Kincaid looked at Bloggs. “All those burglaries took place.”

“He could have read about them in the newspapers.”

“The third one wasn’t reported.”

“Perhaps he did them—he could still be a spy. Spies can steal too.” He felt rotten.

“But this was last week—your man was in London, wasn’t he?”

Bloggs was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Well, fuck it,” and walked out.

Peter Fredericks looked up at Kincaid through a mask of blood. “Who’s he, the bleedin’ Gestapo?” he said.

Kincaid stared at him. “Just be glad you’re not really the man he’s looking for.”

“WELL?” Godliman said into the phone.

“False alarm.” Bloggs’s voice was scratchy and distorted over the long-distance line. “A small-time housebreaker who happened to carry a stiletto and look like Faber….”

“Back to square one,” Godliman said.

“You said something about an island.”

“Yes. Storm Island—it’s about ten miles off the coast, due east of Aberdeen. You’ll find it on a large-scale map.”

“What makes you sure he’s there?”

“I’m not sure. We still have to cover every other possibility—other towns, the coast, everything. But if he did steal that boat, the…”

“Marie II.”

“Yes. If he did steal it, his rendezvous was probably in the area of this island; and if I’m right about that, then he’s either drowned or shipwrecked on the island—”

“Okay, that makes sense.”

“What’s the weather like up there?”

“No change.”

“Could you get to the island, do you think, in a big ship?”

“I suppose you can ride any storm if your ship’s big enough. But this island won’t have much of a dock, will it?”

“You’d better find out, but I expect you’re right. Now listen…there’s an RAF fighter base near Edinburgh. By the time you get there I’ll have an amphibious plane standing by. You take off the minute the storm begins to clear. Have the local Coastguard ready to move at moment’s notice too—I’m not sure who’ll get there first.”

“But if the U-boat is also waiting for the storm to clear, it will get there first,” Bloggs said.

“You’re right.” Godliman lit a cigarette, fumbling for inspiration. “Well, we can get a Navy corvette to circle the island and listen for Faber’s radio signal. When the storm clears it can land a boat on the island.”

“What about some fighters?”

“Yes. Except like you, they’ll have to wait until the weather breaks.”

“It can’t go on much longer.”

“What do the Scottish meteorologists say?”

“Another day of it, at least. But remember, all the time we’re grounded he’s bottled up too.”

“If he’s there.”

“Yes.”

“All right,” Godliman said. “We’ll have a corvette, the Coastguard, some fighters and an amphibian. You’d better get on your way. Call me from Rosyth. Take care.”

“Will do.”

Godliman hung up. His cigarette, neglected in the ashtray, had burned down to a tiny stub.

29

LYING ON ITS SIDE, THE JEEP LOOKED POWERFUL BUT helpless, like a wounded elephant. The engine had stalled. Faber gave it a hefty push and it toppled majestically onto all four wheels. It had survived the fight relatively undamaged. The canvas roof was destroyed, of course; the rip Faber’s knife had made had become a long tear running from one side to the other. The offside front fender, which had ploughed into the earth and stopped the vehicle, was crumpled. The headlight on that side had smashed. The window on the same side had been broken by the shot from the gun. The windshield was miraculously intact.

Faber climbed into the driver’s seat, put the gearshift into neutral and tried the starter. It kicked over and died. He tried again, and the engine fired. He was grateful for that, he could not have faced a long walk.

He sat in the car for a while, inventorying his wounds. He gingerly touched his right ankle; it was swelling massively. Perhaps he had cracked a bone. It was as well that the jeep was designed to be driven by a man with no legs, Faber could not have pressed a brake pedal. The lump on the back of his head felt huge, at least the size of a golf ball; when he touched it his hand came away sticky with blood. He examined his face in the rear-view mirror. It was a mass of small cuts and big bruises, like the face of the loser at the end of a boxing match.

He had abandoned his oilskin back at the cottage, so his jacket and overalls were soggy with rain and smeared with mud. He needed to get warm and dry very soon.

He gripped the steering wheel—a burning pain shot through his hand; he had forgotten the torn fingernail. He looked at it. It was the nastiest of his injuries. He would have to drive with one hand.

He pulled away slowly and found what he guessed was the road. There was no danger of getting lost on this island—all he had to do was follow the cliff edge until he came to Lucy’s cottage.

He needed to invent a lie to explain to Lucy what had become of her husband. She wouldn’t have heard the shotgun so far away, he knew. He might, of course, tell her the truth; there was nothing she could do about it. However, if she became difficult he might have to kill her, and he had an aversion to that. Driving slowly along the cliff top through the pouring rain and howling wind, he marveled at this new thing inside him, this scruple. It was the first time he had ever felt reluctance to kill. It was not that he was amoral—to the contrary. He had made up his mind that the killing he did was on the same moral level as death on the battlefield, and his emotions followed his intellect. He always had the physical reaction, the vomiting, after he killed, but that was something incomprehensible that he ignored.

So why did he not want to kill Lucy?

The feeling was on a par, he decided, with the affection that drove him to send the Luftwaffe erroneous directions to St. Paul’s Cathedral: a compulsion to protect a thing of beauty. She was a remarkable creation, as full of loveliness and subtlety as any work of art. Faber could live with himself as a killer, but not as an iconoclast. It was, he recognized as soon as the thought occurred to him, a peculiar way to be. But then, spies were peculiar people.

He thought of some of the spies who had been recruited by the Abwehr at the same time he had been: Otto, the Nordic giant who made delicate paper sculptures in the Japanese fashion and hated women; Friedrich, the sly little mathematical genius who jumped at shadows and went into a five-day depression if he lost a game of chess; Helmut, who liked to read books about slavery in America and had soon joined the SS…all different, all peculiar. If they had anything more specific in common, he did not know what it was.

He seemed to be driving more and more slowly, and the rain and mist became more impenetrable. He began to worry about the cliff edge on his left-hand side. He felt very hot, but suffered spasms of shivering. He realized he had been speaking aloud about Otto and Friedrich and Helmut, and he recognized the signs of delirium. He made an effort to think of nothing but the problem of keeping the jeep on a straight course. The noise of the wind took on some kind of rhythm, becoming hypnotic. Once he found himself stationary, staring out over the sea, and had no idea how long ago he had stopped.

It seemed hours later that Lucy’s cottage came into view. He steered toward it, thinking, I must remember to put the brake on before I hit the wall. There was a figure standing in the doorway, looking out at him through the rain. He had to stay in control of himself long enough to tell her the lie. He had to remember, had to remember…

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON by the time the jeep came back. Lucy was worried about what had happened to the men, and at the same time angry with them for not coming home for the lunch she had prepared. As the day waned she had spent more and more time at the windows, looking out for them.