"Exactly what I was afraid of," was all Walsingham would say in reply.
McBride had wanted to stop for a while in Salisbury — the white cathedral spire across the fields summoned him from photographs and prints — but he felt energized by a restlessness of mind that prompted him to find the A338 on the other side of the city, and head towards the M4 and London. The spire flicked in and out of the driving-mirror for a time, so that he hardly attended to the news item on the car radio.
"… a police spokesman said that two men were being held in custody at Braintree police station, where it was expected that charges under the Prevention of Terrorism Act would be brought against them later today. Our reporter believes that the two men are among those wanted in connection with the London restaurant bombing…"
He switched channels as the news items of a country he hardly knew continued. Vivaldi sprang from the two speakers behind him, and he tapped at the wheel in a comfortable state of half-attention while he considered what Mrs Forbes — Gilliatt's daughter — had told him.
His own father had been in Ireland, and with Gilliatt, late in 1940, and in connection with a German invasion of Ireland. Emerald Necklace — his father had been part of it.
He had encountered few moments in his even, academic life which possessed such naked shock. Few things had impinged upon him so directly, the halting, recollected sentences of the woman in the chair opposite him beating on him rather than seeping into his consciousness. He was in the presence of events— an alternative present— rather than hearing of some dim time beyond his own experience. A curious sense of predestination assailed him, almost as misty and illogical and assertive as a religious experience. He could not cope with the information, almost ignored the name and whereabouts of the man his father had operated under — Drummond, he'd fixed it like a photographic image, the chemicals of repetition coming to his assistance — in his desire to get away from the house in Sturminster Newton and come to terms with what he had heard.
"What happened to your father I have no idea— my father, would not say, though perhaps he didn't know. But they were together in Ireland, working for Drummond, who was some kind of secret agent—"
She had smiled with apology. She believed her father, naturally, but had no sense of what he might have been doing. Certainly not figuring in some drama she might have read in a fiction.
His own reaction — now in the warm car, the Vivaldi moving crisply through its slow movement — was of a similar unreality. He was ignorant of his father's war record, but the secrecy which may have surrounded it too easily toppled into melodrama. Except that his father was connected with Smaragdenhalskette. His father was a proof of its existence.
It was growing dark by the time he reached the motorway and turned onto it. He began to make good time, looking ahead to a flight to Ireland, to meet Drummond — if he still lived south-west of Cork. It would be a simple matter to trace him, and perhaps as simple to interview him. An old man now, he would open his memory like a box of keepsakes. Somewhere under the years was his father.
McBride had no direct interest in his father — he had, during the drive, sublimated him in the publicity that would attend his new book, the son-of-the-father angle which was pure, dramatic accident. He was not on a quest for his father. Michael McBride, about whom he possessed a certain curiosity, was only one light among the decorations giving off a Christmas-tree gleam as he approached the warm room in which Emerald Necklace waited like a reward.
The minesweeper lowered him into the water, in the ship's motorboat, half a mile offshore — though officially the ship should not have entered the three-mile limit of neutral Ireland's territorial waters — and in the company of the young sub-lieutenant and a stoker in charge of the boat's noisy engine he chugged towards the unlit shore where Drummond would be waiting to pick him up. There was no element of danger, and there would be no protest from the Dublin government. Naval vessels had collected fruit, eggs, even alcohol from the coast of southern Ireland — he was just another item of barter.
He was conscious of the windless night, the almost calm sea, the fresh chill and the smell of land. He was aware of Guernsey and his frantic effort to escape, but now only as an occasion for smiling.
They slipped into low Carrigada Bay, the lights of two cottages a sighting and a welcome; the faintest glow of the village of Reagrove beyond. The lack of black-out so different from England, and — most recently — the dark, wet docks of Milford Haven as the minesweeping flotilla had forlornly set sail. Always that sense of emptiness behind the outlines of cranes, an empty country or city; and always the sense of lights, of scattered quiet lives being lived when he arrived home.
The stoker cut the engine to idling, and the boat immediately began to wallow. McBride slipped over the side, and the chill of the water struck through his sea-boots, the slopping incoming tide reaching almost to his knees.
"Good luck, sir," the young sub-lieutenant called, and McBride waved one hand as he waded through the shallows to the beach and the motorboat's engine picked up again as it turned back to the minesweeper.
The incoming tide would remove his footprints — though most of the locals would have heard the engine of the boat and guessed at its passenger — and he lengthened his stride.
He grinned in the darkness as he moved onto the soft sand above the high-tide mark, and saw Drummond waiting, calmly smoking a cigarette. He was leaning on the side of the shed where a fisherman kept his nets, his tall, lean frame relaxed, unconcerned.
"Michael?" he asked quietly.
"No," McBride replied in German. "Admiral Donitz — I'm here to look around." Drummond laughed softly in the darkness, then shook hands with McBride.
"Welcome back."
When McBride had lit the offered cigarette, Drummond headed the Morris back up the track towards the coast road. McBride settled against the leather seat, contentedly drawing in and exhaling the smoke.
"You were of use to our common masters, I take it?" Drummond asked as he turned onto the road. Lights dotted the fields around them, small as hand-held lamps, each one an uncurtained window or an open door. McBride noted them like a Victorian parent counting heads and reassuring himself his family was entirely present. Not one of those lights would not be there the following night, or the night after that—
Unless Walsingham was right. As he thought that, he was aware, also, of Drummond's half-amused question, even of the nettled irritation far back in the tones which reminded him of Drummond's dislike of loaning one of his agents to London.
"I suppose so. I just went, looked, reported, and was told to keep quiet about it. I suppose it was of some use to someone." Walsingham had told him that Drummond might be informed at a later date. For the present, he was to be told nothing. He did not even know where McBride had been.
"It's secret, of course?" Drummond asked lightly as he pulled up at the crossroads in the village of Nohaval. As expected, there were no other cars, in any direction. McBride wound down the window, and felt the cold air rush into the car.
"Apparently, Robert."
"I've got another job for you, anyway. Your real work," Drummond said as the car pulled away on the Kinsale road.
"Tomorrow, I hope—"
"Tomorrow will do. Reports of a German agent landing two nights ago by boat from a submarine— reliable reports, I hasten to add—" Drummond chuckled. McBride studied his profile. A stereotyped British naval officer, that head above the white roll-neck sweater and the dark jacket that could have been mistaken for a uniform.