Emerald Decision

by Craig Thomas

  "You bastard," Moynihan breathed, leaning closer so that McBride could faintly smell his unwashed mouth and the staleness of last night's supper and his fitful sleeping. And his unwashed body exuded a discernible odour. "You bastard."

  "Come on, Moynihan, you're just angry because your piece of tail went to someone else's bed. You're not interested in a scientific account or a consumer's report. You want to know — yeah, I screwed the ass off your woman!"

  He steadied himself for the blow. Moynihan raised the gun, but then again used his clenched fist into the side of McBride's face.

  "Shut up!"

  McBride spat out the mouthful of blood. "You want to know, dammit! You asked me, and brother, are you going to get answered!"

  "Shut up, keep your filthy mouth shut!"

  "What is it with you guys? You can blow people to pieces but you can't deal with your own balls? You hide in corners watching your women like you watch your bombs go off! You're a prick, Moynihan, a gutless woman-loser — Paddy Pumpkin-Eater, had a wife and couldn't keep her!" Moynihan was standing a yard or so away from the sofa with its brick-coloured stretch covers and the furious, hunched body of McBride occupying its centre. He made a move towards the American, then held off as if he wanted to go on listening while the voice lashed him. His face coloured like a lying child's. "Jesus Christ!" McBride breathed, baring his teeth as if to attack Moynihan like a wolf. "The big tough terrorist wants to marry her. Man, blow society to the moon, kill, maim, burn, explode to get what you want — but make sure you marry the girl before you sleep with her, Sean!" McBride was dangerously elated, long having abandoned caution or calculation. He could not control the urgent press of words, finding his tongue amenable, just able to cope. His stupidity, his captivity and exploitation had been going on too long.

  "Shut up, shut up!" Moynihan pressed his gun against McBride's groin, just as the woman had done the previous night. "I could blow it off for you, McBride. Then try laughing with your balls on the floor." Moynihan's face was cold with a sheen of sweat and self-disgust. McBride had shown him an image of himself the truth of which he felt compelled to acknowledge. McBride, their eyes only a foot or so apart, was afraid. The pain in his groin was minimal, to be disregarded — because now he knew why he had arranged this quarrel; it had produced this open, frontal proximity.

  "You haven't got the balls to do it. She might be angry—" Moynihan jabbed downwards, and McBride winced and cried out — and grabbed the gun with both hands, jerking upwards and to the side at once, so that the round in the chamber discharged into the ceiling. McBride felt sound go far away, and his own breath was the only noise he understood. Moynihan was yelling, or just breathing, as McBride jerked him by his gun hand to one side, toppling his weight over the arm of the sofa, rolling after him, landing on top of him, knee out into Moynihan's groin.

  The desperation that would pump the adrenalin was beginning to come into Moynihan's face, but it was too late. McBride was ahead in that play, felt the hope of escape surge through him. He dropped his head, striking Moynihan across the bridge of the nose with his forehead, then lifted his head as the blood gushed and struck Moynihan's hand against the floor time after time, beating his head into the Irishman's face once more. Moynihan groaned and released the gun. McBride stood up, and his legs felt insecure and newborn under him, the frame top-heavy and overbalanced. He rocked to and fro, holding Moynihan's gun in his two bound hands. It was a big Smith & Wesson from TV police serials, awkward and heavy in his grip. Moynihan lay with his eyes closed, groaning, holding his nose and mouth in cupped hands as if drinking cool water. McBride struck him across the temple with the barrel of the revolver, and he lay still.

  The room reasserted itself, returning with the sense of birdsung silence from outside the windows. No sound of a car, the woman not yet returning. He was indecisive now, the body running down like a broken spring without the injections of anger and desperation. He began quivering with shock and the realization of inflicted violence.

  He went into the kitchen, scrabbled in a drawer under the enamel sink for a knife, came out with a carving knife which he tried to jam unsuccessfully into the drawer, then the door-jamb, finally squatting on the floor with the knife pressed between his thighs while he stroked the strips of cloth over the blade. They parted singly, and slowly, and he cut himself on his wrists and clenched, eager fists a number of times before he could pull the last of the cloth apart and begin to rub the bleeding wrists. Then he stood up, but cramp assailed him, making him hobble to the rear door of the cottage.

  He listened. No car-noise. He paused on the edge of the fine morning, framed in the doorway, coatless and chill with the breeze already, the blue sky interrupted by some rolling white cloud with smudged grey lower edges. He studied the landscape. A farm, and village, the rulered line of the main road half a mile away, and clumps of woodland stretching across the folded, flowing countryside.

  He begun running, recklessly, as fast as he could, almost overbalancing in his rapid movement down the slope. The wind yelled in his ear and his blood pounded. He was free now.

  He did not hear the siren of a police car, growing louder behind him.

  * * *

  Claire Drummond was anxious to get back to the cottage. The danger inherent in her appearance in Andoversford was more apparent to her because she was the one who had squeezed the trigger of the little Astra twice into the face of the pig in the multi-storey car park. Moynihan's breakfast—

  Still, she had to mollify Sean Moynihan somehow, at some little cost. He hated McBride too much, and so obviously and for such a pathetic motive that he was dangerous unless she suggested — even though she hated — that much compromise — that he was back in favour, that McBride had been a necessary stratagem and nothing more. She picked up bacon, eggs, lard, two cartons of UHT milk, some more coffee — they were running low — and a bag of sugar, had to buy a plastic carrier-bag which advertised English apples, and came out of the shop regretting she had left her sunglasses in the car, shading her eyes against the bright morning sun — which gleamed off the chrome and blue-white paintwork of the police car across the main street of the village, parked outside the black-and-white pub. And a white Jaguar with the vivid orange flash of a motorway patrol stood behind the Panda car. Claire Drummond clutched her throat, stood very still, and studied the village street.

  Just the four policemen from the two cars, studying a map across the bonnet of the smaller police car, two of them smoking. One of them pointed up the street out of the village, towards Cheltenham. She began walking, not too quickly, slow down, along the opposite pavement towards the car park at the back of the main street. She did not hurry — slow down, slow down — but something about her manner or appearance or the way she could not help hunching against recognition might have betrayed her—

  But she turned the corner out of sight of the police without a restraining cry, or following heavy footsteps. She got into the car, shaking from head to foot, and fumbled the key into the ignition. She drove jerkily to the barrier, as if the choke did not function, and reached out to insert the coin, stretching her arm and cursing because she had parked badly, then dropping the tenpenny piece. She made to get out of the car, and it stalled — she'd left it in gear — picked up the coin, fed it into the coin-slot, and the barrier swung up.

  She took three attempts to restart the engine, jerked the gear-stick into first, let out the clutch and jerked forward under the raised barrier. Perspiration dampened her upper lip and her hands on the wheel and made her blouse sticky inside her sweater. She pulled forward to the junction of the alley with the main street. The police car — the motorway patrol — passed her as she waited to pull out, and the policeman in the passenger seat stared at her. Her face felt naked and gleaming in the bright sunlight coming through the windscreen. His eyes transferred to the numberplate of the car and then he was out of sight until she turned out into the main street. She watched her rear-view mirror as she drove out of Andov
ersford.

  No police car followed her as she turned off the A436 up the narrow side-road to the cottage.

  * * *

  Walsingham listened to the radio traffic at the other end of the mobile HQ the Gloucestershire Constabulary had set up in the middle of the village of Shipton, less than two miles from the cottage which contained the people he sought. The report of a car driven by a woman who answered Claire Drummond's description had been passed immediately, on Walsingham's intervention, to the spotter helicopter diverted from motorway traffic checks on the M4. The helicopter had not, as yet, picked up the Volvo on any of the main roads around Andoversford, and Walsingham waited with an edginess he could not quite despise. They had narrowed the area just by sighting the car — he had no doubt it was Drummond's daughter, so obsessively single-minded had he become in the sleepless hours after the killings — and it would only be minutes before the car was spotted. Nevertheless, he shifted on his chair, and listened intently to the radio traffic. The ACC for Gloucestershire was in one of the other two caravans, checking the co-ordination of search reports inside his designated circle ten miles in diameter. Walsingham knew they would have to request army help by the afternoon, unless—

  "Eagle to Mother."

  "Go ahead, Eagle."

  Walsingham savoured the code names like distinct tastes on his tongue — Eagle sharp, acid, Mother sweet with anticipation.

  "Green Volvo spotted turning off A436, two miles north-east of Andoversford."

  Tell them to keep well away!" Walsingham shouted down the length of the caravan, already hot inside from the Indian-summer sun beating down on it. The police radio operator was startled, and looked up at a chief inspector in uniform who nodded without expression on his face.

  "Do not close, Eagle—"

  "What do you think we are? We're well back. There's a cottage up ahead of the car—"

  "Where is that?" Walsingham asked, joining the chief inspector at a map pinned to board along one wall of the caravan. The police officer pointed out Andoversford, then traced the red line of the A436, then the narrow yellow thread of the track. He ran one fingernail up the map, and tapped it.

  "About there, sir."

  The car's definitely stopping, turning into the gate of the cottage — shit! — we've banked away sharply, and we're out of sight. Orders, Mother?"

  Tell them to circle the cottage, but to keep as much out of sight as possible," Walsingham instructed and while his orders were being relayed, he said to the inspector, "Let's get men up there at once, Inspector. Guns, and tear-gas."

  "Sir."

  * * *

  She found Moynihan bathing his head and face with cold water, and knew at once what had happened. She could almost hear McBride needling him, bringing him closer—

  "You bloody fool, where is he?"

  "He's gone — Claire, I'm sorry, he—"

  "You idiot! You absolute turd" He was all we had. How can we do anything now?" She realized she was shaking him, his hangdog face like a backward child's puzzled and hurt and about to cry. She despised him, and sensed his dependence at the same time. She turned away from him, wanting to scream, to rage. "We've lost everything — it's all been for nothing!

  "Please, Claire—"

  "For God's sake what's-the-matter-with-you?" She turned on him, and in the silence as she took in his hurt, beaten face almost unable to register emotional pain, so puffed and misshapen was it, she heard the first distant police siren. He seemed not to hear it, only respond blinkingly to the chalky pallor of her features, wonder at the hand that dabbed round her mouth like a bird seeking a nest. "No—" she murmured at last, running for the door. The siren was loud now, and there was another, more distant one accompanying it, coming from the A436. She opened the door, and saw a police Rover pulling into and across the gate. The driver and the two other policemen all descended on the far side of the car, and she could see the rifles.

  She ducked back inside, slamming the door behind her, rolling her body to the shelter of the wall. Moynihan was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at her, wet hair lank on his forehead, ridiculous broken nose and puffed lips still trying to form adequate expressions. She waited for him to blame her as the second siren wound down the scale and a third member of the sudden chorus wailed more distantly. Then he shrugged, almost pleased that they were trapped there together.

  He crossed to the window, something momentous having been decided between them, and peered round the faded curtain. Two cars, one across the gateway and the other a little down the track, its nose poking up over the rise like a scouting animal's — then the police Range Rover disgorging four men who cut through the nearest trees towards the rear of the cottage. Mere details. He looked at Claire, and nodded in expectation. She had moved to the side window of the sitting-room, where she could see the old man in the heavy, burdening fawn topcoat and trilby hat. She sensed his importance, perhaps even his implacability. She returned Moynihan's nod.

  Moynihan smiled, then knocked out a pane of the window, and fired immediately through the hole, two shots. Claire saw a head duck back down, the party by the Range Rover scatter, then the rifles returned fire, the heavy bullets shattering the windows, plucking plaster in shards and lumps from the far wall of the room. One whined up the chimney, after ricocheting. No warning, no call to surrender through a loudspeaker, no dispositions for a siege. Claire knew they were not intended to survive. She looked at Moynihan, who loosened off three more shots from the Browning he'd hidden in the cottage weeks before. He yelled with pleasure — she saw a police marksman holding a reddening limp arm behind the Rover. She fired through her own glassless window, bullets skittering from the Astra off the bonnet and bodywork of the Range Rover, starring the windscreen.

  Another volley of shots rattled in the room, making their bodies shudder with anticipation.

  "I'll watch the back!" Moynihan called, and moved on all fours out of the sitting-room. She watched him go almost with affection. She heard the kitchen window knocked out, but the fusillade of rule shots preceded, drowned, canceled any fire from his pistol. In the silence, she waited fearfully — then she heard one shot from the pistol, and relaxed.

  The gas-shells pitched and rolled on the floor near her feet at the same moment that Moynihan stumbled through the doorway to the kitchen, blood smeared across his chest. One of the gas-shells rolled to his feet and he stared at it without recognition while the acid tear-gas enveloped him. His single cough racked him, then he slid down the door frame into an untidy heap, sitting with his legs splayed out like a bonfire Guy. The CS gas masked his frozen, distorted features.

  She began to cough. The man outside still would not speak to her. Either they already had McBride, or they assumed he was safe upstairs in the cottage. Or they wanted him dead, too. Her eyes streamed with tears and she dragged air into her lungs, head lifted to the ceiling. She couldn't see to fire through the window, and felt her way along the wall to the door. She should not open the door, but she obeyed the imperative of her lungs and eyes. She plunged through the opening, feeling the air she drew in snatched away by the impact of the first and second bullets. She had no physical sense of falling—

  Walsingham's throat was tickled and his tear-ducts irritated as he walked swiftly to the body of Claire Drummond and turned it over with his foot. He thought the woman attractive, but her still-open eyes were bolting in death, suggesting the fanaticism of life. He placed his handkerchief over his mouth and nose and entered the cottage. He virtually ignored Moynihan's body, and climbed the creaking stairs.

  "McBride," he called. "McBride, are you here?"

  It took him only seconds to check the two upstairs rooms and the bathroom. McBride was not in the cottage. He opened the bathroom window, not to call down to the police but to draw in clean air. He felt weakened and nauseous, a condition he could not ascribe to the tear-gas. McBride had either been taken elsewhere, which was unlikely, or had escaped while the woman was in Andoversford. The man's face
downstairs looked beaten about—

  Closer, he comforted himself, closer. Just one voice left. Very well — he was still thankful the man had opened fire so conveniently — he would frighten McBride into a parley, into his trade-off. He could already see the item in the afternoon newspapers, and the nationals the following day.

  Police seek American professor after double murder in Cotswolds — and then McBride's name. He'd try to trade, he'd come in. He'd have to.

  Nevertheless, he felt grateful for the sweet mid-morning air as the last of the CS gas dispersed.

  November 1940

  Churchill stood before the mirror of the washroom, staring at his puffy, tired face, seeing his own question answered in the blue eyes. The convoy was perhaps less than an hour from the minefield, and he would allow it to sail on to its certain destruction.

  He picked up the towel, and wiped his wet face. His features appeared round the edges of the towel as he dried himself, as if furtively seeking some mark that would indicate his guilt, reveal his decision to the mirror, to the world. No, he could manage to hide it.

  Necessity is the mother of atrocity, he told himself with grim amusement. Fitzgerald would be lost, Roosevelt told that U-boats had sunk the convoy, and the Germans would sail into the minefield.

  Churchill wished, almost futilely, that Japan would declare war on America and drag Roosevelt and his reluctant Congress into the war. The defeat of this minor German invasion plan was only a respite. Next summer they would attempt Sea Lion again unless the Russians opened up another front in the east, or Hitler tired of Stalin as an ally and turned on him.