He had turned perhaps half a dozen corners at random when the whistled tune worked as bait. A soft, slightly blurred voice asked: “Are yez lookin’ for comp’ny or jest a fight wid an Englishman?”
“Me stomach’s empty and me pocket’s full and not a word of the lingo to change one for t’other.”
“Ah, ye’ve come to the right man.” He had the short squat build of a seaman, a rolling gait due more to an evening in town than a life at sea, with dark smelly clothes and a knitted cap – unlike everybody else on the streets, who seemed to be wearing peaked sailor’s caps no matter what their trades. “Is it yer first voyage to Kiel?”
“Me first time anywheres in Germany,” O’Gilroy said, letting him lead the way. “And I’m no sailor.”
“I t’ought the clothes was wrong, but ye might be, a nancy-boy of’n Lord Arsehole’s yacht.”
“I might throw ye in the harbour,” O’Gilroy said pleasantly, “but it looked too clean to be fouled wid Galway men.”
The tavern or cafe or whatever – just a single room with a bar and furniture too heavy to break easily – was kept by a Wicklow man named; at least professionally, Paddy, and his German wife. O’Gilroy introduced himself as Terence Gorman.
Paddy nodded and started drawing two Pils. The Galway man said: “I knew a Gorman oncest,” to begin the ritual of swapping names until they found one they both knew or had heard of.
“So did me mother,” O’Gilroy said, stopping the ritual dead. Then to Paddy: “Me passin’ acquaintance here sez ye can feed me.”
“Me wife can.”
“And a fine job she makes of it,” O’Gilroy said with true respect. Indeed, he had never seen a fatter Irishman. That apart, Paddy was about sixty, with thin white hair and a barman’s way of asking inoffensive questions that you could answer or ignore according to mood.
Such as: “Are yez in town for Kiel Week?”
“He’s a nancy boy off’n a yacht,” Galway said.
“Shut yer mouth or buy yer own. I’m valet to an English gent – ”
“Jayzus! Ye are a nancy boy!”
O’Gilroy ignored him. “And we was touring about and heard of a man – we’d seen him just a week gone in Holland – was killed in an accident here. Did ye hear of it?”
Paddy nodded, his eyes looking over O’Gilroy’s shoulder at someone who had just come in. “Up in one of the new locks. Bin in the Royal Navy, they said.”
“He’d be a spy, then,” Galway said firmly. “And who’s yer gent? – a detective?”
“Does he ever,” O’Gilroy asked Paddy, “spread the story that somebody’s normal, or would that be too wild at all?”
Paddy said and expressed nothing, just picked up a tin tray and bar-rag and went over to the new customer. Casually, O’Gilroy turned to watch. The man was youngish, heavyish, in rough longshoreman’s clothes and well-kept boots. He had brought a newspaper along so that he could look self-contained and unaware; they usually did.
Paddy came back and started drawing a mug of beer. “’T’would seem yer good for me trade.”
Galway looked puzzled, O’Gilroy just shook his head sadly. “Ah, sounds like me gent’s bin asking questions. And him taking the dead boy’s room at the Club to pack his things, and shoving me in a stinking guest-house.”
“Ye prefer the Adlon or the Ritz, do ye?” Paddy wore a wisp of a smile as he poured spilt beer from the tray into the mug.
“I’ve slept hard in me time, but I prefer soft and someone else doing the paying. And ye can spread that wild story about me,” he told Galway.
“Ye should try sleepin’ in a wet bunk in a North Sea gale wid a cargo o’ timber creakin’ in yer ear,” Galway said sullenly.
“Yer a secret recruiting sergeant for the Merchant Navy. I knowed it all the time.”
Before packing Cross’s clothes, Ranklin pretended he was Cross himself, getting up in the morning and going through the day, to see if there was anything missing. He was sure that, on one excuse or another, Lenz or Reimers had searched the room: had they taken anything? But apart from clothes and shoes that Cross had died in, or that he now wore in the coffin, nothing was obviously lacking.
He sat down and stared at the meagre paperwork – particularly the bond certificate. The Wik Landentwicklungsgesellschaft had issued it in 1905 promising to pay four per cent on a scheme to develop the land on the south side of the new locks in the district of Wik (Holtenau was a village on the other side of the Canal, beside the existing locks). The plan was shown in an elaborate and imaginative engraving – doubly imaginative, since it was from a bird’s or balloon’s viewpoint some distance up in the air, and showed the new locks and attendant buildings finished and ships busily shunting to and fro – which wouldn’t happen until some time next year. In the lower foreground was a small lighthouse and a building fronting onto the long inlet of the harbour.
All very picturesque, but why should Cross want four per cent per annum of 200 marks-worth of it – an income of just eight shillings?
Baffled, he rustled the papers and magazines and came up with the list of visiting yachts and their owners. That at least made one thing clear: that a hurricane in Kiel that night would leave Lloyd’s of London sleeping on a park bench wrapped in newspaper. Looking up, he realised that what he saw through the window was a city of floating palaces, belonging to kings, emperors, princes as well as mere Kaufleute such as Krupp von Bohlen, Pulitzer, Armour, Sharing … What name? But there it was: SY (for steam yacht, presumably) Kachina, registered at Newport, owner Reynard Sherring.
Instinctively, he leant to peer harder at the harbour, but had no idea what the Kachina looked like even by day. Well, well. There was a good chance that Mrs Finn would be on board, unless Pop left her to mind the bank whilst he went boating. He wondered if, and how, he could approach her as James Spencer. It would do no harm for Lenz and Reimers to know he had a powerful friend at hand – and he could use her financial knowledge in the matter of that baffling bond.
O’Gilroy had chosen the one hot dish that Frau Paddy had to offer. “Now what d’ye call that again?” he asked, helpfully bringing his empty plate back to the bar. The Galway man had drifted off when he found he wasn’t being offered a free meal.
“Labskaus,” Paddy went on rinsing beer mugs in what looked like harbour water. “Pickled meat and pickled herring and beetroot and fried egg.”
“Sure, I recognised the egg. Very nourishing. What would I drink to keep it down?”
Irish whiskey turned out to be far too expensive for Terence Gorman’s pocket, so he tried the local Korn. And left his mouth open to cool.
Paddy asked softly: “Your gent: does he have any ideas about that accident?”
“I wouldn’t be knowing. But he’s got the time to waste.”
“Now, if the police have the idea he’s having ideas …” Paddy’s eyes flicked to the follower; “… ye’ve already got them trailing ye. So let them and let them be. And never in this world hit a one of them.”
“Ye mean they wouldn’t take it for a joke, like in the Old Country?” O’Gilroy’s smile was mostly a sneer.
Paddy looked down at the slopped beer he was rearranging on the bar with a soaked rag. “Ye can find out for yeself, like some I’ve known. They’d pick on six, mebbe eight, poor defenceless policemen in their own cells, just for the fun of it. Sure and ye could hear them laughing right up to the Canal where yer friend had his accident. Now, he wouldn’t have been a man that liked a joke, would he?”
“I wouldn’t be knowing. He wasn’t my friend.”
Paddy looked at O’Gilroy carefully, then said: “Another thing: near midnight Saturday, the police was in here – and every place, I heard – askin’ about a man could be yer friend: English, with a pink boating jacket and straw hat. Sudden keen to find him, they was. Mind ye,” he added, “I’ve said nothing.”