"A car?"
Both men strained to listen. The wind whipped the sound away from them, then lulled so that they could hear the almost-silence of a car engine just turning over, then being switched off.
The silence menaced them.
"The track is over there," McBride whispered, pointing north to a line of pencilled blackness. A hedge, Gilliatt supposed. The moon disappeared behind more blown cloud. "Cut across this way."
McBride moved off the path they had been following up from the beach, climbing heavily into then out of the ditch, breathing stertorously. Gilliatt jumped the ditch, caught up with him. McBride dragged himself stubbornly, angrily through a gap in the thorny hedge, and Gilliatt followed him more cautiously, snagging his coat and hands. Then they heard Drummond's call from no more than thirty yards away.
"Michael? Michael, are you all right?"
Gilliatt was about to comment when McBride pulled him roughly down beside him into the shadow of the hedge.
"Shut up!" McBride whispered savagely, glaring into Gilliatt's face.
"But—"
"Shut up, damn you!"
Again, Gilliatt sensed the distance between them like an uncrossable gulf, aware of nationalities which dictated their individuality, governed it. Drummond's English tones again, then, a further assertion that Gilliatt was somehow on the wrong side in a war not of his choosing.
"Michael?" They could hear his footsteps now, coming down the track to the beach. "Michael — where are you?" There was no hesitation and no fear in the footsteps. Gilliatt saw Drummond's form through the hedge, passing them. He listened until the footsteps stopped by the dead body. A low whistle of surprise, a grunt as Drummond got to his feet again. "Michael?"
Gilliatt realized that McBride had his revolver in his good hand, saw his implacable face.
Gilliatt grabbed McBride's gun hand, and the Irishman looked at him with unconcealed hatred in his eyes. Gilliatt looked back at Drummond, who was casting about for any sign of them. He wanted to stand up, call out to Drummond and disprove McBride's wild suspicions. But he felt the quiver of hate running through McBride's frame, and Drummond was little more than a dark upright shadow and there was a dead IRA man on the ground only yards from them, and the impression of danger was so omnipresent that he remained silent.
Drummond hurried away, back up the track. McBride immediately got to his feet, as if to pursue him. Gilliatt stood up.
"Are we going after him?"
McBride seemed to debate the matter, then shook his head. "No. Not yet. He's got too many helpers."
Drummond's treachery seemed improbable, McBride's suspicions delirious. "What do we do, then?"
"No night for us to be walking the countryside," McBride said, grinning, leaning into Gilliatt's face. "We'll try the beach. The tide's out, we can cross the inlet to Harbour View, maybe walk all the way to Timoleague before we join the Clonakilty road."
"Can you make it?" Gilliatt already knew the answer.
"Oh, don't worry about me. I'm not going to die just yet. I have to see a man about a coffin and a funeral service. Come on, let's get back down to the beach before the moon comes out again."
McBride squeezed roughly back through the hedge, and Gilliatt hesitated for a moment, in the grip of a momentous, undeniable reluctance. Then fear came with a sudden chill blast of wind, and he hurried after McBride.
The First Sea Lord Turned from the tall window of his spacious office in the Admiralty, hands still behind his back. He had been looking across St James's Park to a smudge on the grey horizon which was the last sky-writing of the previous evening's Luftwaffe raid. The smoke over Battersea worked powerfully upon his imagination, suggesting the necessity of the man Walsingham's proposal, Emerald, while it also seemed some kind of prophetic warning, a commandment rather than a sign to follow. He unclenched his hands, then attended to March and Walsingham, who sat on the other side of his massive desk. The long room that was his office seemed to press around him once he turned from the window, almost threatening in the dull gleam of morning light from the polished dark wood and the book-shelves. The high light ceiling seemed lower. Conspiracy had entered the room. The ranks of portraits on the walls seemed to frown with disturbing unanimity. The First Sea Lord consciously did not glance in the direction of Nelson's portrait, above the fireplace.
"Commander Walsingham, while I accept the evidence you have so assiduously amassed, and believe that the Germans plan to mount an invasion of the Irish Republic—" He glanced swiftly and keenly at Walsingham, seeing the quick passage of emotion on the man's face before he gained control of his features and they reassumed their non-committal tightness. Then his eyes, as he continued speaking, wandered again over the dark wood in the room. The light often made the wood translucent and alive, but now only depths were suggested, the absorption of light. "But I cannot recommend to the War Cabinet the suggestion contained in your Emerald file. I shall, however, request a meeting with the Prime Minister later today, and I am certain the evidence you have presented will be discussed in full Cabinet either today or tomorrow."
The hour-long meeting was suddenly over. The First Sea Lord felt no relief, for immediately he finished speaking the full weight of Walsingham's evidence seemed to settle on his shoulders. The man's solution was unthinkable—
Yet he sensed a battered city beyond his office, and a country beleaguered beyond that. Britain was powerless to prevent the invasion of Ireland and the opening up of a second front. He hoped March and Walsingham would leave his office quickly. He needed to sit down.
The thin grey trail of smoke was apparent to them as they cycled down the last half-mile of the road to Leap. McBride had borrowed two ancient and unsafe cycles in Clonakilty from his wife's cousin, and they had made good time through the last hours of the night and the slow grey dawn. Gilliatt was weary, yet the relief of having encountered none of Drummond's men remained with him until they saw the smoke beyond the last slope. He glanced at McBride, who at once began to ride furiously up the slope. His face was chalk-white, strained, tired and afraid. The hours making good time along the still wet shoreline to Timoleague seemed to have taken little out of him, even wounded — even the jarring of his arm as he guided the cycle seemed to leave him with reserves of purpose and a kind of wild, determined pleasure in outrunning Drummond. Now, however, he appeared drained and fearful.
McBride was twenty yards ahead as Gilliatt topped the rise, pedalling furiously towards the shell of a burned-out cottage that Gilliatt knew must be McBride's home. Gilliatt paused, as if not to intrude upon an evident grief. Another, more selfish emotion occupied him gradually. The IRA had committed an atrocity, whether McBride's wife was amid the ruins of the cottage or not. Gilliatt was afraid for himself. He could hear McBride calling his wife's name as he flung down the bicycle and clambered into the smouldering ruins of the cottage — white distemper scarred and blackened, the roof fallen in, smoke wreathing the small, demented figure of McBride. Gilliatt pedalled down the slope, pulling up in front of the cottage just as McBride emerged. His hands and face were blackened, and he was sweating so that rivulets of white appeared down his cheeks. His eyes were feverishly bright.
"Is she—?" Gilliatt began, letting his cycle fall to the ground.
"No. I can't find her." There was no relief.
"Where could she be?"
McBride seemed not to have considered any hopeful explanation, and to be nonplussed. He rubbed the dirt on his good hand into his face, making a wilder figure of himself. The hand then flapped loosely at the air as if trying to gain some grip or purchase.