The Blood Dimmed Tide Read online

  I rolled to the side and tried to clamber back down the tunnel but the figures cut off my only escape route. In the pale light, I saw Inspector Grimes’ face bending over me, his inquisitive eyes examining me closely. He wore his uniform but he seemed larger, swollen with menace, like one of the floating barrels. More figures slipped out of the darkness and crowded around him. They weren’t wearing their police uniforms, but I recognised most of them. The only person I didn’t see was Wolfe Marley.

  ‘Welcome to my crypt, Mr Adams,’ said Grimes, his bulk crowding out the light, his gun so close to me I could smell its oiled metal casing.

  ‘An insatiable curiosity mixed with a death wish, that’s the fatal flaw with you ghost-catchers,’ he said. ‘You must have known that by coming here tonight you would risk everything, including your life, but foolishly you had to see for yourself.’

  I scrabbled against the wall, searching for a stone or a piece of bone, but it was pointless trying to resist. I was a panicked amateur surrounded by a gang of professional criminals.

  ‘All you had to do was take my advice and stay away from Blind Sound. You could have left Sligo at any time, but you didn’t and now you’re going to pay the price.’

  ‘The same advice you gave to Captain Oates.’

  Grimes did not blink. It was like talking to a statue. ‘So have you figured it out yet?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The puzzle.’

  ‘What puzzle?’

  ‘Why the body of a nineteen-year-old rebel was found washed ashore in a coffin from the last century?’

  ‘Puzzles are always easy when you know the answer.’

  Two of the men pitched towards me and snapped back my arms, forcing me to arch my neck. Under Grimes’ instructions, they began binding me with tight ropes.

  ‘Your problem is that you approached the mystery with too many assumptions and preconceptions. You believed that Rosemary died because of some complicated ritual or bizarre accident, but the answer was much simpler than that. We killed her because she discovered our secret smuggling tunnels. We placed her body in a coffin for the same reason every corpse is placed in a coffin, to bury it and put it beyond sight forever. Obvious isn’t it? End of puzzle.’

  ‘So why did the coffin wash ashore?’

  ‘The solution to that question lies in the nature of the sea.’ He surveyed the human remains embedded in the tunnel walls. ‘I see you’ve been making yourself at home in the stranger’s bank.’

  ‘What is this place? Some sort of burial ground?’ My hands, tied behind my back, groped at fistfuls of dirt but were unable to throw them. Grimes circled and paced around me, like a predator waiting its moment to spring forward.

  ‘The ground around us was used during the last century to bury unidentified bodies washed up on the beach. Disasters at sea, sailors and fishermen washed overboard, suicides swept away by rivers. Because their Christian names weren’t known, the unfortunate souls couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. Over the decades, the sea has eroded these tunnels into the bank, and carried away parts of the graveyard. The night we killed Rosemary we came across a coffin that was intact and decided it was the best hiding place for her corpse. We buried the coffin back into the tunnel wall, as deeply as we could. We assumed that if the coffin was ever found it would be simply buried again, no questions asked. After all, the unknown dead command no one’s attention. We hadn’t counted on a sea storm eroding the wall and washing the coffin from its resting place right before the prying eyes of Captain Oates.’

  ‘What about the swimmers with ropes?’

  ‘Have you ever stopped to consider how difficult the business of smuggling is? The sea is the worst criminal of all. I wrecked several yachts along this coast not to mention the loss of countless barrels of merchandise. I discovered the only safe way to bring in the contraband was to have swimmers tow the barrels in on a rope. Even then, I lose a third of my bounty. The tide that rises through these tunnels has sucked away a fortune in brandy.’ He crouched in front of me like a dog about to bare its fangs. His men drew closer, bristling with violence.

  ‘You’re no longer a policeman,’ I accused him. ‘You’re a smuggler and a murderer.’

  My words were cut off by an oil rag stuffed into my mouth, which forced my tongue down my throat. I gagged as someone pulled a sack over my head. The smell of oil stung my eyes and made my breathing laboured.

  ‘Unfortunately for you, we can’t stop now,’ said his voice, the only firm thing in the darkness. ‘This is our prime time, our window of opportunity. What do you think will happen when the insurrectionists rise up and overthrow British Rule? What will happen to the Irish Constabulary then? Where will we go? The War Office will abandon us to our fates in a country run by priests and peasants. The contents of these barrels are our pension, our security against a hostile future.’

  I writhed against my captors. I kicked back with my legs and struck my head against a sharp rock. Then everything went black.

  When I returned to consciousness, I found myself trapped in a tiny cavity with only enough space for my curled up body. I held my breath and wriggled my shoulders, and the tiny cavity swung into motion, rocking back and forth. I was floating in some sort of barrel or tub. I called out but no one answered. I listened to the slow-paced sound of waves washing against the sides, solitary as the tolling of a bell, and lay still waiting for God only knew what.

  25

  Queen of Cups

  YEATS was unable to remember for how long, how many hours or days he had spent in the hotel bedroom, recovering from his illness. His mind floated away from his body and wandered through the dirty side streets of Sligo town and out to vantage points along the wild coast. He spied the wreckage of great estates, laurel and clematis running with abandon across the once flourishing gardens. He saw unbridled horses galloping across dawn-bleached beaches, young women full of anger and longing sinking into the deathless foam. He watched as phantoms that could neither touch nor hear nor see led him through secret tunnels of churning water to the dreaded gateway between this world and the next.

  His mind drifted in and out of sleep. A weary tenacity swept him on like a swimmer too weak to fight the current. His mind flitted through the events of the past month, sorting through the countless gestures and expressions he had observed. He kept imagining himself returning exhausted through the deserted streets of Sligo, to find Georgie waiting for him like a guard at the threshold of a darkened room, her arms crossed, a frown on her lips. A powerful wind rushed through his mind and the room filled with fluttering pages. ‘Whose wings are these?’ she asked. But it was only the inescapable pages, falling and rising between them, pages crowded with words, smudged and urgent and full of wretched spelling mistakes, pages like the state of his mind, bursting with rage and frustration.

  When he switched on the bedside lamp and sat up in bed, he could still see her face and page upon page of her writing flash before his half-closed eyes like flickering images from a magic lantern. He was so agitated he could not sleep, and his eyes, desperate to go on searching for the meaning behind the words, left his weakened body and floated down into an abyss of lurking terrors, half-human beasts, unborn children and screaming birds, all whirling in a gyre beneath a stormy sky that resembled a monstrous black rose.

  Later in the night, he was aware of Georgie slipping quietly into the bedroom. The dark illuminations of his mind had vanished, leaving him with the sobering realisation that it was not the spirit world that had dragged him back to Sligo, but the influence of a more mortal hand. Someone a lot closer to home. With this insight, he felt the silver cords binding him to the ghost of Rosemary O’Grady fall away one by one. The letter addressed to him was a piece of pure fiction. A fragment of ridiculous fantasy.

  He could see the motivation behind it, now. At one stroke, the letter-writer had swept him out of reach of the Zeppelin bombers, as
well as the clutches of Gonne’s daughter Iseult and the entire London literary and spiritualist scene. She had cleverly whetted his appetite for spiritual investigation as well as pulling on his emotional heartstrings. She had manipulated him completely.

  All his feelings of insecurity about his marriage resurrected themselves. How little he had learned about life in his fifty-two years, to allow a twenty-five-year-old woman to deceive him on so many levels. But then, he thought, modern women mature much more quickly than their male counterparts. Georgie might not spend sleepless nights pondering metaphysical problems, but the light of wisdom shone clearly from her face. Perhaps life would be much easier if he simply allowed himself to be guided by that light.

  He broke the silence. ‘My ghost-catcher tells me there are no ghosts, Georgie. Just you and me.’

  A load fell from his shoulders immediately, and he decided to show all his cards when she didn’t reply. ‘It was you that sent me Rosemary’s letter, wasn’t it?’

  He felt her stiffen. Clearly this was the question she least wanted to hear. She had been counting on his natural discretion to prevent him ever mentioning the subject.

  ‘Please don’t talk,’ she urged him. ‘You’ll tire yourself out. I can see the colour has completely left your cheeks.’

  He savoured the small victory her response had delivered. Minutes before, he had been filled with the insecurity of a husband confronted by a woman who was more like a stranger than a wife. For her part, Georgie seemed to grow more vulnerable. She fidgeted distractedly with the edge of the blanket, the colour rising to her cheeks. For a moment, he feared he might have pushed her too far.

  ‘Is this what you’ve been thinking about during your fever?’ She talked as if she was trying to gain time.

  ‘Yes.’

  They both sat in bed, saying nothing for a while. They listened to the wind blowing fiercely against the window pane. Somehow the remorseless wind was reason enough for them to continue lying together.

  ‘I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done,’ she said in a calm voice. ‘I was working to save my marriage.’

  ‘Is that meant to make me feel ashamed? Are you suggesting I am the one to blame for this tower of deceit?’ Any sense of satisfaction he had felt suddenly vanished. ‘If your aim is to shame me to make yourself feel better, then you are wasting your time.’

  ‘I wasn’t the only one who deceived you.’

  ‘Who else then? Who else had a hand in this mess of lies?’ He thought of Maud Gonne, Iseult, Charles Adams, the other members of the Golden Dawn.

  ‘You deceived yourself.’ She waited for him to absorb what she had said. ‘But don’t you see how necessary it all was? You merited a great lie, one designed to bring you back to Sligo, where your country and its people need you.’

  ‘And what about the automatic writing? Is that a complete fabrication, too?’

  ‘After we were married, you wouldn’t speak to me. You threw yourself into your books and letter-writing. I had to express myself somehow.’

  ‘By all means, a woman should express herself.’

  ‘But you made it impossible. Your ghosts and your past loves oppressed me. Marriage oppressed me. I was in dread of losing my identity. I needed some form of expression.’

  ‘You should have articulated yourself in verse or prose. Kept your feelings on record, if only for ourselves.’

  ‘I was afraid of your criticism.’

  ‘I would have understood.’

  ‘No. It is so different for you. You had the good fortune to be born a man. You have the automatic freedom to express yourself, without taboos. You can write whatever you want to write, say whatever you want to say. When you married me, I became the wife of a great poet. I was voiceless, a new bride trapped in a roomful of old ghosts. No wonder then, that I made them speak for me.’

  Yeats sank his head back on the pillow, and stared at the ceiling with the look of a man watching his cherished dreams dissolve like mist into the darkness. How easy it is to be deluded by the wonders of the imagination, he thought to himself. He pulled the sheet up to his chin and closed his eyes. He was aware of Georgie settling down beside him, following the same sequence of movements as every other night, smoothing the bed sheet and plumping up her pillow, loosening her dark hair and placing the pins on the bedside table. He felt her seek out the familiar hollow of her pillow. Neither of them spoke for what seemed a long time.

  ‘Willie?’ She reached out to him suddenly.

  ‘Yes?’ He held her hand.

  ‘Am I demented?’

  ‘No more than any other human, I would say.’

  They lay side by side, holding each other, until the drifting irrationality of their waking life dissolved into the cold sanity of sleep.

  26

  Page of Cups

  GRIMES followed his men back up the tunnel, reluctant to leave, a man contentedly reflecting upon the end of another dangerous but profitable mission. It had been a good night’s smuggling rounded off with a satisfactory conclusion to the problems caused by the prying Englishman. He recalled the pathetic sight of Adams’ limp body as he was sealed inside the barrel, deriving a grim amusement from the watery fate that awaited him. He stopped suddenly, and crouched low in the tunnel. The sight of a strange light drifting against the cave wall had interrupted his self-congratulatory thoughts.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked one of his men. ‘Some sort of signal?’

  Grimes snuffed out his lamp with his fingers and ordered his men to do the same. They waited as the light grew closer. A figure in plain clothes was illuminated. A man with a black cap and a long belted raincoat approached them. It was Marley, looking disappointed, as though he’d arrived too late at a much anticipated sporting contest. He was surrounded by other men in plainclothes, more British agents. They gathered around the smugglers quietly.

  ‘Where is our ghost-catcher?’

  ‘Floating out to sea.’

  ‘Like Captain Oates?’

  ‘Yes. He’s found what he came looking for. His trip to Ireland is complete.’

  ‘That is disappointing. I had hoped he would experience the full effects of the British justice system in this troubled land.’

  The cave walls sighed with the echo of a wave rippling in from the sea.

  ‘What do you want?’ Grimes’ eyes glittered.

  ‘One less murder. I want to take Adams to Sligo gaol where he will face a summary trial for treason.’

  If Grimes was surprised, he did not show it in his voice.

  ‘What do I get in return?’

  ‘The address of a house.’

  ‘Whose house?’

  ‘Maud Gonne and the Daughters of Erin.’

  I lingered in a suspended state of shock, between amnesia and agony, shaking with the coldness of the water that leaked through the barrel’s cracks, tossing and turning within its creaking walls like a man falling a long way. The more I moved, the more the barrel rolled with the waves so that it felt as though I was floating far out to sea, but I could still hear the reassuring hiss of surf pounding upon a nearby beach. The water was stingingly salty, rising all the time around my cramped body, and I fought hard to find a breathing space. As each moment passed, it took more and more effort and concentration to get a breath. I was struggling to keep my chin out of the water when, above the grating of the barrel against the rocks, I heard what sounded like a commotion, voices shouting from somewhere nearby.

  A muffled sound and a shaft of piercing daylight from above told me that someone had opened the barrel lid. I twisted round and fell through the opening into the sea, my arms still tied behind my back. A trail of air bubbles exploded from my mouth as I went under. Then a hand came through the water and pulled me by the neck back to the surface. More hands joined in, dragging me onto the beach. The hood fell off me, but I was so busy struggling for each wre
tched breath that I could not identify who my saviours were.

  When I had finished coughing up seawater, I found myself lying on a flat beach under a calm sky. The sea was an expanse of unruffled blue, so silky it seemed composed of air rather than water. Waves rose and fell with the faintest of slaps upon the beach. Marley stood over my drenched body as though I was the reluctant subject of a complicated water ritual.

  ‘I hate to dash your spirits Mr Adams, but I’m not the rescue party you’d hoped for.’ His face looked genuinely sorrowful as he produced a pair of handcuffs. ‘I’ve waited a month for this opportunity.’

  ‘You could wait a while longer,’ I replied, rising to a sitting position, my body still shaking from the cold water.

  ‘It’s too late for you. I’ve come across men like you before, never knowing how deeply in the mire they’re stuck.’

  Grimes and his men stood behind him like a group of harmless spectators, as though there had been no violence that morning, as though they were out for a gentle stroll on the beach.

  ‘You knew about the smuggling, too?’

  ‘Better than that. I helped orchestrate it. Why wait for a conspiracy to be hatched when you can create one yourself? I work for the British Admiralty. We spy on everyone, including the Irish Constabulary. We’ve known about the smuggling for some time, but we’ve tolerated it, even encouraged it, because it helps us achieve our aims.’

  ‘Which are what? To break the law and murder innocent people.’

  ‘To weed out misfits and troublemakers like yourself. Like Rosemary O’Grady and Captain Oates. In the greater terms of war and peace, smuggling alcohol and tea is acceptable, but smuggling weapons and plotting a rebellion is not. Which is why we tolerate Inspector Grimes’ little hobby.’