The Lambs
Page 27
‘I will not!’ bristled his wife, Mary, as she rounded angrily on her husband. ‘I don’t want to go to Dublin! I like it here in Drumlish!’
‘For the love of God, Mary, how long have we been doing this? I’ve got nigh on thirty years behind me and when they say it’s time to move it’s time to move.’
‘But Dublin’s full of eejits with guns!’ she shrieked.
Flynn woke with a start. He was afraid; his face slick with sweat, his wet shirt stuck to his back. His temples throbbed painfully as he sat up and he was momentarily disorientated by the stink of flatulence mixed with stale sweat that seemed to pervade every barracks he had ever lived in.
‘I don’t want to go to Dublin!’ Mary McLain shrieked through the thin plasterboard wall, sending daggers lancing through Flynn’s hungover brain, making him nauseous. He knew he drank too much but sometimes it felt like the only way to blot out the memories that stalked the shadows of his mind whenever he tried to sleep, whenever it was quiet; the only way to curb his fear.
‘Jaysus, woman, there is no talking to you!’ McLain shouted, as he slammed the door and stomped into the duty room below the dormitory.
Flynn’s hobnails scraped on the bare floorboards as he fumbled open the top drawer of his bedside cabinet. As he pulled out a worn, leather-bound hip flask, bedsprings groaned painfully across the room and Constable Jim O’Leary poked his ashen face out from a mass of grey blankets to peer through the gloom at Flynn.
‘The usual?’ O’Leary muttered.
‘Aye, the usual,’ Flynn replied hoarsely.
‘You know, Kevin, my boy, you look like shit,’ O’Leary added, before disappearing back beneath the blankets in a flurry of creaking springs. Flynn shook his head and smiled and unscrewed the flask’s cap, sniffing the contents. His nose hairs tingled; it was good stuff. You could always count on policemen to know where the best poteen – illegal potato whiskey – could be got. He sighed and, replacing the cap, tossed the flask back into the drawer.
Downstairs Constable Gary O’Neill’s dark, watchful eyes followed Sergeant McLain as he stomped, red-faced, into the duty room, his full moustache bristling with impotent rage. O’Neill handed McLain a mug of tea.
‘Will you be having a brew, Sarge?’ O’Neill asked, his harsh, Antrim accent oddly out of place in County Longford.
‘Do they not teach you Prods to make tea?’ McLain grimaced as he sipped the mug of tea and calmed slightly.
‘Mrs McLain doesn’t want to go to Dublin then, Sarge?’ O’Neill asked quietly.
McLain looked thoughtfully at O’Neill and sighed wearily. ‘She’s got it into her head that I’ll get shot if I go to the depot. She says she likes it here and, to tell the truth, O’Neill, so do I, but orders are orders and you’ll be in good hands with your man Sergeant Willson when he gets here. He’s a proper peeler, so he is. Not like some I could name!’
O’Neill rolled his eyes theatrically, ignoring McLain’s dig at him for having served in the Irish Guards during the war. ‘At least it’s not to Cork they’re sending you. Now, there is a place full of eejits waving guns,’ O’Neill added
‘Aye, so they’re not, thank God,’ McLain said, as he strolled over to the barracks’s front door and opened it, silhouetting himself perfectly in the light. ‘I knew Jim McDonell, you know, and Paddy O’Connell, the two lads the Shinners murdered in Soloheadbeg when all this bloody nonsense kicked off. They were proper peelers too. Thank God nothing like that will happen here, eh?’
McLain tensed as a lone figure loomed out of the gloom, hunched against the damp chill, his collar up and his cap down, casting deep shadows, and his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. In some parts of Ireland it was an offence to put your hands in your pockets, just in case you were hiding a gun, but McLain thought that was all nonsense. In the dark McLain couldn’t see the man’s face but relaxed as he recognized the gait.
‘Good evening to you, Sergeant McLain,’ the shadowy figure called through a haze of pipe smoke.
‘Good evening yourself, Mr Kelly. Give my regards to Mrs Kelly too,’ he replied in a ritual exchange they repeated at the same time every day.
The tip of the rifle’s foresight hovered neatly around the area of McLain’s round chest. The sight alignment was perfect and, as he lay in the dark scrub of the field opposite, the rifleman’s breathing was controlled, calm even. Slowly, unthinking, he clicked off the safety with his thumb and felt the pressure of the trigger against his index finger.
‘Not yet,’ a voice hissed in his ear. ‘It’s not time yet!’
‘But I’ve a clean shot,’ the rifleman stated quietly.
‘Not yet!’ the voice continued firmly, and the shadowy rifleman reluctantly reapplied the safety catch with a gentle click, slumping out of his fire position with a disappointed sigh. Even in the dark, the man’s frustration was tangible and as Joe Maguire, the local IRA commander, patted the rifleman’s shoulder he could sense it. ‘There will be plenty of time to get him later,’ Maguire whispered, and the silent rifleman nodded, the moonlight glinting in his cold, hard eyes. The last thing Maguire wanted was for the trap to be sprung too early, especially as his boss was out there somewhere watching the proceedings.
Further up the street Maguire’s boss, Sean MacEoin, tucked himself neatly into the deep shadows of an alleyway and watched Mr Kelly wend his way home to bed. It was a perfect vantage point to observe the barracks and co-ordinate the impending attack. Behind him a lean young IRA man, Brendan Fitzgerald, stood guard over his boss, a silver-grey 1911 Colt .45 automatic tucked in his trench coat pocket. Everything was almost ready and MacEoin licked his lips in anticipation….
Copyright
© Peter James Cottrell
First published in Great Britain 2014
ISBN 978 0 7198 1469 3 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7198 1470 9 (mobi)
ISBN 978 0 7198 1471 6 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7198 1183 8 (print)
Robert Hale Limited
Clerkenwell House
Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
www.halebooks.com
The right of Peter James Cottrell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988