J. Janes - Betrayal

One third the cost of the Austin. Each time a person entered the North behind the wheel of a car, the bond was handed over in trust; the same when entering the South. You’d think they might have at least got together on this. You’d think that every car owner who had passed through here had been in the used-car business. You’d think that by now they’d know her well enough, but oh no. Every time it was the same.

Every time but this.

Jimmy ran a smoothing hand over one of the county maps. ‘Been down to Kinsale, have you, Mrs. Fraser?’ he asked, suddenly looking up at her with nothing in those dark brown eyes of his but the emptiness of a military man in a time of war.

‘Kinsale?’ he asked, reminding her of it.

‘Of course not,’ she heard herself answering. ‘Hamish and I did want to take a little holiday this past summer, but …’

Again her shoulders lifted in that shrug of hers. ‘But what?’ he asked.

He wasn’t going to leave it. ‘But work at the castle didn’t allow for it. That map’s from summer. That’s why the Old Head of Kinsale and Roaring Water Bay have been circled in pencil.’

She’d remembered it from summer-perhaps. She’d forgotten about the cigarette butts. Allanby thought then that he’d best let her forget about them. Mrs. Mary Ellen Fraser was thirty-two. There were amber flecks in the large brown eyes with their touches of green-one noticed them when she was at one of the staff do’s in the common room. One noticed her, one had to, but did lying make the amber come out? She had the blush of windburn about her, the cold of the rain against her cheeks, but was it also from the salt spray of some hidden little cove? She liked the sea, liked it a lot, liked being alone, too, the young wife of a Scottish country doctor-not a good one, not really. One who had messed up his life some place down the line and had been ditched by the first wife because of the drink only to find a niche in which to sit out the war. Bloody old Ireland and all that it entailed.

‘Are you done with me?’ she asked tightly.

‘No, I’m not quite done with you.’ She wasn’t beautiful, but handsome. Yes, that’s the word he wanted, but defiantly proud of what? Her body, her mind, her place in things, or what she’d been up to?

Something, by God. Something!

The rain had plastered the hair to her brow and made its thickness cling to the whiteness of a slender neck and the broad collar of her coat. Her chest rose and fell quite easily enough. Calm now, was it? he wondered, even with all the others stealing little glances at her. What the blazes had she been up to?

‘This farmer you gave a lift to. Describe him for me.’

So he’d decided to press on with it regardless. Yet again then, she would shrug, thought Mary, but this time would pull off her gloves as if they were soiled. ‘About seventy-five, I should think, and speaking Erse in spite of my telling him I couldn’t understand a blessed word. Blue eyes-lots of the Irish have those, don’t they, Jimmy? Wrinkles-he’d have had those too, wouldn’t he, Captain? You see, I wouldn’t really know, now would I, my eyes being on the road?’

Allanby waited. At some hidden thought her lips curved gently upwards in a faint and hesitant smile, then she said, ‘Sheep. He was into sheep and potatoes, this much I do know.’

‘And he was over seventy,’ he muttered, exhaling the words and wondering why she had bothered to taunt him.

‘He also smoked cigarettes without a filter. Hand-rolled-I’m sure if you look, you’ll find a few stray shreds of tobacco on the seat or the floor.’

‘Sergeant, have a look, will you?’

‘Sir.’

‘Check the odometer, too.’

‘Sir.’

‘Jimmy, I haven’t done anything wrong. I didn’t go to Kinsale and I didn’t pick up this … this IRA bomber. How could I have?’

‘But you did do something, Mrs. Fraser.’ He’d abruptly turn from her now. ‘Mr. O’Toole, what was the odometer reading of the motorcar when it left here three days ago on Saturday early?’

O’Toole found the form, but played magistrate with his eyeglasses and tone of voice. ‘The odometer read 7,263 miles, sir.’

He did lisp the sir but one had best ignore it for the moment, thought Allanby. It was near enough to twenty-one miles from the village and the castle to the border here. Another three and a half to Dundalk, then twenty-one to Drogheda and another twenty-five to Dublin. Close on seventy miles, then, and one hundred and forty on the round trip with another twenty thrown in to bugger about. That would make it one hundred and sixty, a goodly distance these days but petrol wasn’t rationed in the South, not yet, just damned expensive.

The sergeant came back to give another salute and another crashing of his heels. Must he? cringed Mary.

‘Tobacco flakes as the lady has said, sir. Odometer reads 7,434 miles.’

Allanby watched as the softness of another smile grew to sharpen the windburn, and he realized then that it was at moments like this that the handsomeness passed into beauty.

‘Are you satisfied?’ asked Mary, seeing a hardness she didn’t like enter his gaze. Was he still offended that she’d no time for him socially? Of course he was.

‘Mr. O’Toole, have you any reason to detain Mrs. Fraser? If not, she’s free to proceed.’

O’Toole closed and fastened the catches on her bags. As he handed them to her, his puffy eyelids lifted in feigned distress. ‘We’ll be seeing you again, Mrs. Fraser. Say hello to the doctor, will you? Tell him October’s best in the second week, with a passable in the third. I’m away to fish the Blackwater then myself. Sure and it would be grand if the two of us could …’

He left it unsaid in shyness perhaps, or in feeling out of place, and suddenly she felt a rush of warmth and sympathy for him and answered, ‘Thanks, I will. Everything all right about the motor?’

‘As right as rain, m’am. Now be off with you while I hold the troops at bay.’

She chucked the cases into the backseat but paused before getting into the car. Allanby watched her through the window of the custom’s shed. He noted straightness, the defiance, the determination and wondered why she’d taken it upon herself to let him see her this way.

The rain came down the glass, blurring his image of her. A fine young woman-heady, the Irish would have said, as of a filly that needed to be trained for the course.

Corporal Donaldson raised the barrier and she drove on through without a second look or wave, knowing she’d be followed by their eyes. Until the car was out of sight, Allanby watched it. She’d stop some place down the road to dry her hair a bit and shake the water from her coat, would try to calm herself.

Unknown to him, Mary nipped into the bracken round a bend and had a pee. Then she stood out in the rain, gazing steadily back towards the frontier which could no longer be seen.

London’s underground station at Charing Cross was a shambles. Blood-spattered bits of charred clothing seemed everywhere. One of the child’s shoes was broken at the heel, the shoes no doubt second-hand and either purchased at a church jumble or picked up from one of the collections for those who’d lost their homes. A lisle stocking had caught on the shoe’s buckle and had been dragged off-Churchill knew it had, the force of the explosion being such that the poor thing had been thrown some distance.

A button lay beneath the shoe-had it been from her overcoat? he wondered. She would only have had the one coat, such were the restrictions on what could and could not be taken by evacuees, so as to limit the amount of baggage to a single suitcase.

As he picked at the debris with the end of his walking stick, Winston Spencer Churchill let his moist blue eyes sift over the carnage. The fire had fortunately been quickly extinguished but even now pools of water still lay in the shallowest of hollows and the stench of wet, charred wood and wool and smouldering rubber stung the nostrils.