He follows me into the bathroom and I fix his tie and check the mike and the tape recorder. It’s all fine.
Back to the table. I make him take another sip of the coffee.
“Just do exactly what we told you and everything will be OK,” I tell him.
He gets to his feet and nods.
He walks out of the café as if he’s on his way to an execution, which, in truth, he might be …
I return to the cryptic crossword.
“The rich and powerful fear you, o masterful bleak cop,” I say to myself.
O masterful bleak cop is a weird thing to say, it must be an anagram of something, maybe a— “Peter Falk as Columbo,” I say and fill in the clue. The final remaining clues tumble in pretty easily.
When I’ve paid the bill and gone back outside the rain has ceased but a cold wind is blowing in from the sea and the mountains are caught in its bitter grip. The southern rim of the sky is thinning from grey to black. The rush hour is over and the road is quiet and in the dense empty silence you can hear the alarms of wood pigeon and the cries of hawks.
I walk to the Beemer, look underneath it and get inside.
A spook called Wilson taps on the passenger’s side window. I unlock the car and let him in.
“Did you gentle his condition, Duffy?”
“He’s as good as he’s going to get,” I tell him.
“If he doesn’t have a heart attack he might be quite a useful little asset,” Wilson says with satisfaction.
“We’ll see. You’ll take it from here then, will you?”
“Aye. We’ll take it from here.”
“I’ll be off then.”
“Safe home.”
Up along the motorway and into Carrickfergus. I drive to #113 Coronation Road where there is a giant For Sale sign on a board in the front yard.
I go inside, where Beth and Emma and Jet the cat are waiting.
Beth is poring over the forms for Glasgow University, where her potential supervisor has said that it would be fine for her to study Frank Miller’s Batman as a response to Henry Miller’s Air Conditioned Nightmare.
“Oh, I got sent some estate listings today. What do you think of this place?” Beth asks, handing me an estate agent’s brochure. It’s for a house overlooking the sea in Portpatrick, Scotland,” she says.
I look at the house with its falling gables and ivy-covered windows and overgrown garden and path down to the water. It’s practically a ruin but the location is terribly romantic.
“It’ll be perfect. Let’s go take a look at it.”
31: SILENCIO
Blue. Big sideways swathes of blue. A universe of blue. A great blue engine. A machinery of blue.
Beth was manning the tiller, showing Emma how it worked.
I was up front in all that blue.
We had left Carrickfergus early, at five am, just as the sun was coming up as it is wont to do in August, at this hour, in these latitudes.
It was a straight run across the North Channel with only one tack. McCrabban and Lawson were sitting gingerly in the back, wondering if it was really a good idea to let an infant steer the boat. Wives and children had been invited but Helen was no sailor and didn’t trust the little boys on board and Alex didn’t have a steady girlfriend yet. It was warm already but Crabbie was dressed for an expedition to Ice Station Zebra with a massive windbreaker and multiple layers under that.
“Are we in any danger?” Crabbie asked nervously.
I shook my head. “It’s a gorgeous day, not a cloud in the sky. We should be fine.”
Gorgeous indeed.
When we cleared Belfast Lough Beth decided to hoist the big green spinnaker sail.
“You boys need to help,” Beth said to Crabbie and Lawson. “Alex, you pull on that sheet over there and Crabbie, you pull on that sheet here.”
“What sheets?”
“The ropes. The blue rope and the red rope.”
We raised the spinnaker and the main and a curly-haired, freckled-faced, deeply concentrating Emma steered the Deirdre out of the lough and into the Irish Sea.
We were heading for the Scottish coast. Carrickfergus was behind us now, even the castle looking small and grey on the shoreline. Jet the cat came up on deck after falling asleep on a rope coil. He decided that the moving watery realm was not for him and went back down below.
“How’s the farm going?” I asked Crabbie as I handed him a cup of tea.
Crabbie, unlike every farmer on the face of the earth, did not spend the next ten minutes complaining about how difficult it was to be a farmer.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“And your health?”
“Mustn’t grumble,” he said.
“Does he ever grumble?” Beth asked and Lawson and myself both shook our heads.
“He doesn’t grumble but his frown could fell a gazelle at fifty paces,” Lawson said.
Yeah, that frown. Last week McCrabban and I had driven to Judith McKeen’s house in Cushendun and told her that the two men who had shot her daughter were both dead. Both themselves shot. She nodded and when she asked if the third B Special had had anything to do with it I had said no, that he was innocent, and that was when Crabbie had frowned. It was a lie, a necessary lie, but a lie nonetheless.