A few of the men along the coast were fishermen, but not many, not now that the economy was dragging itself, along with the country’s social problems, into the twentieth century. The north was a ferment of naive idealism and brutish anger, the whole concoction spiked by foreign meddling of the most malign nature.
In particular there was one young man, his hair wild and with a beard to match, whom he met in Drogheda, and who had spoken to him of the fishing industry and the village pubs and of politics. Politics seemed to pervade life in Ireland as though the very air carried whispered reminders of bloodshed and injustice. He had listened with an unjaundiced ear, explaining in his turn that he was on holiday, but that really he was recovering from a broken heart. The young man nodded, seeming to understand, his eyes keen like a gull’s.
In one of the pubs they sat for night after night, though he could feel, through his happiness, the end of the holiday approaching. They drove into the countryside one day, so that the young man, Will, could spend some time away from the gutting of fish and the rank posturing of the boats. They ate and drank, and, with Will’s directions, approached a quayside as dusk was falling. He pointed over to a small boat. The air was rich with the smells of fish and the endless screeching of the herring gulls. The boat, Will told his companion, was his own.
‘Shall we take her out?’
As they did, out past the green-stained walls of the quay, out past the bristling rocks and the wrack, into the choppy Irish Sea, the older man trailed his hand in the bitter-cold water, feeling the salt cling to his wrist. Will explained why the wind was slightly warm, and spoke of the hunt for some legendary giant fish, a shadowy monster that had never been caught. People still caught sight of it, he said, on moonlit nights with a tot of rum inside them, but if it was still alive, then it would be hundreds of years old, since the first such tales had been told centuries before. The sky gaped above them, the soft spray like an anointing. Perhaps, thought the Englishman, he was the outdoor type after all. He would return to London, give up his job (which was, in any case, about to dump him), and drift, seeing the world through rechristened eyes.
The engine stopped, and the lapping of the water became the only sound around him. It seemed a pure and a miraculous peace. He looked back in the direction of the shore, but it was out of sight.
‘We’re a long way out,’ he said, one hand still paddling the water, though it was growing numb with cold.
‘No,’ said the younger man, ‘it’s only you that’s a long way out. You’re way too far out of your territory.’
And when he turned, the gun was already aimed, and his mouth had opened in the merest fraction of a cry when it went off, sending him flying backward out of the boat, so that his body rested in the water, his legs hanging over the edge, caught on a rusty nail.
The younger man’s hand shook only slightly as he placed the gun on the floor of the boat. From a bag concealed beneath one seat he brought out a load of stones, which he hoped would be sufficient for his purpose. He tried to pull the corpse back into the boat, but it had become sodden and as heavy as the deadweight it was. The sweat dripped from him as he heaved at his catch, growing tired quickly as though after a full day on the boats.
Then he caught sight of the face and he retched, bringing up a little of the dead man’s gifts of food and wine. But the job had to be done, and so he gathered up new strength. He had done it, after all, he had killed his first man. They would be pleased with him.
1
The Arab’s Smile
One
Miles Flint wore glasses: they were his only distinguishing feature. Billy Monmouth could not help smiling as he watched Miles leave the club and head off toward his car, which would be parked some discreet distance away. Miles and Billy had joined the firm around the same time, and it had seemed inevitable that, over the years, they would become friends, though friends, in the strictest sense of the word, were never made in their world.
Miles was feeling a little heavy from the drinks. Billy had insisted on buying — ‘the prerogative of the bachelor’s paycheck, old boy’ — and Miles had not refused. He fumbled now at the buttons of his coat, feeling a slight and unseasonal chill in the London air, and thought of the evening ahead. He had one more visit to pay, a few telephone calls to make, but apart from that, Sheila and he would have their first full evening together for a whole week.
He did not relish the prospect.
As suspected, his car had collected a parking ticket. He ripped it from the windscreen, walked around the car once as though he were a potential and only half-informed buyer, and bent down as if checking for a bald tire or broken muffler. Then, satisfied, he unlocked the passenger door. The Jaguar’s interior, pale hide complementing the cream exterior, looked fine. He slid across into the driver’s seat and slipped the key into the ignition, turning it quickly. The engine coughed once, then roared into life. He sat back, letting it idle, staring into space.
That was that, then. He was not about to be blown up today. He knew that the younger men in the firm, and even the likes of Billy Monmouth, smiled at him behind his back, whispering words like ‘paranoia’ and ‘nerves,’ going about their own business casually and without fear, as though there were invisible barriers between them and some preordained death. But then Miles was a cautious man, and he knew that in this game there was no such thing as being too careful.
He sat for a few more minutes, reflecting upon the years spent inspecting his car, checking rooms and telephones and even the undersides of restaurant tables. People thought him clumsy because he would always drop a knife or a fork before the meal began, bowing his head beneath the tablecloth to pick it up. All he was doing was obeying another of the unwritten rules: checking for bugs.
The car was sounding good, though it was a luxury much detested by Sheila. She drove about in a battered Volkswagen Beetle, which had once been orange but was now a motley patchwork of colors. Sheila did not think it worthwhile paying a garage to do repairs, when all one needed was a handbook and some tools. Miles forgave her everything, for he too had a quiet liking for her car, not so much for its performance as for its name.
Miles Flint’s hobby was beetles, not the cars but the insects. He loved to read about their multifarious lifestyles, their ingenuity, their incalculable species, and he charted their habitats on a wall map in his study, a study filled with books and magazine articles, and a few glass cases containing specimens that he had caught himself in earlier days. He no longer killed beetles, and had no desire to exhibit anyone else’s killings. He was content now to read about beetles and to look at detailed photographs and diagrams, for he had learned the value of life.
He had one son, Jack, who built up tidy overdrafts during each term at the university, then came home pleading poverty. Miles had flipped through the stubs in one of Jack’s famished checkbooks: payments to record stores, bookshops, restaurants, a wine bar. He had returned the checkbook to Jack’s secondhand tweed jacket, replacing it carefully between a diary and a letter from a besotted (and jilted) girlfriend. Later, he had asked Jack about his spending and had received honest answers.
Miles knew that his kind did not deal in honesty. Perhaps that was the problem. He examined the large-paned windows along the quiet street, the car’s interior warming nicely. Through one ground-floor window he could watch the silent drama of a man and a woman, both on the point of leaving the building, while by running the car forward a yard or two, he might glance into another lit interior. The choice was his. For once, and with a feeling of abrupt free will, he decided to drive away completely. He had, after all, to visit the watchmen.