"I'm going to have to talk to the Admiralty — to confirm my suspicions. They weren't loading, refuelling, anything like that?" McBride shook his head. They emerged from the trees, and the narrow stream was filmed with grey ice. It appeared remarkably forlorn, evocative. The grass along the bank was stiff, sharp-edged, with rime. Beyond the stream, the countryside to the edge of the estate — where it was bordered by a farm — was dulled, rendered vacant and inhospitable by the grey air, the trees fuzzed into rounded lumps of frosty branches. In the distance, cows picked their way, painfully slowly, across a white field.
"No, they were repairing the damaged sub — but I had the sense of mission over, rather than mission ahead." McBride stared into the distance, seeing the Friesians taking and losing shape against the background. "What had they been doing, Charlie?"
Walsingham looked at him, and seemed to judge that the moment was right.
"By the way, you're going back to Ireland via Milford Haven, with a minesweeping flotilla — it should be illuminating!" He chuckled. "Sorry — I want you to see for yourself, then tell me — via Drummond or the captain of the minesweeper, of course."
"Just tell me, simply — what are the Germans up to?"
"Drummond's crying out for your return, you know — there have been several reports of submarine activity, and of at least one agent landing west of Cork—"
"Charlie, don't be irritating—"
Walsingham flung his arms wide like a magician. He looked more like a schoolboy than ever.
"I think the Germans are going to invade the Republic of Ireland — and I think they're going to do it soon!"
Heathrow was conspicuously neat, and orderly, and cool. McBride had used the airport many times before, either travelling to England or in transit for Europe. The limited chaos that he always perceived by comparison with Kennedy or Dulles or Logan — those long cool corridors, the quiet, the whisper of luggage-conveyors and escalators — had disappeared; he had always regarded Heathrow as the triumph of desperation, perhaps the apogee of the British capacity to make do as a way of life. Yet now the busiest airport in the world was creeping about its business.
Because of the soldiers.
The terminal was full of them, armed, and the baggage search seemed endless, and his passport was checked with a thoroughness perhaps more appropriate to Dusseldorf — in fact, he realized as the passport controller, with a soldier standing armed and bored behind him, held his passport face-down beneath his desk, that the British had imported, and put to use, the German computerized passport system they used at Federal Republic airports.
It was almost an hour and a half after he disembarked from the Trident 3 that he emerged with his bags into the lounge of the terminal. He looked immediately for a telephone, found one near the bookstall, and dialled directory enquiries.
He was eager to work in London, go over all the wartime records he could lay hands on, and therefore he had decided to get Gilliatt out of the way quickly. Gilliatt and his own father seemed impossibly distant figures, unreal beside Kohl and Menschler and others that Goessler might unearth, given time. If he could arrange to see Gilliatt — hire a car and drive down and back in a day — listen to the old man, thank him and walk out of his life, so much to the good.
A soldier paused near him, looking with exaggerated suspicion at his bags. McBride smiled, edged them closer to him with his foot. The soldier — who appeared sixteen behind his straggly fair moustache, acne belying his manhood — nodded, and moved on, the 7.62 SLR over the crook of his arm looking modern and plastic and completely, unnervingly deadly. McBride watched him move on. The guns on the belts of German policemen had become familiar but this — because a rifle and carried by a soldier in an airport — disturbed him.
Gilliatt's number was supplied by the enquiries operator. McBride scribbled it on the back of the folded letter from which he had supplied the address — outside Sturminster Newton in Dorset. His Michelin map had indicated on the plane that he could drive there and back in a day.
He dialled.
Emerald Necklace, he thought, grinning helplessly as if he had been given an expensive, long-desired present. It was in his hand now, in his hand. The phone went on ringing for a long time, and then it was picked up.
"Yes?" A woman's voice, and he was instantly aware that the voice was weary of answering the telephone; someone expecting the same wrong-number call for the tenth time.
"Is that Sturminster Newton 8826- Peter Gilliatt's home?"
He'd had better transatlantic calls. A long pause, then: "It is."
"My name is McBride—"
"Michael McBride?" the woman asked. "No, I'm sorry — Thomas McBride, you're his son, aren't you?"
"Yes — to whom am I speaking?"
"Peter Gilliatt's daughter." "Hello — is your father available to talk to me?"
"I'm afraid he isn't—"
"I see. When will I be able—"
"You don't see at all, Mr McBride. My father is dead — he died last week of a heart attack."
CHAPTER FOUR
Western Approaches
Gilliatt's cottage was on the northern outskirts of the village of Sturminster Newton, beside the road to Marnhull. It was white and pretty and very English to McBride's eyes as he approached it, checked its name against the sign on the three-barred gate, and crunched up the gravel drive. The last roses round the trellised porch to the door were puckered with a slight overnight frost, but more than that they carried an overtone of mockery to McBride. As if, in some medieval woodcut, a skull grinned out of the heart of each flower.
Thatch, leaded windows, brass door-knocker. McBride, as he shook off the ironies of the cottage's appearance, almost expected Mrs Miniver to appear in the doorway. Instead, Gilliatt's daughter was small and neat and dark, and her face was wan, strained, without make-up. She gestured him inside without a greeting, and he noticed the wedding-ring on her hand. She was aware of his glance, and rubbed one hand with the other.
"I'm staying here for the moment, though I don't like it — since the break-in. Through there, please—" Rugs covered the flagstones of the hall. He ducked under an exposed beam, and went into the lounge which overlooked the garden behind the cottage. Dark wood panels, bright prints on the old, substantial furniture, french windows out onto the terrace.
He said, shocked awake: "What break-in? When?"
He turned on her, even as she was gesturing him to sit down, and she flinched as if struck. She sat down, brushing her pleated skirt smooth, then plucking at the collar of her blouse. She was in her late thirties, McBride estimated, and normally a self-composed, assured woman. Worn down by grief? Or something else?
"It was last week — just after the funeral. I came down at the weekend to find his papers and stuff everywhere—" Her hand swept vaguely across her skirt, indicating the carpet. "It — seemed more terrible because he was dead, can you understand?" He nodded. "And so ridiculous here — my father had lived here for years, it couldn't be anyone from the district—" He wondered whether she was reassuring herself. "I've stayed here this week — my husband's coming from Bristol on Friday."
"You're frightened," he said bluntly. "Why?"
"I don't know—" She frowned, the broad clear forehead running into furrows, her small mouth pursing. "Perhaps — puzzled, and that's become fear. Nothing was taken, you see. My father had a small collection of jade, and a few items of silver. I'd packed them away — but that wouldn't have stopped a thief, would it?" Her hands were fidgeting now, stabbing in emphasis, or lying irresolutely, unrestfully, on her lap. "Anyway, I decided to stay — there were things to do, his solicitor in Sherborne—" She smiled, nervously. He sensed she had been happy here as a child and a young woman, and she wanted to absorb something of it, for the sake of the years ahead — but what had once been a good, if maudlin, idea was now making her nervous, afraid, and vulnerable.