TWO

Lily Merrin, a typist employed by the British intelligence service, stood on the stone-flagged floor of First Section’s archive in the cellars of Dublin Castle. The building was the nerve centre of Britain’s colonial and military bureaucracy in Ireland, a fortified mass of granite stonework comprising a central block, a barracks and a rat-infested prison famous for its executions. She peered through the keyhole into the corridor, waited, paced up and down, waited, and then, as soon as the guard walked off, she flung open the door andran down a darkly coiled staircase into a side courtyard visible only through the barred windows of the prisoners’ cells. She would have preferred rain or blinding snow, anything that might have concealed her passage out of the castle and through the streets, but that afternoon the weather was dauntingly bright for December. Exiting through a door in the Liffey side of the outer wall, she could see, in the distance, a cordon of policemen blocking the monumental gateway to the castle, and the dark figure of a man in a long coat and riding boots leering at the queue of office girls being searched at gunpoint.

For a moment, she was at a loss what to do. She contemplated creeping back and returning the files, which she had secretly removed from the dusty stacks of the intelligence archive and hidden beneath her coat. The long shadows cast by the winter sun made the fortress seem more sepulchral than it was in reality, the windows and entrances eerily deep and dark. Its gloom seemed to reach out towards her like a pair of possessive hands eager to take back its secret knowledge.

She knew there was no way back now, and that sheshould hurry with her familiar lunchtime routine. The less energy and time she expended worrying about the dangers of what she had undertaken, the better for all concerned. The consequences of not carrying out the mission were so dire for her son, she could not jeopardise his safety by losing her nerve now. In any case, the guard might have returned to the archive section, removing any chance of safely replacing the files.

The heavy-set policemen worked their way through the queue of staff and visitors. She heard the rumble of their broad Ulster accents as they shouted out orders. They were predictable and concentrated in their efforts, like hunting dogs sniffing at every hole in the ground. She could tell that it was not a routine search from the nervous expressions of the workers and the behaviour of the man in the riding boots, whose presence, as he circled the policemen, had the effect of galvanising their efforts. They proceeded with increased urgency, working their way through the line, pulling roughly at coats, emptying handbags and briefcases, ushering a few of the secretaries back into the confines of the castle. The low sun fixed the scene like a moment from a nightmare.

Hearing footsteps approachingfrom behind, she stepped off in the opposite direction, tightening her handbag around her shoulder. To allay her anxiety she tried to imagine herself as a fragment of a larger picture, a shadow scuttling away from the main action, a page ripped from a book that no one dared to read. She did not know the importance of the files she had hidden beneath her coat, nor would she