by Craig Thomas
"You'd better look up their number," she said as he embraced her. Allies.
She'd call Moynihan later, and set up a meeting. He'd have to hear it in person, what she chose to tell him. She'd make him bring Treacey. She nibbled at McBride's ear as she felt with a crawling sensation his breath on her neck.
* * *
Walsingham's duty surveillance team watched McBride enter Trinity House on Tower Hill, then parked their Vauxhall near Tower Hill Station, from which point they could observe the main portico and steps of Trinity House. To be certain they did not miss McBride when he came out again, one of them, Ryan, took a newspaper and sat on a bench in Trinity Square gardens. When McBride left, he would signal the car, then go in and discover what McBride was doing there. To elicit the information would require no more than his CID card, one of the many organizations of security to which he was accredited.
McBride came out again near lunchtime. The woman that the man on the park bench had been observing waved to McBride, then joined him on the pavement opposite the gardens. They embraced. The watcher stood up, could almost hear the starting of the Vauxhall's engine though he knew that was impossible in the lunch hour traffic. He watched McBride and the woman — Drummond's daughter from his briefing — talking animatedly as they walked away towards Tower Hill, saw the Vauxhall tailing them down Savage Gardens, then he crossed the road to the main steps of Trinity House. In the imposing Front Hall with its numerous models of ships, he showed his CID card to the security guard, who put through a call to the Assistant Keeper of Records. In five minutes, Ryan was closeted with the Assistant Keeper, being shown the material that McBride had requested.
No, the Assistant Keeper had no way of knowing which names McBride had been concerned to check. Were there specific names? Professor McBride from the University of Oregon was interested in the kind of records, their history and comprehensiveness. Something for a paper he was to deliver to the American History of the Sea and Seafarers Society in Boston on his return to the United States. Ryan almost laughed, inwardly applauding the smokescreen McBride was capable of creating, his pulse quickening at the implications of such an elaborate subterfuge.
Records — just lists of names, sailors and the ships on which they had served. Period 1940 to "45. Trinity House, as Ryan well knew, was and is responsible for the relief of distressed and aged master mariners, but it also keeps records of all merchant seamen in distress or requiring any kind of help — all the old men with a life at sea behind them and nothing in front — together with its work in erecting and maintaining all lightships and lighthouses and being the chief pilotage authority in Britain.
Ryan clenched down on his drifting thoughts as the Assistant Keeper rambled on, repeating the information he had passed to McBride before leaving him alone with the records. Names of old sailors? Would it mean anything to Walsingham, who'd get his report direct from Exton?
As soon as politeness allowed, Ryan left Trinity House and called in his findings. The duty officer assured him that Exton would make sense of a visit to Trinity House. Meanwhile, a requisition for the Trinity House records would be issued. Would Ryan like to hang about and help carry them to the van when it arrived?
Ryan put down the phone before his expletive could be topped, and stepped out of the telephone box into the warm lunchtime sunshine, feeling hungry.
November 1940
The motor launch came close inshore, off Garrettstown Strand in Courtmacsharry Bay, but against the tide and they had to lower a raft to put McBride and Gilliatt ashore. There was a high wind that streamed water over the sides of the raft like a heavy, driving rain, and the sea was choppy and cantankerous. Two ratings rowed inshore, but McBride and Gilliatt still had to wade to the beach out of waist-deep water because the raft almost overturned and its crew could hardly hold it against the retreating tide. McBride felt his legs go from under him the moment his feet touched the bottom and then, as he spluttered and splashed about with his arms, Gilliatt's hand grip his collar and drag him upright. Gilliatt was laughing. The raft bobbed away from them, sudden moonlight from behind ragged cloud silhouetting it and the slim, graceful shape of the ML beyond it.
"Come on, McBride, you really are no bloody sailor!"
"Tressed man, sir," McBride answered in an adopted brogue, coughing out seawater in the wake of the remark. They hurried through the shallows onto the smooth wet sand. Turning, they could see the raft being hoisted aboard the ML, then the engines moved up from idle and the launch seemed to do no more than ease away from them in silent apology as it turned out to sea, heading back to England.
McBride jogged Gilliatt's arm. "Wistful?"
"What? Oh, sorry."
"Just rather be there than here, eh?"
"Working for Walsingham is what I can't take," Gilliatt replied with unexpected vehemence.
They walked on up the beach towards the dry sand above the tide-line, McBride systematically wringing his sleeves and trouser-legs and jacket as they went.
"My socks are drenched. I'm surprised you feel that strongly about him. Charlie's all right."
Gilliatt halted, and waited until McBride was looking at him. McBride stopped wringing the last moisture from a sleeve, and stilled his chattering teeth with an effort. "Just watch out for him, Michael. Don't let him put your head in too many lions" mouths, that's all."
"God, I'm cold." McBride attempted to avert the too-direct remark.
"Listen to me, Michael. I've met a lot of people like Charles Walsingham—"
"Are you going to lecture me, Uncle?" McBride sat down like a disgruntled child and pulled off his boots, then his socks. He twisted them in his hands and the water streamed onto the sand, darkening it like blood. McBride wondered why the image had invaded his mind. He looked up at Gilliatt standing over him.
"I'm just trying to warn you—"
"You'll give me a lecture on Drummond when you've met him, I suppose?" McBride's temper was completely under control, though he did resent Gilliatt's interference in his affairs.
"I might well do that." Gilliatt obviously thought what he had to impart was important. There was an evident attempt to remain calm and not to antagonize McBride or be antagonized by him. "My old school was full of people like him, wearing their charm like the grass they use to cover lion-traps—"
"I like that," McBride said mischievously.
"He does. Walsingham resents being in the navy at all, and is prepared only to use this war to advance his career in intelligence. You remember that I've worked in intelligence before. I met people like him, every week!"
"All right. I'll watch out for myself." McBride was abstractedly rubbing his feet warm again before putting on his socks. When he finished talking, his teeth went on chattering. "God, I'm cold. What's the time?"
"Ten minutes to two."
"Bloody early! No wonder Drummond isn't here with his little car and his rum ration." He held out his hand and Gilliatt pulled him to his feet. Then he sat down and began to take off his boots. The understanding between them was almost instinctive, one on watch while the other was off-guard, easily surprised. McBride hardly remarked it, except that a sense of Gilliatt's dependability lurked at the back of his mind. McBride scanned the empty beach in another gleam of moonlight, the wind almost visible as a stream of silver. Sand pattered against his trouser-legs and the ungloved hands at his sides. "This will be one of their beaches."
Gilliatt looked up from chafing his feet and calves. "What?"
"They'll land here." He stretched his arms out to encompass the wide stretch of flat beach.
"If they have as much trouble as we did, then everybody's safe. They can be picked up while they're drying their socks." Gilliatt looked up and down the beach. "I agree. Flat and open."
"How many beaches do you reckon?"
"Four or five. What do you think Walsingham wants, after we identify the most likely landing beaches?"
"God knows." McBride was slapping his arms against his sides. "He'll be l
ucky to persuade Dublin to repel boarders."
"He can't use British troops."
"He might. He would, but will Churchill?"
Gilliatt stood up. "I could do with some of Drummond's rum."
"Drummond's usually early himself. Come on, let's leg it up to the track and meet him. What's the time?"
"Five to."
"I wonder where he is? Flat tyre while we freeze to death!"
They climbed a bank up off the beach onto the narrow track that ran down to the strand from the Kinsale-Clonakilty road. McBride halted and listened, but there was no engine-noise. The wind seemed colder still as it ground and snarled through hedges and bent the few stunted trees.
"How far to your place?"
"We're not going to walk that, Peter my lad. Drummond's house is only a couple of miles from here."
He was certain that Gilliatt was going to reply. He even framed his lips in preparation for a smile in response to any witticism. But he did not hear any words because of the sudden explosion only yards from him. Gilliatt's figure was outlined in orange flame, a heavy black shape nothing more, then it was flung on its back into the ditch alongside the track and he, too, was lifted, clouted around the body by the pressure-wave from the grenade, and deposited in a muddy pool. He was aware of a trickle of stagnant water into his mouth, the trickle of something warmer down the side of his face which made his left eye blink furiously, and of being totally deaf and removed by that deafness from the scene around him, from himself and from any real sense of danger.
More than anything, however, he was aware that only Drummond knew where they were supposed to land that night. Only Drummond in the whole of the world outside the Admiralty.
The first of the dark shapes rose from the grass thirty yards from him, moving onto the track even as the last dirt flung up by the grenade was still pattering down on the back of his jacket. McBride felt the hard shape of his gun against his hip, and tried to move his arm down. The arm seemed frozen, then was shot through with excruciating pain so that he yelped, startling the approaching figure and making him more cautious. His arm wouldn't move.
Only Drummond, he kept on thinking. He did not even consider whether Gilliatt was dead or alive. Only Drummond.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Survivors
October 198-
The Rt Hon. David Guthrie'S PPS, a man Walsingham hardly knew, informed him that the Secretary of State was unable to see him at the moment because he was receiving representatives of the Dublin government in an attempt to finalize the initial meeting with the Irish Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. Fingers crossed, things are looking quite hopeful, the PPS confided to Walsingham as he was conducted to a small, comfortable sitting room to await Guthrie.
Walsingham set the small cassette-recorder down on the low table, and slipped the single cassette he had brought with him out of his coat pocket. It was in a buff envelope which he left beside the recorder. The tape was a transfer from reel-to-reel of the call McBride had made to the minister's office that afternoon. The envelope's innocence in the room's gathering dusk was false and uncomfortable to Walsingham. McBride was an angry man, had resented being deflected and turned away by a secretary, had spoken of the minister's wartime experiences with a cunning masked by ingenuousness. McBride was somehow no longer the straightforward academic or his effrontery merely that of a gauche American. It would be interesting to watch Guthrie's face as he heard McBride's words for the first time. There was, at the same time, a pressure in Walsingham to go on thinking of McBride as an historian, even as an American. Both ideas made something objective and unknown of him, effectively severing him from Michael McBride in his mind.
Walsingham glanced round the room, then got up and poured himself a whisky at the cocktail cabinet. Then he moved to the tall window and looked down at Whitehall splashed by the last of the sun. The very familiarity of the scene threw his mental landscape into greater relief. How dangerous was McBride? What would they have to do about him?
McBride was angry that his notebooks had been stolen from him. Walsingham now felt that move had been precipitate, an over-reaction. And he had discovered the body of the man Hoskins — would he believe that to have been some kind of official interference? Who was Hoskins, anyway, and what part was he to have played, or had he played? The questions lit his mind garishly, detonations along the hillside he had to assault.
He returned to the sofa, sitting down heavily like a fat old man. Special Branch had no leads on Hoskins" killer. Was it connected? Wasn't it all too accidental, too convenient, that McBride and the events seemingly attendant on him should appear at the precise moment of this crisis of relations between London and Dublin? Was McBride being used? But if he was, then by whom?
The door opened, and Guthrie entered smiling, his hand extended to Walsingham. Walsingham studied him as they shook hands. Guthrie was tired, but there was also a combative light in his eyes, and a suggestion that his reserves of energy and patience remained almost unimpaired.
He poured himself a drink, refilled Walsingham's glass, then said: "I apologize for keeping you waiting, Charles. Bloody obstructive people—" The smile did not go away. Infighting seemed to tone Guthrie like a cold shower. "Your call sounded urgent, even by the time it got to me. Something the matter?"
Walsingham indicated chairs, reseated himself on the sofa, and Guthrie sat casually opposite him in an armchair, crossing his long legs, cradling his drink in both hands as if to protect the crystal glass. He was attentive, unperturbed, curious. Walsingham, with some sense of the theatrical, took the cassette from the envelope and inserted it into the recorder.
"This call was made to your office yesterday—"
"A tape?" Guthrie asked quickly. Walsingham nodded. It was evident the minister expected some death-threat from a crank with an Irish accent that might have been real or assumed.
"Listen to it, please."
Walsingham played the tape. When he had done so, Guthrie indicated that it should be replayed. After a second hearing, the minister said: "McBride? Is there an Irish connection?"
"His father was Irish. I knew him during the war."
Guthrie was puzzled. "What's going on, Charles?"
"This man McBride is a bona fide historian, but he's also had some success with a sensational account of Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker. His current project concerns the proposed German invasion of Ireland in 1940—" There was still no reaction from Guthrie, except that he nodded his head to punctuate Walsingham's narrative. "He — has come into possession of certain information concerning the British response to that threat, including your name."
Guthrie replied, in a chilly voice that gathered force from the dusky gloom: "How did that happen, Charles?"
"Admiralty records."
"What?" Disbelief rather than anxiety.
"There is still material in existence, material that has been overlooked up to now."
"My name, Charles. How did he get my name?"
"I'm not certain. I'm having that checked. However, he has it."
Guthrie went on nodding periodically in the silence that followed, punctuating some internal debate. Walsingham was being made to feel at fault, incompetent. All the while, however, Guthrie's face remained a smooth, inexpressive mask; unless the gloom disguised tiny flickers of emotion. Walsingham wanted a light to study him by. Eventually, Guthrie spoke. "It would be far better than shooting me, wouldn't it?" He grinned. "Much better."
"Yes."
"Is there an IRA connection?" He seemed to be asking himself, going back over his recent meeting, perhaps re-examining it in another, colder light.
"I don't know. I've checked with his agents over here. They don't have much idea of what he's working on, but they do know he's aiming for a very big sale, and a lot of money."
"Simple cupidity?"
"It could be."
"Any connection through the father?"
"No. He was an agent of mine, that is true. But the
re was nothing to give rise to a motive there." Walsingham rubbed his forehead, inspected his hand. "Rather the reverse. He'd not like the IRA because of his father."
"Then is it as sinister as it seems?" Guthrie held up his hand. "I fully realize the consequences for myself and for future relations between ourselves and Dublin — the dreadful consequences for the whole of Ulster — should this matter become public. But, does it need to become public? Can't you talk to this man McBride?"
"We could, but I'm not certain that I want to do that. Oh, we are having him watched, and we know more or less how much he knows." He paused, but did not elaborate. "But, we know very little about him as yet, and I do not want to make any precipitate moves."
"I understand that. There are no Irish hands in this pie, you suggest?"
"Not that we know. As far as we can be certain, McBride has no connection, even in the United States, with any Irish organization, and since our surveillance began there has been no contact with any suspected person." The statement sounded dry, official as it was meant to. Walsingham now almost regretted making this personal appearance, as if he had run to Guthrie to apologize or confess. "If we obtain evidence of any — organized plot against you or next week's meetings, then we shall act. In any case, McBride can never be allowed to publish."
"Then it might come to the same thing, might it not, whether he's alone or part of a conspiracy?" Guthrie's voice was similarly dry, official. He steepled his hands in front of his shadowed face.
Reluctantly, Walsingham nodded. He could see Michael McBride's face, imposed upon the white, featureless mask across the table from him. Hallucinatory, and unsettling.
"Yes, it might." McBride might well have to die. He saw Guthrie nod, satisfied it seemed with the monosyllable. Walsingham wanted to tell Guthrie about Hoskins" murder, suddenly, to unsettle and disturb him, show him that events might have run away from them already. Who was Hoskins? Who had just smothered him as they might have done a Christmas puppy they had tired of amusing and feeding? Who had killed Hoskins, and was the killing connected?