by RA Williams
‘Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.’
‘A Totenkopf,’ said Dietrich.
‘Totenkopf?’ asked Mauss.
‘The symbol of the Death’s Head Division of the SS.’ Dietrich turned to Elle.
She nodded, understanding. The Nazi division had adopted Balthasar’s death’s head as their unit symbol.
‘Until now, I half found your theory of the Externsteine utterly false,’ continued Dietrich.
‘I didn’t possess evidence to prove predation until…’
Dr Mauss looked at the elaborate wiring leading away from the gelignite and back up the passage to the plunger at the surface. ‘You must not open this.’
‘But it was you who brought me to this point,’ Elle replied in dismay. ‘I need to know what’s behind it.’
‘Once you open this door, there is no closing it.’
Caution and prudence battled it out with determination, but it was no real fight. Elle knew she had to find her answer.
The gelignite was detonated, and the hollow breached.
A hand gripped the collar of her shirt, spinning her around. She caught a glimpse of coal-scuttle helmets and black uniforms before everything went sideways.
It would have been better, perhaps, had she chosen prudence after all.
❖❖❖
30 AUGUST 1939
THE STRAIT OF DOVER
The wagons-lits shunted onto the Ferry Boat de Nuit. It had just gone two in the morning and Elle couldn’t sleep. She hadn’t for three days already, and probably wouldn’t until the night ferry crossed the English Channel and docked in Dover, England.
She was heading back to the States with her tail between her legs.
Raising the window blind in her compartment, she just glimpsed the Quai des Monitors before her sleeper carriage disappeared into the gaping gangway of Twickenham Ferry’s train deck. The port of Dunkirk was Elle’s last stop on the Continent before crossing the Channel.
She watched from her window as a conductor waved his carbide lamp, directing the train onto one of the ferry’s four tracks loaded with blue-and-gold-accented sleeper carriages and luggage vans. The lights lining the Train Deck’s riveted ceiling were dimmed, so as not to disturb First Class passengers asleep in their berths.
A grinding clang echoed along the walls of the deck. A pair of labourers manhandled large oily chains, while others busily jacked up the uncoupled sleeper to take the weight off its springs. The chains were attached to mooring rings on the underside of the carriage and tightened with screw-eyes. There was a carnival atmosphere to the loading of the carriages, the racket unnerving. Elle wondered if the French labourers took some kind of perverse pleasure in awakening the passengers.
Crossing the compartment, she raised a small folding table in the corner, revealing a tiny washbasin beneath. Turning on the taps, she moistened a flannel and then looked at herself in the mirror. She dabbed the stitched wound at the back of her head, hardly recognising herself, her eyes hollow and surrounded by dark rings from lack of sleep. The rough dressing wrapped about her head had ceased weeping, but what she needed was a proper bath to wash out the dried blood caked in her hair. Tossing the flannel into the basin, she reached for her baseball cap sitting on the brass rack above her bunk and positioned it to cover her bandage. She would have to make do with a jaunty tilt.
‘Greta Garbo you ain’t.’
As if she didn’t already look cuckoo enough in her soiled dungarees, clunky work boots, shepherd check shirt and moth-eaten grey sweatshirt with St Dunstan’s scrawled across the front of it in green and white chenille lettering.
Sliding back the compartment door, she guardedly looked both ways along the narrow corridor. Coast clear, she made her way aft; type F carriages were accessed at the rear. An attendant stood from his flip-up chair at the end of the carriage.
‘Madam, can I help?’ he asked quietly. She took a step back, his blue uniform too similar in the dark to the get-up worn by the SS thugs.
‘I’m going to deck,’ she responded, opening the outer door at the rear of the sleeper.
‘Do you not wish to sleep?’
‘With that racket?’ she said, jabbing a thumb in the direction of the ferry workers. ‘I need to take some air.’
‘Very well,’ he replied graciously. ‘Your carriage number is 3805. Please do mind your step as you alight.’
She smiled. Manners were a nice change.
With rainwater dripping from wet carriages onto the iron decking already slippery with rail grease, the hobnails on the bottoms of her boots made negotiating the train deck a thorny business. Even so, the dock labourers spared her nary a glance as they hurried over a slab of tracked gangway folding upwards as the ferry prepared to make way.
With the sleepers secured and the labourers now gone, the deck grew quiet. Flat-footing her way forward, she came to a stairway. A sign in English read First Class Dining Saloon & Deck.
After making her way up into a cloud of tobacco smoke hanging lazily in a companionway, she passed by a set of open double doors to the First Class bar. Ice clinked in glasses. A woman giggled. Apparently, Elle wasn’t the only passenger unable to sleep. She could use a drink but didn’t fancy the mindless banter that went with it. An open hatch led up to the deck. Making her way amidships, she stopped below the ferry’s black-tipped red funnels. Save for the sound of herring gulls and the distant thrum-thrum-thrum from the propellers, the night was peaceful, the air keen. Threatening clouds that had hounded her since Antwerp came apart and moonbeams patinated great swathes of the Channel.
Steadying herself against a lifeboat, Elle removed a crumpled packet of cigarettes from her pocket. Enver Bey. In her final, confusing minutes at the Externsteine, the Chesterfields Dr Mauss had given her went missing. She tossed the shit German Zigaretten overboard. Fluttering down the dark hull of the ferry, they landed in the waters of Dunkirk Harbour, disappearing into the bilge outflow.
She raised the collar of her shirt, pulling her St Dunstan’s sweatshirt taut about her neck as she closed her eyes, taking in the briny night air. Although it was August, the Strait of Dover had a nip to it. The last three days had been torturously long. Bad Meinberg to Essen, and then on to Antwerp and from there to Dunkirk, where she had boarded the night train. In a few hours more, she would be safely in England.
Slipping a hand underneath her baseball cap, she felt for the wound. It throbbed. If being butted in the head by a Schmeisser submachine gun wasn’t bad enough, having seventeen stitches hurriedly applied by Dietrich’s shaking hands was worse still.
She had been tossed into the back of an Opel Blitz truck, followed closely by her hastily packed field trunk, and driven to the train station in Bad Meinberg. Kept under guard by the SS, she was then unceremoniously booted off the train at the Belgian frontier – and still that wasn’t the worst of it. Coming so close to validating everything she had spent the last twenty-seven years trying to prove, but being unable to see it through, was the worst trauma imaginable. She had touched the blocking stone at the end of the passage, a familiar death symbol grimacing back at her, carved into the stone, the apophthegm: Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.
Balthasar Toule had been there.
Elle had detonated the gelignite and breached the hollow. But she never got a look within. She sighed, now wishing she hadn’t tossed her cigarettes into the Channel.
A man in a wrinkled linen suit appeared through the hatch leading to the saloon. He lit a cigarette.
‘Sorry to bother,’ she said.
He nodded, his features becoming clear in the light from the companionway. Although his face showed signs of age, his grey hair was filled with waves, making him look younger. ‘No bother, mijn schatje.’
He produced a packet of Gauloises and offered her one. She accepted. He fished a gold lighter from his trouser pocket and handed it to her. Clicking it open, she sparked a flame. She took in a drag, her exhalation filling the night air with smoke, and held out t
he lighter, but he refused to take it.
‘Looks as though you need it.’
‘That obvious?’
‘You have the look of the vagabond.’
She stared at him in the darkness; something about the man gave her a curious feeling of déjà vu.
‘Difficult journey, ja?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘It would be impossible to fail to notice a lady dressed in such attire.’
Elle realised she looked a mess. ‘I’ve had a rotten couple of days.’
‘Ja. I should think you have, mijn schatje.’
He was speaking Flemish. Belgian. His manner suggested he held a lady in esteem, and not as an object of desire. Yet something about his demeanour conveyed a rakish streak. Like an Eton drunk.
‘I’m not much of a conversationalist just now, I’m afraid.’ She put a hand out. ‘Eleanor Annenberg.’
Even in the dim light of the saloon’s windows, she saw the Belgian’s face blanch. A long, uncomfortable moment of silence followed. She saw schemes hatch in his shrewd blue eyes. When he spoke, his tone was changed.
‘This ferry will not terminate at Dover in the morning.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It will call into Folkestone.’
‘Folkestone?’
He nodded, eyes narrowing. ‘Lovely in summer. I recommend a visit to the Parish Church of St Emiliana. It’s quite a meeting place.’
With that, he dropped his cigarette end on the deck.
Elle watched as he turned from her and, without another word, disappeared through the companionway leading to the saloon. She had no idea what had changed in the man so abruptly, but after the thrashing she had taken in Germany, she wasn’t keen to run after him to find out. Or to remain in the open.
Another cloudburst sent sheets of rain down onto the ferry. Elle scurried from deck. There were cabins and a dining room on the ferry for First Class passengers, but after the odd behaviour of the Belgian, she wanted only to be safely back in her sleeper compartment. Returning to the train deck, she squeezed around the carriages, nervously looking about for the first sign of trouble, catching Dunkirk as it faded from view through the open aft deck.
‘Au revoir, Continent.’
She made her way forward along the carriage’s corridor, a tannoy crackling to life just as she reached her berth.
‘Please excuse the interruption,’ a subdued and all-too-British voice announced. ‘Due to heavy fog at Dover Marine, this ferry will divert to Folkestone. Please accept our apologies.’
Sliding the door closed behind her, she slumped onto the banquette, the ferry gently pitching as it changed course.
❖❖❖
30 AUGUST 1939
FOLKESTONE, KENT
The first hint of the new day arrived in pink and red. It was gone five and Elle had still not slept. The chalky White Cliffs of Dover showed themselves in the distance, lights from the harbour winking to the east. So much for fog.
Eight miles down the coast, she made out the lights of Folkestone. Had the paling Belgian merely informed her of a change in destination, or was she now seeing coincidences everywhere? And she didn’t believe in coincidence.
By half six, the sun began to show itself, and Elle was able to take the air just in her shepherd check shirt. Features of the English coastline grew clear. Although not as vast as the port of Dover, Folkestone’s harbour was humming. Packet boats preparing for the morning’s sail to Boulogne jostled in the high tide with nimble fishing luggers. Down the coast from the harbour’s fish sheds, the seafront became a place of amusement. A whitewashed pier jutted into the Channel, the pavilion’s zinc roof glistening in the morning sunshine. At the top of the beach stood a long, undulating switchback roller coaster. Rows of yellow-and-white trimmed changing tents opened for bathers on the shingled west beaches, while porters set out wood and canvas chairs along the high-water mark. A few early bathers were taking their morning plunge in an open-air swimming pool.
While the Germans threatened their neighbours, Britain was on holiday.
On the cliffs above the beach stood a long row of stately Regency homes and hotels. Just showing itself over a copse of poplar and ash was a church tower.
Twickenham Ferry made Folkestone’s outer harbour in a scant fifteen minutes. Lines were tossed to dockhands, who pulled them over bollards, securing the ferry to the pier.
No sooner had Elle returned to her carriage than vibrations began to rattle her window. Lowering it, she leaned out and watched as the chains securing her carriage to the deck were drawn away. Darkness gave way to drenching sunshine as her sleeper rolled onto an iron gantry. The wagons-lits were marshalled along a siding, where a pair of Stirling locomotives waited to double-head the train up a steeply graded rail spur. As the carriage began inching forward, Elle retrieved from her rucksack one of the old tennis balls, R.F. Downey & Co still just visible in the worn felt.
Settling into her banquette for the two-hour trip up to London, she tossed the ball against the wall of her berth and caught it as it bounced back. The sun dazzled her through the open windows. Seagulls cawed overhead, and she heard children laughing in the distance. A Union Jack fluttered outside the harbour master’s office. She was safe.
As the locomotives crawled forward, Elle closed her eyes, the slow, drawn-out tugs of the Stirlings pulling the carriages across the viaduct lullabying her. She was just dozing off when she was roused by the hoot from a steam whistle. Opening her eyes as her carriage passed a signal shed, she caught sight of a white sign below the signalman’s window. In black letters: Folkestone Harbour.
Black letters on a white background.
A light clicked in her head as the carriage jarred, the pitch of the room changing as the train began climbing the incline towards the upper town. She opened the lid of her travel trunk, digging through a jumble of personal effects until she found the ledger Dougie Beedham had given her on Utila Island, ten years before.
The incline steepened. Elle tumbled onto the upholstered banquette, morning sun illuminating faint gold lettering pressed into the ledger’s cover: US Commerce Committee Investigation into RMS Titanic.
Inside it was Titanic’s closet: White Star Line’s cargo manifest. Transatlantic cargo was traceable – where it came from and where it was heading. Titanic’s cargo manifest should have contained a record of the skeletons in Balthasar Toule’s closet. She had pored endlessly over the manifest, from stem to stern. Keel to crow’s nest, but there was nothing so extraordinary as a pair of sarcophagi. Nothing linked to Toule. Nothing in No. 2 Hold or any other on the ship.
Quickly flipping through the pages, her finger slid down the rows of cargo: forty-three mink coats from Russia, twenty-eight crates of crystal from Venice, seventeen rugs from Persia, a 1912 Renault motor car from Paris, eight dozen tennis balls.
No. No. And no.
Then, on page eighty-nine, an addition. Notation: Not written with a fountain pen, but scribbled with pencil. Last-minute addition.. Her finger slid across the details:
27061965QI.
Item description: 1 Large Crate. Roentgen secretary.
Notation: Excess weight. Charge levied.
Destination: New York.
Port of Origin: Folkestone.
‘Folkestone,’ she said.
Black letters on a white background.
‘I’ll be damned.’ Struggling to her feet in the cockeyed cabin, she leaned out of the window. The locomotives had made the top of the incline. Although her sleeper remained on the slope, already she felt an increase in speed.
Folkestone. She didn’t believe in coincidences. She was meant to end up there. If the night ferry had landed her in Dover, she would have zipped on by Folkestone without giving it more thought.
Rummaging through her trunk, she grabbed Corky’s compass, shoving the tennis balls and the ledger into her rucksack, along with her Tigers baseball cap. Sliding back the berth’s door, she stumbled into the companionway.
‘Madam,’ the startled attendant called from his seat at the rear of the carriage. ‘Please return to your compartment. It’s dangerous in the companionway.’
‘I’m alighting,’ she replied, half charging, half falling towards the rear of the carriage.
‘You mustn’t,’ the attendant said, alarm in his voice. ‘The train will not be stopping. Please, you must return to your compartment.’
Elle hadn’t felt such courage since the night she descended into Titanic’s flooding holds. Twisting the handle to the outer door, it flew open, the sound of steel trucks below her screeching along the rails like nails across a chalkboard. She stood there, momentarily frozen by the rush of air that greeted her. The attendant tripped on the wool carpet as he made his way to stop her, crashing against the ornate wood panelling. With renewed vigour, she slung her bag onto her shoulders and leaped from the carriage, just as the attendant grabbed hold of her sweatshirt.
‘Madam!’ he shouted as she slipped from his grasp. Tumbling amid the grease-soaked cinders at the side of the rails, she rolled clear of the rake of sleepers, kitchen carriages and luggage vans. The attendant stared back at her in horror. ‘Have you lost your mind?’
Laughing nervously as she staggered to her feet, knees wobbly, head spinning, even she was surprised by her bravado.
‘Nope,’ she hollered over the screech of the train, wiping off the oily ballast stones sticking to her sweatshirt. Uninjured, she made her way down the incline, pulling off her sweatshirt and rolling back her shirtsleeves before picking up her ruck and, shouldering it, added, ‘I believe I have found it.’
A porter in burgundy livery stood before the Royal Pavilion Hotel’s entrance, adjusting his spotless white gloves.
‘Could you tell me, do you have any vacancies?’ Elle asked.
The porter gave her bedraggled appearance a not-so-kind looking over.
‘Sorry, ma’am. You’ve arrived dab in the midst of our high season. We’re bursting. You may have better luck at a hotel atop The Leas.’
‘The Leas?’
