Elsie closed her eyes, her train of thought brittle, suddenly. The desire to flee, to escape this nightmare was overwhelming, but there was one thing left to do.
Tugging back on her errant thoughts, she tried to replay her mother-in-law’s last words before she had plummeted over the cliff, but they were grainy, vague and distorted. The Spyglass File—that was what she had said.
If Elsie found The Spyglass File, she would find her baby.
Chapter One
3rd June 1940, Dunkirk Beach, France
They entered the town of Dunkirk as the walking ghosts of their fathers’ generation. They wore their boots, their scarred helmets and their ill-fitting uniforms. They carried their Great War guns. They had marched through places appallingly memorable: Ypres, Cambrai, Flanders and the Somme. They had fought on the land of the dead, ploughed and planted just twenty times since.
Laurie Finch, with his two remaining comrades, staggered into the town. The three men instinctively stopped and looked around them in a detached way, shiny black sludge from a discarded Austin K2 ambulance licking at their boots.
He knew that it was Dunkirk because the road signs had told him so. But this place could never have been a normal French seaside town. It could never have lived. It could never have seen joy or laughter or love; it could never have been anything other than what it was now.
Long columns of British army trucks and lorries had been dumped at the roadside. Wheels missing. Smouldering. Wires spewing forth from open bonnets. The buildings around them abandoned, windowless and roofless, like unfinished dolls’ houses, fire continuing the destruction wrought by the endless pounding of Luftwaffe bombs and bullets. The streets, soaked from burst water mains, were strewn with debris: glass, shrapnel, clothing, unidentified engine parts and the charred unrecorded corpses of bullet-ridden soldiers and civilians. Several severely wounded men were slumped on the pavement, their eyes empty, accepting their certain fate.
By wordless agreement, the three men continued through the town, side-stepping the wreckage and the rubble, the craters in the road and the twisted remains of their comrades. Their vision was blinkered, centred on the point just a few streets ahead, where the buildings ended and the salvation of the beach began. The place where the rescue boats awaited them.
None of them flinched as a drunken naked man suddenly appeared from a side road on horseback, galloping past them, whooping and waving a tin helmet in the air.
Onwards they walked, following in death’s footprints.
Just as they neared the final row of beachfront properties, Laurie shot out his arm to stop his friends, recognising the brief agonising groan of surrendering bricks and mortar. The men dived to the ground as the entire corner building collapsed in a thunderous crash, enveloping them in a dirty granular darkness.
It was the first moment in several days when time had behaved as it should; each minute that passed with the men pinned to the floor, choking, contained exactly sixty seconds.
One by one, the men stood, spat out mouthfuls of grainy spittle and shook off their rind of dust. Then they gazed ahead.
For days they had known that they would be the last of the last. The fourth battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment had been among the ill-fated chosen to form the rear-guard, allowing the rest of the British Expeditionary Force to evacuate. At every bridge they had crossed, sappers had waited, detonating their charges just moments later.
Yes, they knew they were the last of the last, but they hadn’t expected this. Evidence of the final hours of tens of thousands of soldiers was encapsulated in the detritus which appeared on the beach like an uninterrupted lurid tide line: countless bicycles with frames twisted beyond recognition; dozens of axe-smashed motorbikes; hundreds of thousands of smashed rifles, stacked in an enormous pyre; an unimaginable quantity of helmets; thousands of burned out cars and trucks; horses with bullet holes behind their eyes; crashed and wrecked RAF aircraft.
And the dead.
All around them, the dead.
A ragged mongrel chewing on the fingers of a corpse.
‘Your land is desolate. Your cities are burned with fire. Your fields—strangers are devouring them in your presence; it is desolation.’
Laurie turned to Bill Rhodes, who had just uttered those words and wondered when he had last heard him speak. Had he spoken today, before now? Had Joe spoken today? Or had the three of them just walked, one foot in front of the other, as they had done since the order had been given to evacuate? Five days ago, the bleakness of their situation had percolated down through the ranks, when an order to retreat to high ground at Mont des Cats had been issued. Somewhere in the region of seven thousand men and bumper-to-bumper queues of British army transport had ascended the hill for the dubious sanctuary of the Gothic monastery. But the order of Trappist monks residing there could not offer them any protection from the twenty Luftwaffe warplanes that had relentlessly bombed and machine-gunned the hill, nor could the monks protect them from the blasting that followed from approaching German tanks and mortar fire, nor from the advancing line of infantry. Chaos had infiltrated the infallible precision of the British army, and finally the order had been given to abandon the monastery and head twenty miles north-east to an evacuation point at Dunkirk. It had been, and continued to be, every man for himself.
Tears welled in Laurie’s eyes.
Amidst the carnage, there was hope.
A snaking line of soldiers—a few hundred, Laurie guessed—wound its way from the beach, through the shallows of the English Channel, past the carcasses of several destroyed vessels, to two small navy warships, where the men were being dragged aboard. Above them, a swarm of Nazi Stuka dive-bombers circled rapaciously. Waiting.
It was Laurie who went first. He broke into
