Dryden forced himself to stand, dragging his feet on the cellar floor as he paced in front of her.
‘But you were in Italy. Why come to England?’
She shook her head, listening, calculating. ‘Liz – at the hospital – sent me a cutting from the local paper. You wrote it. About the body in the tunnel. She thought I would be interested, and I was.’
She moved her hand swiftly to the gun and put it quickly on her lap, the barrel and stock sticky with clay.
Dryden forced himself to talk. ‘And I thought it was all for the painting. For the money.’
She laughed, the sound catching in her throat and almost making her cry. ‘It’s about hatred. About a brother hating his brother; about a wife hating her husband. And all for love.’
He could see her eyes filling and he knew she was going to kill either herself or him. It would be herself, he guessed.
‘If you kill me, they’ll know,’ he said, instantly regretting the suggestion.
She fought to keep her composure, even her sanity. ‘If you live, they’ll know for sure.’ She laughed again, and this time there was no hint of a sob.
Dryden realized she was getting stronger, not weaker. This is why she’d been able to kill Azeglio.
She stood, trying to level the pistol. He saw her muscles tightening along her arm, the tanned skin twisting around the bone, and he knew he had guessed wrong. She was going to kill him.
A dog barked in the tunnel, a bolt slid back on the cellar door, and she pulled the trigger. Dryden heard the tiny sound, slightly gritty, and then the flash burnt into his eyes as he was thrown back against the wall, the ridges of the bookshelves cutting into his flesh.
He opened his eyes and saw blood on his chest, and a clout of bone and brain on his thigh. A blue mist hung in the cellar, the echo of the explosion bouncing within the space, trying to escape.
She knelt on the floor as her husband had done, slumped back on her haunches. Her right arm, the arm with which she had held the gun, was gone. A stump showed the white bone of the shoulder, but there was very little blood. Her face was black on the right side, the skin scorched over the cheek, the lips revealing the spattered remains of teeth. Between them on the floor was all that was left of the jammed gun, the sticky green clay on its stock now veined with arterial red. Boudicca barked from the tunnel again, but was no nearer.
The last thing Dryden remembered was Siegfried Mann standing at the top of the stairs, a key in his hand.
A dog barked in the guardhouse beyond the wire and Siegfried Mann stood in the moonlit ruins of Vintry House and thought of the girl in the blue dress. Whatever he thought about, he thought of her; she ran across his past, a fleeting presence, her arms held out for her grandfather. He pressed his fingers to his eyes as he heard again the multiple shots of the firing squad. Beyond the wire the guard in the nearest tower swung his searchlight across the serried rows of the PoW huts. It was 10.30pm, two hours after lights out, and the only sound was the dog, whimpering now, by the trip wire. The moon left a cloud and he stepped back into the shadows of the old house. He’d seen it many times from the stoop of the hut where he sat and read the books the Red Cross sent: the roof was just rafters, the walls obscured by ivy, the garden wildly overgrown.
He felt no fear. They never turned the lights outwards, into the fen, something they’d all noticed right from the start, but something they’d only appreciated after they discovered the tunnel.
Hut 8. His own. They’d been bound to find it eventually, but it was only the second day when they were examining the base of the old stove that they saw the gap, felt the current of air rising in the summer heat. But in the end they’d decided it was too late for them to escape. Summer 1944. They knew the war was over, even if the fanatics didn’t. In the other huts the members of the Party planned their escapes, dreamed of returning to a victorious army. And if the end did come they planned murder, their captors first, their enemies within second, themselves last. Which is why they kept the tunnel secret. They might need it when the end came.
So when he found Serafino’s picture he’d thought about this meeting from the start. What had happened at Agios Gallini? Clearly the villagers had not murdered their guard. Did they attack him, perhaps? Force him into the hills? But he suspected the truth, and he wanted Serafino to tell him. So, using the Italian dictionary they’d found amongst their predecessors’ belongings, he had written the note.
‘Meet me at Vintry House – the ruin beyond the wire. We have found the tunnel but need your help. We can pay. 10.30: August 10th’. Then he’d given it to one of the Italians who helped distribute the food, sealing the envelope with wax and paying the man well with the promise that other letters would follow.
August 10th. He had some Italian, learned at school and on holidays in the Alps, but this gave him a month to learn enough from the dictionary to ask his questions. He wanted to hear this man’s confession in his own tongue: from the heart, if he had one.
He heard across the fen the cathedral bell toll the half hour. Instantly he saw him, stepping round the crumbling wall of one of the old outhouses. By moonlight the familiar face seemed younger. How long had he known Serafino? Six months, perhaps. Long enough to think he trusted him. And Serafino knew him, which is why he stayed back, one hand gripping the masonry of the old wall.
‘Oberstleutnant Mann?’ he said, the Italian accent redolent, even for the German, of the Veneto.
‘How are you, Serafino?’ he said, his Italian poor but passable. ‘I am happy you are alive. I am surprised also.’
Serafino moved his hands down his tunic, as if cleaning blood from his hands. Mann knew two things: that he was tempted to run, and that he didn’t have a gun.
Silence.
‘Why did you desert your post, Serafino?’
Mann thought he might run then, now that he knew why he had been called. ‘Why, Serafino? Tell me, please.’
