"He put the Security people onto him."
"I doubt he did, Mrs Jackaman. Your husband was making his objections to Tyler in the Whitehall circuit. Not in Tyler's world."
"It's the same thing." She got up to refill her glass. He waited until she came back.
"Has that letter really gone to the Russians?"
"You're thinking like an Englishman, Major Harry."
"If they ever come across the Elbe, Mrs Jackaman, do you think they're going to stop at Holyhead?"
She sloshed the whisky around in her glass, looking moodily down at it. "Do you know what Gerald wrote before he died? Do you know that? No, of course you don't. You never saw it and nobody else did either. Except me. Now you're going to ask me why I didn't show it to the police. A bloody silly question, Major Harry Whatsit. Bloody silly." Quietly, she had gone over the top into real drunkenness. Maxim sat still and folded his hands around his glass.
"I can translate it for you, Major Harry. I can remember it. He said that the Security Service had been planting money in our French account just to discredit him. He'd found they'd been doing that. Now what do you think ofthat, Major Harry?"
Maxim took his time answering.
"But it wasn't, Mrs Jackaman. It was you, putting in money without him knowing."
She stared at him with watery red, deep-sunk eyes. "I should have had to get to the bank statements from the Compte Nationale before he did."
"I think you did. You must have handled that side of the marriage anyway, or you wouldn't have risked it."
"And where do you think I got that much money?"
"Nobody said anything about how much money." There was a long silence while she frowned and tried to remember, then took a mouthful of whisky and shrugged. Maxim went on: "It was probably an inheritance or selling property in your own family, over here. It might be easier to move money out of Ireland to France. I don't think it's any more legal."
Outside, the afternoon was beginning to darken, and a new wind made the water slap irregularly but monotonously against the metal hull. She eased out from the crowded table and went to the corner cupboard, then came back without having refilled her glass.
"All right," she said wearily. "What do you want me to do?" She took a small orange from the bowl and began tearing the skin off; the sudden sharp smell cut through that of paraffin.
Maxim was suddenly tired of the whole Tyler letter business, of Mrs Jackaman and her whisky breath. Next time. But he had to make sure there would be a next time.
"The first thing," he said firmly, "is to get away from here. Forget the car, the boat, everything. Don't worry about the cost. I've said that others could find you just as easily as I did. You do see that?"
She moved her head, half nod, half shake.
"Is there anybody you can stay with?" Maxim asked. "A friend, not a relative, somewhere it would be difficult to trace you?"
"I can think of one or two. If you haven't found a few friends by my age…"
"I'll drive you wherever you want. An airport or main-line station. A hotel."
"It's like that, is it?"
"This is the first division, Mrs Jackaman. With the Cup Final coming up. Three people have been killed about that letter already."
He'd over-done it. Her face was tight and suspicious. "Really? I'll pack my case."
She went through into a cabin in the bows that must be a bedroom. Maxim tore a small orange apart for himself, dunking the segments in his whisky and chewing them angrily. The oblong aluminium-framed windows were misting over, but he could still see the gentle green lines of the far shore. How can anybody live in Ireland and not believe that people get killed for politics?
She came back with her black coat on, carrying a heavy suitcase of battered fawn leather, held together with plenty of straps. Maxim took it. She turned off the hidden stove, gave one look around, then led the way out.
He had stowed the case in the back of the Escort when she joined him, rattling the houseboat keys.
"I'll take the car into Nenagh and leave it at the garage there. It's quite all right, Major," She had seen the look on his face. "I was sick when you weren't looking. I'm never sick when anybody is looking. I learnt that much from the Diplomatic. I can drive." She opened the Citroen. "You go ahead."
He was parked about twenty yards in front. He had backed away perhaps another twenty when her car exploded.
There was no sharp noise like a normal explosive. Just a heavy thud and flames surging out of every window as if there had never been any glass in them at all. Then it was a shapeless blistering bonfire, rolling black smoke into the air and reminding Maxim of something… He began running towards it, but mostly so that he could later say to himself that he'd done so.
There was nothing he could do, not even get within ten feet of the furious blaze. Perhaps if she'd rolled out in the first two seconds, and without taking a breath… but she hadn't.
He remembered now. A Land-Rover loaded with petrol cans that some idiot had managed to drive over a land-mine in the Yemen… He also remembered what had been left when the fire died out. It wasn't enough even to be horrible. He got into the Escort and drove away from the smoke signal.
The letter wasn't in the suitcase, not even in the lining, though he hadn't really expected it to be anywhere. Perhaps somebody in London would complain about lost evidence; if so, he could tell them precisely where he dumped the case, weighed down with rocks, into the Lough.
After that, he drove on up to Nenagh and turned back southwest on the main road to Limerick, bypassing Ballina and the Lough-side road. There probably wouldn't be any Gardai checkpoints set up yet, but it would be silly to get involved at all. An innocent man can be convicted, but not a man they don't even know exists, have never met.
How had he got to thinking like that? He'd joined up to be a simple soldier, hadn't he? The rain blattered down again, and he grinned sourly. That should wash out his tyre-marks in the lane, and the lane's mud from his tyres. How had he got to thinking like that?
21
In Limerick he found a telephone and rang the number that was probably some MI5 office or safe house. A man's voice, perhaps a different one, said: "Yes?"
"H here. I'm afraid the project's been terminated. There was some prejudice, extreme prejudice."
There was a silence at the other end. 'Terminate with extreme prejudice' was CIAese for 'bump off', or so Maxim had heard; he hoped the man had heard that, too.
The line crackled. "I see. Yes?"
"I don't think they'll even bother to send us a letter about it." He was proud of that sentence, though God alone knew how he'd explain it if anybody was listening in.
"Right," the man said. "I'll ring the Automobile Association for you, as well." The phone clicked.
Maxim stared blankly at it. The AA? What had they… Then he realised that they were Agnes Algar's initials, as well. So that was her office name, or one of them.
He hurried back through the rain to the hotel and sank himself in another hot bath. For a commercial traveller, he was being remarkably clean. Then he listened to the six-thirty radio news, but there was no mention of the fire.
The beef at dinner was over-cooked.
The ten o'clock news had two sentences about a body in a burnt-out car near Ballina, County Tipperary, but nothing about what the Gardai thought of it. Maxim lay on his bed and tried to watch them work – assuming they went about it much the same way as in Belfast after a car bomb.
First, put the fire out, if somebody else or the rain hadn't done it already. After one look inside, there then wouldn't be any hurry. Block off the road with plastic cones, seal off the area with white tapes tied from hedge to hedge, and maybe poke around a bit. In Belfast there wouldn't be any doubt about what had happened. Down in County Tipperary they would have less experience in jumping to the right conclusion.