Inside everything was fine. Meg had phoned a friendly neighbour, who kept a spare key, and got her to switch on the underfloor heating, so that the place was warm and welcoming. Tim had been there before, so of course he considered himself an expert on the house’s layout, and showed us which rooms were which.
It was a good job we had him with us, otherwise we’d have spent all day in bed, as well as all night.
With a fire going in the front room the house became a cocoon, cradling our little family, and there wasn’t much temptation to go outside. All the same, that first afternoon we walked along the shingly beach. The tide was coming in, and the sea was flat and calm, with only the tiniest waves turning over as they hit the shore. I showed Tim how to choose flat stones and give them an underarm flick so that they did ducks-and-drakes across the water. At that stage he wasn’t much good at throwing, and he spun himself round in circles with his efforts to get more leverage on to his arm. I noticed that there was plenty of driftwood on the high-tide line, so on the way back I collected an armful for the store in the shed behind the cottage.
All the time I was thinking of the white farmhouse at Ballyconvil and the dark forest on the hill. How was I going to account for my need to be absent for hours at a time? Why should I want to disappear in the middle of what was, in effect, our honeymoon?
I’d already tried to explain to Tracy that guys in the Regiment habitually told their wives and girlfriends as little as possible about what they were doing. It was plain good sense and good security, I said, to restrict knowledge to a minimum. With her knack of going straight to the point, she’d come back with, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound great. If you’re not coming clean about your work, how am I to know what else you may be covering up?’ She was right, of course. Secrecy breeds distrust — and now, with our relationship hardly started, I was going to have to start deceiving her.
I said nothing that day. While she was getting supper on the go I walked down to the pub at the other end of the village. Den had told me that out there, in tourist country, it was safe enough, especially as he and Meg were well known locally. The place was called the Spanish Galleon, and the walls were covered with mementoes of the Armada, mostly pictures of fantastic gold jewellery recovered from the Girona, which was wrecked off the coast in the autumn of 1588. I bought myself a pint of stout and explained to the landlord that we’d come to the cottage for the week. I couldn’t tell whether or not he knew about Kath, so we just had a general chat, mostly about fishing. A fellow about my age, who was already at the bar, said he had a friend who owned a fishing boat at some place nearby. After a while I bought a bottle of plonk for supper and set off home.
In the morning, before it was fully light, Tim came bursting into our room in his pyjamas. ‘Why are the beds pushed together?’ he demanded.
‘So we can have a cuddle,’ said Tracy.
‘Gran and Grandad don’t have them like that.’
‘Well — come on in and have a cuddle anyway.’
Next thing, he was in between us, wriggling like a ferret.
‘Why are you bare?’ he asked accusingly.
Jesus! I couldn’t help laughing.
‘This duvet’s nice and warm,’ said Tracy. ‘We don’t need pyjamas.’
So it went on. She was brilliant with him, especially when he started on about God.
‘Who’s God?’ he wanted to know.
‘He’s like a big father, up there in heaven.’
‘Why can’t I see him, then?’
‘He’s like the wind. You can feel the wind, but you can’t see it. You know? God’s like that.’
‘What does he feel like?’
‘Sort of warm. Like if someone’s kind to you. He feels good.’
‘Is Mummy in heaven?’
‘Yes. I’m sure she is.’
‘Why did she have to go there?’
‘I expect God wanted her.’
‘What did he want her for?’
‘Because she was a very good person.’
‘Can I go and see her?’
‘Not really…’
The inquisition was relentless, but Tracy was equal to it; she never lost her cool or cut Tim short with an unsympathetic answer. By the end of breakfast there was a terrific bond between the two of them. Altogether we were a happy family that morning.
It was all the harder, then, to break the news that I had to go off in the afternoon to do a job of work. Tracy looked really pissed off. ‘But I thought you were on leave,’ she said. ‘That’s the whole point of my being here.’
‘I know,’ I prevaricated, ‘But there were a couple of things outstanding. I promised the lads I’d get them done.’
She knew I was being deliberately evasive, but because of the earlier conversations we’d had about security she didn’t press for more information. When I said I’d be back after dark, she just said, ‘Take care. You’ll find supper waiting.’
It was less than an hour’s drive to Ballyconvil. But I didn’t go to the village at all. Navigating with the help of the big-scale map, I took a swing out right-handed, to the west, and came up to the forestry plantation from the opposite direction. Once again the entrance was deserted. A quick check confirmed that nobody had moved it since my last visit. Pulling on a pair of thin silk gloves, I brought out my little collection of bent levers and spikes, and in a minute I had the padlock open. The barrier-pole swung up easily, with the lump of concrete on its end acting as a counterweight. With the car through, I closed the gates and put the padlock back in position.
Inside the plantation, the road climbed to the left in a wide curve. The spruces on either side were quite large — maybe thirty years old and fifty feet tall — and they’d never been thinned, so that they were growing in a solid mass. Nobody could look into the forest from a distance and see a car moving. Half a kilometre up, I reached a fork and took the left, along the contour, in the direction I wanted. Round a corner the road suddenly came to an end in an apron of gravel, a spread big enough for timber-trucks to turn. Uphill, above it, was a small patch of bare ground under the first rows of trees; I got out and checked that it was firm, then backed the car as far under the branches as it would go, out of sight of any passing helicopter. I’d thought about cutting branches and covering it completely, but decided that, if I did, it would be too obvious that somebody had tried to hide it. Instead, I relied on an element of bluff. On the front passenger seat I left a book that I’d sent away for: Field Guide to the Birds of the British Isles. (I’d taken some stick when that arrived in the warehouse and was opened by Security in case it was a bomb — ‘Fucking hell, there’s only one kind of bird that Geordie’s interested in,’ and so on. Very witty.) Now, I hoped, it might come into its own.
I locked up, settled my day-sack on my back and set off along a fire-break that continued the line of the hard road. It felt odd to be moving operationally in the open without a G3 or a covert radio. It felt even odder to be on my own, without at least one partner in immediate contact. All I had in the way of equipment, apart from the Luger and the kite-sight, was my knife, wirecutters, secateurs, a torch and a pair of binoculars. While planning the sortie I’d thought hard about borrowing one of the troop cameras, so that I could take pictures of Farrell, develop them myself, and make certain I had the right man. After a while, though, I’d abandoned the idea. One problem was that I couldn’t take a camera away for a whole week without its absence being noticed — and in any case, I knew well enough what Farrell looked like. What with Pink Mike’s photos and our live sighting at the transit hide, there was no chance I could mistake him.