'I love you,' he whispered, and she pressed her cheek closer to his chest. He stared at the furniture of the room as if appraising its value.
Rear Admiral Robert Evelyn Drummond, RN Retd, still lived at Crosswinds Farm, County Cork. It had taken only a couple of telephone calls, and a visit to a branch library in Bloomsbury for a Cork Area telephone directory, to locate him. The Admiralty were pleased to confirm his continued existence in good health, though they would not immediately release his address without some personal details.
McBride had determined not to telephone Drummond before he reached Cork, but instead simply to visit him as the son of Michael McBride — letting surprise and perhaps even pleasure spring the lock on the memory-box. He anticipated no difficulties with Drummond.
As he changed flights at Dublin Airport for the flight to Cork, he was unaware of being watched. When he left the Aer Lingus Viscount at Cork Airport and passed through Customs, he did not see Moynihan sitting at the cramped and tiny snack bar, reading a copy of the
Later, Moynihan drove down to Kilbrittain and booked into the one small hotel in the village. The next day, he expected McBride to call on Drummond and his daughter at Crosswinds Farm.
CHAPTER FIVE
Open Door
McBride squatted on his haunches, staring at the seaweed wrack, the splinters of wood, the old bottle, the shells where he had brushed his hand across the soft white sand above the reach of the tide in Rosscarbery Bay. He smiled, squeezed the wrack so that one of its dry pods burst with a flat cracking noise, and wished that Drummond's reported German agent had left an evident, unmistakable sign of his passage. McBride was working his way from Galley Head and Dundeady Island west around the bay. The stiff little wind rustled and whisked the sand, and carried the smell of exposed mud now that the tide was well out.
No, he didn't wish it. Perhaps just the slenderest clue, the momentary glimpse as if through a door-crack into the agent's mind — and then the slow, building pursuit. He breathed in deeply, engaged in something more fierce — more enmeshing — than his love-making with Maureen late in the night. Maureen had been tidied to one part of his mind again, her habitual and appointed residence, fuzzy and localized like a snapshot of some place in the past. Yet he loved her as he had loved no other woman, and would love no other. He never discussed with himself the
He had pondered, at first, whether the war had distracted him from his marriage; but, remembering the caged days in the studio-attic in Cork, the search for this cottage in Leap, the restlessness of the days in the bedroom he then used as a studio — he knew that perhaps the war had saved his relationship with Maureen. She had become only a necessary fraction of his life, placed in proportion; he thought that she, too, had accepted that he was somehow disabled from accepting the completeness of a life that centred on the domestic, on a relationship.
He walked slowly through the soft sand, head down, eyes casting about for something out of place. The smoothness of sand where the belly of a dragged float had passed, one half-erased footprint missed in the night—
McBride was a hunter. Something Drummond kept in a kennel until there was a man who needed hunting down. German agents had been landed in southern Ireland, along the Cork coast, since 1937 or '38, most of them taking the quick route north either to Dublin to cross on the ferry as native and neutral Irish to Liverpool; or into Ulster and from Belfast to England. In either case, the object was the same — spying on Britain.
Until perhaps three or four months ago, when McBride had found a dead body on the beach — drowned when his float capsized in a rough sea — carrying papers which gave his nationality as Irish, and which would not have fitted him to cross to mainland Britain, but rather would have suited a resident of the Republic.
Since then, rumours, traces — in one case a killing — of agents who were staying in the Cork and Kerry areas, possibly being taken off again by submarine the way they had come. Rumours of men with assumed English identities — painters, bird-watchers, travellers, students. Swallowed by the damp, musty County Cork earth, for all the hard evidence.
The sun was well up — the day bright, hard as steel against his face, the low hills behind the bay sharp in the dry, frosty air, the sea smooth beyond the exposed mud flat — by the time he reached the point where the road bordered the beach, which itself narrowed to a thin, grey strip. He had found nothing, and wondered whether he might temporarily abandon his search and check Ross Carbery itself, sprawled haphazardly on the far bank of the bay's narrow inlet at the mouth of a lazy river. An agent with the right papers might have gone into the village — they were walking up to the front door these days, after all—
He climbed the steps up to the sea wall and the road, his eyes alert as if he expected to see an unfamiliar ornithologist or cyclist. He walked up to the main road from Clonakilty, along which he had been driven by Drummond the previous evening. He felt almost light-hearted, in spite of his wasted morning, and he whistled to himself, hands thrust for warmth in the pockets of his donkey-jacket. He was happy in his work, and he was working again. Walsingham and his concern with Guernsey had receded in his imagination.
A pony-trap caught up with him just before he reached the bridge across the inlet to Ross Carbery. He turned, and his face darkened as he saw the driver was his father-in-law, Devlin, the principal grocer in the village. Devlin, who must have recognized his walk, his posture, still adopted no conciliatory face. He'd been delivering to the farms, perhaps, and was as reluctant about the encounter as McBride.
'Good-day, Da,' McBride said, squinting with the sunlight and perhaps with irony.
'Michael — good-day.' McBride observed Devlin's thick neck, the squat body which he could never decide was actual or merely the visual exaggeration prompted by his dislike of the man. In the end, Devlin's Republican politics; his short-changing, his bully's air were little alongside the man's voice, gestures, shape. 'How is Maureen?'
McBride climbed up beside the man, acting out their mutual parody of propinquity. Devlin clucked the pony into movement, shaking the reins on its back.
'Maureen's fine.'
'You've been away, then?' Devlin continued as the cart moved onto the narrow road bridge. A bull-nose Morris squeezed past it.
'My aunt in Dublin — sick again. You know how it is, Da, when they get old—' Neither of them believed, but both normally accepted, the fiction of his behaviour. Devlin certainly knew that McBride worked for the British, and despised him for it. McBride, for his part, had nothing but contempt for the narrow, bigoted, unrealizable aspirations of the IRA. Sometimes, he wondered when some of Devlin's more outspoken, and less cowardly, acquaintances would get around to an attempt on his life — as a traitor to something-or-other.
'Ah,' was all Devlin replied.
'Any strangers in Ross Carbery in the last three days?' McBride asked, studying the pony's rump intently.
Devlin was silent almost all the way across the bridge, then he said: 'I haven't heard.'
'The lads about as usual, then?'
'They are.'
'All of them?' Devlin steered the pony into an alleyway off the main street of Ross Carbery, to the yard behind his shop. He grunted as if it took all his physical strength to control the docile animal. He did not look at McBride, who suspected he was lying.
