records repository and nothing more. A creeping, invidious sense of danger gradually assailed McBride as he sat in the man's office, the electric fire which warmed it seeming not to radiate in his direction. He felt alone, cut off by thick, almost soundproof glass from the other man.
'I see — they do it often, then?' A straw. The navy man, usually insensitive to any but his own responses, was puzzled by the thick, clogged voice that issued from McBride. McBride looked pale, too—
'You all right, Professor?'
McBride nodded. 'Yes, yes I'm OK. Just — infuriating, them taking all the stuff away just when I was working on it.' He stood up. 'Well, I guess you can't do anything, neither can I. I'll keep on looking—'
'If you could tell us what you want—'
McBride shook his head. 'I'll know it when I see it. Thanks.'
When he was back in the cold staff room that was now a reading room, he could no longer control the shake that had developed like a palsy in his hands and spread through his frame. He felt very cold, and very, very alone. He clasped his hands together, to still them, but his body went on shivering beneath his topcoat. He sat down, cold perspiration down his back when he felt his shirt pressed against him by the chair, and cold patches under his arms. He rubbed his face with his hands.
Everything was gone. Someone wanted to stop him, right there. Someone with official contacts, official powers. That was it. There was something he shouldn't find. The past had to stay underground, nice and buried like radioactivity. Who was going to get burned if he dug it up — apart from himself?
For a long time he sat there unmoving, his body gradually growing warmer, the shaking subsiding. And, as with a storm that has passed, there was damage and the topography of his mind and body was not quite the same, but the violence of the storm itself could no longer impinge so forcibly. The weak sun of his curiosity came out from the clouds. He wanted to know what there was to know. He wanted to know what might be left here in Hackney, overlooked in the rush to remove the evidence.
He didn't know where the bodies were buried, but he knew they hadn't died by accident. The epithet amused, calmed him. The sense of menace began to evaporate like floodwater.
Walsingham indicated McBride's notebooks and papers with his hand. Exton, his senior aide in the Executive Branch of MI5, adopted a more attentive look and sat slightly straighter in his chair in Walsingham's office.
'He was close, Exton, very close.' Exton nodded, as if silence was all that was required. 'These German papers and interviews on the one side, then our own records. He had most of it—' Exton tried to look interested, but the old man had not put him fully in the picture, just issued orders to Clarke the previous night and had the stuff delivered direct to him. Exton, the perfect functionary, was not insulted or offended by the lack of a briefing or Walsingham's failure to consult him before they lifted this American's notebooks and raided the dust-heap at Hackney, but neither could he take the matter seriously. Which, he supposed, was what came of being only ten when the war ended. 1940 was the year he was five, and not significant for much other than that fact.
'Sir,' he murmured.
Walsingham always treated Exton, whom he disliked, with excessive formality. Noting the stiffly returned
'Exton, I want this German historian, Goessler, checked out. And all the other names in his notebooks. And I want Hackney gone over with a fine-tooth comb after he's got tired of mooching around there.
Exton nodded, and stood up. 'I'll get straight on with it.'
'Take this stuff with you— have it all broken down and properly sifted. Then, start daily reports on McBride, direct to me.'
When Exton had gone, Walsingham kept repeating to himself a single phrase, much as if he might have been invoking some god or protective spirit.
The fishing smack owned by Jean Perros and his sons put out from Ste Anne-du-Portzic in a sudden and unexpected snowstorm, and on an incoming tide. McBride and Gilliatt, dressed in blue jerseys and oilskins, assiduously checked the nets and gear with Perros's two sons, Jean-Marie and Claude. The wind-driven sleet half- obscured the shoreline and the straggling suburb that joined Brest to the fishing village. To the east, they could not see — yet — the long, low, grey line that marked the harbour wall of Lanilon where the Germans had constructed their submarine pens.
The engine of the smack was running rough, doctored by the engineer, a cousin of Perros, coughing and chugging with a worrying irregularity had the crew not expected it. McBride's hands became stiff and frozen as he fumblingly worked at checking the heavy, tangled nets, and he concentrated on what he had to do when they reached Lanilon. Occasionally, he looked up as the grey shape of a warship or submarine slid past them in the murk. Perros's boat was unlikely to be challenged, at least not until they neared the breakwater. He welcomed the weather. Gilliatt, seemingly absorbed in his task, appeared oblivious of weather or danger.
The engine cut out, dying throatily like an asthmatic old man. The boat suddenly wallowed in the tide. McBride looked beyond the bow, seeing the grey harbour wall loom in the sleet, then disappear, then re-emerge. They had rounded the Pointe de Portzic, and were drifting towards the western end of the huge harbour. At the western end were the U-boat pens.
The smack drifted under the shadow of the wall, which stretched over them like a great dam. The tide chopped whitely against its base. The minutes limped by. Perros, in the wheelhouse, used the rudder as best he could against the tide and wind, turning the boat portside-on to the harbour wall. The swell caused the boat to lurch repeatedly. Through the squalling snow, McBride could see no other vessels, and no guards on top of the breakwater. The nearest steps down to the water were also obscured.
He touched Gilliatt on the arm, startling him out of a fixed attention to the nets, and nodded. Then he went forward to the wheelhouse. Perros, hands whitened with effort on the wheel, glanced at him.
'The steps are a hundred metres or more ahead of us,' he said. Beside him, a nephew scanned the water ceaselessly for other vessels, swinging his glasses in an arc across the wheelhouse screen.
'Can you make it?'
'Maybe. This tide is doing its best to stop me!' He grinned. He'd taken Lampau's death without emotion earlier that morning, almost without comment. He evidently did not blame the two Englishmen, rather seemed to admire them, and to be flattered that they required and needed his assistance. 'If we have to start the engine, so be it. It can always cut out again!' McBride nodded, collected his own binoculars from the rear of the cramped, fuggy, fish-stenched wheelhouse — engine-oil smells seeping through the deck planking from the tiny engine-room below. 'Good luck,' Perros called after him as he went out again.
McBride looked up at the threatening wall, now only yards from the ship's deck. Ahead of them, he could see the steps. He heard the ringing of the wheelhouse telegraph as Perros called for the engine's power. A cough, stutter to life, and the smack pushed forward. The engine throbbed through the deck planking. McBride waited as the steps neared, aware that Gilliatt and the two sons were watching him intently. The engine died suddenly, and McBride wondered whether it had really broken down. Then the boat lurched with the tide against the harbour wall, planks straining, crying out, then the boat began to move away. He jumped, glasses banging against his chest. His hands grappled with the slimy seaweed of the bottom step, water splashed over the tops of his sea-boots, then a wave drenched him up to the waist as he began to slip, his grasp loosened.
He scrabbled for a hold, catching an iron mooring-ring set in the concrete of the lowest exposed step, pushing at the same time with his feet against a seaweed-slippery step beneath the water. Then he pulled himself up, resting only when he was above the reach of the tide.
He sat down. Gilliatt gave him a thumbs-up signal from the stern of the fishing-boat, and Perros's two sons were smiling. The smack had lurched away from the breakwater, wallowing helplessly. Then Claude Perros held up the mooring-rope at the stern, and McBride, suddenly frightened by the insecurity of his perch on the steps and chilled by the wind blowing against the soaking trousers beneath his oilskins, climbed to the top of the harbour wall where the wind heaved at him, trying to throw him back into the water. He waved his arms, and the rope snaked out towards him from the stern of the smack. He caught it, but his frozen fingers could not close on it before its
