It all unravelled when she overheard some unshaven lump of an Obergefreiter and his younger comrade-in-arms trying to impress each other by comparing scars. It didn’t take that much ‘overhearing’ because they were loud enough to carry across La Taverne. The older one showed a semicircular scar in the muscle next to his neck and laughed about how it had been given to him by some ‘filthy little Walloon bitch’, and proceeded to regale the company with his hilarious account of what he’d done to the woman by way of punishment.
Eline walked up to their table and enquired politely if die herren had finished with their drinks, then she calmly smashed a wine glass against the edge of a table and drove the jagged point of the broken stem into the German’s carotid artery, just where his throat met his chin.
She managed to stab him three more times before they pulled her off. Throughout the entire attack she didn’t make a sound.
It would be a lie to say that she wasn’t afraid when they dragged her outside. She knew that the best she could hope for was a quick bullet to the head, and that it could be much, much worse. But she neither cried nor begged, and maybe that was what convinced Abraham Scheller that she was worth saving.
Scheller was on the personal staff of Colonel Hans Piekenbrock, chief of Abwehr 1, the German army’s intelligence-gathering division. His purpose in Huy was interrogating prisoners held at the town’s ancient citadel, and he had been drinking at La Taverne Meuse for several nights. It wasn’t exactly a lucky coincidence that he should be there in that back alley behind La Taverne to order the soldiers to let Eline go, but it certainly felt like it to her.
‘You are good,’ he said to her. She was lying in the garbage, curled foetally around several painful kicks to her ribs. ‘You maintained an immaculate façade and when you attacked you did so effectively and mercilessly. You will be trained to be better.’ He bent down closer, holding his finger and thumb an inch apart before her eyes. ‘This is how close to death I am going to let them beat you, so that when you come to work for me you will know how close you are, and how little it will take to finish the job, should you betray me.’ Then he said to the soldiers: ‘Anything except her face,’ and left her to them.
A year later, when the little fishing boat sneaked her ashore on the British coast just north of Scarborough, her orders being to liaise with Van Alst, her first action was to walk straight into the nearest police station and offer her services to the Allies.
* * *
So she stood on the hill and watched the city burn with a sick satisfaction because she knew it could have been worse; on their way in from the North Sea those bombers would have shed some of their ordnance on a non-existent coastal airfield that she’d convinced Van Alst of, and every bomb that fell on sand dunes was one less to fall on the people below.
She sidled up to Van Alst, wrapped her arms around his right one where it was jammed furiously into his coat pocket, and stroked his sleeve. He was rigid with tension. ‘It’s out of our hands now,’ she murmured. ‘There’ll be other opportunities. We’ve done our best. You’ve done your best.’
The mollification of his bruised ego seemed to have done the trick, because she felt him slump suddenly, the rage draining out of him.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said, and gave a rueful little laugh as he gestured at the flames, the explosions, the distant sound of sirens. ‘It’s not as if this isn’t a glorious enough sight on its own, is it?’
Right then and there she wanted to kill him – to take the stiletto dagger that was nestling in the calf of her right boot and open another wider, smugger smile in the throat beneath his mouth – so she cuddled closer and said, ‘It’s beautiful.’
A few minutes later Eline shivered and complained about how cold it was, and he did the chivalrous thing by wrapping his greatcoat around her shoulders as they walked back to his car.
They went to the nearest public air raid shelter, under the picture house in Rubery, where they whiled away the rest of the raid just like all the other ordinary men, women and families crammed in like sardines: playing cards and singing songs. When the raid was over he drove her back to her digs and saw her to the door with an oddly chaste little peck on the cheek, as if they’d done nothing more dramatic than stepping out together to a dance.
* * *
Eline’s boarding house had a telephone but she did not trust that old witch Mrs Higgins not to eavesdrop on her tenants’ conversations, so she threw on a coat and went to the phone box around the corner. She had to queue for half an hour before it was her turn, by which time it had started to drizzle and she was cold and irritable, which was never the best frame of mind with which to approach one’s superiors. The phone box was at least warm, if somewhat fuggy with the smell of other people.
She dialled the number that she’d been given, got through a number of secretaries with the correct pass codes, and was eventually put through to Colonel Robert ‘Brass-Eye’ Collins. She hoped she’d woken him in bed with his fat wife.
‘It’s done,’ she said. ‘You can bring Van Alst in now.’
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Possibly. Possibly.’ In the background she could hear a metallic clicking, which she knew to be the sound of him tapping his monocle against his teeth thoughtfully. He probably wore that stupid thing to bed, too. Just the sound of it gave her the shivers; it had been the accompaniment to long hours of interrogation at his hands as he worked to decide how much of her story he believed and how far he could trust her. The soles of her feet cringed at the memory.
‘What do you mean, “possibly”, sir?’
‘I just wonder how much more our old friend Nial Van Alst is good for. One doesn’t want to cook the golden goose before it’s laid its last egg, after all.’
‘But, sir, tonight’s raid. The Germans will have bombed Starfish 12.’
‘Yes, they will.’
‘Which means that it’s only a matter of time before their reconnaissance shows up that there aren’t dozens of British planes wrecked on the tarmac, and that there isn’t even any tarmac in the first place. He’ll know that I’ve been turned.’
‘Yes, I am aware of that. There’s no need to harangue me, Lambert.’
‘But, sir—’
‘Twenty-four hours, Lambert. See what else crawls out of the woodwork and we’ll bring him in. You have my word. In the meantime, business as usual, understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Eline hung up and stood looking at the receiver for a moment. Business as usual. The man had no idea how paranoid and volatile Van Alst was. She wouldn’t put it past Brass-Eye to have decided that she had outlived her usefulness and to let her swing in the wind. Her thoughts were interrupted by a tapping on the phone box window and she turned to see a man in a trilby huddled against the damp, waiting for his turn. She left and went back to her digs, filled with a profound unease.
* * *
To maintain the illusion of normality Eline went to her shift at Austin’s ‘shadow’ factory at Marston Green the next morning, where the raid was all that anyone was talking about, at least during tea breaks. The factory floor was simply too noisy and the work required too much concentration for idle chit-chat. Eline was one of a gang of twelve women whose job was to weld fuselage sections of Lancaster bombers together. The sections were manufactured at the Longbridge’s East Works and transported across the city to Marston Green because their runway was too short for Lancasters. Welding was hot, sweaty, exhausting work, but quick to teach and easy to pick up if you wanted a skilled trade and a good excuse to be hanging around planes. Colonel Collins could have wangled her an administrative post at RAF Cosford, with access to all sorts of classified information, but that would have looked just a bit too convenient for Van Alst. The Dutchman thought that the intel she passed to him about the Lancasters’ ultimate destinations came from chatting with the female Air Transport Auxiliary pilots who ferried them from the factory to their operating bases, because he believed that women loved nothing more than gos
siping to each other. The truth was that the workers on the factory floor rarely saw any of the ‘atta-girls’, and when they did it was like catching sight of royalty. In their flying jackets, the women pilots of the ATA knew that they were absolutely the most glamorous and inspirational creatures the welding girls had ever seen.
As the day went on, Eline’s feelings of unease increased. She imagined high-altitude Nazi spotter planes photographing the ruins of the fake plywood airfield in Sussex where she had told them the Lancasters were being sent, the German analysts poring over those prints, radioing their findings to Van Alst, him coming to her digs that evening with several large friends…
It was time to disappear again and find another barley field in which to lie low. Sweden, possibly. During her lunch break she made another phone call.
Bill Heath was a thief, smuggler, and black marketeer. He had Brylcreemed hair and impeccably stylish tailoring, which was impossible given the rationing, but he wore it proudly as an advertisement for all the things he could get, no questions asked. The man was his own walking billboard. There was no way that the police didn’t know about him, which only proved how effective his web of bribery and corruption was. He told Eline he could get forged papers and transport to somewhere northern, and she paid him with the cash that she’d been saving up from what both Colonel Collins and Van Alst had been paying her, which was nicely ironic.
At two o’clock on a freezing November morning she found herself, suitcase in hand, on a darkened street corner, jumping at every shadow and waiting for the sound of Bill Heath’s car. She heard it a long time before she saw it; he was driving very carefully without headlights, only occasionally flashing a torch at the road signs to navigate.
If there had been any lights – anything, even the gleam from a window of some night-owl peering out – to let her see who was in the car with Heath, she would have taken to her heels.
As it was, when the torchlight swept briefly over her and Heath’s voice said, ‘Bloody finally. Get in the car, bab,’ she did as she was told, opened the back door and got in.
Then she smelt it. Van Alst’s cologne. It seemed like Heath’s connections ran in all sorts of directions.
The unmistakable hardness of a gun barrel pressed into her side. Van Alst’s profile was a black shadow against the car window.
‘You know where,’ he said to Heath, who set off carefully again.
‘Sorry, bab,’ Heath said from the front seat. ‘But you know how it is.’
She ignored him. Her brain was a twittering aviary of panic and she could only afford to concentrate on one thing. ‘Nial,’ she started, hating the way her voice quavered. ‘Listen…’
The gun jabbed harder, silencing her. ‘I would rather not draw attention to myself by shooting you in the street,’ he said. ‘But I would not push it if I were you.’
Van Alst leant across and reached for her door, and in a single moment of gut-twisting certainty she knew that if he pushed down that lock button she was a dead woman. The sick sweetness of his cologne thickened as his face moved closer to hers; it was an awkward position for him and he had to twist slightly to keep the barrel of the pistol in his right hand pressed into her side, and she heard him inhale and knew that he was smelling her, enjoying it, probably excited by her fear, and the unspeakable vileness of him made her dart forward and sink her teeth into whatever flesh they could reach.
His right ear, as it turned out.
Van Alst howled and very helpfully pulled away, and with a snap something was left in her mouth. She spat it out and clawed at the door.
Something shoved her sideways, hard. At first she thought the most ridiculous thing, that he was actually trying to help her out of the car – then her fingers on the door handle were slippery and the stench of his cologne was replaced by something thicker and meatier. Blood.
Her blood. Her fingers left the door handle and went to her side, exploring. Her coat, jacket, and blouse – everything there was sodden.
Then the shock hit her, mercifully before the pain, and her head felt like it was being sucked inside out. Through the buzzing void that the world had become she was aware of Heath screaming at Van Alst, demanding to know what the fuck he thought he was doing, while Van Alst had one hand clamped to the side of his head and his pistol in Heath’s face, ordering him to drive, or he’d do Heath too. Heath, quite rightly fearing that he was dealing with a madman, switched his headlights on and floored it as much as he could with hooded lights and without attracting attention. If anyone saw anything odd about the car, they stayed behind their curtains.
Heath drove them south, out to the Lickey Hills, and by the time they arrived the pain had started to cut through the grey fog of shock and it was like nothing Eline had ever experienced. The bullet must have passed straight through from one side to the other because it felt like she was being sawn in half with a length of red-hot barbed wire. She could barely pull together the strength to whisper, ‘Please…’ which they ignored anyway, as they dragged her out of the car and dumped her at the foot of a broken oak tree.
Almost worse than the pain was the knowledge that she was dying. Being hurt was awful, but soon she simply wouldn’t be, and that seemed somehow offensive, aberrant, a mockery of everything that her family had endured.
‘Hurry up!’ hissed Van Alst to Heath, who was busy with a ladder of all things, reaching in through the top of the hollow trunk to pull out bags and boxes, which he piled up next to the car.
‘I’m not bloody leaving this stuff in there with her, am I?’ Heath shot back. ‘There ain’t room, for one thing.’ This was obviously where he stashed his black-market goods, and just as suitable a place to hide a body. But Van Alst and Heath weren’t going to wait for her to die, and the Dutchman didn’t even have the decency to finish her off first. They picked her up, one under her arms and the other under her knees, and hoisted her towards the black, yawning hole, and despite the pain and weakness this was when she really began to struggle and scream, because to die was bad enough, but to die like this? They paused for a moment while Van Alst shoved something – a handkerchief, possibly – in her mouth as a gag. Then there was rough bark tearing the skin of her legs, something hitting against her head and then a sudden jarring drop, and…
Eline couldn’t move. She could feel the roughness of the wood with her trembling fingertips, and the space was so tight that she couldn’t lift her arms to her face to pull out the gag.
Then things started crawling over her feet.
She was screaming into the gag, into the blackness at the heart of the dead oak, which swallowed her pain, her rage, and even her death. She had thought that non-existence was the worst thing imaginable, but now she knew she was wrong, because this tree wasn’t going to let her simply dissolve into nothingness. It would let her body die, but even after that it was nowhere near finished with her. It was greedy, this tree.
She was still screaming long after she died.
14
THE MIRROR BOX
TOM MADE A RAPID RECOVERY OVER THE FOLLOWING two weeks. Not wanting any more unwelcome distractions from her dead hand, Rachel took to wearing her prosthetic most of the time, and a compression sock for the rest, only baring the skin of her stump to wash it. And even though the prosthetic’s harness and straps chafed her shoulders and the cup rubbed her stump, it worked – the phantom sensations stopped almost completely, except for a slight grumbling of pins and needles every now and then. With her husband to care for, it was easy for Rachel to dismiss the nightmares as the product of stress and anxiety.
Tom – in a fit of creativity brought about by the extreme boredom of an enforced convalescence – delighted her by cutting a slot for her iPhone into the prosthetic’s plastic underside, exactly where she’d once worn her watch. Now she could use her phone without having to hold it in the same hand, even if she did feel like she was playing at being a secret agent by talking into her cuff. That was as far as she allowed him to go, however, despite
the detailed schematics for a wrist-mounted crossbow that he drew up for her. ‘If you want one of those you’re going to have to cut your own hand off,’ she told him, and menaced him with her claw.
‘My very own Furiosa,’ he laughed.
They took plenty of walks to build his stamina and she got back into her running, and for days at a stretch she could almost pretend that they were on holiday together. But before long he was fit enough to get back to work and she was left alone in the house again. Far from being peaceful, its emptiness seethed with the ticking of clocks, the buzzing of the fridge and a dozen other appliances, the whisper of traffic, the murmur of neighbours. There was no such thing as silence. She wondered, if she could silence all those things, what would emerge to fill the void? What fundamental whisper of the universe’s heartbeat would she hear then? She thought it might sound like that place where her dead hand was.
She did her best to ignore it. She couldn’t wear her hook in bed, of course, but covered that by getting some mild sleeping tablets and wearing her compression sock. While she waited for the wheels of bureaucracy to grind their slow way towards letting her have her life back again, she filled the silence of the days with the inane babble of daytime chat shows and soap operas. When Tom came home they watched movies or went out to the pub or played board games – something she normally detested, but if Tom noticed how out of character this was he didn’t say anything. Maybe he liked the novelty of having chatty, sociable company in the evening instead of the pair of them staring like zombies at their phones in silence. She prayed that he wouldn’t notice the desperation behind it – the fear of that buzzing silence and what lay on the other side of it, because the more she ignored it the louder and louder and louder it got.
In the brief moments when she wasn’t wearing her hook or stump-sock, the phantom sensations in her ghost-flesh clamoured, becoming more insistent the more she tried to ignore them. It became so bad that Rachel dreaded showering and started having baths again, being careful to keep her left arm out of the water until she absolutely couldn’t avoid it, washing her stump quickly while her ghost hand burned and throbbed.
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