Ossian's Ride (8 page)

I asked for a single room for one night and was told that luckily there had been a cancellation. The register signed, I was shown to a second-floor room by the receptionist. Even while she was showing me the facilities I heard a car start up outside. By the time I reached the window, the Chevrolet was pulling away down the street.

Before dinner I visited the bar. Although it was pretty crowded I saw nobody that I recognized, which in the circumstances was perhaps as well. A man with an air of proprietorship was busy behind the counter. I took this to be Houseman, but I could read nothing from his manner. He looked around fifty, tall, heavily built, putting on weight, hair graying, normal.

I was more fortunate at dinner. I have said that Deirdre and her intimates have vanished without trace. But this I saw must be wrong as soon as I entered the dining room. For she herself was there, alive in all her original loveliness, no longer a queen it is true but a waitress. Surely this must be some descendant of those bygone days. Perhaps the intervening generations had wrought some slight change, for her face was warm and friendly, incapable of the disdain that her ancestor had shown on that last unlucky day.

I was still thirsty from the long walk when she passed.

“Deirdre, could I have a glass of water, please?”

She stopped and stared at me in some surprise. “Me name’s not Deirdre, it’s Cathleen.”

Of course it was, for her face had reminded me of something far less pleasant than the story of Deirdre. This must be the sister of the dead boy in the wood.

The position was both delicate and exasperating. Cathleen must be told about the shocking demise of her brother, and that very soon. But when I suggested that we have a word together she took me for a fast stranger with doubtful intentions, which I suppose must have seemed not at all an unusual event. She trotted off in a huff, whether simulated or not I don’t know. It took the best part of a couple of hours before I was able to waylay her alone.

I caught her as she came out of the kitchen.

“Look, mister, if you don’t go away from me, it’s for help I’ll be shouting.”

Plainly I was not of the stuff that the heroes of American aphrodisiacal literature are made, the sort of man the girls chase from cover to cover.

“I want to speak to you about your brother. You have a brother, haven’t you?”

This checked her instantly. “What is it?” she whispered.

“We must go where we can talk without being overheard. Come up to my room in about five minutes. It’s Number 17.” There was no point in having our conversation overheard, and no point in our being seen too obviously together. Metaphorically speaking, I could smell rats all over this hotel.

Announcing herself with a light tap on the door, Cathleen slipped inside. I told her as briefly and quietly as I could all I had seen during the afternoon. She made me repeat my description of the lad’s appearance several times, until there could be no doubt that he really was her brother. Then she collapsed in a chair and sobbed quietly and uncontrollably.

I stood around, unable to do anything but offer my handkerchief. Then quickly, so quickly that I was taken by surprise, she jumped up. “Come back, you little fool ...” I began, but she was gone.

I began to curse silently to myself. In my school days, in the era of scholarships, I used to be afflicted by a recurrent nightmare. I would dream that I was given an examination paper, all the questions of which I could do with considerable facility. Then, just as I started to write out the first of them, there would come an interruption, the invigilator would cry out, “Excuse me a moment, I have an announcement to make ...” The announcement would take a quarter of an hour and would be followed immediately by a second interruption and then by a third, and so forth until the whole three hours was over, when once again the booming voice of the invigilator would ring out, “Gentlemen, time is up.”

Just as I was handing in my blank paper I would waken, sweating with apprehension.

From the moment I had started on this mission I had suffered one interruption after another. First, Parsonage, who couldn’t allow me to get into Ireland in my own way. Then the ill-fated Colquhoun, who hadn’t the elementary common sense to see that since his organization had spawned three traitors, there wasn’t the slightest reason why it shouldn’t spawn four, or five, or six .... And now Cathleen, who must whip away on a desperate course without giving me the slightest chance to help her. I had a shrewd idea of what she might be doing, but I couldn’t go padding about a strange hotel in the hope that I’d just chance on the right move to make. Better to stay put. At least she’d be able to find me if she wanted me.

I anticipated her return by packing my rucksack. The sooner I could get away from the Unicorn Hotel and from Mr. Houseman the better. Three times I had been asked by the hotel staff for my passport. Each time I had stalled—I hadn’t the smallest intention of handing it over. I knew Houseman, with his own background to consider, would never bring in the police, but he must already be aware that I was someone to be watched.

By a miracle Cathleen had managed to find what she wanted. She came in breathing fast, with a file of papers clutched in her arms.

“Let me put them in the rucksack.”

She handed them over more trustingly than she should have.

“Come along quickly now. We can creep out by the back way.”

Maybe we could and maybe we couldn’t. As it turned out, we could. The point of course was that at this hour, 10 P.M., Houseman was heavily engaged in the bar. It would be at least an hour before business became lighter, and maybe it would be another hour or two before he discovered the loss of the papers. Perhaps he wouldn’t even find out until morning.

Cathleen had a couple of bikes ready in the lane outside. “Give over the rucksack to me, and you take this,” she said, handing me a spade. I noticed that she had a blanket in the carrier on the front of her machine. The next part of our joint enterprise was grimly obvious.

We cycled silently out of the town. I led the way back without difficulty, for it is curious how easily one remembers every detail of a road along which one has walked, in pitiful contrast to the hurrying motorist who sees little and remembers little.

We found the wood again, left our bicycles where the car had been parked, forced our way through the undergrowth. He was still lying exactly as I had left him. I held one of the cycle lamps for Cathleen to lift my sleeping bag. She made no cry, but looked for perhaps half a minute.

“Poor Mickey boy,” she whispered, and then added in a small voice choked with passion, “I’ll get them for this.”

In turn she held the light for me while I dug his grave. Once the spade had cut through the surface turf the ground was rich and soft. I guess it must have taken about an hour before I had excavated a trench about three feet deep. We wrapped him in the blanket and lowered him gently. She wept as I filled in the soil again and replaced the grassy turf.

I put my arm around her shoulders and led her back to the bicycles. We started off along the road, but we hadn’t gone far before I saw that the girl was exhausted and on the verge of collapse. Clearly we couldn’t ride all through the night. Equally clearly we couldn’t go back to the Unicorn Hotel. It would be best to get a few miles away from the wood, and then lay up until morning.

We rode along rather shakily for the first mile or two. I had of course discarded the spade and was able to give Cathleen a bit of a push, but it wasn’t at all easy in the blackness. Then surprisingly she began to go along on her own steam, and after a while she took the lead.

“Have you any idea where you’re going?”

“I want to go to Morag’s cottage” was the reply.

Since I had no idea of the whereabouts of Morag’s cottage I had no choice but to follow along. We rode back almost into Longford, but cut away on the east side, crossed the wide main road to Mullingar, and a mile or two farther on started down an unsurfaced lane. There was a solitary cottage rather more than half a mile along.

An old woman answered our knock. When she saw Cathleen she exclaimed, “Mother of God, what an hour to be on the road!”

While Cathleen went inside and told the old woman whatever she wished to tell her, I stood outside examining the approaches to the cottage. I put the bikes where we could readily get them onto the road again if we should be in a hurry, for truth to tell I didn’t like this cottage business. When he found his papers to be missing, Houseman was certain to begin a frenzied search.

I didn’t know of course what sort of an organization he had at his disposal, but it was safest to assume that the organization might be formidable. He would obviously look for Cathleen at every place he could think of, and Morag’s cottage might well be one of these. It would have been wiser to have slept in the woods, but Cathleen was so tired that I couldn’t find it in my heart to insist. The one comfort was that the lights of any car could be seen approaching the cottage from far off. I thought it most unlikely that anyone would, drive that particular night without at least some degree of lighting.

Morag had of course brewed up a pot of tea. She offered me a cup when I came in from the lane.

“And now be off to bed with you,” she said to Cathleen.

“Try to get some sleep, but don’t take your clothes off,” I added. “We might have to make a quick getaway. I’ll keep watch, don’t worry.”

Cathleen nodded, evidently seeing the point.

“Morag, can you tell if a car turns into the lane?” I asked. The old woman answered that she could.

“Then would you be willing to keep a watch, in case I fall asleep?”

“You may be assured that I will.”

But I had no intention of sleeping. I took out the file of papers and began to look systematically through them. The first part was scientific, the latter part and the appendices were mathematical. One needed little knowledge of science to appreciate the importance of the first part; it was no less than a description and blueprints of a thermonuclear reactor, the disposition of magnets, currents and voltages, etc. I remembered Parsonage’s statement that I.C.E. had produced a working thermonuclear reactor, and a piece of the puzzle became complete in my mind.

Not to make a mystery of the matter I might remark that one of the entries in Colquhoun’s notebook read as follows:

The
I
was probably short for I.C.E. Presumably the situation was that Michael had a job at I.C.E. or at least had had the entree into the I.C.E. territory. It must have been Michael who got hold of the manuscript. In the ordinary course of his business he had brought the manuscript to Shaun Houseman, who must instantly have perceived its fantastic value on the open market. When Michael got wind of Houseman’s intentions, he, Michael, had simply been brutally snuffed out. This seemed to make sense, at any rate the sort of sense that one expects to meet in this brand of business.

As I read on, I became more and more uneasy. By now I had reached the mathematical parts. Either my memory was slipping, or there were steps in the various proofs that simply did not seem to follow. At first I thought the stress and strain of the last month, and of the last day in particular, had softened my wits, but bit by bit I found things that were certainly wrong. I even found an elementary blunder: the statement that apart from an additive constant every monotonic continuous function is equal to the integral of its derivative. On a grand scale, this was another nonsensical document of the sort that I had already seen in Parsonage’s office.

But it gave me some idea of the subtlety of the people I would soon be dealing with. Evidently I.C.E. had a deliberate policy of turning out spoof documents, which they fed to the foreign agents much as one might fling hunks of poisoned meat to a pack of snarling wolves. Poor Michael! This was something that I must be careful to keep from Cathleen.

I must have dozed off round about dawn, for I was roughly wakened by Morag.

“Away with you. They’re coming up the boreen.”

The lane was a little more than half a mile long. Assuming the car came quickly along the very rough surface, it would take the best part of a minute, sixty precious seconds, of which Morag must have consumed ten. I took five more to get upstairs to Cathleen’s bedroom, another five to drag her out of bed, ten to get her downstairs and a final ten to grab my rucksack and the file of papers and to race out after her to the bikes. This left twenty seconds to reach the turn of the lane beyond the cottage before the car appeared. We managed it with nothing to spare.

The car would stop at the cottage, but not for long. However skillfully Morag prevaricated, we had left obvious signs of our flight. It occurred to me that I ought to have left the papers behind too. This would have delayed them longer and might even have caused them to call off the pursuit altogether.

We came out of a thin wood into open fields, and my heart fell, for there were gates across the path. I fretted at the precious seconds that were lost in opening the first of them—the car had started again. But it was the gates that saved us. It takes longer to open a gate from a car than from a bicycle, and what we gained in this way made up for the extra speed of the car on the stretches between.

It must have looked a preposterous race to an onlooker. I would forge ahead, slide off onto one of the pedals, jump down and half open the gate. Cathleen following behind would ride through and head for the next gate at full speed. Meanwhile I would slam the gate, making sure it was firmly shut. By the time I reached the next one, Cathleen would have it open and I would ride through and then head for the third and so on. By this technique we kept the car at bay, a couple of fields behind, and certainly out of shooting range.