Echoland (26 page)

‘And who are you?’ the porter asked.

Duggan told him and the porter handed him an envelope. He could feel the keys in it before he turned his back on the porter and opened it, expecting a note. There was nothing apart from the two keys.

He got back on his bike and cycled up beside the canal to Huband Bridge and turned into Mount Street, swerving around a prostitute who stepped off the footpath to pose before him. He stopped outside Nuala’s building and the first key he tried opened the hall door. He pushed the light switch in the hall and climbed the stairs and opened the door to her flat and stepped in, turning on the light switch.

He stepped back, startled. Nuala was sitting at the head of the bed, hunched tight in the corner where the two walls met, her knees up and her arms around them. She was wearing pale trousers which flopped around her legs and her feet were bare. Her face was pale, exaggerating the dark circles under her eyes, and her reddish hair was a mass of uncontrolled curls.

‘Jesus,’ he breathed out and closed the door behind him.

They stared at each other for a moment.

Then Nuala said, ‘You wanted to talk to me.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Duggan exploded. ‘I wanted to talk to you! I’ve been beaten up because of you. Followed by some gunmen. Threatened by your father. Risked my army career over you.’

She raised her hands from her knees. ‘Sorry,’ she said without any sign that she was. ‘I didn’t involve you in any of this. It was my father.’

‘Okay,’ he said, his anger rising. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I just want you to know I don’t want anything more to do with you and your father’s games. Okay?’

He turned and opened the door, feeling an unexpected twinge of sympathy for Timmy. There were two of them in it.

‘Wait,’ she sniffed. ‘I am sorry. I need your help.’

Duggan took a deep breath, held it, and closed the door.

‘I,’ she said, stretching her legs out in front of her and looking at her feet, ‘appreciate what you’ve been doing. I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this. But I do need your help.’

Duggan took out his cigarettes, offered her one, and she took it. He lit both and sat down on the side of the bed and waited for her to explain.

‘You know they’ve kidnapped Jim?’

‘The IRA,’ Duggan nodded.

‘Yes, but my father’s behind it.’

‘Timmy kidnapped him?’

‘They’re working for him.’

‘The IRA?’ he didn’t hide his scepticism.

‘A few of them. The one’s who kidnapped Jim.’

‘He told them Jim was a spy?’

Nuala shook her head. ‘He knows he’s not a spy.’

‘He says he knows nothing about him.’

She gave a short laugh. ‘Yeah, he would. He knows all about him.’

‘Look,’ Duggan got up and walked over to the draining board and
got a cup to use as an ashtray. ‘Just tell me what’s going on.’

Nuala sighed and didn’t seem to know where to begin.

‘You pretended to be kidnapped,’ Duggan prompted her. ‘Why?’

‘To get some money out of my father. To pay compensation to someone he had wronged.’

‘What?’

Nuala rubbed the little ash on her cigarette against the rim of the cup. ‘This isn’t easy,’ she said, giving the cigarette her full attention. ‘Even though we don’t get on. He’s still my father.’

Duggan waited, mystified.

She inhaled deeply. ‘This is not something that should ever go outside the family.’ She looked at him, waiting for a response. He nodded, not knowing what he was agreeing to.

‘You know our house down the country? The farm?’ she
continued
. He nodded again. ‘That belonged to Jim’s family. His mother inherited it from an uncle. During the War of Independence.’ She looked at him again as if expecting him to make sense of something. ‘Jim’s father was in the RIC. A district inspector. A target of the IRA. His mother went to the IRA, to my father, and offered to sell him the house for very little if they left her husband alone. My father agreed. And then they shot him on his way home from Mass one Sunday.’

The newspaper cutting, Duggan thought. The district inspector recovering from his wounds. The name must’ve been Bradley; he should’ve made the connection. ‘He survived,’ he said.

‘He’s crippled. He’s still alive. Living in England. In a bad way.’

‘And his mother?’

She nodded. ‘She’s still alive too. But they’re both in a bad way. They have no money. He has just a small pension. And they have big medical bills.’

‘So how can Jim afford to go to Trinity?’

‘His mother’s uncle left him a bursary to go there. Just to Trinity.’

Duggan jabbed his butt at the bottom of the cup, a sick feeling in his stomach. He handed the cup to Nuala. There were tears in her eyes.

‘How’d you find out about this?’ he asked.

‘I always knew there was something,’ she said, putting out her
cigarette
and raising her knees and holding onto them again. ‘Once when my father had some old comrades around they were all drunk and laughing about something and I remember someone saying to him, you know the way something sticks in your mind, something that you don’t quite understand. Someone said, you did nicely for yourself anyway. In that sort of knowing way. And they all laughed. In that knowing way. You know?’

‘Was my father there?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think he ever came to those get togethers. I never knew what it meant, but it stuck in my mind. I
supposed
it meant the politics, the Dáil seat. But then I met Jim and …’

‘He told you.’

‘No, he didn’t know at the time. It only came together in dribs and drabs. Extraordinary really.

‘I was crossing the street outside Trinity one day and this young lad on a bike came flying around from Dame Street and knocked me down. He fell off the bike too but got up and cycled off. Jim stopped and helped me up. I wasn’t hurt, not really, but I was shaken and my knee was sore and I was hobbling. So, he said, come in to Trinity and sit down for a few minutes. And we went into his rooms and he made tea and we chatted. You know, the usual. Where’re you from and all that. He has an English accent but he said his family was from Galway and I said where and I said that’s where I’m from too.’ She shrugged. ‘You know how it is.’

She took a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose.

‘Then later,’ she went on, ‘one thing led to another. He told me
about his father being shot. And, later again, when we got to know each other better, about his mother. She had a heart attack a few months ago and he went home to see her. And that’s when she told him about the deal she had done to protect his father. She never told his father about it. He still doesn’t know. Can you imagine that?’

Duggan didn’t want to imagine any of it. How could Timmy do what he had done? How could he dirty a noble cause with greed and double-dealing?

‘He shot him?’ he said, half question, half statement, spelling out the facts that were hollowing his stomach. ‘Your father shot Jim’s father? After agreeing with his mother to leave him alone in return for the house?’

‘I don’t know if he did it himself. He wouldn’t tell me.’

‘You asked him?’

She nodded. ‘I told him I knew all about it. And that he should pay Jim’s mother the proper price now. Now that he can afford it. We had a blazing row. The worst we’ve ever had. And we’ve had a few.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He wouldn’t talk about it. Told me it was none of my business. It was a revolution. I should be glad to be living in a free country. And proud of the sacrifices he and his comrades had made. Good men had been tortured and died to give us the freedom we now enjoyed.’ She waved a dismissive hand in the air. ‘All the usual stuff you get if you ask any awkward questions.’

‘So you and Jim pretended you were kidnapped.’

‘Jim knew nothing about it. It was my idea, my doing.’ She paused. ‘He didn’t even know at the time that my father was the one who bought his mother’s house for next to nothing. I put it together from the names and places. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I was so ashamed.’

Duggan stood up and walked around the room and lit another
cigarette. Nuala sniffled and blew her nose behind him. He turned back to her and offered her a cigarette and lit it.

‘So you got the five hundred pounds I left in that place in Wicklow Street,’ he said.

‘You left it? I didn’t know that.’

‘How’d you collect it?’

‘I just walked in,’ she hinted at a smile. ‘Covered my hair with a scarf and put on an old coat and shuffled in.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then I told Jim about it. Gave him the money for his parents. But he wouldn’t take it. He got all upset about it. Said we had to give it back. Two wrongs wouldn’t make a right. All that sort of stuff.’

Duggan sat back down on the bed.

‘I said I had no intention of giving it back. That I’d send it to his parents anonymously. That it was my money. In a kind of a way. And I owed it to his mother. And I was going to pay it. Then,’ she paused to take a deep drag on the cigarette, ‘he insisted on picking up the
second
payment. Said it was—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Duggan interrupted. ‘There was a second payment?’

‘Another five hundred.’

‘When?’

‘The next day.’

‘Same place?’

Nuala nodded. ‘He wanted to just leave it there. But I said we couldn’t do that. You’d never know who’d walk away with it. But he wouldn’t let me go to collect it. Said it was too dangerous. He said he’d go. And he never came back.’ She stared at Duggan. ‘I knew I should’ve done it myself. This wouldn’t have happened.’

‘So you gave Timmy back the first five hundred.’

‘He got all his money back,’ she corrected him. ‘After Jim
disappeared
, these handbills about a British spy appeared. There was one
left here. Someone dropped one into the hospital in an envelope for Stella. Other friends of mine were given them.’

‘You gave back the money so you expected him to be released.’

‘Yes,’ she said, with an air of resignation. ‘He’s won. I just want Jim to be freed and for it to be over. None of it is his fault.’

‘Christ,’ Duggan muttered.

‘What?’ she said.

He made a helpless gesture with his hands. ‘This might have taken on a life of its own. I mean, the IRA say they’re holding a British spy and will execute him unless some prisoners are released. They’re not going to be released. So, they have to execute him. Or else their threats are empty.’

She nodded and propped her elbows on her knees and pushed her eyes hard into the palms of her hand. ‘I know,’ she muttered.

Duggan watched her for a moment and then leaned forward and took the remainder of the cigarette from her fingers and put it out in the cup. ‘I talked to your father about Jim,’ he said. ‘I might’ve taken him up wrong but I got the impression that he’d try and get Jim released if you go and talk to him.’

She lowered her hands and her eyes were red. ‘I promised myself I’ll never talk to him again.’

‘If it gets Jim released …’ he left the idea hang.

‘If anything happens to Jim that’d be it. I’d certainly never have anything to do with him again.’

‘Okay,’ Duggan sighed. There were two of them in it, he thought. Though she had right on her side. More right than Timmy, anyway. ‘Have you talked to your mother about any of this?’

Nuala snorted. ‘My mother doesn’t want to know.’

‘You have tried to talk to her?’

‘No. My mother’s only interested in her novenas and first Fridays and her bridge club and all that.’

‘She doesn’t know anything about it?’

Nuala thought for a moment. ‘If she does, she doesn’t want to know. You know what I mean?’

Duggan nodded.

‘I think she might know something but maybe not the details. Because she doesn’t want to know. So she’s buried herself in religion.’

‘You father seems to be afraid that she’ll find out something.’

‘Does he now?’ Nuala perked up for the first time. She hasn’t given up, Duggan thought. In spite of what she had said, she hasn’t accepted that Timmy has won.

‘Don’t do anything yet,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to your father again.’

‘What’ll you say to him?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ Duggan admitted.

‘You can tell him he’ll never see me again if a hair of Jim’s head is harmed,’ she said. ‘And I’ll be out campaigning against him in the next election.’

It was dark out when they left although there was still a faint light in the western sky. Duggan sat up on his bike and she stood on the step.

‘How’ll I contact you?’ he said.

‘Leave a message inside,’ she said. ‘Hold on to those keys.’

He was about to push off when he noticed the man about fifty yards away on the other side of the railings at the corner of Herbert Street, little more than a dark shadow. ‘Fuck,’ he said. He should’ve kept an eye on his back but he hadn’t bothered since they’d caught Billy Ward.

‘What?’ she said, echoing the alarm in his voice.

‘Get up on the bar. Quick.’

She sat up sideways on the crossbar and he pushed off and
pedalled
as hard as he could towards Merrion Square. As he swung
around he caught sight of the figure disappearing into Herbert Street. Maybe it was a false alarm, he thought. But he doubted it. He picked up speed, his mind a jumble. The Special Branch had a stakeout somewhere in this street, watching the British legation, but where? Would Gifford be in Merrion Square? But the door would be locked. Why hadn’t he brought his revolver?

‘Can you see?’ he asked. ‘Is anyone following us?’

Nuala bent forward to try and look around him, almost
unbalancing
the bike. She tried to raise herself to look over his shoulder but couldn’t. ‘I can’t see,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘I think there was someone watching the flat,’ he said, glancing back over his shoulder and seeing a bicycle round the corner from Herbert Street. ‘Fuck,’ he repeated. ‘He’s following us.’

He turned quickly into a laneway on the left and tried to pedal harder.

‘I see him now,’ Nuala said as they went around the corner.

‘How far back is he?’