the same movement, he took the German pistol out of his pocket and pushed it hard against the side of her handsome head. But still Rocard refused to give way, even when Cade let go of the woman’s arm and used his free hand to pull back the hammer of the gun.
Quick movement and sudden stillness. This was how Ritter remembered it all afterward. The silence in the trees shattered by the sudden rat-a-tat-tat of the machine guns. And now the angry foreign words, followed by the colonel’s seizure of the woman, seemed to leave them all immobilised, frozen in a tableau of fear.
It was the dog that broke the standoff. It must have been barking for some time, tied up somewhere inside the house, and Ritter was surprised that he hadn’t heard it before. All his attention must have been focused on the scene in the doorway. It was a black mongrel dog almost as big as a Labrador, and it came at them suddenly, its lip curled back over its yellow teeth. But it never got to bite anyone. The colonel had wonderfully quick reactions back then, and he pulled the gun down from the Frenchwoman’s ear and killed the animal with a single bullet.
It was funny that it was the dead dog, and not the threat to his wife, that cracked the Frenchman’s resolve. Or perhaps it was the killing of the dog that made him believe that the colonel would really kill his wife. Whatever the truth, they did not need to do any more. Rocard agreed to give the colonel what he wanted.
“He’s going to get something for me, from inside the house,” said the colonel to Ritter. “You go with him, Reg, and watch what he does. Check he hasn’t got a gun, and make sure he doesn’t get one while he’s in there.”
The Frenchman didn’t react when Ritter patted him down. He just kept his eyes fixed on his wife and on the gun that the colonel had brought back up to the side of her head straight after he’d killed the dog. Rocard had nothing in his pockets. Not even a penknife. But Ritter didn’t trust him, and he kept close behind when the Frenchman went back into the house, pressing the muzzle of his gun into Rocard’s back, feeling out the concave hollow between his shoulder blades.
It was cool inside. Crossing the hall, Rocard started up a narrow staircase in the corner and Ritter, following behind, found himself stepping from light into semidarkness and back, again and again, as they crossed pools of evening sunlight let in by the small rectangular windows set high in the walls of the house. In the rooms on either side Ritter could see evidence of the Germans’ recent occupation-a photograph of the Fuhrer hanging slightly askew on a whitewashed wall, a trestle bed lying overturned on its side, and papers, both handwritten and typed, strewn about everywhere. On one of the desks Ritter noticed the remains of someone’s supper-a crust of black bread and a half-eaten German sausage. The man who’d been eating it only an hour before was now lying in a pool of blood halfway down the drive, baking in the last of the sun. The thought made Ritter smile. Life was a funny thing sometimes.
They carried on up the stairs to a room at the very top. It was almost an attic, and Ritter had to half stoop to get through the door. This was evidently where Rocard and his wife slept-the only place left to them after the house was occupied, and the bed was the main piece of furniture. It was old and ornate, with elaborate carving on its four posters, but it had lost its canopy and the coarse army-issue blankets covering it were out of keeping with its grand design. It took all Rocard’s strength to move it away from the wall, but he didn’t ask for any help, and he didn’t try to hide what he was doing when he pulled up one of the rough floorboards that he had exposed. Underneath, Ritter saw over the Frenchman’s shoulder that the hollow space contained an old thin book in a heavy leather binding. Wasting no time, he seized the book out of Rocard’s hands.
On the way back down, the Frenchman remained compliant until they turned a corner of the stairs and started down the final flight into the hall. Then, suddenly, there was an outbreak of shouting from beyond the entrance to the living room, and a second later Ritter caught sight of Carson framed in the doorway, and below and to the side of him an old man half shouting, half kneeling on the floor. He looked to be in his seventies, but he could have been older. Time seemed to have been kind to him up until now. He’d kept his teeth, and his hair hadn’t fallen out but had instead turned bright white with age. Now, however, Carson was using it to half drag, half pull him toward the front door. Halfway across the flagstones, Carson noticed Ritter on the stairs and laughed.
“Here’s the old sod that let the dog out,” he shouted to make himself heard above the old man’s cries of pain. “The colonel saw him peeping out the window and sent me in to bring him out. On all fours was my idea. Just like his fucking dog.”
Carson’s antics enraged the Frenchman. Seeing his old servant reduced to a howling animal, he started forward down the stairs, and Ritter had to drop the book and seize Rocard by the collar of his shirt to pull him back. At the same time he thrust the barrel of the gun hard into the small of Rocard’s back, and now the Frenchman stood almost doubled up with pain at the foot of the stairs, powerless to help his old servant as Carson dragged him out of the house, administering several kicks to the old man’s back and ribcage before he dumped him on the ground at the colonel’s feet, beside the dead dog.
“He was hiding behind one of the big heavy curtains in there,” said Carson, pointing back at the house. “And it was him that let the dog out. I found him with this bit of rope in his hands. Why don’t we use it to string him up? What do you say, Colonel? Let’s teach these Frenchies a lesson.”
“That won’t be necessary, Corporal,” said the colonel acidly. Carson was joking, but he had no time now for the man’s petty sadism. All his attention was focused on Ritter and the Frenchman. “Did you get it, Reg?” he asked. “Show me what you got.”
“Just this old book. He had it under the floorboards,” said Ritter, handing over the thin leather-bound volume that he had seized from the Frenchman up in the attic. “Is that what you wanted?”
The colonel didn’t reply. His hands were shaking as he took the book from Ritter and let go of the Frenchman’s wife. She immediately went over to the old servant and raised him unsteadily to his feet. He couldn’t stand unsupported, but Carson did nothing to help her. He was still trying to control his laughter.
The colonel turned the pages quickly but carefully, ignoring the dust that flew up into his eyes.
“It’s the codex, all right,” he said as if to himself. “From the moment I read that letter in Rome, I knew it was here. Here all the time.”
“Colonel,” interrupted Ritter. They needed to decide what they were going to do with these people before someone from the regiment came looking for them.
“Colonel, it’s getting late,” he tried again a moment later.
This time Cade looked up from the book. “Where did you say it was, Reg?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard Ritter’s question.
“In a hollow space under one of the floorboards in their bedroom,” said Ritter.
“Was there anything else in there? In the space?”
“No. I checked.”
Still, the colonel seemed dissatisfied. He closed the book and began speaking to the Frenchman in his own language again. Quickly. Question after question. Ritter could understand almost nothing of what was being said, but it was obvious that the colonel was getting angry. He kept repeating a word that sounded like roi or croix in a voice that demanded a response, but it was a one-way conversation. The Frenchman raised his hands several times in a gesture that seemed to imply that he didn’t understand what the colonel was talking about, and then after a while he just looked away.
Suddenly the colonel took hold of the woman again, squeezing her wrist and saying that same word over and over again. Croix or roi. Roi was a king, and Ritter didn’t know what a king had to do with it, but perhaps that wasn’t the word. The woman struggled, and Ritter was about to go over to help restrain her, when she threw her head back and spat at the colonel full in his face. It made him drop the book, and he used his freed hand to slap her hard across both cheeks. They were hard blows and she fell to the ground, weeping.
“We’ve got to decide what to do, Colonel,” said Ritter. He felt worried now. The sun had almost set and they needed to stay in radio contact with the camp. The colonel seemed to be getting nowhere with the Frenchies.
“All right, Reg, I know that,” said the colonel. “It’s just that they know more than they’re saying. A little bit longer and I can get it out of them. I can feel it. Help me take them over to the church. We can work on them in there. And you, Carson, come up there with us and keep a lookout. We won’t be long.”
PART ONE
