by Manda Scott
Seriously? Schweizerdeutsch, if anything. Swiss, not German. The Brigadier has not moved. His gaze is flat, open. It may possibly be hostile, there’s no telling.
‘Uncle? You know I’m not—’
‘Lie back, you’ll do yourself an injury. Of course you’re not. But with your looks and your linguistic capacity, you could pass for the Hun and just now, we have need of that. We might have asked you anyway, but the sleep-talking makes you a perfect fit.’
‘For what?’
‘For some underhand, undercover work, of exactly the sort your father loved and you loathe. No, hear me out. There’s no escaping biology: you are your father’s son. And your mother’s.’
And there’s the rub. From his father come his sharp edges, his failure fully to fit in the world, always the jagged peg never quite settled in the round hole. And from Mother, his polyglot languages, the brilliance of his hair, his unfailingly Aryan looks; none of these is an asset in this war. Alicia Vaughan-Thomas is still alive. One has to imagine she knows her only son is here, wherever ‘here’ is. She hasn’t been to visit.
Uncle Jeremy is still talking. Or asking. Or ordering. By the time you’re a brigadier, the two are indistinguishable.
‘So this is a straight request, and if you say no, we’ll speak no more of it. Would you be prepared to sleep for a night or two in a ward of POWs? They’re all airmen: bombers, mostly, two fighters, all in various stages of injury. Duncan Hammond’s boys brought down a 109 near Lincoln three days ago. All on board dead, but we’ll say you’re from that, and we’ll make sure you’re sporting a few more bandages, make out you’ve been burned worse than you have. You won’t need to talk to them if you don’t want to.’
‘But I can listen?’
‘Precisely.’
‘What for?’ He has said yes. He was never going to do anything different: that’s not how these things work.
‘If we knew that, we wouldn’t need you. We picked up some radio chatter linked to the hospital, but we can’t work out how or why. So just keep your eyes and ears open. I’ll see you’ve got a bell within easy reach. If things get sticky, ring it and we’ll pull you out. If you pick something up and want to talk, tell the surgeon your hand is going bad, he’ll know what it means.’
His uncle stands, picks up his briefcase, his umbrella. ‘We’ll get you some reading material so you’re up to speed on the Luftwaffe, but don’t speak if you’re not confident. The more ardent ones have a habit of smothering those of their compatriots who don’t say their Heil Hitlers with sufficient enthusiasm.’
Two weeks pass, in which time he progresses to the point where he can sit up, can hold his own mug of tea. Being on the ward is harder than he had imagined. He hasn’t been in German company since he was fifteen and two years is a long time when there’s a war on. His memories of summers on the Rhine are viewed now through lenses of blood.
In poor English, he complains of his hand to an RAMC surgeon who pretends to know no German and the next day, the surgical orderly withholds his breakfast.
An hour later, stomach grumbling, he is wheeled out of the ward and along a corridor to a small, well-lit office which – glory be – doesn’t smell of gangrene, burned flesh and antiseptic. The curtains are of heavy maroon velvet, drawn shut. The electric light bulb in the centre of the room is brighter than he’s seen all war.
The orderly departs. There are no papers on the desktop, nothing else to see, but in a drawer is a half-empty pack of Player’s. He hasn’t had one since the accident. His lungs, apparently, are not fit yet, but some things are worse than dying and being smokeless is one of them.
He is bending down to light up when his uncle walks in. ‘I’m not sure you should be doing that.’
‘Are you going to stop me?’ His voice has all the dry rustle of a turpentined rag.
His uncle shakes his head. ‘It’s your life. I’ll have one if you are.’ They light from the same flame, share the first, beautiful, cool-hot smoke. It makes him cough, but there is no blood. He doesn’t stop.
Sir Jeremy is tired and making no effort to hide it. His skin is grey and taut. The whites of his eyes are cross-hatched in red.
‘Got anything?’
Laurence says, ‘Gerhard Lange, the Jagdwaffe pilot at the far end of the same row as me, has been passing messages in cipher to one of the orderlies: Whitaker.’
‘Whitaker.’ A note, scribbled in a small book. ‘Conscientious objector?’
‘I imagine so, or he’d be in uniform, not mopping floors. He pretends not to understand German. I haven’t spoken to him.’
‘How does it work?’
‘Gerhard attempts The Times crossword, leaves it half done. Whitaker picks it up and finishes it. They work out anagrams on the page. Some of the letters are written slightly stronger than the others. If you bunch those together in a grid, they make a Playfair cipher. In German, obviously.’
‘Playfair?’
‘It’s a pretty basic digraph substitution cipher, and not at all secure, but it has the advantage that you don’t need a shared key if you have a word.’
‘A digraph substitution cipher?’
The Brigadier looks at him as if he’s speaking Greek. Laurence says, ‘It’s harder to crack than single letter subs, but not as hard as the Vigenère. I can sketch it out for you if you like?’
‘Not at all. I’m sure you’re right. How do you know this?’
‘Father taught me; he taught all of us. Chris was just as good.’
‘Was he, by God? I never thought that Archie so much as gave him the time of … never mind. What does this one tell us?’
‘A time and a date and a code phrase: WARM, BRIGHT NIGHT. If I’m right, someone else is coming to meet them both, some kind of organizer.’
‘Any idea who this organizer might be?’
‘No, but the meeting is on Friday at fifteen forty-seven on the lane that runs behind the hospital. The men are allowed out to walk around without much of a guard. That should be stopped, too.’
‘Splendid, I’ll see to it. Anything else?’
‘The bomb aimer from the Heinkel in bed three, the one with the broken ankle. You might want to pull him out, give him a cup of tea and a biscuit, and bring him back.’
‘And why would we do that?’
‘Gerhard and the others already think he’s a spy. If you give them a good enough excuse, they’ll kill him.’
‘We’ll take a look at that.’ The Brigadier stands. ‘The medics say you’re fit to leave the ward and head back into the outside world. A spot of convalescence in the bosom of your family and we’ll have you fighting fit. Lydia is making up a bed for you at Ridgemount as we speak. We’re the last men in a family of women, you and I. You’ll be mothered and sistered and cousined back to health. After that …’ There’s a spark in the Brigadier’s eye: mischief, or something darker. Different, at any rate.
‘What?’
‘There’s a new outfit that has need of your skills.’
‘Even with this?’ Laurence holds up the wreck of his hand. His German wardmates have been most sympathetic.
‘Wear gloves. Nobody will know. And don’t smoke too much. I want your lungs back to fighting fitness. But really, it’s your brain we need, and your other skills. We’ll send you up north for a spot of training, just to make sure you’re fit, and then get you where you’re needed and put your mind to work.’
CHAPTER FIVE
ARISAIG
May 1941
GOD, IT’S WET. If it rains any harder, half the bloody mountainside will sweep down and punt Mallaig into the sea.
‘Vaughan-Thomas?’
‘Here.’ Flight Lieutenant Laurence Vaughan-Thomas is lying prone on a rocky shelf halfway up said mountainside. The top third is lost in the cloud layer and has been since he arrived, three weeks ago.
The ghillies said the peak wouldn’t be visible this side of midsummer and Laurence, not believing this could possibly be true, took a foolish be
t with Captain Patrick Sutherland that they’d see it before they left. With a little under thirty-six hours remaining before they take the train south, he is going to lose.
Captain Patrick Sutherland, late of the Black Watch, is out of sight, over in the bracken to his left. Sutherland was finishing his training as a medic when the war broke out. He could have served as an army physician, but signed up instead in his father’s regiment and proved far too valuable to waste his time winding bandages and hacking off limbs. He has seen action in France and was mentioned twice in dispatches during the mayhem of the evacuations the year before, then followed that up with something else more subversive he’s not allowed to talk about, but which seems to have involved inflatable rubber dinghies and plastic explosive: certainly he is adept at handling both.
He is the best saboteur Laurence has ever seen, skilled in this mud-soaked squirming over open ground, with a Sten on his back and a long-knife in his boot and earth plastered over his face so that the pale skin doesn’t show up; not that anyone can see more than a dozen yards in this murk, but still …
He, Laurence, can barely see the rock from whence the call came. He slides over, belly to the heather, breathing in the heady almost-eucalyptus scent of bog myrtle.
And here is Sutherland, crouched in the lee of a rock, alert, cheerful, eyes a-shine, his receding hair line lost beneath a grubby woollen hat that is certainly not standard army issue.
Nothing he wears is army issue: the little tailor of Jermyn Street has done them all proud, and Sutherland has taken to heart the injunction to make the clothes look worn, to the extent that the left knee is already patched and both elbows of his jacket have holes in. He doesn’t reek of garlic and Cognac, or have a Gitanes drooping from his lip, but if ever a British officer stuck halfway up a Scottish mountain could look authentically French, Sutherland is doing so. He has rust-red hair, which spoils the illusion a bit, and he doesn’t sound absolutely French. His accent, in fact, is decidedly Belgian, but nobody has yet said this puts him out of the running.
At Laurence’s stealthy approach, he lifts his hat in salute. ‘Fine weather for the time of year.’
Two can play at that game. Laurence forces a cheerful grin. ‘Keeps the midges off, at any rate.’
‘Right enough.’ Sutherland works his way forward a yard or two, takes a look over the edge, down towards their target at the foot of the hill, then edges back again. ‘We’ve got ten minutes, I’d say. They were slow to start.’ He fumbles under his jacket. ‘Cigarette?’
After seven months’ convalescence, Laurence’s lungs have been given the all-clear. He smokes now more than he ever did when he was flying. ‘Got a match?’
They share the intimacy of the flame, close enough to breathe in each other’s sweat, last night’s whisky, this morning’s coffee, the last breath of bacon.
The last time he was this close to a man was with Chris, on the morning before—
‘You all right, Thomas?’
‘Fine.’
Sutherland huddles back under the rock. ‘Got the Talisker?’
‘Of course.’ He hasn’t. He hasn’t worked out how he might get it, either, short of sending down to Uncle Jeremy in London and getting him to ship one up from White’s on the overnight sleeper. ‘But I won’t need it. It’ll clear in the morning, McGillivray said so.’
There is a pause. Somewhere, a sheep bleats, lonely in the rain. Sutherland smiles, thinly, round his cigarette. ‘Don’t ever let the Boche ask you questions. You’re a terrible liar.’
He’s right, probably. Laurence says nothing. After a moment, Sutherland gets up again, pokes his head out for a look. ‘Where are the others?’
‘Back at the saddle of Càrn Mòr, where you said.’
‘Think they’ll hold?’
‘Castlemaine might be sticky. He’s not keen on the rain.’
‘Nor loud bangs, neither. He’ll hide in a hole as soon as the plastic goes up. His language is good, though. He’ll do well if he’s put in a city somewhere, with good roads and a half-decent bicycle. The others? Hughes-Symmonds and Cartwright?’
‘Solid. They understood what you wanted.’
‘And in France? Think they’ll hold?’
France. They’re not supposed to talk about France. There’s a fiction that the ten of them don’t know why they’re here or what they’re training for. In reality, France is the Promised Land, the place where dreams and nightmares may both come true. Laurence says, ‘They’ll hold.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘How does it feel slogging through all of this and knowing you’re not going at the end of it?’
Again, that stabbing pain in his chest. ‘What do you mean?’
There’s a silence, jagged at the edges. Patrick Sutherland has grey eyes, the colour of pewter. Here in the water-light of the West Highlands, they are flecked with green to match the lichened rock around them. They can be damned inhuman at times.
He blows out an irregular smoke ring. His gaze is fixed somewhere in the middle distance. ‘You don’t know, do you?’
‘Know what?’
‘You’re not going.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know why you’re here, but it’s not to get you ready to jump into France. They won’t send you. They can’t.’
‘Screw you, Sutherland.’ He’d leave, but there is nowhere to go, and there is an exercise to finish and he will not accept …
And yet— He lifts his hand. Bitterly: ‘Because of this?’ Even here, now, in the middle of nowhere, the curled claw is gloved. ‘I can still—’
‘Shoot. I know, I’ve seen you. And swim. Run. Climb rocks. Use a knife. But in France, we not only have to do that, we also have to be invisible. We can dye our hair or cut it short, we can grow beards and shave them off again, we can pad out our clothes to look fat as a goose … hell, we can wear a dress if we have to, and look good in it. But if you have a hand that won’t unwind, and the Boche get to hear of you, you’re finished. The high-ups won’t send you. Besides, your uncle won’t let them.’
‘My—? You utter bastard. Leave my family out of this!’
‘That’s tricky when your uncle is third or fourth in line to the throne of the Secret Intelligence Service. Add to that the fact that he lost his only son in a downed Hurricane and you’re his sole surviving male heir. I’d say he’s highly unlikely to send you out on work where the average lifespan is six weeks after landing.’
‘My uncle is in the Ministry of Works and Buildings. He has no say in this.’
And at last, a kind of eye contact. Here, in the rain, with his world turning over, it may be hateful, but it is better than before. Except that there is pity in the cold, grey gaze. And truth. It slides, cold, into his belly.
‘How do you know who my uncle is?’
‘I took a look at our personnel files when everyone else was enjoying the Drambuie the other night.’
‘You said you were feeling ill.’
‘So I’m a better liar than you are. Or else they expect us to break in. I rather suspect they do.’
‘They wouldn’t write “SIS” on anyone’s file.’
‘Naturally. Nor “MI6”, which is the preferred title these days, I gather.’ The cigarette is pinched out, slipped into an inside pocket. ‘I went to college with a chap who really does work in the Ministry. Your uncle has an office there, but he’s never in it. All his mail is forwarded. He’s in something so hush-hush that my contact was nearly cashiered simply for asking. He had to pretend he was a schoolfriend of your late cousin’s, trying to find a way to send condolences.’
‘You will leave Christopher out of this.’
There was a time when he thought he couldn’t kill. Then the 109s flew out of the horizon line, and he knew he could kill at a distance. Now, he could kill this man with a knife in his throat, and not care for the consequences. He keeps his hands rigid by his sides.
‘I’m sorry.’ Sut
herland raises a placating palm. ‘Genuinely sorry. I thought you were—’
‘My uncle’s stool pigeon.’
‘Something of the sort. And you’re not, I see that now. And I’ve spoiled your day, for which I apologize without reservation.’ Sutherland eases out from the shelter of the crag, worms forward to the edge and back. ‘They’re there. We have to go. You can keep the Talisker as a gift from me. Drink it if you hear I’ve been picked up. Now I think we should show young Devereaux and his friends that we’re the better team, don’t you?’
HAMPSHIRE AND SURREY, ENGLAND
August 1941
Three months on and the rain-soaked mountains of Arisaig are a distant memory. Between then and now has flowed a sequence of ever more implausible, daring, demanding – technically, physically and mentally – jaunts, each one successful.
The final ‘graduation’ took them to Cambridge where Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, Patrick Sutherland and ‘that youth’ – the implausibly young Alain Devereaux – succeeded in blowing up the railway line, at least in theory. The dummy charges did not actually explode, but the local police and the chase team of their fellow students singularly failed to stop them. Celebrations began on the way home and here, at Beaulieu, the Mess has an end-of-term feel to it. Nobody is sober, not even the trainers. Especially not the trainers.
Laurence Vaughan-Thomas and Patrick Sutherland are a team, welded, bonded, tempered to perfect union. They have seen the worst of each other and discovered the best in themselves and there is nothing sweeter than either. They think as one, move as one, drink as one. Elbow through elbow, they are currently doing their damnedest to drink the Mess dry while the boy Devereaux is up on a table demonstrating, with much swinging of arms, the sword dance taught him by his Scottish Highland grandmother. For the first time in many months, Laurence is warmly, giddily happy.
Patrick’s face gives him the clue. Patrick, suddenly and disconcertingly sober. ‘Thomas. Look left.’