J. Janes: Betrayal

There were seven boats in the group, U-85 being the most northerly. They’d begin the attack in the evening as darkness fell. In the interim, he’d see what the British did. If they directed the convoy northward towards the Greenland coast, the ships would have little room to manoeuvre and he’d know for certain that the enemy had decoded his wireless signal.

Or would he? Even with Huber’s warning in hand, he still knew the British could well have some new means of detection. Perhaps Kramer would be able to shed some light on the matter, but what, really, would Berlin do about this Irish business? Would they offer the world so long as the IRA broke the Kapitanleutnant out of that castle?

Kramer … Begrudgingly Donitz had to admit that Huber’s choice had been wise. But the IRA? They were unreliable-governed by whim, totally involved with their own cause, and not to be trusted.

‘Ludi, send our friends in Berlin something they will have to pay attention to: Most urgent. Hydra believed compromised. Initiate Triton .’ 4

Adding a fourth wheel to the Enigma encoding and decoding machine that every one of his boats carried would give the British something to think about.

‘And the IRA, Commander? Berlin will want an answer.’

‘Yes, of course. Imperative agree IRA demands secure release and safe return Kramer .’

‘Mrs. Mary Ellen Fraser?’

‘Hello, Jimmy. What’s on? Has someone escaped from the castle?’

‘Not bloody likely. No … no, it’s nothing so easy to take care of as that. Some IRA bastard set off a bomb in the tube station at Charing Cross and killed a little girl.’

‘So all the borders in creation have to be closed while you …’

‘A little girl, Mrs. Fraser. A child of seven. She was finally on her way out of the city to an aunt in Staffordshire, the mother having refused to include her among the evacuees at the outbreak of hostilities.’ In September 1939, with the invasion of Poland, though London’s evacuations hadn’t really begun in earnest until a year later.

‘Look I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t important.’

‘Of course you didn’t.’

Water pouring from the peak of his cap, Allanby reached for her passport and held it just inside the window so as to shelter it from the rain, but as the backs of his fingers touched her, she stiffened in alarm and moved away a fraction.

‘Sorry,’ was all he’d say, she staring straight ahead now but catching sight of the corporals with their Lee Enfield rifles and their bayonets.

‘Has something happened to your sergeant?’ she asked tightly, not turning to look at him, for he’d lowered the passport.

‘Sergeant Stuart’s inside the hut. Would you care to see him?’

‘Not really. Is it necessary? I’ve only been to …’

‘To Dublin and back. Look, I don’t make the custom’s rules, do I, Mrs. Fraser?’

‘And I’m not carrying contraband or IRA fugitives, am I?’

‘No one said you were.’

‘Stuart’s not the one I should see then, is he?’

Jimmy opened the door for her and waited. The rain came down, the droplets breaking on the shiny black toes of his boots. Water ran from the creases in his khaki trousers. It clung to the Sam Brown belt, the pistol in its holster, the brass buttons of his tunic and the medals.

Allanby saw her defiantly swing one stockinged leg out of the car and then the other. Always neat as a pin, he’d be thinking. Good legs, nice ankles, that soft woollen frock coming well below her knees, he giving her a hand now, for one had to do that sort of thing, especially if one wanted to. …

She standing at last in 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.

‘I don’t,’ she answered tensely.

‘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 …

‘I … I don’t know whose those are. You’ll have to ask my husband.’

‘Inside, I think,’ he said, taking her by the elbow. ‘Sergeant!’

‘Sir?’

‘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?

‘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.’

‘Going in to market, was he?’

‘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 this.

The maps were being sorted. She signed the declaration papers-two bottles of Bushmills-it was so hard to get whiskey in the North even though the Bushmills distillery was there; and yes, silk stockings hadn’t been seen in Dublin either since before the war.

Reluctantly Mary paid up the duty. ‘There’s nothing else but the motorcar to settle, Mr. O’Toole. My husband has posted the bond on a more-or-less permanent basis, as you know.’