Read Blind Arrows for Free Online Page B

him, and then the lingering precision of her lips on his cheek, her breath sweet and clean. He tried to seal the moment up in that hushed chamber, keep it intact forever. He felt a strange happiness flood through him. Their encounter had been something to treasure, a jewel in the casket of the cab, and he felt an urgent need to reveal it to the general, but his caution held him back. He knew he ought to have warned Merrin, revealed who he was and why he was following her, but he had been unable to say a word. He passed his hand over his face, still feeling the astonishment at being kissed by a frightened, dangerous woman. He might have bartered everything to be the man she thought he was, cast his subterfuge to one side, risked his safety, warned her that Dublin Castle reacted with ruthless justice to betrayal, especially when the traitor was one of their own.
    Thornton elbowed him. ‘What’s bothering you, Kant? You look out of sorts.’
    He smiled and tried to keep a prudent control of his tongue.
    â€˜I haven’t seen you at the boarding house for day s. The landlady thought you’d returned to London.’
    Riley chipped in. ‘He must have a woman hidden away in a hotel room somewhere. I recognise that look in his eyes.’
    â€˜You know very well that I couldn’t afford to keep any woman in a hotel room,’ replied Kant.
    â€˜Then it’s a girl locked up in a back-street boarding house.’
    â€˜What we all need is a big house like Corporal Isham’s,’ whispered Thornton. ‘One that has no prying landladies, only subservient Irish maids and lots of empty rooms.’
    They looked at Isham’s bored-looking face, colder and calmer than the general’s but somehow less civilised. Kant had heard reports of how the corporal had requisitioned Park House, a seventeenth-century mansion with private grounds in the Wicklow Mountains. Every weekend, he organised hunts and parties for Dublin’s ruling classes and its military commanders so that they could wallow in the luxury and glory of the Protestant Ascendancy, shooting pheasants and deer, while IRA guerrillas ambushed their foot soldiers in the city’s back streets.
    â€˜Mr Kant is uncomfortable with all this talk of women,’ said Riley. ‘He must be married with a little wife in suburban London who knows nothing of his secret life in Dublin.’
    The reporter shuddered at their line of questioning .
    â€˜My relationship with women changed during the Great War,’ he said. A spasm twitching his lips. Still that memory of Lily Merrin’s kiss, a furtive little pleasure.
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜I can no longer ignore the fact that I am an ill man. And that instinctive love is beyond my reach. ’
    â€˜Are you saying all you feel is lust?’
    â€˜I am not an animal.’
    â€˜Neither am I, but I would like to be an animal. Just for tonight. To revert to nature, to prowl through these bars and take what I want.’
    Perhaps we are all animals, thought Kant, we survivors of the Great War, damaged creatures with the minds of monsters, without any hope of refuge from our base instincts.
    â€˜We are here because of work,’ Thornton reminded them. ‘Let’s not mix it with pleasure.’
    â€˜I’ve had enough of work,’ replied Riley, with vehemence. ‘When do we enjoy the pleasure?’
    Kant broke into a racking coughing fit. When he had finished, he looked across and saw the general’s drunken eyes staring at him.
    â€˜You work for the Daily Mirror , is that correct?’
    He cleared his throat. ‘Their war correspondent, yes.’
    â€˜War.’ Stapleton pronounced the word without irony or sadness. He lifted his chin, as though the last glass of gin had revived him. ‘Did you enjoy reporting on the carnage at Ypres?’ he asked.
    â€˜It was my job.’
    â€˜Your Daily Mirror sketches were very popular with