Майкл Ридпат - Launch Code

They unfolded themselves from the car and stretched. The air cut into Toby’s face, cold and bracing after the fug of the car, tinged with salt, a faint smell of marsh and the smoke from the fire inside. He opened the boot.

‘Do you mind if we leave my bags in the trunk for now?’ said Megan. ‘Until I’ve had a chance to talk with Dad.’

Bill Guth met them as they approached the front door with a broad grin. He hugged his two daughters and then Toby. Although in his sixties, he was still trim, a little over six feet, with thick grey hair and kind, shrewd brown eyes.

A high-speed yelping bundle hurled itself past his legs and leaped up at Alice first, then Toby.

‘Hi, Rickover!’ said Alice, grabbing the fox terrier’s ears. ‘How are you, Ricky boy?’

Toby reached down too, and Rickover greeted him eagerly, licking his fingers. Toby and Rickover had a deal, but the dog would have to wait for a more private moment.

‘Sorry you had to come up so early,’ Alice’s father said. ‘I’ve gotten the turkey out of the refrigerator, Alice, but the rest is up to you.’ He had a deep, pleasant voice, with a rich American accent he had preserved during his decades away.

‘Did you have trouble finding one?’ Alice asked.

‘Some. You’d think it would be easy, this county is crawling with them, but it’s the old story, they’re all being grown for Christmas. I called the butcher in Burnham Market two weeks ago and he promised me one.’

‘OK,’ said Alice. ‘I’ll get to work.’ Bill was actually a pretty good cook, but a major Thanksgiving dinner was beyond him, and Alice was happy to do it. ‘You can help me, Dad. Do you mind if Toby takes a shower? He kinda needs one.’

Bill raised his eyebrows in mild disapproval — Toby thought more of his daughter than his son-in-law.

‘Or a bath?’ said Toby hopefully. Their flat in London only had a shower, and he remembered from previous visits a lovely big cast-iron bathtub in the main bathroom upstairs.

‘Sure,’ said Bill. ‘You know the way. Have you got any more bags in the car? I can go get them.’

Alice turned to her sister and raised her eyebrows.

‘Dad?’ said Megan. ‘I’ve got a little favour to ask you.’

The bath was great. Toby could extend his six-foot-long body, the water was hot, the taps were big and silver and powerful and it was placed right under a window with a view of the pale-blue Norfolk sky, framed by the dead leaves of a climbing rose knocking gently on the glass pane in the breeze.

He was going to enjoy the weekend.

Toby was an only child. His mother was a nurse in a GP’s surgery in North London. Toby hadn’t seen his own father for six years; he was a failed property developer who now lived in the Algarve with a third wife from Leicester who was only five years older than Toby himself. Toby was close to his mother, and saw her regularly, but since his grandparents had died the two of them didn’t really seem like a family, more a partnership.

Whereas the Guth family was a real family. And a family that was happy to include him.

It was one of the many reasons he was glad to have married Alice.

‘You took your time,’ she said when Toby eventually appeared in the kitchen. Bill was sitting at the table with a mug of coffee. Megan was nowhere to be seen.

It occurred to Toby, not for the first time, that Alice was replacing her mother at the centre of the family, and that Bill was content to let her do it. ‘Replacing’ wasn’t exactly the right word. And it certainly wasn’t ‘displacing’. It was more that Alice was taking on her mother’s tasks, her obligations, in memory of her. Honouring her. Toby had the impression that Alice and her father had developed an unspoken ritual, which Alice was happy to follow.

‘How’s it going?’ Toby asked her, kissing the top of her head as she bent over a mixing bowl.

‘Just making the stuffing. The turkey should go in in about twenty minutes.’

‘I was just telling Alice,’ Bill said. ‘There’s a guy coming to see me from Newcastle at four this afternoon. A historian. Wants to talk to me about the Navy in the 1980s.’

Toby knew that Bill had served on nuclear submarines before he and Alice’s mother had married.

‘Is that stuff still secret?’ Toby asked.

‘Most of it. I’ve told him there’s a limit to what I can say, but he still wants to meet me. Would you like to sit in on it?’

‘You should,’ said Alice. She had a small smile of pleasure on her face. ‘Dad can’t talk about it, but the historian probably can. I think you’ll find it interesting. I’d like to be there myself, but this turkey needs my attention.’

Toby felt like he was being cut into a family secret. He liked that. ‘All right, thanks.’

‘You can report back,’ said Alice. ‘Tell me all about it.’

‘What about me?’ said a voice at the door. It was Megan. ‘Can I be there too?’

Toby felt a slight pause from both Alice and Bill. An unsaid shared pause of disapproval.

Megan stared at her father and smiled. A smile of defiance. A what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it? smile.

‘Sure,’ said Bill slowly. ‘That would be great.’

Megan’s smile gained a note of triumph and she left the kitchen.

The historian’s name was Sam Bowen. He was small, round and soft, with short spiky black hair, intelligent eyes behind black-framed glasses, and a Brummie accent. He was about Toby’s age, maybe a couple of years older.

Toby took an instant liking to him, as did Bill, although Toby could sense a wariness on the part of his father-in-law, and he wasn’t exactly sure why.

Bill had made a cafetière of coffee and he, Sam, Toby and Megan all sat in the living room. It was a bright, pretty room, even in the late afternoon gloom, its yellow walls adorned with pictures of a combination of the Norfolk coast and various mismatched paintings Bill and his wife had picked up over the years. A thick oak beam bisected the ceiling, an inch above head height, pockmarked with age, probably supporting the cast-iron bath above. Two logs glowed in the fireplace. Family photos were scattered about the room: the Guth chin on display on daughters at various ages and sizes, as it was on Alice’s mother, smiling benignly on them all. That’s where they had got it; not a Guth chin originally after all.

Outside, the marsh brooded, settling itself for the evening.

‘Well, thank you for seeing me, Lieutenant Guth—’ the historian began, pulling a notebook out of the backpack he had laid beside his armchair.

‘Bill. Call me Bill.’ Bill’s deep voice was welcoming.

‘Bill.’ Sam smiled. ‘As I told you on the phone, I published a book last year on the Cuban missile crisis.’

‘Yeah, I read a review of it,’ said Bill. ‘ No Cigar . Nice title.’

‘Thank you. I’m following it up with a book about the near nuclear-missile launches during the Cold War. All those times when the system would have started a nuclear war if humans hadn’t overridden it.’

‘All those times? How many were there?’ Bill asked.

‘About a dozen that we know of. And there will have been many more that are still secret.’

Bill nodded.

‘So that’s why I want to ask you about your last patrol aboard the USS Alexander Hamilton in 1983.’

Toby’s interest quickened. He could see where this was going.

‘And that’s why I can’t tell you very much about it,’ said Bill, apologetically. ‘Operations were top secret then, and they are still top secret now. I checked yesterday after you called me.’

There was a look of mild disappointment on Sam’s face, but he had clearly expected Bill’s response.