"No trace since?"
"Nothing."
"Where was this?"
"Rosscarbery Bay — the other side of Galley Head. A couple of miles from your place."
"Maureen probably gave him dinner."
Drummond laughed. "You'll have a look around, and let me know?" McBride nodded. "Good. That's the third in two weeks. I wonder what's going on?"
"They could be deserting from their submarines," McBride offered before he settled back into the seat again, lighting another cigarette from Drummond's packet on the dashboard.
The tiny hamlet of Leap lay almost in darkness astride the main Clonakilty-Skibbereen road as Drummond's car pulled up outside McBride's cottage. There was light coming through flower-patterned curtains in the kitchen. Drummond's own house was a spacious, prosperous-looking white farmhouse near Kilbrittain, twenty-five miles back the way they had come, inland of the Old Head of Kinsale. Drummond had officially retired from the Royal Navy in 1934, in company with a great many officers who, at that time, believed the Royal Navy would never rearm and thus rob them of careers, and moved to Ireland, selling a small family estate in order to buy a farm in County Cork. Here, he had continued to work for Admiralty Intelligence, setting up a network of coast-watchers and intelligence gatherers along the south coast of that weak defensive flank of Britain, neutral Eire. McBride had been one of his first, and most successful, recruits.
McBride got out of the car, slammed the door for the pleasure of making a noise that would betray his presence, and walked round to Drummond's window.
"I'll get on with that in the morning," he said, and Drummond nodded.
"Good. Let me have a report in a couple of days. And take care of your health, Michael."
"I will. Thanks for the lift."
"One day you must tell me all about your trip," Drummond said lightly, then switched on the engine, and turned the car round towards Clonakilty again. He tooted noisily as he drove off, a white hand waving from the still-open Window. McBride threw away the rest of his cigarette, and approached the door of the cottage.
Maureen would never come out to greet him if Drummond were there — McBride could never decide whether it was because she was Irish rather than Anglo-Irish like himself or whether it was because she simply resented the man who took him away, placed him in danger. But then, he reminded himself, Maureen didn't like what he did for all sorts of reasons, not least of which was her father's lifelong acquaintance with the IRA. He smiled as he pushed open the door, latched it again behind him — but the smile was saddened, as if he were suddenly burdened with an unpleasant freight of unwished-for complications amid his homecoming.
Maureen emerged from the kitchen into the lamp-lit gloom and warmth of the living-room, her arms white with flour, apron on. She wore her domesticity like an irritant or a disguise; a posture of which he was well aware. She seemed to desire to be nothing much to come home to, have no special place in his mind or affections. The little woman, he told himself as he stood watching her and she did not move from the kitchen door. Since the war, since he had begun working for Drummond and the British — not so much a reproof or disapproval; rather a slight distancing, more in case he got killed than because she objected. She was more comfortable inside an unpretentious outer covering — nothing overwhelming would happen to a woman like her.
"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.
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
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.