Emerald Decision

pale winter sky without other cloud, for miles before he had reached the Surrey suburbs. Then it had taken him hours to make his way through Wimbledon, Wandsworth, Battersea, across the bridge and through Chelsea. Streets wet with fire-fightrng, coated like a new surface with broken glass, heaps of smouldering — or rescued — furniture piled on the pavements, little groups of stunned people, the occasional ambulance, and other small groups who knew what they had lost already and had abandoned hope, holes in the lines of terraced houses in so many streets — heaps of rubble over which firemen and ambulance men clambered for the sake of relatives who watched them dumbly.

They were walking now in Hungerford Lane, near Charing Cross Station, the gaunt skeleton of the railway bridge black against the sky, sombre. The station roof, too, appeared charred by recent fires rather than sooted by time and the steam engine.

'Commodore — would it be a reasonable supposition, then?' Walsingham asked at last, as if he had wearied of visual impressions, wanted now a renewed sense of purpose. He felt himself coming out of mild shock.

The Director of Minesweeping, to whom the damage of the previous night, and the prior weeks, had been a narrow burning perception of the enemy's vileness, looked at his young, small companion. Walsingham seemed troubled by doubts, but the commodore could not decide if that was a deferential pretence or merely the visible reminders of the air raid.

'I would say—' Someone passed them pushing a handcart into which were piled office chairs. The spiky, tumbled legs seemed to threaten, or defy. 'Yes — yes, Commander, it would be a very reasonable supposition.'

They turned down towards the Victoria Embankment, passing under the railway bridge. A train rattled over them, and out across the Thames. The noise silenced them, but the shadows under the bridge were cold, and the sound hammered down at them so that both men flinched as if deep, traumatic memories had surfaced. When the train had gone, both men smiled.

'Yes,' the commodore continued. 'The kind of stanchions and other new fittings you describe would certainly most likely be minesweeping equipment. It's probable that they would operate as a team of six — linked in twos, and rigged out to employ an A-sweep in a 'C' formation.' Walsingham appeared confused, irritated at his own shallow knowledge. The U-boats would be linked in twos, the first two in line, then the second two, then the third pair, in a 'C' formation. It would give them as near as possible a one hundred per cent clearance of the channel they were sweeping.' Walsingham nodded. 'I can't think why they'd be based at Guernsey. Naturally, we drop mines outside their harbours, and the submarine bases in Brittany and Normandy, but Guernsey isn't especially well-placed as a base for sweeping subs, and we don't make a fuss around the Channel Islands. What is going on?'

Walsingham was not prepared to lecture the DMS on security.

'I'd rather not say at present, sir,' he murmured deferentially. 'It's only a theory—'

'Those bloody U-boats aren't a theory, young man. I hope you're not going to play silly buggers with this information, keep it to yourself or something equally stupid?'

Walsingham knew it was bluff. He would not tell the commodore, because he had to conserve the element of shock and surprise for his own masters in Whitehall.

'Sorry, sir, but I will be seeing my own superiors in QIC later today — and they will decide what happens next.'

'Politely telling me to mind my own business,' the DMS snorted, looking studiously ahead at the approaching bulk of Waterloo Bridge. He laughed, an abrupt, loud noise like indigestion. 'Very well, but let me tell you this —'

He turned to Walsingham, stood with his hands on his hips like some more piratical ancestor.

'The Kriegsmarine doesn't have U-boats to spare, Commander. If there are as many as you suggest engaged in minesweeping duties, then they are sweeping to some very exact, and vitally important, purpose.'

'Exactly what I was afraid of,' was all Walsingham would say in reply.

October 198-

McBride had wanted to stop for a while in Salisbury — the white cathedral spire across the fields summoned him from photographs and prints — but he felt energized by a restlessness of mind that prompted him to find the A338 on the other side of the city, and head towards the M4 and London. The spire flicked in and out of the driving-mirror for a time, so that he hardly attended to the news item on the car radio.

'… a police spokesman said that two men were being held in custody at Braintree police station, where it was expected that charges under the Prevention of Terrorism Act would be brought against them later today. Our reporter believes that the two men are among those wanted in connection with the London restaurant bombing…'

He switched channels as the news items of a country he hardly knew continued. Vivaldi sprang from the two speakers behind him, and he tapped at the wheel in a comfortable state of half-attention while he considered what Mrs Forbes — Gilliatt's daughter — had told him.

His own father had been in Ireland, and with Gilliatt, late in 1940, and in connection with a German invasion of Ireland. Emerald Necklace — his father had been part of it.

He had encountered few moments in his even, academic life which possessed such naked shock. Few things had impinged upon him so directly, the halting, recollected sentences of the woman in the chair opposite him beating on him rather than seeping into his consciousness. He was in the presence of events— an alternative present— rather than hearing of some dim time beyond his own experience. A curious sense of predestination assailed him, almost as misty and illogical and assertive as a religious experience. He could not cope with the information, almost ignored the name and whereabouts of the man his father had operated under — Drummond, he'd fixed it like a photographic image, the chemicals of repetition coming to his assistance — in his desire to get away from the house in Sturminster Newton and come to terms with what he had heard.

'What happened to your father I have no idea— my father, would not say, though perhaps he didn't know. But they were together in Ireland, working for Drummond, who was some kind of secret agent—'

She had smiled with apology. She believed her father, naturally, but had no sense of what he might have been doing. Certainly not figuring in some drama she might have read in a fiction.

His own reaction — now in the warm car, the Vivaldi moving crisply through its slow movement — was of a similar unreality. He was ignorant of his father's war record, but the secrecy which may have surrounded it too easily toppled into melodrama. Except that his father was connected with Smaragdenhalskette. His father was a proof of its existence.

It was growing dark by the time he reached the motorway and turned onto it. He began to make good time, looking ahead to a flight to Ireland, to meet Drummond — if he still lived south-west of Cork. It would be a simple matter to trace him, and perhaps as simple to interview him. An old man now, he would open his memory like a box of keepsakes. Somewhere under the years was his father.

McBride had no direct interest in his father — he had, during the drive, sublimated him in the publicity that would attend his new book, the son-of-the-father angle which was pure, dramatic accident. He was not on a quest for his father. Michael McBride, about whom he possessed a certain curiosity, was only one light among the decorations giving off a Christmas-tree gleam as he approached the warm room in which Emerald Necklace waited like a reward.

November 1940

The minesweeper lowered him into the water, in the ship's motorboat, half a mile offshore — though officially the ship should not have entered the three-mile limit of neutral Ireland's territorial waters — and in the company of the young sub-lieutenant and a stoker in charge of the boat's noisy engine he chugged towards the unlit shore where Drummond would be waiting to pick him up. There was no element of danger, and there would be no protest from the Dublin government. Naval vessels had collected fruit, eggs, even alcohol from the coast of southern Ireland — he was just another item of barter.

He was conscious of the windless night, the almost calm sea, the fresh chill and the smell of land. He was aware of Guernsey and his frantic effort to escape, but now only as an occasion for smiling.

They slipped into low Carrigada Bay, the lights of two cottages a sighting and a welcome; the faintest glow of the village of Reagrove beyond. The lack of black-out so different from England, and — most recently — the dark, wet docks of Milford Haven as the minesweeping flotilla had forlornly set sail. Always that sense of emptiness behind the outlines of cranes, an empty country or city; and always the sense of lights, of scattered quiet lives