The Savage Day - Jack Higgins [18]
I said, 'Remember what you were saying about my uncle coming out of the schoolhouse so the children wouldn't be harmed, to shoot it out with the Tans like a man?'
He turned to me with a frown. 'So what?'
I said gently, 'Times have changed, haven't they, Binnie?'
He stood up, walked over to the other side of the room and sat down with his back to me.
I suppose it must have been all of two hours before there was a knock at the door. They all had a gun out on the instant, including Binnie, and waited while the old lady went to the door. Norah Murphy came into the kitchen. She paused, her eyes narrowing as she recognized Lucas, then she placed her case on the table.
'I'd love a cup of tea, Ma,' she said in Irish as Mrs Kelly followed her in.
She was as crisp and incisive as she had been at our first meeting. It was as if nothing had happened in between at all and yet the skirts of her trenchcoat were stained with blood. I wondered if anything would ever really touch her.
Binnie said, 'What happened?'
'I helped out till the ambulances arrived.'
'How many were killed?' Lucas demanded.
'Five,' she said and turned to me. 'I'll have that cigarette now, Major.'
'And soldiers?' Young Riley leaned on the table with both hands, his eyes wilder than ever. 'How many soldiers?'
Norah Murphy turned from the match I held for her and blew out a long column of smoke.
'And who might you be?' she enquired.
'Dennis Riley, ma'am,' he said in a low voice.
'Well then, Dennis Riley, you really will have to put in some practice before your next free show. The score this time was a mother and her two children and a couple of eighteen-year-olds who'd just got engaged. No soldiers, I'm afraid.'
Riley collapsed into a chair and Binnie said quietly, 'The little girl - she died, then?'
'I'm afraid so.'
He turned to Lucas and Riley and the look on his face was the same look I had seen in the pub earlier when he had confronted the hooligans.
'Women and kids now, is it?' He kicked the table over, the Browning was in his hand by a kind of magic. 'You bloody bastards, here's for the two of you.'
Norah Murphy had his arm up as he fired, a bullet ploughing through the ceiling. She slapped him across the cheek. He turned, a strange, dazed look on his face, and she grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him as one might shake a recalcitrant child.
'What's done is done, Binnie. Quarrelling like this amongst ourselves won't help now.'
Lucas stood with his back against the wall, the Schmeisser ready, no more than a hairs-breadth away from cutting loose with it. Riley scrabbled on the floor at his feet for the Webley which he had lost when the table went over.
'Better to move on from here,' Norah Murphy said. 'All of us and the sooner the better. Someone might have heard that shot.' She turned to Mrs Kelly. 'I'm sorry, Ma.'
The old woman smiled and touched her face. I said, 'How are we going to work it?'
She shrugged. 'We'll have to split up, naturally. Better to take your chances on your own, Major. Did you notice a footbridge over the canal on your way here?'
'I did.'
'Cross over, take the towpath for a couple of hundred yards and a narrow passageway brings you into Delph Lane. Half a mile along that and you'll be in the centre of the city.'
'Why in the hell should he go first?' Lucas demanded.
She totally ignored him and said to Binnie. 'We ought to leave separately. It would be the sensible thing.'
'And how would I explain the loss of his niece to Michael Cork if anything happened to you?'
Which was an interesting disclosure. She actually smiled for him, then turned to me. 'Off you go, then, Major.'
The old woman went out ahead of me. I turned in the doorway. 'Up the Republic,' I said. 'Right up!' Then I closed the door gently and moved along the passage.
Mrs Kelly had the door open, and beyond in the yard rain fell in a silver curtain through the lamplight.
I turned up my collar. 'Thanks for everything.'
There was a strangely uncertain look to her, a slight frown on her face as if there was something here