by Craig Thomas
Patrick Terence Fitzgerald's mission gave him no pleasure, and little sense of importance. He was a gravedigger, a priest officiating at the last rites of a great and doomed empire.
Suddenly, he turned on his heel, back to his cabin. He was weary of fresh air and the empty, heaving perspective of the Atlantic.
October 198-
It was late afternoon, and McBride was alternately hot and cold in the small, dusty reading room as he feverishly continued his search for corroborative evidence of the material stolen from him. He had driven himself without rest or food all day, so that he need think about nothing else — especially the consequences of the theft and the identity of the thieves. His search was fruitless, wearying, and frustrating. Whenever he paused for a moment, the chill of the room struck him forcibly, and as soon as be began poring over ledgers or sorting through box-files or ring-binders his temperature climbed again until he was sweating and agitated and flushed. He was like someone with an approaching fever-climax, distraught and barely-rational.
On a wall-shelf which might once have held a teacher's books or the daily post he had collected a pitiful little heap of papers by four in the afternoon. In a new notebook there were perhaps two dozen speculative entries. Confronted by the mass of data he had extracted, with Hoskins" help, from the repository, he convinced himself that there was an answer, that a seam of gold ran through this mine of records, because he could not bear to think that what was now lost to him was the whole and entire basis of the available evidence for the German invasion of Ireland in 1940.
Hoskins carried in another two box-files, blowing dust from them as he entered, just as McBride, rubbing a dirty hand down his face and smearing his cheek, looked up from the ledger which contained the record of ships" movements in and out of Milford Haven. The flotilla of minesweepers did not appear in the ledger, leaving or returning. The record — he could not be certain that it had been amended — indicated that Bisley's flotilla was in Milford Haven sound from three days before it set out until its next sailing, the mines across Swansea harbour, when Gilliatt had already left the ship.
McBride felt a flush of anger, but refrained from directing it against Hoskins, who smiled over the box-files before putting them down on the edge of the table.
"Any luck, Professor?"
"No, dammit!" He tried to grin away his anger, but failed. His face adopted nothing more genial than a grimace. "Sorry, Hoskins. What are these?"
"Convoys." He made the word heavy with significance. McBride studied his face.
"Important?" he asked unhopefully.
"Could be, Professor — but it won't have anything on the convoy I was on." Bright beads of perspiration stood out on Hoskins" pale, furrowed brow. McBride, tired now, was prepared to listen. He remembered the subject being broached the previous day.
"Your convoy?"
"Remember I told you yesterday, Professor?" Hoskins seemed to steel himself, then blurted out: "Must be interesting to you. We were routed south of Ireland, and I heard they'd swept a special channel for us—" McBride's mouth slackened in surprise, even as his body snapped to attention in his chair.
"Go on," he said shakily.
"They couldn't have done the job, could they? We got sunk!" Hoskins said with sudden bitterness.
"Tell me—"
Hoskins glanced theatrically round the room. "Not here." He took a card from his pocket, on which an insurance salesman's name and address had been crossed out, and Hoskins" own address written neatly on the reverse of the card. "Come and see me this evening. I'll tell you everything I know."
"But—"
"Later." And Hoskins went out, closing the door behind him. McBride got to his feet, pacing the room, staring at the two box-files with renewed excitement. A special convoy — couldn't have done the job properly— What the hell did it mean?
He crossed to the table, wanting to close the ledger with a final loud noise and get on with sifting the new box-files, the word convoy lurid with possibilities in his imagination, when he read the last entry of the page he had reached.
Two minelayers arrived in Milford. November twenty-eighth. He flicked over the page, mistaking minelayer for minesweeper for a moment, then correcting himself even as he read that the minelayers had sailed the following day, and found their return as his finger slid down the ledger entries—
Minelayers.
An intuition of such force as to weaken him, make him sit down to rest suddenly untrustworthy limbs, assailed him. He had seen something, somewhere—
Why was it in a different handwriting in the ledger? A new clerk, one not instructed? He flicked over pages. No — God, no! He'd been so bored, so inattentive, so stupid— This was the normal handwriting, the pages containing the references to Bisley were written in a hand that was very like but not identical. God—
He flicked through other pages, saw where a new clerk took over the harbour records — then he flicked to the front of the ledger, and discovered more confusion. He had been reading, dully and mule-like and damn stupidly, the harbourmaster's ledger of shipping movements—
Handwriting, handwriting? No, Jesus but he was dumb, it was the same handwriting. Bisley's flotilla was omitted, but nothing had been changed. He giggled aloud. It was stupid, suspecting a cover-up. But, someone had been instructed not to make an entry concerning Bisley, presumably for security. But the minelayers?
The men who had removed the Milford files had left this, if they'd found it at all, because it wasn't Admiralty records, it had belonged to the harbourmaster. During the war, all shipping had become the responsibility of the Admiralty. But the harbourmaster had gone on keeping his own log of shipping movements, apparently, separately from NOIC at Milford. And someone keeping his log failed to ignore the sailing of two minelayers from Milford to St George's Channel and their return — having resown the passage swept by Bisley's flotilla, and that swept by the Germans for their proposed invasion. God—
Hoskins, he had to talk to Hoskins immediately.
It was getting dark outside. Hoskins would already have left. He plucked the card from his pocket as if fearful someone might already have stolen it. Sansom Street, Clerkenwell. He'd need his tape-recorder from the hotel. Hoskins was on a British ship that went down in the St George's Channel because—
He could not, with any precision, form the conclusion. He was almost afraid of so doing, because it explained everything. The secrecy, Drummond's silence, the theft ot his notes. The British had—
Again, a mental impediment prevented him forming the thought in precise verbal symbols. He didn't know, he told himself. He did not — he did. He did. It explained everything.
He stared at the ledger again. The names of the two minelayers, their tonnage, their captains. Jamieson and Guthrie. He closed the ledger as if doing so might contain its secret. He hugged the leather in his hands.
Guthrie. David Guthrie? On TV. Northern Ireland. The British minister responsible for Northern Ireland. Another David Guthrie, he told himself. He opened the ledger again, flicking the pages feverishly, rumpling the corners of many of them. Bisley, and the minelayers. He barely glanced at the door, then tore hurriedly and crudely at the pages until he had roughly detached them. He stuffed them into his briefcase, paused to breathe deeply once, and then went out.
He felt the tensions, the premonitions beginning almost as soon as he felt the cold air of the early evening on his face.
From inside the telephone booth, Hoskins watched him go, then made a call to Goessler. He did not notice the Vauxhall start up further down the street and pull slowly into the traffic, on McBride's trail.
Moynihan kept McBride in sight until he entered the station, and assumed that he was heading back to the hotel. Hoskins was an anonymous, mousy man he had disregarded. He was not similarly able, however, to ignore the fawn Escort with a driver and passenger who had been following McBride four cars ahead of himself. His suspicions became confirmed when the passenger alighted and followed McBri
de into the station. As the Escort pulled away, Moynihan looked around him for a telephone box.
November 1940
McBride put his hands above his head, and adopted a posture that he hoped was suitably cowed, frightened. In the bad weather, he had approached nearer the blockhouse than he could have hoped, and confirmed the presence in Brest of the ocean-going U-boats he had seen on Guernsey. Had the sun been shining, he would have had to march openly down the breakwater to report that the smack had broken down, and would not have been able to use the binoculars.
His satisfaction was, however, unimportant at that moment. The two German guards were angry with him because he had not been spotted earlier, and perhaps they should have been on patrol but had huddled instead round a fire, drinking coffee. Perhaps their officer had seen him first. The binoculars dangled innocently, yet betrayingly, from his neck.
"My boat," he began in rapid French, pointing back down the breakwater towards the sea. "Engine trouble. I came to report it. We had to tie up alongside the wall — pardon, pardon."
The Germans were suspicious, and disarmed at the same time. Their machine-pistols were held more slackly, barrels angled to the ground. Just a Frenchman — McBride could see the contempt of familiarity and conquest glazing their attentiveness. An Unterfeldwebel and a Pioner from an engineer unit. The Unterfeldwebel was wearing on his uniform lemon-yellow waffenfarben, which meant he was from a signals regiment. And McBride knew that these men had replaced the normal infantry or police blockhouse guards. Close, it was close now—
He tried to ingratiate himself further.
"Come and see, please come—" he babbled, even reaching a hand out for one greatcoat sleeve. A sapper and a signals NCO guarding U-boats, his mind kept repeating. "Please, we do not mean to be here, our engine broke down—" A machine-pistol thrust McBride's flapping hand away, but without animosity. A controlled, confident contempt seemed to animate both men. They betrayed their elite unit background by stance, smile or grimace, ease. Then the idea struck McBride — he could almost sense it growing in a smaller calculating self inside the shell that was impersonating a French fisherman — that he, and he alone, knew for certain that the Wehrmacht intended invading Ireland, and in the immediate future. And if they shot him, the surprise attack might succeed. There was no self-dramatization in the thought, no self-aggrandizement. He was terrified of the responsibility.
"What's the matter?" the Unterfeldwebel snapped in his Alsatian French as McBride stumbled over his words.
"The guns, the guns—" he managed to say. He expelled some of the fear they would expect from a fisherman facing guns. The two Germans were alert, their eyes and stance hardly altered by his supplicatory tone.
"Engine trouble?" the Alsatian asked. The machine-pistol came up again, levelled at McBride's stomach. As if prompted by some cue, the Pioner glanced over his shoulder towards the nearest U-boat pens, then back at the binoculars round McBride's neck. "What engine trouble?"
"I don't know — it cut out," McBride protested, feeling the chill of the wind go away, and the sleet pattering against his cheek become distant. His body temperature began rising beneath his jersey and oilskins. "Please, come and see for yourselves—"
They had shaken off the lethargic, welcome warmth of the blockhouse, the reluctance of coming out into the blowing sleet to investigate a mad Frenchman walking along the breakwater in full view of them. They had readopted their responsibilities.
"Move," the Unterfeldwebel snapped, pointing with the gun. McBride hesitated, knowing that the direction they now took meant everything. The enormous consequences of going on towards the blockhouse, of the arrest of Perros, Gilliatt and the crew which would follow, the investigation of their papers, the questions — all trying to break through the mental barriers erected to help him operate on the thin surface of these successive moments. He shrugged. The Unterfeldwebel poked the barrel of the gun in his stomach, then turned him round with a slap from the machine-pistol against his side. They were going to look at the fishing smack.
"What do you think?" the Pioner asked in German as the two soldiers walked behind him, a couple of feet back, hunching into the suddenly stronger wind.
"Who knows? He doesn't look like much, does he?"
"I'll look at the engine," the Pioner said confidently, and McBride prayed that Perros's cousin below decks would be able to bluff it out.
"Jean! Jean!" McBride called out, waving his arms as he caught sight of the ropes and the smack bobbing slowly, grindingly against the breakwater.
"Shut up, you!" the Unterfeldwebel snapped.
McBride saw Gilliatt in the stern, his face white and watchful — too watchful and not frightened enough, McBride told himself. Claude was with him, the others not in sight. Claude crossed to the hatch, and yelled down it to his father. By the time the two Germans were standing on the edge of the wall, looking down, Perros was emerging through the hatch, wiping oily hands on a filthy rag and smoking the last inch of a cigarette. McBride was grateful for his nonchalance. Gilliatt kept on watching the two soldiers, one hand close to his pocket where the gun nestled. McBride realized he did not know whether Gilliatt could bluff it out, or would panic and start firing.
"You there, you the captain of this tub?"
"It is my family's boat," Perros replied, riding with the awkward swell, bobbing up towards them and away. He kept rubbing his hands.
"What's wrong with your engine? Why are you fishing at this time of day?"
Perros shrugged. "We're not fishing, sergeant. We came out to test the engine, and — phut!" Perros raised his arms in the air, dissipating the engine's power. "We tied up — I sent Henri there to inform you. Don't want trouble—" He grinned.
"We'll go down," the Unterfeldwebel said, nudging McBride with the machine-pistol. Then he raised his voice. "We're coming aboard." Perros shrugged.
They went down the steps, and McBride sensed the two Germans were suddenly hesitant, whether because of the water or the fact they were outnumbered on the boat he could not tell. They prodded McBride to jump first. He waited until the smack's bow swung up towards him, then jumped the gap of grey water, skidding on the wet deck, then standing upright.
One of the Germans, the Pioner, stumbled badly, but recovered, but the sergeant landed easily and confidently. The guns were immediately emphatic, dominant as soon as they were sure of their footing.
"Show him the engine," the sergeant ordered Perros when they had moved to the stern of the smack. Again, Perros shrugged. The sapper ducked his head, disappearing behind Perros into the tiny engine-room. "You — papers!"
McBride reached in his pocket, pulled out his forged ID card, radon book, worker-registration document and his demobilization docket. The Unterfeldwebel studied them. McBride watched Gilliatt carefully, trying to assess his mood. His face was very pale, his hand closer to his pocket. The sergeant handed back McBride's papers, then held out his hand to Gilliatt. McBride watched, saw the flicker of one eyelid, the grimace of Gilliatt's mouth — then he was handing his papers to the German.
Then Claude's papers were checked. The sergeant seemed frustrated, but perhaps he was only angry with them for wasting his time, making him cold. Suddenly, the engine coughed into life. Claude cheered. The Pioner emerged, wiping his hands on Perros's rag, a smear of oil on his cheek.
"The bloody French don't understand engines," he said in German. "Filthy. Fuel-feed was blocked with muck!" He slapped the rag into Perros's hand, who had followed him up from the engine-room. He tossed his head in mock-disgust.
"Thank you," Perros said. The engine was running smoothly. "May we cast off now?"
"Very well, and keep clear in future."
"Henri—" Perros indicated, and McBride went forward again with the two soldiers. They jumped clumsily, but safely, to the steps, and McBride followed them up onto the breakwater. Here, they left him immediately, as if he might ask them to assist him.
He cast off the ropes, trotted down the steps, and ju
mped again for the deck. As he landed, he felt his legs go, and he sat down heavily. He was unable to move for a while, and Gilliatt came forward to check on him.
"You all right?" McBride nodded. The two Germans were thirty yards along the breakwater, watching the smack chug away towards the point." Thank God for that!" All Gilliatt's suppressed fears were in the words.
"It's all right, Peter. OK."
"What?"
"The U-boats are there — and those guards are from elite units, guarding them." McBride grinned. "We know now. It's on, and it's soon—"
"How long?"
"Two or three days, I estimate."
"My God—"
"Ask Him to keep the weather bad — it might slow them down, or make the U-boats travel below the surface."
"You're sure, aren't you?" McBride nodded. "Hell."
"You might be right there — give me a hand up." Gilliatt pulled McBride to his feet. "What worries me is the Fallschirmjaeger. What the hell is their timetable?"
October 198-
Sansom Street was old, narrow and dark. It lurked off the Farringdon Road in Clerkenwell. McBride had taken a taxi from the Portman Hotel after collecting his cassette-recorder. Claire Drummond had not been in her room, and he was almost thankful not to be further delayed by talking to her, explaining why he was going out again. He booked a table for eight-thirty in the hotel restaurant, scribbled her a note, and left. It was seven-thirty now, and the weather was damply chill, misty around the streetlamps. McBride paid off the taxi, and studied the house that was number twenty-two.
He felt the faint tremor of a tube train passing beneath the street on the Piccadilly Line. The house had three steps up to a dilapidated porch, rusty iron railings protecting scrubby remnants of grass and a few overgrown plant-pots. It looked singularly uninviting, and McBride checked Hoskins" card again, nodding reluctantly to himself to confirm the address. Sansom Street was a narrow cut-through to Saffron Hill, something to be driven through as a shortcut or used as a car park. McBride went up to the steps.
