Free The City of Strangers by Michael Russell Page B

to America. It was a wonder that no one could have dreamt of, even a few years ago. There were photographs of the planes, gigantic yet graceful; a great, wide, heavy wing of engines and propellers, with the sleek lines of a ship hanging underneath, cutting down into the waters of the River Shannon as they landed at Foynes. There were men in the navy-like uniforms of Pan American Airways and Imperial Airways, names that on their own conjured up for Tom all the vastness of the earth. There was a map that showed the route the flying boats would take, from Southampton Water on the English Channel across England and Wales, across the Irish sea and all of Ireland to Foynes on the Shannon Estuary; from Foynes over the whole of the North Atlantic, the longest, barely imaginable leg of the journey, to Botwood in Newfoundland; then across the Gulf of St Lawrence and down through Canada and New England to New York, the city of skyscrapers that Tom had only seen in newsreels; a city that felt like it was on another planet.
    The atlas was pulled out to join the cuttings, and for more than an hour the farmhouse on the western edge of the Wicklow Mountains was open to the skies and the oceans and a light that seemed to shine on all the distance in the tiny maps and make it almost tangible. David and Helena too were swept up in the adventure that filled their grandson’s head, and when Tom finally went up to bed he had exhausted them all with his excitement. He felt as if he was going too.
    For a moment even Tom’s father had forgotten that the man he was going to bring back from New York, on the return leg of that great adventure, might be coming home to meet the English hangman.
    And the hangman was still English. Despite the fact that two years earlier, in Éamon de Valera’s new constitution, the Irish Free State had officially been renamed Éire, Ireland, and that it considered itself now, for all practical purposes, a republic, there was still one job no Irishman would ever be asked to do in Ireland. So when that job did need doing it was the English hangman, Thomas Pierrepoint, who took the boat train from Euston, the mail boat from Holyhead, and a taxi from Dún Laoghaire to Mountjoy Prison.
    Stefan was thinking about what his journey meant now, as his mother and father washed up. He folded up his son’s newspaper cuttings and put them away in the Cadbury’s chocolate box that had a picture of a flying boat pasted on it; he closed the box and put it aside to go back to Tom’s room.
    As he returned to the kitchen the telephone rang. It was Valerie Lessingham, her voice bright as always, pushing away what was in his mind.
    ‘Stefan, I only got a bit of what you said. How long are you away?’
    ‘It’s not even a week.’
    ‘I have to be in Dublin tomorrow. So I’m going up there anyway. I thought I might drive you. You said you’d be staying the night. I could too.’
    In a relationship that largely revolved around their children, the time Stefan and Valerie had actually spent alone together didn’t amount to much. When the chance did arise, Valerie dealt with it simply enough. Where Stefan approached it all with caution, she just got on with it.
    He laughed. ‘Well, I suppose if you’re going anyway.’
    It was unlikely she had been going anyway but, like the practical woman she was, there would, naturally, be things she had to do in Dublin.
    As he walked back into the kitchen the last dishes were being dried and put away. His father and mother looked round. In a household where the telephone was still a novelty, an explanation was always expected. Stefan would rather it hadn’t been expected right now. It was an area of his life where the less said, especially as far as his mother was concerned, the better.
    ‘Valerie Lessingham’s got to be in Dublin tomorrow. She’s going to give me a lift up.’
    David Gillespie nodded and turned to put a cup in the press. Helena’s pursed lips told another story. Open skies