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‘That the whole thing has been a deliberate ploy so that I can make a snap inspection of the military situation in the island and its defenses.’
‘That’s really rather clever,’ Hofer said.
‘Yes, I think it is.’ Rommel started to unbutton his tunic. ‘In the meantime, I’ll meet with Falkenhausen and Stulpnagel at some quiet spot and get on with it.’ He yawned. ‘I think I’ll go to bed. See that signal goes to von Schmettow in Guernsey tomorrow. Oh, and speak to Colonel Halder first thing in the morning. Tell him I’m much taken with Corporal Berger and want to borrow him for a while. I don’t think he’ll make any difficulties.’
‘I doubt it, Herr Field Marshal,’ Hofer said. ‘Sleep well,’ and he went out.
Dougal Munro slept on a small military bed in the corner of his office at Baker Street that night. It was about three o’clock in the morning when Jack Carter shook him gently awake. Munro opened his eyes instantly and sat up. ‘What is it?’
‘Latest lists from Slapton, sir. You asked to see them. Still over a hundred bodies missing.’
‘And no sign of Kelso?’
‘I’m afraid not. General Montgomery isn’t too happy, but he has had an assurance from the Navy that the E-boats couldn’t have picked survivors up. They were too far away.’
‘The trouble with life, Jack, is that the moment someone tells you something is impossible, someone else promptly proves that it isn’t. What time is first light?’
‘Just before six. That should make a big difference to the final search.’
‘Order a car for eight o’clock. We’ll take a run down to Slapton and see for ourselves.’
‘Very well, sir. Are you going back to sleep?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ Munro stood up and stretched. ‘Think I’ll catch up on some paperwork. No peace for the wicked in this life, Jack.’
At six o’clock on that same morning, Kelso came awake from a strange dream in which some primeval creature was calling to him from a great distance. He was very, very cold, feet and hands numb, and yet his face burned and there was sweat on his forehead.
He unzipped the flap and peered out into the gray light of dawn, not that there was anything much to see for he was shrouded in a sea fog of considerable density. Somewhere in the distance, the beast called again, only now he recognized it for what it was – a foghorn. Although he didn’t know it, it was the Corbiere Light on the tip of the southernmost coast of Jersey, already behind him as the current swept him along. He sensed land, could almost smell it and, for a little while, came back to life again.
He could hear waves breaking on an unseen shore, and then the wind tore a hole in the curtain and he glimpsed cliffs, concrete gun emplacements on top. The place, although it meant nothing to Kelso, was Noirmont Point, and as the sea fog dropped back into place, the current carried him into St Aubin’s Bay, close inshore.
There were waves taking him in, strange, twisting currents carrying him round. At one side, a wave broke sending spray high in the air, and all around him was white foam, rocks showing through. And then there was a voice, high and clear, and the fog rolled away to reveal a small beach, rocks climbing steeply to a pine wood above. There was someone there, a man running along the shore, in woolen cap, heavy reefer coat and rubber boots.
The life raft slewed broadside in the surf, lifted high and smashed against rocks, pitching Kelso headfirst through the flap into the water. He tried to stand up, his scream as his right leg collapsed under him drowned by the roaring of the surf, and then the man was knee-deep in water, holding him. It was only then that he realized it was a woman.
‘All right, I’ve got you. Just hang on.’
‘Leg,’ he mumbled. ‘Leg broken.’
He wasn’t sure what happened after that, and he came to in the shelter of some rocks. The woman was dragging the landing craft out of the water. When he tried to sit up, she turned and came toward him. Kelso said as she knelt down, ‘Where am I, France?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Jersey.’
He closed his eyes for a moment and shivered. ‘You’re British, then?’
‘I should hope so. The last I heard of my husband, he was a major in the Tanks Corps serving in the Western Desert. My name’s Helen de Ville.’
‘Colonel Hugh Kelso.’
‘American Air Force, I suppose? Where did your plane come down?’
‘It didn’t. I’m an army officer.’
‘An army officer? But that doesn’t make sense. Where on earth have you come from?’
‘England. I’m a survivor of a ship that was torpedoed in Lyme Bay.’ He groaned suddenly as pain knifed through his leg and almost lost his senses.
She opened his torn trouser leg and frowned. ‘That’s terrible. You’ll have to go to hospital.’
‘Will that mean Germans?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
He clutched at the front of her reefer coat. ‘No – no Germans.’
She eased him back down. ‘Just lie still. I’m going to leave you for a little while. I’m going to need a cart.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But no Germans. They mustn’t get their hands on me. You must promise. If you can’t do that, then you must kill me. See, there’s a Browning pistol here.’
He plucked at it and she leaned over him, face set, and took the pistol from its holster on his left thigh. ‘You’re not going to die and the Jerries aren’t going to have you either – that’s the only promise I’m prepared to give. Now wait for me.’
She slipped the pistol into her pocket, turned and hurried away. He lay there on that fog-shrouded shore, trying to get his bearings, and then the leg started to hurt again and he remembered the morphine in the emergency kit. He began to crawl toward the life raft. That, of course, was very definitely the final straw, and he plunged into darkness.
4 (#ulink_f2fb788b-a15d-5d4d-93c6-7da1690e9d16)
Helen de Ville left the cart track which was the usual way down to the beach and took a shortcut, scrambling up the steep hillside through the pine trees. She was strong and wiry, not surprising after four years of enemy occupation and the food restrictions that had caused her to lose nearly thirty pounds in weight. She often joked that it had given her back the figure she’d enjoyed at eighteen, an unlooked-for bonus at forty-two. And like most people, the lack of a car and a public transport system meant she was used to walking many miles each week.
She stood at the edge of the trees and looked across at the house. De Ville Place was not one of the largest manors on the island. It had been once in days of family glory, but a disastrous fire at the end of the nineteenth century had destroyed one entire wing. It was very old, constructed of Jersey granite weathered by the years. There were rows of French windows at the front on either side of the entrance, a granite wall dividing the house from a courtyard at one side.
She paused, taking her time, for there was an old Morris sedan parked in the courtyard, one of those requisitioned by the enemy. For two years now she’d had German naval officers billeted on her. They came and went, of course, sometimes staying only a night or two when E-boats of the 5th Schnellboote Flotilla came over from Guernsey.
Mostly they were regulars, young officers serving with various naval units based in Jersey. The war took its toll. There were often engagements with British MTBs in the area of the Channel Islands, and the RAF frequently attacked convoys to Granville, St Malo and Cherbourg, even when they made a night run. Men died, but some survived. As she started across the lawn, the door opened and one of them came out.
He wore a white sweater, old reefer coat and seaboots and carried a duffel bag in one hand. The face beneath the salt-stained naval cap was good-humored and recklessly handsome. A bravo, this one, straight out of the sixteenth century, who wore a white top to his cap, usually an affectation of German U-boat commanders, but then Lieutenant Guido Orsini was a law unto himself, an Italian on secondment to the German Navy, trapped in the wrong place at entirely the wrong time when the Italian government had capitulated. Helen de Ville had long since given up pretending that she felt anything but considerable affection for him.
‘Morning, Guido.’
‘Helen, cara mia.’ He blew her a kiss. ‘I’m the last, as usual.’
‘Where to today?’
‘Granville. Should be fun in this fog. On the other hand, it keeps the Tommies at home. Back tomorrow. Do you want to go into St Helier? Can I give you a lift?’
‘No thanks. I’m looking for Sean.’
‘I saw the good General not ten minutes ago coming out of the south barn with a felling axe and walking down toward his cottage. See you tomorrow. I must fly. Ciao, cara.’
He went through the small gate to the courtyard. A moment later, she heard the Morris start up and drive away. She crossed the courtyard herself, went through a field gate and ran along the track through trees. Sean Gallagher’s cottage stood by a stream in a hollow. She could see him now in old corduroy pants and riding boots, the sleeves of the checked shirt rolled up above muscular arms as he split logs.
‘Sean!’ she called and stumbled almost falling.
He lowered the axe and turned, pushing a lock of reddish brown hair from his eyes as he looked toward her. He dropped the axe and reached out to catch her as she almost fell again.
Sean Martin Gallagher was fifty-two and, as an Irish citizen, officially neutral in this war. He had been born in Dublin in 1892, his father a professor of surgery at Trinity College, a man who had taken no interest in women until, in his fiftieth year during a professional visit to Jersey, he had met a young nurse called Ruth le Brocq. He’d married her within a month and taken her back to Dublin.
She’d died in childbirth the following year and the boy Sean grew up spending the long summers each year in Jersey with his grandparents, the rest of the time in Dublin with his father. Sean’s ambition was to be a writer, and he’d taken a degree in literature at his father’s university, Trinity College. The exigencies of life made him a soldier, for as he finished college the First World War started.
He’d joined the Irish Fusiliers, a regiment that many Jerseymen served in, and by 1918 was a very old twenty-six. A major, twice wounded, and with an MC for gallantry on the Somme. As he used to say, any real experience of war came after that, fighting with the IRA in Ireland under Michael Collins’ leadership, as commander of a flying column in County Mayo.
The treaty with the British government which had ended the conflict in 1922 had only proved a prelude to a bloody and vicious civil war between those elements of the IRA who refused to accept the treaty and those who chose to fight for the Irish Free State government under Collins. Sean Gallagher had chosen the Free State and found himself a general at the age of thirty, sweeping through the west of Ireland, ruthlessly hunting down old comrades.
Afterward, sick of killing, he’d traveled the world, living on money left to him by his father, writing the odd novel when he had a mind, finally settling in Jersey in 1930. Ralph de Ville had been a boyhood friend, and Helen he had loved desperately and hopelessly from the first moment they had met. His home in St Lawrence, deep in the country, had been requisitioned by the Germans in 1940. Helen, with Ralph away serving with the British Army, needed a strong right arm, which explained his presence at the dower cottage on the estate. And he still loved her, of course, and still quite hopelessly.
The old cart had seen better days and the horse was considerably leaner than it should have been as they negotiated the track down to the beach, Sean Gallagher leading the horse, Helen at his side.
‘If this goes wrong,’ he said gravely. ‘If they find out you’re helping this man, it won’t just be a prison sentence. It could mean a firing squad or one of those concentration camps they’re talking about.’
‘And what about you?’
‘Jesus, woman, I’m a neutral, don’t I keep telling you that?’ He smiled mischievously, the gray eyes full of humor. ‘If they want to keep that old bastard, de Valera, sweet back in Dublin, they’ve got to handle me with dress gloves. Mind you, after the way I chased the arse off him all over Ireland in the Civil War, he might welcome the news that they want to shoot me.’
She burst out laughing. ‘I love you, Sean Gallagher. You always make me feel good at the worst times.’ She put an arm around the small, lean man’s shoulders and kissed him on the cheek.
‘As a brother,’ he said. ‘You love me as a brother, as you often remind me, so keep your mad passion in your pocket, woman, and concentrate. Colonel Hugh Kelso, he said, an American army officer torpedoed off Devon?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And what was all that about how the Germans mustn’t get their hands on him?’
‘I don’t know. He was half out of his mind and his leg’s in a terrible state, but at the suggestion he might have to go to hospital he went crazy. Said it would be better if I shot him.’
‘A fine old mess from the sound of it,’ Gallagher said, and led the horse down onto the fog-shrouded beach.
It was very quiet, the sea calm, so quiet that they could hear the whistle of the German military train from across the bay as it ran along the front from St Helier to Millbrook.
Hugh Kelso lay face-down on the sand unconscious. Sean Gallagher turned him over gently and examined the leg. He gave a low whistle. ‘He needs a surgeon, this lad. I’ll get him in the cart while he’s still out. You gather as much driftwood as you can and hurry.’
She ran along the beach and he lifted Kelso up, taking his weight easily, for he was surprisingly strong for a small man. Kelso groaned but stayed out, and the Irishman eased him onto the sacks in the cart and draped a few across him.
He turned as Helen came back with an armful of wood.
‘Cover him with that while I see to the life raft.’
It was still bumping around in the shallows, and he waded into the water and pulled it up on the sand. He looked inside, removed the emergency kit, then took out a spring-blade gutting knife and slashed at the skin of the life raft fiercely. As air rushed out, it crumpled and he rolled it up and carried it to the cart, shoving it onto the rack underneath.
Helen arrived with another armful of wood which she put in the back with the rest. ‘Will that do?’
‘I think so. I’ll stop by the paddock and we’ll put the life raft down the old well shaft. But let’s get moving.’
They started up the track, Helen sitting on the shaft of the cart, Sean leading the horse. Suddenly there was laughter up ahead and a dog barked. The Irishman paused and took his time over lighting one of the vile French cigarettes that he smoked. ‘Nothing to worry about, I’ll handle it,’ he told her.
The Alsatian arrived first, a splendid animal which barked once, then recognized Gallagher as an old friend, and licked his hand. Two German soldiers in field gray and helmets, rifles over their shoulders, came next. ‘Guten morgen, Herr General,’ they both called eagerly.
‘And good morning to you two daft buggers.’ Gallagher’s smile was his friendliest as he led the horse on.
‘Sean, you’re quite mad,’ she hissed.
‘Not at all. Neither of those two lads speak a word of English. It might have been fun if they’d looked under the cart though.’
‘Where are we going?’ she demanded. ‘There’s no one at the Place at the moment.’
It was always referred to in that way, never as a house.
‘Isn’t Mrs Vibert in?’
‘I gave her the day off. Remember that niece of hers had a new baby last week.’
‘Naughty girl,’ Gallagher said. ‘And her man away serving in the British Army. I wonder what he’ll think when he comes home and finds a bouncing boy with blue eyes and blond hair called Fritz.’
‘Don’t be cruel, Sean. She’s not a bad girl. A little weak perhaps. People get lonely.’
‘Do you tell me?’ Gallagher laughed. ‘I haven’t exactly noticed you chasing me around the barn this week.’
‘Be sensible,’ she said. ‘Now where do we take him? There’s the Chamber.’
During the English Civil War, Charles de Ville, the Seigneur of the manor at that time, had espoused the Royalist cause. He’d had a room constructed in the roof with a secret staircase from the master bedroom known to the family over the years as the Chamber. It had saved his life during the time of Cromwell’s rule when he was sought as a traitor.
‘No, too awkward at the moment. He needs help and quickly. We’ll take him to my cottage first.’
‘And what about a doctor?’
‘George Hamilton. Who else could you trust? Now hang on while I get this life raft down the well.’
He tugged it out and moved into the trees. She sat there, aware of her uneven breathing in the silence of the wood. Behind her, under the sacking and the driftwood, Hugh Kelso groaned and stirred.
At Slapton Sands just before noon, the tide turned and a few more bodies came in. Dougal Munro and Carter sat in the lee of a sand dune and had an early lunch of sandwiches and shared a bottle of beer. Soldiers tramped along the shoreline, occasionally venturing into the water at some officer’s command to pull in another body. There were already about thirty laid out on the beach.
Munro said, ‘Someone once said the first casualty when war comes is truth.’
‘I know exactly what you mean, sir,’ Carter said.
A young American officer approached and saluted. ‘The beach is cleared of new arrivals at the moment, sir. Thirty-three since dawn. No sign of Colonel Kelso.’ He hesitated. ‘Does the Brigadier wish to view the burial arrangements? It’s not too far.’
‘No thank you,’ Munro told him. ‘I think I can manage without that.’
The officer saluted and walked away. Munro got up and helped Carter to his feet. ‘Come on, Jack. Nothing we can do here.’
‘All right, sir.’
