Gus nodded, thinking about it. Then he looked up. “But something important enough to bring you out here? This time in the morning?”
Ingle gazed at him. “Yeah,” he said. “Obviously.”
There was another silence. It was daylight now, outside the window. Looking out, Ingle could see a row of horse boxes, and a neat pile of bales beside a standpipe. The place looked empty.
“You mentioned Warsash …” he said slowly, “on the phone.”
He looked round. The expression on Gus’s face told him what he wanted to know. He smiled. Easy, he thought. Fucking easy. Gus poured the tea, uncomfortable, knowing he’d given Buddy away, some small betrayal.
“What’s he doing there?” Ingle said.
Gus shook his head. “Dunno,” he muttered.
Ingle looked at him a moment, knowing he wasn’t going to get any further. He reached up for the photos, the shots of Buddy and his wife. He gave them to Kee. Gus didn’t say a word. Ingle shepherded Kee towards the door, brushing past Gus at the sink.
“Nice idea,” he said, “the tea.”
Gus looked round and Ingle grinned at him, heading for the hall. Warsash, he thought. Time for breakfast.
Buddy slept for four hours, curled up under a pile of blankets on the triangle of mattress in the bow of the yacht. Eva awoke him at seven, with coffee. She’d been up all night, watching the big carrier across the harbour, the binoculars at her side in the freezing cockpit. She’d seen nothing that indicated any special alert, no activity around the stern, no divers in the water, and she was as sure as she could be that Buddy’s visit had gone undetected.
“We’re OK,” she said, bending over him with the coffee. “You did just fine.”
Buddy peered up at her. His sleep had been curiously dreamless, a heavy black void into which he’d disappeared without trace. He’d not thought about the swim across, the charges, the dull redness of the carrier’s hull, looming over him in the darkness. He’d not thought about the clamp he’d abandoned, tumbling away beneath him, the scrape of the knife on the bare metal plates, the urgent paranoia of his swim back. He’d thought about nothing, and now – waking up – the episode seemed a thousand years away, a chapter from some fantasy novel. He took the coffee. It was hot and sweet.
“What time is it?”
“Seven.”
“You should go soon. The tide turns at eight.”
He propped himself up on one elbow, wiping a clear patch in the cabin window and peering out. The water level had dropped since midnight. It was low tide, the pilings on the marina green with weed. Eva looked at him a moment, then shook her head.
“We’re staying,” she said.
“We?”
“Yes. You and me. I’ve been thinking about it. It’s better to do it from here.”
Buddy laughed. “Why?” he said.
“Because …” she shrugged, “it’s just better.”
Buddy took another gulp of coffee and wiped his mouth. The transmitter was on the table, beside the chart. Harry had already tuned in to the frequency of the detonator. Under normal conditions, it would be OK up to a mile. He looked at Eva. “You don’t trust me?” he said. “Is that it?”
She shrugged, and said nothing. Buddy reached for the transmitter. It was lighter than it looked, black, about the size of a paperback novel. It came with a length of rubber-coated cable.
“You want to do it from here?” he said.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“There’s a problem.”
“What?”
“The charges are on the wrong side.” He nodded out, across the harbour, towards the carrier. “I fixed it on the port side. When she sails, the port side will be furthest away from us. I need to be in Pompey. Over there. Across the water. Otherwise, the mass of the ship will block the signal.” Eva looked at him, frowning. Buddy wondered whether she ever smiled, ever relaxed, enjoyed herself. Probably not, he thought. Poor cow. She looked at the transmitter. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
Buddy shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “Then we’ll do it your way.” He paused. “Just make sure your friends know it was your decision, not mine. I want my wife back.” He smiled at her, swinging his legs out from under the blanket. “OK?”
She looked at him for a moment longer, doubtful. Then she shrugged, extending her hand for the empty mug.
“OK,” she said, “but I’ll come with you. We’ll do it your way. From over there.” She paused. “Both of us.”
*
After three hours, bright sunlight through the kitchen window, Connolly began to understand.
The man in the black leather jacket, Miller, the man with the gun, had taken him back towards the farmhouse. They’d paused for several minutes behind a rock. He’d asked who else was in the place, and Connolly had told him, one man, John, in the kitchen. Miller had nodded, and muttered something into the darkness, fingering the controls on a tiny radio on the belt of his jeans. Then there’d been more firing, two positions this time, and answering barks from the Kalashnikov. Looking down, Connolly had seen shadows beside the house, and heard glass breaking, and then a single, loud explosion. After that there’d been silence, no more firing, and then another message on the radio, definitive, terminal.
“House secure,” the voice had said. “Out.”
Now, eight in the morning, there were three of them in the kitchen, the other two outside somewhere, up in the trees. Connolly sat at the table, Miller opposite. Camps had been through the pantry and the fridge, and was cooking breakfast. What remained of John, the male nurse, had been dragged outside and left by a pile of chopped wood, shrouded under a blanket.
Miller stirred brown sugar into a second bowl of Camps’ porridge. Connolly was telling him about Jude, where she’d come from, the state of the woman, her paralysis. She’d been some kind of hostage, he said, some kind of lever on the husband she’d left behind.
“Lever for what?” Miller asked, testing the temperature of the porridge.
Connolly shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “He was a diver.”
Miller nodded, saying nothing, and Connolly told him about Jude’s final few hours before she’d died, what she’d told him, the message he had to get to Buddy. Miller nodded again.
“We’ll find a phone,” he said, “you’ve got the number?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Miller dipped into the porridge again and Connolly leaned back in the chair. He still had no idea how the man had known his name. He’d asked twice now, but each time the question had been ignored. The men clearly knew each other and Connolly assumed they were some kind of Brit hit squad, but beyond that, their identity was a mystery. The only thing he knew for certain was their target, Scullen. The house, as he’d thought, belonged to the man. Soon, said Miller, he’d be back. Connolly leaned forward in the chair, elbows on the table, determined to find out more, but Miller beat him to it, changing the subject.
“I’ve a message from Mairead,” he said, not looking up.
Connolly stared at him. “You’re serious? Mairead?”
“Yes. She says she misses you. She was a witness at an incident. We got involved.” Miller glanced up, smiling. Then he bent to the bowl again, chasing the last of the porridge. “She sends her love,” he said. “Nice girl.” He looked up at Connolly again. Connolly blinked. He could feel the colour leaving his face.
“What incident’s that?” he said. “Was she hurt?”
“No.” Miller paused. “Bloke got shot,” he said, “one of our blokes.”
“Oh.”
“She saw it happen.” He paused again, pushing the bowl away. “That’s why we went to see her.”
“Ah …” Connolly nodded.
There was a silence. Miller was still smiling at him. Nice breakfast, the smile said, good scoff. Connolly looked at the table a moment, fingering the grain of the wood.
“Is that why you’re here?” he said. “Because of the shooting?”
Miller shook his head. “No,” he said.
“But you’re looking for Scullen?”
“Yes.”
“And what will you do with him? When you find him?”
Miller frowned a moment, a look of slight detachment, the kind of frown you’d bring to a crossword, or a game of Scrabble. The frown cleared.
“We’ll kill him,” he said.
Connolly nodded, believing him, wondering what else Mairead had told them. They must have talked to her after he’d phoned. She must have trusted them. He looked up.
“So you’ve met Mairead,” he said carefully.
“Yes.”
“Talked to her.”
“Yes.”
“She say why I was down here?”
There was another long silence. Miller looked at him. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “She didn’t.” He paused, then gestured around. “It’s a free country. You’ve done nothing wrong.” He paused again. “Have you?”
Connolly shook his head, saying nothing. Then he looked up. “How do I get back?” he said.
“Back where?”
“Belfast.”
Miller shrugged. “We’ll give you a lift,” he smiled, “if that’s what you want.”
Connolly hesitated. In the last thirty-six hours, he’d seen three people die. One of them he’d killed himself. The other two had died with equal violence. These men had materialized from nowhere, English accents, and closed up the house with him inside it. At no point had anyone asked him what he’d been doing, where he’d come from, and now this man across the table was asking him whether he’d fancy a lift back to Belfast, back to Mairead, after they’d disposed of the man they’d come for, utterly benign, utterly matter of fact. It was surreal. He looked up again.
“I’ve got to make the phone call,” he said. “Buddy.”
Miller got up and put the empty bowl in the sink. “Sure,” he said, “we’ve got some cars up the road. One of the blokes’ll run you into town.” He glanced back at Connolly, one hand reaching for the washing-up liquid. “That OK?”
Connolly gazed at him, thinking again of Mairead. “Yes,” he said.
Ingle and Kee were back in Warsash by half past eight, the car parked across the road from the offices of Cruisaway. Ingle sat behind the wheel, the visor down against the strong morning sun. What little he could see of his face in the vanity mirror suggested he could use a wash and a shave.
Half an hour later, a woman appeared at the wheel of a small Toyota. She parked in the bay immediately below the Cruisaway offices, and got out. She was middle aged, with sensible shoes and a white cable stitched cardigan and a bag. Ingle could see a pair of knitting needles in the bag. The recession, he thought. No one hiring yachts these days.
The woman produced a bunch of keys and let herself into a small door beside the fruit and veg shop. Ingle gave her a minute or so to get settled in, then glanced across at Kee. Kee was asleep. He hesitated a moment, wondering whether to wake him up, then decided against it. He got out of the car and walked across the road to the office.
The office was little more than a single room, with a small loo and a kitchen tucked away down a corridor outside. Ingle knocked once and went in. The woman was plugging in a photocopier. The knitting needles were already on her typist’s chair, and there was a tiny pile of mail on the desk. The woman turned round, startled. Ingle showed her his ID. She blinked at him.
“Yes?” she said blankly.
“It’s about a customer of yours,” he said, “a Miss Weiss.”
“Yes?”
“You remember her?”
“Yes.”
“She has a boat of yours?”
The woman nodded, walking across to a filing cabinet. From the top drawer, she produced a file. Inside the file was a photograph. She gave it to Ingle. “Sundance,” she said, “nice little boat.”
Ingle looked at the photograph. It showed a middle-aged woman standing in the cockpit of a white yacht. On the back of the yacht, over the stern, was a ladder of some sort. Ingle knew nothing about yachts.
“How big?” he said, waving the photograph. “What size?”
The woman consulted the file again, her finger in the text. “Twenty-seven foot,” she said at last.
“Is that big?”
“No. Not really.”
Ingle nodded. The photocopier began to hum. “Where is it,” he said, “this boat?”
The woman looked blank. “I don’t know,” she said, “we rarely ask.”
“Abroad?”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “Somewhere local.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She nodded, checking again, making certain. “We ask for a Yachtmaster’s certificate for the longer trips. Miss …” she frowned, trying to make sense of her own writing.
“Weiss.”
“Weiss … she only had a Coastal Skipper …”
Ingle glanced at the photo again. “When did she go?” he said. “Do you happen to know?”
“Yes. They went yesterday.”
“They?”
“She and her husband.” She paused. “Nice couple. I popped down with a spare key to the engine hatch. Just in case.”
Ingle looked at her for a moment, then reached in his pocket for the photos he’d taken from the cottage. He offered her the clearer of the two shots, Buddy and Jude, half-naked, on their honeymoon.
“Is that him?” he said.
The woman looked at the photograph. Ingle could tell from her frown that she disapproved. She looked up. She was blushing.
“Yes,” she said.
Buddy sat in the cabin of the yacht, the door open, sweeping the harbour with his binoculars, to and fro, across the quickly flooding tide. According to the radio, the Task Force was due to sail about noon. Only the two capital ships would leave, Invincible and Hermes. Fearless, the amphibious assault ship, would now be delayed twenty-four hours for, as the reporter put it, “operational reasons”.
Buddy leaned back against the edge of the table, enjoying the sun on his face. The departure time, he knew, was more or less accurate. High tide was at 12.45, and the big ships would need as much water as possible to clear the harbour narrows. Already, on the radio and in the papers that Eva had bought from the marina store, the media had set the stage for the morning’s pageant. Headlines were reviving the spirit of D-Day. Editorials were warning Galtieri of a terrible revenge. Even the Church was beginning to talk about “a just war”. The Prime Minister’s resolve, and the Navy’s success in cobbling together the beginnings of a Task Force, had touched a deep nerve, and now – looking out across the harbour – Buddy could see the results of it all.
In the dockyard, and on board the ships, there was frantic activity, squads of sailors doubling back and forth, convoys of lorries still squealing to a halt on the quayside, mobile cranes unloading pallets of stores, officers in tiny groups, heads bent, chins cupped in hands, tussling with the million last-minute crises that an operation like this would produce. On the water, staying carefully clear of the buoyed channel, were a number of smaller boasts, hired out by the hour, crammed full of relatives, friends, camera crews, reporters.
Buddy settled briefly on one of them. It was a fishing boat, clinker built, with a registration number on the bow. There was a cuddy forward, with a skipper at the wheel, and aft, in the working space, amongst the big plastic baskets and hanging nets, there was a television crew. There was a cameraman, and another bloke beside him, and a reporter with a microphone was talking to a woman in the stern. The boat was too far away to make any real sense of the details, but the woman was young, and looked pretty, and as they drifted slowly past the great grey wall of Invincible, Buddy could imagine the line the TV people were taking: the woman’s husband off to the South Atlantic, she and the kids left behind, the terrible prospect of combat beginning to loom. The woman would doubtless be bright-eyed and resolute and prepared for the worst, but for the first time in
his life Buddy had begun to wonder about the sense of it all, this headlong plunge into war. All the old guff – the flags, the headlines, the national call to arms – was as potent as ever. But what no one seemed to question was where it might lead, and whether a single life – in the end – was worth a handful of islands and two million sheep. The principle of the thing – freedom, sovereignty – was obviously at stake. And principles mattered. But did they matter that much? Were they worth the price of a man’s life? His wife’s widowhood? His kid’s fatherless future? Buddy, lowering the glasses a moment, didn’t know. Politicians made the decisions. Politicians sent these infant sailors off to war. And the only thing he knew about politicians was that they, when the bullets started to fly, were a million miles away. Lives were easier to spend, he thought, when they weren’t your own.
Buddy shrugged, retreating deeper into the cabin, glad that he wasn’t a politician, that he didn’t have to take the decisions. Eva was at the tiny sink, washing up the remains of breakfast. They’d said very little for the last hour or so, ever since she’d announced that she’d accompany him over the water. He knew why she wanted to be there, and in a way he didn’t blame her, but there was going to be a moment of truth, a moment when he had to press the hideous white button on the transmitter, and he’d infinitely have preferred to have done it alone. Grief, his father had once taught him, was a deeply private thing. You drew the curtains. And excluded the world. And simply got on with it. At the time, fourteen years old, he hadn’t a clue what the man had meant. But now he knew that it was true.
Buddy picked up the paper again, a copy of The Times, and began to thumb through it. Distantly, he became aware of footsteps, outside, on the wooden pontoon. The footsteps got closer. He hinged upright on the bunk, and removed the transmitter, hiding it under one of the other papers. The rest of the gear was already stowed away. He looked at Eva. She’d stopped soaping the plastic dishes. She was staring through the curtained windows, up at the pontoon. Two sets of legs came into view. They stopped. He could hear voices. They were discussing the yacht.
Eva dried her hands quickly. Then she delved behind a cushion and produced the gun. Buddy stared at her. The legs were on the move again. A steadying hand stretched out, securing a hold on the cabin roof. The yacht rocked slightly. They were coming aboard.
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