Echobeat Read Free

He passed by without pausing and meandered down to the back of the train and found another seat.
    It was dark by the time the train reached Dublin. Duggan took his time alighting, wanting to make sure that Thomsen was ahead of him. He caught sight of him walking fast towards the exit on his own and began to follow quickly. The women whose compartment he had shared were being stopped by customs men behind the wooden tables half-blocking the platform. They all carried light shopping bags now and there were no signs of their parcels. But they were well wrapped up in bulky clothes.
    ‘It’s just a few sweets for the children from Santa Claus,’ one of them said to a customs man, opening her shopping bag as wide as it would go as if it was an insult.
    ‘Don’t ye have anything better to be doing?’ another sighed as theregular cat-and-mouse game played out. ‘We were only up there for a day’s outing.’
    Duggan passed by quickly, keeping an eye on Thomsen’s back. Beyond the ticket check Thomsen headed for the ramp leading down to street level. Whatever he’d been doing, he’d done it in Dundalk, Duggan decided, veering off to the stairs. He took them two at a time down to Amiens Street and unlocked the chain on his bicycle and walked it across the road.
    The street lights were on but making less impression on the gloom than the glow from shop fronts. He cycled up Talbot Street, slotting into a convoy of other cyclists and weaving around the shoppers overflowing from the narrow footpath outside Guiney’s clothes shop. Unplucked turkeys hung neck-down in the window of a butcher’s and boxes of cigarettes in festive wrappers were lined up in a tobacconist’s, topped with a pyramid of cigars. Passing faces were tense with the urgency of the fast-approaching Christmas deadline.
    He turned into O’Connell Street at the Nelson Pillar, balancing the bike with brakes and pedals as a bus went by, its interior blue lights casting its passengers into spectral relief. A group of carol singers belted out ‘Adeste Fidelis’ outside Clerys and a tram clanged its way through the traffic on the other side of the central median, now an air-raid shelter, its grey concrete wall broken by posters for the Christmas Eve sweepstake to raise money for the Red Cross. The ads on the buildings around O’Connell Bridge were dark, no longer flashing their messages for Players cigarettes and Bendigo tobacco and, beyond, Bovril. He threaded his way across another line of cyclists and in front of a plodding dray into Bachelors Walk. He cycled fast down the quays by the darkening river, speeding up as the traffic eased and had worked up a slight sweat by the time he reached the Red House, the offices of G2, in army headquarters on Infirmary Road.
    ‘Enjoy your mystery tour?’ Captain Bill Sullivan greeted him as he came into their shared office and slumped into his chair.
    ‘Long day for very little,’ Duggan said, placing a carbon paper between two sheets of flimsy white paper and winding them into the typewriter.
    ‘Boss wanted to see you when you got back.’
    ‘Urgently?’
    ‘Don’t think so.’
    ‘Anything happening?’ Duggan opened the empty Gold Flake packet Murphy had given him and shook it upside down. A few strands of tobacco fell out.
    ‘There’s a war on,’ Sullivan said.
    ‘Still?’ Duggan pulled at the silver paper in the packet and a small pad of folded paper came out with it.
    ‘Your secret mission didn’t end it after all.’ Sullivan made no attempt to hide the hint of resentment at not having been told where Duggan had gone and what he’d been doing. He was in his mid-twenties, a couple of years older than Duggan, whom he believed was favoured by their immediate commander.
    Duggan gave a short laugh and turned his attention to unfolding the pad of paper. Torn from a lined copybook, it had a handwritten list of ships’ names in neat capital letters. He typed his report quickly, its structure already clear in