"Why you?"
"My father was a civil servant all his life, mostly at Agriculture or the Home Office. The head-hunters at universities look for sons and daughters of people like him – my sister was at Defence until she married, and my young brother's in the Treasury. We're supposed to have a bred-in sense of duty and patriotism. I suppose we do – for a time."
Maxim scooped crusted snow off the bridge parapet, waited until his bare hands had melted it into a ball, then threw it into the swirling water below. There was no 'glideth' about the Thames tonight.
"What happens after that?" he asked, shoving his hands deep into his coat pockets.
"What happened to you?"
"I asked first."
"So you did." She folded her arms on the parapet and stared down river, against the wind. "I suppose it was because I'd taken the Queen's shilling. And she always seems to want thirteen pence in change. Maybe I should have held out for fourteen pence, like our dearly beloved Rex Masson."
Maxim didn't say anything to that, so she asked: "And what about you, now?"
"I don't know…"
"That's a good start."
He grinned and made a useless attempt to stop his hair blowing in all directions. At least in uniform you wore a hat… "I just wonder now if anybody joins the Army they thought they were joining. A few generals and sergeant-majors, probably, and the odd one like David Stirling or Popski and Tyler. For the rest of us.. there's always enough small issues to keep you busy.
Maybe it's only when you get to Whitehall that you begin to wonder about the big picture – even about whether there is a big picture. Perhaps I let Je-, my wife, do too much of the thinking for me."
"I heard about her." Agnes didn't say any more.
"You weren't married?"
"No." She paused. "I'm not in a nine-to-five job. The big picture is that there's a war on. Or at least you have to believe there is." She swung around and pecked him on the cheek. "G'night, ahr 'Arry."
He watched her walk briskly back across the bridge, then followed more slowly.
19
›From the air, Ireland was an opaque stained-glass window of delicate greens and browns, the hedges and walls making strong lines of shadow in the low afternoon sun. Then a glance of the soft feminine shapes of the western mountains, with only a dusting of snow on their northern slopes, and the Boeing 737 slammed down on Shannon's wet runway.
"Are you commercial?" the girl at the hotel desk asked. Maxim just stared, wondering what the answer should be, before asking what she meant.
"Well, we find…" she was suddenly rather embarrassed, "… that the commercial gentlemen don't usually want a bath. A bathroom, by that I mean. We don't have any rooms left with bathrooms."
"Let's say I'm commercial."
Maxim grinned to himself as he unpacked, then deliberately went and wallowed – free – in a deep tub in the communal bathroom down the corridor. The flight had been two hours late since Heathrow still hadn't got itself defrosted properly, and his job in Ireland could only be done in working hours. It had also been a cold fifteen miles from Shannon to Limerick, the only car left for hire at the airport being an Escort with a busted heater.
He had booked nothing in advance, getting the air ticket at the last moment. The name Maxim hadn't gone ahead of him – they hoped.
"Once you're on that plane, you're out of the United Kingdom," George warned him, quite unnecessarily.
"Most of the serious soldiering I've done has been outside the UK."
"If you do any serious soldiering in the Irish Republic, you needn't bother coming home again. You haven't got that pistol with you, I hope and trust but don't really believe?"
"No." All he had was a totally illegal flick-knife in among his shaving gear. He wasn't sure how illegal it was in Ireland, but assumed it must be.
He walked the damp drabness of O'Connell street until he found a telephone box, and rang a London number Agnes had given him. All he said was: "H at hotel number one."
A man's voice said: "Right," and rang off. George would be told that he'd got in at the first hotel on their list.
Then he rang a number up in the Silvermine Mountains, twenty miles north, and made an appointment for nine-thirty the next morning. The man at the other end was very willing but played his part like the first read-through at a church hall dramatic society. Maxim hurried back through the drizzle grinning wryly to himself. The poor put-upon bastard. Being an old chum of George's and owning a retreat in the right part of Ireland could suddenly become a nervous hazard, particularly since they couldn't tell him what it was all about.
Maxim had vaguely expected a run-down castle. What he got was a run-down cottage. It sat in a field ringed with walls that were just lines of dark stones piled together, and at some time it must have burned down. But long ago, because now the remaining roof timbers were almost smothered by some climbing evergreen, making a green thatch above the empty window-frames. In good weather it would be the perfect meeting-place for lovers from a bad historical novel. Now it seemed like a mistake in map-reading.
But there was a nearly new silver-grey BMW saloon parked in the yard behind, and an unseen wing of the cottage had been restored, slate roof, double glazed windows and all. Jonathan St. John Rafford hurried out and snatched open the door of the Escort.
"My God, isn't the weather awful? Get yourself inside." He scampered away again. Maxim picked up his briefcase and followed. The restored rooms were warm, bright, cosy, with books jammed into every space.
Rafford was pouring coffee. "Black? Do you take sugar?" He was a few years older than Maxim but still trying to be twenty-six. He wore very tight faded jeans with his tummy bulging over them, and a rough-knit fisherman's sweater. His face was slightly puffy, with a sharp aristocratic nose and long dark hair that he had to keep sweeping out of his eyes with an elaborate gesture.
He wrote, so George had said, very sensitive biographies of minor but well-born European politicans.
"Aren't you having any?" Maxim asked. There was only one cup poured.
"No, no, I'll be away. There's the phone, and I've put out the directory. You did want the Yellow Pages as well?"
"Thank you. If you ever have to explain why I was here, and we don't think you will, it was to look over this property in case you'd let George and me buy into it, as a shared holiday home."
"Actually," Rafford said thoughtfully, "that might not be a bad idea."
"Oh Lord."
"I'm terribly sorry." He really looked it. "No, what I meant was: I spurn your offer, after due consideration, as being far below the market value. Is that better?"
"Much."
Rafford picked up a worn duffle coat, turned to the door, then turned back. "This is absolutely nothing to do with North and South, is it?"
"It's nothing to do with Ireland at all," Maxim said firmly.
"Oh, that's fine. Help yourself to anything you can find in the kitchen or the drinks and…" he smiled boyishly; "… just look the property over."
Maxim sipped coffee until the BMW had growled away, then sat down at a telephone which wasn't in a call box and didn't go through a hotel switchboard, and started on the first of a long list of numbers.
He began with what were, or might be, Mrs Jackaman's relatives; Brennans were very thick on the ground in south-western Ireland. Maxim was a London estate agent who only wanted to know who was handling the sale of the English house because he might have a client; did they know where he could contact Mrs Jackaman, nйe Mary Brennan? No fish bit on that one, though once he thought he sensed a nibble. He underlined the name.