Betrayal

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The raindrops were big and singular, and as they hit the steaming dark-blue bonnet of the car, each made a metallic thud that signalled it would burst to pieces. Hunched over the steering wheel, Mary Ellen Fraser tried not to concentrate on them. Their sound was one thing; the sight of them destroying themselves quite another.

Down from her, the gravelled, rut-gouged road narrowed to a single lane before the first of the frontier posts whose tin-roofed hut had the glaze of the forlorn, then it sprang across a small wooden bridge, low and hugging a narrow stream before climbing gently up the long slope to the second of the frontier posts and yet another tin-roofed hut. The North was in the distance: Ulster and a war on over there; the Free Zone here, the Republic, the South and no war here-no continental war, that is. Just neutrality.

Boulders, cleared and heaved from the pastures on either side, hemmed in the road so that no one, not herself or anyone else, could make a break for it. Not on 9 September 1941, not at any time, though the boulders looked as if they’d been here for centuries, and probably had.

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