But Devlin, reassured, retreated from a moment close to intimacy. He merely shrugged and readopted his habitual sour face.
Walsingham paused outside the door of Room T of the Admiralty main building, as if to take a deep mental breath. He tucked the buff folders more firmly under his left arm, yet his hand still refused to turn the door handle. The green stripe of the RNVR(S) between the gold on his cuff now mocked him. At the bottom of some great steep mental slope, he looked up, daunted. He felt little more confident of success than some harmless crank who continually reported the landing of creatures from outer space to the local police.
Then he opened the door, and went in. Rear Admiral March was waiting for him, seated at the far end of the long polished walnut conference table of Room T's main office — other, smaller rooms waited behind the half dozen doors off this main room, where March's Section II of Admiralty OIC seemed to lie in wait for him. March smiled at his entry, gestured to him to join him at the far end of the table.
"Charles — sit down, my boy." Then he immediately looked at his watch, as if impatient of missing another appointment elsewhere. "What can we do for you in Section II?" A distance was marked between them. March was Walsingham's superior, Walsingham was on the strength of Section II, but now he was being made to feel an outsider. His civilian intelligence background, the green RNVR(S) stripe, was again a matter of importance, and being used to dissociate him from the naval staff with whom he worked.
"My — Irish business, sir," Walsingham began, sitting down, opening the top folder. March looked bored almost at once, hardly glancing at the aerial pictures he had seen before or the reports that lay beneath them.
"You've been talking to DMS, I gather," March said in a spirit of surprised offence. "Interesting?"
"Sir, the Director will submit a report to this office as soon as he can, based on our conversation—"
"And you led him by the nose, I suppose?" The Admiral's face creased in a humourless smile. A narrow face, the pitted skin of which was leathery, blue-jowled. Dark, probing eyes, thick grey eyebrows which seemed perpetually lifted in disbelief. "Come, come, Charles, no pouting. I know you. DMS no doubt supports your cock-eyed theory simply because he doesn't know any better."
"Sir," Walsingham said in a tight, smoothed tone. "DMS agreed that what my agent had seen was quite probably a group of minesweeping submarines in Guernsey—"
"This agent — Irish, isn't he?"
"Anglo-Irish, for all it matters. He is reliable—"
"Charles, look out of any one of these tall windows. It is November outside—" As if in sympathy with Walsingham, weak sunlight bloomed on the carpet on the other side of the elegant room, revealing its faded pattern. But, almost immediately, a heavy cloud removed it. It would rain before the afternoon was over. It was cold in the room, despite the huge radiators and the coal fire. "No seaborne invasion plan — such as you propose — would be seriously entered into by the Germans. When we knew Hitler had canceled Sea Lion in October, we also knew we were safe from the sea. The invasion you suggest is impossible."
Walsingham's boyish face narrowed as if he had sucked a lemon. In a moment, he would again be reminded of his lack of experience in naval matters. "Sir, I admit it is unlikely. But not that it is impossible."
March looked at the folders, the original aerial pictures of the newly erected sheds in Guernsey harbour, and the digest of McBride's debriefing beneath them, clipped to them.
"I see. Your man has provided fresh evidence, I take it — hence your persistence?"
"Sir, I request you read his report, and my account of what the DMS had to say." Walsingham realized his knuckles were a strained white as they rested on the table. He removed his hands.
"Very well, Charles, I'll read it. But you're wrong, you know. Utterly wrong."
Crosswinds Farm was an easy house to find on the southern side of the hamlet of Kilbrittam. Solid, white, almost italianate with its red roof and surrounding fruit trees. It was situated on a knoll, looking north to the hamlet and the hills towards Bandon, south over Courtmacsharry Bay and the Old Head of Kinsale. McBride turned the rented car off the narrow, hedged road, up the track to the farmhouse. Friesian cattle watched him over a newly painted wooden fence. As he pulled up before the house, a woman was waiting for him — presumably Drummond's daughter with whom he had already spoken on the telephone.
She moved confidently towards the car, extended one hand and shook his in a firm grip. Mid thirties, he estimated, some instinct making him study her hands for rings. No wedding ring. When he looked up again, she was smiling sardonically, blue eyes amused, yet appraising. Then she brushed her dark hair away from her cheek, and beckoned him towards the house. She was dressed in denims and a pale green sweater over a blouse. A green scarf knotted at her throat. McBride found her immediately attractive, and somehow off-putting, as if a great deal had already passed between them, and her judgment of him had already been made. As if he had been expected for a long time in her life, and she might already have defined and placed him.
He followed her into the house — dark wood panels, a heavy staircase that turned out of sight, polished floors with splashes of bright rug. She led him through the square hall into a large room that looked north towards Bandon and the low green hills where the shadows of clouds chased across their contours, swallowing sheep and cattle, white farms, trees. The view became sinister in an unexpected and inexplicable way the moment he saw it, and Drummond rose from his chair at the side of the big window, hand out. He smiled.
"Admiral," he said. Sunlight on the scene again.
"No formalities," Drummond said easily, waving him to a chair opposite his own, sitting down again himself, at ease, comfortable. Drummond was tall, grey-haired, cleanshaven. The skin was mottled with age, as it was on the backs of his hands, but it was drawn tight on the fine bones. His eyes were clear, his gaze steady. Though McBride knew he must be close to eighty, he appeared still vigorous. Only the ebony cane with the silver fox's head which he had used to get up quickly marked age, infirmity. McBride could understand how the man had successfully run an intelligence network in Ireland more than forty years before.
Then he was struck by the sense that this man had known his father. Not just Gilliatt, and Emerald Necklace, perhaps — but his own father. Drummond's disconcertingly complete appraisal of him, imitating his daughter's intent look, reminded him of it. Drummond was looking for a likeness. He nodded.
"You are like him, Mr McBride — your father, I mean." Then he seemed to notice his daughter for the first time. "Drink, Mr McBride? Claire?"
"Coffee would be fine."
The woman went out of the room. McBride's smile stretched, became strained under the continuing close scrutiny. Eventually, Drummond's gaze released him.
"I'm sorry, McBride. You do remind me of him, very clearly. I am being made aware of how damned old I've got, and how long ago it all was! Forgive me."
"You knew my father well—" It was not a question, and it was not the conversation that McBride had wanted to begin. Yet he sensed the life of memory in the upright, preserved old man, and something reached out to meet it, comprehend it. He suddenly had an intuition that the old man would tell him nothing without being asked.