Drummond came and knelt by his body for a moment, feeling for the absent pulse. A German officer began to apologize, but Drummond dismissed him curtly. He was safe now, but it was too early to take comfort from the thought. McBride's dead face looked up, youthful and innocent. He looked no more than lightly asleep. Drummond was sorry — almost — that he had come back, though he had always known he would.
'David, you simply can't do it! We are so close now. I assure you it's a matter of hours, not days.' Walsingham stared out of the window of the Cheltenham hotel he had booked into, down the length of the Promenade, wide pavements full of shoppers, the sun filtering down, barred and sliced, through the trees. Guthrie's telephone call, diverted to him by the police switchboard, came as a naked, open shock, encompassed him in a momentary futility until the ego narrowed perspective to the purely personal.
'I'm sorry, Charles. It will come out anyway, I'm certain of that. The meetings can be less harmed by my resignation on the grounds of illness or overwork than they would be if I tried to carry on, and got found out. I'd not be forgiven, by
'I'm sorry you have no greater faith in my assurances, Minister,' he snapped dismissively. Guthrie sounded chastened and deflated when he replied.
'It's no reflection on you, Charles, as I'm sure you realize. I am going to do what I feel has to be done to protect my initiative over Ulster. And I can best do that by retiring from the scene — not just temporarily, but permanently.' He cleared his throat to make room for a new portentousness. 'My resignation will be with the PM this evening. I felt, however, that you should be informed.'
Walsingham wanted to tell him that people were dead to protect his precious skin and office and initiative over Ulster, but the bile that rose in him simply drained him, made him feel very old and wish only to end the conversation.
'Thank you for telling me, Minister. Goodbye.' He put down the telephone without taking his eyes from the window. Somewhere out there, in all probability, McBride was considering his next step. Walsingham looked at the afternoon edition of the local paper on the telephone table. It was folded to reveal most of the headline concerning the murders in the Cotswold cottage and the police search for Professor Thomas McBride of Portland. Was McBride reading it at that moment, was he wondering when to call? Walsingham could feel the American like another presence in the room, and he was eager for their meeting as a younger self might have been for love or fornication.
He turned his eyes back to the window. Trade-off. If not, then McBride had to be eliminated like the others.
Where was he? Where?
Thomas Sean McBride sat in the restaurant in the Cavendish House department store on the Promenade, attired in an outfit he had purchased via credit card in the men's department, drinking tea and picking idly with a fork at a huge Danish pastry. The evening newspaper was folded on the tablecloth in front of him. His nonchalance was assumed, the pastry a necessary prop. He had cleaned himself up as thoroughly as he could in the washroom of a pub in Andoversford, and had eaten bread and cheese, washed down with beer, before catching the bus into Cheltenham.
The cops were talking to him, through the newspaper. It was a threat and perhaps a plea. No, he decided, reading the details of the double murder again, it was a threat. The cops had killed the woman and Moynihan.
He still could not give her her name back, not even now she was so evidently dead — unless it was a bluff, but he had already rejected the idea because Hoskins' staring, sightless eyes had come back into his mind, looking out of the first cup of tea. It was unnerving, but something in him concentrated more vividly on the woman and on her death than on his own danger. But he still could not name her.
He felt a curious invulnerability sitting there amid the inherited formalities of afternoon tea, premature fur wraps belying the day, jewellery cording old, wrinkled throats or blazoning shrunken bosoms, chatter brittler than glass, or lumpy as the crockery. The newspaper story also served to distance the cottage at Andoversford and the police hunt for him. They had no idea where he was, the story was meant to bring him in. They wanted to trade.
His removal from the sharp, cutting edges of his recent experience made him reluctant to think about Goessler, or about Drummond. One had been the author of his predicament, the other his father's murderer. To think of either of them made him feel tired, incapable of effort. Nothing in his surroundings or his mental landscape prompted him to action. He was being told in the newspaper he could go nowhere, he was on his own — why not drop in and discuss your problem?
He didn't think he wanted to do that.
McBride finished the Danish pastry then took his bill to the cashier. He paid again by credit card. He had only a few pounds in his wallet and could not foresee how to gain access to more cash.
He passed telephones on his way to the lift. He stopped, and a smile crept onto his face, took hold, broadened. Why not? He ducked his head into the plastic bubble, and consulted the directory. He rang the police HQ in Cheltenham.
'My name is McBride,' he said. 'Don't keep me waiting or I'll hang up.
'Professor McBride, the author of
'Uh? Oh, yes, you want to check I'm no nut, right?'
'That is correct.'
'What kind of a file do you have on me?'
'We could call it sufficient — your father's name, for example?'
'Michael — and he was
'Thank you, Professor.'
'You had them killed, mm? Who are you, anyway?'
'My name is Walsingham. I knew your father well.'
'Nice for you.' McBride began looking around him, furtively. He knew he would be long gone before anyone traced his call, but he could not prevent his physical reactions. 'Drummond told me about you —
'What—?' Then, with recovered aplomb, 'I didn't know that. He is dead, by the way.'
'What?' A small hole was apprehensible in McBride's stomach. 'When?'
'A heart attack last night. I got a routine report after the Admiralty was informed. So, the whirligig of time —'
'He had over forty years' freedom. You had his daughter killed this morning — quite a lot of dying seems to go on around you, Mr Walsingham.'
'Will you come in and talk to us? You have only to pop into the nearest police station.'
'You want to trade, uh? But you'll never pin those two murders on me. It had to be done by a small army.'
'Ah, but there are other deaths, Professor. We would have released the story tomorrow, had you not got in touch by then. A Doktor Goessler and his assistant, two people helping you with your researches, I believe?'
McBride was silent, staring at the wall with the scribbled numbers, surprised that the occasional obscenity had spread as far as the restaurant in Cavendish House.
Walsingham was his one and only enemy, he told himself, holding the receiver away from his suddenly hot ear as if the voice at the other end might infect him. He'd killed four people who knew about the events of 1940. For Guthrie, for the goddam government?
Curiously, he no longer felt animosity for Goessler, or Lobke, or Moynihan, or for Claire. Only the man at the other end of the line was his enemy, his real enemy. A period of emotional paralysis seemed to have passed, leaving only a single object of focus for the dormant feelings that had multiplied during the past days. He was free now, and all the others were dead. This man had killed them.
