Emerald Decision

being lived when he arrived home.

The stoker cut the engine to idling, and the boat immediately began to wallow. McBride slipped over the side, and the chill of the water struck through his sea-boots, the slopping incoming tide reaching almost to his knees.

'Good luck, sir,' the young sub-lieutenant called, and McBride waved one hand as he waded through the shallows to the beach and the motorboat's engine picked up again as it turned back to the minesweeper.

The incoming tide would remove his footprints — though most of the locals would have heard the engine of the boat and guessed at its passenger — and he lengthened his stride.

He grinned in the darkness as he moved onto the soft sand above the high-tide mark, and saw Drummond waiting, calmly smoking a cigarette. He was leaning on the side of the shed where a fisherman kept his nets, his tall, lean frame relaxed, unconcerned.

'Michael?' he asked quietly.

'No,' McBride replied in German. 'Admiral Donitz — I'm here to look around.' Drummond laughed softly in the darkness, then shook hands with McBride.

'Welcome back.'

When McBride had lit the offered cigarette, Drummond headed the Morris back up the track towards the coast road. McBride settled against the leather seat, contentedly drawing in and exhaling the smoke.

'You were of use to our common masters, I take it?' Drummond asked as he turned onto the road. Lights dotted the fields around them, small as hand-held lamps, each one an uncurtained window or an open door. McBride noted them like a Victorian parent counting heads and reassuring himself his family was entirely present. Not one of those lights would not be there the following night, or the night after that—

Unless Walsingham was right. As he thought that, he was aware, also, of Drummond's half-amused question, even of the nettled irritation far back in the tones which reminded him of Drummond's dislike of loaning one of his agents to London.

'I suppose so. I just went, looked, reported, and was told to keep quiet about it. I suppose it was of some use to someone.' Walsingham had told him that Drummond might be informed at a later date. For the present, he was to be told nothing. He did not even know where McBride had been.

'It's secret, of course?' Drummond asked lightly as he pulled up at the crossroads in the village of Nohaval. As expected, there were no other cars, in any direction. McBride wound down the window, and felt the cold air rush into the car.

'Apparently, Robert.'

'I've got another job for you, anyway. Your real work,' Drummond said as the car pulled away on the Kinsale road.

'Tomorrow, I hope—'

'Tomorrow will do. Reports of a German agent landing two nights ago by boat from a submarine— reliable reports, I hasten to add—' Drummond chuckled. McBride studied his profile. A stereotyped British naval officer, that head above the white roll-neck sweater and the dark jacket that could have been mistaken for a uniform.

'No trace since?'

'Nothing.'

'Where was this?'

'Rosscarbery Bay — the other side of Galley Head. A couple of miles from your place.'

'Maureen probably gave him dinner.'

Drummond laughed. 'You'll have a look around, and let me know?' McBride nodded. 'Good. That's the third in two weeks. I wonder what's going on?'

'They could be deserting from their submarines,' McBride offered before he settled back into the seat again, lighting another cigarette from Drummond's packet on the dashboard.

The tiny hamlet of Leap lay almost in darkness astride the main Clonakilty-Skibbereen road as Drummond's car pulled up outside McBride's cottage. There was light coming through flower-patterned curtains in the kitchen. Drummond's own house was a spacious, prosperous-looking white farmhouse near Kilbrittain, twenty-five miles back the way they had come, inland of the Old Head of Kinsale. Drummond had officially retired from the Royal Navy in 1934, in company with a great many officers who, at that time, believed the Royal Navy would never rearm and thus rob them of careers, and moved to Ireland, selling a small family estate in order to buy a farm in County Cork. Here, he had continued to work for Admiralty Intelligence, setting up a network of coast-watchers and intelligence gatherers along the south coast of that weak defensive flank of Britain, neutral Eire. McBride had been one of his first, and most successful, recruits.

McBride got out of the car, slammed the door for the pleasure of making a noise that would betray his presence, and walked round to Drummond's window.

'I'll get on with that in the morning,' he said, and Drummond nodded.

'Good. Let me have a report in a couple of days. And take care of your health, Michael.'

'I will. Thanks for the lift.'

'One day you must tell me all about your trip,' Drummond said lightly, then switched on the engine, and turned the car round towards Clonakilty again. He tooted noisily as he drove off, a white hand waving from the still-open Window. McBride threw away the rest of his cigarette, and approached the door of the cottage.

Maureen would never come out to greet him if Drummond were there — McBride could never decide whether it was because she was Irish rather than Anglo-Irish like himself or whether it was because she simply resented the man who took him away, placed him in danger. But then, he reminded himself, Maureen didn't like what he did for all sorts of reasons, not least of which was her father's lifelong acquaintance with the IRA. He smiled as he pushed open the door, latched it again behind him — but the smile was saddened, as if he were suddenly burdened with an unpleasant freight of unwished-for complications amid his homecoming.

Maureen emerged from the kitchen into the lamp-lit gloom and warmth of the living-room, her arms white with flour, apron on. She wore her domesticity like an irritant or a disguise; a posture of which he was well aware. She seemed to desire to be nothing much to come home to, have no special place in his mind or affections. The little woman, he told himself as he stood watching her and she did not move from the kitchen door. Since the war, since he had begun working for Drummond and the British — not so much a reproof or disapproval; rather a slight distancing, more in case he got killed than because she objected. She was more comfortable inside an unpretentious outer covering — nothing overwhelming would happen to a woman like her.

'Hello — you're not cooking at this time of night, surely?' he said, taking off his coat and throwing it onto a chair. He moved to the fire, rubbing his hands, then turning his back to it as if chilled, waiting for her to move to him.

'I expect you can eat it,' she offered grudgingly. He watched her inspect his body, seeing through the clothes, for new marks, new contours violence might have drawn. He remembered her horror at a knife-wound across his ribs that had bled badly — and she hadn't asked what he'd done to the German, ever. It had happened on a beach east of Cork, early in 1940. Even now, she avoided looking at him as he washed or shaved stripped to the waist, and when they made love her hands hovered near, but never caressed, the scar.

'I can. What is it?'

'A pie.' She wiped her arms with a towel, removing the worst of the flour as if she were removing a disguise. Then she came to him in front of the fire, and put her face up to be kissed. He looked down at the small features, the auburn hair which framed them, the parchment skin that looked somehow raw-boned and stretched, typically Irish. He bent his head, kissed her, squeezing his arms so that he pressed her body against him. He felt suddenly guilty as he stroked her hair as she leaned against his chest. He had been a painter when they met, just finished art school and with a few small commissions from rich dog-owners and one or two advertising companies trying to encourage cheap new talent. There was a studio upstairs, next to the bedroom, and an exhibition of unsold landscapes and portraits of Maureen in the loft. But he had found himself a natural spy, an adventurer, almost in the first days after recruitment by Drummond — one slight pang as if he were betraying his past, or his wife, and then he had leapt into the secret life. Each time he measured her smallness in his arms, he felt guilty again for what he had discovered of himself. He had lain in the room of his own life like an unused weapon until another war required his services. A natural.