Betrayal Read Free Page A

the rain, no hat, just getting drenched because … why because it would be better that way.
    A tall woman with dark reddish brown hair worn shoulder length, and greenish brown eyes, which were wide and searching, sad and distant but saw only the bayonets and the rain.
    Jimmy let go of her and stooped to duck his head and shoulders inside the front seat of the car. Mary waited. She wouldn’t run, wouldn’t lower herself to that. Not yet. Not now.
    He swept his hands and eyes over everything—looked under the seat, opened the glove compartment—rummaged about the side pockets, found nothing but the maps … Oh God, the maps.
    Now it was the ashtray. ‘I didn’t know you’d taken to using tobacco,’ he said, wondering why she was still hanging about.
    â€˜I don’t,’ she answered tensely.
    â€˜Then whose are these? That husband of yours swears by his pipe.’
    He dumped the ashes into a palm and closed his fist about the three cigarette butts that had been forgotten, she remembering them too late, remembering a lonely road in the South with the sound of the sea not far, some ruins, an old abbey, the wreck of a castle …
    â€˜I … I don’t know whose those are. You’ll have to ask my husband.’
    â€˜Inside, I think,’ he said, taking her by the elbow. ‘Sergeant!’
    â€˜Sir?’
    â€˜See that Mrs. Fraser’s bags are fetched and check the boot and spare tyre for contraband. Oh, and bring me those maps from the pocket of the right front door.’
    Trapped, that’s what she was. Trapped inside this bloody hut with the rain hammering on the tin roof and the water dripping off the hem and sleeves of her coat and from her nose and eyelashes. ‘Look, I can explain. Jimmy, I wasn’t doing anything I shouldn’t have been.’
    He unsnapped his rain cape and hung it up. Then he walked around behind the counter on which the sergeant would all too soon have one of the corporals place her bags. Jimmy was a strong man—fit in the body now that the wounds of the flesh had healed. Square-shouldered, the ramrod stance made him only a little taller than herself. He was clean-shaven, too, with dark brown eyes, a hard-cleaved nose, hard wide brow, bony cheeks and a belligerent chin. What more could one have expected, but the slicked down, dark brown hair that was parted on the left and cut too short?
    â€˜First these,’ she heard him say, he tumbling the cigarette butts onto the counter while ignoring completely the constables and the custom’s men who’d taken momentary shelter by the stove.
    Mary looked at the cigarette butts that now lay on the polished brown linoleum of the counter, the scent of prewar lemon oil coming faintly to her on the stuffy, smoke-filled air. ‘I … I gave someone a lift into Dublin. He … he was a farmer. He used the ashtray, I guess. I can’t remember.’
    â€˜Going in to market, was he?’
    â€˜Jimmy, please ! You know how it is. A bit of company. I …’
    Allanby found a blank sheet of typing paper on the nearby desk. Still ignoring the Ulstermen, he rolled the cigarette butts into a tidy packet and put them away in the left breast pocket of his tunic.
    One of the corporals brought her two suitcases and slung them on to the counter. The sergeant brought the maps, Jimmy nodding to one of the custom’s men and curtly saying, ‘You may do the necessary, Mr. O’Toole.’
    That sandy-haired, portly individual flipped quickly through her things, ignoring the plain cotton step-ins as if they were poison but lingering lightly on a half-slip and the white flannel of her nightgown. She could almost hear him saying, ‘Was it cold in them parts, m’am?’ ‘Them parts’ being the South, along the coast road and not far from Kinsale late on Sunday before heading back to Dublin on Monday, but he wouldn’t have known any of