by Craig Thomas
Had to be — had to be done. He finished wiping his face, and put down the towel. He nodded in confirmation to his reflection. He had made his decision. Fitzgerald had to die. He was as much an enemy as the Germans they were trying to keep out of Ireland.
He put on his waistcoat and jacket and went back into the operations room beneath the Admiralty. He looked back fleetingly from the doorway at the darkened washroom, as if he had left something behind him or his reflection still gazed out at him in accusation. Then he shut the door firmly.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Trade-off
November 1940
McBride wriggled through the hedge to the west of the farmhouse, his jersey caught on sharp bare twigs, his hands and knees scraped on the stony earth as he forced his way underneath and through. He pushed the rifle ahead of him, clambered out after it and picked it up, fastidiously dusting its length with his hand as he began running again. The startled and confused Germans were pouring shots towards the point from where his fire had come while he was fifty yards closer to the house and approaching from another, unexpected direction. He skirted the fruit trees which now masked him from his opponents. He paused, knelt down and looked under the low branches of the trees. German soldiers, some without helmets or with uniform blouses and coats undone, were moving towards the hedge which had not returned their concentrated fire. The house was less than fifty yards away, but across a long open lawn which sloped only gently and provided no cover. There was an ornamental pool and a sundial.
He could hardly control his eagerness, the flood of energy that the joining of battle had released; his energies seemed uncontrolled and illogical. He got up into a crouch and moved towards the last of the small trees. His foot crunched wetly on a fallen apple left to rot. He paused, waiting for breath to settle, lungs to expand to meet the effort required, body to judge its own moment. Still nerves jittered in his hands and arms, and impatience crowded him, obscured judgment. Already, his eagerness protested, they would have discovered he had moved on, already it was becoming too late—
He began running, even as he saw a dark shape emerge from the side of the house and another from the fruit trees to his left, twenty yards away. He swerved sideways, barely halting, and fired the Lee Enfield twice from the hip. The figure ducked back into the trees, and McBride did not know whether or not he had been hit. The figure by the white wall of the farmhouse — moonlight leapt betrayingly across the lawn like a finger pointing out McBride and his opponent— was kneeling, taking aim. McBride rolled to one side, coming up onto his belly and elbows and squeezing off three shots simply to distract. He heard each one pluck against the wall, and then the shouts behind him, the pack with a fresh scent.
He drew the Mauser, aimed rapidly, and squeezed off two shots. The heavy old gun jumped in his hand so that he had to compensate by aiming low before firing twice more. Then he rolled again, feeling pinned to card by the moonlight whitening the lawn. The marksman by the wall was an unmoving bundle but there were others now, hardly visible against the fretwork of the fruit trees, and awareness of them dragged at him like clinging mud until he sat up on the lawn, on the edge of the pool where lily leaves still floated but the plants had turned to dry sedge and there was wire to keep herons from the fish. The shadow of the sundial sliced across the lawn, amputated one of his legs. He fired twice, swung the Mauser, held stiffly in both hands, and fired three more shots. He rolled over and got to his feet, running in a crouch until he was a fly against the white wall attracting their fire then a shadow then simply darkness as he slipped round the side of the house, out of the moonlight.
He leaned against the door for a moment, clutching his shoulder as the awareness of pain pushed through his quivering excitement, his elation, and his hand came away wet, very wet. He turned the door handle, sorry, so sorry for the mistake, for the sudden twitching aside of the cloud curtain and sorry for Maureen and the baby — and alive enough to finish Drummond.
There was a shadow in the hall, against the panelling, but the moon was gone again and he could not make it out.
Then, "Michael?" and he fired into the centre of the shadow and it fell away to one side. Then the light came on and he saw the grey uniform and heard the voice again, this time behind him, and even as he turned to the sound of his name he felt the bullets enter, their force knocking him sideways, sending his feet from under him as a rug moved. He fell over, tried to raise the Mauser at Drummond who was at the foot of the stairs, but the effort was far beyond his draining strength. Drummond looked sorry, but it was almost too late to distinguish expressions. He just heard the door bang open and the first pair of jackboots before the light faded and he rested his head lightly on the wooden floor and closed his eyes.
Drummond came and knelt by his body for a moment, feeling for the absent pulse. A German officer began to apologize, but Drummond dismissed him curtly. He was safe now, but it was too early to take comfort from the thought. McBride's dead face looked up, youthful and innocent. He looked no more than lightly asleep. Drummond was sorry — almost — that he had come back, though he had always known he would.
October 198-
"David, you simply can't do it! We are so close now. I assure you it's a matter of hours, not days." Walsingham stared out of the window of the Cheltenham hotel he had booked into, down the length of the Promenade, wide pavements full of shoppers, the sun filtering down, barred and sliced, through the trees. Guthrie's telephone call, diverted to him by the police switchboard, came as a naked, open shock, encompassed him in a momentary futility until the ego narrowed perspective to the purely personal.
"I'm sorry, Charles. It will come out anyway, I'm certain of that. The meetings can be less harmed by my resignation on the grounds of illness or overwork than they would be if I tried to carry on, and got found out. I'd not be forgiven, by anyone, for that." He tried to chuckle confidently. His whole vocal presentation was a charade, Walsingham decided, and suddenly he was tired of Guthrie and the niceties above the salt. Guthrie could go to hell, but Emerald would never go public.
"I'm sorry you have no greater faith in my assurances, Minister," he snapped dismissively. Guthrie sounded chastened and deflated when he replied.
"It's no reflection on you, Charles, as I'm sure you realize. I am going to do what I feel has to be done to protect my initiative over Ulster. And I can best do that by retiring from the scene — not just temporarily, but permanently." He cleared his throat to make room for a new portentousness. "My resignation will be with the PM this evening. I felt, however, that you should be informed."
Walsingham wanted to tell him that people were dead to protect his precious skin and office and initiative over Ulster, but the bile that rose in him simply drained him, made him feel very old and wish only to end the conversation.
"Thank you for telling me, Minister. Goodbye." He put down the telephone without taking his eyes from the window. Somewhere out there, in all probability, McBride was considering his next step. Walsingham looked at the afternoon edition of the local paper on the telephone table. It was folded to reveal most of the headline concerning the murders in the Cotswold cottage and the police search for Professor Thomas McBride of Portland. Was McBride reading it at that moment, was he wondering when to call? Walsingham could feel the American like another presence in the room, and he was eager for their meeting as a younger self might have been for love or fornication.
He turned his eyes back to the window. Trade-off. If not, then McBride had to be eliminated like the others.
Where was he? Where?
* * *
Thomas Sean McBride sat in the restaurant in the Cavendish House department store on the Promenade, attired in an outfit he had purchased via credit card in the men's department, drinking tea and picking idly with a fork at a huge Danish pastry. The evening newspaper was folded on the tablecloth in front of him. His nonchalance was assumed, the pastry a necessary prop. He had cleaned himself up as thoroughly as he could in the washroo
m of a pub in Andoversford, and had eaten bread and cheese, washed down with beer, before catching the bus into Cheltenham.
The cops were talking to him, through the newspaper. It was a threat and perhaps a plea. No, he decided, reading the details of the double murder again, it was a threat. The cops had killed the woman and Moynihan.
He still could not give her her name back, not even now she was so evidently dead — unless it was a bluff, but he had already rejected the idea because Hoskins" staring, sightless eyes had come back into his mind, looking out of the first cup of tea. It was unnerving, but something in him concentrated more vividly on the woman and on her death than on his own danger. But he still could not name her.
He felt a curious invulnerability sitting there amid the inherited formalities of afternoon tea, premature fur wraps belying the day, jewellery cording old, wrinkled throats or blazoning shrunken bosoms, chatter brittler than glass, or lumpy as the crockery. The newspaper story also served to distance the cottage at Andoversford and the police hunt for him. They had no idea where he was, the story was meant to bring him in. They wanted to trade.
His removal from the sharp, cutting edges of his recent experience made him reluctant to think about Goessler, or about Drummond. One had been the author of his predicament, the other his father's murderer. To think of either of them made him feel tired, incapable of effort. Nothing in his surroundings or his mental landscape prompted him to action. He was being told in the newspaper he could go nowhere, he was on his own — why not drop in and discuss your problem?
He didn't think he wanted to do that.
McBride finished the Danish pastry then took his bill to the cashier. He paid again by credit card. He had only a few pounds in his wallet and could not foresee how to gain access to more cash.
He passed telephones on his way to the lift. He stopped, and a smile crept onto his face, took hold, broadened. Why not? He ducked his head into the plastic bubble, and consulted the directory. He rang the police HQ in Cheltenham.
"My name is McBride," he said. "Don't keep me waiting or I'll hang up. McBride — who wants to talk to me?" Then he listened to the clicks and splutters and the muffled voices until someone spoke to him. A cool, clear old man's voice, a hint of suppressed excitement behind the bland tones.
"Professor McBride, the author of Gates of Hell?"
"Uh? Oh, yes, you want to check I'm no nut, right?"
"That is correct."
"What kind of a file do you have on me?"
"We could call it sufficient — your father's name, for example?"
"Michael — and he was murdered before I was born, November, 1940. Now, can we get moving?"
"Thank you, Professor."
"You had them killed, mm? Who are you, anyway?"
"My name is Walsingham. I knew your father well."
"Nice for you." McBride began looking around him, furtively. He knew he would be long gone before anyone traced his call, but he could not prevent his physical reactions. "Drummond told me about you — he killed my father."
"What—?" Then, with recovered aplomb, "I didn't know that. He is dead, by the way."
"What?" A small hole was apprehensible in McBride's stomach. "When?"
"A heart attack last night. I got a routine report after the Admiralty was informed. So, the whirligig of time—"
"He had over forty years" freedom. You had his daughter killed this morning — quite a lot of dying seems to go on around you, Mr Walsingham."
"Will you come in and talk to us? You have only to pop into the nearest police station."
"You want to trade, uh? But you'll never pin those two murders on me. It had to be done by a small army."
"Ah, but there are other deaths, Professor. We would have released the story tomorrow, had you not got in touch by then. A Doktor Goessler and his assistant, two people helping you with your researches, I believe?"
McBride was silent, staring at the wall with the scribbled numbers, surprised that the occasional obscenity had spread as far as the restaurant in Cavendish House.
Walsingham was his one and only enemy, he told himself, holding the receiver away from his suddenly hot ear as if the voice at the other end might infect him. He'd killed four people who knew about the events of 1940. For Guthrie, for the goddam government?
Curiously, he no longer felt animosity for Goessler, or Lobke, or Moynihan, or for Claire. Only the man at the other end of the line was his enemy, his real enemy. A period of emotional paralysis seemed to have passed, leaving only a single object of focus for the dormant feelings that had multiplied during the past days. He was free now, and all the others were dead. This man had killed them.
"Your plan, right — it was all your idea, forty years ago?"
"I — don't think we'll discuss that now. Rather, the terms for your surrender." The voice was cold. McBride felt flushed, excited. He wanted to raise his voice, shout down the telephone at the same time as he became suddenly more aware of his surroundings, the potential threat represented by the people around him, the waitresses, the cashier.
"I don't think I want to do that right now, Mr Walsingham."
"Just think about Goessler and Lobke. You can be charged with their murders, and will be when we take you, unless you give yourself up voluntarily in the next twenty-four hours."
"What's the deal?"
"I think we'll talk about that next time you call."
The telephone went dead. McBride was bemused for a moment, and then he began shaking. They'd traced the call.
The lift doors opened and he waited, frozen. No policeman emerged. He took to the stairs, then made his way to the rear of the store, to the delicatessen. He heard the sirens while his sense of smell was still sifting the sausages and cheeses and smoked meats and fish. One Panda car arrived outside the exit from the delicatessen, and McBride moved through into the record and TV department, and left by the side street door. He walked down to the Promenade, saw the flashing lights of two police cars parked outside the front of Cavendish House, and turned in the opposite direction, taking cover in the crowds inside W. H. Smith.
He recovered his breath and his judgment there as he browsed through the cassette tapes. Squatting on his haunches, his eyes blind to Folk and TV Advertised, he turned over the conversation in his mind. Walsingham had left him the only one alive who knew about Smaragdenhahkette and the British response to it — the murder of Patrick Fitzgerald, Irish-American confidant of Roosevelt, and hundreds of British seamen. His story was worth maybe two million, and his life.
He smiled reluctantly to himself, as if saying farewell to a good friend. His life. Maybe he could have both, but the money definitely came second. He felt assailed by sadness as sharp as a stomach cramp as he squatted there, so that he stood up, lifted out an unrecognized name, turning the cassette in his left hand. Walsingham had killed Claire Drummond, and even fat Goessler, and none of them had wanted to kill him. Walsingham would, if he had the chance. A sure and certain silence, with the dirt rattling on the lid of the box—
Genesis? The name on the cassette cover became clear, and he put it down as if it burned him. The Lamb lies down on Broadway. Not this one—
He shuffled along the shelving, hands in his pockets. How could he turn the tables? A determination to exploit his circumstances was as evident as a metal plate at the back of his head, preventing the incursion of doubt, or fear. He was alone now, and his enemy was identified and a single man. The police at his disposal did not count, somehow. An excitement passed through him like an earth-tremor. He needed someone else to know.
He walked away from the record department, to stationery, and picked up a writing pad and a packet of envelopes. He'd meet Walsingham, but not without insurance. He saw a rack of typewriters, and replaced the paper.
Five minutes later, he left W. H. Smith with a portable typewriter and a packet of bond paper and a dozen sheets of carbon paper. He felt curiously lighthearted. Doubts and trepidations hammered against the
metal plate at the back of his mind, but he knew it would hold. His mind was as shallow and clear as a pool in which, clearly visible, a pike circled a smaller fish. The small fish was grinning.
November 1940
Gilliatt stopped the car at the entrance to the drive of Crosswinds Farm. The house was in darkness, except for one curtained light in a downstairs window. Maureen, next to him, stared through the windscreen intently, unseeingly. Now they had obeyed her frenetic desire to return to find McBride — a consuming guilt for all the years of her marriage, Gilliatt regarded it, whether fair or unfair in its self-blame he could not say — she seemed drained of purpose and energy.
The minor roads and unsurfaced tracks by which they had returned to Kilbrittain had been empty of Germans. It was an experience on the edge of phantasmagoria, the empty dark roads, the silent countryside, the innocent slopes of the land, the clear moonlight. And the silent, hunched woman beside him. In the small cocoon of the Morris he could not even care very much for the fate of Michael McBride. Now, the farm looked as it always had done and McBride's lurid imagery of betrayal and treachery seemed inappropriate.
He cleared his throat.
"I'll go up to the house," he said. She seemed not to hear him. "You wait here. Get into the driving seat." He opened the door and swung his long legs out of the car. "If anything untoward happens — anything at all — start the car and drive away. Don't stop until you reach Cork. Understand?" She looked at him, and he took hold of her cold hand. The other was placed across her stomach as if to protect the fetus she could not possibly feel. He shook her hand, waking her. "Understand?" Responsibility for her weighed on him as he stared into her white, strained features. McBride had run off to play heroic games, but someone always had to be left to tidy up after heroes. His part, dustpan-and-brush for the remnants of hacked armour and the tiny shards of swords. He was angry with McBride. The silent farmhouse belied his accusations, his silly daring.