by Thomas Wood
The area that Joseph had chosen for us was carved up, straight down the middle, by a single train track that must have supplied the factory back when it was in operation, or ready to ship out whatever was being made here, off to one of the French markets as soon as possible.
On the eastern side of the area, was the main factory building, a large brick-built structure, that ran for well over four or five hundred yards, across two storeys, large, airy windows running the length of the building, on both stories.
The inside of the factory was exactly how I had suspected, completely barren of anything that may have suggested what had been manufactured here years ago, apart from the odd sheet of steel and corrugated iron, that was more likely to have been a shelter for a runaway soldier than a result of production here. Most of the windows were still intact, one or two beginning to crack under the strain of keeping the rest of the building upright, but by and large, the building itself was in a relatively good condition.
On the western side of the track was a large warehouse, which mirrored the factory in length, but was far smaller in terms of its height and depth. One end was completely open, with nothing there to protect it from the elements, which had resulted in huge puddles having formed right the way across the stone floor, which put me off from searching it any further. Regardless, I could see straight from the open end to the closed end, with nothing to note apart from the large brick pillars that supported the roof and stopped it from becoming an open-air warehouse.
As I had patrolled the whole area, briefly checking in all of the little offices and outhouses that had clearly been erected around the perimeter of the main factory and its warehouse, I noticed that the train track continued on further south, which I began to walk down in search of an escape route.
I noticed the water tower from quite some distance away and realised that it would have a decent view over the whole of the factory but would still be able to retain some cover due to the trees that had now started to grow around its base.
As I lay on the cold steel of the water tower, I wondered how busy this particular water stop had been back in the day, and how many people operating it would have ever guessed that one day it would be the observation post for a British soldier, awaiting the arrival of one Frenchman and his accompanying German army.
I preferred it up there in the tower, as opposed to on the ground, where the grass was coming up through the cracks in the concrete, swinging in the breeze at knee height. I knew that my vantage point would have been a popular position for a German sniper to site himself, but as soon as I saw Joseph heading in, I would be at the bottom of the ladder and on my way to the factory. My goal was to not get killed before I made it inside that building, everything else was completely inconsequential to me.
I sighed heavily as I began to think about what was going to happen over the next few hours, and how these could be the very last few hours that I had on this earth. It is impossible to tell yourself to not think about the near future when you are convinced you are going to die, and that was exactly what was running through my mind.
If I was Joseph, I would approach the factory alone, warily but alone, because if the person that I was meeting saw that I was accompanied by even a single soldier, it could result in him being scared off, which is exactly what he didn’t want at this moment.
Therefore, I would approach alone, or at the very least, approach in a very public place, before making a big show of entering the building on my own, knowing full well that someone would be watching from somewhere.
My plan was to wait for him to arrive and, as soon as I saw him making his way to one of the factory doors, I would slide down the ladder and leg it as quickly as possible to the factory, about a two-hundred-and-fifty-yard sprint, if my little walk around had been anything to go by.
Once in, I would have to play everything by ear, there was no planning for what he might say once we were inside, or what he might do as soon as he saw my face.
I tried to run through every possible eventuality for the situation; from Joseph not turning up at all but an army in his place, to being found by a German soldier who had no knowledge of the meeting that was taking place, which resulted in me being marched off to the local army headquarters for interrogation.
It was difficult to plan for any of it, but one thing remained consistent in every single possible eventuality of the evening, I would end up captured, or more preferable to me as I sat on that tower, dead.
It is a very odd sensation, to wish yourself dead over an alternative that would see you kept alive. But, since I had seen what Joseph was capable of at the mess that he had left behind of Louis and his family, I much preferred the idea of being killed quickly, or even slowly by a bullet. Just so long as I didn’t have to feel the pain of a nail being driven through my flesh. I didn’t quite know how Louis had remained so calm as I had spoken to him, just the thought of being tortured in that way was enough to make me scream.
I shoved my thoughts along from picturing what kind of torture methods Joseph might have in store, especially as I was convinced that they would be so specialist and barbarous that he would have reserved them specifically for me, the one who seemed to be behind the attempts to try and find out what he was up to. Instead, I found myself thinking of Operation Geranium and everything that Robert had managed to tell me about it when we were back in London.
The boy, Stefan he had called him, was found with an almighty amount of glass and other debris embedded in his face, his chest and his legs, resulting in his death a few minutes after the explosion. I wondered for a moment if he knew what was in the suitcases, or if the men behind the operation had spun a wonderful yarn about how it was to be picked up by someone else, someone incredibly important that might help to avert a war altogether.
I found it difficult to picture what it was like for him, especially as he was so young and must have been terrified at the sudden prospect of dying in a train station that he had never before visited. The one thing that kept buzzing around in my head however was how was Joseph involved? I knew that he was somehow, and the fact that there were very few people left alive to talk about it concerned me greatly, ever aware that before too long, the name Alfie Lewis could be added to the long list of names who had died as a result of Geranium, next to Louis’ wife and his son, and probably next to Robert Jameson also.
My thoughts continued to be bewildered by the offshoots and distractions that were associated with Geranium, so I began whispering to myself the facts surrounding the operation, to try and keep my thoughts within the train track that ran through the centre of my mind.
“Geranium was an operation in Poland. Carried out by Stefan Krawczak, assisted on the ground by Standartenführer Rudolf Schröder. Schröder was killed by Baudouin as he tried to get to Britain, presumably to talk to Jimmy. Red had become an asset of Jimmy’s and is now working for Baudouin and the Germans…for the Germans.”
But was he? He had seemed so genuine when he was in that cottage that I couldn’t quite believe that he had ordered the Germans to fire on us. But, then again, the Germans had fired at the house, only firing on us in the garden when we had started to fire back. Was there a chance that Red had ordered them to pepper the house in order to help us get away? Or was he really in bed with the Germans?
What about Cécile? Had she become an unfortunate victim of the Geranium conspiracy? Or was her predicament purely coincidental?
There were huge gaps in my knowledge of what had been racing around my head for the last few months now, the same old thoughts that encompassed my being each and every time my head hit a pillow, and every waking minute in between. I wondered if I would ever know the answers, or whether I had been so heavy handed in my approach, that I had scared everyone off from helping me and ended up assisting the very people that I was trying my hardest to stop.
It was at that moment that I began to miss Jameson’s presence. He had had a calming influence over me these last few days, primarily because I
had felt responsible for him and that I had to maintain a calm and resolute exterior, as if everything was always under control, like a father to his son. Even when I had found out that Bill had been killed, my Dad had still given me a look, a knowing one, that told me that everything was going to be fine, everything would work out okay.
It was the look that I had needed at the time, but not the one that I had necessarily wanted. I wanted to wallow in my own grief and self-pity, alongside my mother, but he knew that somewhere down the line, I would need that calm, understated nod of assurance, which was all that was playing out in my head now, over and over, one fatherly nod after the other.
I liked to think that, as Jameson had prepared to die, he would have thought of me and my level head, the little nods and winks that I had given him just to buoy him, as one of his last thoughts before he was executed at Joseph’s command.
I hadn’t liked him at first, he hadn’t given me a great deal of reason to, especially after he had been the only face I had seen for the first eighteen hours or so after arriving back in Britain after evading capture for so long.
To me, he had seemed like the classic desk jockey; the clean, pressed uniform that never got so much of a speck of dust on it, the cheap, sweet smelling aftershave poured on by the pint, the constant and over-exuberant dates to London restaurants as if nothing was happening a hundred miles away on the continent. He was even sheltered from the bombs that were falling above his very head in a luxury air raid shelter in the basement of the hotel.
Everything had seemed so black and white back then, I either liked someone or I didn’t, they were either a friendly soldier or an enemy one. Now, together, we had come so far, blurred so many lines that it was almost impossible to recall what life felt like back then.
My opinion couldn’t have changed of him more, from one of total disgust and borderline hatred to pity and sadness for him.
I was proud of him, I was proud to call him my friend, especially as he had come so far as to be the one to suggest we split up, and that he should be the one to head back to Joseph. Especially when he knew full well that he would more than likely end up dead this time around.
It took an immense amount of courage for a man to do that. I only wished that I could have harnessed some of his bravery as I lay prone on the top of the cold steel of the water tower, staring out over the landscape below.
24
I couldn’t get the image of Louis and his family out of my head, the way that he had been hammered to his own kitchen table like he was nothing more than a piece of wood himself, before having kettles poured over his hands to try and issue some sort of punishment.
The backs of his hands were all blistered and torn, and I imagined the steam pouring off them as the water splashed down all around them. Unimaginable screams reverberated round my head, while his face was screwed up in anguish.
What the neighbours had suspected was going on in there I did not know, but I started to pray that one of them, a brave individual, would break into the house to see what the problem was, and help Louis to break free from the table, before tending to his various injuries. I desperately hoped that would be the case, and it wasn’t one of Joseph’s friends that went into the house first, simply to put a round in the back of Louis’ skull, leaving his body there to rot to the point where he was nothing more than a skeleton for the looters to avoid as they robbed his house.
I wondered how long it would be before anyone discovered his wife’s body, or that of his son. I began to think about how they would have died, and whether it had been a quick affair or not. I slowly came round to the assumption that there must have been more than one person to have carried out the awful attacks. I was sure that Louis’ screams would have led them to run straight into the kitchen, and not into the front room where they had met their grisly end.
I imagined that maybe Louis had come home, only to find them dead, before being ambushed in his kitchen by Joseph who pinned him to the table. Maybe that was why he had been so dejected about his situation, not because he was in so much pain he was exhausted.
If that was the case, then he would have known full well that I was lying when I had told him that both his wife and son were in the front room waiting for him. What must he have thought of me? Would he have ever understood why I had lied to him?
If he had already seen their corpses, then he would also know that it was me that had moved them, that it was me who had readjusted them into their chairs, to give off the impression that they hadn’t known what had hit them.
Louis Junior must have been hit second, as his blood appeared slightly fresher than his mother’s. But it was possible that was something to do with the way that he had been killed. He must have been struck across the head by something. I hadn’t seen what, a hammer maybe, which would have taken the wind from his sails as he staggered around the room. He would have then had two or maybe three seconds of comprehension of the situation, in which time he had made for the front door, before the ball of the hammer connected with his skull a second, then a third time, making him slump in a heap behind the door. Judging by the mess of his head, and the hole that was gaping from the back of it as I had looked at him, the attacker must have delivered another two or three blows to the boy, just to make sure, which had sent great streaks of fast moving blood straight up the back of the door and the wall.
His wife, it seemed, had been through far more of an ordeal than her son, which had led me to think that maybe she had been first, and the boy had simply interrupted the attacker as he maliciously made his way through the entire family. She had had her face bashed in completely, blood leaking from every single crevice that it was possible to bleed from; her mouth, her nose, her ears, even her eyes had some scarlet liquid that it had forcibly surrendered.
Her lips had swollen larger than any I had ever seen before, so much so, that her bottom lip had seemed to have covered the entirety of her chin, and her nose was so badly broken I wondered whether it had been possible for her to even breathe through it, after the initial blow had broken it beyond repair.
I couldn’t understand why anyone would have tortured and murdered her in the way that they had done. They had clearly taken the time to watch her squirm and writhe around in agony, before stabbing her several times, only allowing her to surrender to her death when they plunged the final dagger through her heart.
I wondered, as she lay dying, who she blamed for her death and, perhaps more importantly, who she forgave as she passed from one realm to the next. I imagined that, as she gave up her final breaths, that two names passed over her lips, forgiving them for the death that they had subjected her to.
“Louis…Alfie…” It was a great weight from my mind at the thought that maybe she would have found it within herself to forgive me. But I knew that it was all part of my wild imagination, that had grown wilder and more unrestrained with every day that I had been in this hell.
Rubbing my eyes firmly, trying to rid myself of the hybrid of daydreams and memories that would haunt me till my own final day, I tried to force myself into another train of thought. But like a train, it was so difficult to change track without some sort of reason, without a siding to duck into to change your direction.
I found myself imagining the pain and the screams of Louis, when he finally gathered up enough strength to rip himself free from the grips of the nails, the sound of tearing flesh and agonising wails filling my vision.
In everything, that was the one thing that I knew for an absolute certainty. There was no way that I wanted to be anywhere near that house when Louis finally managed to break free, with or without help, and I certainly wanted to be as far away as possible when he discovered that his wife and only child had been murdered. I couldn’t imagine what that sort of thing could do to a man and wondered if Louis would live out the rest of his days, regretting that he hadn’t given in to the beating that he had been subjected to. Spending his life wishing that he had died alongside the only things that had seem
ed important in his life; his wife and son.
I knew exactly what kind of a man Joseph Baudouin was, but even I struggled to comprehend what kind of special breed of evil that man must have to be, to kill a woman and a young boy in the brutal way that he had done, before making his way onto the man of the family.
I wondered if he had had any feeling of remorse or regret as he picked up the nails and hammer, before pressing them lightly on Louis’ hand. Did he really need to do this? This man had been good to him for most of his life, despite the constant taunting as children and the passive bullying that raged through their adult lives.
I doubted that he had any such thoughts, and visualised him even smiling as he lined up the nail, delivering the first blow with his hammer, that tore through Louis’ flesh, a spurt of blood shooting up violently as each force of the hammer hit home. He would have felt a slight resistance as he overcame the barrier of skin, the bravery of bone, before penetrating through the surface of the table. I wondered if he felt proud of himself as he did it. Probably.
I wondered if he had felt any remorse for the loyal man who had been the only one to welcome him back into the village after he had been kicked out of the French army. Or perhaps his memory was as good as a goldfish’s, which seemed the more likely owing to the brutality of a man who had supported him so strongly that he had appeared as loyal as a gun dog.
When I had first discussed Joseph Baudouin and his personality with Louis, he had claimed that he had always thought that Joseph was capable of doing things that were truly evil, even though he had no evidence or proof of it. But now, he did.
