Yard, but I did, so the question is moot.”
“Dunleavy was never able to convince you he was the faction leader, was he?”
Barker lit his pipe, in no hurry to answer, running the lit vesta around the bowl before blowing it out. “No,” he stated. “Alfred Dunleavy was too weak. He is undisciplined, lazy, melancholy, and a drunkard. He had grandiose schemes and a complaint against the world for not making him a great leader. He could not have thought up or enacted the brilliant scheme of employing a team of five men using timed assaults to bring down London.”
“So, whom did you suspect?”
“Everyone, of course. A brilliant leader would be capable of playacting. Now, confess, lad, even when you found O’Muircheartaigh’s letters, I’ll wager you didn’t once suspect Miss O’Casey of being the leader, did you?”
I had to admit it, but I wasn’t going to say it was because she had turned my head. “No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Yes, well. My second list of suspects, if you considered the faction leaders as the first, were: the O’Caseys, Garrity, McKeller, Yeats, the Bannon brothers, and Mr. O’Muircheartaigh. Oh, and Dunleavy, since there was a small chance he was more clever than I thought he was. That was my list of suspects, and I merely had to winnow it down.”
“Yes,” I added, “while concealing who you were, making their bombs, and preparing a plan to capture them when they reached London.”
Barker gave a cough, his answer to a chuckle. “I’ve had a little experience doing this, lad. Where was I?”
“The list of suspects.”
“Correct. I crossed McKeller off early. It’s possible he was more than he claimed, but he seemed so genuine, I believed him. He was a big, violent man, without much of a past or a future. By the way, I must compliment you on defeating him. He was a very dangerous opponent. Did you really intend to put up that weak guard?”
“Yes, sir. I remembered what you said about putting everything into a final effort. It was the only way I could win.”
“You improve, Thomas.”
“Thank you, sir,” I murmured. It was rare praise, indeed.
“The Bannons I dismissed because they were twins. I know it was possible for one of them to be the leader, but they were very self-involved, as twins sometimes are. Also, they seemed to be doing mere yeoman service. They had no internal fire.”
“O’Casey,” I said. “Now, he was the logical choice. Trinity educated and obviously talented. He’s good- looking, intelligent, not to mention a trained fighter. What was it about him that didn’t make you suspect him as the secret leader?”
“He didn’t rise to the bait.”
“Bait?” I asked. “What bait?”
“You, lad,” he said, taking his pipe from his mouth. “I used you as bait. Surely you must have seen that. A young fellow like Thomas Penrith, armed with all the skills of van Rhyn, with decades to develop more. I thought if O’Casey or Dunleavy was the actual leader, they would have been astute enough to latch onto you early. You’ll note that Dunleavy barely spoke a word to you, and young Eamon O’Casey didn’t warm up to you until after the bomb demonstration. He was a little closer to you later, but not enough. I would have thought that someone wishing to attach a man of your skills to this cause would have forged a bond with you. He did not, but Maire O’Casey grew very interested in you.”
“What of that?” I asked. “She was a beautiful woman.”
“I will not say otherwise, but think of it. If she had the world at her feet, if she could have her pick of any man in England or Ireland, why would she choose a little Welsh bomb maker? That is not the decision of a beautiful young woman but the thinking of a leader trying to build a strong faction.”
“So you don’t think she genuinely cared for me.”
Just then, Harm trotted in the room. He came up to me, but when I reached for him, he avoided me, convinced, perhaps, that I was going to blubber in his fur again. He settled into Barker’s lap and fell asleep.
“Believe what you like,” my employer pronounced, scratching the dog’s fur absently. “But it was deucedly convenient. It was that more than anything that made me consider her as a possibility.”
“Before we get into that, what about Yeats and Garrity?”
“I’ll admit I thought hard about them both. An innocent student would be a good pose to assume, and Yeats did deliver messages to and from Dunleavy, but he was a callow youth. Garrity was not. Ah, I missed that sound.”
The sound to which he was referring was Harm’s snores. I had to admit, I’d grown accustomed to them. The dog ran to some sort of schedule every night. He began on the ground floor, arrived on my bed around midnight, then vacated it for Barker’s nest upstairs sometime in the wee hours. It never happened any other way for one very good reason: the Imperial Dog could climb stairs, but he could not go down them.
“Garrity,” I prompted.
“Yes, Garrity,” Barker went on. “It would not have been difficult for him to run the faction from Paris, with a puppet like Dunleavy in his hands. But he is already a respected member of the I.R.B. Were he ambitious enough to wish to run his own faction, he could have formed one himself among the Irish in Paris.”
“Surely you suspected Seamus O’Muircheartaigh,” I said.
“Of course I did,” Barker said. “When I get that man behind bars, I’ll feel I’ve accomplished some good for humanity. When I looked over those letters a little more closely, I saw that the final one was written last year, when O’Muircheartaigh was in Dublin. The last was very accusatory. It is possible they had not communicated until the Americans notified Dunleavy that the money would not make it in time. The money that sent you to Paris was likely a loan from him. Yesterday, one of Soho Vic’s boys spotted her but couldn’t get word to us of it until this morning. A careful reading of O’Muircheartaigh’s letters showed that his feelings were not reciprocated, but they parted amicably enough for her to appear at his door and receive aid at a moment’s notice.”
“Yes, but, hang it all, you make her sound so-so mercenary. This was a girl who cooked for her family, who was sentimental-”
“Sentimental about Ireland, lad.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said with a sigh. “I mean, I do believe it, but it’s rather hard. She was so sincere.”
“I did not doubt her sincerity,” Barker said, “not for the Irish cause, anyway. As for you, who can say? She is gone and cannot tell us either way. Perhaps she genuinely cared for you. For your sake, it would have been better that she didn’t, for I would have brought her to justice all the same. Now, come, it is time we left. I believe we need a barber’s attention before we visit the Home Office to report.”
29
I winced as the first leech bit into the tender skin under my eye. It is an eerie sensation, feeling the blood draining away. One would think in this age of science, with the latest developments in antiseptics and pharmacology, that there would be a better remedy for a black eye than the humble
“Would you like me to pull any teeth while you are here?” the barber asked solicitously.
“No, thank you.”
He reached into his apothecary jar again and attached another of the bloodsuckers to the skin under my other eye. The jar was pink and had the word “leeches” written on it in gold. Perhaps the beauty of the jar was an attempt to disguise the loathsome contents therein. While he set about doing the more mundane part of his work, I glanced over at my employer. He was smiling at my discomfort.
Barker was swathed in a sheet. The gray solution had been rinsed out of his hair and the stiff length pruned back to its more austere form, like one of the Guv’s Penjing trees. His beard was gone, and he was back to wearing his usual spectacles, round disks with a high bridge connecting them in the Chinese manner, with sidepieces of tortoiseshell.
