Echoland

He read down to the end of the letter, turned it over to the beginning, and looked up. Captain Charles McClure was giving him a quizzical eye across the large table they used as a desk, an unlit cigarette
hanging
from his mouth.

‘Well,’ Duggan said, ‘it’s certainly suspicious.’

McClure nodded, flicked his lighter, and blew smoke out around the cigarette.

‘I mean,’ Duggan glanced down the handwritten page again, ‘where he says, “Our friends in Belfast are waiting for a shipment of tools and spares”, it’s obviously a code. Weapons for the IRA?’

‘Could be,’ McClure conceded.

‘And the bit about Harland and Wolff requiring a visit before they finish their latest project at the end of July. Is he telling them to attack before then?’

McClure blinked smoke from his left eye and took the cigarette from his mouth. The phone rang on the table between them and he picked up the receiver. ‘G2,’ he said. ‘McClure.’ He listened a moment and then stretched it across the desk, ‘For you.’

He took the phone and said, ‘Duggan.’

‘Wouldn’t that be First Lieutenant Paul Duggan now?’ a hearty voice said.

‘Yes. Oh, Uncle Timmy,’ he blurted out, biting his tongue as soon as he said it and resisting the urge to look up and see if McClure had reacted. Fuck, he thought.

‘A meteoric rise up the ranks,’ his uncle said.

‘Hardly that.’

‘Only in there a wet week and you’ll be running the place by Christmas. Head of intelligence.’

‘Ah, I doubt that.’

‘Listen,’ Timmy got down to business. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about.’

‘I can’t really at the moment. It’s very busy here.’

‘In person.’

‘I’ll drop around to the house at the weekend.’

‘Can’t wait till then. Come down to Leinster House for your tea.’

Duggan shook his head at the phone. There was no way he was going down there to have Timmy parade him around his political friends. ‘I don’t know what time I’ll get away. It could be late.’

‘Come out to the house then,’ Timmy said. ‘Whenever you’re
finished
. It’s important.’

‘I’ll try my best.’

McClure was reading a report and looked up as Duggan put down the receiver. ‘You were saying?’ he prompted.

‘Yeah,’ Duggan reined in the various thoughts that Timmy’s
cryptic
conversation had created. What was he up to now? Whatever it was, Duggan knew it was going to be trouble. Timmy hadn’t become a successful politician without knowing how to get people to do his bidding. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated, getting back to the letter, ‘is he telling them to bomb the Belfast shipyards before the end of June?’

‘Could be,’ McClure nodded, an encouraging teacher with a promising pupil. He was a decade or so older than Duggan, in his early thirties, and had a natural air of authority, helped by his experience
and knowledge of intelligence work. He had been in G2 a few years before the Munich crisis.

‘Is that a deadline for something they’re building? The end of June? A warship or something?’

McClure nodded his approval again as if Duggan had passed some kind of test. ‘I’ve asked our friends across the corridor but haven’t heard back yet,’ he sighed as if competence and the section of army intelligence dealing with the British and the North were strangers. ‘All in due course no doubt. Meanwhile …’ He shifted some files from one pile to another, stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I want you to go down to Harbusch’s place in Merrion Square. The Special Branch is keeping an eye on him. A detective called Peter Gifford. Find out everything you can from him about Harbusch and don’t tell him anything. Okay?’

Duggan nodded. He put the letter back in its envelope and looked at the address as he stood up. It said Danske something and had a street number and name in Copenhagen.

‘Are we going to post it?’ he asked.

‘Up to them,’ McClure pointed at the ceiling. ‘Probably.’

‘There’ve been others?’

‘Oh, yes. Hans spends a lot of time writing letters.’

‘Like this one?’

‘More or less. There’s usually a respectful request for commissions on sales or expenses in there too. We really want to know if he does anything other than write letters.’

‘Are they all to the same address?’

McClure nodded. ‘It’s an Abwehr post box.’

‘Really,’ Duggan sounded surprised. ‘So he is a German spy then?’

McClure leaned back in his chair and gave Duggan his
thoughtful
look. ‘Yes. We need to find out what he’s up to.’

‘What else should I know about him?’ Duggan dared to ask. He
found McClure a little disconcerting, especially his habit of freezing for a moment while he looked without seeing into the distance. As if he was thinking great thoughts.

‘Hans Harbusch, aged forty-six, German national, came to Ireland from England last year, a couple of months before the war started. Accompanied by an English woman who they say is his wife and may or may not be. Operates an import/export business from his flat in Merrion Square. Sends letters to a long-standing Abwehr post box in Copenhagen and gets occasional letters from a woman in Amsterdam who may or may not be a post box too.’

‘The same kind of letters?’

‘No, very amorous letters. But could be code too.’ McClure leaned forward and tapped another file. ‘You can read them later. They’re a bit more imaginative than the business ones. If they’re a code. Imaginative too if they’re just love letters.’

Duggan tried not to blush and McClure gave him a faint smile. ‘You’re one of us now. You need to know all this stuff. But no one else needs to know any of it. It is not to be shared with anyone, especially not this’ – he looked for the name on his pad – ‘Gifford fellow or any Special Branch men or guard.’ He paused. ‘Or family for that matter.’

Duggan nodded. Fucking Timmy, he thought. Why did he have to ring here?

McClure opened another file. ‘Get out of uniform and go and see what a German spy looks like.’

There was a languorous air to the afternoon as he cycled down the quays, crossed over O’Connell Bridge and rounded the front of Trinity College. The sun was hot, one of the first days of summer, promising more. Men were out in their shirtsleeves, women in short sleeves, awnings over the pavements to protect shop windows, all
overreacting to the unaccustomed sunshine. He swung into Merrion Square, careful to cross the tramlines at a right angle; he still hadn’t got used to city traffic. He went past the National Gallery and Leinster Lawn and turned left into the southern side of the square and a whiff of new-cut grass from the park brought a sudden wave of homesickness.

They’d be saving the hay today, he thought. The sweet smell of mown meadow. The raking and turning and making into cocks. The chat of his father and the other men about characters, epic card games, ghost stories, practical jokes. And his mother bringing bottles of strong tea, already milked, and sandwiches in a biscuit tin into the field. But there wouldn’t be much of that this year. The big meadow was mostly tilled now. Government orders. And he wouldn’t be there for any of it. For the first time.

Near the end of the street he swung his left leg over the saddle and coasted on one pedal into the railings of the park. He clicked the
padlock
shut on his chain, hearing the sound of men digging and talking inside the park. Through a gap in the bushes he caught a glimpse of a mound of earth. Another air-raid shelter, he thought. Their voices mixed with the sound of their shovels sloughing into the earth and then an angry voice shouted ‘Fuck the lot of ye’ and there was a chorus of raucous laughter and catcalls.

Duggan walked across the road to a building with a polished plaque on the door and pushed it open. There was a reception desk in the room on the left and a young woman behind it.

‘I’m looking for …’ he began.

‘Top floor,’ she smiled. ‘Keep going up till you can’t go any further and it’s the door straight ahead of you.’

The wide staircase narrowed as it went up. The last flight was steep and wide enough for only one person and led onto a corridor with a low ceiling. He went to the door facing him and knocked. A
voice inside said something and he went in.

Peter Gifford was sitting on a kitchen chair tipped back against the side of the window, the
Evening Herald
in his hands, his feet against the other side of the window. ‘Ah,’ he looked up. ‘The
cavalry’s
here. I’m saved.’

He dropped his feet and the chair’s front legs to the floor and let the newspaper fall down as he stood up. He was about the same age as Duggan, a stockier build, and an inch or so shorter, maybe five ten. His black hair was combed straight back and set solid with Brylcreem, the comb marks as clear as the ridges of a ploughed field. He held out his hand. ‘Detective Superintendent Peter Gifford.’

‘Superintendent?’ Duggan said, shaking his hand.

‘In my head. I should be one in reality too, of course.’

Duggan laughed and introduced himself.

‘Only a lieutenant,’ Gifford shook his head. ‘But what are you in your head? Commandant? Colonel? General?’

‘Probably a private.’

‘A modest man. You’re a culchie.’ It wasn’t a question.

Duggan nodded. ‘And you’re a Dublin jackeen?’

‘One of the originals. Here since before the Vikings. Welcome to my humble abode.’ He waved his hand as if it was anything but
humble
. The chair in the window was the only furniture. The white paint on the walls was beginning to peel in places and there were no
curtains
on the window. There was a tray on the floor beside the chair with a used cup and a plate with biscuit crumbs.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Since the bloody Vikings. A month or so. On and off.’

‘On your own?’

Gifford nodded. ‘There were two of us to begin with. But your man rarely goes out. Doesn’t seem to do anything. So they decided he could be left to the young lads. Us.’

Duggan went over to the window. Over the treetops he could see the edge of the hole they were digging for the shelter in the park and the first few houses on the next side of the square. ‘Which one is it?’

Gifford moved the chair out of the way and joined him at the
window
. ‘Fourth house down. Second floor. Windows on the left.’

The sun was glancing off the windows and he could see nothing inside. ‘Can you ever see anything?’

‘No. The most exciting part of the day is when they put on a light at night and pull the curtains. That’s the only way we know there’s anyone there most of the time.’

‘Maybe he’s going out the back.’

‘If he’s dug a tunnel. The back garden’s a jungle. The door hasn’t been opened in years. And I can’t see Hans climbing the wall.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s not exactly the athletic type.’

‘Does he have any visitors?’

‘No. Only people going in or out live there. All checked out at the start of the stakeout.’

‘All cleared?’

Gifford nodded.

‘So what’s he doing?’

‘I don’t know, Herr Oberst,’ Gifford clicked his heels. ‘Is this an interrogation?’

‘No,’ Duggan shook his head. ‘Sorry. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense.’

‘That’s why you’re here. Bring the superior deviousness of G2 to it. Make sense of it.’

Duggan grimaced.

‘So why’d they put you in the German section?’ Gifford asked.

‘Because I know some German, I think. But who knows why the army does things? I was in an infantry battalion, western command. 
Transferred a couple of weeks ago out of the blue.’

‘They must have detected a twisted mind in you.’

Duggan laughed and shook his head.

‘How do you like it?’

‘Not a lot, to tell you the truth. I haven’t a clue what’s going on.’

‘Ah,’ Gifford said with satisfaction. ‘That’s why you’re in military intelligence.’

‘I’m here right now,’ Duggan smiled back, ‘so the experts can tell me what’s going on.’

‘Haven’t you read the letters?’

‘What letters?’

‘The only thing Hans does regularly is post letters. What do they say?’

Duggan shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about any letters.’

‘Bullshit,’ Gifford nodded to himself.

‘Are you interrogating me now?’ Duggan smiled. ‘Do you have electrodes and things here?’

Gifford laughed in turn. ‘Okay. Ceasefire.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Nearly afternoon tea time. Did you order a cup and a biscuit with Sinéad on your way in? Mariettas, no choice.’

‘The girl at the desk? How did she know I was looking for you before I even mentioned your name?’

‘Because you’re in uniform.’

‘I’m not in uniform.’

‘You might as well be in uniform.’ Gifford looked him up and down. ‘D’you want me to start at the top, with the hair? Or the
bottom
, with the shiny brown shoes? You might as well be on the parade ground down in Renmore. And what’re you wearing a suit for on a day like this anyway?’

Duggan scratched his head and picked the newspaper off the floor. ‘Germans Seize Channel Ports’, a headline said. ‘British Claim
Successful Evacuation from Dunkirk’, another said. He read the first few paragraphs and dropped the paper on the chair. ‘I’ve got to find out something about Harbusch. Have you talked to the neighbours? Had a look …’

‘Fuck me!’ Gifford interrupted, looking out the window behind him. ‘Beginner’s luck. They’re moving.’

Duggan turned to the window but Gifford was already out the door and taking the stairs three at a time. Duggan turned without looking out and chased after him. Gifford hit the ground floor and blew a kiss to Sinéad at the reception desk. She was still smiling a
wistful
smile when Duggan went by a few moments later and crashed through the front door. Gifford was strolling calmly up the street when he joined him.

‘Well, hello,’ Gifford said as Duggan came alongside as if they were meeting by accident. ‘Fancy meeting you here. Slow down.’

They crossed the road and turned into the other side of the square alongside the park railings. There was no one on the footpath but Hans Harbusch and a woman. He was short and fat and was wearing a navy suit and a navy hat. The woman linking him was half a head taller than his hat, her golden hair curled up at her collar. She had on a brown two-piece suit with a short jacket that showed off her
hourglass
figure.