by Craig Thomas
The tail car parked in the pub car park a minute after they had done so, and Ryan followed McBride into the lounge bar. He waited until McBride had ordered, then went to the bar. He sat reading the Daily Mail until the couple left. Then he followed them out into the car park. His driver started the engine of the Sierra as McBride's Nissan pulled out into Chatham's town-centre traffic.
McBride spent some time locating the seamen's home on a new, almost treeless estate on the outskirts of the town, near the M2. Its former building in the dockyard area had been demolished almost ten years previously. The new low building with its large picture windows looking towards the motorway and the North Downs in one direction and the estate's shopping centre in the other, huddled close to a new, ugly Catholic church and an already grimy and graffiti-bearing Leisure Centre. The car park of the Leisure Centre ran behind the seamen's home, almost overlapping its trim grass verges like a frozen concrete sea. Claire Drummond elected to remain in the car, listening to the radio. She fumed silently but knew she could not intrude upon his conversations with the men he sought without stepping out of character. She relied on her influence to prevent McBride keeping anything from her.
The tail car parked near the small supermarket across the road.
McBride had spoken over the telephone with the Warden of the home, and he was ushered into his office immediately he announced his arrival to the receptionist. He was evidently a small surprise in a deep and rutted routine. Mr Blackshaw was not discontented, but he had through the years of his work with the elderly and the dying and the past-livers lost something of his own vitality, even individuality. The inmates of the home seemed to have lived on him like vampires, or simply worn him out with their combined weight of years and extreme experiences. After he had drawn from McBride an account of the book he was researching, he reluctantly conducted him to one of the home's two television rooms where, he said, the two friends he wished to interview would be watching the afternoon racing.
"You will have to be patient," Blackshaw offered as they clicked down a block-floored corridor, clean, neat and aseptic. None of the untidiness of a real home, McBride observed. Mr Blackshaw's recommendation of patience was that of one who had tired of the virtue, or who saw himself in some impossibly heroic alternative reality shrugging it off like a set of chains. McBride nodded in reply.
"Are they pretty cognitive?"
Blackshaw appeared puzzled, then tapped his forehead questioningly, to which McBride nodded again.
"Oh, I'm afraid not very. They are very old." Blackshaw shook his head, and McBride was tempted to ask him his opinion on euthanasia.
"Ga-ga, uh?"
"Not quite. But their nuggets of wisdom are buried rather deeply these days." Blackshaw appeared surprised at his own epithet, but, emboldened, added, "We have begun to disbelieve the existence of the gold, Professor McBride." He smiled, letting his lips have an unaccustomed freedom to form the expression. McBride responded with an open, easy grin.
"Thanks for the warning. How long may I have with them?"
Blackshaw looked at his watch. "Between races, you mean? Tea will be coming round to them in half an hour. You'll not have their attention for some time after that. Here we are."
The television room was darkened because the colour set was facing the window and the reflections of the day had to be shut out so that they did not interpose themselves between rheumy eyes and the racing. Blackshaw stood beside McBride in the doorway for a moment, as if at a loss. Then he whispered, "The two sitting watching the TV."
There was a third old man, impeccably tidy and wearing a collar and tie, asleep in the darkest corner of the room, apparently at ease with and unconscious of the excessive volume of the set. The commentator's voice was approaching a climax, stringing together the names of the leading horses in a meaningless gabble which did not seem to impinge on the fixed and still attention of the two old men Blackshaw had pointed out.
"I'll leave you," he said. "That one's Mills, and the other one's name is Laker. They've forgotten their seamen's ranks, so I shouldn't worry."
McBride watched Blackshaw scuttle away down the corridor, then entered the television room. The race had finished. The old man pointed out as Mills shifted in his chair, but his companion continued to stare at the screen with all the attention he might once have given to a personal crisis. McBride approached them.
"Good afternoon — Mr Mills and Mr Laker?" Both heads moved suddenly, in accord, and four preternaturally bright eyes watched him. He represented some obscure threat, the eyes exclaimed. The third old man slept on. McBride sat down, dragging a chair near them, then leaned forward towards them, displaying the cassette-recorder he removed from his briefcase. The television had given him a means of impressing himself on them. "I'm from the BBC," he announced.
"American," one old man said to the other, who merely nodded, mouth open as if to catch the information like an insect on the wing. "Bloody American." The face puckered to an imitation of vehemence, but there was no emotion left to hold the expression and it loosened into senility almost at once.
"That's right," McBride said brightly. "I'm working for the BBC for a time."
"Know that Sylvia Peters, do you?" Laker asked. "On the news."
"I've met her."
There was silence. Jaws worked, masticating the morsel of information, tasting the suggested proximity to celebrity. "And Alvar Liddell?" Mills asked. McBride was nonplussed, regretting he had adopted the role he had. He merely nodded while both pairs of eyes watching him gleamed interrogatively behind the lenses of their National Health spectacles. Mills, McBride decided, was even older than Laker. They were twinned in old age; once they might have been different in build or colouring or feature, but now they were almost identical — hairless, wrinkled, grey-skinned. Strangely, however, their hands recollected youth, and suppleness and strength, lying curled like small, sharp-toothed animals in their laps.
McBride switched on the recorder, drawing their attention immediately. Mills nudged Laker, who nudged him in return.
"I'd like to interview you two gentlemen, if I may," he said. "About your wartime experiences. You were both serving on the SS Ashford in 1940, weren't you?" Both of them looked guilty immediately, and their eyes cast about on the floor as if for identity documents or lost memories.
"Mm," Mills offered, committed to nothing. His companion made a similar noise at the back of his throat.
"You were on convoys across the North Atlantic, I believe?" The tape numbers rolled on into the thirties. The microphone he held towards them picked up the gentle snores of the sleeping man. Play School began on the television, and Mills and Laker immediately attended afresh to the set, hands stirring, clasping each other in both laps, backs more erect. Cartoon figures flashed on the screen to accompany a nonsense song. McBride bit back impatience, thrusting the microphone nearer. "Your ship was sunk by Germans in November 1940, two days out from Liverpool." He pronounced each word precisely, but without immediate effect.
Then Mills turned his head slowly like a compass unsure of magnetic north, and looked at McBride. Then he cackled. "Nowhere near Liverpool." He nudged Laker. "Was it?"
"Was what?"
"Liverpool."
"Near where?"
"Cork."
McBride hesitated a moment too long, expecting an elaboration that didn't come or simply indulging the small prickle of excitement in his stomach. When he was ready to prompt them, they were watching two enlarged hands folding paper.
"You said Cork." There was a distinct lack of interest. "Cork is in southern Ireland. Were you in Cork?" Laker turned his head, irritated that the intruder had not yet left. The tape numbers rolled mutely into three figures. Laker appeared about to add something, then his attention was directed towards the set by another nudge from Mills. The folded paper had become a boat which was launched upon a bowl of water. Mills looked across at McBride.
"We were in the water for hours, just waiting for the Jerries
to surface and machine-gun us. Oil in the lungs, a lot of "em." Even his voice was clearer, sharper, insistent with momentarily recaptured emotion.
"Yes?"
The camera had cut from the boat to a glove puppet. A rather supercilious sheep's head which minced its words. McBride recognized an import from his own country.
"Mint sauce," Laker said, cackling and leaving McBride bemused.
Mills, however, seemed to dislike the puppet, or was now burdened with a memory he wished to be rid of.
"A fishing boat picked up a few of us, only because we'd been swimming all night and taken inshore by the current. Irish buggers, but all right. Saved our lives."
"You landed in Cork?" Already McBride could envisage a journey to Cork to seek traces of British sailors brought ashore in late November 1940. Mills merely nodded in reply.
"Most of them dead," he added. A story with pictures was being narrated by the television, and his attention slowly returned to it. McBride could sense the exact moment when he lost him, his attention slipping beneath age's dark water and drowning in an almost-life. He did not know whether a lot of men died in 1940, or had been claimed since. Reluctantly, he switched off the recorder and stood up.
Neither old man saw him leave. Mr Blackshaw, too, perhaps guilty at abandoning him to two of his charges, was nowhere in evidence. McBride emerged into the bright sunshine, waving to Claire across the car park.
Something. Not much, but enough to encourage him. Somewhere, maybe in Hastings or Great Yarmouth or Bognor Regis there would be someone who wasn't senile and who remembered exactly how the British convoy had been sunk — by British mines.
November 1940
Maureen McBride was washing up in the small downstairs kitchen at the rear of Devlin's grocery shop. Her father's assistant was serving in the shop while Devlin himself was out making deliveries. She seemed unsurprised to see her husband, Gilliatt thought, until she became fully aware of his blackened and dishevelled appearance.
"You look as if you've been dragged through a hedge backwards, Michael McBride," she said, soap bubbles wreathing her forearms, a gleaming, willow-patterned plate in her hands. It fell and smashed on the stone floor of the kitchen as McBride grabbed hold of her and squeezed her against him. Maureen saw the tall stranger watching in relief and amusement, and was embarrassed; surprised, too, at the sudden display of affection by her husband.
"Thank God you're safe," he murmured in her ear as she pushed out of his embrace. He, too, was suddenly aware of Gilliatt's presence.
"Safe? And why shouldn't I be safe?" She sniffed loudly, scenting the burned cottage on his clothes. "What is it?"
"They burned the cottage down — gutted it," he said savagely, unwilling to soften the blow. Her hand went to her mouth, her eyes widened. Then she clenched both hands at her sides and looked at McBride levelly. "Who?"
"I don't know — some of your father's friends, Germans — who knows? But Drummond was behind it."
"What?"
"Drummond. He's working for the other side, must have been all the time. He tried to kill us last night—" He indicated Gilliatt. "Oh, Peter Gilliatt. He's English but not bad." He grinned. Maureen wiped her right hand, shook Gilliatt's gravely. He saw a kind of emotional bruising behind her eyes but her face remained calm. She brushed at a wisp of hair fallen from its grip, then seemed aware of her appearance — but only slowly and unimportantly.
"What will you do?"
"Kill him," McBride said abruptly. Maureen seemed to consider his words for a moment, then she nodded her head. "Before he kills us," McBride added. "Sorry about the home."
"Not as sorry as I am," she returned in a way that made Gilliatt aware of his intrusion, presenting an image of a wound opening. As if to apologize, Maureen grabbed McBride's arm. He groaned and she was immediately the solicitous wife again.
"You're hurt—"
"And hungry."
"Injuries first."
"Yes, Mother Maureen." She tossed her head, made him sit and then roughly pulled his sweater over his head. The strip of shirt was darkened with some dried blood, but not a great deal. Maureen looked gratefully at Gilliatt as she inspected the bandage.
"I'll cook," Gilliatt offered. "Where is everything?"
"Go into the shop. Seamus'll cut you some bacon, give you some eggs. Bread's in the cupboard there."
Gilliatt disappeared back into the narrow, box-lined corridor between the living accommodation and the shop. Maureen's face immediately dissolved into a tragic mask, mouth widened and eyes narrowed.
"All right, don't take on now."
"Everything?" McBride nodded. "God damn them."
She sniffed loudly and proceeded to undo the bandage on his arm, touching the stiff crusted blood on his forehead at the same time, seemingly satisfied that it could be attended to later.
"We won't be safe here," McBride said as she washed the gash. A little streak of new blood appeared, "Drummond wants all eight pints or more of it, and he'd use you to get hold of me."
"What do you want, then?"
"We have to run."
"Where?"
"We've all of Ireland, woman."
Gilliatt reappeared with slices of bacon and eggs on a sheet of waxed paper held against his chest. Behind him, as if their conversation had summoned him, was Devlin himself, out of breath and red-faced. But his small eyes darted as if some enemy might have overtaken him even though he had hurried and be lying in wait for him in his own kitchen.
"Da!" McBride sensed the fear, the urgency at once. "What is it, Da?"
"Michael? You're all right? There's — why are you here? They're after you, damn you, and you'll bring them here, down on my head!" Devlin glanced at each of their faces, then around the cramped kitchen. He seemed to sense impermanence wherever he looked.
"Da, I'm sorry—" McBride began.
"Maureen, they've burned the cottage!"
"I know."
"How did you know?" McBride asked, anticipating Gilliatt's question.
Devlin immediately became cunning, his eyes narrowing further; habits of thought and behaviour were automatically reasserted. The present, however, pressed on him.
"I was told. Someone tipped me off, for Maureen's sake."
"So, the boys are in on it, are they?" Devlin appeared reluctant to reply. Maureen, sensing the future, quickly finished re-binding McBride's arm with a clean strip of cloth. "Are they, Da?" Devlin merely nodded.
"You'll have to get out," he said, almost as a plea.
"We're going. The three of us."
"What are we up against, Michael?" Gilliatt asked, a sense of superiority given him by the nationality the others shared. He knew his mood was illusory and irrelevant, but there was a coolness of mind that assisted him even as he began frying the bacon and breaking the eggs into the pan.
"Drummond, whatever Germans are here, and the local IRA," McBride said with a grin.
"They'll not harm us, Maureen—" Devlin began, but the look she gave him made him quail into silence.
"What are we going to do, Michael?" she asked.
"Eat breakfast, dress for the outdoors — and run," he replied, clutching her hand, pressing it. "Don't worry."
"I won't. I don't know why, but I won't." She brushed his hair aside from the scalp wound, inspected it, nodded, and went to the stove, brushing Gilliatt to one side as casually as she had parted McBride's hair. Gilliatt looked at McBride, who winked.
"Who's he?" Devlin asked, fully aware of Gilliatt for the first time, it seemed.
"No one you know, Da. Now, are you coming with us, or not?"
Devlin's face adopted a look of outraged protest, which was swiftly followed by fear, then dismissal of a slow but certain kind as he looked around the kitchen again, then at McBride and Gilliatt — marking them off from himself. He shook his head.
"They'll not harm me. And Maureen would be safe here."
"They'll use her to get me, Da. Look, I know that Drummond is a traitor. He wo
n't want me gossiping to London about it, now will he? Maureen comes with us — she'll be safe." McBride's face went bleak. "Da, they'll use you, but I won't come back for you. There's not enough leverage, you see." He did not look at Maureen, simply concentrated on the dissolving and reforming features of her father. It was as if he looked at him through a curtain of rain or tears, so vivid were the facial movements, so flurried the quick wash and movement of emotions.
"You promised!" was all Devlin could manage. McBride nodded.
"I know I did," he said softly. "Come with us. I'll look after you. But not here—"
Gilliatt turned away from the scene between the two men. It was too oppressively real, too naked yet private so that it made him a voyeur, an intruder. Then Devlin went out of the kitchen, banging against some of the crates and boxes in the corridor in his hurry and disbelief. McBride had disorientated him, turned around his sign-posts, ripped up his maps.
"You didn't have to do that to him," Maureen said softly, sliding bacon and eggs onto two plates she had warmed. She brought the plates to the table, stood looking down at McBride, her face a narrow, tight mask of displeasure. "Why did you tell him that, Michael?"
"Because it's true, Maureen. He'll be used to get to me, and I won't give myself and you up for Da's life."
"Then why do you play God in the first place, if you haven't His determination? Oh, Michael, you make people believe in you when really their belief doesn't make a blind bit of difference to you! Why?"
He looked up at her, his face dark, slapped by her words.
"I don't know how or why I do it, Maureen. I don't know."
Maureen moved past him, following her father into the shop. McBride began eating the breakfast in silence, and Gilliatt kept his eyes on his plate until he had finished eating. As if on cue, Maureen entered the kitchen just as McBride swallowed his last mouthful.