Lickowen, the tiny scattering of cottages overlooking Toe Head Bay, where McBride expected to find a boat, had already been occupied by Germans. The mist betrayed them, allowing them a sense of unchanged calm in the hamlet until it was too late to run. One startled young soldier on guard raised one shout before they saw him at the crossroads, which brought without seeming delay three more soldiers on the run from behind a white-painted, blind-windowed cottage. McBride raised the machine-pistol, but Gilliatt knocked it from his grasp with his MP40, then threw down his gun. McBride looked at him in hatred, but Gilliatt merely shrugged and raised his arms tiredly above his head. The sleepless night, the gnawing emptiness of his stomach, Maureen's flagging body, the suddenness of the surprise — all conspired to drain him of resistance. Even as he raised his hands, he had an image of Ashe, telling him of the defeatism riddling the Admiralty. He'd thrown down his own gun in a similar mood. The Germans were here, everywhere. There was no point to it—
An Unteroffizier inspected the two machine-pistols, then stepped back, a grin on his face. He was younger than either of them, and he was enjoying their capture without thinking of the Germans they had killed to get the guns. He spoke in a thick Bavarian accent, but both McBride and Gilliatt understood him.
"We've got them. Well done, Willi. These are the bastards who turned up in the middle of the landing—" He seemed to remember something then, and stepped half a pace towards McBride, whose face showed more defiance.
McBride tensed, almost inviting some suicidal encounter. Then the Unteroffizier said in bad English, his pleasure at their easy capture unalloyed: "We invite you to breakfast," and laughed. He directed them, with, his own MP38, towards the cottage from which they had appeared.
There was one other soldier in the cottage, already devouring bacon and eggs, cooked by an old woman with wispy grey hair trailing the shoulders of her black dress. She hardly looked up from the stove and the frying pan as they entered, merely seemed to register, waitress-like, the arrival of extra mouths to be fed, and the Unteroffizier motioned them to chairs round the table. As he sat down, Gilliatt accepted the weariness that sidled up from his feet and ankles and calves, encasing him like shroud. Maureen laid her head on the table, closing her eyes with relief. She was simply glad to stop running. The instant she laid down her head, she felt something loosen from her body and mind, received the sensation that she was physically dissolving. She hated Michael for making them run, for the night and the killings and for her tiredness and hunger and the cottage that was burned and the death of her father. Images seemed to unwind her like a mummy, peel her like the layers of an onion.
McBride sat staring at the Unteroffizier, who placed himself opposite the Irishman.
"What do we do with them?" the young guard asked him.
"Officer's business that," the Bavarian replied.
"We're moving on in an hour—"
Then our Irish friends will have to look after these." He studied McBride intently, his head slightly on one side, as if mentally fitting him with various items of clothing. He nodded, eventually. "You're not a farmer," he observed in English.
"Drummond," McBride replied, "where is Drummond?" He asked the question in German, which seemed only to confirm something to the Bavarian. He shook his head.
"Who is this Drummond? You are the ones in the field last night, nicht so?" Slowly, he leaned forward. "But you are not a farmer, my friend. You are Irish, uh?"
"I'm Irish." McBride added no more, returning to an inward contemplation of Drummond where he could not be distracted by the trivialities of his capture. Nevertheless, when breakfast came he fell upon it hungrily, as if restoring necessary strength.
As soon as he had finished, and Maureen and Gilliatt, too, were drinking tea from chipped mugs, the Bavarian said to the guard at the door whose MP40 had been on them all the time, "Go and tell the Herr Hauptmann we have some guests for him to entertain." The guard ducked out of the low door.
"It's tonight, is it?" Gilliatt suddenly asked in German, lighting a cigarette he had cautiously taken from an inside pocket. The Unteroffizier was surprised, then he smiled.
"It is tonight."
"This will be one of the beaches, will it?" Gilliatt continued. "The U-boats will off-load onto Toe Head Bay. How many other beaches are there — can't be more than two thousand men, surely?" He puffed smoke at the ceiling. The Bavarian looked puzzled and angry, but snapped his mouth into a steel line without replying, almost feeling that he had given something valuable to the man who already knew so much about Smaragdenhalskette. "What's the operation called, by the way?" Gilliatt added.
"Smaragdenhalskette," the Hauptmann said from the door. "I obviously do not need to translate into English, or Gaelic. You are neither Irish nor innocent bystanders, I see."
"Emerald Necklace — yes, it would be," Gilliatt observed. "And the boys from Brest come ashore tonight, mm?"
The Hauptmann appeared startled. His young face under the peaked cap seemed white and worried. "How do you—? You're guessing, of course."
"What I know, the British government knows," Gilliatt observed, marvelling at the courage transmitted by three rashers of bacon, two fried eggs and a thick slice of white bread. He was helpless, just a wasp on a windscreen at whom the driver would occasionally flick, but on whom his mind might become increasingly, dangerously concentrated.
"And what have they done with this so-called knowledge?" the captain sneered, moving closer. The old woman seemed to have melted into the flagstones.
"Ah, now I couldn't possibly tell you that. I've been on holiday in Ireland for the last few days. But, I was on the minesweeper that found your precious channel through our minefield—" Gilliatt left the revelation floating on the air until it descended by its own weight. He smiled, and drawing on his cigarette leaned further back in his chair. McBride was watching him carefully. Maureen touched his arm as she saw the captain's face darken.
"When, eh? When did you find it?" the captain asked, dispensing with any pretence, hungry for the information.
"Oh, one day last week," Gilliatt observed blithely.
"Get the Herr Oberst on the radio," the captain snapped at the Bavarian sergeant, who immediately stood up. "Tell the Herr Oberst what this Englishman knows, and ask what is to be done with him." The second half of the sentence seemed to come as relief and inspiration to both the captain and his sergeant. Confidence returned at once.
Gilliatt quailed inwardly, as if from some electricity that might have passed from Maureen to himself through the hand that still lay on his arm. He was a wasp, and he had just buzzed against the windscreen again. He wondered what they would do with him, and prayed that the British government was doing something. A pressing futility was as physical as a pain behind his eyes, but he rubbed at his forehead to rid himself of it. Be a wasp, he thought. Just do your little bit—
Walsingham had reluctantly agreed to accept Guthrie's invitation to lunch at his Georgian house set in three acres of gardens and paddock, through which a trout stream ran, on the Wiltshire-Hampshire border. Guthrie had decided to spend the weekend with his wife, Marian, at his country home rather than in London. Walsingham was driven down in time for lunch on the Saturday and, as the Daimler turned into the drive of Guthrie's home, he was aware at once of the overt security that surrounded the Minister's person, family, and house. Soldiers, supplemented by police dog-handlers, were evident through the trees across the sunlit paddock and lawns, moving in pairs.