Free Echoland by Joe Joyce

go off about family business at the drop of a hat. Not that that argument would have cut any ice with Timmy. Family business was national business to him. Why, he wondered, didn’t Timmy want him to come into Leinster House today when he wanted to parade him around there yesterday?
    He sighed and went back to the Harbusch file. The British thought Harbusch moved to Ireland in July 1939 because he saw the war coming and didn’t want to be executed as a spy. Even though they seemed to have no hard evidence that he was spying. At the very least, they would have interned him as an enemy alien. So was his, and Eliza’s, move to Dublin just to save their own skins? Duggan wondered . She could’ve been interned too in England for her fascist sympathies , whether they were political or sexual; Mosley himself had just been locked up. Or was Hans acting under Abwehr orders?
    He flicked quickly through the surveillance reports on the couplesince their arrival in Ireland. They were mainly a collection of negatives ; they didn’t go near the German legation, didn’t go to any of the depleted German community’s functions in the Gresham Hotel, didn’t mix with the Irish German Friendship Society in the Red Bank restaurant. A report of a surreptitious search of their flat caught his attention. The Special Branch had broken in when the couple were on one of their rare outings but had found nothing incriminating. No transmitters, no code books, only some German novels and English romantic ones. Duggan wondered if Gifford had been on the search.
    He flicked forward to copies of letters from a woman in Holland, addressed to Hans care of a shop in Westland Row. A Special Branch report noted that the shopkeeper had been questioned and was cooperating , tipping them off when letters arrived, delaying their delivery to Hans. ‘I remember with passion our last night of love,’ Duggan read at random from one, its English slightly off key. ‘God willing it will not be long before we do it again and I can still your trembling body with the caress of mine.’ Jesus, Duggan thought, I don’t understand any of this. Why was Hans getting love letters from another woman? In English from a non-English speaker? Using a different address meant he didn’t want Eliza to know about her. Or was it all some kind of elaborate setup? For what?
    He put a slip of paper in the file to mark where he had finished reading, left the office half expecting someone to ask him where he was going but nobody did. He got on his bicycle and sped down the hill to the quays and headed for the city centre. There was hardly any traffic and he kept up the initial momentum, cycling fast and enjoying the exercise, letting it clear his head of all the mysteries it was accumulating. The setting sun was just above a bank of cloud rising from the western horizon and cast a long shadow ahead of him. Beside him, the Liffey was now running faster to the sea as the tide ebbed, hurrying under the bridges as their pillars narrowed its path.Over the sounds of the still evening he became aware of a droning noise, growing steadily. He looked up but couldn’t see the aircraft anywhere; it sounded like a couple of them. It stopped growing louder and began to fade. Probably out over the sea, he thought.
    He left his bicycle at the railings in front of Buswell’s Hotel, a couple of Georgian houses knocked into one inside. He climbed the steps and glanced over at Leinster House. There were a handful of cars parked inside the railings, on either side of the incongruous statue of a lugubrious Queen Victoria. ‘Should’ve been blown up years ago,’ Timmy would shake his head regularly. But blowing it up would’ve broken every window in Leinster House, the National Library and the National Museum. At the very least.
    Timmy was in the bar, holding court with a circle of cronies, all laughing too loudly at some banter. ‘I must talk to this man here,’ Timmy slapped one of them on the back