Gavin Lyall - Spy’s Honour

But first he had to carry twenty sealed bags of sovereigns from the safe in the Admiral’s office out to a blue Vauxhall tourer that sat rumbling under the lamppost in the carriageway. He stowed them on the floor by the back seat, and when the last had gone in there was a noticeable sag of the rear springs.

Peter said: “So now a few broadsides will not be fired at the poor of the world.” It fell flat; nobody was thinking in such terms now. “Now take him back.”

O’Gilroy said calmly: “Let Mick take him.”

“What does it matter?”

“So let Mick take him.” Did O’Gilroy not want to leave Peter unwatched, with the car now loaded and running?

“My friends, we do not quarrel now.”

“Sure. So let Mick take him.”

Muscles in Peter’s face twitched. O’Gilroy was impassive behind the beard, but his thumb was on the shotgun hammers, his finger on the first trigger.

The telephone rang.

Everybody moved in one spasm, then froze in place. The ringing went on, from the Admiral’s desk deep in the dim office. Peter looked around, his face taut.

“You,” to O’Gilroy, “you will say …”

“Not me: they know there isn’t an Irish manservant in the house.”

“Then you,” to Ranklin now. “You say – you say one wrong word and you die.”

Proof of that lay crumpled against the wall, and Ranklin had no intention of giving up his life to save, perhaps, twenty thousand pounds of Admiralty funds. He picked his way through the shadows and lifted the earpiece. “Admiralty House.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Kirkwood here,” the telephone said. “May I ask who that is?”

An arm reached over Ranklin’s shoulder and a knife glittered faintly. He said calmly: “This is Captain Ranklin. Did you want the Secretary? He’s, erm, in the lavatory at the moment …”

“No, thank you, sir. Just checking. And would you tell Lionel that I’m doubling the guard at the next change? Just as a precaution. Good night, sir.”

The knife pulled away as Ranklin hung up, frowning. “Just checking,” but what could he or any man have said with a knife at his throat or a gun at his back? Then he chuckled.

Peter was instantly suspicious. “Why do you laugh? What did you say to him?”

“He called me ‘Sir’. Must have thought I was a Navy captain.”

O’Gilroy grinned, too, but the military niceties were lost on Peter. He pushed Ranklin towards the hallway – and into the sudden eye-stinging waft of petrol.

“Jayzus!” O’Gilroy lunged forward.

Mick stood grinning in the reeking hall, with the car’s now-empty spare petrol tin lying beside the dark blood pool.

“Now isn’t it a quieter way than shootin’ the lot of them?” he said. “And a diversion besides to keep the English busy whiles we git acrost the channel.”

“Yez never goin’ to burn every soul in the house!” O’Gilroy turned on Peter. “Tell him, ye idjit! Tell him it’ll be settin’ the whole country alight and never a place to hide!”

The shotgun was staring in Peter’s face and he made placating gestures, rather spoiled by the knife in his hand. “But, Conall, you agreed we must …”

“Ah,” Mick said. “Me big cousin’s jist gone soft.” And he struck a match.

The rasp spun O’Gilroy round. Perhaps he fired at the match flame but it was in front of Mick’s chest. Or perhaps he just reacted with the instinct of a man who has been controlling a situation with a gun. The blast took the match and Mick’s chest in one gulp and slung the remains halfway through the baize door.

In the hall, it was like a coastal six-incher firing. It blew Ranklin’s eyes and ears shut, and when he got his eyes open again, fully expecting the hall to be ablaze from the blast, he saw Peter drop the knife and grab for his pocket. Forgetting his own pistol, Ranklin dived for Mick’s abandoned rifle.

There was no sound, not through the ringing in Ranklin’s ears, just a dumb show of one man trying to free a pistol from a tight-fitting pocket, another grabbing up a blood-slippery rifle, thumbing for the safety-catch – then Peter gave up and jumped through the open front doorway.

Now unhurried, Ranklin half-opened the rifle bolt to check there was a round in the breech, then looked for O’Gilroy. He was in no hurry to rush into the darkness that now hid Peter and his pistol.

O’Gilroy was cradling his dead cousin in his arms, sobbing wildly and, to Ranklin, silently. He hesitated, then the roar of the car’s engine, cutting through his deafness, startled them both. O’Gilroy laid Mick down and reached for the shotgun.

“Did he git away?” he seemed to be asking, and Ranklin nodded. O’Gilroy snapped off the light and looked cautiously out into the driveway. The car’s rear light was just vanishing past the lodge.

O’Gilroy surprised Ranklin by turning and running back into the drawing room, but he followed. And out through the French windows, down the steps into the garden and on down the sloping lawn.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Yer not invited.”

“Shoot me, too, then,” Ranklin puffed, scrambling over a stone wall on what seemed to be a familiar route for O’Gilroy. For a while he thought O’Gilroy was taking up the suggestion, since he fumbled to reload the shotgun as they crossed another garden, another wall, and ran down an alley into a lower street. But now he had the derringer hidden in his clenched hand – hidden well enough for that darkness, lit only by flares of half-moon light among the ragged clouds.

They came out under the dark stunted bulk of the spireless cathedral, and O’Gilroy turned into a darker alley and grabbed one of two push-bikes hidden against the wall.

“D’you know where he’s going?” Ranklin demanded.

“I do that.” He climbed on the bike. “I hope I do,” he added, and rode off, not bothering with the lamps. Ranklin stared at the other bike, presumably the late Mick’s, then pocketed the derringer and climbed aboard.

The bike was arthritic and loud with rust and took almost no notice of its screeching brakes as he plunged downhill on slippery cobbles. But at least Ranklin was fit: that legacy of the Balkans hadn’t worn off, and as he came to the bottom of Spy Hill and on to the flat road that ran round the corner of the island, he began to catch up with the weaving shadow ahead.

O’Gilroy was riding with the shotgun held crossways on the handlebars as Ranklin came up alongside. Not too close alongside, since the road was flat only in principle, not counting details like potholes and ruts now they had left the town behind. They seemed to be paralleling the railway and the channel up to Cork, heading for Belvelly bridge.

“Have you got a boat … cross the channel in?” Ranklin asked in puffs.

“Niver ye mind.”

“I know this man … he’s wanted in London … Peter Piatkow was his name there … Peter the Painter, did you hear of him? … the Sidney Street siege … the Houndsditch murders before that … you think he’s joined your cause? … others thought that … they did the robberies and got shot … a factory, then a jeweller …”

“That’s not my business wid him.”

“It’s his business with you … taking his cut … only this time it’s the lot … to America … he’s booked his passage,” though that was only rumour. But the rumour that had brought Ranklin there.

They trundled past the lights of a shipyard and the road closed up on the channel again. There were lights on the far shore, no more than a quarter of a mile away, and closer still the lights and skeleton masts of a windjammer being towed down from Cork on the tide.

“Piat-kow, ye said his name was?” O’Gilroy asked.