The Sleeper

by J. Robert Janes

  Longing for yet another cigarette, Christina knew she had none. As she waited in the car in darkness at the side of the road, she fingered the pistol, had taken it out and inserted the spare clip. Uneasy about waiting like this, she wondered what was taking the butcher so long.

  Rolling down her side window, she listened to the night. It was now almost 0400 hours. The dawn would come at 0515 or thereabouts, but had Reiss not thought of this, and what, please, was she to do if he didn’t come?

  Soon, however, a bicycle approached, its lamp flickering through the darkness, and she heard the patient squeaking of its sprocket. He hadn’t thought to bring a farm lorry as she had felt he would. Perhaps that wife of his would have asked far too many questions, but a bicycle … Where did that leave her?

  Leaning the delivery bike against the car, Reiss softly said, ‘So, mein liebes Fräu, what is the meaning of this?’

  ‘You’ve got to help me.’

  He didn’t argue. Instead, he simply asked, ‘What have you done?’ and when she told him, and said that she needed to contact AST-X Bremen, he immediately said, ‘Wait, then, while I tuck the bicycle out of the way.’

  They would drive to wherever he kept the wireless, thought Christina. She would stand over him until he had sent Burghardt her message and then they would have to wait for a reply, and he would have to leave her with the wireless, put the car out of sight, and keep it all from his wife.

  ‘Liebes Fräu …’

  The startled gasp she gave, felt Reiss, was indication enough that she feared not just the British but himself. ‘Frau whatever-your-name-is, my son and his wife and children live on the farm I lease. The wireless is in the smokehouse, it being the one place no one other than myself goes. Unfortunately AST-X Bremen cannot be contacted now, for the British have listening sets nearby and are trying their best to pin down that set of mine, but I will do so tonight and we will have the answer you need, I assure you.’

  Not until tonight … A smokehouse … Weren’t such far too hot for a wireless, and why would nighttime be any safer? Wouldn’t the British hunt for that set of his at night as well?

  ‘Please, meine gute Frau, your unexpectedly coming to the shop, as you did on the third of June, alerted the British. Twice now I have seen people watching it. Once I was even forced to serve a customer who, like yourself, was not really a customer.’

  ‘And now?’ she said.

  ‘For now you must drive back along this road until we come to the bridge. There’s a lane that runs alongside the river and leads to a disused barn where you can leave the car and wait until I come back tonight.’

  The bridge wasn’t far, the lane axle-deep in mud and under overhanging branches, and when they reached the barn, the headlamps shining on it, he said, ‘I will open the doors. As soon as you are in, switch off the headlamps and engine. The fewer who know we are here, the better.’

  ‘Just remember that I’ve killed and will do so again if necessary.’

  Ach, how good of her. ‘Of course.’

  This beautiful creature, who had asked of an Osier he knew nothing of, did as instructed, he closing the doors only to find her switching the engine and headlamps back on.

  Returning to that open side window of hers, he said, ‘Osier has contacted me twice since we first met. Unfortunately I don’t know where he stays and have only a drop box for him, so he, too, will have to wait, but I can see that a message is left for him as well. Anything you like, but keep it brief, as it will be in pencil on a scrap of paper since the two of us have yet to work out a code.’

  What was it that Burghardt had said of this butcher? wondered Christina. That Herr Reiss would always put step after step between himself and those who funnelled messages to him for transmission and return. ‘Then give me that flashlight of yours,’ she said.

  ‘Certainly.’

  As he handed it over, he watched as she reached for the ignition key and had to juggle the pistol as well. ‘Don’t try anything,’ she said. ‘Keep away from the car.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Getting out of the car, Christina backed him up against the wall in front of it, and taking aim, waited as he stammered objections before falling to his knees, having pissed himself at the thought of dying like this.

  Closing the gap between them, she said, ‘Now do you understand how it is with me?’

  Tugging at a pocket handkerchief, he dragged it out to mop his face. Mouldy straw littered the floor round and beneath his knees. Pigs had once been kept here and the stench of them had remained to mingle with that of his urine.

  Yanking at her ankles, she falling back, he scrambled on top of her, the gun still in her hand but now also in his own, a finger jammed behind the trigger so that she couldn’t fire.

  Angrily Christina spat at him and tried to get free, but he was too heavy, too strong, and when he pressed a forearm against her throat, it was as if she couldn’t breathe.

  Passing out, she lay limply under him, he saying softly, ‘Well, Frau whoever-you-are, what shall we do with you seeing as AST-X Bremen has ordered me to do everything possible to protect the wireless?’

  Unconscious, she was even more beautiful, and certainly she would be a glorious fuck, right from the Vaterland, but he had no time for that. Finding the spring-assisted knife he had given her in her handbag, he again straddled her to gently slap her cheeks, she awakening to distantly blurt, ‘Ash … ?’

  The woman’s body hung upside down, impaled on a splintered timber that had jammed itself into the pump shaft. Sickened—horrified by the sight—Hilary grabbed Karen and held her. The dress had been torn right off the woman, her skin a ghostly pallor where not marred by mud, abrasions and massive bruises, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth open in the scream that had been silenced. She wasn’t young, wasn’t old. Having hit the timbers and the walls of the shaft so many times, her legs and arms were broken and twisted at odd angles.

  Karen was sobbing, and Hilary wanted to comfort her but couldn’t.

  Lowering the beam of the light, Beck let it play over the putrid flotsam of bloated small animals and debris that bobbed up and down among the broken timbers with each oscillation of the sea. To their right and left, Hilary could see that openings gave access to the shaft but as yet there had been no sign of Ash and he must have died in the cave-in. Voices did come, however. Shouts, but these were far distant from them.

  ‘They believe we all must have been killed,’ said Beck. Coiling the rope that now tightly bound Hilary’s wrists, he tugged at it, nearly pulling her off her feet, and taking Karen by the hand, started out, the beam of his light passing quickly over the walls to give a last glimpse of the body.

  ‘Who was she?’ blurted Hilary.

  He didn’t answer, for voices came again—Ash must have earlier got a message to the police. They were calling down the main shaft, but when Beck and Karen and herself finally reached it and had turned into that haulageway, the sounds had ceased. Yanking on the rope, he reminded her to hurry. Time, distance and orientation soon became entirely lost as they picked their way through the workings, always striking farther and farther from the main shaft and climbing from level to half-level to level. Exhausted, wanting desperately to stop, Hilary knew they must be closer to the surface, but were they really? Karen hadn’t said a thing since they had left Colonel Hacker and her father. Doing exactly as Herr Beck told her, poor, frightened Karen plodded stolidly ahead, dutifully waiting when he paused to consult the plans of the workings. Always he appeared to be searching for something, the broken, sagging timbers failing to dissuade him.

  Then there it was, and Hilary felt her heart sink, for a ragged, gaping hole at shoulder height lay to one side of the tunnel, having been intersected years and years ago. No more than two feet in diameter, it appeared dark and uninviting.

  ‘Ancient workings,’ he said, and folding the plans, tucked them awa
y before gathering some pieces of the granite for them to stand on. All too soon he had climbed up into that hole, he and his light vanishing, the rope that bound her to him tightening.

  But then the rope slackened, and he came back.

  ‘There aren’t any ancient underground workings,’ seethed Hilary. ‘There can’t be. The Celts and others right up until the Middle Ages, and even now, concentrated the tin on the surface by streaming, by placer mining.’

  He paid no attention. Forcing Karen into the hole, he told her to crawl up it. ‘There is a cave, Liebling. When you get there, don’t be afraid of anything you might feel. Just lie down and wait.’

  If still alive, Ash would never find them, thought Hilary, but said, ‘Her knees are hurting her. Can’t you at least wrap them in something?’

  Beck threw her a silencing glance and told Karen to go. ‘For the Vaterland, ja? And when the Führer pins a medal to your tunic, your mother and grandfather will be proud of you, yourself as well.’

  In despair, Hilary watched the child disappear. Beck would kill her now, and with one broken hand and both wrists tied like this, was there nothing she could do?

  But he said, ‘Now yourself, Fräulein.’

  ‘Then untie my hands.’

  He shook his head. ‘Use your elbows. The tunnel angles. It goes along, then up, then along and finally up.’

  Still she hesitated, was looking into the darkness behind him, Beck wondering if she had seen Ashby, but that couldn’t be, and when he smiled at the ruse, she turned and did as told. Even so, he unwound the rope from his left hand and went back along the crosscut some distance. Listening closely, he waited. Surely Ashby would have tried something by now, even if badly injured?

  In silence, Hilary waited with Karen, for the cave was absolutely dark. Not a glimmer of daylight came through from above, but when the German had rejoined them, light from his torch revealed charred granite walls where fire had been used to mine the rock. Wicker panniers, much broken and decayed, had spilled their lumps of ore. Iron Age adzes, though badly rusted, had short handles of hardwood so smooth from use, Hilary noted they were as if polished. Bunches of eight to ten straight, thin lengths of wood were tied together with strips of now-curled, much-decayed leather. The sticks, having been dipped in pine resin or animal fat, were the torches that had been used. Terra-cotta vessels, also broken, would have, she thought, carried the water these Celtic miners had once dashed on the fire-heated rock to shatter it. Sharp-edged spalls of granite littered the floor. Though far smaller, and of an indeterminate depth below surface, the cavern made her think of the salt mines at Hallstatt, in the mountains of Upper Austria, though there the miners hadn’t had to use fire except to get at the salt. Terrified, yet amazed by what they had accidentally stumbled upon, she knew that there had to be a date for this. The mines at Hallstatt had begun about 1,000 years before Christ, the most recent of them from 700 to 500 BC, though all three of those mines had tragically ended soon after this last due to a terrible avalanche that had not only buried them and everything else, but had filled in some of the shafts and underground workings with trees and glacial rubble. But here the date must be the latter: from 700 to 500 BC perhaps. Joint cracks and the horizontal sheeting planes in the granite, those same elements that had led naturally to the tors and crags so common in Cornwall, had been used to good effect.

  As Herr Beck continued to search the roof for a way out, Hilary continued looking at what they had found, for stone hammers showed where samples of the ore had been pulverized, the rudimentary assays done by washing the dust in shallow, reddish pottery bowls whose triangular designs were as dark as the charcoal. If only she could pick up a hammer …

  Another iron adze lay next to a flint chopper, the beam of the light passing quickly over them, and always there was this damp smell, as if of a burrow, and always now the roof above them became lower and lower as they moved towards the far wall.

  Crouching, she felt the floor and, quickly picking something up, surreptitiously slid it away in a pocket. A rubbish of bones lay about, some charred. Insofar as she could tell, they weren’t human, but of an exit there seemed no sign. Again and again Herr Beck shone the light at the ceiling, but at each blackened fissure where the smoke from the fires must eventually have issued, there was only hard-packed, angular broken granite, a rubble that had been jammed into them.

  It was something he hadn’t calculated on, and obviously he hadn’t thought of Hallstatt and what had put an end to it.

  Disheartened by the lack of an exit, Hilary told him, ‘Those fissures must have been filled in long ago either by nature or to hide the tin-bearing veins.’

  ‘Then we must find the one that is easiest for us to clear,’ said Beck, but since it was almost 0600 hours, they had plenty of time, for he and Karen couldn’t have left in daylight anyway. The girl would be useful in keeping Karen quiet, but once night came, he would have to kill her and then try for Bridgwater, and once there, get Ernst Reiss, of Davidson’s Pork, Beef and Poultry, to help Karen and himself.

  Reaching the shop at last, Reiss put the bicycle on its kickstand and went to unlock the door. It was still far too early to open up, and he didn’t want any undue attention. Leaving the CLOSED sign in the window, he went into the back and put the kettle on. Laura, he knew, would be wondering where he had gone and why anyone should have telephoned like that, forcing him to go out in the small hours of the night, but he had often gone to the farm and come back before dawn, so she would not worry about it too much. And as for MI5’s having watched the shop, as he had told Frau Ashby, he hadn’t seen anyone since her one and only visit.

  But her handbag had held some interesting things. Photos of a child, her own no doubt, a membership card in the Frauenschaft, implying Kinder, Kirche und Küche—children, church and kitchen—an old saying adopted by the Nazis who believed firmly that a woman’s place was in the home, yet someone had given her New Scotland Yard’s report of the murder of Daisy Belamy in the ruins of that chantry near Kilve, a murder everyone hereabouts knew of from gossip and the newspapers or radio. Apparently a Colonel Hacker of MI5 was the prime suspect and must have killed the woman in a moment of unbridled zeal, for Hacker’s job was to apprehend people like himself.

  There were one- and five-pound notes, perhaps 1,000 pounds in all, and nice to have. The perfume, lipstick, nail file, compact and all other personal effects he would have to dispose of. Since the gas ring was already burning, he held the woman’s papers and passports to it and then, when those had crumbled to dust, the Yard’s summation on the murder of this barmaid the woman’s schoolteacher husband had been seeing.

  After having said the name of the husband, she had known what he was going to do to her and had said in Deutsch, ‘Please don’t. I can and will make it worth your while.’

  Turning over onto her stomach, lying there in the straw, she had even hiked that dress of hers up above her ass and had spread her legs, had waited, he letting her squirm until he had broken her neck. With no ID, and left just as that barmaid of the husband’s had been left, she and the car would eventually be found, but would it matter to the schoolmaster?

  As their voices became louder, Ashby realized that he must have climbed to a level nearer to them, but in pitch-darkness, had he any hope of saving Hilary and getting her and Karen safely away?

  Feeling forwards, he came at last to where their voices were, only to realize they must be above him. Beck knew English but, like many Germans, probably little if any French. Karen, however, had once spoken a little, but of recent years none at all that he knew of, yet could he chance it so as to alert Hilary to its use? ‘Chérie, je t’aime, toujours je t’aime,’ he called out.

  ‘Vati? Bist du es wirklich?’ she cried. Papa? Is it really you?

  In a burst of rapid French, Hilary said, ‘Ash, nous sommes dans une caverne que les Celtes anciens exploitaient pour l’étain. Il a son pistolet e
t son canif, mais je pense que celui-là est vide.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ shrieked Beck in Deutsch. ‘Come up here at once.’

  An ancient cavern worked for tin, thought Ashby. A pistol that she thought was empty, a knife …

  Yanking on the rope, Beck spilled her onto her back, she yelling, ‘Je lui suis attachée par une corde.’

  ‘Verdammter Engländerin,’ yelled Beck, yanking on the cord and putting a boot down hard on her chest.

  ‘Don’t! Please don’t!’ shrieked Karen, running at him only to be swatted out of the way, but as the ground rumbled deep below them, each paused in doubt and fear, then glanced uncertainly at the others.

  Torchlight soon shone down through the tunnel, Ashby having also felt the ground shifting. Setting the drill steel aside, he quickly wormed his way into the tunnel and was soon with them. Beck, Hilary and Karen were at the far end of the cave, the light and pistol pointing at him, the ceiling not far above them.

  ‘There’s no time to lose,’ said Ashby. ‘You’ll never manage it, mein Lieber. Police constables are watching every possible exit.’

  ‘But not above us,’ retorted Beck. ‘By my reckoning we must be a good fifteen hundred metres to the south of the engine house and much lower on the slopes of that hill. There’ll be bracken and a litter of loose rocks hiding the entrance while mounds of waste rock lie between us and the engine house.’

  ‘Then let’s hope none of that waste has been piled above,’ said Ashby, wondering how much time they actually had and cursing the loss of his specs, for he couldn’t see them clearly.

  ‘Start emptying this fissure above me,’ said Beck, and pulling on the rope that bound him to Hilary, made her get to her feet and stand much closer to himself.

  ‘Karen, come here,’ said Ashby, hugging her tightly and kissing her on both cheeks before saying en français, ‘Souhaite-moi bonne chance, ma petite.’ Wish me luck.

  ‘No more French,’ said Beck. ‘Just move the rocks.’