Betrayal (7 page)

‘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?'

O'Bannion saw the sickness come into her eyes, but the moment soon passed. Not only could she get a grip on herself if needed but she'd figured things out for herself and had seen glimpses of truth in what he'd just said.

The Germans would have to know if U-121 had been taken and not scuttled off the Orkneys as had been reported in the press of last January. They'd have to know if the British were not now reading the German navy's coded transmissions.

‘He wants to escape. I know he does,' she said emptily, ‘but he hasn't said this to me.'

Her eyes were downcast, she trying to fight back the tears. ‘You'll do as we tell you,' said Nolan—Mary knew it was him, and that he wasn't the leader after all. Grimly she nodded and tried to face them, begged herself to do so.

Fay touched the woman's lovely soft hair, making her jump and look up.

Kevin was the one to say, ‘We've a meeting place, Mrs. Fraser. When the right time comes, we'll tell you of it.'

‘You'll be blindfolded,' said Fay. ‘I'll be the one what comes to take you there.'

They left her then—left her in the middle of nowhere again but with a British Army service revolver, she standing alone amid the clutter, weeping buckets and not knowing what to do.

‘Bastards!' she softly blurted. ‘You're all bastards, Erich especially!'

Kevin O'Bannion watched her from the seclusion of the woods. Mrs. Mary Ellen Fraser pushed the bicycle out into the fleeting sunlight to stand there a moment. Then she did a curious thing for a woman who must surely wonder what must happen to her in the end. She lowered the bicycle to the ground and ran trailing fingers through the thickness of the waist-high Michaelmas daisies that crowded about her. Slowly, as if coming out of a dream and not a nightmare, she began to gather a bouquet and to smell them frequently, as though to banish the stench of what she'd just been through.

When enough of them had been gathered, she found a wisp of straw and wrapped it tightly around the stems several times before tying it. First the gun went into the carrier basket, then the folded jacket and lastly the bouquet. He was impressed, for she would use the bouquet as a talking point if stopped on the road and questioned.

Leaning the bicycle against the wall of the smithy, she picked her way through to the house. Hesitantly she nudged the door open a crack to peer in and then, finally, to step inside, causing him to be dumbfounded at such a summoning of courage and resilience. He knew she'd find among the refuse on the window sill the cast-off boots whose laces were gone, knew she'd find the faded amber of forgotten photographs, the dark brown empties of Guinness, the broken teacups, littered straw and cobwebbed gas mask Padrick Darcy had once used in the trenches of France. The enamelled plaque of the Christ, too, with the words,
Wherever I am hung, I am present
.

Mary knew she was being watched even as she looked out through the window and tried to appear preoccupied, and when, having set down a still half-filled, stoppered bottle of tincture of iodine, she brushed the dust from her fingers and decided that it was time to leave, she came outside.

Kevin—she still did not know his last name—met up with her on the path, she saying only, ‘It was cruel of you people to have left me like that, but I got over it soon enough.'

‘Are you really carrying his child?'

‘You'll have to wonder about that just as I'm wondering myself.'

The water was hot and when she had lowered herself into the tub, her skin grew pink. Steam floated about the place. Stretching out, Mary tilted back her head and shut her eyes, let herself go limp, went right under. She had to unwind, was still far too tense. It had taken guts to have ridden into Ballylurgen with that revolver in the carrier basket but she'd forced herself to do it, hadn't wanted them to think her weak, had known they'd somehow still be watching. The Irish made good sausages and even though rationed, she had managed a pound and some kippers. One couldn't trample kitchen toes at home, though, so she hadn't bought someone else's soda bread and barmbrach that was light with beaten eggs
²
and yeast yet so well speckled with dried fruit she had momentarily forgotten the war. Both Catholic shops of course, both Republicans, it being that sort of day.

A fruit tart and then a custard one had been for herself, secretly and hastily eaten on the road home but enjoyed … yes, enjoyed, crumbs and things dribbling down her chin in spite of feelings of guilt, of starving, war-torn children, and then a few shortbreads—had she been eating for two, or simply because she'd been so darned scared?

In a rush, she surfaced, gasping for air as the water coursed off her. She had wanted to see Parker O'Shane at his farm. Wizened, bent, thin and with a sharply pinched face, Parker's skin had the look of oak tannin. Bound leather was always at the knees of his trousers and down over the laces of his boots, not canvas there for him, the pipe clenched and the scythe going with the rhythm of the centuries. ‘A cutting of the hay it is, missus,' he'd always say. ‘And you like the blush of an April morn. Them cows of mine be powerful eaters.'

Parker was Mrs. Haney's half-brother, so he had the inside track on herself both ways and yet they had a common bond they could explore and enjoy. A trade-off she had welcomed, thereby having gained his respect, a rare thing for an Irishman and not given lightly to an outsider, especially not in these troubled times.

But she couldn't have gone to see him today. Parker would have noticed the burs and weed seeds that still clung to her clothes, the mud on her shoes. He would have known she hadn't just been ‘out and about' but precisely where she'd been, and if not by those, then by the look in her eyes.

Again she tried to let the warmth sooth her, but Mrs. Haney would hear the silence, for the bath was directly above the kitchen range, the woman wondering at it, for a body ought to be scrubbing a body's skin to ‘murder and Creation' with the bristles of a murderous brush.

Carefully budgeting the prewar glycerine soap, she did a thorough job of it, and always there was the blessed relief of gurgling water as it ran away and took its time, giving some few moments of privacy.

They had her right where they wanted. She couldn't go to the police or to Jimmy Allanby—Hamish's life had not only been threatened, he'd be ruined, devastated.

Everything came back in a rush, the Darcy woman, Liam Nolan and Kevin … Would Parker let slip that one's last name if she was careful—had she stooped so low as to use the only friend she had apart from Hamish? Was Hamish really what she should call a friend? It had been ages since they'd been away together. They'd once been very much in love. It had been good, hadn't it?

But then Erich had come between them and the war, the castle and Hamish never refusing to help others when needed.

There were stacks and stacks of books in with all the rest of his things. Dickens, Dumas and Kant—she had to find something big enough. Balzac … Mark Twain … Moliere, Tolstoy, Burns, Darwin, Kant again and such a jumble. It couldn't be a favourite. He had such a mind for his books, such a memory …

The Thackeray, then.
The Virginians
, an illustrated copy.

Even as she touched its red leather binding, intuition told her to leave it, but having come this far and needing it, there was no turning back.

Upstairs, in her room, she cut out almost the whole of the inside of the book before jamming the revolver into the gap. The gun just fit, even its cylinder, but the muzzle did cause a slight bulge in the top of the pages when the book was closed.

Burning the scraps in the grate, she took some string and bound four others with it: a Dumas,
The Man in the Iron Mask
;
Mark Twain's
Tom Sawyer
; Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason
, in the original German; then the Thackeray; and lastly the Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
.

She would leave the bundle on the floor beside her desk with all the others she had prepared. Each was of five, six or seven books, so as to always have something.

They let her into the castle on Friday at just after 2.00 p.m. From the gatehouse and the barbican with its armoury, offices and living quarters for the guards, it was a walk of several hundred yards across the bailey, the huge courtyard that was enclosed by the walls, the house and the towers.

Clutching her bundle of books by its string, Mary started out alone, for the corporal who had accompanied her had been told to go no farther. That, in itself, was unsettling—always someone would escort her right to the library and
not
up to the top of the keep. But what made her even more uneasy was the sheer and utter absence of another living soul.

Only the flapping of the flags came to her, and the solitary sound of her own steps on the metalled surface of the road. One hundred and eighty-two prisoners of war, their guards and guard dogs were here someplace, yet there wasn't a sign of any of them.

It made her think that the truth was out and that they were all watching her—Hamish especially, because he would have been let in early this morning. Colonel Bannerman and Major Trant would both be with him, spiffy in their uniforms but of so vastly different characters and abilities: Trant harshly military and always thinking the worst; Bannermann, the good fellow who was prepared to sit out the war here because the British High Command knew he was of no other use.