There was a small, deserted cheese factory – two rooms in a two-hundred-year-old shed – alongside the dairy. Behind it we found fresh graves, with identity discs hanging on the rough wooden crosses. Some of the crosses were surmounted by British helmets; another bore an officer’s soft cap: half of it had been torn away, and it was stained with blood.
James was with me. The colour left his face. He lifted the cap, and then said, ‘Bollocks,’ softly. Like a whisper. Then he flung it away from him. He prowled the yard with his revolver in his hand; Les with his Sten. There was no one there to shoot at, of course. The Cutter seemed the least moved.
‘We in trouble?’ I asked him.
‘No. They’re long gone. It takes three hours to burn out a truck as thoroughly as that.’
I’d forgotten that he’d been a policeman once, and cops know things like that. James and Les searched the sheds and the house. The Cutter told me, ‘Wasting their time. Does your Major still have his radio?’
‘Yes,’ said James. I swung on him, scared. So did the Cutter. James had come from nowhere. He said, ‘Sorry,’ and, ‘Yes, I do have it. Why?’
‘I wondered if you might think to send a signal to Charlie’s friend Pete. I understand that he’s a policeman again, just like I used to be.’
‘Again?’ I asked him.
‘Yes. He was one before the war, didn’t you know?’
‘Bollocks,’ I said.
‘Precisely,’ James said.
Why hadn’t we known that?
McKechnie and Les left us to it. In the house Les got a brew going. James said to me, ‘I’m flying a bit blind here, old son: sending a signal to an operator who appears to have been substituted for my regular, by your flaky pal.’
‘. . . because your own operator was playing against you, James. Trust me.’
‘Maybe . . . and maybe we’d better go back to sir until this bit’s over with.’
‘OK, sir. It’s your call: forgive the pun. We can either report this, and the law can still catch up . . . or not report it, pass by on the other side, and maybe they never will.’
‘Pass by on the other side: isn’t that sort of what your pal accused us of before?’
‘Yes. We’re good at it, obviously.’
‘You want me to call him up, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Fine.’ It wasn’t. He was pissed off. He sounded as if he’d eaten bitter aloes. James sprayed a short burst of Morse. He had encrypted it, and assured me that the essential detail was there. I wasn’t reassured. He had asked the operator to forward it urgently to Tuesday’s Child. That was neat. We only waited ten minutes for a response, which was Morsed back in clear as, Tx. KKK50.
James showed me, and asked, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’
‘It’s either Pete, or someone who reads old prewar RAF shorthand. It says, Thanks, I will formate on you in 50 minutes. Pete will be here within the hour.’
‘. . . and pigs fly.’
‘Stop grumbling, James. Sir. Come and have a cuppa. We’d better not tell the Cutter about the KKK. He’d take it very personally.’
The room in which Les had discovered a working stove was in what had once been a small farm kitchen. On the way there I said, ‘At least they gave them a Christian burial.’
‘The Czech is probably a Catholic,’ James told me. ‘They can be strict about these things. Why don’t you go and say a few words over them? Just in case no one else has.’
‘You know I’m not a proper parson, sir. So it won’t bloody do.’
‘I’m the bloody Major, and you’re the bloody Captain, and that’s all there bloody is to it! So do as you’re bloody well told, and go and get your bloody book.’
The only good things to happen were that they joined me at the gravesides, didn’t take the mickey, and said Amen in all the proper places. I don’t know why, but at a grave of one of the driver privates I became suddenly convinced that the occupant had a young family. I made a picture of them in my mind. Horsing around, unaware that they no longer had a dad. I suddenly couldn’t go further. My voice went away somewhere, and James stepped in and finished it for me. When we did caps on, and walked back to the office, James grasped my upper left arm, and guided me as if I was a blind man.
But I was still pissed off with him afterwards – with this public school thing of wanting to give all the orders, and still wanting to be one of the boys. Besides; it was my sore arm that he had grabbed. I took the char Les offered me: it was in a big chipped mug he’d found – it held about three-quarters of a pint. He’d also slapped a generous waxer into it: brandy this time. I think that he had the contents of a small off-sales bar in Kate’s boot. Anyway, I walked outside with it. I’ve told you that it looked as if the cheese factory had once been part of a small dairy farm? Its muddy yard was cobbled. I walked across it to the old farm fence away from the main road: I didn’t intend to go into the field beyond, but I suppose that Les was keeping an eye on me anyway, because he wandered up behind me. Leaning on the fence. The
