"Ah — that'd been swept, especially for us," the old man said knowingly, shaking his head slightly. "One or two of the lads joked about it, but the job had been done. They told us that."
"Where did you go down, Mr Abbott. You were on the bridge, you'd know?"
"Off the Old Head of Kinsale, southwest of Cork Harbour." The old man prided himself on his memory, and held this nugget of it up to his inspection, gleaming and undimmed by time.
McBride exhaled slowly. He had it all now. Everything else would be merely corroborative. He said thickly, "And where exactly were you picked up, Mr Abbott?"
"Ah. The boat was taking on water, and the rudder was useless. We drifted out into the channel, more or less southwest. We were a bit worried about the minefield, but our shallow draught must've kept us safe enough. The sea was kind to us. Spotted by an Anson out from one of the Cornish airfields, and picked up the same day. Weather worsened the very next day."
"What was the name of the ship that picked you up?"
"Ah." The old man dredged along the reef of memory. His eyes brightened again. "HMS Saundersfoot. Frigate."
"Thank you, Mr Abbott, thank you."
The old man seemed content now just to sit, and McBride shared his silence for a little time longer. The explosions, the screams, the shattered or detached limbs, the drowning, oil searing the lungs, the frenzy to launch the boats and pull away from the stricken Southwark Rose— all idled to the bottom of the gleaming water of his satisfaction. Nothing existed outside this sunlit room which contained the physical form that experienced nothing beyond a complete, egoistical satisfaction. The outline of his book lay in his thoughts like an unfolded map or a precise, graphed medical chart. He had it all. The German preparations, the sweeping of the minefield, the relaying of the mines, the murder by British mines of an American special envoy. An atrocity. He was made.
It was the last, and most complete, time that he was to think of money in connection with the knowledge he possessed.
Ryan watched McBride and Claire Drummond go into a cafe with a mock-Tudor frontage just off the Promenade, then walked to the nearest telephone box and called Walsingham.
"You're secure," Walsingham told him, his voice becoming slightly more distant as the scrambler was switched on. "Go ahead."
"He's in Eastbourne, sir. With the girl." He laid some slight emphasis on the latter phrase.
"I'm afraid she is not to be considered separately from your assigned target," Walsingham replied. Ryan winced silently. He disliked his superiors when they began using jargon to disguise their proposed wet operations. Blood was going to be let out, breath stopped, physical shape altered irredeemably, but they always wanted to talk about operations and targets and necessities. Ryan had no compunction about murder on the orders of his superiors, but no liking for euphemisms as applied to the job he did.
"Very good, sir. It would seem, from what we could pick up and his manner and the like, he knows most of it now, sir. He's like the cat who's had the cream."
"Very well. Then the girl has to go. He may have confided in her."
"Very good, sir. I'll have an operational report for you by this evening — eight at the latest." He reprimanded himself for his own euphemism. I'll have killed them by eight, sir.
Walsingham broke the connection. Ryan stepped out of the call-box, letting the door swing shut behind him. The car was parked down the street, almost opposite the cafe. Walsingham, behind the induced blandness of the secure line and behind his almost imperturbable calm, was worried. Ryan sensed it like an odour in the call-box. Ripples moved out from the dropped stone that was Ryan's job and his limited view of the operation. Guthrie, Ulster, Washington—
He would not be forgiven any mistakes.
He returned to the car and nodded to the driver. Then, in order to settle the details of McBride's death in his mind, he took an OS map from the glove compartment — when the explosion ripped out the front of the Tesco supermarket three doors further down from the cafe where McBride and the girl were taking afternoon tea. Ryan, head snapping up even before the noise of the explosion followed the disturbance of the air and the alteration of the street's quiet perspective, saw the glass bulge in slow-motion then break into a million shards, flying across the street. Windows emptied. He ducked as the pressure-wave struck the car, rattling doors and windows then pushing in the windscreen so that it emptied over his neck and shoulders, prickling in the backs of his hands where they covered his head. Something warm and sudden spattered against him. In the moment he had ducked, he had seen two bodies lifted and flung outwards into the street, other people subsiding in hideous slow motion.
The driver's face was lacerated, deep gashes from the shattered windscreen across his left cheek and forehead. Ryan was already assuming he would survive when he noticed the red ring like a clerical collar round the driver's neck, staining his shirt. Then the body slumped against him, and Ryan pushed it away in revulsion. He opened the passenger door and the screaming loudened immediately. The Tesco store was on fire, smoke and flame billowing from the wrecked facade. There were perhaps two dozen bodies on the pavements. A bus had run over one form, and then stopped. There was no driver visible behind the wheel. Someone staggered against the wing of the car, blinded with blood, hands pressed against the face — he could not be sure of the sex — as if preventing the features being dissolved by the flow of blood from the scalp. The high scream did not belong either to a man or a woman, not even an afflicted child or animal.
Ryan was dazed by the occurrence of the explosion and not its force, and by the destruction through which he now had to move. All that concerned him was that he had to regain contact with McBride, must not lose him.
Moynihan pressed his handkerchief against his cheek to staunch the surprising flow of blood. He imagined the gash in his cheek was longer and deeper than it could possibly be. There was no window in which he could inspect it. He was standing drunkenly where he had been when the bomb exploded, in a shop doorway well past Tesco's, watching the front of the cafe. Now, all he could do was curse silently the Provisional cell which had planted a bomb in an Eastbourne supermarket when McBride was in the same town, the same street, and know he would have to move before the police and ambulances arrived. Yet he wanted to know that McBride and the woman were safe, unhurt. Some growing sense in him had indicated, as he watched the cafe before the explosion, that the woman had something to tell him, that perhaps the time was close when Goessler would give them McBride or they would take him. He needed to know.
But, as he heard the first high wails of the sirens, he forced himself to move, hurrying up the street past the rows of empty shop windows, clothes and food and tailors" dummies heaped and disarranged and shattered and glass-stabbed.
Ryan shook his head, feeling glass prickling the back of his neck and his hands. He was trying to organize his thinking, reject earlier possibilities and form a fresh course of action. McBride would have to be killed now. He rejected that, but it reformed behind the qualification of the woman. Ryan could do little without the driver, and somehow the carnage thrust upon this afternoon street by the Provisional IRA made him deeply angry, made him require action — soon and sudden.
A woman lurched against him as he crossed the street, her face wide and empty with terror. There seemed nothing wrong with her, until he pushed her away and saw the blood running down her leg like helpless urine, into her shoe. The heel had snapped from the shoe, the stocking was torn on the reddened leg, and there was a gash in her skirt. Smart, young, assured. Glass in her belly. Ryan was enraged even as he was sickened. He tripped over a still form, outstretched hand holding a plastic shopping bag with the blazon of the ruined store on it. Glass had cut madly at the back of the dead woman's head, a tonsure of violence. The back of the coat she wore was opened, violated. Ryan regained his feet, his shoes crunching along the glass beach of the pavement, the heat from the frontage of the store flushing his drawn face. A legless torso wailed from the gutter where it had been blown by the bomb, wrapped in the rags of a shop assistant's uniform. A cash register had spilled on the pavement, meaninglessly. Screams and wailing howled like fire-noises from inside the store, before they were drowned by the approaching sirens.