by Craig Thomas
"Hello — you're not cooking at this time of night, surely?" he said, taking off his coat and throwing it onto a chair. He moved to the fire, rubbing his hands, then turning his back to it as if chilled, waiting for her to move to him.
"I expect you can eat it," she offered grudgingly. He watched her inspect his body, seeing through the clothes, for new marks, new contours violence might have drawn. He remembered her horror at a knife-wound across his ribs that had bled badly — and she hadn't asked what he'd done to the German, ever. It had happened on a beach east of Cork, early in 1940. Even now, she avoided looking at him as he washed or shaved stripped to the waist, and when they made love her hands hovered near, but never caressed, the scar.
"I can. What is it?"
"A pie." She wiped her arms with a towel, removing the worst of the flour as if she were removing a disguise. Then she came to him in front of the fire, and put her face up to be kissed. He looked down at the small features, the auburn hair which framed them, the parchment skin that looked somehow raw-boned and stretched, typically Irish. He bent his head, kissed her, squeezing his arms so that he pressed her body against him. He felt suddenly guilty as he stroked her hair as she leaned against his chest. He had been a painter when they met, just finished art school and with a few small commissions from rich dog-owners and one or two advertising companies trying to encourage cheap new talent. There was a studio upstairs, next to the bedroom, and an exhibition of unsold landscapes and portraits of Maureen in the loft. But he had found himself a natural spy, an adventurer, almost in the first days after recruitment by Drummond — one slight pang as if he were betraying his past, or his wife, and then he had leapt into the secret life. Each time he measured her smallness in his arms, he felt guilty again for what he had discovered of himself. He had lain in the room of his own life like an unused weapon until another war required his services. A natural.
"I love you," he whispered, and she pressed her cheek closer to his chest. He stared at the furniture of the room as if appraising its value.
October 198-
Rear Admiral Robert Evelyn Drummond, RN Retd, still lived at Crosswinds Farm, County Cork. It had taken only a couple of telephone calls, and a visit to a branch library in Bloomsbury for a Cork Area telephone directory, to locate him. The Admiralty were pleased to confirm his continued existence in good health, though they would not immediately release his address without some personal details.
McBride had determined not to telephone Drummond before he reached Cork, but instead simply to visit him as the son of Michael McBride — letting surprise and perhaps even pleasure spring the lock on the memory-box. He anticipated no difficulties with Drummond.
As he changed flights at Dublin Airport for the flight to Cork, he was unaware of being watched. When he left the Aer Lingus Viscount at Cork Airport and passed through Customs, he did not see Moynihan sitting at the cramped and tiny snack bar, reading a copy of the Cork Examiner. But Moynihan saw him, logging his arrival with a nod to two other men in the passenger lounge who followed McBride out, watched him pick up his Hertz car, and drove after him into Cork.
Later, Moynihan drove down to Kilbrittain and booked into the one small hotel in the village. The next day, he expected McBride to call on Drummond and his daughter at Crosswinds Farm.
CHAPTER FIVE
Open Door
November 1940
McBride squatted on his haunches, staring at the seaweed wrack, the splinters of wood, the old bottle, the shells where he had brushed his hand across the soft white sand above the reach of the tide in Rosscarbery Bay. He smiled, squeezed the wrack so that one of its dry pods burst with a flat cracking noise, and wished that Drummond's reported German agent had left an evident, unmistakable sign of his passage. McBride was working his way from Galley Head and Dundeady Island west around the bay. The stiff little wind rustled and whisked the sand, and carried the smell of exposed mud now that the tide was well out.
No, he didn't wish it. Perhaps just the slenderest clue, the momentary glimpse as if through a door-crack into the agent's mind — and then the slow, building pursuit. He breathed in deeply, engaged in something more fierce — more enmeshing — than his love-making with Maureen late in the night. Maureen had been tidied to one part of his mind again, her habitual and appointed residence, fuzzy and localized like a snapshot of some place in the past. Yet he loved her as he had loved no other woman, and would love no other. He never discussed with himself the weight of that love, or its importance in the entirety of his awareness.
He had pondered, at first, whether the war had distracted him from his marriage; but, remembering the caged days in the studio-attic in Cork, the search for this cottage in Leap, the restlessness of the days in the bedroom he then used as a studio — he knew that perhaps the war had saved his relationship with Maureen. She had become only a necessary fraction of his life, placed in proportion; he thought that she, too, had accepted that he was somehow disabled from accepting the completeness of a life that centred on the domestic, on a relationship.
This bed thy centre is— He stood up, shrugging the Donne from his mind. The German agent — if indeed one had landed three nights before — would have left no traces, unless he was somehow careless. The float would be buried or hidden inland, and if he was anywhere in the area still, he would have registered at an inn in a plausible disguise or be staying with one of the fellow-travellers who expected a Nazi victory.
He walked slowly through the soft sand, head down, eyes casting about for something out of place. The smoothness of sand where the belly of a dragged float had passed, one half-erased footprint missed in the night—
McBride was a hunter. Something Drummond kept in a kennel until there was a man who needed hunting down. German agents had been landed in southern Ireland, along the Cork coast, since 1937 or "38, most of them taking the quick route north either to Dublin to cross on the ferry as native and neutral Irish to Liverpool; or into Ulster and from Belfast to England. In either case, the object was the same — spying on Britain.
Until perhaps three or four months ago, when McBride had found a dead body on the beach — drowned when his float capsized in a rough sea — carrying papers which gave his nationality as Irish, and which would not have fitted him to cross to mainland Britain, but rather would have suited a resident of the Republic.
Since then, rumours, traces — in one case a killing — of agents who were staying in the Cork and Kerry areas, possibly being taken off again by submarine the way they had come. Rumours of men with assumed English identities — painters, bird-watchers, travellers, students. Swallowed by the damp, musty County Cork earth, for all the hard evidence.
The sun was well up — the day bright, hard as steel against his face, the low hills behind the bay sharp in the dry, frosty air, the sea smooth beyond the exposed mud flat — by the time he reached the point where the road bordered the beach, which itself narrowed to a thin, grey strip. He had found nothing, and wondered whether he might temporarily abandon his search and check Ross Carbery itself, sprawled haphazardly on the far bank of the bay's narrow inlet at the mouth of a lazy river. An agent with the right papers might have gone into the village — they were walking up to the front door these days, after all—
He climbed the steps up to the sea wall and the road, his eyes alert as if he expected to see an unfamiliar ornithologist or cyclist. He walked up to the main road from Clonakilty, along which he had been driven by Drummond the previous evening. He felt almost light-hearted, in spite of his wasted morning, and he whistled to himself, hands thrust for warmth in the pockets of his donkey-jacket. He was happy in his work, and he was working again. Walsingham and his concern with Guernsey had receded in his imagination.
A pony-trap caught up with him just before he reached the bridge across the inlet to Ross Carbery. He turned, and his face darkened as he saw the driver was his father-in-law, Devlin, the principal grocer in the village. Devlin, who must have recognized his walk, his p
osture, still adopted no conciliatory face. He'd been delivering to the farms, perhaps, and was as reluctant about the encounter as McBride.
"Good-day, Da," McBride said, squinting with the sunlight and perhaps with irony.
"Michael — good-day." McBride observed Devlin's thick neck, the squat body which he could never decide was actual or merely the visual exaggeration prompted by his dislike of the man. In the end, Devlin's Republican politics; his short-changing, his bully's air were little alongside the man's voice, gestures, shape. "How is Maureen?"
McBride climbed up beside the man, acting out their mutual parody of propinquity. Devlin clucked the pony into movement, shaking the reins on its back.
"Maureen's fine."
"You've been away, then?" Devlin continued as the cart moved onto the narrow road bridge. A bull-nose Morris squeezed past it.
"My aunt in Dublin — sick again. You know how it is, Da, when they get old—" Neither of them believed, but both normally accepted, the fiction of his behaviour. Devlin certainly knew that McBride worked for the British, and despised him for it. McBride, for his part, had nothing but contempt for the narrow, bigoted, unrealizable aspirations of the IRA. Sometimes, he wondered when some of Devlin's more outspoken, and less cowardly, acquaintances would get around to an attempt on his life — as a traitor to something-or-other.
"Ah," was all Devlin replied.
"Any strangers in Ross Carbery in the last three days?" McBride asked, studying the pony's rump intently.
Devlin was silent almost all the way across the bridge, then he said: "I haven't heard."
"The lads about as usual, then?"
"They are."
"All of them?" Devlin steered the pony into an alleyway off the main street of Ross Carbery, to the yard behind his shop. He grunted as if it took all his physical strength to control the docile animal. He did not look at McBride, who suspected he was lying.
Devlin provided him with information as readily as if McBride threatened his daughter in some obscure and violent way. He did it, however, simply out of his own fear of Maureen's husband — perhaps even out of fear of Maureen herself. The IRA, for some strange reason, did not frighten him. He did not inform on them, anyway, and the British had lost interest for the moment. McBride had never threatened or coerced. There had been no need.
"Now, Da — anything, anything at all?"
Devlin reversed the pony and trap, then climbed down. He looked up at McBride. His eyes shifted guiltily.
"Someone—" He cleared his throat. "Someone is buying groceries for two—" He choked off any amplification of the bare fact.
"You're sure?"
"I am — twice as much bacon, eggs. Isn't that enough?"
"One of the lads?"
Devlin shook his head vehemently. "No!"
"Da — I don't want him, just his guest." Devlin swallowed, shook his head again. "Come on, Da. His guest won't be Irish, he'll be German—"
Devlin erupted in unaccustomed defiance. Someone had recently warned him about talking to his son-in-law, evidently. The truce was over, and McBride wondered at the reason behind it.
"No, damn you, no! No more than that — find the man yourself, if you want him that much!"
McBride skipped down from the trap, stood before Devlin.
"It's all right, Da — I'll look after you." He felt no reluctance in saying it. Devlin he disliked — but the threat encompassed him, Maureen and her father alike. Devlin hesitated, then nodded. McBride understood his relief. Somehow, just as he was more afraid of him, Devlin regarded him as stronger, more powerful than the IRA men he knew. It wasn't much like respect, but it was a recognition of superiority. "One of the lads, Da. OK, I'll find him—" He frowned. "And what do the silly buggers think they're up to, Da — playing with the Germans? They'll get their fingers burned."
But Devlin, reassured, retreated from a moment close to intimacy. He merely shrugged and readopted his habitual sour face.
* * *
Walsingham paused outside the door of Room T of the Admiralty main building, as if to take a deep mental breath. He tucked the buff folders more firmly under his left arm, yet his hand still refused to turn the door handle. The green stripe of the RNVR(S) between the gold on his cuff now mocked him. At the bottom of some great steep mental slope, he looked up, daunted. He felt little more confident of success than some harmless crank who continually reported the landing of creatures from outer space to the local police.
Then he opened the door, and went in. Rear Admiral March was waiting for him, seated at the far end of the long polished walnut conference table of Room T's main office — other, smaller rooms waited behind the half dozen doors off this main room, where March's Section II of Admiralty OIC seemed to lie in wait for him. March smiled at his entry, gestured to him to join him at the far end of the table.
"Charles — sit down, my boy." Then he immediately looked at his watch, as if impatient of missing another appointment elsewhere. "What can we do for you in Section II?" A distance was marked between them. March was Walsingham's superior, Walsingham was on the strength of Section II, but now he was being made to feel an outsider. His civilian intelligence background, the green RNVR(S) stripe, was again a matter of importance, and being used to dissociate him from the naval staff with whom he worked.
"My — Irish business, sir," Walsingham began, sitting down, opening the top folder. March looked bored almost at once, hardly glancing at the aerial pictures he had seen before or the reports that lay beneath them.
"You've been talking to DMS, I gather," March said in a spirit of surprised offence. "Interesting?"
"Sir, the Director will submit a report to this office as soon as he can, based on our conversation—"
"And you led him by the nose, I suppose?" The Admiral's face creased in a humourless smile. A narrow face, the pitted skin of which was leathery, blue-jowled. Dark, probing eyes, thick grey eyebrows which seemed perpetually lifted in disbelief. "Come, come, Charles, no pouting. I know you. DMS no doubt supports your cock-eyed theory simply because he doesn't know any better."
"Sir," Walsingham said in a tight, smoothed tone. "DMS agreed that what my agent had seen was quite probably a group of minesweeping submarines in Guernsey—"
"This agent — Irish, isn't he?"
"Anglo-Irish, for all it matters. He is reliable—"
"Charles, look out of any one of these tall windows. It is November outside—" As if in sympathy with Walsingham, weak sunlight bloomed on the carpet on the other side of the elegant room, revealing its faded pattern. But, almost immediately, a heavy cloud removed it. It would rain before the afternoon was over. It was cold in the room, despite the huge radiators and the coal fire. "No seaborne invasion plan — such as you propose — would be seriously entered into by the Germans. When we knew Hitler had canceled Sea Lion in October, we also knew we were safe from the sea. The invasion you suggest is impossible."
Walsingham's boyish face narrowed as if he had sucked a lemon. In a moment, he would again be reminded of his lack of experience in naval matters. "Sir, I admit it is unlikely. But not that it is impossible."
March looked at the folders, the original aerial pictures of the newly erected sheds in Guernsey harbour, and the digest of McBride's debriefing beneath them, clipped to them.
"I see. Your man has provided fresh evidence, I take it — hence your persistence?"
"Sir, I request you read his report, and my account of what the DMS had to say." Walsingham realized his knuckles were a strained white as they rested on the table. He removed his hands.
"Very well, Charles, I'll read it. But you're wrong, you know. Utterly wrong."
October 198-
Crosswinds Farm was an easy house to find on the southern side of the hamlet of Kilbrittam. Solid, white, almost italianate with its red roof and surrounding fruit trees. It was situated on a knoll, looking north to the hamlet and the hills towards Bandon, south over Courtmacsharry Bay and the Old Head of Kinsale. McBri
de turned the rented car off the narrow, hedged road, up the track to the farmhouse. Friesian cattle watched him over a newly painted wooden fence. As he pulled up before the house, a woman was waiting for him — presumably Drummond's daughter with whom he had already spoken on the telephone.
She moved confidently towards the car, extended one hand and shook his in a firm grip. Mid thirties, he estimated, some instinct making him study her hands for rings. No wedding ring. When he looked up again, she was smiling sardonically, blue eyes amused, yet appraising. Then she brushed her dark hair away from her cheek, and beckoned him towards the house. She was dressed in denims and a pale green sweater over a blouse. A green scarf knotted at her throat. McBride found her immediately attractive, and somehow off-putting, as if a great deal had already passed between them, and her judgment of him had already been made. As if he had been expected for a long time in her life, and she might already have defined and placed him.
He followed her into the house — dark wood panels, a heavy staircase that turned out of sight, polished floors with splashes of bright rug. She led him through the square hall into a large room that looked north towards Bandon and the low green hills where the shadows of clouds chased across their contours, swallowing sheep and cattle, white farms, trees. The view became sinister in an unexpected and inexplicable way the moment he saw it, and Drummond rose from his chair at the side of the big window, hand out. He smiled.
"Admiral," he said. Sunlight on the scene again.
"No formalities," Drummond said easily, waving him to a chair opposite his own, sitting down again himself, at ease, comfortable. Drummond was tall, grey-haired, cleanshaven. The skin was mottled with age, as it was on the backs of his hands, but it was drawn tight on the fine bones. His eyes were clear, his gaze steady. Though McBride knew he must be close to eighty, he appeared still vigorous. Only the ebony cane with the silver fox's head which he had used to get up quickly marked age, infirmity. McBride could understand how the man had successfully run an intelligence network in Ireland more than forty years before.
