Free Honourable Intentions by Gavin Lyall Page B

have been moving his lips, because O’Gilroy said: “Talking to yeself again? Bad sign, that.”
    “Had a nice refreshing sleep?”
    “Wasn’t sleeping, jest thinking.” O’Gilroy found and lit a cigarette. “That marriage, with the American sailor, it went wrong. Or mebbe the feller died a while gone.”
    Ranklin raised his eyebrows.
    “Why else would ye tell yer son his father wasn’t really his father? Either ye’ve come to hate the feller or he’s been long anough dead it don’t matter, and ye reckon ye can tell the truth – and mebbe make a bob or two out of it.”
    Ranklin thought this over and accepted it. The trouble with high-flown meetings around big tables was forgetting that behind all the national implications lay very simple human emotions. “You should have said that at the meeting.”
    But O’Gilroy just grunted. He said as little as possible at suchmeetings. Perhaps it had been his years in the ranks, perhaps the more dangerous years in the ranks of those plotting for a free Ireland, but the result was that he was the most secretive and distrusting of them all.
    If O’Gilroy got on a tram in a strange city, he already knew which door to use, how one paid, generally what to do next. Nobody had told him, he’d just watched how others did it. He simply hated being conspicuous, of giving away his ignorance or next move by asking – as Ranklin would instinctively have done. So while Ranklin’s protection was that he seemed a simple, open-faced English gentleman, O’Gilroy’s was in not being noticed at all. Neither was right nor wrong, except for himself, and essentially they were complementary. As Ranklin had once put it, they might add up to one competent spy. The hope was that nobody would expect a spy to come in two halves.
    Beyond the train’s window, a fuzz of bright green, brought out by the last few days of sunshine, was blurring the skeleton hands of the winter trees beside the track. The world was waking again, and Ranklin had felt safer when it was asleep.

6
    From Portsmouth town station they took a motor-taxi, dropping Ranklin at St Jude’s Church and taking O’Gilroy on to Abercromby Road. Ranklin hadn’t hoped to find anything more from the parish register – a marriage certificate is simply copied from that – but the vicar might still be the one whose name was on the certificate and remember more.
    After twenty-four years he wasn’t the same, of course, and his predecessor was dead. Nor was the current incumbent, who’d had a properly busy Easter, in any rush to help. His congregation included too many senior naval officers – St Jude’s was quite fashionable, by Portsmouth standards – for him to be impressed with self-important civilians.
    Ranklin’s only consolation was thinking that, if they’d swapped jobs, O’Gilroy might have ended up in custody for striking a “stupid heathen Protestant”.
    However, Ranklin kept his temper and finally the vicar commented: “Odd, this interest in that wedding. I had the lady’s sister asking earlier this week.”
    “Really? Does she live locally?”
    “No, she said she was staying at the Queen’s – a Mrs Simmons, I think.”
    Ranklin, who’d had no idea there
was
a sister, was afire to be off, but now the vicar had melted to his politeness and held him for a five-minute lecture on the care of the vicarage lawn.
    O’Gilroy was loitering on the pavement, wearing a rather papist expression.
    “Nothing on the wedding,” Ranklin said, “except that Enid Langhorn’s sister was asking about it a day or two back.”
    “Mrs Simmons? She was asking at Abercromby Road, too. Staying at the Queen’s Hotel.”
    “Right, then . . .” He looked at his watch. “No, time’s getting on. You get round to the Town Hall and see if there’s any trace of the women witnesses.”
    “Enjoy yer tea,” O’Gilroy said sourly.
    “If she’s left, I’ll see you at the Town Hall.”
    But luckily she hadn’t. She sent down a