The '44 Vintage

'Where's t' major?' The best chance of safety lay in the Lancashire accent he had been trying to lose for two years and more. 'Happen we've got summut for 'im, eh?'

'Back at the gate, sorting out the frogs—' The bandit cut off the automatic answer. 'But 'oo the 'ell—

ooof!'

The question was cut off abruptly and finally by the barrel of Sergeant Winston's machine pistol swung viciously on the back of the man's neck.

There was a garden—or it had once been a garden, but now the trim little hedges and the espalier fruit trees had run riot, and the flower beds were choked with weeds.

'Frogs at the gate,' said Audley. 'Could be that the major's having trouble with your friends, Doctor—

could it?'

'Not my friends, David,' said De Courcy.

Overgrown garden giving place to gravel square at the side of the chateau—

Broken boxes and the remains of a giant bonfire, the fitful wind stirring thousands of charred fragments of paper, black against the pale brown of the gravel.

They have been burning their files—

More debris: all the wreck of a hurriedly abandoned military outpost and the litter of defeat—

And just ahead a broader stretch of gravel, with the welcoming parapet of the bridge to the left—

'Smartly now,' snapped Audley. 'March as though you own the place.'

”What the devil!'

Price, Anthony - [David Audley 08] - The '44 Vintage

An officer's voice. Butler tried desperately to catch Audley's eye, but the subaltern was out of view behind his left shoulder, leaving him closest to the voice.

He turned towards the chateau.

It was one of the officers who had joined them in the barn—or it must be, though again he couldn't recognise the blackened face.

'Prisoner, sir. Caught 'im by t' gate in t'wood back there,' Butler jerked his head in the direction from which they'd come.

'A prisoner?' The officer took three more steps toward Butler, frowning at him. 'What d'you mean?

And who the devil—'

'Herr Oberleutnant!' Hauptmann Grafenberg interrupted him sharply. 'I must protest in the strongest possible terms at my treatment! My rights under the Geneva Convention have been flagrantly violated

—'

'What—?' The officer swung towards him.

It was then that Butler understood, in the last hundredth of a second before he hit the officer, exactly why Second Lieutenant Audley had put so much force into that punch of his.

Striking a private soldier in the British Army—and striking him unawares too—must have been on about the same level of impossibility for Second Lieutenant Audley as what he was about to do was for him.

And that added the force of absolute desperation to the action: when a corporal hit a captain there was no possible room for half-measure.

And he knew also why Audley had said Here, you too—

'Sir—' he said sharply.

The officer turned to receive his fist.

As they marched onto the bridge he was most strangely aware of the different pieces of him that objected to what was happening to them. He could feel his toes itch— His ear ached with a dull pulse of pain— And now his skinned knuckles burned.

Everything was unnaturally sharp and clear in the sunlight: the weathered parapet of the bridge, the gravel under his feet, the great windowless tower rising up into the blue sky.

Price, Anthony - [David Audley 08] - The '44 Vintage

And now there was a gap between the end of the parapet and the curve of the tower—a gap in which he could see the beginning of a stone stair spreading to the left and right beneath them. And away beyond it the river rippling and flashing, olive-green and silver.

Audley went through the gap without missing a step.

Journey's end, thought Butler stupidly.

But not in lovers meeting.

'That'll do very nicely, Sergeant Purvis,' said Audley, holding out his revolver stiffly, two-handed.

'You can put it down now—just let it go—and back up, both of you.'

'Or don't let it go—I'd like that,' supplemented Sergeant Winston. 'Then I can shoot you with a clear conscience, you sonofabitch.'

Purvis looked at them for a second without recognition. As he had turned towards them, before Audley had spoken, Butler had caught the ghost of that familiar smile which he'd last seen at the road junction to Sermigny. But now the ghost was gone, and almost as quickly the uncomprehending look became one of frozen surprise at being faced by other ghosts: the dead of Sermigny risen from their graves.

The sledge hammer dropped with a clatter among the jumble of stones and the scatter of mortar fragments which lay on the pavement around the sergeant's feet. In the few minutes since they'd last glimpsed him he had completed his job: clear from waist height to the curve of the original arch there was a gaping hole in the