'And returned when things really started to warm up again?'
'And as they say, has never looked back.'
It was still difficult to believe. 'It's a miracle he's still alive.'
'You intend to see him?"
'Yes, I think so.'
'Give him my best and tell him... tell him-' He appeared to hesitate.
'What?' I said, curious.
He suddenly looked very sad indeed. 'No, what would be the point? I tried to say it all years ago. This senseless violence, the dark path he walks.' He shook his head. 'There can only be one end, you know.'
.
But before Belfast I returned to Studley Constable, for there was still one other person left to see. Someone very special indeed. Prior Farm must have changed a lot since Devlin's time. There was a silage tower, numerous outbuildings and the yard had been concreted. When I knocked at the front door it was opened by a young woman in an overall with a child on her hip.
'Yes?' she said politely enough.
'I don't know if you can help me?' I told her. 'Actually, I'm trying to get in touch with Molly Prior.'
She burst into laughter. 'My goodness, you are out of date.' She called, 'Mum, someone to see you.'
The woman who came into the hall had iron-grey hair and wore an apron. Her sleeves were rolled up and there was flour to her elbows. 'Molly Prior?' I asked.
She really did look astonished. 'Not since 1944, that was when I changed my name to Howard.' She smiled. 'What's all this about?'
I opened my wallet and extracted a newspaper cutting similar to the one Gericke had shown me. 'I thought you might find this interesting.'
Her eyes widened, she wiped her hands on her apron and caught my arm. 'Come in. Please do come in.'
We sat in the front parlour and talked while she held the clipping in her hand. 'It's strange,' she said. 'I do believe I've heard that name, but I never connected it with Liam.'
'And you've never seen a newspaper picture like this of him before?'
'We only get the local paper and I never read that. Always too busy.'
Then how can you be certain it's him? How could you even be certain he was alive?'
'He wrote to me,' she said simply, in 1945 from America. Just the once. He said he was sorry for keeping me in suspense for so long and asked me to go out there and marry him.'
I was completely thrown by the calm and matter-of-fact way she said it. 'Did you reply?'
'No,' she said.
'Why not?"
'No point. I was already married to a good, kind man twenty years my elder who didn't mind damaged goods.' And then I saw everything. 'Yes, she said. That was the way of it.'
She got up, opened a cupboard and produced an old jewellery box which she opened with a key hidden behind the clock on the mantlepiece. She took out various things, passing them to me to examine. The exercise book of poetry, the letter he had left that fateful day, the one from America and there were photos there also.
She passed one across. 'I took that with a Box Brownie." It was Devlin in cap, goggles and raincoat, standing beside the BSA.
She handed me another. Devlin again, driving a tractor and then I saw a subtle difference. 'My son William,' she said simply.
'Does he know?' I asked.
'As much as he needs to. I told him after my husband passed on seven years ago. Will you be seeing Liam?'
'I hope so.'
'Give him that photo.' She sighed. 'He was a lovely man. There hasn't been a day of my life I haven't wondered where he was and what was happening to him.'
She took me to the door and shook hands. I'd got to the car when she called and as I turned, the sun came out and for a moment, the years faded and standing there, half in shadow, half in light, she seemed Devlin's beautiful ugly little peasant girl again.
'And tell him, Mr Higgins." she called. Tell him I hope he finally finds those Plains of Mayo he was always looking for.'
She closed the door and I got into the car and drove away.
Once booked into the Europa in Belfast, I made the right phone calls to the right people, told them what I wanted, then sat back and waited nervously for two days during which the city saw eighteen separate bombing incidents and three soldiers shot dead - and that wasn't counting the civilians.
On the evening of the second day the call came and I took a cab to the Royal Hospital where I was picked up by a bread van which dropped me outside a small terraced house in a mean side street off the Falls Road five minutes later. Inside, I was searched with considerable expertise by two hard and dangerous-looking young men, before being allowed to step into the tiny living room.
The man who had called himself Liam Devlin was sitting at the window in shirtsleeves, writing in an exercise book. He wore reading glasses and there was a Smith & Wesson.38 revolver on the table close to his hand. He put down his pen, took off his-glasses and turned. I looked into that face, ravaged by the years, to see some sign of that other man, and it was there in the bright blue eyes, the ironic quirk.
'You'll know me next time.'
'I will so,' I told him.
'I read that book of yours. Not bad for an Orange boy off the Albertbridge Road. I can't see why you don't take the oath and join the movement. It was good enough for Wolfe Tone and he was a damned Prod too.' He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and put a match to it. 'Now, what's all this about? You said it was urgent, so if it's an interview you're after, I'll have your balls for wasting my time.'
I produced the photo Molly had given me and put it on the desk. 'Your son,' I said. 'Molly thought you'd like to have it.'
He reeled as from a physical blow, his face turned very pale. He sat staring at the photo for a very long time. Finally he said, 'You'd better tell me what it's all about.'
Which I did, and during the telling he constantly interrupted me, correcting the odd fact here, inserting one there. When I came to the final act and Steiner on the terrace at Meltham House he jumped from his seat and got a bottle of Bushmills and two glasses from a cupboard. 'He came that close, did he? By God, he was a man, that one.' He splashed whiskey into the glasses. 'We'll drink to him.'
Which we did. I said. 'I hear you tried teaching in the States for a few years after the war?' 'There was little enough to do here, God knows.'
'And the Churchill affair?' I said. 'Didn't it ever occur to you to let the facts be known?'
'From me?' he said. 'One of the most wanted men in the IRA? Now who in the hell would ever have believed in a story like that coming from me?'
Which was fair enough. 'Tell me,' I said. 'How does a man who told Max Radl in October 1947 that he disapproved of soft target bombing come to be one of the prime architects of the Provisional IRA's present campaign, where the bomb, after all, has been your main weapon?'
There was pain in his eyes and his smile was more savage than anything else. 'As the times change, all men change with them. Some idiot said that, I forget who.'
'Has it been worth it?' I said. 'All these years? The violence, the killings?'
'The cause I represent is a just one,' he said. 'I fight for an ideal of freedom...' Quite suddenly, he broke down and sagged into a chair, his shoulders shaking.
At first I thought that he was crying, but then he looked up and I saw that he was laughing his head off. 'God save us, but all of a sudden I was standing six feet away and listening to myself. I tell you, son, you should try it some time. It's a salutory experience.' He poured himself another whiskey. 'Steiner was right. It's just a bloody senseless game after all and when it gets you by the ballocks it won't let go.'
'Have you any message for Molly?'
'After all these years? From a walking corpse like me? Be your age, son, and now get out of this. 'I've work to do.'
There was the rattle of small arms fire in the distance, the crump of an explosion. I paused at the door. 'Sorry, I almost forgot, Molly sent you a message.'
He looked up, face expressionless. 'Did she?'
'Yes, she said she hoped you finally find those Plains of Mayo.'
He smiled a smile of infinite and terrible sadness and I swear there were tears in his eyes. 'If you see her,' he said simply, 'give her my love. She had it then, she has it now.' He reached for his glasses. 'Now get to hell out of here.'
.
It was almost a year to the day since I had made that astonishing discovery in the churchyard at St Mary and All the Saints when I returned to Studley Constable, this time by direct invitation of Father Philip Vereker. I was admitted by a young priest with an Irish accent.
Vereker was sitting in a wing-back chair in front of a huge fire in the study, a rug about his knees, a dying man if ever I've seen one. The skin seemed to have shrunk on his face, exposing every bone and the eyes were full of pain. 'It was good of you to come.'
'I'm sorry to see you so ill,' I said.
'I have a cancer of the stomach. Nothing to be done. The Bishop has been very good in allowing me to end it here, arranging for Father Damian to assist with parish duties, but that isn't why I sent for you. I hear you've had a busy year.'
'I don't understand,' I said. 'When I was here before you wouldn't say a word. Drove me out, in fact.'
'It's really very simple. For years I've only known half the story myself. I suddenly discover that I have an insatiable curiosity to know the rest before it is too late.'
So I told him because there didn't really seem any reason why I shouldn't. By the time I had finished, the shadows were falling across the grass outside and the room was half in darkness.
'Remarkable,' he said. 'How on earth did you find it all out?'
'Not from any official source, believe me. Just from talking to people, those who are still alive and who were willing to talk. The biggest stroke of luck was in being privileged to read a very comprehensive diary kept by the man responsible for the organization of the whole thing, Colonel Max Radl. His widow is still alive in Bavaria. What I'd like to know now is what happened here afterwards.'
'There was a complete security clampdown. Every single villager involved was interviewed by the intelligence and security people. The Official Secrets Act invoked. Not that it was really necessary. These are a peculiar people. Drawing together in adversity, hostile to strangers, as you have seen. They looked upon it as their business and no one else's.'
'And there was Seymour.'
'Exactly. Did you know that he was killed last February?'
'No.'
'Driving back from Holt one night drunk. He ran his van off the coast road into the marsh and was drowned.'
'What happened to him after the other business?'
'He was quietly certified. Spent eighteen years in an institution before he managed to obtain his release when the mental health laws were relaxed.'
'But how could people stand having him around?'
'He was related by blood to at least half the families in the district. George Wilde's wife, Betty, was his sister.'
'Good God,' I said. 'I didn't realize.'
'In a sense, the silence of the years was also a kind of protection for Seymour.'
'There is another possibility,' I said. 'That the terrible thing he did that night was seen as a reflection on all of them. Something to hide rather than reveal.'
'That, too.'
'And the tombstone?'
'The military engineers who were sent here to clean up the village, repair damage and so on, placed all the bodied in a mass grave in the churchyard. Unmarked, of course and we were told it was to remain so.'
'But you thought differently?'
'Not just me. All of us. Wartime propaganda was a pernicious thing then, however necessary. Every war picture we saw at the cinema, every book we read, every newspaper, portrayed the average German soldier as a ruthless and savage barbarian, but these men were not like that. Graham Wilde is alive today, Susan Turner married with three children because one of Steiner's men gave his life to save them. And at the church, remember, he let the people go.'
'So, a secret monument was decided on?'
That's right. It was easy enough to arrange. Old Ted Turner was a retired monumental mason. It was laid, dedicated by me at a private service, then concealed from the casual observer as you know. The man Preston is down there, too. but was not included on the monument.'
'And you all agreed with this?'
He managed one of his rare, wintry smiles. 'As some kind of personal penance if you like. Dancing on his grave was the term Steiner used and he was right. I hated him that day. Could have killed him myself.'
