‘OK.’
‘Given that there’s a bounty out for you, who wants your head stuffed, and mounted on the wall over the fireplace?’
‘Peter Baker. Either him or Addy, Grace’s mum.’
‘Well done. Why?’
‘Because although they’ve changed their minds, I haven’t turned back even though the op’s been scrubbed. They don’t want Grace back now, after all.’
‘OK. Why did they want you to find Grace and the baby, to bring them back in the first place?’
‘To get an embarrassing situation back under control. And at first they thought the kid was mine. That was OK – more or less. Then someone did the arithmetic: I was out of the frame, but several others were in. That includes bold Sir Peter, and might well shaft his hopes of promotion if it gets out. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t ask the questions, Charlie. That’s my job.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Now tell us why they’ve changed their minds and want to stop you, now that you’re close to bringing them both home.’
‘Because now they know what we know, and what they didn’t know when all this started. She’s heading east, and has no intention of coming back. They can live with that. Their problem has been solved, but Grace doesn’t know it. She’s still running, isn’t she?’
‘I warned you, Charlie. Two days’ CB.’
‘Sorry, Boss.’
‘That’s all right. Congrats, by the way; I knew that you would work it out – you have that sort of mind.’
I opened my eyes, and looked first at Les, and then at James. I asked them, ‘What do you think?’
Les didn’t say anything. He looked as if he’d just flipped over a stone and found something unpleasant there. After a pause James said, ‘It’s all pathetically fucking domestic, isn’t it?’
Les fished a fag out of his beret and lit up.
The odd thing was that it didn’t occur to me that I should stop right there, get on Cliff’s plane, and fly home. Albie had said that he’d got this far, and now he wanted to go all the way to the Big City. I was beginning to understand how he felt. It must have occurred to Les and the Major, but they didn’t say anything about it immediately either. We were close. It was a strange feeling.
Kate was alongside one of those ungainly looking American armoured cars with six wheels: we leaned in on her bonnet looking as if we were having a war talk. I took the opportunity to fill a pipe, Les smoked a few of the strands of string he had that resembled cigarettes, and the Major produced a thin black American cigar from somewhere. What he said was, ‘I suppose that it only makes sense to push on, even though none of us seems to be conspicuously keen on it today.’
‘You’re supposed to be in charge, sir,’ Les told him.
‘I’d rather have a day off,’ he said, ‘but there isn’t anywhere to go.’ None of us said anything for a while, then he used one of those decision-made voices. ‘Let’s push on, and stop at the first place we find that hasn’t been raped by rude soldiery, and has a bar.’
I suppose that that is the sort of reasoning the officer corps is paid for.
Just as I was knocking out the bowl of my pipe on my heel, a flight of Tempests went low over us, howling out their customary bellows of rage. I don’t know why I chose to remember it then, but the pipe I was cleaning was my first and only . . . and Grace had given it to me. She went all the way up to London to get it from a shop with which her old man had connections. It was only months ago, but was like looking back a million years.
The bar was just after a crossroads on a worn crease in one of James’s prewar maps. He thought that the village was called Corne, or Korne. There was plenty of that around: the big fields were a dusty emerald green, and not too many of them had been arseholed by tanks. There were probably ten or eleven buildings along each arm of the cross, but because the countryside around was wide and flat and firm – good tank country – the village wasn’t strategically all that important. The war had simply driven around it. One of those nasty little Dingo scout cars had turned a fetching shade of black and was still smouldering in a field close to the road. Its tyres had melted. The acrid smell of hot rubber bit at our eyes. A building at the very centre of the hamlet had had its corner lopped off by an inexpertly driven tank, and three-quarters along the west–east axis a knocked-out Tiger tank sat forlornly inside the blackened house into which it had been reversed. Its gun barrel drooped almost to the road. It was a big bastard, but not as big as the Elephant in the Bois.
Les said, ‘King Tiger. Handy-looking thing, isn’t it?’
I said, ‘It looks bloody lethal.’
‘Would be if the engines ever worked, but they don’t: they piss out oil everywhere.’
Everything else about the village seemed to be conspicuously unwarlike and normal. There were people in the streets, and some children chasing an old car tyre: they just ignored us. We can’t have been the first Allied soldiers they’d seen: a tattered Union flag clung to a telegraph pole, kicking in the breeze, and there was an HD sign daubed large on the gable end of a low thatched cottage.
‘Mind the kiddies,’ the Major warned Les. ‘It’s not their war.’
‘Yes, Major.’
I don’t know why it had taken me that long to get it, but that was when they slipped back into role: whenever we were on parade with strangers. It was like a blink of an eye, and Les and James became the driver and his Major. They ran a very good act.
The bar was the furthest building
