no idea what you’re talking about. So why are you following me?’
‘I did think you were working with Lynch.’
‘Does it look like I am?’
‘No. I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know why you arrested Hugo Keller, only to have Special Branch pull him out of a cell in Pearse Street and take him home. I don’t know who Hannah Rosen is or what she’s got to do with Keller. I don’t know why you met her today when you’ve been told, in a variety of ways I imagine, to lay off Herr Keller now. But I’d hazard a guess that Lynch is looking for something he thought you had.’
‘And is that what you’re after too, Lieutenant?’
Cavendish looked at him, saying nothing. He had been thrown into this conversation abruptly and unexpectedly. Whatever about the nonchalant smiles, he had blown what was meant to be a simple surveillance.
‘It’s not my business, Lieutenant. I don’t want to get between you and Special Branch. You’ll have important work to do, following one another round Dublin. I just arrested an abortionist when nobody wanted me to.’
‘What happened to the evidence you took out of Merrion Square?’
‘Lynch has got it.’ Stefan smiled. ‘Except for what’s missing.’
‘And what is missing?’
‘Give me a clue. I might have seen it, who knows?’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘It means it would take a lot more than a punch in the face from Jimmy Lynch’s bulldog to make me give up something worth having. So what’s your offer? You don’t look like the shite-kicking sort, Cavendish.’
The soldier didn’t reply. He was trying to get the measure of Stefan. He wasn’t sure about him. Was he joking? Was he really hiding something?
‘Look, I haven’t got it, Lieutenant. I don’t even know what it is.’
‘So what are you doing then?’ persisted Cavendish.
‘My job.’
‘And where does Keller come into your job now?’
There seemed no reason not to tell the truth. It wasn’t a secret.
‘I’m looking for a woman who disappeared earlier this year. The last thing she did was go to Merrion Square for an abortion. That makes Hugo Keller the last person who saw her, the last I know about anyway. That’s what I’m doing. So what about you? Why don’t you tell me what you and Special Branch are looking for? Did Keller keep a list of his customers?’
‘That would be some of it,’ replied the lieutenant.
‘I guess there’d have to be more to interest Special Branch?’
Cavendish’s silence gave him his answer. Then the officer smiled.
‘So what do you know about Hugo Keller, Sergeant?’
‘As a posh backstreet abortionist, he’s got some unusual friends. And he seems to generate a surprising amount of activity in unexpected places. What with Special Branch dancing round him, not to mention the director of the National Museum, who happens to be the leader of the Nazi party the Germans have set up here, and now Military Intelligence, I can’t decide whether he’s a national treasure or a threat to national security. Which is it?’
The lieutenant didn’t answer. ‘So, who is this missing woman?’
‘I doubt she’s going to be of any interest to G2 or to Special Branch. She’s just a woman no one’s seen for a long time. I’d be surprised if she’s alive. I don’t know how, or why, but that’s what I think. That’s what I was talking to Hannah Rosen about. It’s what I intend to talk to Herr Doktor Keller about, whether it goes down well with Military Intelligence, or Special Branch, or the German embassy, or my inspector or anybody else.’
‘Well, if determination was all there was to it, Sergeant –’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Adolf Mahr drove Keller to Dún Laoghaire last night and put him on the mail boat. He’ll be in London by now, I’d say on his way to Germany.’
Lieutenant Cavendish got out at Naas, where the train took the branch line that led along the River Slaney and the western edge of the Wicklow Mountains to Baltinglass. And as the train set off again Stefan Gillespie took out the letters Hannah Rosen had given him. Immediately he found himself in a world that was complex, intense and unfamiliar. Naturally enough, the letters between two old and close friends were full of epigrammatic references to people and events he could know nothing about, both in the lives they had shared in Dublin and in the lives they now led in Ireland and Palestine. As a detective he had tried to piece together the jigsaw of a stranger’s life before, but this had an intimacy that at once absorbed him and made him uncomfortable. Susan Field almost certainly wrote as she spoke. Her words tumbled over each other and took tangential, unlooked for directions, sometimes finding their way back, circuitously, to what she had started speaking about, sometimes leaving the original thought behind, never to return. Several times she made him laugh out loud – once when she described sitting in the gallery of the Adelaide Road synagogue on a Saturday morning, mesmerised by a man who had fallen asleep below, wondering how long it would be before the growing intensity of his snores would be loud enough to compete with the cantor’s recitation of a psalm; another time, when she kept patting the packet of cigarettes in her coat pocket to reassure herself that soon, very soon, she would be outside the synagogue drawing in the invigorating smoke that was all the more desirable because it was forbidden on the Sabbath. It reminded her, she wrote, of the time she and Hannah, just seventeen, tore along the South Circular Road after shul to light a cigarette in a doorway, only to meet the pious and disapproving faces of Mrs Wigoder and Mrs Noyk. He could feel the vitality of Susan Field in her breathless words; it brought him closer to the loss that consumed Hannah. It wasn’t hard. His own loss wasn’t buried very deep.
The letters were punctuated by words Stefan didn’t quite understand, but every so often there was something familiar about the closeness of a community that was both a part of the world around it and at the same time engaged in its own private rituals and habits. Catholic Ireland was a public event, but his own childhood, especially the teenage years, when his Sunday mornings still belonged to the Church of Ireland, didn’t feel very different to some of Susan Field’s memories. There was the same mix of boredom, irritation and impatience; there was the same sense of something apart. He looked out of the window, seeing the water of the Slaney for the first time, and to the east the round-topped Wicklow Mountains. He played no part in all that now. He couldn’t remember when he last sat in the church by the river in Baltinglass. Yet he still knew that what his father always said was true; it wasn’t just a more private way of looking at the world; it was about keeping your head down. His parents still did keep their heads down.
By the end of the first few letters Susan Field’s swirling narrative had moved from the past to new excitement about being at University College Dublin. He knew her better here. And he still felt the closeness between her and Hannah. There was a letter that ended with a paragraph of invective about a priest who was lecturing on medieval philosophy. He was arrogant, supercilious and never listened to what anybody else said. Fierce intelligence and blind faith. Didn’t the first mean you shouldn’t be a prisoner of the second? How could you argue with someone whose ideas admitted no doubt? In the letters that followed, her irritation with the man she started to refer to jokingly as ‘John’ was replaced by an admiration that was already about something else altogether. She had done more than find his doubts.
He came to the pub with us. I don’t know why. He never did before. I started arguing with him, mostly about how his lectures infuriated me. But he wasn’t as stuffy as the stuff he spouts. I don’t mean he doesn’t believe things I could never believe, but he was so much sharper and funnier than in college. He’s full of questions about what he believes after all. He’s obviously committed to being a priest, but he said he