Free Irregulars by Kevin McCarthy Page B

blesses herself as she says this, before continuing. ‘Much though it breaks my heart, always having tried to rear the boy with a proper hatred for all politics—not politicians, mind, who are grand custom for a woman of my trade, but politics, ideas. This country is full of madmen and their mad ideas, and mad ideas never did anyone a lick of good, did they? But my Nicky up and joined them. Boys … men …’ Her words ring with weary disgust. ‘If there’s a fight to be had somewhere, they’ll seek it out. Peace and profit are just not good enough for them.’
    O’Keefe groans inwardly. He wants to do right by this woman, for his father’s sake. And in the past few minutes he has felt a spark of interest that he has not felt since he left the Constabulary—the instinct of the hunt, the search, that is every policeman’s curse and blessing. But the boy could be anywhere in the country by now if he was fighting. And God knows, O’Keefe thinks, it will be hard enough scaring up a friendly contact among the Irregulars; someone who might be able to point to where the lad might be. It has been less than a year, after all, since a good number of them had been trying to kill him and his colleagues in the RIC.
    ‘How do you know he joined the Irregulars, Mrs Dolan?’
    ‘He told me. Fourteen years old, the cheek of him. And I forbade it, of course, but he’s a headstrong boy, Mr O’Keefe. He was proud as punch. Said that he was running messages and other things he couldn’t tell me. As if I’d spent years doting on him and educating him so that he could go out and join up with that army of eejits.’ Ginny Dolan’s voice cracks and she pulls a handkerchief from her dress sleeve and wipes her eyes. O’Keefe notes how the woman’s speech shifts: from the delicate and refined one moment to the courser register of the streets where she runs her business the next.
    She continues. ‘And I blame his school mostly. It was there he learned all that independence nonsense that’s about these days and even then they saw fit to throw him out. The masters there, and all their talk of the rights of man and republican heroes and independence. All well and good to a boy of fourteen until they cast him out for what his mother does for to put food in his mouth. To pay his school fees.’
    Confused, O’Keefe holds up his hand. ‘What school was it, Mrs Dolan? And why was he expelled?’
    ‘Francis Xavier’s, off North Great George’s Street. Do you know it?’
    ‘I do,’ he says, sitting up, a slight dart of optimism piercing him, something he can use in this information. ‘I went there myself. Me and my brother.’
    ‘Of course you did. Sons of a respectable policeman.’ There is bitterness in her voice now, a hardness that alerts O’Keefe to the danger a woman such as this could be. A woman of wealth like Ginny Dolan, in the trade that she plies, would not have got to where she is now in the world through kindness alone.
    ‘But my Nicky? Turfed out when someone went to the Fathers with what kind of business I run. Some little turncoat. As if my money wasn’t good enough for the mighty Jesuits and their fine school.’ She roughly stubs her cigarette in the brass ashtray, exhaling a last blast of smoke. ‘Fine and fucking dandy, Mr O’Keefe, for them Fathers teaching the sons of lawyers and bankers and … and politicians, all of them as bent as the bishop’s crozier. But the son of a straight and true upstairs girl like myself isn’t half good enough for them. As if it was Nicky’s fault what his mammy does for a shilling. I run a good and honest business, Mr O’Keefe, and don’t let any manjack tell you different. I’m good to my girls and I provide a service much needed in this city. And let me tell you, I know things about some of them holy Fathers that would curl your hair.’
    O’Keefe nods, thinking just how much one’s profession colours one’s view of the world. In this way, coppers are the same as