towards his Fuhrer. Now, as he sat over a bony kipper and stewed tea in Bewley’s Cafe he could see how much of it didn’t fit after all, and how much he had ignored to get an answer.
Hugo Keller had told him and he hadn’t heard. It was a guard, not Detective Sergeant Lynch, a guard. There were the Blueshirts too, the ones who had come for Vincent that night after the Eucharistic Mass, the night he was murdered. They couldn’t have had anything to do with Jimmy Lynch. He was exactly the kind of anti-Treaty IRA man the Blueshirts had been created to fight. Besides, Billy Donnelly had sat on those letters for a year before Lynch even joined the Guards. And however Lynch found out about them he didn’t take them to help Robert Fitzpatrick, he took them to sell to Hugo Keller. There were always too many holes. The fact that Jimmy Lynch was bent didn’t make him a killer, though he’d killed easily enough in the IRA. The fact that Robert Fitzpatrick hated Jews and admired Adolf Hitler didn’t make him a killer either. Perhaps Stefan had wanted it to be the monsignor. He wanted it because of everything Fitzpatrick believed. He wanted it because the curate in Baltinglass was a little Fitzpatrick too. And there was Hannah. Perhaps he wanted to give her the answers she needed just a little too much. He had missed something. Now he had to go back and find what he’d missed. If anyone would let him. But if he couldn’t, the book was still in his pocket, Hugo Keller’s insurance policy, and tucked into it at the back were the letters to Vincent Walsh. It was his insurance policy now. If there were no more answers to find, Stefan had his weapon, and he would use it.
He was tired of thinking as he followed the familiar wall of Trinity College along Nassau Street, but the back bedroom on the top floor of Annie O’Neill’s Private Hotel in Westland Row wasn’t anything to hurry back to. The trains would have stopped now, but by five in the morning they’d be rattling over the bridge again and shaking the windows. It was cheap and Annie knew the Gardai. Her husband had been in the Dublin Metropolitan Police when he disappeared in 1921. She always said he’d been shot by Michael Collins personally, which was no small honour, but everyone knew he’d left her for a woman who had a butcher’s in Clonmel. There were always bottles in the sideboard in the dining room at Annie’s and if you wanted to sit up all night with one of them you paid her what you thought you’d drunk, and if you couldn’t remember she wouldn’t overcharge you. The sheets weren’t as clean as you’d like but at least they got washed now and again, and because she was used to guards staying when they were up from the country, she didn’t care what time of the day or night you came and went. If you wanted rashers at five o’clock in the morning you’d find her in the kitchen cooking them. She said she could never sleep once the trains started up. When she was younger you could get more than rashers if you had a problem sleeping. Stefan smiled. At least Annie made him laugh. And one drink before he went to bed wasn’t such a bad idea after all that tea.
In Lincoln Place there was a terrace of empty buildings. There were boarded-up shop fronts below and rows of black, broken windows above. The previous year one of the buildings had collapsed. There were piles of rubble where demolition had started and abruptly stopped, and on either side of the gap scaffolding held up the walls of adjacent buildings. A corrugated iron fence had shut off the collapsed building at first but the steel sheets had been robbed and the rubble and broken walls were open to the street. The man had followed Stefan Gillespie back to Annie O’Neill’s earlier. He had followed him again that evening and waited, first outside Neary’s and then in Grafton Street, never staying still for long, never being in one place too many times, always at a good distance. And when Stefan was clearly heading back to Westland Row he didn’t follow him at all. He made his own way straight to Lincoln Place and waited. All that mattered was that there was no one there to see him. And it was late enough now. It was quiet. It would be all right.
He came at Stefan from behind, out of the darkness of the rubble of the ruined building. One arm was round Stefan’s head, pulling his neck back, stopping his breath. The other was round his chest, pinning his arms to his sides. He was being dragged into the darkness, over the piles of bricks and broken glass and roof tiles and rubbish. It was so sudden and so unexpected that it took only seconds before he was behind half walls and heaped debris, unable to breathe, unable to make any sound except the choking in his throat. He was trying to kick, but the man was very strong. And as he was pulled back, further and further from the street, the man’s elbow closed tighter on his neck. His lungs were bursting. Then the grip loosened. The man spun him round and pushed him against a wall. He held him with one hand and punched him in the stomach with the other, again and again.
Stefan dropped to the ground. He tried to move but he couldn’t. He looked up. The man was standing over him. He couldn’t see properly. It wasn’t just the darkness. He had been almost unconscious. Now he began to make out the shape looming above him. Then it was clearer, even in the dim light. It was Detective Garda Sean Og Moran, Jimmy Lynch’s errand boy. He was holding a pistol in his hand. Stefan struggled to get up. Moran kicked him back. Then he knelt down. One knee was on Stefan’s chest. One hand pinned his neck again. The other hand held the gun. Stefan knew what it was: the captive bolt pistol. He was going to disappear too. Maybe he’d lie in a shallow grave in the mountains, just like Vincent Walsh and Susan Field. Tom would never even know what had happened to him. It was the image of Tom that filled his head. He tensed his hands. They were the only part of his body that had any strength left. And they were free. His fingers were touching something hard and cold close by. It was a piece of lead pipe.
As the big man cocked the pistol and bent closer Stefan swung his arm up, finding every bit of strength he had left. The lead hit Moran on the side of the head. He cried out and fell sideways. There was silence for a moment. Stefan knew that moment might be all he had. His blood was flowing; he was breathing deeply. He pulled himself up, leaning against the wall. Sean Og was pushing himself up too, still dazed. He was still holding the gun, but it was no use to him at a distance. Stefan stepped forward, steadier now. He swung the pipe again, holding it with both hands now, driving it into the detective’s ribs. Moran fell again. The gun dropped. He was in pain, agonising pain. But he was still trying to lift himself. Stefan swung the pipe against the back of his head. Sean Og collapsed for the third time. And he didn’t try to get up. For a few seconds Stefan stood over him with the pipe. He wanted to keep hitting him. He wanted to kill him. There was a little light now. The cloud was clearing. As he looked down he saw the pistol glinting in a puddle of oily water. He picked it up. Then he climbed over the piles of bricks and rubble and walked back into Lincoln Place.
Stefan winced with pain as the Mother Superior of the Convent of the Good Shepherd dabbed iodine on to his chest and back. It was the next morning and he sat shirtless in Mother Eustacia’s office. He hadn’t asked for her help, but the blood still seeping from the wounds inflicted on him by Detective Garda Moran was spotting his shirt. She looked at the bruising on his throat and neck. She drew her own conclusions, but said nothing. It would be an exaggeration to say she was pleased to see Stefan; she remembered his last visit and she remembered the dark- haired woman he’d come to collect.
‘You shouldn’t have left this.’
‘It looks worse than it is.’
‘I’d say it’s worse than it looks.’
She walked to a cupboard and put the bottle away. As he dressed himself she sat behind her desk and put her clasped hands on the table. The good-shepherding was over. She looked at him with an air of cautious disapproval. ‘I need to ask you some questions, Reverend Mother.’
‘So I understand.’
‘It’s about a woman who was brought here.’
‘A lot of women come here.’
‘It was last year. The twenty-sixth of July. She was brought here quite late that night, in a car, by two men. One of them was a guard.’ She was not going to be communicative, that was obvious enough; to say the other one was a priest wouldn’t help. She might know about that or she might not know, but it was Garda Sean Og Moran he needed to find out about now.
‘I think you know that’s not unusual.’
‘He wouldn’t have been in uniform.’
She said nothing.
‘It was an abortion. Something went wrong. They couldn’t stop her bleeding. She should have gone to a proper hospital, but the men came here with her.’
‘These things happen. It wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘I think you saw her.’
‘If I did I would have told them to take her straight to the Coombe.’
‘That’s what you did.’
‘Then there don’t seem to be any more questions, Sergeant.’
