The Judas Gate by Jack Higgins Read Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t as if he needed the money. It was all part of a wonderful, lunatic madness. Anyway, right now he needed rest and recreation. It would be nice to see his mother again. He hadn’t kept in touch much this time. It was better to use mobile and satellite phones sparingly these days, unless they were totally encrypted and encoded. Too many people failedto realize that every conversation you made was out there somewhere and capable of being retrieved.
    He wondered if his mother had made one of her rare visits to the family estate, Talbot Place, in County Down. Her own mother, Mary Ellen, had died the previous year, but his grandfather, ‘Colonel Henry’ to the servants, was still alive at ninety-five.
    Soldier, lawyer, politician, Member of Parliament at Stormont, and a Grand Master in the Orange Lodge, Colonel Henry was a resolute defender of the Protestant cause who had loathed Roman Catholics—Fenians, as he called them—all his life. Now in his dotage, he was surrounded by workers and house servants who were mainly Catholic, thanks to Mary Ellen, a Protestant herself, who had employed them for years. Justin Talbot’s mother despised the man.
    Talbot yawned again and decided that if his mother had gone to Ulster, he would fly across himself, possibly in one of the firm’s planes. He could use a break. He closed his eyes and drifted off.
    At that moment, his mother, Jean Talbot, was crossing a hillside high above Carlingford Lough, the Irish Sea way beyond. A seventy-one-year-old woman, slim and fit and young for her age, in both looks and energy, as the Irish saying went, was wearing an Australian drover’s coat, heavy boots, a cap of Donegal tweed and carrying a walking stick. The house dog, Nell, a black flat-coat retriever, was about her business, running hither and thither. Jean reached her destination,a stone bothy with a bench outside. She sat down, took out a packet of cigarettes, and lit one.
    The sun shone, the sky was blue and the morning wind had dropped to a dead calm. This was an amazing place with an incredible backdrop, the Mourne Mountains. Far down below was the village of Kilmartin, and Talbot Place, the splendid old Georgian house that had been the family home for two hundred and fifty years, the house in which she had been born.
    She stubbed out her cigarette carefully, stood up, whistled to Nell and turned. It was good to be back and yet, as always, she already felt restless and ill at ease; as usual, her father was the problem. During the Second World War, with him away and her mother in charge, she had been educated at a local Catholic boarding school run by nuns who accepted day-girls and didn’t mind a Protestant or two. She had never known her father and was terrified of the arrogant, anti-Catholic bully who returned after the war and was outraged to find his daughter in the hands of nuns, and ‘bloody Fenians’ all over the estate.
    Mary Ellen’s quiet firmness defeated him, as did the good humour of his tenants, who smiled and touched their caps to Colonel Henry, convinced, as Jean Talbot realized as she grew up, that he was a raving lunatic. The nuns succeeded with her so well that she was accepted by St Hugh’s College, Oxford, to study fine art.
    To her father, busy with the law and politics at Stormont, it was all a waste of time, but she had enough talent to then be accepted by the Slade School of Fine Art, UniversityCollege, London, after Oxford. Mary Ellen hugged her in delight, but her father said it was time she settled down and gave him an heir.
    Her answer was to get pregnant by a sculptor named Justin Monk, a Roman Catholic separated from his wife who’d refused him a divorce on religious grounds. Shortly after the birth, he’d been badly injured in a motorcycle accident. Jean was able to visit him once and show him the baby and promised to name it after him. He died soon afterwards.
    When Henry Talbot and Mary Ellen came to visit her in her London lodgings, he had