Emerald Decision

'They couldn't have done the job, could they? We got sunk!' Hoskins said with sudden bitterness.

'Tell me—'

Hoskins glanced theatrically round the room. 'Not here.' He took a card from his pocket, on which an insurance salesman's name and address had been crossed out, and Hoskins' own address written neatly on the reverse of the card. 'Come and see me this evening. I'll tell you everything I know.'

'But—'

'Later.' And Hoskins went out, closing the door behind him. McBride got to his feet, pacing the room, staring at the two box-files with renewed excitement. A special convoy — couldn't have done the job properly— What the hell did it mean?

He crossed to the table, wanting to close the ledger with a final loud noise and get on with sifting the new box-files, the word convoy lurid with possibilities in his imagination, when he read the last entry of the page he had reached.

Two minelayers arrived in Milford. November twenty-eighth. He flicked over the page, mistaking minelayer for minesweeper for a moment, then correcting himself even as he read that the minelayers had sailed the following day, and found their return as his finger slid down the ledger entries—

Minelayers.

An intuition of such force as to weaken him, make him sit down to rest suddenly untrustworthy limbs, assailed him. He had seen something, somewhere—

Why was it in a different handwriting in the ledger? A new clerk, one not instructed? He flicked over pages. No — God, no! He'd been so bored, so inattentive, so stupid— This was the normal handwriting, the pages containing the references to Bisley were written in a hand that was very like but not identical. God—

He flicked through other pages, saw where a new clerk took over the harbour records — then he flicked to the front of the ledger, and discovered more confusion. He had been reading, dully and mule-like and damn stupidly, the harbourmaster's ledger of shipping movements—

Handwriting, handwriting? No, Jesus but he was dumb, it was the same handwriting. Bisley's flotilla was omitted, but nothing had been changed. He giggled aloud. It was stupid, suspecting a cover-up. But, someone had been instructed not to make an entry concerning Bisley, presumably for security. But the minelayers?

The men who had removed the Milford files had left this, if they'd found it at all, because it wasn't Admiralty records, it had belonged to the harbourmaster. During the war, all shipping had become the responsibility of the Admiralty. But the harbourmaster had gone on keeping his own log of shipping movements, apparently, separately from NOIC at Milford. And someone keeping his log failed to ignore the sailing of two minelayers from Milford to St George's Channel and their return — having resown the passage swept by Bisley's flotilla, and that swept by the Germans for their proposed invasion. God—

Hoskins, he had to talk to Hoskins immediately.

It was getting dark outside. Hoskins would already have left. He plucked the card from his pocket as if fearful someone might already have stolen it. Sansom Street, Clerkenwell. He'd need his tape-recorder from the hotel. Hoskins was on a British ship that went down in the St George's Channel because—

He could not, with any precision, form the conclusion. He was almost afraid of so doing, because it explained everything. The secrecy, Drummond's silence, the theft ot his notes. The British had—

Again, a mental impediment prevented him forming the thought in precise verbal symbols. He didn't know, he told himself. He did not — he did. He did. It explained everything.

He stared at the ledger again. The names of the two minelayers, their tonnage, their captains. Jamieson and Guthrie. He closed the ledger as if doing so might contain its secret. He hugged the leather in his hands.

Guthrie. David Guthrie? On TV. Northern Ireland. The British minister responsible for Northern Ireland. Another David Guthrie, he told himself. He opened the ledger again, flicking the pages feverishly, rumpling the corners of many of them. Bisley, and the minelayers. He barely glanced at the door, then tore hurriedly and crudely at the pages until he had roughly detached them. He stuffed them into his briefcase, paused to breathe deeply once, and then went out.

He felt the tensions, the premonitions beginning almost as soon as he felt the cold air of the early evening on his face.

From inside the telephone booth, Hoskins watched him go, then made a call to Goessler. He did not notice the Vauxhall start up further down the street and pull slowly into the traffic, on McBride's trail.

Moynihan kept McBride in sight until he entered the station, and assumed that he was heading back to the hotel. Hoskins was an anonymous, mousy man he had disregarded. He was not similarly able, however, to ignore the fawn Escort with a driver and passenger who had been following McBride four cars ahead of himself. His suspicions became confirmed when the passenger alighted and followed McBride into the station. As the Escort pulled away, Moynihan looked around him for a telephone box.

November 1940

McBride put his hands above his head, and adopted a posture that he hoped was suitably cowed, frightened. In the bad weather, he had approached nearer the blockhouse than he could have hoped, and confirmed the presence in Brest of the ocean-going U-boats he had seen on Guernsey. Had the sun been shining, he would have had to march openly down the breakwater to report that the smack had broken down, and would not have been able to use the binoculars.

His satisfaction was, however, unimportant at that moment. The two German guards were angry with him because he had not been spotted earlier, and perhaps they should have been on patrol but had huddled instead round a fire, drinking coffee. Perhaps their officer had seen him first. The binoculars dangled innocently, yet betrayingly, from his neck.

'My boat,' he began in rapid French, pointing back down the breakwater towards the sea. 'Engine trouble. I came to report it. We had to tie up alongside the wall — pardon, pardon.'

The Germans were suspicious, and disarmed at the same time. Their machine-pistols were held more slackly, barrels angled to the ground. Just a Frenchman — McBride could see the contempt of familiarity and conquest glazing their attentiveness. An Unterfeldwebel and a Pioner from an engineer unit. The Unterfeldwebel was wearing on his uniform lemon-yellow waffenfarben, which meant he was from a signals regiment. And McBride knew that these men had replaced the normal infantry or police blockhouse guards. Close, it was close now—

He tried to ingratiate himself further.

'Come and see, please come—' he babbled, even reaching a hand out for one greatcoat sleeve. A sapper and a signals NCO guarding U-boats, his mind kept repeating. 'Please, we do not mean to be here, our engine broke down—' A machine-pistol thrust McBride's flapping hand away, but without animosity. A controlled, confident contempt seemed to animate both men. They betrayed their elite unit background by stance, smile or grimace, ease. Then the idea struck McBride — he could almost sense it growing in a smaller calculating self inside the shell that was impersonating a French fisherman — that he, and he alone, knew for certain that the Wehrmacht intended invading Ireland, and in the immediate future. And if they shot him, the surprise attack might succeed. There was no self-dramatization in the thought, no self-aggrandizement. He was terrified of the responsibility.

'What's the matter?' the Unterfeldwebel snapped in his Alsatian French as McBride stumbled over his words.

'The guns, the guns—' he managed to say. He expelled some of the fear they would expect from a fisherman facing guns. The two Germans were alert, their eyes and stance hardly altered by his supplicatory tone.

'Engine trouble?' the Alsatian asked. The machine-pistol came up again, levelled at McBride's stomach. As if prompted by some cue, the Pioner glanced over his shoulder towards the nearest U-boat pens, then back at the binoculars round McBride's neck. 'What engine trouble?'

'I don't know — it cut out,' McBride protested, feeling the chill of the wind go away, and the sleet pattering against his cheek become distant. His body temperature began rising beneath his jersey and oilskins. 'Please, come and see for yourselves—'

They had shaken off the lethargic, welcome warmth of the blockhouse, the reluctance of coming out into the blowing sleet to investigate a mad Frenchman walking along the breakwater in full view of them. They had readopted their responsibilities.