FOURTEEN

When he woke and saw that it was light beyond the small, high, barred window of his cell, Swan felt faintly surprised he had slept so soundly. He should by rights have tossed and turned on the thin palliasse that was all he had been supplied with in the way of bedding. Certainly there was plenty for him to worry about. So far, no one had laid a hand on him, but Sergeant MacSweeney was clearly itching to try fists instead of mere threats of violence to extract the information they believed Swan possessed.

He would have revealed the true nature of Cardale’s interest in Quilligan if he had thought it would do him any good. But there was no persuading MacSweeney or his impassive superior, Inspector Moynihan, that he was anything other than some kind of intermediary between German military intelligence and the IRA. His interrogation had lasted many hours, though exactly how many he could not have said. Nor could he recall any details of the interrogation beyond a repetitious exchange of accusation and denial. He suspected the fact that he was British had won him a few reluctant favours, but his pleas for them to ask Cardale to corroborate his story had fallen on deaf ears. And he was far from confident that the warder at the Curragh who had sat in on his visit to Quilligan would support his account of their discussion. All in all, his situation was grim and likely to become grimmer yet. But beyond cursing his folly and misfortune, there did not seem to be anything he could do about it.

An exchange he had had with Moynihan at some late stage in his questioning lingered sourly in Swan’s memory. ‘Are you sure this act you quoted applies to foreigners, Inspector?’ he had asked.

‘Oh yes, Mr Swan, I’m sure,’ Moynihan has replied. ‘While the emergency lasts, by which I mean the war, we can do pretty much what we like. As we will, with you, tomorrow.’

Swan doubted the literal truth of that. At some point, they would realize he was not what they thought and let him go. The problem was how many teeth he had to lose in the process, how many ribs he had to have broken. They had let him sleep on the knowledge that his interrogation, when it resumed, would take a harsher turn. He looked at the red bite marks on his arms that suggested he had shared his bed with at least one flea and pondered the likelihood that he would leave Dublin Castle with much worse wounds to remember it by.

His watch having been taken from him, he had only the haziest idea of what time it was. Eventually, a constable delivered his breakfast: stale bread and stewed tea. Swan asked him the time and was rewarded with an unhelpful answer the constable appeared to consider the height of wit. ‘Don’t worry about it, sir. We’ll organize all your appointments for the day.’

Swan fell to wondering how Moynihan and MacSweeney would be breakfasting, while he sat on his bed, soaking the bread in the tea until it was soft enough to chew. Moynihan he imagined in some well-to-do house in the suburbs, adoring wife and rosy-cheeked children gathered round him at the table while he sipped fresh coffee, smoked a cigarette and checked the letters page in the Irish Times for expressions of dissident sentiment. MacSweeney, by contrast, he saw in a cramped tenement, forking down a fry-up prepared by a slattern to whom he might or might not be married.

At length, the witty constable returned with a colleague. They escorted Swan down the long, dimly lit corridor that led back to the room where he had been questioned the night before. He braced himself as best he could for the rigours of what lay ahead.

He was still doing so when they walked straight past the room and headed upstairs. Swan glimpsed sunlit cobbles in the courtyard beyond unbarred windows. They reached an office noisily full of other constables, where a uniformed sergeant presented him with a tray bearing his confiscated belongings and asked him to sign a receipt for them.

‘What’s going on?’ Swan belatedly asked.

‘You’re free to go, sir,’ the sergeant replied. ‘Have you got everything you came with?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘Then we needn’t detain you a moment longer.’

‘Where’s Moynihan? And MacSweeney?’

‘The comings and goings of Special Branch aren’t vouchsafed to the likes of me, sir. Do you want to leave a message for them?’

Swan made no reply as he loaded his pockets. The turn of events had left him lost for words.

‘I thought not,’ said the sergeant.

Swan walked out into the courtyard and sniffed the sweet morning air. Sheer incredulity allowed little room for relief. He was guided by an instinct to quit the Castle before they changed their minds about releasing him. Tie looped unfastened around his neck, shoelaces bunched in his hand, he headed for the gate he had been driven in through the previous afternoon.

As Swan strode across the yard, a man emerged from the deep shadow cast by the battlemented tower next to the Castle chapel and called out: ‘Hold up.’ Swan stopped and turned to look at him. He was short and dapperly dressed, with a distinctive cock-of-the-walk strut to him that stirred a memory.

The memory became disbelieving recognition when the man took off his hat to show his face – smooth-cheeked and rounded beneath slicked dark hair, a sardonic smile dancing around the lips.

‘Linley? Miles Linley?’

‘The very same.’ They advanced to meet each other. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘You’re a sight for sore eyes and no mistake,’ said Swan as they shook hands. ‘I can hardly believe it.’

‘Nor me. A real turn-up for the books, eh, Cygnet?’

Cygnet was a nickname Linley had conferred on Swan at Ardingly, where Swan had fagged for the debonair young man Miles Bosworth Linley already was at seventeen and seemed still to be eighteen years later. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Coming to your rescue. I’m with the British Legation. Anglo-Irish trade links are supposed to be my province, but when Special Branch contacted us this morning for info on a suspicious globe-trotting Brit who’d been out to the Curragh to visit one of the IRA hard men they have penned there, and his name happened to be the same as my uniquely monikered fag of times gone by, Eldritch Swan, I naturally took an interest. Luckily for you.’ Linley grinned. ‘Consider this an overdue reward for cleaning my rugger boots so assiduously all those years ago.’

‘How did you persuade them to let me go?’

‘By vouching for you, you clot. By assuring Moynihan’s boss, who enjoys a regular round of golf with my boss, that your explanation for visiting Quilligan, quixotically implausible as it may have seemed, was entirely consonant with your character and that a less likely German spy than you would be hard to find. Friends in high places, Cygnet. They’re invaluable, even when you don’t know you’ve got them.’

‘Good Lord, Linley, I can’t thank you enough.’ Swan shook the other man’s hand a second time to make his point. ‘I thought things were going to take an ugly turn today, let me tell you.’

‘Rough stuff, you mean? I expect they held off until they could establish what we knew about you. Which was nothing, of course. Except that you’re not working for the Germans.’ Linley’s face took on a look of mock solemnity. ‘You aren’t, are you?’ Before Swan could reply, he went on: ‘Just joking. You look pretty bloody awful, I have to say. I take it the accommodation here is seriously sub-par. Did you book into a hotel before all this blew up?’

‘The Shelbourne.’

‘Excellent choice. And it’s only a short walk from here. What say you soak in the bath there and spruce yourself up, then meet me for lunch? Jammet’s, in Nassau Street, at one. A little cuisine française at the legation’s expense to help you forget your disagreeable tangle with the forces of law and disorder. We can chat about old times and you can tell me what you’re really up to in Dublin.’

Linley was right: it was only a short walk through the shopping streets of central Dublin to the Shelbourne Hotel. But geography was no measure of transition in this case. From the forbidding purlieus of the Castle, Swan passed at once into a different realm. The shop windows of Grafton Street were filled with all the luxuries he had learnt to forgo in London. No barrage balloons floated overhead. And St Stephen’s Green, which the hotel overlooked, was a riot of colourful flower-beds: no vegetable plots despoiled the parks of Dublin. He was in a place apart, where there might be an emergency, but there was still no war.

The comforts of the Shelbourne rapidly restored his equilibrium. He had always been able to rely on his own resilience. It was, he knew from long experience, one of his more abiding characteristics. Two hours after his hangdog arrival, he exited into the warm lunchtime air at a self-confident amble, in a clean shirt and pressed suit, bathed, buffed and shaved, revived and ready to face the world.

Linley was already waiting for him at a prime window table when Swan reached Jammet’s. A bottle of champagne was on ice to celebrate their reunion. There had been many worse seniors to fag for at Ardingly than Miles Linley, several out-and-out sadists among them. Thus Swan was not just enormously grateful for being rescued from the clutches of Special Branch, he was also delighted to have discovered an Englishman in Dublin he could happily spend a few evenings (not to mention lunchtimes) with during his stay in the city.

The champagne and starters were seen off during an exchange of summarized autobiographies covering their adult years. There were Oxford experiences to compare, though Swan was careful to say nothing about how his university career had ended. After that, their life stories diverged. The Diplomatic Service seemed, when Swan came to think about it, an obvious avenue for Linley to follow, with his natural charm, easy manner, cosmopolitan air and undertow of cynicism. Swan did his best to make his own tale of wandering from one unorthodox but well-paid job to another sound like the pursuit of a true vocation, though whether Linley was convinced was an open question.

‘Cardale’s a generous employer,’ Swan explained as their roast mallard main courses arrived and a toothsome Saint-Émilion was opened. ‘So, I didn’t quibble when he asked me to make overtures to Quilligan on his behalf. An all-expenses trip to Dublin sounded like a welcome break from London, to be honest; more of a holiday than anything else.’

‘A lot of people think that,’ said Linley as he nodded to the sommelier in approval of the wine. ‘And with good reason. Éire’s must be the only tourist association in Europe that’s still in business. We get a good few journalists over from Britain to research pieces condemning the Irish for staying neutral, but I notice they never fail to fill their boots while they’re here. The GNR’s had to lay on extra trains from Belfast to cope with the shoppers. Make sure you take a few pairs of silk stockings back with you, by the way. They’ll win you a lot of favours with the ladies. I suppose I should be glad to be here myself.’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Not exactly. It’s unreal, isn’t it? A make-believe refuge from the war. It’ll come to their doorsteps soon enough if we can’t hold Herr Hitler at bay for them. Meanwhile, we dips have to watch our step. And we advise visitors from the mainland to do the same. I have to say, Cygnet, it was naïve of you to think you could just stroll into the Curragh for a chinwag with Quilligan without attracting some unwelcome attention. De Valéra’s scared stiff the IRA will try to attack the North using weapons and expertise supplied by Germany. It’s a fair bet that’s why their chief of staff has gone to Berlin. So, Dev has to do everything he can to keep the lid on them. Hence internment for the duration. And hence Special Branch keeping a careful eye on any contact they have with the outside world.’

‘But you’ve been able to persuade them my visit was entirely innocent?’

‘I’ve been able to persuade them to give you the benefit of the doubt. But Moynihan won’t have liked being told to release you. He’ll probably be monitoring your movements from now on. I certainly wouldn’t recommend calling in at the German Legation for tea and cakes.’

‘It’s not at the top of my list.’

‘Glad to hear it. What is?’

‘Well, I have to see Quilligan’s brother. He’s a solicitor. I need him to agree that the document Cardale’s solicitor drew up is legally watertight. After that, it’s just a question of waiting for Quilligan to sign himself out of the Curragh.’

‘Then you take him back to London?’

‘Post-haste.’

‘Excellent. Better still, it’s a perfect match with the argument in your favour I put to Superintendent Hegarty. An IRA member willing to give up the struggle, especially one with Quilligan’s reputation, is a moral victory for the government. It might encourage others to follow his example. They should actually welcome your intervention.’

‘What is his reputation?’

‘As bloodthirsty as most of his kind. But he’s a survivor of the Easter Rising, which gives him the status of a folk hero. And they tell me he’s a gifted artist into the bargain. He’s supposed to have sacrificed a promising career with palette and brush in England to resume the quest for Irish unity. I take it the death of Cardale’s daughter might have had something to do with that decision?’

‘You take it correctly.’

‘Thought as much.’ Linley paused to savour a succulent forkful of mallard.

‘The Irish authorities will be pleased to see the back of Desmond Quilligan. You’ll be doing them a favour.’

‘Not as big as the one you’ve done me.’

‘Not at all. Easing pressure points in Anglo-Irish relations is my job. But … one good turn does deserve another, doesn’t it?’

‘Absolutely. If there’s anything I can do …’

‘There might be, Cygnet, yes. There very well might be.’ Linley took a sip of wine and beamed at Swan. ‘I’ll let you know.’