Several seconds passed during which Graf’s mind tried to assimilate these details. Was he a survivor from the launch platoon, accidentally left out overnight in a state of shock? Was he a ghost, even – not that he believed in them? He felt his hair stiffen on his scalp. He took half a step forwards and the apparition vanished – jerked behind the tree trunk, turned and ran. No ghost, then.
‘Seidel!’ he yelled. ‘There’s someone here!’
He set off in pursuit. Whoever it was, he was nimble, but not strong enough to force his way through the undergrowth, and Graf, crashing straight ahead, was soon close enough to make a grab at his jacket. He missed the first time, but the second time seized his collar and hauled him backwards, dragged him down onto the ground and squatted on top of him, pinioning his arms with his knees, as if it were a children’s game. And that was what this wriggling creature was, he realised – a child: a teenage boy with a delicate, small, sharp-featured face. But when he pulled off the cap and saw the thick blonde hair, he realised he was sitting on a young woman of eighteen or twenty. He reached out to brush away her hair to get a better view of her face. She twisted her head and bit him on his thumb. He swore and snatched his hand away.
‘Graf! Where are you?’ It sounded as though Seidel was still some distance off.
At the sound of another man’s voice, she bucked and writhed helplessly beneath him, then gave up and lay still. Her eyes were fixed on his – full of fear and wild defiance, like an animal’s in a trap.
The lieutenant’s voice came again, closer now. ‘Graf! Are you all right? I’m over here!’ He let off a round from his pistol. The crack of the gunshot rang around the wood.
Graf looked over his shoulder towards the place where the gun had been fired, then stared down at the girl. What should he do? If he handed her over to Seidel, the army officer would be duty-bound to turn her in to the SS. They would shoot her for sure. She was not much more than a child. The idea was intolerable to him. He put his weight on one leg and then the other, hoisted himself clear and carefully stepped away from her. She didn’t move. Was she half-witted? Had he injured her? He gestured with his head and hissed: ‘Go!’
She scrambled to her feet without a word and slipped away into the trees.
‘Graf!’
‘It’s all right! Stay where you are! I’m coming!’
He hurried back through the undergrowth. The lieutenant was at the edge of the crater. His gun was drawn, his expression irritable. ‘What the devil’s going on? What were you shouting about?’ He glanced over Graf’s shoulder as if he suspected he might have been followed.
‘I thought I saw someone. But it was nobody. I’m sorry. This place gets on my nerves.’
‘I heard you running.’
‘I was chasing a shadow.’
Seidel looked him up and down. For the first time Graf was aware of the dirt and leaves stuck to the front of his coat. He brushed them away. His hand was bleeding slightly from her bite. Some kind of explanation seemed to be required. ‘I fell.’
‘You fell?’ It was clear from his tone and the way he raised an eyebrow that the battery commander did not believe him, but after a moment he returned his pistol to its holster. ‘We should go.’
10
THE DAKOTA WAS DESCENDING FAST, shuddering so violently in the turbulence Kay could see its fuselage twisting. It didn’t take much effort to imagine it shaking itself to pieces. In the last five minutes, two more passengers had vomited up their breakfasts. The smell in the unheated cabin was cloying, inescapable, contagious; she had to fight the urge to be sick herself every time the plane bucked and her seat belt cut into her stomach.
She forced herself to stare ahead through the window opposite at the dirty white gauze of cloud. Rivulets of raindrops crawled across the glass like drops of sweat. She gripped the metal seat struts. With a final vertiginous plunge that reminded her of an express lift, they dropped out of the cloud base. The colour in the window changed abruptly from white to grey. She turned to look out the porthole behind her. They were coming in low over a town. She could make out streets and red-roofed houses, several big square church towers in the distance, and beyond them a wide navigable river with docks and cranes, shaped like a mortise key with a long straight handle and stubby levers. The distinctive pattern was familiar to her from Medmenham, so that when the sergeant next to her said, ‘Where are we, ma’am?’ she was able to answer, ‘Ghent.’
She had expected them to land at an aerodrome like Northolt, and as they lost height, she kept looking out for one, but at the last moment she realised they were coming down onto a field. Trees flashed past alarmingly close and she braced herself for the impact. They hit the ground once and bounced up again, then hit it a second time and a third before jolting at speed over the uneven ground. The Dakota braked suddenly and flung them forward. The engines cut.
‘Christ,’ drawled one of the army officers, ‘that was bloody awful.’
Kay laughed with the others.
Never had she been more relieved to arrive anywhere than she was that November morning, carrying her suitcase the length of the fuselage, stepping out of the fetid cabin into cold fresh air and down onto the damp grass. The RAF airfield consisted of nothing much: a couple of big tents, a fuel tanker, two lorries, a staff car and half a dozen jeeps, one of which had a machine gun mounted on its back. But to her it was the primitiveness that was thrilling. She walked up and down and took a few deep breaths and pressed her shoe into the spongy ground. So this was Belgium – an enemy-occupied country less than three months ago. This was what it had all been about. This was the war. The fact that the other WAAFs still seemed to be deliberately ignoring her did not bother her in the least.
One of the section officers clapped her hands. ‘Very well, listen, please. As you can see, our transport is ready. The sergeants are to travel on the lorry.’ The announcement was greeted by a few good-humoured groans. ‘Sorry, girls. Officers – you’ll be travelling in the jeeps.’
Kay picked up her suitcase. The officers were arranging themselves into groups of three – two to sit in the back and one up front next to the driver. She didn’t want to travel with the wing commander and Flight Officer Sitwell, so she hung around the rear of the column and waited for someone to take pity on her. Finally two women detached themselves from the others and came over to her – one quite tall, blonde, plump and pretty, with a wide, open face; the other thinner, shorter, dark-haired.
The blonde stuck out her hand. ‘Hello, I’m Joan Thomas.’
‘Kay Caton-Walsh.’
‘And this is Louie Robinson.’
They shook hands.
‘Front or back?’ asked Joan.
‘Whichever you prefer.’
‘Why don’t we go in the back and you take the front?’
The two women climbed into the jeep with their suitcases. Kay got into the front. There wasn’t much space. She had to twist her knees to the side and clutch her suitcase to her chest. The driver nodded affably. ‘Ladies.’
Louie said, ‘We’re officers to you, Private.’
‘Sorry, ma’am.’
The jeep with the machine gun mounted at the back jolted past them and took up position at the head of the convoy. Kay said, ‘We have an armed escort?’
‘There are still a few Germans about,’ said the driver. He started the engine. ‘You’ll need to keep your eyes open.’
The column moved off. Kay could see the pale faces of a couple of the sergeants staring out of the gloom from the back of the covered lorry. She didn’t envy them. Not that the jeep was much more comfortable. It had a thin canvas roof and was open at the sides. She drew her coat together to protect her knees against the cold. They rattled off the airfield and onto a country lane, then turned left onto a main road.
The back seats were set higher than the front. Joan leaned forward
and shouted in her ear, ‘So where have you come from, Kay?’
She tipped her head back to answer. ‘Medmenham. You’re all Stanmore, I take it?’
‘Yes, that’s right – Filter Room.’
‘I feel a bit of an outsider.’
‘Oh, you mustn’t say that! We’re a very friendly lot, aren’t we, Lou?’
Lou grunted.
‘That’s good to know,’ said Kay. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’ Joan settled happily back in her seat. In the rear-view mirror Kay could see that the two women were holding hands. Well, well, she thought, and returned her attention to the road.
The Flanders countryside spread out exposed on either side, flat and bare, unprotected by the hedgerows she was used to in England. They passed isolated farms and barns, a big empty greenhouse with most of its windows broken, a line of leafless poplars like the teeth of a broken comb. There was little traffic, apart from the occasional old man on a wobbly bicycle. Nobody was working in the winter fields; there was no livestock. The vastness of the sky only served to depress the landscape further. Layers of monochrome clouds stacked up from the horizon. It began to spit with rain.
The first little town they came to seemed entirely shut. Outside a church, beside an elaborate 1918 war memorial of green oxidised copper, a group of children stood on the corner and held out their hands like beggars. The army vehicles swept past without slowing. The optimism of the autumn, when liberated civilians showered British tanks with flowers, looked to be long gone. Houses, shattered by bombs or shelling, stood roofless beneath the grey sky. The shop windows were empty. My God, thought Kay, with a stab of shock, this place is starving.
They drove eastwards for about an hour. Signs of war were everywhere – tanks on their transporters parked down a side road, the barrels of an anti-aircraft battery poking out of a palisade of sandbags, a stone bridge chipped by bullets and guarded by troops. Buildings seemed to have been burned out at random. One field was a moonscape of perfectly circular waterlogged holes. She wondered if it were true that there might still be some Germans in the area. It seemed unlikely. The battlefront must have swept on weeks ago. Perhaps it was just a story the driver had invented to unsettle them.
Around noon, she spotted a sign for Mechelen, and soon afterwards the convoy entered the outskirts of a town, thundering down a narrow cobbled street of small houses. The black, yellow and red stripes of the Belgian flag hung from a couple of the upstairs windows. Up ahead, rising over the roofs, were the twin spires of what appeared to be a large church.
The lorry with its trailing column of jeeps emerged from the street and drove onto a low bridge spanning a wide canal. In the distance, on what looked like waste ground leading down to the water’s edge, two big, boxy olive-green vans with radar dishes and radio antennae on their roofs were parked behind barbed wire. The dishes were directed away from them, pointing northwards – towards The Hague, Kay guessed. She turned to the back seat to share her excitement, but Joan and Louie had already seen them.
Louie said, with an air of expertise, ‘GL Mark Threes. The latest MRUs.’
At the end of the bridge a yellow road sign pointed left to Antwerpen and Sint-Niklaas, right to Heist-op-den-Berg, Leuven, Brussel. What Kay had mistaken for a church turned out to be a massive fortified medieval gate, on top of which a pair of ugly twin spires of dark slate had been stuck, apparently as an afterthought. The convoy swung around it, passed along a broad, handsome street of big flat-fronted houses and shops, and drew to a halt.
From the back seat, Louie sounded surprised. ‘This is it?’
The driver nodded. ‘It is, ma’am. HQ, 33 Wing.’
Kay had presumed the headquarters would be in some big country pile like Danesfield. Instead, they were confronted by a nineteenth-century provincial terraced house with an iron balcony – grand but nondescript. She swung herself out of the jeep and pulled the passenger seat forward to let the other two out. She noticed the lorry had disappeared.
‘What happened to the sergeants?’
‘They’ve gone straight to the barracks,’ said the driver. ‘HQ is officers only.’
Joan pointed to a sign in thick Germanic script above the doorway: Soldatenheim. She gave a nervous laugh. ‘You’d have thought they might’ve got round to taking that down!’
The WAAFs began to congregate on the pavement with their suitcases. It was raining harder now. An old-fashioned cream-coloured tram rattled past, half empty; a few curious faces turned to stare at them. Wing Commander Knowsley put his hands on his hips and gazed up at the three-storey building. His little moustache twitched slightly – like a mouse’s whiskers, Kay thought. He looked pensive, just as he had at the Air Ministry the previous afternoon – a man who had perhaps offered more than he could deliver and rather wished he was back in north London. He stepped to the front door and rang the bell. Almost at once it was opened by an RAF sergeant. ‘Welcome to Mechelen, sir.’ He saluted. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’
Kay let the others go in ahead of her. The sergeant was waiting in the dimly lit hall. ‘If you’d leave your case at the bottom of the stairs, ma’am, you can collect it later. There’s a cup of tea and a sandwich waiting on the first floor.’
Evidence of the previous tenants was everywhere – in the mezzotint pictures of Bavarian lakes and mountains that lined the staircase, in the Gothic signs on the doors leading off the first-floor landing – Raucherraum, Esszimmer, Bibliothek. German army announcements and instructions covered a noticeboard. The sergeant noticed Kay examining them.
‘Sorry about that, ma’am.’ He started taking them down. ‘Been meaning to get round to it.’
In the large front room overlooking the street an aircraftman was pouring tea. A tin of evaporated milk stood on a table under the window, next to a pair of plates piled with fish- and meat-paste sandwiches. The two tasted indistinguishable. Kay stood at the window with her teacup and saucer and surveyed the street. On the opposite side, the army lorry had reappeared and was parked outside what looked to be a bank.
‘Now come on, Kay,’ said Joan. ‘You mustn’t hide in the corner. It’s time you met the others.’ She guided her by the arm into the centre of the room. Conversation ceased as five pairs of eyes turned to survey her. ‘This is Joyce Handy…Barbara Colville…Gladys Hepple…Molly Astor…Flora Dewar…’ Kay repeated their names as she shook hands in an effort to anchor them to an individual face. They were all her own age and type – middle-class, well-educated young Englishwomen, apart from Flora who sounded Scottish.
Barbara said, ‘So you’re the girl from Medmenham?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You must be rather special.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘We had to leave Evelyn behind to make room for you.’
So that was why they were so unfriendly. It hadn’t occurred to her that someone else might have to be thrown out of the unit. ‘I’m sorry to hear about that – I didn’t know.’
Flora said mournfully in her Aberdonian brogue, ‘The wee lass was terribly upset. She wasn’t told she wouldn’t be coming until she was about to get on the bus.’
‘Oh dear, the poor thing! How rotten for her.’
Joyce said, ‘Are you a mathematician, Kay?’
‘No.’
‘But you’ve plotted incoming enemy aircraft?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Then I suppose it only goes to show,’ said Barbara, with a smile like broken glass, ‘how important it is to have friends in high places.’ She was irritatingly good-looking, with a model’s cheekbones.
Friends in high places… The innuendo hung in the air. They knew, or at any rate they’d heard a rumour. I must stand my ground, Kay thought, or go under. She said sweetly, ‘Well, Barbara – it is Barbara, isn’t it? – it sounded such a glamorous assignment �
�� fish-paste sandwiches in Belgium in midwinter – that naturally I decided to pull every string I could to make sure I got it.’
A couple of the others laughed. Molly glanced over her shoulder and said quietly, ‘They were rather frightful.’
Barbara frowned. ‘I’m sure they’re doing their best. We don’t all have such refined taste.’
Flight Officer Sitwell came over. ‘Are we getting to know one another?’
Kay, her eyes still fixed on Barbara, said, ‘Yes, ma’am. Very much so.’
‘Well I’m sorry to interrupt, but we have work to do. Leave your cases where they are and follow me.’
They returned their teacups to the table. Sitwell led them out of the room, down the stairs, out into the street and across the wide road. They walked in single file. Like a gaggle of grey geese, thought Kay. A few passers-by stopped to watch them. One elderly woman smiled at Kay, and she smiled back.
The bank, like the house, was nineteenth century, with a facade of heavy grey stone. A soldier guarded the entrance. They followed the flight officer inside and stood on the polished wooden floor in front of the tellers’ counter. It was dusty, the air was stale. It felt as if it hadn’t been used for years.
‘Close the door,’ said Flight Officer Sitwell. She waited until it was done. ‘Right, from now on, every time you enter this building you will be required to show your identity card, so make sure you don’t leave it behind.’ She lifted a section of the mahogany counter and pushed open the low door. One of the rear windows had been opened to let in bunches of electrical cables that ran around the skirting board. The mobile radar vans were visible in the distance. The women followed her between the rows of empty desks and down a flight of stairs into the vault. The door to a big safe, lined with deposit boxes, was open. In the dim light, beneath a low ceiling, the sergeants were at work: shifting tables to form a central workspace, setting up Anglepoise lamps, wheeling chairs into place, hanging charts, lifting a blackboard onto an easel, putting out wire baskets, graph paper, slide rules, books of logarithms. Wing Commander Knowsley was seated behind a desk in the corner with three telephones in front of him. Soldiers from the Signals Corps were unrolling cables around his feet.
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