Betrayal at Lisson Grove

wide.

Stoker came in, holding a bundle of papers in a large envelope, half hidden under his jacket. His hair was damp from the slight drizzle outside, as if he had walked some distance. Narraway hoped he had, and taken more than one cab, to make following or tracing him difficult.

‘What are you doing here, Stoker?’ he said quietly, for the first time this evening drawing the curtains closed. It had not mattered before, and he liked the presence of the garden at twilight, the birds, the fading of the sky, the occasional movement of leaves.

‘Brought some papers that might be useful, sir,’ Stoker replied. His voice and his eyes were perfectly steady, but there was a tension in his body, in the way he held his hands, that betrayed to Narraway that he knew perfectly well the risk he was taking.

Narraway took the papers from him and glanced down at them, riffling through the pages swiftly to see what they were. Then he felt the breath tighten in his chest, and his own fingers clumsy. They referred to an old case in Ireland, twenty years ago. The memory of it was powerful, for many reasons, and he was surprised how very sharply it returned.

It was as if he had last seen the people only a few days ago. He could remember the smell of the peat fire in the room where he and Kate had talked long into the night about the planned uprising. He could almost bring back the words he had used to persuade her it could only fail, and bring more death and more bitterness with it.

He could bring back with exactness that still hurt the look in her eyes, the lamplight on her skin, the sound of her voice when she spoke his name — and the guilt.

Even with his eyes open, in his mind he could see Cormac O’Neil’s fury, and then his grief. He understood it. They all had reason to hate Narraway. But for all its vividness, it had been twenty years ago.

He looked up at Stoker. ‘Why these?’ he asked. ‘This case is old, it’s finished.’

‘The Irish troubles are never finished,’ Stoker said simply.

‘Our more urgent problem is here now,’ Narraway replied. ‘And possibly in Europe.’

‘Socialists?’ Stoker said drily. ‘They’re always grumbling on.’

‘It’s a lot more than that,’ Narraway told him. ‘They’re fanatic. It’s the new religion, with all the fire and evangelism of a holy cause. And just like Christianity in its infancy, it has its apostles and its dogma — and its splinter groups, quarrels over what is the true faith.’

Stoker looked puzzled, as if this were all true but irrelevant.

‘The point is. .’ Narraway said sharply, ‘. . they each consider the others to be heretics. They fight each other as much as they fight anyone else.’

‘Thank God,’ Stoker said with feeling.

‘So when we see disciples of different factions meeting each other in secret, working together, then we know that it is something damned big that has healed the rifts, temporarily.’ Narraway heard the edge in his own voice, and saw the sudden understanding in Stoker’s eyes.

Stoker let out his breath slowly.

‘How close are we to knowing what they’re planning, sir?’

‘I don’t know,’ Narraway admitted. ‘It all rests on Pitt now.’

‘And you,’ Stoker said softly. ‘We’ve got to sort this money thing out, sir, and get you back.’

Narraway drew in his breath to answer, and felt a sudden wave of conviction so profound — a helplessness, a loss, an awareness of fear — that no words were adequate.

Stoker held out the papers he had brought. ‘We can’t afford to wait,’ he said urgently. ‘I looked through everything I could that had to do with informants, money and Ireland, trying to work out who’s behind this. This case seemed the most likely. Also I’m pretty sure someone else has had this out lately.’

‘Why?’

‘Just the way it was put back,’ Stoker answered.

‘Untidy?’

‘No, the opposite. Very neat indeed.’

Now Narraway was afraid for Stoker. He would lose his job for this; in fact, if he were caught, he could even be charged with treason himself. All sorts of possibilities raced through his head, including that of a deliberate trap. Even if it were, he wanted to read the pages, but not with Stoker present. If this were the act of personal loyalty it seemed, or even loyalty to the truth, he did not want Stoker to take such a risk. It would be better for both of them for him not to be caught.

‘Where did you get them?’ he asked.

Stoker looked at him with a very slight smile. ‘Better you don’t know, sir.’

Narraway smiled back. ‘Then I can’t tell,’ he agreed wryly.

Stoker nodded. ‘That too, sir,’

There was something about Stoker calling him ‘sir’ that was stupidly pleasing, as if he were still who he had been this morning. Did he value the respect so much? How pathetic!

He swallowed hard and drew in his breath. ‘Leave them with me. Go home, where everyone expects you to be. Come back for them when it’s safe.’

‘Sorry, sir, but they have to be back by dawn,’ Stoker replied. ‘In fact, the sooner the better.’

‘It will take me all night to read these and make my own notes,’ Narraway argued, but he knew as he said it that Stoker was right. To have them absent from Lisson Grove even for one day was too dangerous. Then they could never be returned. Anyone with two wits to rub together would look to Narraway for them, and then to whoever had brought them to him. He had no right to jeopardise Stoker’s life with such stupidity. It was poor thanks for his loyalty, if that was what it was. Perhaps it wasn’t — he might have his own entirely different reasons — but Narraway clung to the thought that it was loyalty. He needed it to be that, and a belief in the truth.

‘I’ll have them read before dawn,’ he promised. ‘Three o’clock. You can return then and I’ll give them to you. You can be at the Grove before light, and away again. Or you can go and sleep in my spare room, if you prefer. It would be wiser. No chance then of being caught in the street.’

Stoker did not move.

‘I’ll stay here, sir. I’m pretty good at not being seen, but no risk at all is better. Wouldn’t do if I couldn’t get back.’

Narraway nodded. So Stoker understood the risk he was taking. Perhaps it was as well. Never underestimate the enemy. He himself was only just beginning to taste the power of this one.

‘Up the stairs, across the landing to the left,’ he said aloud. ‘Help yourself to anything you need.’

Stoker thanked him and left, closing the door softly.

Narraway turned up the gas a little more brightly, then sat down in the big armchair by the fireplace and began to read.

The first few pages were about the Mulhare case: the fact that a large sum of money had been promised Mulhare if he co-operated. It was paid not as reward so much as a means for him to leave Ireland and go, not as might be expected, to America, but to Southern France, a less likely place for his enemies to seek him.

Mulhare had not received the money, according to Austwick. Instead he had remained in Ireland, and been killed. Narraway still did not know exactly what had gone wrong. He had paid the money out. At least he had completed all the paperwork to have it paid, and had checked that it had gone. Then, it now seemed, inexplicably, it had reappeared. Someone had evidently intervened so that the end result had been the exact opposite from what Narraway had instructed, and Mulhare had been murdered in the very way he’d feared.

The papers also referred to a twenty-year-old case that he would like to have forgotten. It was at a time when the passion and the violence were even higher than usual.

Charles Stewart Parnell had just been elected to Parliament. He was a man of fire and eloquence, a highly active member in the council of the Irish Home Rule League, and everything in his life was dedicated to that cause. There was a sudden resurgence of hope that Ireland might at last throw off the yoke of domination and govern itself again. The horrors of the great potato famine could be put behind them. Freedom beckoned.

Of course, 1875 was before Narraway had become head of Special Branch. He was simply an agent in the field at that time, in his mid-thirties; wiry, strong, quick-thinking and with a considerable charm. With his black hair and almost black eyes, his dry wit, he could easily have passed for an Irishman himself. When that assumption was made, as it was, he did not deny it.