ambulance he could see was turned over on its side further down the street.
‘No, listen,’ Thorn said urgently, reaching out to take hold of Trave’s bare arm. ‘You’ve got to find out what Seaforth’s planning. You have to. Heydrich-’
‘Don’t worry about that now,’ said Trave, interrupting. ‘We can talk about it later when you’re feeling better.’
‘No, I don’t know if there’ll be a later,’ said Thorn, digging his fingers into Trave’s wrist. His tautened features showed how much even this small physical effort was costing him. ‘Find his mother. Maybe she’ll know something. There’s a town-’ He stopped in mid-sentence, closing his eyes, and Trave thought for a moment he was gone. The unbloodied side of Thorn’s face had a deathly white pallor, and his breathing seemed to have stopped. But then, just as Trave was about to try to resuscitate him, Thorn spoke again. ‘Langholm,’ he said, pronouncing each syllable separately, as if determined to get it right. ‘It’s just the other side of the border. Maybe she’s still there. Promise me …’, he said, looking imploringly up at Trave.
But Trave was spared the need for a response. An ambulance — a converted greengrocer’s van — came to a screeching halt beside where Trave was kneeling and the driver jumped out — a determined-looking man of about Trave’s age wearing an ill-fitting tin hat with SP for ‘stretcher party’ stencilled on the front in capital letters. Trave could see that the rest of the crew were heading over to the devastation on the other side of the road.
‘Let’s have a look,’ he said, taking Trave’s place beside Thorn, who appeared now to be unconscious. He examined Thorn quickly and then cut away the sleeves of Thorn’s jacket and shirt with a pair of sharp scissors and injected his arm with a syringe. Trave assumed it was morphine.
‘Is he going to be all right?’ Trave asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said the medic, who was now busy writing on a tag that he’d taken from his pocket. ‘He’s hurt his shoulder, although I can’t tell if it’s a break, and he’s got some nasty shrapnel injuries around his right eye. Maybe there’s more, but that’ll have to wait for the hospital.’
‘Which one?’ asked Trave.
‘St Stephen’s — over the river,’ said the medic as he tied the label around Thorn’s ankle. There was a capital M written on it and an X with a question mark. Trave had been at enough incidents before this one to know what the letters stood for: M for morphine and the X? for the possibility of internal injuries.
‘Come on, help me with this,’ said the medic, opening the back of the van and taking out a stretcher. ‘You’re lucky you were in the park, you know. Word is the mine exploded on the other side of that building,’ he said, pointing over towards the ruins of Gloucester Mansions. ‘You’d both have been goners if it had gone off in front.’
Trave swallowed and his hands shook as he helped lift the now comatose Thorn onto the stretcher and carry him to the back of the van. He realized he’d been saved from extinction by nothing more significant than the strength of a south-westerly wind that had happened to be blowing just hard enough and in just the right direction to take the mine’s silk parachute over the roof of Gloucester Mansions before it fell to the ground and exploded. His survival was pure chance, and the poor devils who had died were the victims of an entirely random harvest.
There was nothing more Trave could do to help Thorn. So, holding his shirtsleeve mask over his face, he crossed Prince of Wales Drive to get a closer look at the smoking ruins of Gloucester Mansions and the destruction in the narrow streets beyond. He moved carefully, picking his way around an abandoned fire engine smouldering in the road with its rubber tyres entirely melted. Shattered glass lay everywhere like dirty drifts of pack ice.
The larger fires seemed to be coming under control, but here and there flames kept springing up, and residents were helping the firemen to put them out, using sand and stirrup pumps. Many of the firemen looked like ghosts with their faces covered in plaster dust from the falling walls and ceilings and their eyes red from the smoke. Trave had to tread carefully to avoid tripping over their tangled, twisting hoses that lay interwoven with the dust and debris, snaking in all directions like the entrails of some gigantic disembowelled monster. In some places he used the fallen masonry as stepping-stones to enable him to keep moving forward. He needed to keep going; he thought he would go mad if he stayed standing still.
He turned into a street of terrace houses that had felt the full force of the blast. Some were still standing, unlike Gloucester Mansions, but none had been left undamaged. It was as if a gigantic tin-opener had wrenched them open, revealing their broken contents to an indifferent world. Trave thought of all the years of hard work and saving, all the scrubbing, and all the pride that had gone into these homes that were now no better than scrap heaps, fit only for the bulldozer.
He was filled with a sudden, intense hatred for the country that had perpetrated this wanton destruction. Not just for Germany and its rulers, but for the German people as well. They had elected Hitler to power; they were responsible for the crimes he was committing against innocent civilians. Now Trave understood the men who had rushed towards the descending parachute, burning with murderous rage. He felt just the same. He wanted revenge.
But there was no outlet for his anger. The enemy planes had disappeared from the sky, and there was nothing to be done. God had turned His back on the world, and this was the end of days. The last war had been a dress rehearsal; this was the real thing. Here among the smouldering ruins, under the smoking red-black sky, amidst the apocalyptic desolation, the young policeman gave way to despair.
And it was then that he saw it. A hand sticking up disembodied out of a pile of broken masonry where there once had been a house. He went over immediately without thinking, knelt down, reached out, and took hold. The hand was warm and he knew straight away that the person below was still alive, buried under the rubble on which he was standing. Not just alive but conscious too — he could feel the fingers wrapping themselves around his. It felt like a woman’s hand. There were no rings on the fingers.
He forced himself to let go and began scrabbling madly with his hands in the dirt, trying to dig down into the wreckage. But he made no progress. He’d come up against two heavy blocks of masonry lying side by side and he couldn’t move them, however hard he tried. The hand was sticking up between them; the rest of the woman’s body had to be lying trapped underneath. Without help there was nothing he could do to get her free.
And there was no one in sight who could help. Further down the street, a few people were picking through what remained of their homes, but Trave didn’t bother calling out to them. He knew that even if they came, it would make no difference. Heavy lifting equipment would be needed to move the slabs that were pinning the woman down.
Trave thought of leaving, going in search of professional assistance, but he knew it would never arrive in time. So he sat down in the dust instead and once again took hold of the hand. He squeezed it gently and felt an answering response, and then he remained where he was, summoning all the love in his soul, trying to communicate it through the medium of touch to the invisible dying woman by his side.
He had no idea how long his vigil lasted, except that it was dark when the hand held his hard for a moment and then relaxed, letting go. She was gone. He could feel it. She didn’t need him any more. He wondered who she was, what her life had been, and realized that he would never know. Yet he felt certain that he had learnt more in the preceding hour than he had done in all his life before he entered the ruined street. And until his dying day, he never forgot the feel of the woman’s hand in his and the knowledge it brought of the transcendent power of human love in the face of certain death.
CHAPTER 4
Earlier the same evening, Seaforth sat alone in the living room of his Chelsea apartment, twirling the stem of a glass of dry white wine between his fingers. From his carefully positioned armchair, he had a beautiful view not only over the canopy of the plane trees in Cadogan Square below, but east too over the rooftops towards the Palace of Westminster, where Churchill was no doubt meeting his ministers, plotting his next move in the war against Germany. A war he was going to lose because he now had less than a week to live. Seaforth knew he might be being optimistic about the timing. The journey of the Portuguese diplomatic bag from Lisbon to the embassy in London could take anywhere from several days to more than a week depending on interruptions to air and shipping routes caused by the war, but he had no doubt that he would receive the go-ahead from Berlin by the end of the month and that Heydrich would provide him with sufficiently appetizing intelligence to ensure another summons to the Prime Minister’s presence.
