'We'll explain — don't make difficulties, Peter. Don't give in to the sense of doom.'
'You knew—?'
'Ah, it happens every time. One of the things you have to put to the back of your mind, every time. Come on.'
The van was waiting at the back of the cottage, where Foret had parked it. One of its doors was open. McBride touched the door and then inspected his hand, sniffing the dark blood. He nodded, then began to examine the bodywork of the van, near the engine. He found no bullet-holes, and lifted the bonnet.
'Get in,' he said to Gilliatt, and the engine fired as he wired the ignition. Then the torches and the single searchlight came on, flooding the yard, picking out the van and McBride in a cold clear light.
All McBride could think of was that he hadn't heard the truck arrive, that its noise had been shielded from them by the cottage and by the shooting. He hadn't heard the truck with the mobile searchlight—
Then the voice, speaking in German through the megaphone.
McBride stared into the box-file labelled MILFORD HAVEN, and his hands hovered over the mass of material it contained. Yesterday had brought nothing of any significance, and he was almost superstitious now about beginning again. If he touched it in the same way, in a different way—
The papers were cards. He needed to be dealt another hand. He discarded immediately the material he had checked the day before, lifting it out in the solid wedge he had held together with an elastic band, putting it aside. Outside, rain ran down the window of the reading room, and he felt cold. The small electric fire did not work.
He flicked through the uppermost scraps of paper, discarding everything dated later than January 1941. The mound of rejected paper and notebooks and official forms and dockets grew on his left, while the scratched and doodled deal table remained bare near his right hand.
By lunchtime, he was in a fury of irritation and the first of the box-files had been re-filled and dumped on the floor by his briefcase. The second one, with an identical gummed label, was open, but he had no heart to begin it on an empty stomach and in his present defeatist mood. He had lost sight of the pattern of his researches again, and wondered whether he might not have been sidetracked once more. What could this have to do with
He had no evidence of that — had he been confused by the appearance of Gilliatt's name, by his father's shadowy proximity to events? He wasn't sure any longer.
The seedy pub he found was unprepossessing, but he didn't want to walk any more in the rain and opened the door to the Saloon Bar. One or two faces looked up at him, a blowsy laugh faded as he was inspected by the landlady, and he saw in one corner, by the fireplace where a tiny fire clung to life, the male clerk from the records repository. Wispy greying hair damply wiped over a bald head, dentures making much of a cheese roll. A half-pint of beer in front of him on the table. He seemed to plead silently to be joined by McBride. And McBride was aware of the style and cost of his raincoat and slacks, and the red sweater he was wearing — and the wallet he took from his back pocket. He might have stepped back into an earlier time through the door of the bar.
'Beer,' he said. 'And the same for my friend—' He indicated the clerk — Mr Hoskins, was it? He'd been introduced. The landlady nodded, pulled at the lever on the bar. The beer swished into a glass with a chip in it.
'Haven't had many of your lot down this way since the war,' the landlady observed. 'Lot of 'em here then, eh, Bert?' She addressed the last remark to a shrivelled man sitting at the far end of the cramped bar, reading
'A pie, maybe.' Even the woman looked dubious. Bert snorted in his beer.
'Potato chips — sorry, crisps?' The landlady nodded, visibly brightening. 'Two bags.'
He carried the beer over to Hoskins' table, who finished his own half-pint quickly and sipped at the new glass after raising it to McBride's health.
'She makes my cheese roll for me,' he observed. 'Special order. I have to bring my own fruit.' He brought an orange from a coat pocket, and proceeded to peel it. The imagined mingled flavours of beer and orange upset McBride's palate as he opened the bag of crisps. He smiled tentatively at Hoskins, his thoughts reaching back to the second MILFORD HAVEN/DMS box-file and the hours he would have to spend sifting through its disorganized, patchwork image of minesweeping operations. Even records of disciplinary action taken against drunken sailors—
He tossed his head. Hoskins looked at him questioningly.
'Professor? Something the matter?' He sucked on a segment of the orange. The weak fire was still too warm for McBride, and he slipped his arms out of his raincoat. Hoskins studied the coat with unmasked envy.
'No. Just routine, is all. Dull, mm?'
'Fascinating, some of that material, Professor. What is it you're looking for, by the way?' His face was ingenuous, grateful for conversation.
'Oh, this and that.'
'Minesweeping, eh?'
'That and other things.'
'November 1940, I gather, from some of the files you've requested?'
'Yes—' McBride hid his hesitancy behind his glass, sipping at the cold thin beer.
'Ah — merchant navy myself, during the war, that is.'
'I see.'
'Atlantic convoys.'
'You've worked here a long time, Mr Hoskins?'
'Just over a year, Professor. Used to work at the Admiralty itself, but I'm just about to retire. Easy job. I was only a boy when I did my first convoy, in 1940.' He smiled mysteriously. 'We had shoreleave in New York before we set out—' He was being deliberately mysterious. 'Three ships and a cruiser escort. Special fast run, going by the southern route round Ireland—'
McBride hardly heard him.
'Sure,' he said. Hoskins seemed about to repeat himself, then took a pocket-watch from his waistcoat and consulted it. 'Must get back, late already. See you later, Professor.'
Hoskins went out swiftly, pressing his trilby firmly down on his head, putting up his umbrella almost before he was through the door.
McBride sat until he had finished both packets of crisps and his beer, and only as he got up to leave did Hoskins' last words register. And they puzzled him. But he couldn't remember the date that Hoskins had supplied, and he rejected the coincidence. The file loomed more distinctly in his imagination, and he tried to work up some enthusiasm for his task as he walked back to the repository, its parking area still marked out as a netball court.
McBride slammed down the bonnet of the van, and moved to the door. Gilliatt was in the passenger seat, immobile and blinded by the light. McBride slipped the.38 № 2 revolver from beneath his jacket then turned on his heel, arm out straight like a duellist, and fired twice. Glass shattered, tinkled in the sudden darkness over by the silhouette of the truck.
McBride clambered into the driving seat, revved the engine wildly, and let off the handbrake. The Citroen heaved off the mark, careering as McBride swung the wheel.
'Get down, get down!' he yelled at Gilliatt, immobile as a stunned animal in the seat next to him.
An instant later, the windscreen shattered and emptied its fragments over the shoulder and back of Gilliatt's jacket as he crouched, head covered by his arms, below the dashboard. McBride swung the wheel again, hearing the thud and tear of heavy bullets along the offside flank of the van. He was in darkness, but he knew the direction of the barn and the narrow passage between it and the cottage.
A grey shape loomed, bounced off the offside wheel arch, and McBride spun the wheel again, feeling the rear wheels bite on some lump beneath them, then rush free, skidding hideously.
'What's happening?' Gilliatt yelled.
