Into the Fire

by Into the Fire (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  After breakfast – it had been getting on for mid-morning by then – Ben had shown her the view from a small window at the back of the attic, a view along the coast and over the southern part of the expanse of sand that was uncovered at low water. The tide had been about halfway down: a shimmery, hazy summer seascape under a flecking of high white cloud. In the foreground there was an island called Garo, and beyond that the inshore end of the rock-strewn channel the M.G.B. would be coming down. Familiar territory, to Ben – though less so in daylight. She’d asked him what kind of danger there might be, if local suspicions of a leak about arms shipments proved to have been justified: would you expect military activity on the coastline, or interception of the M.G.B. at sea, on its way in or out?

  ‘Perhaps both. If I was the Kraut in charge I’d have an R-boat or two standing by. Destroyer, if available. Round the corner there, say – other side of the peninsula. It’s a long inlet, decent anchorage, small warships do use it.’

  ‘Any there now, do we know?’

  ‘Weren’t – up to last evening. But the buggers could slip in after dark. They’d want to catch us bending, wouldn’t advertise their presence. Come from the other direction too – round from Brest, for instance. But – worst came to the worst – which it won’t, don’t worry – if the bastards handled it right, we’d be sitting ducks.’ He’d pointed to the left, southwestward: ‘Down there – three-quarters of a mile, no more – that’s the nearest of the coastal batteries. Just that end of the village. The other two are closer to where we’ll be crossing the sand bar.’

  ‘What a place to pick!’

  ‘Wouldn’t expect us to, though, would they?’

  ‘I remember – you said that.’

  ‘The other pinpoints aren’t all that much better… You know, Rosie, we’re both sort of taking this situation for granted, but – well, Jesus—’

  ‘What else should we do?’

  ‘I know – but still—’

  ‘I’ve thought of you, from time to time.’

  ‘Thought of you, practically non-stop!’

  He’d kissed her – gently, carefully, as if conscious that she was an invalid. ‘You’re lovely, Rosie.’

  ‘I’m a wreck.’

  ‘Hell, you are.’ He did it again, for longer and less carefully, and this time she felt herself responding. ‘Rosie—’

  ‘No.’ Pushing free. ‘Ben, I am slightly wrecked. Let’s go down?

  They’d been setting out after a midday lunch of bread and cheese. The gunboat’s visit wouldn’t be confirmed until this evening, but the sand bar could only be crossed an hour or so either side of low water – which would be around two p.m. – and they had to be on Tariec in time to be rowed over to Guenioc as soon as it was dark enough. Vidor and Léon would be bringing their boat up to Tariec from the Aberbenoit inlet. They’d have heard the BBC broadcast by then, too.

  If the gunboat was not coming—

  Well, you’d be stuck there. So forget it, assume it was bloody well coming.

  The seaweed-gathering cart would be here quite soon, and the doctor from Lannilis would be bringing Bright and Farr and the two R.A.F. sergeant-pilots. A cousin of Léon’s would be driving the cart, and Rosie was to ride in it – with some children, apparently. The other party – five escapers, one R.A.F. and four U.S.A.F., with a friend of Vidor’s guiding them, would already have started, Ben told her. They’d ostensibly be shell gatherers, armed with buckets. Seaweed and shell gatherers had been out there regularly all summer, weather and tide permitting, so to the Germans in the coastal batteries there’d be nothing out of the ordinary going on.

  Again – touch wood…

  Solange bathed and disinfected the cut in Rosie’s head for her. It seemed to be clean, also less tender than it had been. Her knees were better too: strong enough for a limp around the farm, with Solange as guide. The dog – Marco – seemed to have accepted her as a friend although he was still warily hostile to Ben. Old Brodard hadn’t been very kind to him, she gathered.

  Léon’s cousin – Albert, who was older, bald, and had a huge moustache – brought the cart, and came into the house while Ben took the horse out of the shafts and tethered it near the water trough. Then he rejoined them, and they’d hardly given up on the bread and cheese when the doctor’s gazo pulled up in the yard. Ben shot out again, and from the doorway she saw him greeting his long-lost shipmates and two airmen. The doctor shook hands quickly with them all, then turned his car and drove away. Léon’s cousin went to put the nag back in its harness; the rest of them trooped into the house, where Solange introduced them to Rosie. Bright and Farr remembered her – or said they did.

  Solange would be staying behind now, but she’d be going down to the beach in the early hours of tomorrow morning to meet three agents who’d be landing from the gunboat, and bring them up here. Ben put an arm round her shoulders: ‘So you’ll have company again. That’s good.’

  ‘Not for long, though.’

  Rosie thought, Not the company you’d choose, either…

  Ben was telling them all, ‘She’s some girl, this. I mean it, she damn well is… Solange, how can we ever thank you?’

  ‘It’s for me to thank you, Ben.’

  ‘We’ll come and look you up some time. Won’t we, Rosie?’

  ‘Definitely.’ She kissed her. The others were drifting out, ready to go. ‘Solange, if you should come to England, ever—’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  She – Rosie – knew that Ben had suggested it, at some stage: Solange had mentioned it, during their tour of the farm. He was hugging her now, and she was trying to hold back tears: Rosie agreeing in her heart that he was right, she was rather special… She heard Ben saying, ‘If you decide to come – or need to – ask Vidor if he can’t fix it. Rosie might even get you a job in her outfit… Meanwhile, though – when Pierre gets back, tell him from me he’s an exceptionally lucky guy, will you?’

  Rosie asked him, crossing the yard, ‘Pierre?’

  ‘Her boyfriend. In some labour camp in bloody Germany. Very good hombre, Vidor says.’

  * * *

  The cart was far from comfortable to ride in. Constant jolting, and a tarpaulin over the top making it greenhouse-hot, and a stink of seaweed. Flies were abundant, too. Then on the track from the road to the beach they stopped to pick up three boys and a girl – twelve-to fourteen-year-olds – who climbed in with her, by no means improving matters. They were needed, Albert had explained, to make up numbers on the return journey across the sand, for the benefit of Germans watching from their lookout posts. It wouldn’t be the same number coming back as had gone out, but it would be enough to fool them, he’d said. Rosie found it best to sit upright against the back-end of the cart with her legs out straight, having warned the kids to keep off them. It was better once they were on the sand, the cart then meandering from one area of seaweed to another, the men using hayforks to toss the stuff up without much of it actually landing on the tarpaulin. She put her head out from under it only once, to catch a sight of the others – the shell gatherers with buckets, in two widely separated groups – distant, mirage-like figures across the sultry haze of sand.

  On Tariec, where they all met up, Ben found the dinghy where they’d hidden it, under a mound of rotting seaweed weighted down with stones. There’d evidently been no storms on this coast in the past three weeks. No Germans, either – unless they’d left the boat here deliberately, to watch and see who came for it. Ben worked with the two seamen, getting the muck off it and checking for any damage: Bright asking him, ‘You’ll be taking us out in her, will you, sir?’

  ‘No, I bloody won’t!’

  ‘Ah.’ A wink at Rosie. ‘Shame, that is.’

  The cart was on its way back by this time, zigzagging across the sand with the young girl handling the reins while Léon’s cousin and the three boys forked up seaweed – loading the cart properly, now. Here, with a long wait ahead of them, they settled down o
n the island’s blind side, sprawling in the coarse sea-grass.

  Wondering about Jean-Paul again…

  Primarily, what he’d been for. Partly because the allegation that he was a pimp didn’t wash: therefore that old Pierre had indulged in at least some deception. Second, if those men had boarded at Rennes, she could have identified César to them, surely – as long as she’d had some way of recognizing them, which surely wouldn’t have been too difficult. Third, the feeling she got when she thought back to the way he’d looked when he’d been standing over her – before she’d shown him the knife.

  The feeling she’d been in danger herself, at that moment. A suspicion that if she hadn’t made her move when she had – and hadn’t by sheer luck had the knife in the first place…

  Jean-Paul could have broken César’s neck. In retrospect she was sure of it. But he’d only held him, allowing her to do the killing. Despite the considerable disadvantage of all that blood. Letting her prove something?

  Pierre’s long-stop, she thought. If César had somehow looked like getting away with it – have her killed. She’d said to him herself, ‘Shades of La Chatte’, and he’d brushed that off with, ‘Never heard of her’ – but Pierre was a clever, very devious man: it must surely have occurred to him at least as a possibility?

  Hence the provision of a long-stop?

  Except – countering that devil’s advocacy now – one, she’d already told him that César knew about him. César would therefore have been a prime target even if Vidor’s réseau had been saved by Jean-Paul killing her: and two, she needn’t have come to Pierre at all, could have stuck to her original intention of only telephoning to ask him to let Vidor know she was on her way.

  That was the clincher, surely. She wouldn’t have gone near him. And he’d have seen that, it wouldn’t have taken him this long to work it out.

  So Jean-Paul was – more or less – what Pierre had said he was? But in a more generally supervisory capacity, perhaps? If he hadn’t wanted to tell her that in effect he’d been lending her a one-armed bodyguard?

  Drop it in their laps at Baker Street, she thought. Let them lose sleep over it.

  * * *

  ‘Will they send you back, d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ben.’

  She’d been asleep. Easier in her mind for having decided that old Pierre had probably not had thoughts of having her killed. Awake now, yawning, she had the feeling that she was more or less back in her right mind: at least, capable of logical thought to some degree. Plucking a blade of the thick, sharp-edged grass, tasting the salt on it.

  ‘Well.’ Ben was on his back, gazing up at streamers of white cloud in a mellowing sky; the sun was well down, by this time. Turning his head, he had to shield his eyes against it. ‘I hope you won’t, Rosie.’

  ‘Won’t what?’

  ‘What we were saying. Be sent into France again.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry… Well – I expect I’ll do just what I’m told.’

  ‘I’d say you’ve done enough.’

  ‘My lords and master may think so too. May not. We’ll see.’

  Hansen, the American major, joined in. ‘Once would be enough for me, I’ll tell you that. Our safari down to Bordeaux – hell, I wouldn’t volunteer for that again… And that’d be nothing, to you, I guess… Ben, one question I meant to ask you – your motor gunboats only operating when there’s no moon – must leave a lot of time you’re inactive – huh?’

  ‘Not really. Maintenance is one thing, training’s another. Training never stops. Landing practice on our own beaches, for instance. This kind of job – like tonight’s pickup – it’s not all they use us for. For instance, we work quite a bit with what are called Small Raiding Units. Commando teams – snatching prisoners from a certain area for interrogation, say.’

  ‘Like from one of these coastal batteries, you mean?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But that’d be moonless period stuff too, wouldn’t it?’

  He nodded. ‘Point is, it’s another type of operation, different field of training. And operating with other gunboats or M.T.B.s, for instance. You have to work out new techniques and practise them. More humdrum jobs too, on occasion – we’ve even been known to escort convoys around the coast, for God’s sake.’

  Rosie said, ‘I’ve wondered the same thing. Thought perhaps you all went up to London and chased girls.’

  ‘We do that too, of course.’

  Looking at her. Willing her to look at him. She did, finally. Asking him, deadpan, ‘You do, do you?’

  ‘Haven’t for quite a while, as it happens. Might again soon, though. Matter of fact—’

  ‘Are you going to be in trouble, Ben –’ Hansen cut in, over their murmurs – ‘on account of that piece of bad luck you had?’

  ‘It’s on the cards. Might lose my job, even.’

  ‘Well, that’d be too bad!’

  ‘Kind of you to say so. If they sent me back to a desk job – yeah, it would. I did have one, before this, and – to put it mildly, I’d sooner not.’

  ‘It was because he’d had his eardrums flattened, getting shot up in some action in the Channel. German destroyers, Ben, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Only one eardrum, actually.’

  ‘Your hearing seems pretty normal again now, anyway. Could it have become un-flattened?’

  ‘Let’s try it out. Come here, whisper a few sweet nothings. This ear first?’

  ‘Stupid bloody colonial!’

  Soft laughter in the fading light… Hansen asked him, ‘Knew each other before, did you?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’ He reached out, found her hand. ‘Sort of.’

  * * *

  ‘Rosie?’

  ‘Hello. Oh – it’s quite dark…’

  ‘Is dark. They’ll be here pretty soon – or should be… You had a good long zizz, Rosie. Caught up, yet?’

  ‘Should’ve, shouldn’t I… Unless it’s sleeping sickness… I suppose your time here’s been fairly restful?’

  ‘Oh – mostly.’

  ‘Apart from comforting Solange?’

  ‘Only breaks in the monotony – well, I got chased across some fields, by Krauts – and before that I helped shift a weapons cache-to a tomb in a churchyard, would you believe it?’

  ‘Believe anything.’

  ‘You can, really, can’t you? Even more so in your world, I’d imagine.’

  ‘Absolutely anything.’

  ‘Tell me more about what you’ve been doing?’

  ‘Some time, Ben. One day.’

  ‘Official Secrets Act, or you don’t trust me yet?’

  ‘I do trust you.’

  ‘You didn’t, though. Thought I was a shyster taking advantage. If we hadn’t run into each other again – by purest chance—’

  ‘You know how it was, Ben, how—’

  ‘It was glorious, that’s how it was. You know what I’m talking about too. But you ran away – stayed away—’

  ‘Going to hold it against me for ever, are you?’

  ‘Not holding it against you for one second – merely bloody commenting—’

  ‘How about changing the subject, then?’

  ‘All right. Good idea, let’s do that. Water under the bridge. Quits. New start. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Where’s home, Rosie?’

  ‘Place called Passenham. Near Stony Stratford – Buckinghamshire. You take a train to Bletchley, and I meet you there. I’ll give you the address and phone number, and when you have leave – and when I’m home—’

  ‘I’m finding it difficult to believe my semi-functioning ears.’

  ‘My mother tends to be a bitch, I warn you.’

  ‘That’s incredible too. Anyway, never mind, I’ll de-bitch her with my famous Aussie charm. You know, this is incredible?’

  ‘I’ve got an uncle you’ll get on with very well. My mother’s name is de Bosque, by the way – I think I told you my father was French? And the family name – Uncle Bertie
’s – is Mathieson. My name’s Ewing.’

  ‘Rosie Ewing. Rosie Ewing. I like it…’

  ‘I don’t, much. Ben keep your voice down. Beaches are all ears, you know?’

  ‘Yeah, but stuff ’em. Listen – don’t like Rosie Ewing, how’s Rosie Quarry sound to you?’

  * * *

  High broken cloud, a few early stars, a light wind from the west. The noisy lop of sea along Tariec’s craggy western edge came from a swell heaving in lazily from the Atlantic. Farr heard the rowing boat coming, the sound of creaking oars: then one of the sergeant-pilots spotted it. McDonnell, the Irishman. Ben, Bright and Farr waded in to meet the Frenchmen, hauling their boat in high enough for embarkation, Vidor calling, ‘Ben – it’s OK, gunboat is coming!’

  ‘You’re a genius, Vidor!’ Then to Rosie, ‘Hear that, did you?’ It was Hansen who answered: ‘Sure did. Sure did, Ben…’

  Rosie telling herself, It’s real, we are on our way…

  And the job done, by and large. Counting on Marc Pigot – which she was certain she could do. An echo of Romeo’s words reinforced her own instincts, in that: Trust him to Kingdom Come, you know? And subject to Jacqui sticking to her guns, seeing it through. She would have, for sure, if her friend Jeanne-Marie had been able to stay with her, and the only reason for less than total certainty now was that she’d have some interval of time with only contrary influences working on her.

  Persuade the people in St James’ not to leave her unattended any longer than they had to. Wasn’t anything else one could do…

  Ben and the two sailors were getting the dinghy down into the surf. They’d decided – Rosie heard snatches of this as she was getting down there herself – that the three of them would make the crossing to Guenioc in it, under tow from the larger boat. It would save Vidor having to make a second trip, and the dinghy had to be brought out with them anyway. Léon queried, ‘Why should we tow you? You have oars there?’ Then it turned out they didn’t have a line suitable or long enough for towing anyway. Léon suggested, ‘Stay close under our stern, Ben.’ Face to face in the dark, the swirl and heave of white water thigh-deep around them, and the others wading out to embark. ‘We’ll watch for you, too.’