a little muscle at you you broadcast it.’ I waved down his explanations. ‘Go and get your equipment,’ I said.
Giorgio made some quiet remarks about Clive’s bright-green undersea gear, but it was much more professional than I feared it might be. As for Charlotte, I’d never seen her before, but there were two things about her one could never forget. However, she set to work in the kitchen in a way that surprised me. They were both dying to prove how efficient and tough they were.
After breakfast we had a conference. Joe spread the linen Admiralty charts across the table and showed us the way the U-boat was lying. The echo-sounder charts were strips of electrolytic paper about seven inches wide. Down each was a thick black uneven band (the ocean floor) and a thin black uneven band, separated by a quarter-inch of white. The thinner of the two bands was fish or objects lying along the ocean floor. On one chart a shape could be interpreted. I was prepared to take an expert’s word that it resembled a U-boat.
According to Singleton, Naval Intelligence were very keen to get the log of the U-boat as it was of a new type about which they had very little information. I asked Giorgio and Joe what the chances were.
Joe said, ‘If the log wasn’t dumped overboard before the sub. sank, it’s easy.’
‘You know where to find the log book? I can ask London about stowage procedures.’
Giorgio said, ‘It will not, I think, prove necessary. I have encountered some experience of the life aboard the German craft.’ We exchanged thin grins.
‘And if they did jettison it?’
‘In that case it depends upon: one,’ Giorgio tapped his index finger, ‘how far the boat traversed between the jettison and sinking, and two, if the Kelvin Hughes apparatus will encounter such a small flat objective which will likely submerge into the mud, and three,’ the gold ring on his finger flashed in the bright sunlight, ‘if the boat has been moved much distance by means of the underwater currents which I suspect are strong.’
After that Giorgio asked Joe about tidal movement at surface, absolute slack-water times and slack-water duration, and they discussed ways of setting out a diving timetable in order to use those facts to advantage.
Charlotte brought in a large tin pot of coffee and a plate of black figs. She said, ‘After I’ve drunk my coffee I’ll go and do the bedroom.’ There was a moment or two in which we were all alone with our thoughts.
There was no point in getting the boat into position so late in the day. I told everyone to relax that afternoon, we’d have another briefing that night and go out on the morning tide for a reconnaissance.
Dawlish had cleverly realized that the way to prevent someone deserting from a situation was to put him in charge of it.
The sea was kicking idly at the beach that Friday afternoon. Charlotte was nearly inside a white bathing suit, Giorgio was doing handstands that had her oo-ing and clapping her brittle little hands together, and Singleton was jumping in and out of the water like a yo-yo. I told Giorgio to swim out to sea with Singleton and let me know what sort of endurance he had.
‘Go out about two hundred and fifty yards and come in again. Don’t hurry him, but let him know you’re watching him.’
‘Yes, it is understood,’ said Giorgio, and went to tell Singleton.
I watched them run across the soft damp sand lengthening the curved imprints that marry space and time in huge dotted arabesques. Then Joe talked about the echo-sounder.
‘I put the sounder in when we first got a whisper of this job three – no, nearly four – weeks ago; we’ve used it for fishing ever since. It’s deadly efficient and some of the fishermen have been talking about buying them for themselves.’
‘Isn’t there a possibility that they’ll follow us out to locate the fish?’
‘No, I disconnected it yesterday and I told the old man to say it had gone wrong.’ He paused, carefully designing a sentence that wouldn’t sound impertinent. ‘Why doesn’t London do this operation through official channels – and get local cooperation?’
‘The whole thing stinks, Joe. To tell you the truth, I have an awful feeling that we are sitting out here bleating like a goat in a tiger trap. That message Singleton brought about the log book. It doesn’t ring true. The only department still interested in Nazi U-boats is the Historical Department. How could it be of importance to a modern intelligence department?’ I told Joe about my being followed by the two cars, and how one of them belonged to Henry Smith, the Cabinet Minister. I told him about Butcher, Smith’s dirty-work man who had sold us the ice-melting documents. I told him that I thought it all connected up. ‘And what about this Giorgio character?’ I finished. ‘Why does he have to meet me at a weird little place like Los Palacios?’
‘He’s been doing a job underwater inside a gasometer in Seville.’
‘Where is his equipment?’ I said immediately.
‘He leaves a set there,’ Joe said. ‘It’s a contract job. He really is O.K.; he’s been checked and re-checked, but there is an American living here in the village that I’m not at all sure about …’
As he said it Giorgio and Singleton came out of the water. Giorgio was tanned dark-brown and moving like he’d just come out of the shower. He brushed his chest as though still wearing his silver tie. Singleton had his mouth open and was gulping down deep draughts of air, throwing his head back and running an open hand through his long fair hair. They walked slowly up to where Joe and I were sitting and waited for words of praise.
‘How do you feel, Singleton?’ I asked.
His white chest heaved. ‘O.K., sir … absolutely … first rate, sir.’
‘Then I want you to go out half as far – but swim underwater there and back. Break surface only when you have to, that means I don’t want a train of foam and bubbles. If you have any difficulties tell Giorgio immediately. I’m not recruiting dead heroes, I prefer live cowards. And Giorgio, stay close.’
They both nodded. ‘Joe and I are going upstairs to watch you and count the number of times you come up for air. And one more thing, Singleton, you’re not on parade, so try to look like an English tourist …’ They turned back towards the sea … ‘that is to say miserable,’ I shouted after them.
‘Do you think you’re being a little hard on Singleton, sir?’ Joe asked. We walked up the whitewashed steps to the patio.
‘Probably,’ I said. ‘He reminds me of people who sing “There’s a hole in my bucket” to a guitar at Chelsea parties.’
We went on in silence and then Joe said, ‘You may be worrying for nothing, sir. It might be as easy and straightforward as it seems.’
I didn’t think so.
The next great green Atlantic wave sucked the wooden boat out of the surf. The old fisherman used the oars to keep it at right angles to the beach. Joe tugged the lanyard on the outboard motor. Another wave held us high in its open palm and hesitated before dashing us back on the sand. I was high in the prow and Joe was below me in the steeply angled boat. He flung his arm out and I heard the splutter of the motor like a sewing machine. The water foamed at the stern and we headed out into the Atlantic as the screw bit the sea.
The fisherman was a walnut-faced man of eighty. He flashed his brown teeth at me as I helped him ship the oars, and scuttled over to the echo-sounder to reconnect it. From the big picnic hampers Giorgio and Singleton produced clear polythene bags, removed the folded rubber suits, and began to pull them on. We chugged westward.
The green skirt of the sea dashed its frilly petticoats at the yellow rocks. Each rock has its dangers and its name – ‘the Castle’, ‘the Pig’, and the long stretches of vertical strata called the