"Go to hell," he mumbled in reply to Moynihan. Moynihan crossed the room and struck him across the face. The woman seemed to enjoy the act, to anticipate a second or third blow and be disappointed when they did not come. Moynihan laughed, threatened with his open hand so that McBride flinched, and then returned to his seat.
"Don't be bloody stupid, McBride," he said, picking up his glass of whisky from the rug beside his chair. "You're all on your own, in this delightful weekend cottage, no one knows you're here. You'll get yourself buried in the garden if you don't co-operate."
"Then who'll believe your story?"
"It'll still make good reading, cause quite a stir."
"You need me — and not too knocked about, either, you dumb bunny," McBride sneered. He didn't know where the energy, the defiance had come from. Perhaps only from the woman's silence, her withdrawal from the verbal baiting. Moynihan made as if to rise again, slopping his whisky over his trousers. "Little wet-pants," McBride added, laughing.
The woman suddenly stood up, and crossed to McBride. The gun in her hand, the little Astra she'd used in the car park, was close to his head. She grinned, pressing the hole of the barrel against his temple. She squeezed the trigger, very slowly and in plain sight. Her eyes were mad — she was going to kill him.
The hammer clicked, and she laughed. She showed him the magazine in her other hand. Then she leaned close to him. He could smell the grease of their flsh-and-chip supper on her breath — he'd been able, with terrible hunger, to smell the fish and chips in the boot as they sat in a lay-by and ate them — and he could see tiny fragments of white fish between her bottom front teeth. She leaned to his ear, and began whispering to him. He heard the magazine click back into the gun. She pressed the barrel against his groin, moving it in a rubbing motion as if it was a part of her body, her own crotch touching his. She pressed harder and harder.
"I promise you, darling," she whispered in a grotesque parody of seductive tones, her breath quick and shallow and obscene in his ear, "I promise I'll let my gun make love to you, but not just yet, not just yet—" The gun hurt now, pressing into him. He winced. "You want it to love you, but not yet, darling, not just yet—"
He screamed as she dug the barrel of the gun deeper, then drew back from him. Her eyes were alight, possessed. He clutched his bound hands over his groin, sobbing despite himself.
He heard Claire Drummond saying: "He knows now I could do it, just as easily as anything. Blow off that thing he's had inside me. He knows his life isn't really worth a light!"
McBride looked up. "You're mad."_ " -
"Yes," she said, sitting down again, putting the gun back in her shoulder-bag as primly as if it were her make-up or cigarettes. "Oh, yes. The awful thing for you is — you know I'm aware of it, that I can use it, turn it on like a tap. You'll never know when I'll do it, or what effect it might have on you. Terrible, aren't I?" She lit a cigarette, exhaling the first smoke at the stained ceiling with its cracking plaster between smoke-blackened beams.
"See?" Moynihan said as if he had planned the demonstration. "You'll co-operate." McBride blinked back his tears of pain and fear. "We want you to make a statement first of all, just a trailer for the main film, so to speak. On tape, and we can play it over the telephone or send it to one of the newspapers. You mention Guthrie's name, and the war, and a couple of other little items of interest, and we'll set up the meetings and make the financial arrangements. Oh, you won't be left out of it, darling. You'll stand to make — oh, fifty thousand. At least. That's about the going rate for serialization. You ought to make twice that. You can't prove Guthrie was queer as well, can you now? That'd be even better." Moynihan was speaking through his own laughter, enjoying his joke enormously.
Then McBride was laughing, too, so that Moynihan fell silent. McBride shook his head. His voice was old and weak and tired and bereft of resistance. He said, "You dumb bastard — I was thinking of millions, not thousands. Millions! Now, isn't that the funniest part of the whole thing, uh? Isn't that a real belly-laugh?"
The noise of the approaching car cut off his laughter. Claire Drummond rose swiftly from her chair.
"Put the light out!" she snapped, moving to the window.
Walsingham put down the telephone with a quivering hand, rattling it in its cradle. Against all hope, against all hope—
He couldn't help it. Of course, they'd temporarily lost the car again, after they'd spotted it in a pub car park outside Cirencester, but it had been seen. They knew the area. If it moved on any road in the Cotswolds that night, they would pick it up.
But, his satisfaction and relief were almost overpowering. They'd traced the car-hire firm Goessler had used — a small one, not one of the giants — late in the afternoon, just before closing, then sent out a general alert to all police forces. By ten in the evening, a constable in a Panda patrol car of the Gloucestershire Constabulary had spotted the white Ford Escort in the pub car park. Goessler in his overconfidence had left it bathed in the white illumination of the country pub's floodlighting, unsuspicious that he was even "wanted for questioning". Goessler's unconcern, his illusory sense of safety, bolstered Walsingham's nerve more than any other factor. Goessler's unawareness of him put him at a disadvantage. It made him more stupid than Walsingham, slower and capable of being outwitted. He had Goessler in the palm of his hand now. He could, and would, crush him.
The hatred was pure and deep and uplifting. Goessler had been out to get him. Now, he would finish Goessler, the author and onlie true begetter — he smiled at the quotation — of this operation. Finish him and stalemate McBride. A stand-off.
Of course, for Goessler and for the Drummond woman and anyone else who knew, it was an end-game. That was another of the certainties he felt able to allow himself after Exton's telephone call.
He looked around his sitting-room, at the high, corniced, shadowy ceiling then at the rich carpet. The substance of the room seemed to have returned. He seemed more substantial, heavier, sitting in his favourite armchair. All would be well.
He raised his glass.
"To a gallant loser — Herr Goessler," he mouthed, smiling, his lips seeming too thin and small to contain the vivid dentures.
He would meet Goessler just the once, when they picked him up and before—
He stopped the thought there, like breaking off chocolate to keep for later.
"Please don't be inhospitable, my friends!" the voice called from outside the door of the cottage. "I am not a stern parent come to spoil your happiness or invade your tree-house. Open the door. We are surely still friends!"
McBride lifted his head. He couldn't believe that he recognized the voice and shook his head as if to clear it of deception. His groin ached and he was frightened and the voice seemed to belong to a calmer past. But, incredibly, Goessler went on speaking outside, addressing Claire Drummond and Moynihan. McBride, hunched over his bound wrists and aching groin, watched from under slitted lids; a physical approximation to cunning that had no inward reality. The woman opened the door, and Moynihan turned on the light as it closed again. It was Goessler, and Lobke, the so-called embassy official. The light seemed hard and dirty, making Goessler look older, fatter but with somehow hollower cheeks, stubbled and with the cheekbones emphasized like reminders of distant youth. Lobke looked wary, concentrating on Claire Drummond and Moynihan, both of whom still held their guns level on the two Germans.