When Shadows Fall by Paul Reid

Author:Paul Reid
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2014-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

The screams and sudden surge of people drove Tara and James back through the carriage. Tara was pushed against a window; she could see a gunman, the drawn features of his face, and she gasped.

“Tara, get away from the window,” James cried.

More shots rang out and the panic intensified. Tara felt an elbow in her back as a big-bellied man tried to shove his way to safety. Pressed against the glass, she saw commuters fleeing in terror. Shots were being traded on the platform, and now, as she looked on, a second gunman appeared, a tall man with his collar pulled up beneath his hat. He crouched and fired twice. She watched in appalled awe.

“Tara!” James pulled her back. “Christ, keep your head down.”

It was a cacophony of shrieks and curses and bawled instructions. With Tara on the floor, James glanced back through the window. “A shootout, by heavens.”

“Who? Who is it?” She struggled under his pinioning hand.

“Assassins. Whole platform’s swarming with ’em.”

She shrugged off his grip and rose in time to see the second attacker sprinting for the exit, long coat flapping around his knees. Then he disappeared.

It was some moments before the police asserted control and the commotion subsided. Finally the shocked passengers were allowed to disembark, some on the point of fainting, others agog with excitement.

It soon transpired that there had been only two attackers, one of whom was already dead. The other had fled the scene under pursuit, while the presumed target, Major Dirk Ripley, was perfectly alive and unharmed.

James summoned a taxi. “You’ll find this sort of daft behaviour in London,” he told her as the car negotiated a route up Grosvenor Place. “Rebels or anarchists or some aggrieved subjects of the empire.” He rolled down the window and shook out his pipe. “But given that Ripley was the target, my money’s on Irish boys. They get bolder by the minute.”

Tara peered through the window at the wall that enclosed the back of Buckingham Palace gardens. She thought of the lone gunman, fleeing the mob of policemen, whistles sharp in the air. How far could he have got? They must have run him to ground by now.

And she was glad.

The IRA brought their wickedness everywhere. Her parents lay beneath the freezing soil of Kilmainham cemetery. Her brother could have been married by now.

I hope they hang him.

Not for the first time she felt gratitude for the presence of James and his British compatriots in her country. They were, after all, the enforcers of law and order, the protectors of the innocent, the scourge of people like Larry Mulligan and that gunman.

At Hyde Park Corner the driver swung left past St. George’s Hospital. To their right was the grassy expanse of Hyde Park itself and the arcing Serpentine River, an artificial sheet of water radiating a silver sheen in the crisp morning.

“They allow bathing in that, you know,” James told her. “Summertimes, of course, though a few hardy enthusiasts take a morning dip all year round.

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