He looked up at Stoker. “Why these?” he asked. “This case is old, it’s finished.”
“The Irish troubles are never finished,” Stoker said simply.
“Our more urgent problem is here now,” Narraway replied. “And possibly in Europe.”
“Socialists?” Stoker said drily. “They’re always grumbling on.”
“It’s a lot more than that,” Narraway told him. “They’re fanatic. It’s the new religion, with all the fire and evangelism of a holy cause. And just like Christianity in its infancy, it has its apostles and its dogma—and its splinter groups, quarrels over what is the true faith.”
Stoker looked puzzled, as if this were all true but irrelevant.
“The point,” Narraway said sharply, “is that they each consider the others to be heretics. They fight one another as much as they fight anyone else.”
“Thank God,” Stoker said with feeling.
“So when we see disciples of different factions meeting in secret, working together, then we know it is something damn big that has patched the rifts, temporarily.” Narraway heard the edge in his own voice, and saw the sudden understanding in Stoker’s eyes.
Stoker let out his breath slowly.
“How close are we to knowing what they’re planning, sir?”
“I don’t know,” Narraway admitted. “It all rests on Pitt now.”
“And you,” Stoker said softly. “We’ve got to sort this money thing out, sir, and get you back.”
Narraway drew in his breath to answer, and felt a sudden wave of conviction, a helplessness, a loss, an awareness of fear so profound that no words were adequate.
Stoker held out the papers he had brought. “We can’t afford to wait,” he said urgently. “I looked through everything I could that had to do with informants, money, and Ireland, trying to work out who’s behind this. This case seemed the most likely. Also, I’m pretty sure someone else has had these papers out recently.”
“Why?”
“Just the way they were put back,” Stoker answered.
“Untidy?”
“No, the opposite. Very neat indeed.”
Now Narraway was afraid for Stoker. He would lose his job for this; indeed, if he were caught, he could even be charged with treason himself. Regardless, he wanted to read the pages, but not with Stoker present. If this were the act of personal loyalty it seemed, or even loyalty to the truth, he did not want Stoker to take such a risk. It would be better for both of them not to be caught.
“Where did you get them?” he asked.
Stoker looked at him with a very slight smile. “Better you don’t know, sir.”
Narraway smiled back. “Then I can’t tell,” he agreed wryly.
Stoker nodded. “That too, sir.”
There was something about Stoker calling him sir that was stupidly pleasing, as if he were still who he had been this morning. Did he value such respect so much? How pathetic!
He swallowed hard and drew in his breath. “Leave them with me. Go home, where everyone expects you to be. Come back for them when it’s safe.”
“Sorry, sir, but they have to be back by dawn,” Stoker replied. “In fact, the sooner the better.”
“It will take me all night to read these and make my own notes,” Narraway argued, knowing even as he said it that Stoker was right. To have them absent from Lisson Grove, even for one day, was too dangerous. Then they could never be returned. Anyone with two wits to rub together would look to Narraway for them, and then to whoever had brought them to him. He had no right to jeopardize Stoker’s life with such stupidity.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll have them read before dawn. Three o’clock. You can return then and I’ll give them to you. You can be at the Grove before light, and away again. Or you can go and sleep in my spare room, if you prefer. It would be wiser. No chance then of being caught in the street.”
Stoker did not move.
“I’ll stay here, sir. I’m pretty good at not being seen, but no risk at all is better. Wouldn’t do if I couldn’t get back.”
Narraway nodded. “Up the stairs, across the landing to the left,” he said aloud. “Help yourself to anything you need.”
Stoker thanked him and left, closing the door softly.
Narraway turned up the gas a little more brightly, then sat down in the big armchair by the fireplace and began to read.
The first few pages were about the Mulhare case: the fact that a large sum of money had been promised to Mulhare if he cooperated. It was paid not as reward so much as a means for him to leave Ireland and go—not as might be expected, to America, but to Southern France, a less likely place for his enemies to seek him.
As Narraway was painfully aware, Mulhare had not received the money. Instead he had remained in Ireland and been killed. Narraway still did not know exactly what had gone wrong. He had arranged the money, passed it through one of his own accounts. It had been kept in a different name so that it could not be traced back to him, and thus to Special Branch.
But now, inexplicably, it had reappeared.
The papers Stoker had brought referred to a twenty-year-old case that Narraway would like to have forgotten. It was at a time when the passion and the violence were even higher than usual.
Charles Stewart Parnell had just been elected to Parliament. He was a man of fire and eloquence, a highly active member in the council of the Irish Home Rule League, and everything in his life was dedicated to that cause. Indeed, if he’d had his way, Ireland might at last throw off the yoke of domination and govern itself again. The horrors of the great potato famine could be put behind them. Freedom beckoned.
Of course 1875 was before Narraway had become head of Special Branch. He was simply an agent in the field at that time, in his mid-thirties; wiry, strong, quick thinking, and with considerable charm. With his black hair and eyes, and his dry wit, he could easily have passed for an Irishman himself. When that assumption was made, as it often was, he did not deny it.
One of the leaders of the Irish cause then had been a man called Cormac O’Neil. He had a dark, brooding nature, like an autumn landscape, full of sudden shadows, storms on the horizon. He loved history, especially that handed down by word of mouth or immortalized in old songs. He was a man built to yearn for what he could not have.
Narraway thought of that wryly, remembering still with regret and guilt Cormac’s brother Sean, and more vividly Kate. Beautiful Kate, so fiercely alive, so brave, so quick to see reason, so blind to the wounded and dangerous emotions of others.
In the silence of this comfortable London room with its very English mementos, Ireland seemed like the other side of the world. Kate was dead; so was Sean. Narraway had won, and their planned uprising had failed without bloodshed on either side.
Even Charles Stewart Parnell was dead now, just three and a half years ago, October 1891, of a heart attack.
And Home Rule for Ireland was still only a dream, and the anger remained.
Narraway shivered here in his warm, familiar sitting room with the last of the embers still glowing, the pictures of trees on the wall, and the gas lamp shedding a golden light around him. The chill was inside, beyond the reach of any physical ease, perhaps of any words either, any thoughts or regrets now.
Was Cormac O’Neil still alive? There was no reason why he should not be. He would barely be sixty, perhaps less. If he were, he could be the one behind this. God knew, after the failed uprising and Sean’s and Kate’s deaths, he had cause enough to hate Narraway, more than any other man on earth.
But why wait twenty years to do it? Narraway could have died of an accident or of natural causes anytime between then and now, and robbed the man of his revenge.
Could something have prevented him in the meantime? A debilitating illness? Not twenty years long. Time in prison? Surely Narraway would have heard of anything serious enough for such a term. And even from prison there was communication.