Free Betrayal by J. Robert Janes

and hastily eaten on the road home but enjoyed … yes, enjoyed, crumbs and things dribbling down her chin in spite of feelings of guilt, of starving, war-torn children, and then a few shortbreads—had she been eating for two, or simply because she’d been so darned scared?
    In a rush, she surfaced, gasping for air as the water coursed off her. She had wanted to see Parker O’Shane at his farm. Wizened, bent, thin and with a sharply pinched face, Parker’s skin had the look of oak tannin. Bound leather was always at the knees of his trousers and down over the laces of his boots, not canvas there for him, the pipe clenched and the scythe going with the rhythm of the centuries. ‘A cutting of the hay it is, missus,’ he’d always say. ‘And you like the blush of an April morn. Them cows of mine be powerful eaters.’
    Parker was Mrs. Haney’s half-brother, so he had the inside track on herself both ways and yet they had a common bond they could explore and enjoy. A trade-off she had welcomed, thereby having gained his respect, a rare thing for an Irishman and not given lightly to an outsider, especially not in these troubled times.
    But she couldn’t have gone to see him today. Parker would have noticed the burs and weed seeds that still clung to her clothes, the mud on her shoes. He would have known she hadn’t just been ‘out and about’ but precisely where she’d been, and if not by those, then by the look in her eyes.
    Again she tried to let the warmth sooth her, but Mrs. Haney would hear the silence, for the bath was directly above the kitchen range, the woman wondering at it, for a body ought to be scrubbing a body’s skin to ‘murder and Creation’ with the bristles of a murderous brush.
    Carefully budgeting the prewar glycerine soap, she did a thorough job of it, and always there was the blessed relief of gurgling water as it ran away and took its time, giving some few moments of privacy.
    They had her right where they wanted. She couldn’t go to the police or to Jimmy Allanby—Hamish’s life had not only been threatened, he’d be ruined, devastated.
    Everything came back in a rush, the Darcy woman, Liam Nolan and Kevin … Would Parker let slip that one’s last name if she was careful—had she stooped so low as to use the only friend she had apart from Hamish? Was Hamish really what she should call a friend? It had been ages since they’d been away together. They’d once been very much in love. It had been good, hadn’t it?
    But then Erich had come between them and the war, the castle and Hamish never refusing to help others when needed.
    There were stacks and stacks of books in with all the rest of his things. Dickens, Dumas and Kant—she had to find something big enough. Balzac … Mark Twain … Moliere, Tolstoy, Burns, Darwin, Kant again and such a jumble. It couldn’t be a favourite. He had such a mind for his books, such a memory …
    The Thackeray, then. The Virginians , an illustrated copy.
    Even as she touched its red leather binding, intuition told her to leave it, but having come this far and needing it, there was no turning back.
    Upstairs, in her room, she cut out almost the whole of the inside of the book before jamming the revolver into the gap. The gun just fit, even its cylinder, but the muzzle did cause a slight bulge in the top of the pages when the book was closed.
    Burning the scraps in the grate, she took some string and bound four others with it: a Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask ;Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer ; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , in the original German; then the Thackeray; and lastly the Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities .
    She would leave the bundle on the floor beside her desk with all the others she had prepared. Each was of five, six or seven books, so as to always have something.
    They let her into the castle on Friday at just after 2.00 p.m. From