by T D Griggs
‘And forged the transit order to Drancy.’
Sharif nodded.
‘And then my father stumbled across the bodies two years later - have I got this right? - even though everyone says he’d never been to La Division. Oh, and then he didn’t mention it to anyone. Is that your theory?’
He shrugged.
‘Then there’s Mathieu Garnier’s witness statement,’ I said. ‘Why did he lie? Why did these four guys want everyone to think the escape had been from the Vasse, instead of from here? And how come the Garnier family suddenly decided to erase this place the moment I showed up with the map?’
‘Excellent questions.’ Sharif slung the remains of his coffee into the grass and got to his feet, closing his chair with a snap. ‘Perhaps your father knows the answers. Or the saintly Dr Pasqual. Why don’t you ask them? And while you’re about it, ask yourself what good could possibly come of stirring all this up.’
‘Three people are dead,’ I said. ‘You can’t just forget about it. That’s been the problem all along: that people have tried to forget about it.’
He stowed the chair neatly in the boot of his glossy Peugeot, and stood there dusting his hands as if he had just completed an hour of physical labour.
‘Leave well alone, Iain,’ he said. ‘You weren’t even looking for these people when you came here last night. You were after your legendary diaries. The diaries that will Tell All.’ He sighed. ‘So you can show me that we’re wrong about Serge Baladier.’
‘You are wrong about him.’
‘Maybe so, but this won’t prove it. This has nothing to do with him.’ He closed the boot. ‘Oh, and by the way – you did come here alone, didn’t you? The Garnier brothers seem convinced you had company…’
‘What on earth makes them think that?’
He lifted his eyebrows. ‘Two torches?’
‘I like to be prepared.’
‘Your Boy Scout training, no doubt. Just out of interest, how did you get past the dog? The Garniers say he’s quite fierce.’
‘I give money to a dog charity. I showed him the receipt.’
‘Oh, you English. How you make us laugh.’
Two overalled gendarmes came out of the ruined farmhouse carrying a stretcher. We both watched as the men crossed to the corner of the paddock where the police vehicles waited.
I got up.
‘Be very careful, won’t you, Iain?’ he said pleasantly. ‘You’re a smart guy. A bit too smart, maybe. Good morning to you.’
I didn’t attempt to go back into the ruins to pick up my gear. I walked out past the police cars and vans and on through the yard towards the gate, past the small mountain of rusting car wrecks and a white ziggurat of old refrigerators. It was spitting with rain now, the fat drops kicking up the dust around me.
‘Monsieur Madoc?’
Old man Garnier came out of the barn and shambled over to me. He had always made me nervous, despite his age, but now he looked shrunken, too small for his greasy coat. He stopped in front of me, breathing hard, as though the mere effort of crossing the yard had tired him.
‘He should’ve had the Croix de Guerre,’ he said.
’What?’
‘Mathieu. My brother. He earned it. Though I don’t expect you to believe that.’
‘It doesn’t matter much what I believe, Monsieur Garnier.’
‘I didn’t know him real well. Funny that, isn’t it? Not to know your own brother. I was much younger than him, and most of the time he was overseas with the army. But he was a hero to me. And not just to me.’
I should have let it go, probably, but I was tired and on a short fuse and I turned on him.
‘Your brother signed a witness statement. He said how guilty he felt that he couldn’t help the Rosens. He said how he went in and turned the stove off for that poor woman, after she was arrested. And it was a lie, from beginning to end. What kind of a man would lie about a thing like that?’
Garnier coughed. ‘I was just a little kid back then, Monsieur Madoc. I don’t know what happened here. I’m not saying it was good. But it’s not right Mathieu should carry the can for it.’ He shuffled a step closer to me. He was unshaven, and his bristles were grey against his sallow skin. ‘What you done to Yannick – he deserved that. I know it. But it’s not right what you’re doing to Mathieu. Kick a man who can’t fight back. It’s not fair. Someone has to say that.’
He turned and stumped back to his shabby little office.
I walked along the fire trail to the car. I didn’t start the engine at once, but sat listening to the rain drumming on the roof and watching it run in dusty streaks down the windscreen, carrying the pine needles which had gathered on the roof overnight. The exchange with old Garnier had rattled me. The wind was strong enough now to whip the top branches of the fir trees, and I watched them through the wavering screen until I calmed down a little.
I thought of Serge, hidden away on the launch, and the wind and the tide rocking the hull and making the moorings groan. That wouldn’t worry him. He wouldn’t be concerned about the sea. He’d be thinking about me, about how I would come to him as he hid there, hungry and alone, and tell him what to do for the best. He had put his trust in me, and when I arrived he would be crouching there inside that swaying hull, trying to second guess what news – what hope – I would bring him.
56
I let myself into the house and snapped on all the lights. I turned on the shower and took off my filthy clothes. As I dropped my jeans onto the tiled floor I heard the clink of metal. I reached into the pocket, drew out Lena Rosen’s locket, and put it on the bathroom shelf. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it.
I stood under the water at full blast for five minutes.
It didn’t help much, not even when I’d towelled myself dry and changed into fresh clothes. I took the locket through to the kitchen and laid it on the table under the light. I turned it slowly in my hand. It appeared to be silver. I took it to the sink and ran the hot tap and rinsed it gently, rubbing at it with my thumb. The accumulated dirt and corrosion of six decades crumbled and swirled against the porcelain. I dried it carefully and took it back to the table.
I could see now that it had a substantial silver case, perhaps originally for a gentleman’s pocket watch. I touched the dented metal where the bullet had clipped it. I tried prising the clasp open with my thumbnail but the damage had jammed it shut. I tapped it smartly on the table top, several times, but it remained as solid as an oyster.
I put it on the table and stared at it. The room was dim and the rain had started to trickle in under the tarpaulin which covered the hole in the roof. I found a kitchen knife in the drawer and took it and the locket across the sodden garden to the cabin.
I sat at the makeshift desk under the glare of the table lamp and worked the point of the knife into the clasp of the locket. Losing patience, I twisted hard. The case sprang open and a yellow disc fell with a clatter onto the desktop. I picked it up and held it in the light.
It was a gold sovereign, one edge bent and smeared where the bullet had compressed the soft metal. Otherwise it was in mint condition, and it shone as if it had just been buffed. King George VI’s profile, the delicate milling of the edge, and the tiny letters and numerals of date and inscription were all as sharp as the day they had been stamped. As sharp as those on the sovereign Hamelin had given my father. I closed my eyes and opened them again and examined the coin afresh, but its message remained the same.
Madeleine Rosen was supposed to have died in 1942. But around her neck she wore a coin minted in 1944.
I felt dizzy and a little nauseous. The light hurt my eyes and I turned it off and stumbled over to the bed and sat heavily on it, my head in my hands. My mind was full of images which lurched and flickered and would not come to rest. She had vanished in 1942, this girl, and her parents with her. I saw them in my mind’s eye, lost and alone, as if in another dimension. And then, two years later, they materialised just long enough to be cut down,
in a miserable cell beneath their own home. I didn’t know how they had got there. I didn’t know where they had been in those two years. But I knew what had happened to them at La Division. And I knew my father had witnessed it.
The rain boomed on the roof of the cabin.
I closed my hand over the sovereign and felt the cold kiss of gold, the only kiss Lena Rosen had enjoyed for over sixty years.
57
I sat up sharply on the bed, convinced that I had overslept. It was gloomy enough in the cabin for the numerals on my watch to stand out like neon, but they showed me it was only six in the evening. I stretched and massaged my neck and shoulder. I had slumped awkwardly against the wall and my muscles were locked stiff.
Outside, the rain was roaring against the shutters and chattering in the downpipes. It was cool in the cabin, even cold. I was hungry and chilled. I rubbed my face hard and tried to wake up.
Then, on the far side of the room, I saw the bulky shape of a man hunched near the model of the launch. I jerked to my feet.
‘Hello, Iain,’ my father said. He reached across and flicked the light switch, blinding me.
Before I could recover, the door opened and Kate put her head into the cabin. Her hair was in rats’ tails and she looked white and strained, but her face filled with relief when she saw me.
‘I brought Granddad,’ she said.
‘Yes, I spotted that.’ I squeezed my eyes closed, but the world didn’t make much more sense when I opened them. ‘How did you get here? And where’s your mother?’
‘She… she didn’t exactly know I was coming. Not at first, anyway. She found out pretty soon, though. I took her car.’
‘You took it?’
‘I kind of… stole it.’
‘Kate, you haven’t got a licence.’
‘I only went as far as Portsmouth. Well, I picked up Granddad first, obviously. Then we took the ferry. I called Mum from St Malo. I told her we were fine, but she’s… a bit upset.’
‘No. Really?’
‘She said she’d been trying to call you, but she can’t get through.’
‘The phone’s off the hook.’ I shook my head. ‘Kate, what did you think you were doing?’
‘What did I think I was doing?’ She tossed her head defiantly. ‘I’ve brought the two of you together. That was supposed to be impossible, wasn’t it? Now what are you going to do?’
She banged the door behind her so hard that the cabin shook.
I looked across at my father. Neither of us spoke. He took his eyes off mine at last, got to his feet and turned his ponderous attention to the model beside him. He found his glasses inside his hairy jacket, put them on and began tracing the line of the boat’s hull, bending to squint through the wheelhouse windows.
‘Near perfect,’ he said, straightening. ‘All bar the Oerlikon, that is.’
‘The what?’
‘The cannon. The Oerlikon cannon. He’s got a left hand magazine on it.’
‘For God’s sake. Does anybody care about the bloody Oerlikon?’
He faced me. ‘The maid said Dominic built this for you. Is that right? He was always good with his hands was Dominic, even as a lad.’
‘He didn’t build it for me, Dad. He made it for you. He told me I should keep it for you.’ I pictured Dominic smiling his soft smile in the sunshine. ‘He said you’d come, one day.’
‘He knew more than I did, then. But there again, perhaps he always did.’ He paused. ‘So they come for him at last, did they?’
‘They?’
Though he had invited the question, he did not respond to it.
‘Not fourteen years old, that boy,’ he said. ‘They said he wasn’t the full quid, but I’ll tell you this: he wasn’t scared of nothing. Not the shooting, not the priest’s screaming and his blood running down the steps into the crypt.’
‘Dominic was with you the night Father Thomas was killed?’
‘He shamed us all. More loyal and steadfast than any of us.’
Silence gathered in the room. We each waited for the other to make the first move. The rain drummed on the shingles overhead and the cabin creaked like a ship at sea. I could hear the surf bursting against the beach.
‘I found the Rosens, Dad. But you knew where they were all along, didn’t you?’
‘I knew.’
‘Because you were there when they were murdered.’
‘Yes.’
‘You couldn’t stop it...’
‘I didn’t stop it. That’s the truth.’
‘How could you?’ I said. ‘But you’ve blamed yourself for it ever since.’
The locket was still in my hand. I held it up for him to see, the sovereign in my palm beside it.
He was quiet for a while, gazing at it.
‘He’d given her that,’ he said at last. ‘Lucien. She told me so. He gave her the locket and the sovereign both, after I first brought him over in March. He promised to get them out. All of them. This was his token.’
‘But he couldn’t do that. Get them out.’
‘No. How could he?’ His eyes were stony. ‘I left him to drown the night he would have brought them to freedom.’
‘You tried.’
‘Be still. It was later that same night, when Billy and I were taken to the crypt ourselves, that we found the Rosens. They’d been there for nigh on two years.’
Two years. I felt again the clammy and claustrophobic darkness.
‘Father Thomas hid them,’ I said, and all at once I understood.
‘That’s right. Before the Jewish round-ups began in ‘42. Couldn’t find a way to smuggle them out after.’
‘And Lucien knew they were there all along.’
‘Of course he did. He’d helped hide them.’
‘So he came back for them.’
‘He fixed it somehow. Got himself sent here. But no matter what he told me or those who sent him, when I brought him back in March of ’44, he came to find Lena and her parents. Do you see it now? Lucien was their last hope, and I snuffed that out when I came back to get him.’ My father drew a long breath. ‘Me and Billy, we were down there with the Rosens for eight weeks after I lost the launch. Eight weeks they nursed us, that girl and her mother. The father helped, too. Billy was in a bad way with the burns. If it hadn’t been for the Rosens, I doubt either of us would have survived. And mark this: young Madeleine knew I’d failed Lucien. She knew one way or the other his death was my fault. But she never uttered a word of reproach. Never a word. Instead she’d tell me of the times they’d spent together when they were growing up. The beach. Family picnics. And then, as they got older, learning what was happening between them, making plans for the future. Then she’d tell me how she’d lost him when they went into hiding, and how precious it had been to see him again for that month after I brought him over. She’d thank me for it. Thank me! Can you believe that? It went through me like a sword.’
‘You did give them that month, Dad.’
‘Aye. And took away the rest of their lives.’ His eyes closed for a moment. ‘She nursed me and Billy like we was her brothers. They all treated us the same. We shared their food. We shared their fear and their hardship. Then the Germans came for the priest, and while we was wondering what was to become of us, those four French lads broke in and took us up to the farmhouse. All five of us, and Dominic tagging along. And in the night...’ His voice locked. ‘The boat was too small… It couldn’t take all of us. It could barely take two, and we all knew it. And in the night…’
‘In the night,’ I said, ‘the Rosen family were pushed down into the cellar and shot.’
He swayed a fraction and I reached out to steady him, but he opened his hands as if to ward me off, as if he could accept no help for this, as if this were something he had to do alone. ‘Just one of them done it. The leader.’
‘Garnier.’
‘I didn’t know their names. I didn’t wish to. But it was just him. The others never knew it was going to happen. No more did Bi
lly and me.’ He gathered himself. ‘What became of that one? The leader?’
‘He’s long dead.’
‘He was spared, then. Spared all this.’ My father drew himself up and looked me in the eye. ‘No, it won’t do. I’ll not pretend I didn’t know something evil was going to happen that night. The girl cried out to me as she was pushed down the steps. She begged me not to forget. And I never have. I never have. I’ve never forgotten that I didn’t raise a finger.’
‘What could you have done?’
‘I make no excuses for myself. Don’t you make none for me.’
‘Dad, it wasn’t your fault.’
‘It was my fault,’ he said sharply. ‘All my fault. Because I’d abandoned him. I’d abandoned Lucien. It all sprang from that.’
‘No. You made a mistake.’
‘You’re wrong. It wasn’t that I didn’t try hard enough to save him. I didn’t try at all. Can’t you get that through your head? I judged him, and condemned him for something he hadn’t done.’
‘I know that, but at the time –’
‘And having condemned him I left him there, out on the Shoals, clinging onto that damned bell. Screaming at me. I didn’t even have ears to hear what he was shouting. Not till later.’
‘You were under fire.’
‘Is that what Billy said? He was staunch, was Billy. Staunch and grateful. But it’s not true. I saw Lucien hanging onto that bell-buoy – we all did – and I cruised past him without so much as cutting speed.’ He looked at me. ‘I could have taken him off, but I left him there to drown. It was only afterwards that the Germans saw us and the shooting started.’
‘Dad –’
‘And now you know what Lucien wanted, what he was screaming about. He didn’t want to save himself. He’d come out in that rowboat to tell me about the Rosens. He’d come out to beg me to pick them up, off the old jetty at La Division. Father Thomas was going to take them there later that night.’