Gibraltar Road (28 page)

Was this whole damn nuclear set-up in the present-day world worth while? If security demanded that for the sake of England Gibraltar’s unconsulted people should die was it, in the last analysis, worth it? Hadn’t the times and men’s morals degenerated so far that
nothing
was worth while saving-—saving only for the universal holocaust to come?

All these thoughts had gone through Hammersley’s mind as he’d sat with his driver and his A.D.C. in that truck during the morning, glum and not speaking, driving along Gibraltar’s narrow, noisy, crowded streets. The only conclusion he could come to as some salve for his own conscience was the obvious one: it wasn’t just England. Narrow concepts of nationalism didn’t wash these days, couldn’t wash, mustn’t wash. It was the free world’s way of life that was at stake; perhaps these people wouldn’t die—those of them who would have to—in vain. Or not quite in vain.

And he told himself that the people he had seen that morning had been pretty good. He knew that to-morrow, as the evacuation fleet began to enter Algeciras Bay, the seawalls would be crammed with people watching, wondering . . . would they go on believing that this movement of shipping and the disposal of the troops who were now moving to their stations along the streets was due to an exercise? Hammersley was still, in accordance with orders, keeping as much as possible dark until the very last moment, the moment when he would make that final broadcast, the moment when the evacuation itself would actually begin. He hadn’t told even his own family the full, awful truth, though he sensed that behind his wife’s admirably controlled front was hidden some blame, which she couldn’t altogether conceal, for the fact that he’d allowed their sons to come out to Gibraltar. He hoped that before the end came he’d have time to put that right with her, to explain things. It wouldn’t be long now, of course, but there was still that slim chance that either the
Cambridge
would find Ackroyd aboard the
Ostrowiec
or that Shaw would have something concrete to report.

And now it was night again—the time that seemed the worst of all. It was after midnight; to-morrow, in fact, had come.

Hammersley had had a direct line laid on, from his own office in The Convent to the power-house; and he had only to lift the receiver to get the latest information immediately. But mostly when it was answered the first thing he got was that racking
dum-da, dum-da
sound. . . . He didn’t know quite why—perhaps it was on account of some morbid curiosity that made him unable to leave the receiver alone—but he stretched out a hand now and put the thing to his ear.

A weary voice said, “Hullo, yes?”

Hammersley asked, “Is there any change? This is the Governor speaking.”

The awful strain under which those men were working was fully evident in the technician’s voice. He said heavily, almost sarcastically, “Yes, sir, I know who it is. There’s no change.”

Hammersley flushed; the man was right in his implication—he must resist the temptation, mustn’t get them flustered and irritated. They’d let him know at once. . . . Quietly he said, “Very well.”

The call was cut off then; but not before Hammersley had heard the note of AFPU ONE in the background—
dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da. . . .

He rammed the receiver back on its stand and stood up. He was breaking out in a light sweat which wasn’t entirely due to the night’s stuffiness. Tugging at his sticky collar, Hammersley went over and pressed a bell.

Three minutes later he was driving along Main Street again with his A.D.C.

Debonnair was shivering badly as she sat with Shaw’s thin wet coat round her shoulders, in the open boat with the sea slopping over every time Mr Ackroyd wriggled about in the bottom-boards. Shaw noticed her distress. He said, “Sorry, darling. It won’t be all that long now.”

“I know. Don’t worry about me, you’ve got enough on your plate.” She looked away to port, where the land     reared up high and bleak. She said, “Sheer cliff.”

Shaw nodded. “It’s like that all the way from Tarifa right round to Carnero, I fancy—just over ten miles.” He sighed. “We’ll be ashore as soon as we can.”

He looked down as Mr Ackroyd knocked against his foot. He was about to tell him, succinctly, to keep still if he didn’t want to upset the ruddy boat and throw them all into the sea when he realized that the little man was trying to say something. In spite of the cold, Ackroyd’s face was all sticky with sweat, and his straggly moustache clung wispily to his upper lip, drooping over his mouth like oily hair on a bald man’s head. A thin stream of saliva oozed from the corner of his mouth, which was slack and drooly. But his eyes were fixed, pathetically, in a stare at the girl’s face.

Mr Ackroyd spoke then. He said, perfectly clearly and distinctly, “I never did like him, lass, tha knaws that. Bloody teddy-boy, that’s what ’e is. . . .”

Shaw almost stopped breathing; obviously Ackroyd was wandering, but if only he could get him to talk for a little, to talk rationally, he might get some information out of him about the existence or otherwise of that supposedly missing part, and if it was missing the little man might be able to give him some lead to Karina’s whereabouts—he could have overheard something about her plans, possibly. And if Ackroyd was allowed to talk it might do him a power of good, might release something from his system before they reached Gibraltar. If they reached Gibraltar.

Shaw put out a hand, dropping the oar for a moment, to steady Ackroyd’s shoulder. Ackroyd gave a little cry as his injured arm caught him, and then he turned his attention to Shaw and said, “Eh, lad, but that other woman’s a bitch.” He gave a shuddering kind of sigh as he said that.

“I expect she is,” Shaw agreed, with soothing quiet. He took up the oar again, resumed pulling steadily. He said, in a low voice, “Debbie, can you cope—get him to talk—you know?”

“Leave it to me.” She reached out competently, helped Mr Ackroyd aft over the thwarts—with the boat in danger of capsizing—and pulled him down so that his head was pillowed in her lap. Shaw heard her talking to him gently, soothingly, for some minutes; after a while the physicist began to speak to her, as distinctly as before, though nothing he said made much sense; he seemed, so far as Shaw could gather, to be telling the girl all about his home life. But after a little he began to ramble on about Gibraltar, and that was Debonnair’s chance.

She took it.

She said, “Now look, Mr Ackroyd. Gibraltar’s awfully important to you, isn’t it—I mean, you work there, don’t you?”

Her glance flicked up to Shaw, and he nodded.

Ackroyd said—a little doubtfully, but as though it had got home, “Ah, lass, ah do.”

“Do you . . . remember much about it?”

Still uncertainly, he said, “Ah, it’s a reet nice place.”

Shaw put in, “What about the tunnel, Mr Ackroyd? Do you like working down there?” He leaned forward urgently. “Do you?”

Ackroyd looked up at him and frowned. After a moment something seemed to click and he asked suspiciously, “Now look ’ere, lad, what does tha knaw about toonel? That’s what t’bloody bitch kept on about, but ah didn’t tell her nowt.”

Shaw had caught the unmistakable note of truth. He said carefully, “I don’t know a thing about the tunnel, Mr Ackroyd. It’s not my line, that sort of thing.” He hesitated, then plunged. “But—when you left Gib—did you have anything with you? A sort of—of fitting, anything of that sort? A bit of machinery, I expect it was, from that power unit of yours —AFPU ONE,” he added off-handedly. “D’you remember at all?”

Mr Ackroyd’s face altered, an expression of fear and puzzlement coming over it. After a time he whispered, “Ah had it, yes. Ah took it.”

Well, this was progress of a sort—but not the sort Shaw liked. That technician’s theory was undoubtedly confirmed, but equally certainly Ackroyd hadn’t got that part now. As Shaw, his face strained and anxious, bent forward to go on with his questions, the blank look came back to Ackroyd and Shaw felt desperate. Ackroyd began his dirge again:
Dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da. . . .

“Shut up, for God’s sake!” As soon as Shaw snapped that at Ackroyd he regretted it. Debonnair looked at him warningly, but it was too late. Mr Ackroyd sobbed a little and drooled. Shaw cursed, felt his fingers grip the oars tighter . . . if only he could make the little blighter understand. He said despondently, “Debbie, you have another go. See if he knows what’s happened to that missing part, will you?”

She waited a while until Ackroyd had quietened. Then, almost rocking the skinny frame in her arms like a baby, she began on him—quietly, soothingly, flatteringly at times, pressing always. She went on and on, and in time remembrance began to come back to Mr Ackroyd of something that he knew was desperately important and had seemed just lately to have developed some connexion with women—first that bitch, then an old, wrinkled-up crone somewhere or other, and now this good-looking tit-bit . . . tit-bit! Now then!

Suddenly a new light came into Mr Ackroyd’s eye.

“Eh?” he asked.

It wasn’t much of a reaction, but they hardly dared to speak in case they made him lose it again; after a moment Shaw nodded at the girl, and she went on with the process. Slowly Mr Ackroyd looked away from them both, looked down at his clenched fists. He opened his right hand ... he looked at that hand for a long time without speaking. Then he looked up and said slowly, “Teeth. A little piece of metal, lass, with teeth.”

Shaw hazarded, “Teeth . . . to engage into another moving part, a—a sort of cog?”

“Ay, lad, that’s reet, that is. Teeth.” Ackroyd held up his hand. Across the palm, just visible in the moonlight, Shaw noticed a line of indentations, little red pits and bumps. Ackroyd went on, “Ah had that, ah had. Yes. Ah ’ad it all the while.” There was a tearful, upset note in his voice now. “Mind, ah never told that bitch a bloody thing, not a bloody thing. And ah ’oong on to that piece of the mechanism. See, ah knew it were important, very important. And ah had it.

And ah never said one word, not the ’ole time, ah didn’t.”

“Good man.” Somehow Shaw believed this unlikely-looking little hero whom Gibraltar knew as a finicky, standoffish, nervy type who ran a mile at a loud noise. He asked gently, “Look, Mr Ackroyd, if it’s important we ought to get it back, oughtn’t we? I mean—”

“Course we ought . . . why ever did I let it go?” Mr Ackroyd’s voice was panicky now; a moment later, however, it faded away again, drifted off as he developed a spasmodic facial twitch which Shaw found painful to watch; drifted off, when Ackroyd spoke again, into nonsense. Shaw clenched his hands, a feeling of utter desperation coming over him again. Gibraltar was waiting ... he shook Ackroyd a little, tried to stop the meaningless meander about some one called Ernie Spinner in Liverpool.

In the end he succeeded. Ackroyd stopped. He said slackly, “Ah’ve joost remembered where that part is, lad.”

He grinned up at Shaw. Shaw could have sworn he saw a wink on the drawn white face.

He asked quickly, “Yes, old chap? Where?”

Mr Ackroyd gave a tired chuckle, put his hand to his mouth as though about to say something confidential. Shaw felt his scalp tingle, felt the rising irritation ... at any moment Ackroyd might forget again. Ackroyd said:

“Roody woman rammed it down ’er tits.”

There was a brief pause, then a sudden, irrepressible giggle from Debonnair. “Ah don’t knaw, ah’m sure, but ah’d have said it’d be roody uncomfortable down there. Prickly, like.”

Shaw let out a long sigh, and heard Debonnair still giggling away in the stem. There was a tired smile on his lips as he said wearily, “Well, now we know, we’re not much for’arder—not until we find Karina. And then it probably won’t be down her—er—”

“Exactly,” agreed Debonnair primly.

Main Street was quiet at this early-morning hour just past midnight, except for a few drunks and one or two ladies of easy virtue hanging about, from force of habit, round the entrances to night-clubs, and the M.P.’s, and the Naval Patrol with their measured tread and the blancoed belts and gaiters moving solemnly along from the Picket House, and the infantrymen stationed by their trucks. Grim-faced, sunburnt men behind the steering-wheels, smoking the cigarettes which they—some of them—hurriedly squeezed out in their fingers as the Governor came round.

Hammersley thought bitterly: Do they really think I’m going to have their names taken for smoking at a time like this, when it could be about the last packet of Players or Woods they’ll ever open in their lives?

Then he knew he had to shake himself—and the men— out of such thoughts; a time like this was one of the times when discipline was needed more than ever, the very time it justified itself. He didn’t worry about those men, the older ones, who’d had the common sense to douse their dog-ends when they saw him—that was in itself an act of respect, an acknowledgment of basic and ingrained discipline. Those men would be all right. But when a group of young soldiers carried on smoking as he went past, and stared at him superciliously as much as to say: Go on, you bastard, you just try choking us off now and see what happens, mate . . . then Hammersley went into action.

He roared, “Company Commander!”

A sergeant came forward at the rush, halted, saluted. “Beg pardon, sir, the officer’s gone along—”

“Very well, Sergeant, you’ll do. Once you’ve done your buttons up, that is.” His voice was sharp, his face pugnacious. The N.C.O. fumbled at his buttons. “Those men.” Hammersley pointed with his cane. “Why are they smoking?”

The sergeant stared woodenly into space. “Sorry, sir. I reckon they feel . . . well . . . what’s it matter, kind of, sir.”

“I see.” Hammersley looked at him, felt years older again. “And do you feel like that too, Sergeant?”

“Well, sir.” The man swallowed. A biggish Adam’s-apple wobbled uncertainly in a long brown throat. “Yessir. I do, sir.”

“All right.” Hammersley climbed out of the staff car. He raised his voice deliberately, so that the men could hear. He said, “In that case I’ll see you’re broken to the ranks. . . . If you can’t take charge you’re not fit to wear your chevrons. What’s your name?”