Yet he sensed a battered city beyond his office, and a country beleaguered beyond that. Britain was powerless to prevent the invasion of Ireland and the opening up of a second front. He hoped March and Walsingham would leave his office quickly. He needed to sit down.
The thin grey trail of smoke was apparent to them as they cycled down the last half-mile of the road to Leap. McBride had borrowed two ancient and unsafe cycles in Clonakilty from his wife's cousin, and they had made good time through the last hours of the night and the slow grey dawn. Gilliatt was weary, yet the relief of having encountered none of Drummond's men remained with him until they saw the smoke beyond the last slope. He glanced at McBride, who at once began to ride furiously up the slope. His face was chalk-white, strained, tired and afraid. The hours making good time along the still wet shoreline to Timoleague seemed to have taken little out of him, even wounded — even the jarring of his arm as he guided the cycle seemed to leave him with reserves of purpose and a kind of wild, determined pleasure in outrunning Drummond. Now, however, he appeared drained and fearful.
McBride was twenty yards ahead as Gilliatt topped the rise, pedalling furiously towards the shell of a burned-out cottage that Gilliatt knew must be McBride's home. Gilliatt paused, as if not to intrude upon an evident grief. Another, more selfish emotion occupied him gradually. The IRA had committed an atrocity, whether McBride's wife was amid the ruins of the cottage or not. Gilliatt was afraid for himself. He could hear McBride calling his wife's name as he flung down the bicycle and clambered into the smouldering ruins of the cottage — white distemper scarred and blackened, the roof fallen in, smoke wreathing the small, demented figure of McBride. Gilliatt pedalled down the slope, pulling up in front of the cottage just as McBride emerged. His hands and face were blackened, and he was sweating so that rivulets of white appeared down his cheeks. His eyes were feverishly bright.
'Is she—?' Gilliatt began, letting his cycle fall to the ground.
'No. I can't find her.' There was no relief.
'Where could she be?'
McBride seemed not to have considered any hopeful explanation, and to be nonplussed. He rubbed the dirt on his good hand into his face, making a wilder figure of himself. The hand then flapped loosely at the air as if trying to gain some grip or purchase.
'Her father's—'
'Where, man?'
'Ross Carbery. She might be there — sometimes when I'm away she goes, sometimes not. I don't know —'
Gilliatt interrupted the leaky tap of McBride's thoughts, stopped the dribble of rusty ideas. 'Let's go there. You're sure?' He indicated the ruined cottage with a nod of his head. McBride shook his head like a wounded animal. As if to complement the image, he seemed made aware of his arm, and clutched it to stop it hurting.
'No. She's not there.'
'Come on, then.'
McBride turned to look at the remains of his home. He felt the blackened timbers, the charred walls and burst, scorched furniture wrench at him. He understood the house as a destination rather than a home, but that did not weaken its impact upon him. Broken china, charred books similarly now seemed to bear a weight of significance never previously possessed. The sight of the cottage distracted him from thoughts of his wife for some moments. Then he turned his back on it, picked up his bicycle — stifling a groan as pain shot through his damaged arm — and mounted it.
'Come on, Peter.' He saw Gilliatt's expression of bemused, anxious fear. 'It's all right,' he added gently. 'I think she'll be with her father. This—' He tossed his head to indicate the cottage at his back, ' — is just to tell
McBride studied Gilliatt in scornful silence. 'We'll have to ask him when we meet him again, won't we?' He hesitated, then some urgency seemed to press on him. 'Come on. I'm hungry.'
The Trinity House records had supplied the present whereabouts of seamen listed as sailing on the three ships of the convoy lost in November 1940, where and if they had entered homes administered by Trinity House or an affiliated organization. McBride had a small handful of names of men still living, scattered across the country in seamen's homes. His eagerness had selected the home in Chatham, less than thirty miles from London.
The day was bright, clear and warm and he was grateful for the company of Claire Drummond. He intended to go on from Chatham to Hastings and the third name on his short list, and to spend the night with her possibly, in Canterbury. He had never seen the cathedral city, and the lightness of tourism seemed appropriate — or desirous at the least. As they left Lewisham behind and crossed the river Darent, McBride felt the weight of recent events diminish. Hoskins' murder, the theft of his notebooks and files, receded.
He was not aware of the tail car at any point in their journey along the A2, and they arrived in Chatham just before lunch. McBride was enjoying merely the pleasure of driving and the woman's company. As they turned into the car park of the Red Dog Inn in the centre of the town, he anticipated pickle and bread and cheese as fiercely as he might have done something of much more significance. Claire Drummond was aware of the mercurial changes of mood of which McBride was capable. He seemed able to shed past experience almost at will, leaving it neatly packaged against some vague time when he might need it and return to it. She had been surprised at his easiness in the aftermath of Hoskins' death, his lack of curiosity concerning the perpetrator, even his lack of fear concerning his own safety. For herself, she could not share his enthusiasm for seeking out derelict sailors who might or might not have something of interest to say. But she and Moynihan had determined that she must accompany him everywhere while they followed his trail, because he was their only chance of circumventing Goessler.
The tail car parked in the pub car park a minute after they had done so, and Ryan followed McBride into the lounge bar. He waited until McBride had ordered, then went to the bar. He sat reading the
McBride spent some time locating the seamen's home on a new, almost treeless estate on the outskirts of the town, near the M2. Its former building in the dockyard area had been demolished almost ten years previously. The new low building with its large picture windows looking towards the motorway and the North Downs in one direction and the estate's shopping centre in the other, huddled close to a new, ugly Catholic church and an already grimy and graffiti-bearing Leisure Centre. The car park of the Leisure Centre ran behind the seamen's home, almost overlapping its trim grass verges like a frozen concrete sea. Claire Drummond elected to remain in the car, listening to the radio. She fumed silently but knew she could not intrude upon his conversations with the men he sought without stepping out of character. She relied on her influence to prevent McBride keeping anything from her.
The tail car parked near the small supermarket across the road.
McBride had spoken over the telephone with the Warden of the home, and he was ushered into his office immediately he announced his arrival to the receptionist. He was evidently a small surprise in a deep and rutted routine. Mr Blackshaw was not discontented, but he had through the years of his work with the elderly and the dying and the past-livers lost something of his own vitality, even individuality. The inmates of the home seemed to have lived on him like vampires, or simply worn him out with their combined weight of years and extreme experiences. After he had drawn from McBride an account of the book he was researching, he reluctantly conducted him to one of the home's two television rooms where, he said, the two friends he wished to interview would be watching the afternoon racing.
'You will have to be patient,' Blackshaw offered as they clicked down a block-floored corridor, clean, neat and aseptic. None of the untidiness of a real home, McBride observed. Mr Blackshaw's recommendation of patience was that of one who had tired of the virtue, or who saw himself in some impossibly heroic alternative reality shrugging it off like a set of chains. McBride nodded in reply.
'Are they pretty cognitive?'
Blackshaw appeared puzzled, then tapped his forehead questioningly, to which McBride nodded again.
'Oh, I'm afraid not very. They are
'Ga-ga, uh?'
