Irregulars Read online

  IRREGULARS

  IRREGULARS

  Kevin McCarthy

  IRREGULARS

  First published 2013

  by New Island

  2 Brookside

  Dundrum Road

  Dublin 14

  www.newisland.ie

  Copyright © Kevin McCarthy, 2013

  The author has asserted his moral rights.

  PRINT ISBN: 978-184840-227-0

  EPUB ISBN: 978-184840-228-7

  MOBI ISBN: 978-184840-229-4

  All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright

  law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be

  reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any

  form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written

  permission of the copyright owner.

  British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  New Island received financial assistance from

  The Arts Council (An Comhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland

  Times of unrest are always difficult for police and of course anyone who stands in the road of revolution is bound to get the wrong end of the stick. Contrary to what is thought generally, the Irish are a peaceable people, but when roused they can be ruthless.

  David Nelligan

  DMP man,

  IRA spy,

  National Army Director of Intelligence

  The Spy in the Castle

  He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.

  William Shakespeare

  King Lear

  Acknowledgements

  The author would like to thank the following: my agent, Jonathan Williams for his expert representation and editing; Eoin Purcell for his faith in the O’Keefe novels and his work on their behalf for both Mercier and New Island; Dr Justin Corfield for his editing, and all the staff at New Island for their tireless work and support; Emma Barnes for her once again wonderful cover design; my first reader and editor, my mother, Juliet McCarthy; John Dorney and Jim Herlihy for answering my many queries about the minutiae of life during the Civil War and the workings of the CID during the conflict; Colin McCarthy, Susan Dunne, Niall Hogan who generously read and offered comments on early drafts of the novel; my father, Geoffrey McCarthy, Breda Dunne, Geoffrey ‘Jefe’ McCarthy, Susannah and Jonathan Grimes, Mary McCarthy and Sergo Gabunya, Karen Fullenkamp and Gina McCarthy and all my friends and work colleagues who supported me during the writing of this book; most especially, the author would like to thank Regina, Áine and Eibhlin, without whom the writing of this novel would not have been possible.

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Regina

  OCTOBER 1922—DUBLIN

  Prologue

  Two boys enter Burton’s Hotel on Lower Abbey Street and pause in the lobby as their eyes adjust to the bright, electric light. The young woman behind the reception desk watches as they share a quick word; watches as they settle something between them before the taller of the two approaches the desk, his companion stepping to the side of the lobby’s entrance to wait.

  The young woman notes that the approaching boy has clear skin and large, dark eyes; brown hair that hangs over his forehead from under his cap and is tightly cut around his ears and collar; that he is wearing long trousers and a well-cut jacket, polished black boots. She reckons him to be fourteen, perhaps fifteen, years old. He wears no telegraph boy’s hat or badge and is too well-dressed for a messenger boy.

  Smiling, revealing even, white teeth, the boy says, ‘Mr Murphy from across the water, which room is he in?’

  ‘And why would you be needing to know that?’ the receptionist asks, smiling back at him not unkindly. A messenger boy after all, she thinks. Of a sort.

  The boy blushes and takes off his cap, tapping it nervously against his thigh. The woman is used to this. She has a similar effect on many young men, causing them to blush and stammer and stumble over their words. It is not an effect she intends. She does not see herself as beautiful; though she is aware that her appearance—her green eyes, and the mass of red hair tamed in a demure French knot—is one of the reasons she was chosen above others to man the reception desk at Burton’s Hotel.

  ‘I’ve … I need to see Mr Murphy. I’ve a message for him.’

  ‘Why don’t you give me the message? I’ll have it taken up.’ The young woman arranges the guest register on the mahogany counter, aligning it perfectly with a stack of the previous day’s newspapers and a booklet advertising train tours for the visitor to Ireland.

  The boy shakes his head and says, ‘No, I’ve to take it up meself … myself. It’s important. It’s …’ He searches for help from his friend but none is forthcoming and he brings his gaze back to the woman. This time there is an exaggerated, youthful severity to his face, a seriousness in the boy’s large, brown eyes that belies his age. ‘Can you give me Mr Murphy’s room number or have a porter call for him, Miss? He’d be cross with us both if he thinks I’ve been delayed.’ He pauses for effect. ‘And we can’t be having that, can we?’

  The woman nods at the veiled threat in the boy’s words.

  ‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘It’s room thirty-four. You can take the lift. I’ll get Michael to run it for you.’

  ‘It’s grand, Miss,’ the boy says, appearing relieved by her acquiescence, smiling, his face young again, innocent. ‘No need to bother your man. I’ll take the stairs, sure.’

  She watches as the boy turns away and crosses the lobby, checking the clock on the wall and her wrist-watch to be certain, and jots the time in a diary kept below the desk. When she hears the boy’s footsteps ascending the stairs, she steps into the small closet behind the reception desk that houses the hotel’s switchboard, closing the door behind her. First, she rings room thirty-four and speaks briefly with Mr Murphy from Southampton. Then she dials an outside line and consults with a man waiting in the Flowing Tide public house nearby.

  Moments later, a man enters the hotel. Without acknowledging the receptionist or the lad waiting by the front door, he takes a seat in one of the lobby’s armchairs and opens a newspaper.

  The receptionist knows that this man’s colleagues will soon be waiting—with a motor car, or perhaps on foot—in the darkened laneway that runs beside the hotel, for the boys to emerge.

  Huddled in the laneway, hands jammed in the pockets of ill-fitting and threadbare jackets, are not the reading man’s colleagues but two ragged, barefoot youths with caps pulled low on their foreheads.

  The older of the two boys, a shock of long, white-blond hair riding his collar, does not plan on being barefoot for much longer. He has the fish-knife after all, and not many fellas—especially not jumped-up, jam-eating youngfellas like the ones they had spotted on Suffolk Street and followed to the hotel—put up much fight once they glommed an eyeful of the knife. No, the boy thinks, even if the youngfellas take ages inside, they are worth the wait. Worth a bob or two and a shiny, fine brace of black boots to land the toes in, in the offing, them two young buckos, strutting the streets this late at night like peacocks in their lovely smart jackets and white shirts. Asking for it, they are, he thinks and then says aloud: ‘Fuckin’ asking for it, wha?’ His mate, smaller, younger, smiles and nods in the shadows beside him.

  When the messenger boy returns to the lobby, the receptionist notes in her diary that it is four minutes to midnight, writing the time as ‘23:56’ as she has been taught. She does not look up when he passes h
er post and is met by his waiting friend, nor does the man sitting across the lobby with the newspaper. She hears the front doors to the hotel open, feels a blast of cool evening air enter, bringing in with it the scent of coal smoke and diesel fumes, toasting hops and the low ebb of the Liffey.

  A moment later she hears the man’s newspaper crinkle and fold, hears the soft thap as he tosses it onto a side table and follows the boys out onto Lower Abbey Street.

  She lights a cigarette in the empty lobby—holding it low below the counter out of a habit of secrecy—and takes furtive drags in silence. Waiting, wondering if she will ever know what has happened—if anything happens—outside.

  1

  ‘Seán O’Keefe is on his fourth pint of stout in Slattery’s of Rathmines. Relishing the silence—curling cigarette smoke winding in the shebeen light of late afternoon—he is drinking the day away, as he has done most days in the five months since he demobbed from the besieged and now disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary. What he had begun thinking of as an extended holiday from the incessant strife and danger of life as a Peeler has turned slowly, surely, to this: a Player’s Navy Cut burning down in his fingers, a fairy mound of shredded betting slips in front of him on the bar, five or six pints in an afternoon and sometimes more of an evening. Not doing the dog on it, as the saying goes, but supping enough to damp down the nightmares that still come to him, even now, in his new life as a conscript in Dublin’s vast army of thrifty, jobless bachelors. It is an army marching on bacon sandwiches, tinned stew and beans heated on single-ring gas burners in damp digs and back bedrooms; an army barracking in pubs and betting shops; convalescing in the Carnegie library, weary foot-soldiers obliterating the days and hours alongside snuffling, time-killing comrades.

  Today, O’Keefe has had two winners—one a decent one, three bob at eight to one—and a fair place from Newmarket. He is up in pocket for his efforts, though it hardly matters to him if he wins or loses. He lifts the Sporting Life racing pages and wonders will he bother with another flutter.

  ‘Michelle’s Prize in the four-ten at Gowran Park,’ an older man at the bar says, three stools away and the only other customer in the pub since O’Keefe entered, not looking at O’Keefe but staring at his own racing sheet, eyeglasses resting on a bulb of burst capillaries. ‘I’ve been watching her—worth a look she is.’

  ‘The ground’s meant to be fierce hard going,’ O’Keefe says, to be polite, not looking at the man in turn, ‘but she’ll have weight against her.’

  The man beside him shrugs and pushes his spectacles up his nose.

  Davey, the young barman’s apprentice, stands over the day’s Freeman’s Journal opened out on the bar, his rag-wrapped hand idly polishing the inside of a pint glass. Sensing need—already proficient at the trade—he looks over, and O’Keefe nods for another pint, and as he does there is the unmistakable sound of gunfire from outside the pub. Four sharp cracks—pistol shots, O’Keefe knows from experience—and then a burst of what sounds like machine-gun fire. Couldn’t be, he thinks. No, it could be. It could be artillery next, the times that are in it. As he thinks this, a stray round punches high through the pub’s front window, carving the air above his head before shattering the nicotine-tinted mirror behind the bar. There is a moment of frozen silence before it is broken by a flurry of harried motion behind the counter, and O’Keefe watches young Davey wrench open the hatch to the keg cellar and leap below for cover.

  O’Keefe turns in his chair but does not rise. If it’s for you, it won’t go past you. He listens, tossing his cigarette end to the floor. Two single shots follow, and again silence. Then a woman’s high-pitched wailing, a whinnying horse and the urgent gurgle of male voices on the path outside the pub. The man on the stool beside him looks up from his newspaper, but not before circling something with a nub of pencil and jotting out several figures beside this.

  ‘Safe enough for a shuffle ’cross the way, would you say? Wouldn’t want to miss the off.’

  O’Keefe knocks gently on the bar with his knuckles. ‘You take your chances in this life.’

  ‘That you do,’ the man says, standing and draining the foamy dregs of his pint. ‘Life, love, horses.’ He smiles. ‘Bullets. All a game of chance, wha’?’

  Turning back to his pint, O’Keefe says, ‘You’re not wrong there, you’re not.’ He watches the man leave the pub, squinting against the momentary flare of raw daylight as the pub door swings open, and as he does, he thinks of his brother, Peter. A game of chance …. On the beaches of Turkey, bullets and luck. He had won and Peter had lost, and he had never felt like he’d won a thing since that day and the bloody days that followed. Guilt bucks inside him. Lucky boy, you, O’Keefe. He leans over the counter and looks down into the bar’s cellar. ‘Come up and pull my pint, Davey.’

  The young barman’s head appears in the hatch at floor level, red-faced with fear or shame or effort. On the smooth-worn boards around the hatch are shards of shattered mirror, a thousand tiny reflections of the end of an afternoon. ‘Is it over?’

  ‘It’s over,’ O’Keefe says.

  Climbing the steps to stand behind the bar, letting the cellar hatch clap shut behind him, the barman looks up at the spidery bullet hole in the window and at the mess of glass crunching under his feet. ‘Mr Slattery’ll dock me wages for that mirror.’

  ‘Only if the bullet was meant for you, Davey,’ O’Keefe says. ‘I’ll tell him you did your best to catch it before it hit the mirror.’

  ‘It’s no lark, Mr O’Keefe. Those fuckin’ … feckin’ … rebels! And the Free Stater jaysus bastards. A shower of bullies … all of them, both sides, God forgive me, but the English weren’t half as bad. We could have been killed.’

  ‘That’d stop Slattery docking your wages.’

  The barman ignores him and collects a sweeping brush and dustpan from the end of the bar. ‘What was it anyway? It’s not often there’s shooting around here. In town, fair enough, but Rathmines? Sure, who’s there to be shooting at? Surgeons and commercial travellers and bank managers, for the sake of holy God.’

  ‘There’s more than one who’d like a pop at his bank manager, mind,’ O’Keefe says.

  The young barman shakes his head and looks up from his sweeping. ‘Will you not go out and see what happened, Mr O’Keefe?’

  O’Keefe sighs. He has seen enough shooting in the past ten years to sate a lifetime’s curiosity as to its causes and effects. Yet even now, since leaving the police and settling to his quiet life of pints and ponies, he cannot escape it. Gunfire is as common a sound as the tolling of church bells in his city now, but O’Keefe has stopped caring why, or how, or what has happened.

  Once the bullets are not for him, he couldn’t give a tupenny fuck. Every bullet has its billet—another saying he remembers from one of his wars. The billet this time: the mirror behind the wall, or some poor sap outside. He is about to say this to young Davey but is suddenly ashamed of the sentiment. Once it’s not got my name on it …. There is something craven and cowardly in it. He searches for his reflection in the bar-room mirror and finds only the pocked and naked plaster.

  He slumps off his stool. ‘I’ll go out and see. You pull me that pint.’

  The young barman nods. ‘Mind yourself, Mr O’Keefe. They could still be out there.’

  ‘Life’s a game of chance, Davey, were you not listening?’

  On the footpath outside the pub, O’Keefe joins the usual crowd of onlookers that assembles at any accident as if to reassure itself of its continued good fortune relative to the hapless maimed or dying. ‘Look-sees’, he and his fellow constables in the RIC had called them.

  The look-sees have clustered this time around the fresh corpse of a fallen dray horse, still bound in its traces, attached to the coal wagon it had pulled in life. The beast’s legs are splayed unnaturally beneath it, its dead eyes wide and still behind blinkers, which have slipped in the tangled riggin
g of reins and bridle. A thickening pool of crimson soaks the road, grouting the gaps between the cobbles and the tram tracks.

  Horse carts, motor cars and a tram halted on the obstructed tracks are blocking traffic behind the scene of the violence, and O’Keefe has an instinctive desire to enter the scene and bring it to order. He resists the urge, searching the crowd for any attending Dublin Metropolitan Police. There are none in sight, and O’Keefe is not surprised. Unarmed, the DMP are known to be scarce when the shooting starts. The new Free State government has allowed the DMP a continued existence, unlike his own disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary, but has not granted them any power to prevent or investigate crimes committed as part of the civil war. The new government has its own ‘police’ for such matters.

  Several minutes have passed since the shooting, and O’Keefe’s eyes are drawn to the sacks of coal stacked on the back of the wagon and to the street boys and haggard men beginning to take an interest in it. The coalman is lucky, he thinks, that his horse has been shot in Rathmines. Any closer to the city centre and there wouldn’t be dust enough left on the coal wagon to raise a cough. He takes out a Player’s and lights it, watching the wagon driver kneeling beside the horse. It takes O’Keefe a moment to decipher what the driver is shouting.

  ‘Who will pay for this? Who will pay for me horse? Jaysus and all the fuckin’ holy saints, I’ve had this horse for nine year and now look at her! Jaysus wept, how’s a body to make a crust in this godforsaken pit of a place at all?’

  There are tears in the driver’s eyes, rage or genuine grief for the horse, and O’Keefe feels a flash of pity for the man.

  ‘Who indeed?’ a man’s voice next to him says, and O’Keefe turns to it.