Northern Spy(65)

“It’s empty,” she says.

All of these houses might be vacant. With the degree of conflict here, everyone might have moved away. The road feels deserted. A stillness hangs over it, like we’re the only ones for miles. No one answers at the next house, either. We keep walking, though I’m having trouble moving my legs.

A dog barks. The hairs lift at the base of my neck. The dog barks again, a hoarse, rasping sound, from a small dog. I walk toward the sound, and there is the dog, a fox terrier. My knees start to tremble. The dog tilts his head at me.

An elderly woman in a coat and woolly hat comes around the side of the house, holding a snow shovel, which she drops when she sees me. Her hand flies to her mouth. I stand at the edge of her property, with bare, scratched feet, my clothes stained with blood.

“Can you help me?” I ask.

She’s about to speak when Marian appears beside me. The stains on her jumper have darkened to almost black. The woman’s eyes flick between us, and she says, “Jesus, oh, Jesus, come in, come inside.”

We follow her into the bungalow and she locks the door. She takes two blankets down from a press and wraps them around us. “I’ll ring for an ambulance.”

“No,” says Marian, “please don’t.”

No one from here can see us. We can’t trust the paramedics, even, not to mention us to the local IRA.

“How far are we from the border?” asks Marian.

“Twelve miles.”

“Can you drive us across it?”

In her car, the woman turns the heat on to full blast. I curl my numb fingers against the heating vents, and pain bursts through them as the nerves come back to life. She reverses the car, and races down the road. “I’m Evelyn,” she says. I try to answer, but my teeth are chattering so much my name barely comes out. Evelyn looks in her rearview mirror. “Were you followed?”

Marian shakes her head, and we speed toward the border. We’re not safe yet, every car that passes could be an IRA member. They’d kill Evelyn, too, for helping us.

“Can I please use your phone?” I ask, and she hands me her bag. I dial Fenton’s number. “Do you have my son?”

“No,” he says, and everything stops. My chest is being crushed. “Finn’s with your mam,” he says, and I burst into tears.

“Where?”

“A house in Ballynahinch, under protection. Where are you, Tessa?” he asks, but I’m crying too hard to speak, so I pass the phone to Marian. She says, “Hi, detective. We’re on the A29 near Crossmaglen, heading south. We don’t have papers to cross the border, can you call ahead for us?”

He asks her something, and she says, matter-of-factly, “We were abducted. They were going to kill us for informing but we escaped.”

In the driver’s seat, Evelyn looks admirably unfazed by this information. She says, “There’s a hospital across the border in Monaghan.”

Marian relays this to the detective. “He’ll meet us there. The police will bring mam and Finn,” she says, and I close my eyes.



* * *



—

At the hospital, two nurses are waiting for us outside A&E. They wrap us in foil blankets and lead us into treatment rooms. “How long were you outdoors?” asks my nurse.

“Maybe half an hour, or forty minutes.”

“And did you have shoes on for any part of that?”

“No.”

The nurse carries a tub of warm water over from the sink. I watch her roll my jeans away from my feet, without feeling anything. She gives me some pain medication. “This will hurt,” she says, and eases my feet into the water.

Under the surface, my feet are white. I look down at them, curious, and then the burning starts as they warm, the skin turning red, then purple. “That’s good,” says the nurse, “that’s what we want to see. Are you okay?”

I nod, fighting to hold them in the water. She takes my blood pressure and temperature, checks my fingers and ears for frostbite. It feels nice to be handled. She doesn’t mention the blood on my clothes, or ask whose it is. Eventually she lifts my feet from the water and wraps them in gauze bandages. “They’re going to blister,” she says. “But on the bright side, you’re going to keep all your toes.”

She’s fastening one of the bandages when I hear a baby’s cry in the hall. “Sorry. Sorry, one minute.”

I hobble into the corridor. Finn is sailing toward me, grumbling, carried in my mam’s arms, with Fenton and two uniformed constables behind them. I hurry forward, clumsy on my feet, my heart surging with wild joy, and then Finn turns his head and sees me. “Mama,” he says, pointing at me, and throws himself forward into my arms.

Marian comes out of her room, too, and claps her hands when she sees the baby. The detective looks from me to her. He says, “I don’t know where to begin.”





41


IDON’T WANT TO FALL entirely asleep. I’m too comfortable, this is too pleasant, the soft hospital bed, the pillows.

I lie on my side, with a pillow under my head and another between my knees. They didn’t cut off my clothes earlier. I don’t know why I’d expected they would. The nurse asked me to change into a hospital gown. Afterward, I watched her put my stained clothes into a clear polystyrene bag and hand it to a constable. She scraped under my fingernails, and gave him those samples, too.