by Thomas Wood
“He wanted me to join up like all the other lads, to pretend to everyone, including my own family that the police had let me go without charge. When I got in, all he told me to do was wait to hear from him again. Otherwise, I was to go about my normal life in the army.”
There was a silence that descended upon us once again, one of anticipation where no one wanted to be the first to break it, or interrupt someone else who was willing to do the honours.
“Did you never wonder, Alf, why I was never promoted? It wasn’t because I wasn’t put up for them or because I wasn’t capable, it’s because he was always there, blocking them for one reason or another. In the end, I guess the Ruperts got a little bored, so stopped putting me up for them. That’s why all the officers didn’t like me, Alf. Because they knew that I had someone upstairs keeping an eye on me, controlling me from the outside, and they didn’t like having some government sort interfering in what was their command. That’s why they couldn’t stand me.”
I began to mull it over. I supposed it did make sense. He was one of the finest tank drivers that I had ever met and, more than that, he garnered a lot of respect from all the ranks that he served with, becoming one of the most popular lads in the entire battalion, if not the regiment.
Everyone knew who he was, knew how good he was, which was why he had been selected as my personal driver, when I was made the reconnaissance officer way back when I was fresh faced and ready for war.
I had always wondered why he had never received some kind of promotion, but never let it get further than my own thoughts, in case the attention brought to him if he was granted some stripes, led to him being transferred away from me, which left me more vulnerable to being killed myself.
“It’s all because of him. That man that you’re now working for. He wanted me at the bottom of the pile, so that when something came along I’d hardly be suspected, would I? The dippy lad from Newcastle who couldn’t even make Lance Corporal? No way. He even gave me a new identity, a new background. The works.”
“Holloway isn’t your real name?”
“Na, course it’s not. That was some other poor blighter’s name that died under Jimmy’s command. My real name’s Warner, Philip Warner. Seems so long ago now though that I don’t even turn around to that name anymore.”
“What did the man look like?” Jameson piped up, “The one who came to visit you in your cell. I want to know what he looked like.”
“Well…” Red began, twisting his head from side to side, as if the memory of his face was so far back that he needed to drag it forward with a little help from some gravity. “He was short, yeah quite short. Not quite as tall as me, maybe coming up to my nose. That’s why he never sat down I reckon. He had quite a pointy face, stern-looking, like a headmaster…And bright eyes, grey I think they were, but bright. Very memorable…Oh and erm, he had a moustache, a small one, almost pointless in it being there if you ask me.”
I looked across at Jameson, who was already staring at me angrily, as if he wanted to jump and down screaming, “I told you so! I told you so!”
“That’s Jimmy alright, isn’t it Alf?” Was all that uttered from his mouth, and I could tell immediately that his throat had gone just as dry as my own. Until that point, it was possible that Red had simply made the whole thing up, an elaborate web of lies and deceit, but there was no way that he would have been able to get Jimmy’s description so accurate just by guessing. He must have met with him at some point.
The sickness, that had so often manifested itself as a nausea that came sweeping over my body, this time took on a different approach, as I digested each morsel of information. It formed itself, like a slowly developing bruise in my mind. Instead of riding up and down on the crest of the waves it normally delivered, it steadily grew as the wound expanded.
My neck developed an ache as the heavy burden of carrying the weight of guilt and desperation in my mind became too much for it. My limbs began to grow heavier and weaker, the pain burning up my arms that was keeping the pistol upright becoming almost unbearable. It nearly got to the point where I succumbed and simply passed out on the floor, but my stumbling footsteps somehow managed to keep me upright, and I began to deal with the bruising in my mind.
“So, have you been working for British intelligence, or have you been turned by the Germans?” It was a question that had been burning on my heart ever since I had seen that he was still alive, about ten minutes ago, but one that I did not want to know the answer to all the same.
“No of course not. I haven’t been working for either really. Not in my heart anyway. That man, Jimmy, has been threatening my family ever since he first met me. They don’t even know that I’m alive. Even while I’ve been out here he sends me the odd message, through Baudouin, about them. There’s no way that anyone would know half the stuff that he knows unless he had someone watching them Alf. And even if he wasn’t, how am I to know if it’s true or not? He knows that I can’t contact them to confirm anything, otherwise he’ll kill me.”
He began to sob and, for the first time since I had seen him blown up by a mortar round, I realised that I had started to feel sorry for him, a very dangerous place to be considering that I didn’t believe him entirely. There was still a very real chance that I was going to have to execute him before the night was out, and I wanted to be able to do it without the feelings of sympathy and remorse that he had managed to slip into my mind.
“Baudouin has weekly communications with him. That’s how he manages to tell me these little tid bits of information. They are both evil, Alf. Seriously, you have to believe me.”
“So, how did you know that Jimmy wanted you to work for Baudouin then?”
He looked at me sheepishly, “Joseph gave me the codeword that I was given back in Britain. If I heard it in any capacity, then I was to know that this was where Jimmy wanted me and whoever gave it to me would become my direct commander. I guess he wanted me to work for Joseph so that he could keep his hands clean while he went to the Germans.”
“What was the codeword, Red?”
The windowpanes, as I had predicted, were paper thin, which played to our favour as Red launched himself over towards the window, as they had given us a pre-warning, as they rattled nervously in their frames. We were almost out of time there, we were going to need to make a run for it, and soon.
There must have been at least three trucks pulling up down the road, judging by the noise that attacked the window panes, each one imaginably stuffed full of battle-hardened troops who had spent plenty of months down on the firing range to get their eye in, particularly for this night.
“We’ve got to go. Now, if we want to stay alive.”
“No, Red. The codeword first, what was it?”
He seemed reluctant to hand it over, more because of what Jameson and I would think of it when we heard it, rather than any malicious attempt to cover up something.
“Red?”
“Alright, alright. I was given the codeword from Baudouin. It was Geranium.”
16
Suddenly, as if doctor Frankenstein had forced a current of electricity through his body, Jameson sprang into action. For a second, I thought that maybe he was capable of working out in the field and that I had completely misjudged his abilities; when the chips were down, he rose to meet the challenge. Or at least I hoped.
But then I realised he wasn’t springing into action to save us, but that he was actually lurching towards me, an expression of complete aggression scratched into his face. His vision was completely blinkered now, I could see it in his eyes. There was no one else in that room but me and him, Red was no longer part of his consciousness, nor were the sounds of the trucks turning up outside the cottage.
As he came closer to me, the adrenaline surged through my body, my own focus becoming tunnelled and tuning into the face of Robert Jameson. I didn’t care what he was doing right now, or why he was doing it, all the initial feelings that I was being double crossed by the man that I tho
ught I could trust the most, faded into nothing, surplus to the requirements of me fighting for my life.
I held my breath as I waited for his body to connect with mine, but even though I watched him into me, the wind was rapidly knocked out of my lungs, as his shoulder made a firm contact with my ribs. I felt the bruising develop instantly and knew that I would be carrying a dull ache in the region for the next few days at the least.
It was only then that I realised he was screaming, not a victorious cry as he took me to the ground with him, but a more terrifying, primal scream, like he was possessed by the evillest demons in existence.
I almost threw up as we both landed on the floorboards, utterly convinced that they would give in due to the weight that had slammed into them. The only thing stopping the vomit was the fact that I had no oxygen left in my lungs to help bring it up and so, it stayed where it was, in the pit of my stomach, simply burning away at my insides as I wheezed and sucked, trying to bring in as much air as I possibly could.
My pistol flew through the air and clattered into the wall, just beside the window that had been our observation post, quivering slightly as it lost all of its momentum. I was completely powerless now to the dead weight that straddled me, with no weapon other than my own pathetic fists that struggled to hit out as they were crushed by his mass.
We began to tussle around on the floor, like a bear that was trying to devour its struggling prey, and I quickly found myself losing to the man who had seemed more comfortable sat behind a desk, especially as I focused on trying to get air back into my lungs, at the very least to stop the stars from bursting in my eyes.
He began to gain confidence in what he was doing, using one hand to force my head over to one side, so that all I could see was the sodden floorboards and the gas lamp in the corner, with no way of being able to look into his face and plead for my life. His second hand began to run his way all over my body, as if he was searching for my papers or simply trying to mug me.
Eventually, his attention moved round to my waist, and he suddenly yanked me up by the scruff of my collar as he smoothed out the creases on the back of my shirt. Gradually, he made it to the waistband of my trousers, and found what he was looking for. I couldn’t believe that I had been so stupid to tell him where the pistol would have been. I should have known by now that the only person that I could trust with secrets like that was myself. I was now going to die as a result of my own stupidity.
I felt him wrap his hand around the pistol grip, giving it a couple of yanks as he pulled it out from under my belt. Almost instantly, my head crashed back into the floorboards, and the weight that was crushing down on my chest was suddenly lifted.
Not wanting to waste a second, my chest began to fluctuate up and down, as the oxygen that I sucked in was welcomed into my despairing lungs with open arms. My breathing was still somewhat restricted by the bruising that I had sustained, but I had enough air within me to begin scrabbling around, crawling at first before trying to find my feet.
All the while, I kept my eyes fixed on Jameson, working out what he was trying to do and how I could get out of this situation alive. Red was no longer in the room to me, I felt like I could trust him to a degree that he wouldn’t be putting a bullet in my head purely because of the history that we had together. Now it was just me and Jameson.
Jameson had the pistol over his knees, as he struggled to pull the top slide back and chamber a round. Maybe he wasn’t as adept at this game that I had given him credit for not twenty seconds before.
Eventually, he managed to get the pistol to do what he wanted it to do, in which time I had managed to sufficiently pull myself together.
At the same time that I worked out what he was about to do, he brought the pistol up, arm outstretched and pointed it directly towards Red’s head. Closing one eye, to make sure that he wasn’t going to miss, from a near point blank range, he began to psych himself up mentally as he prepared to execute the man before him.
He let out an overexaggerated sigh as he saw the face that he was pointing the gun at; sad, disappointed, betrayed. It was the first time that I had properly looked down the barrel of a gun and in that moment, the prospect of death didn’t seem as terrifying as one thinks when the immediate threat of it wasn’t existent.
There was just a hole, a dark and barren barrel which I stared down, nothing in there to comfort me but likewise nothing to terrify me. There was no possibility of injury if he was to pull the trigger now, there was only death, a peaceful and calming outlook.
“Get out of the way, Lewis. I want to kill him.” He had no expression in his voice, there was no anger or violence rumbling away at the back of his throat. Nor was there any fear or desperation crackling in the back of his vocal chords. There was nothing in his voice and, I could only presume, there was nothing in his mind other than making sure that the traitor that stood before him was executed in the most clinical of fashions.
“No Robert. You aren’t going to be doing that. He’s my friend.” As the words slowly tumbled from my mouth, I couldn’t quite believe them. What Jameson was doing was right, Red deserved to die, he had betrayed his country, had wormed his way out of a death penalty and had even deceived his family. There was no way that I should have considered him a friend, but that was all that was surging through my mind right now. If Red truly was working for the Germans, if he really bought into their ideology and ideals, I would be nothing more than a slab of meat sprawled out on the floor by now.
But the fact was, I wasn’t. So, for now at least, Red was still my friend. And I had to protect him.
Jameson scoffed, in total disbelief, “But he’s working for the Germans! Alf, he’s literally killed people from his own army to get here. Think it through!”
“Yes, I have,” I said forcefully, trying to get him to realise that he didn’t have any choice in the matter. Deep down, I knew that he was right but, in my mind at least, Red had been granted a new lease of life, an opportunity to redeem himself of his past, maybe even get back to Newcastle to see his mother. In my heart of hearts, I knew that it wasn’t going to happen, but I had to make myself believe it in that moment, he was the only true friend that I had ever had.
I had to let him live. Red was alive. I knew that somewhere, somehow, Cécile was still alive and that there was a chance that she and I too may be reconciled someday.
Red and Cécile had been two of the main players who had haunted my dreams for months since I had first been in France. Red always blaming me for his death, while Cécile had quietly accepted her own fate. Maybe, now that I knew the two of them were alive, the dreams would stop. That it had somehow vindicated me of my conscience and every dream I should subsequently have would be free of the horrors.
The only one that would haunt me now would be the elusive shadow, the one that was always turning to meet me, but never speaking. Maybe he would simply vanish, along with my guilty conscience.
The pistol that I was staring down at began to quiver ever so slightly, before re-affirming itself and holding perfectly steady in between my eyes. As he readjusted his grip on the weapon, Jameson began to speak, timidly at first, before finding his confidence in the fact that he was the only one with a gun right now.
“No, Alf. You haven’t. Think about what he’s done, who he’s killed. He’s worse than a German.” He spoke with a softness, as if he had just finished telling off a child and was now softly reiterating the moral behind the rebuke.
My face suddenly exploded in pain, and I thought for a moment that he had squeezed the trigger and that I would be dead before I felt my head hit the floorboards for a second time. I wasn’t dead however, the full eruption of pain coming just half a second later as I clattered into the desolate flooring.
My cheek seemed to part and a red sea, very different from the one that Moses had parted, began to leak itself all over the floor, staining my head a beautiful scarlet colour as I reached up to dab and inspect the pain. My skull pounded as I let a low groan pass
involuntarily from my lips, as I tried to process what Jameson, the man that I supposedly trusted, had just done to me.
Blurred, but still functional, my vision began to come back to me. I opened my eyes, locking straight away onto the end of Jameson’s hand at the very pistol that had delivered a fine blow across the side of my face, now with a sprinkling of blood along the side of it, with a helping splashed across Jameson’s own hand.
The pistol was proudly pressed into Red’s forehead, with no quiver or signs of fear as it sat there.
“Jameson, please.” I began to beg with him, as my cracked teeth began to roll around my mouth, making me spit them out onto the floor, along with a nice dose of sticky blood.
“No, Alf. We need to end this chapter now. Be rid of him and move onto Baudouin. It’s why we’re here. Don’t let your past cloud what is going on here.”
I looked across briefly at Red. He was holding his own, for now, his nostrils flaring as he began sucking in huge amounts of oxygen, trying to keep himself as calm as possible. His eyes were opening and closing much slower than a normal blink, as he prayed that each time they opened, that the pistol-wielding man would simply disappear from his gaze.
He stared at Jameson, deep into his eyes and I realised that he had resigned himself to death. As if that was his only way out. In all the time that I had got to know him, I never thought I’d see him accepting death in the way that he was at the hands of Jameson, he had always been the positive member of my command, looking at death as a fact but not one that should be talked about. I always thought that he would be scared of dying, but as the pistol burrowed deeper into his forehead, I realised he had given up.
“Jameson. Please, think about what you’re doing. You don’t want to die. If you pull that trigger, then we both are.”
