Gilliatt dismissed the image of the wasp on the windscreen. It hadn't worked. It was too late for second thoughts, for reconsiderations. The plans were made, orders given, strategy rigidly defined. The parachute troops would hold the beaches for the seaborne landings early the following morning. Gilliatt had been unable to make their grasp on the situation loosen even a fraction.
Riordan seemed to take a pleasure in guarding McBride. He treated him warily, keeping a physical distance between them that admitted the danger McBride might represent, but satisfied with the docility, the unarmed innocuousness that Gilliatt knew McBride was deliberately presenting to his captors. Riordan's desultory, mindless baiting of McBride went unanswered.,McBride, to all appearances, was a beaten man.
They were given bread and cheese and beer for lunch, soon after the Germans left. As the afternoon wore on, Maureen seemed least able to accept her captivity. She paced the barn continually with jerky, caged-animal steps, wearing a path in the strewn hay. McBride showed no interest in her, but Gilliatt was concerned. Her behaviour was irritating Riordan and the others, making them more edgy and watchful when they might otherwise have been lulled into carelessness. If McBride tried to escape, then he and Maureen would also have to go. At the moment, they were prisoners of war. He had no desire to become a hostage.
McBride's suspicions of Drummond had become preposterous to Gilliatt. It was far easier to believe in bad luck, in accident, than in Drummond's treachery. But McBride was obsessed, almost doom-laden. He was set apart, not even concerned to involve Gilliatt and Maureen in any plan of escape.
"Sit down, woman!" Riordan snapped out eventually, his rifle moving indecisively but dangerously on his lap. Gilliatt, as if newly aroused, looked at his watch. Four-thirty. It was getting dark outside. "For God's sake, sit down!"
Maureen appeared stung, slapped across the face by his anger. She stood in front of him, fists clenched, her body visibly quivering with anger and the released strain of her captivity. She simply would not accept, nor exploit her situation. Gilliatt got to his feet — McBride hadn't even looked up at the scene from where he sat, which had to mean he was dangerously near making some move — and moved swiftly to Maureen's side. She shrugged off his hands on her upper arms, but he pulled her back against him in an embrace. Riordan laughed.
"He's very friendly with your wife, McBride!" he roared, highly amused at Gilliatt's overacted concern and Maureen's reluctance to be mollified. "Just take her away," Riordan added to Gilliatt. "She'd wear out the patience of a saint!"
"She doesn't like being, held prisoner," Gilliatt offered affably. "Come to that, neither do I." His words had a studied lightness, lack of menace. Riordan smiled confidently, seated on a hay-bale, the woman between him and the man, and her face becoming more docile, bovine as her anger spent itself through her working hands and her clenched jaws. Gilliatt was leaning his head against hers in a parody of comfort.
"You'll just have to accept it, like he—"
His eyes were moving across to McBride, and widening slowly as they did so. His words cut off, and Gilliatt wondered whether McBride had left it too late. He pushed himself and Maureen forward, toppling their combined weight onto Riordan. The rifle was coming to a bead on McBride, then he lost sight of it under Maureen's body. It discharged as he fell on top of her, and she screamed. Gilliatt felt a blank emptiness as he rolled aside, striking out with his fist at Riordan's head, which bobbed into his view. His fist connected with Riordan's temple. Maureen went on screaming and screaming and Gilliatt moved slowly — too slowly it seemed — away from her body, clambering up her frame to fasten his hands on Riordan's rifle as the Irishman disentangled the Remington Mk. 1R from World War I from beneath Maureen and tried to bring it to bear on Gilliatt.
Gilliatt heard one shot, then the click of a bolt — the man Paddy's Lee Enfield Mk. - then a second shot and a third, punctuated by the noise of the bolt-action. He let Riordan pull the rifle towards him, and then pushed, smashing the stock into his face. Riordan howled, letting go of the rifle. Gilliatt hit him again, and whirled round, fumbling with the bolt.
McBride was standing very still, the Lee Enfield in his hands. Just in front of him, Paddy lay unconscious, while across the barn the whey-faced man with the half-formed features lay on his back, three holes in close grouping in his coat, an old Mauser C96 still in his hand, unfired. Maureen, unwounded but terrified and hysterical, went on screaming. McBride crossed the barn, turned her face to his and slapped her three times across the cheek. She subsided into sobbing which racked her body like unassuageable grief. McBride looked at the unconscious Riordan, then at Gilliatt.
"I think we'd better be leaving, don't you?" he said with a grin. He was as tense as a wound spring, the pleasure of winning and killing running through his frame like electricity.
"My God," Gilliatt muttered, feeling his legs give way. He sat down untidily alongside Riordan. "My God, I could have killed her," he added, looking blankly at Maureen.
"You'll have enough time to make it up to her," McBride observed. "When you've dropped me off, you'll take care of her." It was like an order. Gilliatt looked up at him, bemused.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" he shouted, looking from McBride to Maureen and back again. "We could have got your wife killed between us. Doesn't that matter to you at all?" McBride appeared unimpressed. "What the hell's the matter with you?" he asked again, more softly.
McBride shook his head. "Don't confuse the issue with moral speculations, Peter. I'm going to kill Drummond and you're going to look after Maureen. Those are the assigned roles. You drop me off at Kilbrittain and take her on to Cork."
"Don't you care about her at all?"
"It isn't relevant at the moment," McBride said without emotion. Gilliatt saw him on an outcrop of egocentricity, not even bothering to signal to a vessel that might rescue him. McBride crossed to the body on the floor and re-moved the Mauser from its grasp. He weighed it in his hand and seemed satisfied with it. "Killing him with a German gun might be more than appropriate, don't you think?"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Process of Elimination
Mcbride pulled Riordan's small Morris over to the side of the road, wrenched on the handbrake, and switched off the engine. To Gilliatt and Maureen, the silence was suddenly ominous and foreboding. McBride had skirted Clonakilty and then taken the road north before doubling back southwards towards Crosswinds Farm and Kilbrittain. They had encountered no German — or Irish — troops in the hour and a half's driving. The night was heavy and wet as a facecloth when McBride wound down the window, but it had stopped raining. The sky showed black and starless through appearing tears in the cloud cover.
Crosswinds Farm was three miles away from them, across the fields that fell away from the hilltop where McBride had chosen to stop, and beyond the scattered few lights of Kilbrittain.
"You can't attempt it," Gilliatt began, aware of the dangerous, heedless smile on McBride's face. It irritated him, and he changed his tactics. "You haven't a shred of proof against him, Michael!" McBride's smile faded.
"Is that all you have to say, Peter? Fair play for Drummond? I'd forgotten — you're both in the Navy."
"So are you — or supposed to be." McBride shook his head.
"Drummond's broken the contract I had with him. God, you were there! What more proof do you need of his collaboration with the Germans?"