'Number?' It was given. 'Unit?'
Another long silence, during which time the soldier huddled in the corner of the lamp-lit room which smelled of stored meal and cooking, McBride squatted next to him on his haunches, stone-like and unmoving, and Gilliatt leaned against the door as if to keep out the rabid Frenchmen who had hurt the boy.
'Rifle Regiment, Third Fallschirmjaeger Division.' Very quiet. McBride made him repeat it, then his head swung towards Gilliatt, his eyes wide in surprise. The boy was responding to the German language, to nothing else. He'd never envisaged this, that his life could end in a dirty French cottage after they had pulled out his fingernails with a pliers and beaten him into a semi-coma. For him, the German words came out of a pain-filled void, and he wanted the voice to go on speaking, and he would answer,
'Billet?' The boy replied slowly. Gilliatt looked at the fair hair plastered close to the pink skull with sweat. He was impatient to be gone, blamed McBride because he had to go on looking at the suffering German. 'Other units in the area?' McBride asked next, his accent clipped, military, officer-like. Another long silence, as if the boy hesitated or savoured the words like ointments.
'Forty-fifth Division — Fourteenth Panzers, their grenadier and reconnaissance units—' Silence again, then, and the growing sense of the boy slipping away from them and wanting to hear them without interruption. And the sense in both of them that Lampau waited outside the door, eager to finish what he had started.
'Thank you, Unteroffizier Hoffer,' McBride said quietly, patting the boy lightly on the shoulder, and standing up. 'Well done. You may rest now.' Then, as if he divined the boy's need, he added, 'We will come back and check on you later.
Gilliatt grimaced at the violent, black farce. McBride tried to usher him from the room, but he pulled away from the Irishman.
'No—' he hissed.
'Don't be a bloody fool, Peter!' McBride snarled almost under his breath. 'Those French would kill us if we tried to stop them killing this boy. Forget it—'
'How can I?'
'By considering what you've just heard, man!' McBride had his hand firmly on the door handle. 'These troops have been in the Plabennec area for less than two weeks, most of them. Lampau told us that — Hoffer is in the rifle regiment of a parachute division — a whole crack infantry division here, and Panzer experts. What does it sound like to you? Well, what does it sound like?' McBride, shorter than Gilliatt, had grabbed the other man's chin in his hand, turning his face towards him, averting his gaze from the crouching, semi-conscious Hoffer.
'I suppose—'
'Yes?'
'A small, specialized invasion force — I agree with you, damn it!' Gilliatt wrenched open the door, passed Lampau who grinned mirthlessly, and went out of the cottage. McBride nodded to Lampau, who entered the room, while McBride, forgetting Hoffer almost at once, followed Gilliatt outside. Gilliatt was leaning against the wall of the cottage in the narrow passage between the house and the rickety barn, hugging himself, shivering helplessly. McBride could smell the vomit in the chill night air.
'Peter?'
'What do you want?' Hurt mistress or child.
'Forget it — or think about the people you've known who've died. Anything, but not about one Wehrmacht Unteroffizier killed for invading France—' He put his hand on Gilliatt's shoulder, but it was shrugged away. 'Peter, Peter, I don't like it any more than you do, but I'm not going to argue with Lampau for the sake of a German.'
'You're as bad as they are!' Gilliatt accused, turning on McBride.
'I hope not, Peter,' McBride whispered. Then he lit two cigarettes and offered one to Gilliatt, who coughed on the first inhalation of smoke, then seemed not to shiver so uncontrollably. McBride saw one white hand wipe across Gilliatt's mouth, eyes. 'OK?'
'Yes. Thanks.'
'There'll be a lot more of it. This is only the beginning, Peter, the cleanest bit of it—'
'God, not really a Richard Hannay adventure, is it?' He laughed mirthlessly.
'Maybe not, but it's the only adventure we've got right now.'
'Is that why you do it — adventure?'
'Isn't it why you ran away to sea? Remember?' Both of them recalled their conversation on the bridge of the
'An invasion of Ireland?' McBride nodded. 'What'll they do when they know for sure?'
McBride shrugged. 'God knows, Peter. Fill up the hole in the minefield for one, I should think. Maybe they'll send troops to Ireland — who knows?'
'Fill up—?'
'Come on. Lampau will have cleared away the remains by now. He has to get us into Brest before first light. The rest will be up to us.'
A dog barked suddenly, startling them. Neither of them had heard a dog on the smallholding before. Sound carrying from the farm, Gilliatt wondered—
Then torchlight, wobbling before it was flicked off. Across the field, a hundred yards away. Nothing else to be seen in the black, moonless dark. McBride was quicker than Gilliatt to realize the danger, because Gilliatt was struggling to recall why they dare not re-sow the St George's Channel minefield, not yet—
'God, it's the Germans. Peter, Peter, come on, damn you — the Germans have come looking for Hoffer!'
Walsingham was working late in his office at the Admiralty — no more spacious than a large cupboard, as if to remind him of his temporary commission with the Royal Navy — preparing his report for the First Sea Lord. He was drafting it in the certain knowledge that his conclusions were the right and only permissible ones, and drafting it, too, in the light of possibly making his case after McBride's death. Walsingham regretted that he had had to send McBride — Gilliatt as a virtual stranger he cared far less about — but he had been near panic, desperate for proof that would be irrefutable. He was aware that a massive inertia, compounded by a nerveless fear that had grown since the cancellation of
He shuffled the handwritten sheets in front of him, then leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He wondered briefly about McBride, then excised him from his mind, realizing as he did so that he was behaving with the same bunkered disregard for realities which so angered him in their Lordships. Even March, who should have been convinced by now.
He yawned.
Another reality insisted, came to light and to a sudden prominence in his mind so that he could not ignore it. The convoy. What could they do about the convoy?
And, with a colder insistence, something stirred like a nightmare he had not relived since childhood but which was now coming back with all its old force; an idea that had the terror of a shambling, nameless creature, an idea he knew, finally, would be adopted.
A war crime — would they call it that?
Yes.
Sir Charles Walsingham, Head of the Directorate of Security, MI5, sat in his spacious civil servant's office in the Home Office, where his official rank was Permanent Under-Secretary, his fingers splayed upon the green blotter in the middle of his oak desk. He seemed possessed by an old dream or nightmare, his lips compressed to a single thin line, his forehead deeply trenched with creases, his eyes vacant yet inwardly intent and mesmerized. It was late in the evening, and outside in Parliament Street the lamps bloomed in soft, insinuating rain. His room was lit by his table-lamp and by an ornate standard lamp in one corner. He preferred the shadows at that moment.
He had called at the Home Office before returning to his flat in Chesham Place. Drummond's cryptic, almost insolent telephone message was waiting for him in his aide's neat, womanish handwriting — a large question mark beneath the final words.
