Echobeat (14 page)

‘Well, now.’ Timmy emptied his glass and reached for the Paddy bottle and poured himself another one. ‘You want to lock him up too? Like you did with the others?’

‘We want to get a message to him.’

‘Seen the light, have ye?’

‘I don’t make the decisions,’ Duggan kept his voice even, determined not to get into an argument with him. ‘We just want to ask him a question.’

‘What question?’

‘Why they have been dropping bombs on us for the last week.’

Timmy gave a short laugh. ‘Don’t you fellows read the papers? It was there in black and white the other day for everyone to read. From the horse’s mouth in Berlin. They haven’t dropped any bombs on us.’

‘Our people have no doubt that they did. The bombs were German.’

‘But who dropped them?’ Timmy wagged a finger.

‘The Luftwaffe. From Heinkels.’

‘Did you see them?’

‘Enough people did,’ Duggan took another drag to calm himself. ‘It’s not that hard to tell planes apart.’

‘And who was flying them?’

‘Where would the British get Heinkels even if they had German bombs?’

Timmy shook his head, unconvinced. ‘You couldn’t be up to the fuckers.’

‘How well do you know the O’Sheas?’ Duggan tried to get the conversation back on track.

‘I know him to say hello to. He was very helpful to us in the old days, when he was a medical student. Patched up a few lads who couldn’t go near hospitals. He’s got a bit lah-di-da since then. Now that he’s qualified, raking in the money.’

‘What about her? Do you know her well enough to have a quiet word with her?’

‘Mona’d know her better than me. They’re in the same bridge club. And something to do with the church. Altar committee or something.’

‘Maybe I should talk to her.’

‘What are you saying?’ Timmy narrowed his eyes.

‘Mrs O’Shea is in touch with this German. Hermann Goertz.’

‘Well, now,’ Timmy said, with a slow smile. ‘Isn’t that something?’

Duggan drank some of his Guinness, wondering why Timmy was smiling and what machinations were going on in his head. He couldn’t avoid the feeling that this information meant more to Timmy than he knew. But then, he reminded himself, Timmy was an expert in appearing to be more knowledgeable than he was. It was part of his stock-in-trade to appear to always know more than anyone else. ‘Could you ask aunt Mona to ask her to pass the question on? Ask him why they’ve been dropping bombs on us?’

‘It’s her?’ Timmy raised an eyebrow. ‘Not him?’

‘Definitely her,’ Duggan said. ‘Could be him too, but I don’t know that for a fact.’

‘And who would we say wanted to know?’

Duggan shrugged. ‘We wouldn’t have to say, would we? You’re a member of the government party.’

Timmy gave him a slow smile. ‘You’re getting to be a crafty little fucker,’ he said, a compliment. ‘But we’ll leave Mona out of it. You don’t want too many middlemen. Or middle women. So what’s the question again?’

‘Why are they bombing us? Is it in response to something we’ve done or are doing?’

‘Like what?’

‘That’s what we want to know. If they’re sending us a message we want to know what it is.’

‘I could give you a few reasons why they mightn’t be happy with you lot.’

‘We want to hear it from them,’ Duggan cut him short.

‘Fair enough. We’ll see what we can do.’ The look on Timmy’s face showed that he was already thinking about the possibilities this request opened up for him. Duggan didn’t want to think too deeply about what they might be.

The spinning record on the gramophone, its song long ended, broke into the sudden silence. Timmy stood up and lifted the needle with care and settled the arm back on its rest. He tossed his cigarette butt into the fire and shovelled some coal from a scuttle onto it. He stood in front of the fireplace with his thumbs under his braces, the lord of the manor.

‘There’s something else,’ Duggan said, putting out his butt in the full ashtray.

‘Jaysus,’ Timmy gave him a happy grin. ‘You’re a mine of information all of a sudden.’

‘Do you know someone called Roddy Glenn?’

‘Roddy Glenn?’ Timmy rocked back and forward for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Where’s he from?’

‘I don’t know exactly.’ He doesn’t know, Duggan thought. There hadn’t been the slightest flicker of recognition. So Roddy Glenn wasn’t the source of the photographs of the British government documents that he had. At least not directly.

‘Glenn? Glenn?’ Timmy shook his head. ‘Another intelligence fella?’

‘I don’t know,’ Duggan said truthfully. ‘Just a name that came up
and I wondered if you might’ve heard of him. You come across so many people.’

‘Glenn? Is he Irish?’

‘I know nothing about him.’ Duggan stood up and put on his jacket. ‘I better let you get back to work.’

‘It’s more or less done. Finish your drink.’

Duggan poured the remainder of the bottle into the glass and waited it for it to settle. ‘By the way, they’re very interested in the photographs you gave me.’

‘You passed them on.’

‘I gave them to Commandant McClure.’

‘And?’

‘They’ve had several meetings about them. They’re convinced they’re genuine.’

‘Of course they’re genuine.’

‘They want to know where they came from.’

‘And what’d you tell them?’

‘Nothing.’ Duggan drank most of the Guinness in his glass. ‘But they know you gave them to me.’

‘How would they know that?’

‘They know we’re related,’ Duggan shrugged. ‘I didn’t tell them and they didn’t ask. But I know they know.’

Timmy nodded, not unhappy. That was exactly the sort of conclusion that he would have reached in their situation. Imparting information without saying anything was another of his specialities.

‘And they want me to ask who the original source is,’ Duggan continued. ‘And if he will talk to them.’

Timmy switched his hands to his pockets as if to hide them. ‘I can’t tell you that,’ he frowned.

Can’t or won’t? Duggan wondered. Can’t because he doesn’t know. Or won’t because it’s a suspect source of some kind. A German?
An IRA man? But the documents seemed to be real. And sources were often suspect. ‘Captain Anderson is handling it,’ he said. ‘The man you mentioned to me.’

‘The northern fella with the reddish hair?’

‘That’s him. He’d like to have a word with you about it.’ Anderson hadn’t said any such thing to him but it was a fair assumption. And a way of keeping Timmy at arm’s length.

Timmy rocked back and forth on his heels, attracted by the prospect of having another contact in G2, cautious of the pressure it might put on him. ‘No, no. We’ll just leave it as it is,’ he said at last with a hint of regret. ‘Anything I come across I’ll pass on through you. And if they want to jump to conclusions about where it came from we can’t stop them.’

‘They’re going to keep on at me about it,’ Duggan sighed and drained his glass. He didn’t relish the prospect of continuing as the go-between. ‘It’s important that they know.’

‘Tell them you can’t get blood out of a stone,’ Timmy gave him a crooked smile. ‘They’ll just have to accept it for what it is.’

Duggan reversed the car over to the steps of the Red House and kept the engine idling as he waited for Commandant McClure. He watched Captain Anderson come in the gate past the sentry and catch his eye. Both held their stares as Anderson approached and Duggan began to wind down his window.

“Have you ever seen this Roddy Glenn character?’ Anderson demanded without preliminaries.

Duggan shook his head.

‘How do you know he exists?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How do we know this source of yours hasn’t made him up?’

‘Why would she do that?’

Anderson gave him a withering look. ‘You trust her?’

‘Others have seen him,’ Duggan retorted.

‘Who?’

McClure bounded down the steps with a buff folder in his hand. ‘Any response from Captain Collison?’ he asked Anderson over the roof of the car.

‘He says the name doesn’t ring any immediate bells. But he’ll investigate.’

McClure gave a sardonic laugh, sat in the car and Duggan drove away.

‘He’s still trying to find out about Gerda,’ Duggan said as they went along the quays and told McClure what Anderson had been hinting at. That Gerda might be feeding information to them.

‘Is that possible?’ McClure asked in an even voice.

Duggan glanced at him, taken aback that McClure would even raise the question. ‘No,’ he shook his head to emphasise his reply.

‘Agreed,’ McClure said. ‘I’ve had a word with Mrs Lynch and she confirms Glenn’s existence. But she doesn’t know where he lives or anything else about him. Except that he’s a troublemaker and she has barred him.’

‘So Gerda was telling the truth,’ Duggan said with an unconscious hint of victory.

‘Did you have reason to doubt it?’

‘No, no,’ Duggan glanced at him again, wondering why he was raising the question again. McClure had a way of discomfiting him like this now and then. Perhaps to keep me on my toes, he thought. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘I doubt he’ll go back to Mrs Lynch’s again. It’s a dead end for him. He can’t sell his paintings there, if he really is an artist. And the German internees won’t talk to him. So there’s no point going back.’

‘So what do we do?’ Duggan turned onto O’Connell Bridge and stopped at the signal of the garda on point duty.

‘Circulate your description of him and hope someone picks him up somewhere. He might try and contact the German legation directly now if all over avenues are closed.’

They watched the garda trying to hurry along the cross traffic with fast waves of his baton. Most of it was made up of cyclists and drays: there were noticeably fewer cars on the roads with the new year’s shortage of petrol. The city itself was sinking back into his mid-winter torpor, the last signs of Christmas disappearing from shop windows. There were few people on the streets, moving fast against the penetrating damp.

‘Does Captain Collison really run MI6 here?’ Duggan asked, seeing an opportunity to inquire. McClure was always more discursive on these car journeys.

McClure grunted an affirmative.

‘So they’re spying on us while we’re cooperating with them?’ Duggan looked at him.

‘That’s it,’ McClure gave him a wan smile. ‘But different organisations. MI6 runs their spies abroad. MI5 tries to catch foreign spies. Like us. So we have a common interest with them. Up to a point.’

‘That’s mad,’ Duggan let up the clutch as the garda waved his baton at them. ‘So we should be chasing them at the same time as we’re cooperating with them.’

‘We are,’ McClure said, indicating the corner of College Street and Westmoreland Street with his thumb as they went by the statue of Tom Moore. ‘Their main undercover operation is based in that building over there. The StubbsGazette offices.’

‘Really?’

‘A good cover,’ McClure added. ‘They can go around asking questions while people think they’re just checking out creditworthiness and business matters. Of course,’ he gave a dry chuckle, ‘it’d be an even better cover if we didn’t know about it.’

‘And we’re just letting them do it?’

‘If we close it down they’d only set up another operation. Better that we know what they’re doing than waste time trying to uncover their next effort.’

‘And what are they doing?’

‘Trying to find German submarines harbouring along the west,’ McClure laughed as if it was a joke.

‘Ah,’ Duggan said, remembering what Anderson had told him. ‘The fishermen?’

‘Them as well. Wasting their time looking for something that isn’t there. But it keeps them out of harm’s way.’

‘What if they find a U-boat?’

‘Then we’d be in trouble, wouldn’t we?’ McClure smiled, still treating it as a joke.

Duggan gave him a sharp look, not seeing the humour.

‘There are no German submarines there,’ McClure smiled back at him. ‘Anyone who gives it a moment’s thought knows that.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ Duggan let the car idle behind a couple of cyclists until a tram had gone by and he could overtake them.

‘U-boats don’t use petrol or diesel. They usual a heavy oil that we don’t have in this country. Besides, who controls all the oil we do have?’

‘The British,’ Duggan nodded as he sped around the cyclists. ‘So why do they go on about it, then?’

‘Politics. Propaganda,’ McClure said as though they were the same thing. ‘The only way the Germans could refuel U-boats in Irish harbours would be from their own tankers. Not from some fishermen giving them a few cans of petrol. And they couldn’t bring their own tankers there on the Q.T. for long.’

‘That’s as mad as us cooperating with them while letting them spy on us.’

‘Now you have it,’ McClure clapped him on the back as they came to a stop outside Government Buildings. ‘There’s no point having the left hand and the right hand wasting time doing the same things. Anyway, it’s better sometimes to keep the real issues out of sight.’

They climbed the steps into the building, passing the bored garda outside, and waited while the porter checked with someone on the phone. Pól Ó Murchú was sitting back in his chair when they were shown into his office, looking like the cares of the world had crushed
him into the back rest. His face was pale in the gritty twilight and there were dark rings under his eyes. He made no effort at formality this time, merely indicating the chairs facing his desk with a tired hand.

McClure placed the file on his desk and sat down. ‘We are making some progress in the search for Dr Goertz,’ he said. ‘We hope to close in on him shortly. Or at least find out what, if anything, he knows about Germany’s current intentions.’

‘Tonight will tell the story,’ Ó Murchú said in a gloomy tone. ‘I gather the weather is clearing from the west.’

‘Tonight or tomorrow night,’ McClure corrected him, his good humour ebbing away. ‘It’s doubtful if it’ll have cleared enough by tonight for their bombers.’

‘And do we have any more cards in our hand?’ Ó Murchú stared at the ‘
SECRET
’ stamp in a red box on the file cover.

‘We have evidence of German internees collecting intelligence of military value while out on parole and passing it to the German legation.’

‘Good, good,’ Ó Murchú nodded a couple of times. ‘The more breaches of diplomacy we can throw at them the better. Though it won’t make much difference at the end of the day, if they’ve decided to make an issue of expanding their legation.’

‘Have they?’

‘That’s the question. We’re getting mixed signals. Herr Hempel says the bombings are accidents. Flyers off course, confused by our air defences shooting at them. That sort of thing.’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘Like it’s our fault. Apparently the Irish Sea is very difficult to see from up there. No mention of it being retaliation for us dragging our heels over flying their men into Foynes. And we haven’t made any overt linkages either.’

He straightened himself in the chair as if it was more a mental
effort than a physical one. ‘And we now have to worry as well about the British, about their multipronged campaign against us and their efforts to mobilise President Roosevelt against us.’

‘Yes, sir,’ McClure said.

‘This sudden’ – Ó Murchú opened his hands in a search for an appropriate word – ‘influx of information about high-level British plans. Are we to take it all at face value?’

‘We are operating on that basis. But we are still trying to assess the sources.’

‘Sources?’ Ó Murchú picked up on the use of the plural with alacrity.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I understood it all came through one source.’

‘No sir. It all came to the attention of Captain Duggan here but from two different sources.’

Ó Murchú turned his attention to Duggan.

Duggan cleared his throat. ‘The British government plans came from one source, sir. The letter to President Roosevelt from another. As far as I’m aware, they did not originate from the same person.’

‘That seems hard to credit,’ Ó Murchú said drily. ‘That there are suddenly two sources with access to top-level British government information and both are willing to share it with us at the same time.’

Duggan reddened under his stare, wondering if he should point out that Churchill’s letter to Roosevelt was not intended for them but for the Germans. He half-expected McClure to explain but the commandant said nothing. ‘We’re trying to trace the original sources of both sets of documents, sir,’ he kicked to touch.

‘In the meantime,’ Ó Murchú went on, ‘we have to deal with the unpalatable fact that these documents, whether they are authentic or forgeries, do express the known and likely sentiments of the people concerned. And they pose another series of grave threats to us.’

Nobody said anything and a clock marked time in the silence,
emphasising the air of gloomy fatalism that seemed to have inhabited Ó Murchú’s office and settled on his shoulders. He stirred himself after a moment and added, ‘The Minister for Defence Co-Ordination, Mr Aiken, is going on a critical mission to Washington shortly. To procure arms for you people. Perhaps his visit will throw more light on the threat we face from the Americans.’ He gave McClure an inquisitive look. ‘And there are reports of Americans moving into Derry.’

‘So I understand, sir.’

‘How reliable are they?’

‘I couldn’t say, sir. That’s not our section.’

Ó Murchú gave a humph, as if to say that he wasn’t surprised at McClure’s response, that this was the type of inadequate help he had to deal with to do his job.

McClure lit an inevitable cigarette as soon as they got back into the car. ‘That wasn’t exactly encouraging,’ he wound down his window an inch and blew a stream of used smoke at the gap.

‘What do you mean?’ Duggan looked over his shoulder to check the traffic and did a quick U-turn, bumping over the ridge of frozen snow in the centre of the road.

‘He sounds like he’s given up the ghost,’ McClure said. ‘Like it’s getting to be too much. Trying to keep all the balls in the air.’

‘He seemed more concerned about the Americans than the Germans or even the British.’

‘He is. They are,’ McClure inhaled. ‘It’s much harder to resist pressure from the Americans about the ports. We’re friendly nations, in every sense, not just diplomatically. Both neutrals. How can we not help them make sure their shipping isn’t being sunk in the Atlantic?’

‘But it’s not their shipping.’

‘It’s their cargoes, exports, supplies.’

‘But they’re for the English.’

‘Yes,’ McClure agreed. ‘For their friends and allies. Part of the group of democratic nations opposed to the dictatorships. As we are too. So we have a community of interests and friendships. And some of those supplies are for us. So how can we not help them?’

‘It all goes back to partition,’ Duggan suggested. But that wasn’t of much interest to the Americans, apart from the Irish-Americans, of course.

‘Yeah,’ McClure sighed. ‘And now the Americans may be moving into the North. Into our national territory, without the courtesy of even an advance warning.’

Jesus, Duggan thought, realising the dilemma that created for the government. Should they protest? And create bad feelings with the Americans? Or should they just ignore it? And accept that the US was also part of the partition problem, actively supporting the British position?

‘Which increases the pressure on us to provide the Americans with port facilities,’ McClure continued, thinking aloud. ‘To keep in their good books. And it’s only a small step from that to transhipping supplies across the country to Britain. And for the Germans to see that as a hostile act and to start bombing the transhipment routes. Roads, railways, ports.’

‘And then we’re in the war.’

‘Yep.’

‘Christ,’ Duggan sighed. You do need three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, he thought. And end up spinning in circles and getting dizzy. ‘We can’t keep out of it forever, can we?’

‘Depends,’ McClure shrugged. ‘The Germans don’t want to declare war on the Americans but there’s probably a limit to the amount of provocation they’ll take. Now that Roosevelt’s been re-elected he’s
going ahead with his lend-lease plan to increase supplies to the British. As long as the Americans are officially neutral, we might have some protection, I suppose. But I can’t see that lasting long if we’re directly providing supplies to the British in a way we didn’t before the war. It’s all right to go on exporting cattle to them as we always did. Turning Galway or someplace else into a big transatlantic port is another matter.’ He wound down his window some more and flicked out his cigarette butt with his thumb. ‘It really all depends on what happens next. When the Germans make their move on Britain.’

Back in headquarters Captain Sullivan was going into the Red House as they parked, and followed them in. ‘What’s up?’ he demanded in response to their sombre faces as he and Duggan went into their own office.

‘Nothing.’

‘Come on,’ Sullivan persisted. ‘You two look very serious.’

‘Just got a grilling from External Affairs,’ Duggan said. ‘Because we couldn’t answer all their questions about Adolf’s plans.’

‘Hah,’ Sullivan gave a short laugh. ‘Tell them to talk to my old man. He’ll know exactly what Adolf’s going to do next.’