‘Where are they?’ demanded the man.
He didn’t see the bottle coming either, as Vincent summoned every ounce of fear and force and love in his body and pushed the splintered glass into the Blueshirt’s face. As the man cried out in pain, Vincent was already through the door that opened straight on to the stairs. The other Blueshirts, racing from behind the bar they were pillaging, were too late to stop the bolt on the inside of the staircase door shooting home. The older man was screaming now; he was momentarily blinded by the blood pouring down his face. The others wrenched at the door. It wouldn’t take long to break through it. It was just about as rotten and rickety as everything else in Carolan’s Bar.
Vincent Walsh was already at the top of the first flight of stairs. He didn’t stop. He carried on running up the narrow, twisting staircase that led to the top of the house. He pushed open the door to the tiny room that was his home. An iron-framed bed, a lopsided chest of drawers with a drawer missing, a hat stand with a few clothes, a wash basin and a jug, a paraffin stove, a pile of second-hand books. There was no lock on the door but he slammed it shut behind him and pushed the chest of drawers a few feet across the room against it. He turned to the bed and reached under the mattress. He pulled out a small bundle of letters, four blue envelopes.
He looked at the letters for a moment, unsure what to do, knowing he only had seconds to decide. He pushed them into his pocket. Then he climbed on to the bed. In the sloping roof above it was a small, square window. He pushed it open and pulled himself through, out on to the roof.
Thick cloud hung over the city and there was a steady drizzle now. The slates were wet underfoot; many of them were loose. But Carolan’s Bar was tucked tightly into the side of a more substantial Georgian building. As Vincent scrambled and slid down the roof, his fall was broken by the parapet wall next door. He climbed over it, into the lead valley on the other side. He had been here before. He had lain in that wide valley on hot summer nights sometimes, when his room was too stifling to let him sleep. He heard the angry, vengeful Blueshirts as they burst into the room above, but in the seconds before one of them appeared at the window, Vincent had run along the lead valley to the back of the Georgian house. He had disappeared.
*
It was raining heavily now. It had been for several hours. The city was silent. The day’s celebrations had gone on long into the night and they had faded away, finally, with a reluctance that wasn’t hard to understand. Tomorrow ordinary life would return. And the rain itself seemed to carry that message. Vincent Walsh was soaked to the skin. The cuts that covered his body had long since stopped bleeding and the bruises could have been worse. There were plenty of times they had been worse. But pain and fear didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had saved the letters. And in saving them he had saved the man he loved. Even if he never saw him again, even if the priest never knew about it, Vincent believed he had done something that made him worthy of the love he felt. This was the romantic notion that had grown in his head as he walked the streets of Dublin, pushing out the real world again, as it had been pushed out twenty-four hours before, walking along the Quays to the Park. Perhaps it was all his head could find to keep the truth out of his heart. He would have to leave Dublin, for a while at least, but he could come back when things had quietened down. There would always be a place to stay with Billy. He knew that. It didn’t matter. One day, one day he would meet the priest again. One day he would be able to tell him everything.
There was almost a spring in Vincent’s step as he turned the corner into the street that led through Smithfield Market to Red Cow Lane and Carolan’s. He was still wary, but it was four hours since he’d scrambled down the pub roof and made his escape. There’d be no one there now, except for the publican. He was sure they wouldn’t have hurt Billy; it was him they wanted. But he wasn’t as sure as he’d like to be. He walked more quickly. Then, as he stepped out across the echoing emptiness of Smithfield, he stopped. There was a car ahead. He recognised it immediately. Finally he knew that everything that had happened since he had set off to walk through the night to the Phoenix Park had been right. The faith he had found had been real. It was the priest’s car. He had come after all, after everything. Hadn’t there been the great procession in O’Connell Street that evening? A grand reception at the Mansion House? He had come when he could. Vincent didn’t move. He was smiling, smiling like an idiot. The car headlights blazed into his eyes. The engine started up. He was still smiling as he walked forward again. The car moved forward too, picking up speed. A puzzled frown was all that Vincent Walsh had time for as it came towards him, faster, louder. There wasn’t even time for fear before it hit him.
The rain was much heavier now. He could feel it on his face. The pain that had blasted through his whole body as the car smashed into him was there, somewhere, but it was a long way away. It was a pain in a dream that didn’t quite seem to belong to him. It was the rain on his cheek that he could feel most, running down to his lips, into his mouth. He didn’t know that his own tears were there too, mixing with the rain. He didn’t hear the car door open. He didn’t hear the footsteps coming towards him across the cobbles. His eyes opened for only a second, level with the pool of water his face was lying in. No moon shone through the heavy clouds, but inches from his eyes the water shimmered in the headlamps of the car. He registered the golden ripples spreading over that oily, muddy puddle. He felt he was struggling to wake from a deep sleep and couldn’t. All he could see was light, water and light. He didn’t even register the figure that was crouching down beside him now, cutting off that golden light. He would never register anything again.
2. Merrion Square
Dublin, December 1934
The woman was obviously preoccupied. As she stepped off the pavement to cross from Kildare Street to the Shelbourne Hotel a horn blasted at her. She stepped back abruptly. A taxi, turning in from Stephen’s Green at speed, swept past without slowing. A string of abusive words cannoned back at her in the broadest of Dublin accents. She smiled, pausing to catch her breath. Even those insults carried the flavour of a Dublin she had missed far more than she was ready to admit. She looked down Kildare Street and back to the Green. She crossed and walked on past the Shelbourne, her head up now, determination in her eyes. She was doing what she had to do. It wasn’t easy, but she wasn’t supposed to be afraid of things that weren’t easy. She wasn’t supposed to be afraid of anything. She stopped for a moment, by the entrance to the hotel, looking up. A man was leaning out of an upstairs window, where a flagpole carrying the Irish tricolour, green, white and orange, extended over the pavement. There was a second pole beside it and the man was unfurling another flag. She knew the colours even before it dropped down beside the tricolour; red, white and black, and at the centre the swastika. She glanced round, expecting other people to be surprised, but no one else had noticed. She walked on quickly. She had other things to do.
The woman was in her early twenties. She was tall. Her hair was almost black, flecked in places with red. There was a warmth about her dark skin that could almost be felt, as if it had known a fiercer sun than ever shone in Ireland, even on the best of summer days. It was a sun that certainly didn’t shine on grey and soft December days like this one.
The purpose in her step was firm and unwavering as she walked along Merrion Row. She moved to avoid a crowd of winter-pale faces, bursting noisily out from a pub. She caught the breath of beer. It was another memory, almost comforting, but she wasn’t here for comfort. She turned into Upper Merrion Street. It was quieter. The flat fronts of Georgian houses gave way to the pillared buildings of government at Leinster House. She saw the trees that marked out Merrion Square. What preoccupied her was the tall terraced house at number twenty-five, with the closed shutters and the green paint peeling from the door, and the big room at the end of the long unlit corridor where the man who smiled too much did his work. Briefly her pace slowed, but only briefly. There was no real fear in her about what she had to do. The fear was about the darkness that might lie on the other side of it.
‘She’s back, your dark-eyed acushla.’
It was the fat policeman who spoke, squeezed uncomfortably into the driver’s seat of a black Austin 10, exhaling smoke