Ashes In the Wind (7 page)

‘My son, murder is a mortal sin, a terrible sin. The archbishop has proscribed the Volunteers. I can give you absolution only if you can perform a genuine Act of Contrition and leave the IRA.’

‘O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pain of hell...’

There Tomas stops, gets up off his knees and walks out of the cathedral. Unshriven.

He goes back to the house uneasy, aware that he has crossed into a world where his old certainties are gone. There is no return. He and Patrick O’Mahony had walked across to Staigue Fort the night before the ambush for a change from the drudgery of the farm. The bloody halo round Seamus O’Connell’s head and the bullet that destroyed Pat’s knee had given a bitter meaning to adventure. Tomas has to wrench his mind away from the recurring images of the remote farmyard and the shooting of Eileen Burke and William McKelvey.

He turns into Station Road and goes into the front room. Frank is there with Mrs O’Hanrahan and Kitty.

‘We’d best be on the move. Get your stuff and we’re away.’

Getting his stuff takes no more than a moment; all his possessions are in a small carpet bag of his mother’s. He shakes Mrs O’Hanrahan’s hand, holds Kitty’s for a long moment, who looks down, then brushes Tomas’s cheek with her lips.

‘There’s no time for that,’ says Frank, frowning, and they walk out the door. As they reach the far end of the road a lorry pulls up outside number 17 and half a dozen Auxiliaries jump out. ‘Don’t run,’ says Frank as they turn the corner. Half an hour later they are in a small room above a bar down by the docks.

‘The Queen Victoria’s a great name for a Republican snug,’ says Frank, pointing to the sign. ‘Eamonn was for changing it. I said, better leave it alone. Call it the Wolfe Tone or the Ninety-Eight, it’ll fill up with singing heroes and get raided every other night.’

In the upstairs room they are joined by a third man a little older than Tomas. He is called Denis; no last names are exchanged.

‘The three of us are away to the country for a while,’ says Frank. ‘Michael Collins has a job for us back here when we’re ready. You two need some practice.’

‘Practice at what?’

‘The revolver.’

Frank leaves later that evening; the next morning Michael Kelly, a fifty-year-old farmer arrives in a pony and trap and gives detailed directions to Tomas.

‘It’ll take the best part of the day. And go easy on Cora, on the pony. She’s not one of your Kerry mares. Frank says you know horses – I hope he’s right.’

‘He’s right enough,’ says Tomas with a smile, patting Cora on the neck as she nuzzles his sleeve. He has a sudden longing for the farmyard smells of horses and cattle and hay.

He and Denis swing up onto the trap and trot off down Victoria Quay. The city is soon left behind; the Cork countryside down towards the coast is flatter and more prosperous that the boggy, rocky little fields of County Kerry. Bracken, rowan and larch mark their journey and in the distance lies the grey-blue sea. The journey passes without much conversation. Tomas extracts a couple of monosyllabic replies from Denis and then gives up, concentrating on the road and, now and again, Kitty’s soft parting kiss.

Outside Ballygarvan they are stopped by an army roadblock.

‘Where are you two going?’ asks the sergeant, looking down at a sheet of a dozen photographs.

‘Back to our farm at Lissagroom,’ says Tomas. Denis looks straight ahead and says nothing. There is a perfunctory search of their bags.

‘What’s in the sacks?’

‘Potatoes.’

The sergeant laughs, rips open the topmost sack, tumbles out a few of the potatoes, rummages about and finds nothing.

‘I’d have thought you had enough of these already. And they’re a bit small, no?’

‘They’re seed potatoes for next year.’

The sergeant holds up the sheet of photographs alongside Tomas, then Denis. Tomas sees Frank’s picture in the gallery and looks away.

‘You’re neither of you there yet,’ says the sergeant. ‘Be off with you.’

They arrive at the farmhouse in the evening after a couple of wrong turnings, directions hard to come by from the cautious travellers they pass along the road. Frank is already there.

‘Were you stopped along the road?’ he says.

‘Only the once. They’d never seen seed potatoes before.’

‘Lucky they didn’t look in every sack,’ says Frank as he shifts the load and takes the bottom sack into the house. He opens it and unpacks three bulky packages, each revealing a shiny new Smith and Wesson .38 revolver and several boxes of ammunition.

‘These’ll do the business once you learn to point them. More reliable than any automatic.’

Tomas and Denis say nothing, offended that they hadn’t been told.

‘I’ll see to the pony,’ says Tomas; he goes out, unharnesses Cora and leads her into the small stable opposite the farmhouse front door. She drinks thirstily from the bucket, then sets about the hay-net while Tomas runs his hands down each leg in turn. Sound as a bell and all four shoes still on, he says to himself. Good girl, Cora.

The next morning they take the pistols up the hill to a small quarry where Frank puts up a couple of makeshift cardboard targets. Tomas is surprised at how close they stand.

‘We’re none of us Wild Bill Hickok,’ says Frank. ‘These are accurate at close range. They’re revolvers, pull the trigger each time, watch the kick as you fire. Stand square on, brace your right wrist with the left hand and pull steady, don’t jerk.’

Tomas gets the hang of it quickly. After a week he is putting three shots into a soup-plate-sized ring every time.

‘That’s fine,’ says Frank. ‘We’re not snipers. If you have to fire from forty yards it’s to frighten them off. You’ll hit anything only through pure luck. Remember, close as you can, two or three to the body, one to the head to finish him off.’

Denis takes longer. Frank is patient, showing him the grip and the stance and the pull again and again.

Practice with the revolvers takes an hour a day; the rest of the time they spend in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and reading back numbers of
Ireland’s Own
, all they have to stave off boredom. On the third day the farmer returns from Cork City.

‘You’ve looked after Cora all right,’ he says. ‘Better than I’d expect from a Kerry man.’ This is high praise.

The farmer has brought a message from Michael Collins.

‘Here’s our man,’ says Frank, spreading out a two-week-old copy of the
Cork Constitution
.

The picture on the front page is of a moustached figure in British Army uniform. Underneath he is quoted as saying to a group of Auxiliaries, ‘If the persons approaching carry their hands in their pockets or are in any way suspicious, shoot them down. You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped and you are bound to get the right persons sometimes.’

‘Colonel Gerald Smyth, DSO and Bar. All the way from Banbridge in County Down to make our lives a misery in Cork. He’s attached to the Auxiliaries – they’re the ones who roughed up Maureen O’Hanrahan and Kitty the day we left.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’ says Tomas angrily.

‘Because I didn’t want you heading off back to Cork to no purpose. It could have been worse if the Auxies hadn’t been called away.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘Maybe. Any road, the colonel goes to the County Club every day for lunch, and reads the paper in the smoking room after. One of our boys is a waiter there. You, Tomas, are to go in and shoot him. Denis here will watch your back.’

‘Go in and shoot him, do I? Just like that,’ says Tomas. What a world am I in, he thinks, where I can be told to kill a total stranger.

‘Just like that,’ says Frank. ‘You’re not being asked to do anything I wouldn’t do, haven’t done, myself.’

‘How will I recognize him?’

‘Easy enough. He’s only the one arm – lost the other in the war. Always in the armchair on the right of the fireplace.’

‘One arm?’

‘Never mind that. It’s his left he’s missing, and he’ll use his right to shoot you if you give him half a chance. You’ll be on your own, the two of you. They’re on to me in Cork City.’

The next morning Tomas and Denis set off with Cora back to Cork; this time the revolvers and ammunition are in a box on the underside of the trap.

At the start of their journey they come round a corner beyond Lissagroom and run into a small good-humoured crowd, mainly men, a few women, all heading the same way.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Road bowling,’ says Denis, excited. ‘Don’t you have it in Kerry? Stand up in the cart and watch – we’ll not get past until they’re done.’

Tomas sees a man running to a mark, lifting a large ball up and back behind him, then whirling it forward with a leap in a powerful underarm throw, the ball clattering along the rough road. His opponent follows. Each throw is accompanied by a loud cheer from the spectators, who then run forward to the next marks.

‘That thing is solid iron, weighs twenty-eight ounces; you’d need to be a strong fella to lift it, never mind hurl it. Look, that one’s marking the best line for his man’s next throw.’

‘How far do they go?’ says Tomas.

‘Three miles or so. You win with the fewest throws. My uncle won the Cork Championship over the Knappagh course three years ago with twenty-two. You loft the ball over the corner when you get to a bend in the road.’

The bowling, which involves argument and betting as well as throwing, holds them up for an hour.

‘I’ve not seen the like in Kerry,’ says Tomas.

There are no roadblocks, although beyond Ballygarvan there is a trench, four feet deep and three across, cut into the road.

‘Bloody Tans,’ says Denis.

‘It’s most likely our people,’ says Tomas.

The earlier hold-up and the long detour add two hours to their journey, and they arrive in Cork just before the nine o’clock curfew. They spend the night in the Queen Victoria. Tomas has been forbidden by Frank to visit Station Road.

‘The house is watched day and night. You’ll wind up inside if you go there.’

The next day Tomas and Denis walk together along the Quays and cross the north channel of the River Lee to South Mall. The County Club is a late Georgian town house in grey stone with wrought-iron balconies on the first floor. A small brass plate by the door confirms that they are studying the right building. They look at the club for a few minutes; no one enters or leaves, and there is no sign of a police guard. When a man comes out on one of the balconies they walk away to Patrick Street.

On the following morning they go back to the club by the same route. Tomas goes in first, followed by Denis; the porter at the entrance looks up and looks away. As they go into the smoking room they pull out their revolvers. The man on the right of the fireplace sees them and begins to rise out of his chair, reaching inside his jacket pocket; his left sleeve is empty. Tomas walks towards him, fires twice and the man slumps back into the chair for a moment, chest covered in blood, then gets up as Tomas fires again. He falls forward, tries to speak, lies still as blood comes from his mouth, staining the carpet a deeper red. The three other men in the room are silent and still. The shots have been violently loud in the confined space. In the sudden silence that follows, a waiter drops his coffee-cup-laden tray with a clatter.

It is all over in three minutes. Fifty yards up the street a car is waiting, and ten minutes later they are back in the Queen Victoria.

‘That was easy enough,’ says Denis as they walk up the stairs.

‘You didn’t pull the trigger,’ says Tomas. He feels a sick excitement, realizing that this time killing a man had indeed been easy. The power the revolver had given him was real. That night he wonders whether he will see Kitty again and what he will say to her if they meet.

The following evening Tomas and Michael are sitting in a corner of the Queen Victoria’s saloon bar, each nursing half a pint of mild.

‘Stout’s too bitter for me,’ says Denis, and Tomas agrees. Frank O’Gowan comes in, carrying a copy of the
Cork Constitution
.

‘You’re headline news. “Appalling horror in Cork City – five masked men kill defenceless war hero in his chair by the club fire,”’ he says. ‘You did well. The air in Cork City is sweeter for the killing of Inspector Smyth.’

Frank takes them up to the bar and orders three whiskeys.

‘It’s a celebration,’ he says, talking more loudly than usual. ‘By rights it should be five whiskeys for the two of you.’ He sees the look on Tomas’s face. ‘We’re among friends tonight,’ giving a little wave of his hand that pulls in the six other men standing at the bar.

Each of them nods to Frank. The tallest, a man with a strong jaw and unruly dark hair, is Michael Collins, who introduces himself in a gravelly West Cork accent and shakes hands with Tomas and Denis.

The Big Fellow is already a legend among the Volunteers. At first sight he doesn’t stand out; he is wearing a dark suit, well-polished black shoes, and his grey Homburg is on the bar beside him. Tomas has seen the
Police Gazette
description.

‘Clean-shaven, youthful appearance, dark brown eyes, regular nose, fresh complexion, oval face, five feet eleven inches high, about thirty years of age, dark hair. Generally wears trilby hat and fawn overcoat.’

Frank says, ‘Mick wants us in Dublin, Tomas. Denis, you’re to stay in Cork.’

Denis looks relieved.

‘I’ll need to get a letter to my mam,’ says Tomas. ‘She’s heard nothing from me since Staigue Fort. I’m killed or captured for all she knows.’

‘You do nothing, no letter-writing,’ says Frank. ‘We’ll get a message to her, put her mind at rest.’

There’ll be little rest for my mam if she knows what I’ve been doing, thinks Tomas.

Frank leans forward on the bar and orders another whiskey for himself and the Big Fellow. They clink glasses. To Tomas’s astonishment Frank starts to sing in a sweet tenor voice. The others around him join in, the Big Fellow beating his hand on the bar in time with the tune. Frank looks at Tomas with a half-smile, then sings the second verse.