Irregulars Read Free Page B

man down injured. In her mind she sees the man pile through the open door of the Ford Tourer and the car leaving, roaring off in the direction of the Custom House, no instructions given to her other than to get the fallen man to a hospital. And she remembers the quiet that descended as the car’s motor faded in the distance. She can almost feel the heft of Kenny’s head in her lap and the warm blood on her hand as she pressed it to the wound, the knife handle still there, lodged between his ribs.
    Her interrogator stares at her for a long moment, and Nora wonders if it would have been better to remain silent. She has worked with this man, and men like him, for the better part of two years, indirectly at first, but directly for the past nine months. This is, she thinks, her second war, and yet she feels little different, at times, than when she was a summer typist in her father’s accountancy office.
    ‘And all this happened at what time?’
    She makes an effort to remember. ‘It couldn’t have been more than ten past midnight. You have my operations report. The boy passed by me and exited the hotel at … what did I write? Eleven fifty-six? Forty-six? And Detective Officer Kenny followed him.’ She is growing angry, a flush of blood in her cheeks, her palms still sweating, but there is steel in her voice as she speaks. She has done her job. In no way is she to blame for the death of a man who should have known better.
    Kenny, the man with the newspaper. An unlikely detective, she thinks, with his pinched, wan face, his thin body and quick-bitten fingernails. A man who, in reality, had looked every inch the Active Service Unit gunman he had been in the fight against the Crown. But they have called each other ‘detective officers’—it is their rank and they are paid as such—ever since transforming from Michael Collins’ handpicked squad of shooters to the Criminal Investigation Department in Oriel House. Detecting was not what men like Kenny had joined up for, Nora knows, though some of the newer members of CID, and some who had come to the unit from the Irish Republican Police or from IRA units in distant counties, are under the illusion that they are, in fact, detectives.
    ‘And you’ve no idea who stabbed Kenny?’ her interrogator asks, lighting a cigarette.
    ‘No, no idea. You’ll have to ask them when … when they come in,’ she says, filling the silence as much as answering the question. Behind her low-burn anger, fear continues to smoulder. ‘It’s all in my report,’ she adds. ‘Did Dillon or O’Shea file theirs?’
    Her interrogator watches her for a long moment. Then he closes the manila file on his desk and leans forward, holding out his packet of Sweet Aftons.
    Finally: ‘No. They’ve not come in yet, and when I rang Wellington barracks I was told they hadn’t checked in there yet either.’
    ‘So that leaves us where?’ she asks, not sure if she should.
    ‘It leaves us wanting to speak to them and catch whoever stabbed Detective Kenny. Finding O’Hanley seems secondary now, in a way, though we mustn’t stop searching for him, or laying bait.’
    Felim O’Hanley is the target of the hotel operation. Slippery as Collins—God rest him—had been to the British, and now running the Dublin Brigade for the anti-Treaty Irregulars. After another long silence, Nora meets her interrogator’s eyes.
    He says, ‘There was nothing you could have done, Nora. You’ve been doing good work and you did what you were called on to do.’
    She leans across the desk and takes a cigarette. Detective Superintendent Terence Carty, like Detective Officer Kenny, was a member of the Big Fella’s special squad, one of his twelve apostles during the Tan War, but smarter, more nuanced than most of them. From fearing Carty to remembering now how he’d always respected the work she had done for the cause during that war; how he had personally recruited her into the Free State Army Intelligence Department and