'I think we'd better be leaving, don't you?' he said with a grin. He was as tense as a wound spring, the pleasure of winning and killing running through his frame like electricity.
'My God,' Gilliatt muttered, feeling his legs give way. He sat down untidily alongside Riordan. 'My God, I could have killed her,' he added, looking blankly at Maureen.
'You'll have enough time to make it up to her,' McBride observed. 'When you've dropped me off, you'll take care of her.' It was like an order. Gilliatt looked up at him, bemused.
'What the hell's the matter with you?' he shouted, looking from McBride to Maureen and back again. 'We could have got your wife killed between us. Doesn't that matter to you at all?' McBride appeared unimpressed. 'What the hell's the matter with you?' he asked again, more softly.
McBride shook his head. 'Don't confuse the issue with moral speculations, Peter. I'm going to kill Drummond and you're going to look after Maureen. Those are the assigned roles. You drop me off at Kilbrittain and take her on to Cork.'
'Don't you care about her at all?'
'It isn't relevant at the moment,' McBride said without emotion. Gilliatt saw him on an outcrop of egocentricity, not even bothering to signal to a vessel that might rescue him. McBride crossed to the body on the floor and re-moved the Mauser from its grasp. He weighed it in his hand and seemed satisfied with it. 'Killing him with a German gun might be more than appropriate, don't you think?'
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Process of Elimination
Mcbride pulled Riordan's small Morris over to the side of the road, wrenched on the handbrake, and switched off the engine. To Gilliatt and Maureen, the silence was suddenly ominous and foreboding. McBride had skirted Clonakilty and then taken the road north before doubling back southwards towards Crosswinds Farm and Kilbrittain. They had encountered no German — or Irish — troops in the hour and a half's driving. The night was heavy and wet as a facecloth when McBride wound down the window, but it had stopped raining. The sky showed black and starless through appearing tears in the cloud cover.
Crosswinds Farm was three miles away from them, across the fields that fell away from the hilltop where McBride had chosen to stop, and beyond the scattered few lights of Kilbrittain.
'You can't attempt it,' Gilliatt began, aware of the dangerous, heedless smile on McBride's face. It irritated him, and he changed his tactics. 'You haven't a shred of proof against him, Michael!' McBride's smile faded.
'Is that all you have to say, Peter? Fair play for Drummond? I'd forgotten — you're both in the Navy.'
'So are you — or supposed to be.' McBride shook his head.
'Drummond's broken the contract I had with him. God, you were
'Those weren't Germans. They were your countrymen. Irish.'
'And that's your
Maureen interrupted them. 'Michael, come with us. Whatever the truth of it, you can't do anything by yourself.' McBride seemed abashed without being softened or dissuaded. He shook his head in a minute, determined movement.
'I'm sorry, lovey, it just won't do, you see. Drummond tried to kill me, he's tried to have all of us killed. He's not getting away with that.'
'Stupid heroics—' she began.
'No. It's much older than heroics. Revenge.'
'For God's sake, don't do it!' she wailed. 'I'm going to have our baby. Do you think I want him to have to listen to tales about the father he never saw?' She clutched his hands convulsively, tears streaming down her face. McBride looked as if he had been cheated, that she had played to other rules than his and beaten him at the game. 'For God's sake think of the child if you won't think of me.'
McBride's face was twisted and shaped by conflicting emotions. Gilliatt found their intensity almost unbearable. Then McBride climbed swiftly out of the car.
'I'll be back,' he said.
'Damn you, Michael McBride, damn you!'
'Maybe — maybe,' he said, then nodded to Gilliatt and strode off into the night, dropping swiftly out of sight down the hillside towards the lights of the hamlet.
'Damn you — damn you!' Maureen kept calling out after him while Gilliatt got out, and went round the Morris to the driver's seat. He slammed the door angrily, started the engine — over-revving, the tyres squealing out of the dirt at the side of the road — then headed north-east again, on the road towards Ballinadee and the main road to Cork. He was angry, his nerves were being shredded by the woman's ceaseless cries, magnified in the tin box of the car, and he wanted nothing more to do with Michael McBride and his wife and the Irish. His simple duty was to reach the authorities in Cork — preferably the British authorities — and tell them what, as far as he knew, was happening. It did not matter what then happened, it did not matter what was or was not being done — this was his job. If only the bloody woman behind him would stop wailing and screaming—
He only realized that he had taken a wrong turning and was on the Kinsale road heading back towards the coast when he saw the signpost in the headlights and, almost at the same moment beyond the crossroads, a barrier of barrels across the road and grey uniforms passing to and fro just at the fringe of the glare of the lights. Then one soldier stepped into the spill of light, machine-pistol at the ready, and began walking towards the car.
'Shut up, damn you!' Gilliatt barked, and the woman subsided sobbing into the back seat. Gilliatt cursed himself, watching the German approaching the car, joined by a second soldier. Both of them were fifteen yards from the Morris. Gilliatt shoved the gear-stick into reverse, revved, and backed away down the road, switching off his headlights as he did so. He could hear the shouting over the noise of the engine, and he swung the car round on the handbrake, accelerating recklessly with the back wheels in soft dirt at the side of the road; the car suddenly jerked free and careered away down the road. 'Keep your head down!' he yelled with a dangerous elation bubbling up in his chest and a lightness, an invincibility enveloping his thoughts.
He ducked, too, and the bullets thudded into the boot of the Morris, shattered the small back window over Maureen's cowering form, and pattered on the road behind them. He kept his foot pressed down, trying to remember the road and how long the straight stretch lasted, bounced the car suddenly off the bank as the road began to descend, and switched on the headlights. A bend in the road leapt at him, and he swung the wheel furiously, braking with a squeal of rubber, and went through it, the car immediately slowing on an uphill stretch.
'You all right?' he said hoarsely.
'Yes — yes, I think so,' he heard in a child-like voice from the back seat.
'Thank God for something!' Cork appeared a distant, infinitely desirable oasis in the chaos of the night. No more wrong turns, he thought. Straight through, no stops.
McBride squeezed through a gap in the hedge, and jumped the ditch. His trouser-legs were sodden with rain from the grass, and his boots were beginning to let in water. Kilbrittain was behind him now, and he could smell the sea on the light breeze that was moving the clouds sluggishly, opening up gaps of starlit darkness. He had avoided two German patrols, each time the effect of night and secrecy and silence leaking more dangerous adrenalin into his system. The old Lee Enfield was cold and potent in his hand and the Mauser a hard-edged shape in his waistband. He was less than half a mile from Crosswinds Farm, approaching it from the north. That last hedge might even have marked the boundary of Drummond's land.
McBride felt unfettered. The cramping, desolating noises of his wife's parting curse, the wild, hampering words she had yelled at him to stop him, had diminished. He had digested them, incorporated them within his single-minded purpose. Nothing was going to prevent him from killing Drummond. Revenge whirled up in him like
