‘Thanks. Don’t mind if I do, and you can slip that safety on now.’
Raffles laughed again.
‘That’s what all the French tarts say.’
They lit up. Raffles blew out the match and tossed it on the verge. As it touched the grass there was the flat thump of a close explosion, and in the field an immediate small cloud of that odd yellow-grey coloured smoke that the Kraut ordnance always generated. The car rocked. The policeman staggered. We were showered in mud, grass and small clods of earth. The copper swore. Then he said, ‘Found it.’
‘Do you think you’ll find them?’
‘Doubt it. No one’s screaming.’
‘Can we move along then?’
‘Yes. Take care until you’re clear of the lane. Thanks for the fag, mate.’
‘Pleasure.’
Raffles eased us carefully along the country lane. It was bordered by high hedges. There was a hole in the hedge on the right-hand side, and the smoke drifted through it. On the windscreen in front of him was a small red splodge. He tapped the glass to draw my attention to it.
I said, ‘We once came back from somewhere – Lübeck, maybe – with fifteen feet of human guts draped over the wingtip. Lanc just blew up in front of us and we flew through the remains.’
‘The trouble with you RAF johnnies,’ Major England said, just to prove that he didn’t miss much, ‘is that you always have to cap a good story.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you detention tonight. You can stay at home and look after Kate, if Les and I are on the town.’ I thought that this had been a slip of the tongue until he added, ‘Sod it, Les; I can’t keep up the Major baloney much longer. Are we far enough away from England yet, do you think?’
‘Yessir.’
‘You tell him then.’
‘This is a small car, Mr Bassett, and we’re a small team, so from now on, if it’s all right with you, sometimes I’m Les, and sometimes the Major’s Jim, or Jimmy or James.’
‘What about me?’
‘Charlie; that right?’
‘Yeah: pleased to meet you. It makes life easier, doesn’t it?’
‘So say thank you to Jimmy for saving your life.’
‘Thank you, Jimmy. I didn’t know he had.’
‘That shows you how good he is.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Back at Fécamp. You were stupid. Cliff would have killed you.’
‘Oh, that. I wasn’t sure.’
‘We were.’
We were stopped at two more blocks before nightfall, and diverted off our route three more times. When I asked Les why, James answered for him.
‘Mines. Jerry left them as a going-away present. We must have driven down that last lane about . . . how many times Les . . .?’
‘Four.’
‘. . . four times, without seeing them or setting one off. Funny, ain’t it?’
‘Yeah; very funny,’ I told him. ‘Remind me to laugh.’
‘That’s the trouble with you RAF johnnies,’ Les said. ‘No bloody sense of humour.’
We stayed at a small inn just outside a place named Gournayen-Bray. It was showing no lights, but that was because they had a good blackout. Up close to the iron-studded front door you just got a glimpse of the light feeding out beneath it. Raffles hammered twice, with the flat of his hand: it sounded thunderous. Then he shouted, ‘It’s Mr Raffles, and the Major.’
Then he hammered again. The door opened immediately. He turned to me, and said, ‘I arranged with them how many times we’d knock, and what I’d say. It’s worth your remembering, in case you’re on your own on the way back.’
‘I couldn’t remember the way here, and I don’t know what the place looks like. It’s dark.’
‘That solves that problem, then, doesn’t it?’
He nosed inside, the Sten held vaguely at the port before him. In the small panelled reception we were met by a tall, thin woman and a boy of about fourteen. The boy had bulgy eyes of the palest blue-grey colour, and a massive goitre. You knew immediately that he wasn’t the full shilling. The boy had admitted us, and bolted the door behind us.
Raffles said to me, ‘This is our friend Madame Defarge.’
The woman laughed. It was a bitter sound, but she held her hand out to me.
‘Madame Demain. Your friend Raffles is droll.’
‘Not my friend. My driver.’
‘Make him your friend, Monsieur . . .?’
‘Charlie.’
‘. . . Monsieur Charlie. You will find him a useful friend.’ She paused and then added, ‘And a good one.’ The smile she directed at Raffles seemed genuine enough.
He asked her, ‘How is the boy?’
The boy’s right hand had begun to tremble. She took it in her own.
‘As you see him. Perhaps a little better.’
‘You have had news of Monsieur Demain?’
‘None since January . . .’
James England seemed to have nothing to add to the conversation.
The boy’s trembling increased. His shoulders shook. Madame hoisted the sails of the most beautiful language in the world, and gave him a dozen or so sentences as fast as Browning machine-gun fire. He stuttered a couple back.
The Major had squeezed in behind me, and said, ‘That’s the trouble here. Neither Les nor I were picked for this job for our fluency in French. I can just get by in German, and Les even has problems with English. I don’t know whether she said something reassuring, or told him to cut our throats in our sleep.’
I told him, ‘The boy’s terrified of me because he hasn’t seen me before. He thinks that I’ll attack her. She told him that I was a friend of Les’s and wouldn’t harm them because they were too useful to you. She also told him not to make any trouble because they need the money.’
‘Good God. Why didn’t you say you spoke the lingo?’
‘Nobody asked. It’s something I’m learning from people like you.’
‘What is?’
‘Need to know.’
Raffles guffawed. Then he said, ‘Tell her that you speak good French.’
‘Fairly average French,’ but I did. Her raised eyebrows told me something about how Brits were regarded by their geographically closest ally. Thickos.
Raffles spoke
