"Those weren't Germans. They were your countrymen. Irish."
"And that's your English answer to everything, is it? It's only the bloody stupid Irish — let them get on with it. Is that your solution? Drummond's working for the Germans, damn you!"
Maureen interrupted them. "Michael, come with us. Whatever the truth of it, you can't do anything by yourself." McBride seemed abashed without being softened or dissuaded. He shook his head in a minute, determined movement.
"I'm sorry, lovey, it just won't do, you see. Drummond tried to kill me, he's tried to have all of us killed. He's not getting away with that."
"Stupid heroics—" she began.
"No. It's much older than heroics. Revenge."
"For God's sake, don't do it!" she wailed. "I'm going to have our baby. Do you think I want him to have to listen to tales about the father he never saw?" She clutched his hands convulsively, tears streaming down her face. McBride looked as if he had been cheated, that she had played to other rules than his and beaten him at the game. "For God's sake think of the child if you won't think of me."
McBride's face was twisted and shaped by conflicting emotions. Gilliatt found their intensity almost unbearable. Then McBride climbed swiftly out of the car.
"I'll be back," he said.
"Damn you, Michael McBride, damn you!"
"Maybe — maybe," he said, then nodded to Gilliatt and strode off into the night, dropping swiftly out of sight down the hillside towards the lights of the hamlet.
"Damn you — damn you!" Maureen kept calling out after him while Gilliatt got out, and went round the Morris to the driver's seat. He slammed the door angrily, started the engine — over-revving, the tyres squealing out of the dirt at the side of the road — then headed north-east again, on the road towards Ballinadee and the main road to Cork. He was angry, his nerves were being shredded by the woman's ceaseless cries, magnified in the tin box of the car, and he wanted nothing more to do with Michael McBride and his wife and the Irish. His simple duty was to reach the authorities in Cork — preferably the British authorities — and tell them what, as far as he knew, was happening. It did not matter what then happened, it did not matter what was or was not being done — this was his job. If only the bloody woman behind him would stop wailing and screaming—
He only realized that he had taken a wrong turning and was on the Kinsale road heading back towards the coast when he saw the signpost in the headlights and, almost at the same moment beyond the crossroads, a barrier of barrels across the road and grey uniforms passing to and fro just at the fringe of the glare of the lights. Then one soldier stepped into the spill of light, machine-pistol at the ready, and began walking towards the car.
"Shut up, damn you!" Gilliatt barked, and the woman subsided sobbing into the back seat. Gilliatt cursed himself, watching the German approaching the car, joined by a second soldier. Both of them were fifteen yards from the Morris. Gilliatt shoved the gear-stick into reverse, revved, and backed away down the road, switching off his headlights as he did so. He could hear the shouting over the noise of the engine, and he swung the car round on the handbrake, accelerating recklessly with the back wheels in soft dirt at the side of the road; the car suddenly jerked free and careered away down the road. "Keep your head down!" he yelled with a dangerous elation bubbling up in his chest and a lightness, an invincibility enveloping his thoughts.
He ducked, too, and the bullets thudded into the boot of the Morris, shattered the small back window over Maureen's cowering form, and pattered on the road behind them. He kept his foot pressed down, trying to remember the road and how long the straight stretch lasted, bounced the car suddenly off the bank as the road began to descend, and switched on the headlights. A bend in the road leapt at him, and he swung the wheel furiously, braking with a squeal of rubber, and went through it, the car immediately slowing on an uphill stretch.
"You all right?" he said hoarsely.
"Yes — yes, I think so," he heard in a child-like voice from the back seat.
"Thank God for something!" Cork appeared a distant, infinitely desirable oasis in the chaos of the night. No more wrong turns, he thought. Straight through, no stops.
McBride squeezed through a gap in the hedge, and jumped the ditch. His trouser-legs were sodden with rain from the grass, and his boots were beginning to let in water. Kilbrittain was behind him now, and he could smell the sea on the light breeze that was moving the clouds sluggishly, opening up gaps of starlit darkness. He had avoided two German patrols, each time the effect of night and secrecy and silence leaking more dangerous adrenalin into his system. The old Lee Enfield was cold and potent in his hand and the Mauser a hard-edged shape in his waistband. He was less than half a mile from Crosswinds Farm, approaching it from the north. That last hedge might even have marked the boundary of Drummond's land.
McBride felt unfettered. The cramping, desolating noises of his wife's parting curse, the wild, hampering words she had yelled at him to stop him, had diminished. He had digested them, incorporated them within his single-minded purpose. Nothing was going to prevent him from killing Drummond. Revenge whirled up in him like dry bracken set alight, consuming reason and perspective and the future. His life was a succession of immediate, vivid moments — the setting of one foot in front of another, the recognition of slopes and lines of the land, the smell of the sea, the rifle in his hand, the wetness of his trouser-legs, the images of Drummond sitting in kitchen or study or sitting-room — through which he moved like a shadow, impervious to larger, vaguer experiences or imaginings. He had even lost the capacity to judge what he was doing, to see it in any moral light. His one certainty was that Drummond had tried to kill him, which had spilled a corrosive desire for vengeance over brain-cells and bodily organs that made him hunger for destruction.
Drummond would expect him. Drummond was Irish enough to understand what he had started and how McBride would expect to end it. The farm would be under heavy guard. McBride bared his teeth, not with the effort of the slope but with anticipation. When he topped the gentle rise, the framework of hedges was suddenly clear in quick moonlight and in the centre of the maze-like pattern there was the white low farmhouse. And the patrols.
He slid into a hollow, ignoring the wet grass soaking his buttocks and back, and watched. Before the moon disappeared behind more distressed cloud, he counted six guards, all Germans in uniform — in three pairs, moving like figures from some ornamental clock, round and round the garden and the vegetable plot and the drive that surrounded the house. They were contained, it seemed, by the pattern of hedges and small trees, as if they required the protection of the lights from the farmhouse and the proximity of its walls. They were small, ineffectual creatures, hardly any protection at all for Drummond. He slipped out of the hollow after checking the progress of the cloud across the moon's face, and made his way carefully down the slope to the shelter of another hedge. The nearest patrol was a hundred yards away, moving across his line of sight, skirting the fruit trees at the bottom of the garden. He clicked the bolt of the Lee Enfield as gently, lovingly as he could. It made the smallest noise, but he held his breath. He could hear, on the breeze, the quiet conversation of the patrol, even the sound of machine-pistol against bayonet once or twice, one of them clearing his throat, spitting.
He watched them, surrendering to the omnipotence of the moment, looking up at the moon, tensing as the edge of its disc slid from behind the cloud, then lining up the rifle-sight. The backsight needed some fine adjustment, and he attended to it like a conscientious workman. Then he aligned the foresight with the two shapes a hundred yards away. He selected one of them who moved for a moment slightly away from his companion, inhaled, then squeezed the trigger with the gentlest touch. He heard the noise of the rifle in his ear, saw the German topple slowly over, and then the components of the scene moved feverishly as he snicked back the bolt, resighted and fired again as a light in the farmhouse went out and the second German, startled but already moving, was flung forward onto his face. Two huddled, moonlit shadows like sleeping animals beneath the fruit trees.