Майкл Ридпат - Launch Code

‘They’d just got engaged!’ said Toby. ‘That would be a strange time to kill your boyfriend. Plus, she’s pregnant, the poor woman.’ Toby winced as he thought of Sam’s girlfriend — Jazz was her name, he remembered. Her life together with Sam shattered. A baby to bring up by herself, without the man who had helped make it.

‘OK.’ Lars realized he had gone too far with the girlfriend, but he wasn’t going to give up entirely. ‘Perhaps it was a serial killer. You have those in England, right?’

‘I haven’t read of any other murders like that around here.’

‘They’ve got to start somewhere.’

Lars was floundering, which made Toby even more convinced that Sam’s murder was related to the submarine. And then there was Alice. ‘Did the police mention Alice?’

‘You mean her seeing Sam last night? Yes, they did. I didn’t know anything about it; I thought she had gone to the grocery store.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ said Toby.

‘So you don’t know what she spoke to Sam about?’ Lars said. ‘Did she tell you?’

‘No. But my guess is it’s about what happened on that submarine.’

‘Weird she won’t tell you?’ Lars said. Toby thought it was weird, but he didn’t like Lars’s question, and so he didn’t answer it.

It was quiet on the dyke. Back inland, a volley of distant shotguns popped. Down on the mud flats a curlew cried, and a stand of tall brown bulrushes whispered in the breeze as they bowed and curtsied to the ditch running along the side of the path. A squadron of twenty or so geese honked gently as they patrolled overhead in an elegant V formation.

A lonely figure marched towards them on the raised path, carrying a tripod on his shoulder: a moustachioed birdwatcher, who exchanged nods and grunts with them as they eventually passed each other.

‘Why did you come over to England, Lars?’ Toby asked.

‘To see my old friend, Bill. I told you.’

‘But why now? Did it have something to do with Sam Bowen? You said he had visited you in America?’

Lars looked for a moment that he was about to claim it was another coincidence, but he thought better of it. ‘It’s true I did want to see Bill again. But it’s also true that Sam’s questions made me think of our time in the Navy together.’

‘Is what he said accurate?’ Toby asked. ‘About the order to launch your missiles?’

‘Hey. You heard Bill. It’s Classified.’

‘But is he on the right track?’

‘Yeah. He’s on the right track.’

Toby ran through the conversation with Sam in his mind. ‘Sam said something about how it was impossible for him to talk to the captain of the submarine. It sounded like the captain was dead.’

‘He is,’ said Lars.

‘Was that related to the near launch?’

Lars hesitated before replying. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Because I wondered if that was how Bill “persuaded” the captain to change his mind. By killing him. I don’t know how nuclear submarines work, but presumably the captain has to authorize a launch, and if he’s dead...’

‘You’re just guessing,’ said Lars, avoiding Toby’s eye.

‘I am, but am I right?’

‘Toby. You’re fishing and I’m not going to bite. I’m just not going to. You got that?’

‘All right,’ said Toby. ‘I’ve got it.’ He was just guessing, but he was pretty sure he was guessing correctly.

They walked on.

‘Do you mind if I ask you what it was like?’ Toby asked. ‘To know you had come so close to blowing up the world?’

‘No, that’s OK,’ said Lars. ‘It kind of screws you up, is the truth. It screwed up all of us. All of us on the submarine. Especially those of us who were involved in the argument whether to launch: me, Bill, the XO. I mean, if it had gone the other way...’

‘But it didn’t.’

‘No, it didn’t. And that’s a good thing, and you would think that would be enough. You’d think we could just forget it and get on with our lives. But...’ Lars took a deep breath. ‘We can’t.’

Toby waited to see whether Lars would volunteer more, but he had fallen silent.

They had reached the sand dunes, and cut through them on a twisting path of wooden boards to the narrow beach. The tide was high, and they could only see fifty yards or so out to sea, before the grey water merged into white fog. The air was damp and salty.

The beach was empty, save for a green fibreglass boat, little more than a tub, that was hauled up to the edge of the sand against the dunes a few hundred yards away.

Out here, they were quite alone, out of sight of the village or even the marsh. Just sand and sea merging into the milky sky.

‘There must be more to it than Bill let on,’ said Toby. ‘You wouldn’t have come all this way if there wasn’t more.’

Lars glanced at Toby and then stared out into the fog.

‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘There’s more to it. A lot more.’

Alice was glad that when she was finally let out of the interview with the detective inspector, Toby was nowhere to be seen. She needed some time by herself. She needed to think.

She hurried upstairs to their bedroom and shut the door firmly behind her. She picked up her iPad, stared at one of the half dozen draft documents she was supposed to be working on, and then tossed it on to the bed. Who was she kidding?

She looked around the room, her room. It was old: the floor was uneven, sloping upwards on one side, toward the window. She had been a student when her parents had bought the place, and scraps of her childhood had survived in that room: in the small bookshelf, her complete set of Harry Potter supported Virginia Woolf on one side and The Master and Margarita on the other. A poster from a 2010 Taylor Swift concert faced the old photograph of the loggers on the Susquehanna that had followed her from bedroom to bedroom all over the world.

She moved over to the window and gazed out at the marsh. Two figures and a dog were making their way along the dyke and had nearly reached the dunes. That must be Toby, Rickover and someone else: it looked like Uncle Lars.

She hoped Toby would be away for a while. She felt badly about snapping at him earlier when he had asked her about seeing Sam. It had been a fair question. It was going to be hard to face him, but she would have to. She needed to rely on him, to trust him to stick with her even though she had lied to him.

She had as good as lied to the police as well; she certainly hadn’t told them the whole truth.

What the hell should she do now?

She couldn’t ask her dad.

She wished her mother was still around. She would know. Her mother was the wisest person Alice had met. Alice liked to think that a lot of that wisdom had rubbed off on her, her daughter.

They had been very close. Mom had been close to all the daughters, but in different ways. Alice was the oldest, and the one that their mother had relied on most, especially in those final months. It didn’t seem so at the time, but in fact it had been fortunate that Mom had been diagnosed just as Alice was in her final months at law school. She had still managed to pass her exams, and the timing meant she could fly over to England right afterwards to spend the last months of her mother’s life with her while she studied for the New York bar. There were only three of these: the cancer had been advanced when it was diagnosed.

Alice had helped her father look after her mother and had supported him in his dark moments. She had comforted her sisters: Brooke was at graduate school in Chicago, Megan was a sophomore at college and Maya still at her private girls’ school in London. She had spent a lot of time with her mother, most of it up here in Barnholt, walking with her while she could still walk, reading to her. And talking to her.