little fecker’s probably lying. Says he’s a tinker and aren’t all tinkers liars?’ Sweeney couldn’t follow Danny’s logic, selectively sifting truth from lies to slake his own bigotry. ‘He showed up a few days ago but there’s no one around here can vouch for him. One of the boys saw him having a wee chat with the peelers up on the main road.’ Sweeney was in front of him now. ‘Then we found him poking around up here, out in the barn.’ The hooded man grunted. ‘The bastard wouldn’t stop squealing so we gagged him,’ explained Danny.

  Sweeney yanked off the hood, exposing Grogan’s face. He’d been beaten, badly beaten, his lived-in face swollen and bloody beyond recognition. He couldn’t tell his age. It didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to get much older anyway. He’d been scoured by wind and rain and too many nights beneath the stars. There was something pathetic about the way his watery eyes watched Sweeney with desperate hope. Sweeney pulled the gag free from Grogan’s swollen mouth. He whimpered.

  ‘Are you Michael Grogan?’ Sweeney asked gently.

  ‘In the name of God, sir, I swear I was only looking for a place to sleep,’ gabbled Grogan in a brogue that was neither here nor there and hard to place. Sweeney calmly repeated the question. Grogan nodded.

  ‘You know, Michael, spying for the enemy is a serious crime,’ said Sweeney.

  ‘I was only looking for a place to sleep, sir!’ protested Grogan but Sweeney merely held up his hand to silence him.

  ‘Michael, I just want to help you out of a tricky situation. Now, you look like a decent enough fella but you were seen talking to the peeler and now you turn up here. Look, if you tell me everything then I can help you. Just tell me what they said to you,’ Sweeney asked calmly.

  ‘They were moving me on, sir! I swear it!’ There was panic in Grogan’s voice.

  ‘He’s lying,’ growled Danny. The man with the shotgun agreed. They looked agitated, overexcited by the man’s suffering. Sweeney made a note to deal with the pair later. He didn’t like working with fools, especially sadistic fools – they were a liability. Grogan was weeping, blubbering like a child as fat tears rolled down his unshaven cheeks.

  ‘For God’s sake, can you not at least act like a man?’ complained the man with the shotgun, brandishing it at Grogan’s head. ‘Can’t we just shoot the shite now and be done?’ he added, cocking his gun. Sweeney threw him an angry glance that made him step back.

  ‘Look, Michael, if you cooperate, then you’ve nothing to be afraid of,’ said Sweeney softly as he squatted down in front of Grogan, doing his best to ignore the smell. ‘Your only hope is to tell me what you told the peelers. What did they want to know? Did they ask you to keep an eye out for anything strange, anything unusual?’

  Grogan nodded, hanging his head.

  ‘They said I was to tell them if I saw anything but I swear to God I was just looking for somewhere to get me head down! I’d never go grassing anyone up to the peelers, sir,’ he gabbled. Sweeney nodded and stood up, pulling the sack back loosely over Grogan’s head. ‘W-what’s happening?’ spluttered Grogan, twisting his head from left to right.

  ‘Don’t you go worrying yourself, Michael, we’ll be done soon,’ said Sweeney as he walked behind the chair, pulling his pistol from his jacket pocket. He pointed it at the back of Grogan’s head, steadying the weapon as he took aim. The noise was deafening, ricocheting off the thick byre walls. Danny flinched, crossing himself as Grogan’s body was thrown forward, a jagged hole torn in the back of the hood. He stepped forward, placing the muzzle against Grogan’s head, and fired again; the coup de grace.

  ‘I thought you boys might—’ gasped Mary from the doorway, dropping the tray of tea she was carrying. She screamed. The man with the shotgun jumped, spinning around and snatching the trigger in fright, refilling the small room with flame and noise. Sweeney felt the shot fly past his face, some of it peppering Grogan’s head whilst the rest tore a bloody hole in Mary’s chest, sending her flying back from whence she came. Then came silence; a terrible, echoing, sulphurous silence that hung like a shroud over them, filling everything.

  ‘What the feck have you done, you fecking eejit?’ shouted Sweeney, running over to Mary, pale with shock. Reaching down he touched her face – it was still warm. He wanted to hold her but somehow resisted the urge because of the blood. It was everywhere. He could see her ribs poking through the tattered remnant of her breast like some grotesque toast rack. ‘What have they done to you, Mary darling?’ he whispered, gently brushing lank strands of blonde hair from her wide blue eyes, disturbing her look of surprise at death’s swiftness.

  ‘It just went off,’ the man with the shotgun whimpered pathetically, as if the weapon had a life of its own. ‘Jaysus, I’m sorry.’ Sweeney hated working with amateurs; half-trained idiots who seemed to think revolution was some kind of a game. ‘I … I … it just … it just went off,’ he repeated. Sweeney stood up, feeling his shock turn to rage. He had liked Mary a lot, maybe even loved her; he would never know now. He turned, his face like a demon from the depths of hell, and stepped towards the shooter, who let the weapon slip from his fingers. Danny stepped in the way.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Danny, looking very afraid.

  ‘You’re going to fetch a shovel and bury them,’ he said, his voice dangerously calm and quiet. ‘And then I will decide what to do with you two culchie eejits.’ He would de
al with them later. No one would ask any questions. People disappeared all the time.

  CHAPTER 24

  28 August 1916, Chocques, Hulluch Sector

  The shunting yard was in chaos.

  ‘Bloody rain,’ cursed Fallon from beneath the meagre shelter of his tin hat, greatcoat and gas cape. ‘I could have stayed at home for a soaking like this!’

  Nearby, his friend Collins sat with the rest of the company looking equally forlorn. It was cold, it was wet and they were all tired and hungry. Everything was ‘on the bus’ then ‘off the bus’ and always ‘rush, ready, wait’, typically army. No one had a clue what was going on but far too many people were willing to shout about it. He could never work out why the army insisted on doing things in the middle of the night, as if the War Office was run by insomniacs; but it did. He couldn’t remember when he’d last slept in a bed. It would be hours before they ate, he just knew it, and he regretted not snatching a bite when he’d had the chance – but the letter from his wife had thrown him. Well, technically she was his wife, although he’d not seen her in years, not since he went to India and she stayed in Kildare. Now she was demanding money: a cut from his pay. She even threatened to write to the CO about it. He’d deal with it later. Right now he had more pressing matters on his mind.

  ‘Old Hackett says we’re off to the Somme,’ said Collins authoritatively. Old Hackett was uncannily well informed for a store man. ‘No good will come of it,’ he added, trying to light a soggy Woodbine.

  Fallon could see that Collins wasn’t happy.

  ‘I reckon you’re right,’ he agreed wistfully. ‘I hear tell the Brass have made a right balls-up down that way. Worst cock-up since … since … ah, well, just pick one, there’s been so many. Anyway, they wouldn’t be sending us if they weren’t going to attack again. By Christ, why couldn’t they have sent me back to one of the mobs they sent out east?’ His eyes lit up as he remembered the first time he’d passed through Suez. ‘I could be living it up in the sunshine with some sloe-eyed bint and a couple of sherbets.’ He was watching Mahon approaching, ramrod straight, holding a clipboard that he’d inverted in a desperate attempt to keep his precious paperwork dry.