CHAPTER TWENTY
It was a twenty-minute bike ride from the peasant cottage Rosie shared with Paul and Boo to the fishing wharf at Kerneval. The groups knew as little about one another’s activities as they could get away with, so as Rosie stood under a dilapidated roof watching her fish being wrapped in newspaper, she had no idea that an agent had hosed down in this exact spot the night before.
With the parcel of fish in the basket between the handlebars, Rosie pedalled uphill, passing two streets before turning right. The sun was hot, but the breeze made it bearable. She’d spent so much of the last month cooped up in the little cottage sending radio messages back and forth that it was good to feel her heart pumping.
When she reached number twenty-five she took a quick glance around before raising the latch on the side gate, leaning her bike next to a couple of metal dustbins and walking into the back yard.
There was a woman pegging out washing a couple of gardens down, so Rosie dipped her head below the level of the fence as she headed towards the outhouse. The stench made her gag as she opened the creaking door. The facilities comprised a broad plank with a hole in, directly over an open sewer pipe that ran downhill to the harbour.
She sent a dozen bluebottles into the air as she grabbed a key hanging from a rusty water pipe. After using it in the back door, Rosie was surprised to find herself in a bright open space, lit through large skylights. There were stacks of blank and unfinished canvases resting against the walls, most depicting the same woman in a variety of nude poses as she rested on the purple chaise at the far end of the room.
The radio she’d come for was in a leather case, stacked alongside bags and boxes of equipment that had been delivered by Madeline II and the trawler Istanbul the day before. The case was smaller than expected and a tug on the handle revealed that it was only half the weight of their current set.
Rosie should have picked it up and left immediately, but she was fascinated by the canvases and began flipping through.
‘The artist was an Austrian Jew,’ PT said. ‘Fled here, then went off to America.’
Rosie spun around with her hands clutched to her chest. ‘Bloody hell, you scared the daylights out of me!’
‘He didn’t get time to pick up any of his paintings,’ PT explained. ‘But he left a key with Alois’ daughter and we’re pretty sure he won’t be back any time soon.’
‘Oh yes!’ Rosie gasped. ‘I only saw her for a few minutes the night we arrived, but I thought the girl in the paintings looked familiar. Paul would absolutely love it in here, with the easel and the blank canvases.’
‘So do I get a hug or what?’ PT asked.
Rosie laughed, then they hugged tightly and started to kiss. They hadn’t seen each other for almost a month.
‘God I’ve missed you,’ PT said, as he grabbed Rosie’s bum and pushed her against the back of the chaise. ‘Thinking about you is the only thing that’s keeping me sane.’
Rosie opened her mouth to let PT’s tongue in, but she wasn’t keen on his stubbly beard and the whiff of alcohol in his sweat.
‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ Rosie asked, as she pushed PT back gently.
PT looked thin and his eyes seemed desperate. ‘I can’t get you out of my head,’ he said, as he wiped the slobber off his cheek on to the cuff of his shirt. ‘I knew you were coming here to pick up the radio today. I had to see you.’
‘You’ve lost weight,’ Rosie said.
‘It’s the job,’ PT said. ‘Twelve-hour shifts on the roof of that bunker in the sun. It’s so boring. After an hour your legs and your back hurt from shovelling concrete and you’ve still got eleven more to go. One day we were working near the edge. All the skin on my back was blistered up with sunburn and I just thought, if I jump off and go head first into the dockside I’ll never have to do this again. It may sound crazy, but I was really considering it.’
‘Poor you,’ Rosie said sympathetically. ‘It’s boring working the transmitter all day with Boo, but it’s not as bad as all that.’
‘I’ll have to speak to Henderson about it, or something,’ PT said, but he cheered up when Rosie moved in close and started kissing him again.
As they snogged, Rosie backed on to the chaise. She grabbed PT’s bum, as he squeezed her breast.
‘I really love you, Rosie,’ PT said.
Rosie was touched by the emotion in PT’s voice. ‘I love you too,’ she said. ‘It’s maddening, knowing you’re so near but not being allowed to see you.’
PT started pushing his hand up Rosie’s skirt. She let him get away with it because the kiss was amazing and she didn’t want it to stop, but she pulled him back when he tugged on her knickers.
‘Don’t spoil this,’ she begged, but he pushed her hand away and started dragging the knickers down her thighs. ‘Stop it, now!’
‘Come on,’ PT said softly as he nuzzled Rosie’s earlobe. ‘I’ll be really gentle. I know you didn’t like it last time, but if you relax it’ll be a hundred times better than any kiss.’
As Rosie pushed PT’s head away, he made another lunge at her knickers. She pushed his arm back, but this time he kept tugging.
‘I need to have you,’ PT said.
He still had the emotion in his voice, but now there was anger too. The stretched elastic dug painfully into Rosie’s thigh. She brought her free leg around and pushed PT gently, but when he still didn’t take the hint she gave him a shove.
PT put his hand out to save himself, but his palm missed the edge of the chaise and he rolled off, banging his elbow on the paint-spattered floorboards. Rosie shot to her feet and pulled up her underwear.
‘Why did you have ruin it?’ she said, with a slight sob in her voice.
PT clutched his elbow as he sat up. ‘It’s what men and women do.’
‘I’m not ready for that,’ Rosie said. ‘It really hurt when you tried before and you swore that you wouldn’t try and make me again.’
‘How can you not be ready?’ PT said, dismissing the idea with his hand. ‘You’re a beautiful young woman. You think God would have given you that sweet little body if you weren’t ready?’
‘It’s not up for debate,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m fourteen and you’re just dirty.’
‘You’re acting like a little girl,’ PT shouted, as he stamped the floor and pointed accusingly at Rosie. ‘Well I’m sixteen, OK? Girls are no good. I need a woman.’
‘A woman is someone you cherish,’ Rosie shouted back. ‘What you’re after is a whore.’
‘There’s a war on. For all we know a bomb will come out of the sky tomorrow and kill us both,’ PT said. ‘You’ll be dead, and you won’t even have lived.’
‘AAARGH!’ Rosie screamed, as she put her hands over her ears in frustration. ‘I can’t believe I said I loved you. You treat me like one of your con tricks: tell me what you think I want to hear and try scoring a jackpot.’
‘Screw you,’ PT said. ‘Find yourself another boy when you’ve grown up.’
As PT charged down the hallway and slammed the front door, Rosie slumped on the chaise. She thought she was going to cry, but then realised that she was far too angry.
‘Selfish, big-headed moron,’ she mumbled, as she tilted her head back and looked at the clouds through a skylight.
After a few deep breaths she stormed outside with the transmitter and started tying it to the rear end of her bike.
*
Instead of the afternoon nap he’d hoped for, Marc had to ride across to Kerneval. Troy, Olivier and Michel were at sea, so he left a message with Nicolas who was still laid up with a bad back. They were to meet before dark at the abandoned house where Marc and Henderson had stayed on the night of their first scouting mission.
He then walked to the artist’s house, where he was surprised to find the back door left open.
‘Hello?’ he shouted.
There was nobody home, but he decided it wasn’t suspicious: if the Germans had found the house and laid a trap they wouldn’t d
o something as obvious as leave the back door open. Whoever had been here last had been clumsy though, and as there was no sign of a radio he correctly guessed that it was Rosie.
Marc found the plastic explosive. It came in waxed paper and had been dyed a creamy yellow colour so that it resembled butter, but its strong almondy smell meant it wouldn’t fool anyone for long. The itching powder was in one-kilo cloth bags of the kind you got when you bought grains or flour.
He unknotted the drawstring and sniffed the powder suspiciously, while being careful not to actually inhale any of it. He then pulled up his shirt and sprinkled a few sticky flakes over his stomach, to no immediate effect.
Fifteen minutes later he rode over the bridge back into Lorient. It was always the same five or six guards who worked there. They knew he worked for Madame Mercier, and as they turned a blind eye when he came through with cartloads of black market food he wasn’t worried about his little satchel.
‘No strawberries?’ the guard asked, as he waved Marc through.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ Marc said cheerfully, as he pedalled off. ‘I’ll save you some.’
He’d forgotten about testing the itching powder, but as the checkpoint disappeared his skin started to burn. The compound was designed to be activated by the acidity in sweat and the exertion of the bike ride had done the trick.
Marc stopped by a drinking fountain and washed the powder off, but while the coolness soothed it, washing the powder away didn’t stop the itching. It felt like hot pins digging into his flesh.
Still scratching, Marc sailed past Mamba Noir and the rest of the entertainment district, then cut down a side street and freewheeled into a stable block. Before the war, horses were popular for local deliveries in small towns like Lorient, but with the fuel shortages they were the only choice.
Part of Edith’s fragrance came from the amount of time she spent mucking out and grooming Madame Mercier’s horses. For Marc straw, piss and manure reminded him of his hated rural upbringing, but Edith loved it here. She’d fixed up a little den at the back of the hay store, complete with books, blankets and a gas lamp. She often slept here if one of the horses was sick, or just because she liked being on her own.
‘Why are you walking like that?’ Edith said, as she imitated the way Marc stepped around the worst of the manure. ‘You’re such a pansy. It’s only poop.’
Marc shuddered. ‘I saw this boy’s comic once. They had a drawing of what houses will look like in 1960. It was big block, twenty storeys high. That’s where I want to live when I’m grown up. Right on the top floor, with no dirt or grime. Indoor toilet, electric heating, whitewashed walls.’
‘That’s so dirty having a toilet inside your house,’ Edith said. ‘It must stink.’
‘The toilets in Mamba Noir don’t stink,’ Marc noted.
‘You should try the ladies after Madame Mercier’s been in there for half an hour,’ Edith said. ‘So did you want something, or are you here to admire my beauty?’
Marc looked around. There was nobody about right now, but people brought horses and carts in and out all the time and he didn’t want anyone to overhear. ‘Can we talk inside?’
Marc laughed when he stepped past the hay bales and saw that Edith had pinned magazine pictures of good-looking movie stars to the wall of her den.
‘I always thought you preferred horses to humans,’ Marc said.
‘Get on with it,’ Edith said, as she blushed. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’
‘It’s two things,’ Marc said. ‘First, Henderson wants you to go up into the woods around the engine sheds on the edge of town at eight tonight.’
‘Why do you keep scratching?’ Edith interrupted. ‘Have you got fleas?’
‘I’ll get to that in a minute,’ Marc said. ‘Can you go up there?’
Edith nodded. ‘What for?’
‘Just to look around. There’s usually only one guard, but we want you to count the engines and make sure there’s nothing unusual going on.’
‘What are you up to?’ Edith asked.
‘Better you don’t know,’ Marc said. ‘Can you do it or not?’
‘Yeah,’ Edith agreed. ‘If they stop me I’ll say I’m picking berries or something.’
‘Great,’ Marc said, as he pulled the bag of itching powder out of his satchel. ‘This is why I’m scratching.’
‘Itching powder?’
Marc nodded. ‘A kid at my old school bought some from a joke shop in Paris one time, but you just shook it out of your shirt and you were fine. This stuff is like the industrial-strength super version. I only put a couple of little grains on my skin. It’s driving me nuts and washing it off didn’t make any difference.’
‘So it’s not the sort of substance you want in your long johns if you’re stuck inside a U-boat for a month,’ Edith said.
‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking,’ Marc said, wagging his finger. ‘But Henderson’s not interested. He’s angry that they didn’t send more explosives to blow up the trains.’
‘Ahem,’ Edith said.
Marc looked awkward. ‘Well it wasn’t going to stay secret once half the town’s heard them blow up, anyway.’
Edith sat on a bale of hay and acted thoughtful. ‘You’d have to find out where the Germans have their clothes washed. Then you’d have to do it with the laundry for a boat that’s about to sail.’
‘Do you think the laundry is done separately for each boat?’ Marc asked. ‘Or do the sailors put their laundry in as and when they need it?’
‘How should I know?’ Edith asked. ‘But I take the bed-sheets and tablecloths to the laundry up by the station for Madame Mercier. I bet one of the washerwomen would know how the Germans get their laundry done.’
‘Don’t ask too many obvious questions,’ Marc said. ‘It only takes one snitch and you’ll be in a Gestapo cell.’
‘And you don’t want the poor washerwomen getting in trouble either,’ Edith said. ‘But there has to be a way.’
‘There’s a lot of working out to do,’ Marc said. ‘But I definitely think this powder could make more difference than Henderson seems to believe.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Marc and Henderson arrived at the farmhouse at a quarter past eight. Since the single night when they’d slept here two months earlier, they’d repaired the front door and tidied up downstairs. A couple of airmen had used it as a hideout before their voyage home, but it was mainly set up as a bolthole.
If things went bad and any of Henderson’s team had to leave Lorient in a hurry, they could stop off here and find a radio transmitter hidden in the loft. There were clothes, high-energy foods, a few first aid supplies, plus knives, guns and ammunition. There was also a gap in the garden wall where a fleeing agent could leave a message to say what had happened.
They always wound a piece of cotton between two tacks on opposite sides of the door frame when they left the house, which would snap if anyone opened the door. After turning the key, Marc pushed the door in a few centimetres and made sure the cotton was intact before stepping inside.
He kicked a garden rake out of the way and checked that the spade was still wedged under the back door handle, while Henderson inspected the windows for signs that they’d been forced.
‘Looks safe,’ Henderson said. ‘Let’s get to work.’
The plastic explosive – commonly just called plastic – was a recent innovation. Until its invention by a British chemist a few years earlier, all known high-explosive compounds degraded rapidly in open air and could detonate if dropped or handled roughly. Plastic was safe to handle, could be moulded into any shape and wouldn’t blow your head off if you fell over carrying a backpack full of the stuff.
Henderson set all five pats of explosive out on the kitchen cabinet, along with two packets of detonating fuses. The first pack contained time pencils. Once activated these would go off when acid corroded through a metal wire, triggering the detonation. The corrosion time depended on the strength of the acid and the pack
et contained a selection of pencils designed to explode in anything between ten minutes and six hours. The second pack contained sympathetic fuses which were triggered by the shock wave from another explosion, enabling an agent to set off dozens of small explosions simultaneously.
It felt like cookery, as Henderson used the kitchen drainer to cut the sticks into fifteen evenly sized pieces. He put sixty-minute time pencils in the first two and sympathetic fuses in all the others, before passing them across to Marc.
The plastic was naturally sticky enough to mould on to a porous surface like wood, but steam trains were made of metal which was usually painted or polished. To ensure the plastic stayed where it was put, Marc dipped his hand into a large jar of Vaseline and smeared it liberally over each bomblet.
The results looked like iced cakes, with the fuses like birthday candles sticking out of the top. This unintentional effect was completed by dropping each bomb into an actual paper cake casing so that it could be handled without covering yourself in the greasy Vaseline.
‘Perfect timing,’ Henderson said enthusiastically when Michel and Olivier arrived. ‘I know you’ve been out at sea all day, so thanks for coming at short notice.’
Michel was seventeen, though working as a fisherman had weathered his skin, making him look older. Olivier was two years younger and although they were only cousins the two lads were near identical in build and appearance.
Troy had also come along to show them the way to the house. He was narked by the fact that two untrained French boys had been picked for the operation instead of him, until Marc discreetly called him into the front yard and explained that Henderson wanted the locals to feel like they were more than just couriers and lookouts.
‘Steam engines are heavy, brutal machines,’ Henderson explained, as he picked up one of the explosive cakes. ‘I could stick all fifteen of these babies next to the main boiler of a big locomotive and they wouldn’t make a dent. Train wheels are toughened steel and a cake exploding might buckle one, but you could jack the train up and have it running again within three or four hours. You can throw this in the firebox and blow a big hole, but that’s an even simpler repair. Fortunately for us, all steam engines do have a vulnerable spot.’
Henderson's Boys: Grey Wolves Page 13