Soldier No More

Under the trap door there was an undulating earth floor, dry and dusty . . . or maybe it was a thick layer of chaff and ancient chicken-droppings from the powdery texture of it, and the mixture of feathers in it, even though the smell had long gone.

He ploughed through the stuff, inches deep, towards the crude little door, following tracks already furrowed before him.

Could he really squeeze through that?

The detritus had been scooped away from it, to reveal its full size, and the rusty iron hinges had been oiled, but it still looked more like a chicken-door than a Roche-door.

He lifted up the latch, and then dowsed the torch before he eased it open, his hands trembling.

His head ached and the sweat poured down his face. He was long past thinking clearly, and nothing mattered any more: this wasn't how it was meant to be, but this was how it was

—

He reached above him, at full stretch, and rapped the butt of the pistol on the flooring. Then he eased the door wide.

Cold air wafted around him, cooling the sweat on his face. He could just make out the stalks of weeds and vegetation ahead, black against paler blue.

Then he heard someone shouting, far away but insistently: Audley was drawing their attention to the front, as he had promised to do. So it was now or never.

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He squeezed himself into the aperture, parting the weeds ahead of him as carefully and silently as he could with his hands, feeling his shoulders first compress, and then scrape, on the rough stone.

As his hips came through, and he knew that he was out and free, he held his breath. The shouting continued in the distance, only marginally louder than the beating of his own heart.

Through the weeds, and in between the thicker stems of some kind of bush . . . and then the shallow ditch opened up before him, half filled with coarse grass.

He wouldn't be able to stop that grass moving, yet it might not show above the top of the ditch, and the light was bad now—but was it bad enough?

Anyway, the man covering the back shouldn't be watching the ditch— they'd hardly have looked over the Tower expecting this sort of siege—

Siege? He examined the ditch again, and saw that although shallow it was wide—even wide enough to be the remains of a defensive moat round some petty hobereau's fortified manor, of which the Tower itself was the last relic. And the wideness encouraged him to make himself believe that it was deeper than it seemed.

He crawled—and crawled as he had been taught to crawl at OCTU, with the fear of Staff Sergeants above him.

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And at last stood up, and ran—

He had not the slightest idea where he was at first, but Audley had said turn left, and somehow the geography of the ridge came to him as he ran—it curved into a re-entrant, such as the army map-reading experts loved—until there at last, black-towered among the treetops, was the Chateau Peyrony.

The gloomy woods didn't frighten him now, he was too breathless to be frightened, but the door wouldn't let him in.

He banged on it—hammered on it, starting up echoes which the house had never heard before, and went on hammering.

'M'sieur!' The old crone was outraged even before she saw his appearance. ' M'sieur—'

He pushed past her, taking the stairs two at a time, scattering the house-ghosts headlong.

The light was glowing under the door, exactly where he remembered it—there was no need to knock— she was expecting him— and not only because of the noise he had made, coming to her now— she had known all along that death was loose in her country—

'Madame—'

She didn't move, she didn't turn a hair and she didn't interrupt him as he spoke, until—

'Gaston! Put that thing down—at once!'

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Roche turned into the twin mouths of a shotgun, with his own pistol hanging uselessly at his side. The old man was breathing heavily—and, for God's sake, the old woman had something in her hand too, just behind him! Madame Peyrony stood up. 'Angelique: you will telephone the Police and tell them that Algerian terrorists are attacking the Englishman's Tower—they must come this instant. Then, you will telephone M'sieur Galles with the same message. At once!'

'Oui, Madame.' The old woman didn't turn a hair either—

she might just as well have received orders for supper. She simply vanished from the doorway.

In her place, with a scampering slither, a small boy appeared behind Gaston, wide-eyed and tousle-haired.

Roche drew in his breath. It was there, just as he had known it would be—the last treachery of all, deep inside him, where he had always known it would be, waiting for him.

He looked at Madame Peyrony. Nobody could do more, or more efficiently, than she was doing. And no one could blame him for waiting here with her for the distant sound of the police klaxon—he was only one man, and too far away from the Tower to get back there in time. Whatever happened now, there was nothing more that he could do.