The City Underground

Book 7: Stefan Gillespie

by Michael Russell

Genres: Thrillers; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

Ireland 1941. A German spy escapes from Mountjoy Prison, clearly with inside help. Yet no one wants to catch him. When the head of Garda Special Branch sends Inspector Stefan Gillespie to find out why, it must be in secret. But he meets a web of deceit in which the past's dark shadows loom over the lies of the present. Alone, except for an alcoholic private detective and a woman who could betray him to the IRA, Stefan embarks on a journey that drags him into a plot to attack British interests in Ireland and an attempt on the life of the IRA Chief-of-Staff by his own men. Crossing into war-torn Northern Ireland, he is suddenly unprotected, a rogue policeman to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a dangerous spy to the IRA.

Praise for Michael Russell

'Complex but compelling . . . utterly vivid and convincing' Independent on Sunday

'A superb, atmospheric thriller' Irish Independent

'A thriller to keep you guessing and gasping' Daily Mail

'Atmospheric' Sunday Times

Release date: July 26, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 100000

Sample

Dublin, November 1920

The first man I killed was the easiest. I don’t even know if I killed one man, or two, or maybe none. Joe Leonard was there with me, firing too. The Tommies were a long way off. But between us, one way or another, we killed two. And I wanted to do it. Perhaps I needed to. When we ran that day, we were both laughing. I remember that laughter. I remember a feeling that was close to joy.

I wasn’t there in the Rising. Most of the other Volunteers I knew were. I was too young. My father wouldn’t let me go into Dublin that day in 1916. And when I eventually did get into the city it was all over, bar the shooting. Hope and pride became pride and fury. I felt I had something to make up for when I finally joined the Volunteers. Nobody said I’d to be blooded, but that was in my head. I was young enough to anticipate the thrill of it. I might have said it was all about anger. I might have said it was about the war we had to fight, about what I’d give, including my life, to make Ireland a nation once again. My words were often the stuff of songs. But it was a desire. And like any desire, it gnawed at my heart.

The day we held up the mail van in Dominick Street and robbed the post for Dublin Castle was the first time I knew how excitement and fear could pump together through my veins and make my head as light as air. I wanted more. But no guns were fired that day. Back at the dugout, the Dispensary, we read the headline in the evening paper, ‘Sensational Coup Robbery of Castle Mails’, and congratulatory words came down from Michael Collins himself. In all my pride and elation, I only wished the gun I carried had been used, that we’d taken the lives of some peelers or Tommies along with the posts. It surprised me that the older men didn’t feel the same. They had nothing to say about it. And it irked me that the Quartermaster only applauded us for doing the job and not wasting ammunition.

I was lucky to have a gun. A Mauser automatic, brought back from the war in Europe. When I joined the Volunteers, the Quartermaster tried to take it. Every weapon was needed and I was too young. I stood my ground. If anyone was going to fire the Mauser, it would be me. My temper made him laugh. But I kept the gun. I still hadn’t used it, but it served me well. The fact I was armed took me into the action. The gun never left my pocket but it was a talisman. And it was because of the gun that Dick Phelan spotted me for Intelligence, and Collins himself put me in his Squad. But the itch to use the Mauser was there all the time, stronger than ever.

Wasn’t I a gunman among the gunmen now? And if I was still in my teens, it wouldn’t stop me being as fearless as Mick’s Boys had to be. But what did I do in Intelligence? Sat in a room with a pile of newspapers and a scissors and glue. I cut out every piece and paragraph that mentioned an RIC man or soldier or Auxiliary, whatever it was. And when we intercepted letters, or got hold of bills, even tax returns, I did the same. I pasted on cards. I cross-referenced every transfer, promotion, game of rugby or soccer or cricket, every christening, wedding, funeral, concert, garden party, church fete, holiday, home address. For the higher-ups I searched Who’s Who, for their universities and clubs. Connections, always connections. Who their friends were, who they associated with, where they lived.

But action came. A look-out here, more mail robberies, freeing prisoners – succeeding sometimes, failing more often – then look-out again, on ambush after ambush called off before a shot was fired. There was a bloody shooting war going on somewhere and I was only told not to waste ammunition. Yet the itch kept itching. Maybe to feel I was as hard as the rest. Maybe because blood mattered.

One Sunday morning I was with Joe Leonard, coming from a ceilidh at the Banba Hall, where we’d stayed because of the curfew. We called at Paddy Cullen’s. There was information on two detectives from the Castle. We knew where they’d be. We were meeting more Volunteers. There’d be nine of us. Twice before an attempt on these G men had been called off. This time we’d have them.

There was a dark mood across the city. It was in the air. In Brixton Prison, Terence MacSwiney, the Mayor of Cork, was seventy days into a hunger strike. He would soon be dead. Everyone knew. And everyone knew his death would not go unmarked. If we already grieved, we were ready for what would follow. Something was changing. Killing would matter more now. We were up for that. They were, too. They were waiting, the peelers, Tommies, Auxies, Black and Tans. Two dead G men that day would let them know what they were waiting for.

We were coming to the railway bridges at Ossory Road when a lorry of Tommies passed us. They stopped at the bridge over the Royal Canal. It was an army picket. They were common enough, and you never knew where or when. We were heading straight for it. And we had guns. If you were found with a weapon, you wouldn’t last long. The Tommies mightn’t kill you, but they’d hand you to the Black and Tans who would. We were out of sight, but we could see the Tommies. We took Paddy’s gun and sent him to the bridge. Unarmed, he could pass through and tell the others. But as we watched him, we saw more soldiers, moving towards our hiding place. Joe and I crossed the road and climbed on to the railway. As we walked the tracks we could see the Tommies on the canal bridge and more on the banks. We would not get across. If the job went ahead, it would be without us. But if it did, the soldiers were close to the ambush spot. Very close and a lot of them.

We needed to give the Tommies something else to think about. If we didn’t act, the other Volunteers might walk into them. By now we were at Drumcondra Bridge, looking at the roadblock again, and people being searched as they crossed over the bridge. A bell began to strike eight in the convent along the road. The attack on the G men would happen any time. Joe’s eyes followed mine to the canal and the soldiers. No words were needed. We knelt behind the parapet of the bridge. My Mauser was in my hand. Joe had his revolver. We fired. We fired until every bullet was spent. We didn’t wait for results. We ran to the railway and along the tracks to come up on another road. We stopped at a Volunteer’s house to drop our guns. They’d be stopping people at random now. With no weapons we were safe.

Soon afterwards, walking away from the city all the time, we were close to my home. I hadn’t seen my mother for weeks. If I wasn’t exactly on the run, it was better to sleep at the Dispensary or a safe house. It seemed I wasn’t known yet, but you could never be sure. Sooner or later they found out. My mother asked no questions. She made breakfast. Joe and I ate in silence. Every so often we looked up and grinned, our hearts pumping blood and adrenalin like mad. I didn’t think about the men we’d killed, only that we’d done it. In truth, we didn’t know till later that we’d killed anyone. Yet we felt it, like an article of faith. We were blooded.

By the time the day they call Bloody Sunday came, there had been a lot more killing. I’d seen friends killed. I saw their bodies when the Auxies and the Tans had finished. We gave back what we were given. Sometimes we gave more. We knew, as they knew, that terror was the sharpest way. And I did my share. Killing not so often, but I did the work that staked men out. My scraps of lives on cards were weapons. They set the traps and loaded bait. I didn’t question it. I still don’t. Maybe I can’t. We were an army by then, the Irish Republican Army. We fought as we had to. We fought as they made us. And army is a sacred word. It takes away the sin of killing. The nation gave us absolution. Every nation says it. It was true. It is true still. But you don’t want the truth following you around, watching you in the darkness, snapping at your heels. I cannot leave it behind. But I need it to leave me alone. The truth should be a light, to lighten the path ahead, not a worm in my soul. Not truth with the beauty emptied out of it. Not truth that drains me of who I am.

But that was to come. That was something for time to do.

In the Squad, in the winter of 1920, we knew something big was on the way. Only the men nearest to Mick knew how big. But we felt it. Our work was behind it. All those cards, all the tittle-tattle picked from barroom conversations. We were coming for their people. Not just the RIC or the Tans, but the spies, the G men, the Castle detectives whose houses we had marked, the officers too careless about walking home. We could not guess how many. I did know one target. My target.

Then it was on. As we sat in the Dispensary with a supper of tea and hard-boiled eggs, the orders came. The next day, the Sunday, would be a killing day unlike any other. We were told just what we had to know, but the scale was clear. It would be all over the city. For some of us in the Squad the job was to go in with the Volunteers who would do the shooting and pick up what we could. Papers, notebooks, reports, names and addresses. We would meet the Volunteers at stations, on street corners, and go to our assigned locations, to hotels, homes, boarding houses. This was what Mick had planned. This would truly fuck them.

We greeted the orders with a murmur of excitement. Then we were quieter. Some men drifted out into the evening, to Mass, for a solitary drink. We checked our guns over and over and smoked one cigarette after another. A few half-hearted jokes came out but never found a punchline. We all had the same tightness in our chests and lungs. At the Dispensary, only a few of us slept. We sat round the fire, talking through the night, softly, quietly, about nothing that I can remember.

In the morning we hunched over tea and eggs. Guns were checked again, for something to do that didn’t involve speaking. The only conversation was the repetition of orders, times, addresses, names. We were calm. It was our stock-in-trade. But there was no one not riddled with anxiety. We moved to the door. Across Dublin bells tolled the first Masses. We crossed ourselves. Someone said it was the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady in the Temple. Whether the words were meant as a sort of prayer, I don’t know, but they intensified the silence. Then someone laughed and said, ‘Sure, with luck she’ll be too busy to watch the sport!’

We split off as we walked into the city, each of us going to meet a group of Volunteers. I peeled away near Merrion Square to the corner of Upper Pembroke Street. Paddy Flanagan was there with half a dozen of the third battalion. I didn’t know them all. The ones I didn’t know were young like me, but without my experience. They were raw, excitable. The way I had been on Drumcondra Bridge. But that wasn’t like this job. In minutes they would look into a man’s face and put a bullet in it. No man who knew how to do that, and I did, could feel excitement.

‘We have the details of their rooms,’ said Paddy. ‘My boys have their instructions. Quick and clean and out. And you’re to get any papers in the house.’

I nodded. Two of the youngest Volunteers laughed, almost giggled.

‘We’re relying on your Rosie, lad.’ Paddy smiled. ‘Let’s go, boys.’

I returned his quiet smile. He wasn’t sure of some of those boys either.

I didn’t find Rosie myself. I don’t know who spotted her, but she was a bright, fast-talking girl from Clondalkin. Someone heard her, in a pub or at a dance or after Mass, or at some wedding or funeral with more drink taken than was good for her. She was a maid in a boarding house in Upper Pembroke Street, and she wasn’t backward gossiping about the English gentlemen who stayed there. Those gents were on our cards, which made Rosie a grand girl to know. And because she had a cousin who’d been at school with my brother, and because I was only a little younger than her, I was sent to get to know her. She was a looker and it was better than clipping newspapers. I had money to take her to tea and a dance and a drink in the kind of place she’d never been. She knew I was a fierce Republican, but so was she in her common-or-garden way. And if I impressed her over cakes at Bewley’s, she wanted to impress me with her knowledge of the English gentlemen at 28 and 29 Upper Pembroke Street. They had the way of military men, she said, officers, though she’d never seen one in a uniform. And they’d odd habits. They didn’t go out in the day, but they were out at night, after curfew. Quiet they were, and great ones for the writing. Forever at their desks, scribbling and filling wastepaper baskets, till paper spilled on the floor. They were hard enough to clean up after.

I don’t know what Rosie made of my interest in her gentlemen. She knew I wanted information, not gossip. When I asked her to bring me the papers she cleared out of their rooms, she was easy with it. She was helping the cause, in the way she saw the cause. I don’t think she saw that ending with gunmen walking into the house. I don’t know if she made that connection. It didn’t matter to me. I got what I wanted on the men we knew were British Intelligence officers. We had their names, real and assumed. We could recognise them by sight. We knew where they went, their contacts, the layout of the house. We knew who slept where. And if on some evenings, I got something else from Rosie, that had nothing to with any of that, well, I only hoped it made her all the keener to deliver up her information.

It was exactly nine o’clock when I mounted the steps of the house in Upper Pembroke Street, with Paddy Flanagan and six Volunteers. The same thing was happening across Dublin. The front door was open. It was always open, as Rosie said. The big hall was empty. Two flights of stairs ascended to two halves of the building. Four of us took one, four the other. When my party reached the first landing, there were two doors. We divided again. A Volunteer knocked at each door. The man with me was older. Timmy Clancy, solid, reliable. No shots had been fired, barely a sound made. The door in front of us opened to show the face of a man pulled out of sleep. He had a gun in his hand, but it was there out of habit. He was expecting nothing. Timmy shot him without hesitation. The man fell back into the room. There was another shot along the landing. A scream. Shouting. Sounds of struggle. More shots, further away. More shouting. Screams of women.

I pushed the door and went in, stepping over the body. My companion looked at the man and shot him again. I stood in semi-darkness with the Mauser. I walked to the desk to pick up papers and notebooks, stuffing them in a briefcase.

‘Come on, you bastard!’ shouted Timmy.

‘I have to see what’s here. Just wait.’

‘Wait be fucked! Let’s get out, quick as we can.’

We came on to the landing. In front of us was the boy who had giggled with excitement in the street, staring at his hand, covered in blood. It was not his. Paddy Flanagan came through the other door. He thrust a wad of papers into my hands.

‘You got him?’ he said quietly. Timmy Clancy shrugged. Paddy shrugged in return, and walked on past the young Volunteer, heading downstairs into the hall.

‘Move!’ he called back.

The boy still gazed at his bloody hand. He was crying.

‘I said, come on, you bugger!’

Paddy turned back and grabbed the boy’s arm, pulling him down the stairs, down to the hall, and out through the front door. I walked down more slowly with Timmy. The shooting had stopped in the other part of the house, but there was shouting and screaming, men and women, incoherent. As we reached the hall a man staggered from an open door close to the other staircase. There was blood on his head, and blood soaked one side of his blue striped pyjamas. He slumped against the wall. As he slid down it his blood smeared the lemon flock wallpaper.

A woman rushed through the same door. She threw herself beside the man. Her dressing gown was stained with blood, though she wasn’t wounded. She tried to pull him up, sobbing and shaking. More blood now, on her hands, on her chest.

‘Just get up. Darling, get up. I’ll get you help.’

Two more shots sounded elsewhere in the house.

‘James, come on! You have to move! We can get out!’

She looked up and saw us for the first time.

‘Help us! Please help us. They shot him … they’re in the house …’

The man was trying to push himself up.

‘They’ll help us, James! You’ll be all right.’

The man coughed. There was blood in his mouth. He was looking at us too. From somewhere, he had found enough strength to step forward. He shook his head slowly. He knew we wouldn’t help. Timmy Clancy took out his revolver.

‘Get away, Daisy! Get away from me now!’

The woman was still holding him.

‘Do as he says,’ said Timmy. ‘Move away from your man.’

She stared, uncomprehending, still holding her husband. Finding another ounce of strength, he pushed her away. She fell and sprawled on the tiled floor. She had stopped sobbing. Timmy nodded at the man with a kind of respect. He fired. Nothing happened. The gun had jammed. Again. Nothing. It was enough.

‘Jesus! Fuck this! Let’s get out!’

‘We’re not done here,’ I said.

‘You want to wait till the Tommies arrive?’

‘Mick wants it finished.’

‘Then let Mick do it. We need to get away and dump the guns.’

He ran out through the front door, into the street. I could have followed. Looking back, it’s unlikely the man would have survived. And I was there to collect intelligence. My instructions were to leave the shooting to the others and get out with what I could. But I didn’t move. Young as I was, I wasn’t just any gunman. I was in Mick Collins’ Squad. If others couldn’t do it right, quick and clean, I could. This man was a killer in his own way. He may not have pulled the trigger himself, but like me he was a collector of all the little things that sent men to their deaths. The woman, his wife, watched me with silent, pleading eyes. She lay on the floor where her husband had pushed her. She seemed beyond speaking, but she opened her mouth to say something. I looked back to the man. I have often wondered what it was she tried to say. It felt no more than a breath, but I think the words ‘Thank you’ were in that breath. She thought it was over. She thought I would go. Her husband knew better. We two understood each other in that instant.

I clutched my briefcase under one arm. My other hand took out the Mauser. I aimed. I pulled the trigger. The man was dead. I put the gun into my coat and left.

Dublin, October 1941

In three years as a private detective, Emmet Warde had made many mistakes. He often felt the job itself was a mistake. The woman was certainly a mistake. He could have said no, the first time she came to see him. It was hard now. Now he would have to tell her to fuck off, in so many words. He had intended to several times. Her quiet persistence irritated him. The things she believed and never talked about irritated him too. There was that part of her, behind the careful words and the politeness, that saw him not for who he was but for who he had been. She hadn’t come to him because he was a private detective with a reputation for finding missing people, sometimes the missing dead. She came because he had been on the other side; someone who mattered on the other side. Twenty years ago he had been part of what was, for her, a corrupt, canting, half-arsed gang that fought the anti-Treaty IRA, part of an Irish state she didn’t even accept was her country’s legitimate government. She thought the fact that he held high rank in the Free State’s army during the Civil War meant he might go where she could never go.

A long time ago he would have had words for her: Republican bitch, IRA whore. Those words had gone, with everything else. But he detested what she stood for. He still had contempt for the self-righteous gunmen who claimed a sacred right to attack the fragile democracy he had defended. She was sincere, but he had no patience with that. Too much sincerity was the calling card of any fanatic, anywhere. The war beyond Ireland’s shores now was a sink of sincerity.

In all that were the reasons he should have said no the day she asked him to work for her. It wouldn’t have surprised her. Yet she had assumed he would help. And he was doing it. He needed the money, but it was a job he didn’t want. Why take it? It wasn’t sympathy. He wasn’t sure it was about her at all. It was about him somewhere, about the unremarkable wreckage of his life. She couldn’t know anything of that, yet instinctively she trusted him to try to find out what happened some twenty years ago, to her brother. He had been barely sixteen when he was arrested by Free State soldiers, putting up anti-Treaty posters with a friend one afternoon in 1922. He had been taken to a police station. Records insisted he had been released the same evening. However, neither boy was ever heard from again.

The woman’s years of looking for the truth, born of the need to find a body to lay to rest, produced nothing. Now she had asked Emmet Warde to do what no one had done before. Perhaps he was simply one more path to a dead end. Perhaps she had been doing it too long to stop. He had said yes; now he couldn’t say no. What irritated him more than almost anything else was that he did want to help her.

Emmet Warde was not a successful private detective. He wasn’t sure why he did it, except that he could find nothing else to do. It made him answerable to no one and that, more than anything else, suited. And it meant that some days, when too much drinking left him indifferent to working at all, there was no one to question it. Sometimes there was a job for an insurance company, or for someone with money, that delivered over the odds for doing little more than ask questions no one had bothered to ask. More often there was hardly any income, and what there was went to the wife and family he had left behind him in Drumcondra. He could have made more chasing what kept most private detectives busy: marriage and infidelity; feckless men and women everywhere, fucking where they shouldn’t fuck. But he had no stomach for it. No principles were involved, only distaste. The mess of his own marriage, born of too much drink and temper, had brought him to the two rooms above an ironmonger’s in Capel Street. A desk and two chairs in one bare room; a bed and a gas ring in the other. Cataloguing the wreckage of other lives, while contemplating his own, wasn’t something he could take very seriously.

Josie Kilmartin hadn’t told him how she found him. She came into the office in Capel Street and recounted the story of her brother’s disappearance with barely an introduction. It was a story she had told for twenty years. She told it well. There was no excess emotion, though he saw what was buried inside. She made no attempt to appeal to his sympathy. It was clear what she believed and he found no difficulty believing it himself. At some point after their arrest, Eamon Kilmartin and Brendan Davey were killed. She said she hoped they had only been shot, not tortured. She was not looking for revenge. She was past caring who did it. She wanted to see Eamon buried. Above all, her mother needed that before she died.

The idea that two teenage boys had been executed for putting up posters ought to have raised a question, even twenty years on. It raised none for Emmet Warde. The fact that the Civil War had sunk into a pit of silent invisibility in Ireland was not despite its darkest moments, but because of them. No one talked about it. There was no shortage of acts of brutality to set beside acts of bravery on both sides. They were uncounted and untold. Emmet, like many others, thought about them little but knew them better than made him comfortable. There were things he carried that were not easily filed away as the unavoidable detritus of war. He carried things not only from the war against his former brothers-in-arms, but from the war against the British before that, and from the war in the trenches he fought for Britain before that. He didn’t know whether she sensed some of that when she met him. Calm as she was, quiet as she was, she had a way of looking at him and into him that was unsettling. What she wanted to know seemed reasonable enough. Didn’t time make it more reasonable? But he knew no one would thank him for asking the questions that he would be asking for her. He would make no friends.

He said yes, recognising it was a mistake. He got what details Josie had; the snippets of information that had been put together at the time; the little she had gathered since. Twenty years ago the silence from the Free State had been aggressive; since then it had been passive, yet no less obstructive. For Josie, that was a statement about what Ireland was: a sham Republic, dishonest, perverted, built on lies. Emmet could see that her Republicanism was more than a political passion. She didn’t say it, but she didn’t hide it. She was close to the IRA. Close enough, he suspected, to hang on their coat-tails. He tackled her about the IRA only once. What he learnt surprised him. The Boys, after all that time, had little care for what happened to Eamon Kilmartin and Brendan Davey. It wasn’t how she put it, but it was obvious. Maybe the Boys had too much of the present to think of; maybe they had buried too many bodies of their own. Whatever the reasons, Josie got no more help from her friends than from the state she considered her enemy.

Emmet Warde was careful what he asked and where he asked it. At first he thought he would just go through the motions, knowing it would lead nowhere, and end up telling Josie exactly that. Yet he found himself doing more. He didn’t tackle it head-on. If there was anything to find, it would come from going in sideways, to look for a half-remembered conversation, half-forgotten memories. There were men in the Irish Army he still knew, more who had retired. There were Guards and Special Branch men he drank with, who had been in those jobs a long time. And once in a while Superintendent Gregory, head of Special Branch, asked him to find something or to watch someone in a pub; occasional jobs that for some reason couldn’t be done inside the Branch. He was not quite an outsider. Asking a Special Branch man about Josie Kilmartin over a drink wasn’t so strange. He could pretend she was a woman he was suspicious of, in terms of Republican activities that might interest Terry Gregory. But moving from that to asking about disappearances in the Civil War was different. It was stretching things to say the head of Special Branch owed him a favour, but if there were some simple facts, if there was a way to find something about how Eamon Kilmartin and Brendan Davey disappeared, maybe Superintendent Gregory would help. Maybe, at least, he wouldn’t stand in the way.

He started slowly, with the neat, typed notes Josie Kilmartin gave him. Her brother Eamon had joined the Fianna, the Republican youth wing, late in 1920. The War of Independence was almost over. The truce with Britain came suddenly; then the Treaty that gave Ireland only a kind of freedom. And when another war came, between those who accepted the Treaty and those who accepted nothi. . .