by S Block
Suddenly, the pressure building within Pat’s skull forced a single thought of complete clarity into her consciousness.
Stop wasting time with this. It doesn’t matter. Find Marek. Get up and go. Now. Leave!
Bob’s eyes narrowed in victory. He’d never been a gracious winner, always relishing his moments of triumph over her. Pat instantly recognised his expression, but refused to be its object for another moment.
I hate you. I can’t quantify how much I absolutely loathe everything about you. And now I’m going to leave you.
‘I suspected something at the Czech dance. And when I regained the ability to walk – which was long before you thought I did – I followed you and watched you whoring after him. I followed you a second time and watched you leave a note in the churchyard. I check every morning when I go for the paper. I don’t know which I look forward to reading more.’
Pat’s eyes flicked down to Marek’s message. She was desperate to know what it said. As Bob well knew.
‘You can read it if you want. But why don’t I save you the bother? In brief, your Czech bastard is being mobilised with his men at fifteen hundred hours. Today. That’s three o’clock to you and me.’
Pat glanced across at the clock on the wall of the hall.
It’s twenty to three. Twenty minutes . . .
Bob smiled gleefully at his wife, and nodded.
‘He so wanted to see you before he left.’
‘How dare you read my private letters,’ said Pat. ‘You had no right.’
‘You’re my wife. Mine. Not his. I feed and clothe you. Put shoes on your feet. I give your life meaning. I have every right, yes?’
Pat tried to summon the energy to stand up and walk out of the hall, but her legs felt like stone.
‘How can you do this now? Here?’
Bob smiled and took a deep drag on his cigarette, blowing the nauseating smoke back into Pat’s face. She stared at him, her eyes blazing with pure hatred.
‘If there was a knife on this table I would cut that sneer off your face. I would hang for you, Bob. Willingly.’
Knowing Pat wanted to annihilate him in that moment made Bob’s sneer deepen with sadistic delight.
‘So much in life is about timing, Patricia. Choosing one’s moment. I do believe the moment has come for you to choose yours . . .’
Chapter 10
Pat’s focus on the road ahead was so absolute that she failed to register the soft whoosh of a stricken Spitfire, engine shot to pieces, glide low over the wet roofs of Great Paxford in the direction of the now empty church. Had she looked up Pat would have seen thick, oily smoke streaming from the plane’s choking exhaust stacks. She might even have caught a glimpse of the helpless young pilot inside the jammed cockpit canopy, screaming for his mother.
She continued to run towards Cholmondeley Castle in the driving rain, deaf and blind to anything that wasn’t connected to finding Marek before he was shipped out of the area. A quarter of a mile to Pat’s left, the crippled aircraft continued to sink inexorably lower. Its left wing obliterated a chimney stack in a spray of rubble, before the rudderless, powerless machine ricocheted off the west transept of the church and disappeared from view with a soft crump. The noise it made upon landing made Pat turn in its direction, but what had caused it was out of view. Pat puzzled on it for a moment, then continued. Her mind was focused on one thing – finding Marek before he was gone for ever from her life.
Pat hadn’t run since childhood, and even then never as fast as she was running now, propelled by a dread that she might already be too late. The heavy rain drenched the shape from her dress, and her lungs struggled to suck in sufficient air to keep her legs moving. A blister was forming on her right foot, but she didn’t slow. The first image of Bob after his return from Dunkirk flashed into her head – lying on his side in a hospital bed. She’d felt a pulse of loathing for the familiar curve of his spine beneath the sheet. The nurse had smiled at her, touching her arm as she passed. ‘Lucky him, Mrs Simms. Lucky you.’ But Pat’s blood had chilled as she’d watched Bob sleep. Why did you have to survive? Of all men, why you?
Fuelled by an incandescent fury with Bob, and an absolute determination not to let him prevent her from seeing Marek, Pat ran against the harsh Cheshire weather that seemed determined to push her back down the hill. She continued on, failing to register the fresh litter of Spitfire-smashed bricks and tiles across the graveyard where the wedding party had applauded the happy couple just two hours earlier. She ran onto the road towards Cholmondeley Castle, where Marek and the Czech contingent had been stationed for the past four months.
But the instant she turned the corner she stopped dead.
The scene before Pat overwhelmed her senses. Just thirty yards ahead a Spitfire was sticking out of the front of a house, wreathed in a cloud of smoke and dust. Both its wings had snapped on landing, making the plane look like a model that had been dropped by a careless child. The pilot lay slumped against the inside of the cracked canopy, as if stealing a few moments’ rest before his next sortie. A slick of oil and fuel had started to gather under the Spitfire’s tail, oozing into the road towards Pat. Smoke was starting to rise from the debris. The front of the house had disintegrated, pushed into the rest of the property by the force of impact.
Pat stood transfixed by the extraordinary scene. Then a baby started to cry close by. She scanned the immediate vicinity for the child, but could see no sign of one. Nor of anyone else. Pat’s brain, so flooded with adrenaline, and so focused on finding Marek, now struggled to process a sight so bizarre. It matched nothing in her experience, and the incongruity of standing before a house in the village with a Spitfire embedded in it proved so utterly astonishing that she failed to recognise that the house was the Campbells’ – which meant the house next door was her own.
The sound of shouting some way behind punched through her numbing bewilderment, causing Pat to turn round and see what seemed to be the entire population of Great Paxford running along the road, calling Pat’s name, yelling at her to get away.
‘Pat! Get back! Get back! For Christ’s sake, woman – move away!’
The baby’s cry suddenly bubbled up from beneath the rubble, before sputtering into silence.
The villagers of Great Paxford were now almost upon Pat, yelling at her to move away. But Pat stood her ground and turned to face them, shouting ‘Baby!’ as loudly as she possibly could.
Chapter 11
‘Mim?’
In pitch darkness a man’s voice struggled to speak.
‘Mim?’
She thought she recognised the accent from somewhere. And then again.
‘Mim?’
The accent was Welsh. Her brain worked slowly, its customary speed dulled by a blow to the side of the head. Erica only knew one Welshman: Bryn Brindsley.
She tried to move, but a great weight pressed her slender body into the floor. She could flex her fingers and toes but nothing else. Her eyes were gritty with dust trapped under the lids, but she was unable to lift so much as a finger to clear them.
‘Miriam?’ Bryn called weakly.
Erica tried to sit up and immediately cracked her forehead against a thick slab of masonry an inch above her, and sank back to the floor. I’m in my coffin. This is my coffin. I’m not quite dead yet, but this is where I’m going to die.
‘Miriam? Is that you, love?’
Erica opened her mouth to speak and felt grit fall from her top lip onto her tongue.
‘Bryn . . .’
Erica heard a faint scrabbling to her right as Bryn tried to turn towards her in the darkness.
‘Miriam?!’ The hope in Bryn’s voice raised it an octave.
Erica’s head was pounding, her thoughts swirling into one another, impossible to separate. She tried to focus on something other than the pain in her head.
‘It’s Erica . . .’ she eventually managed.
She waited for a response but only heard herself breathing.
&nbs
p; ‘Bryn . . . I can’t move.’
‘Where’s Miriam?’
She spoke slowly. ‘Bryn . . . where are we?’
‘Miriam? If you can hear me, please, love—’
Erica’s voice sharpened. ‘Bryn – where are we?’ She shifted her position slightly to redistribute the pain caused by something sticking into her lower back, between two vertebrae.
‘Your house.’
‘My house?’
‘Mim, if you can hear me, say something. Make a noise. Mim, please . . .’
Erica tried to make sense of how they could possibly be in her house. Her house had a surgery, a pharmacy, a sitting room, a dining room, a kitchen, three bedrooms and a bathroom. Her house was a light-filled family home for Will and her two daughters. Her house smelled of baking, and soap, and medical disinfectant, and Will’s pipe tobacco. Wherever they were now was the opposite of that. No light whatsoever, and the air carried a dreadful stench of brick dust and gasoline.
Bryn started to sob quietly where he lay.
‘Bryn. What happened?’
But before he could answer, Bryn’s low sob mutated into the quiet grizzling of a baby. A baby? How is that possible? Bryn’s a grown man.
Erica listened for several moments before realising the grizzling wasn’t coming from where Bryn lay, but from her left.
Erica tried to orientate her head to the baby crying as best she could, twisting her neck. She listened as the grizzle wound up into a full-throated wail, the way an air-raid siren starts with a low whine and works itself into an almighty howl to alert everyone for miles. The baby was now wailing at the very top of its lungs. The piercing noise had the effect of clearing Erica’s head, allowing submerged fragments of recent memory to bob into her consciousness. The wedding. Miriam brought from the church into the house by me, Bryn and . . . Joyce Cameron. Yes. Miriam’s waters breaking. Yes. Will leading her into the surgery. Will and Erica delivering the child, her hands slimy with vernix . . .
‘Mim?! Can you hear that?! Our baby! Mim?!’ Bryn called to his wife to respond.
But there was no response. The pitch and volume of the baby’s cry increased as it recognised Bryn’s voice as its father’s, heard every day from inside the womb.
‘Mim . . .’
Bryn’s voice was weaker. He was a big man, and his breath struggled as his functioning lung fought to retain sufficient air to keep him conscious, while the other wheezed uselessly inside his chest, punctured by a rib that had fractured when the Campbell house caved in on him.
The baby fell quiet.
Gasoline fumes had started to dull Erica’s senses once more. Words were hard to come by. Coherent thought even harder. It was now or never. She took a deep breath and opened her mouth, hoping the sound that emerged would penetrate the darkness and connect.
‘Will?’ she said in a whisper that she could barely hear herself. And waited for him to respond.
Chapter 12
A corporal from Nick’s guard of honour was the first to reach Pat. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away from the immediate vicinity of the smouldering wreck of the Spitfire, and the smashed house it had impaled. The rain was dampening flames among the debris, but there was no way of knowing what was slowly coming to the boil within the fuselage, or beneath the broken wings. The corporal pulled Pat into the grounds of the church.
‘Stay right back!’ he yelled into her face, and ran back across the road.
Pat watched as he joined his colleagues, who were staring at the plane, assessing the risk of explosion and fire against their determination to get the pilot out.
‘Miriam’s baby!’ Pat shouted, now completely understanding the full extent of the situation. The corporal turned.
‘She’s just given birth! In the house. It’s stopped crying now, but I definitely heard it.’
Nick arrived at the scene out of breath, the rest of the village not far behind. Without stopping, he eased his six-foot-plus frame effortlessly over bricks and timber to reach the Spitfire’s cockpit. He wiped dust and earth from the glass with the sleeve of his uniform and peered inside. A thick red smear of fresh blood coated the inside of the canopy. The pilot slouched almost casually against the side of the cockpit. He had seen dead pilots before, but never so soon after death, when mortality was at its most apparent, wounds wet and vivid, skin still pink and youthful.
Nick glanced down at the young man’s gloved hands, similar to his own flying mitts. The pilot’s bloody fingers gripped a small black-and-white photograph of his mother and father, similar in type to the one Nick kept of his parents when he’d flown sorties. Nick looked at the young man’s face, pulped and split open, and saw his own broken face projected onto the pilot’s. He wondered how his parents would take the news of his death. How Teresa would respond to becoming a widow on her wedding day. Over time he had made his peace with his own mortality. But he suddenly realised he had no clue as to how those who loved him might react.
The corporal climbed over to Nick and gestured towards Pat in the churchyard.
‘Sir, that woman claims to’ve heard a baby crying just before we arrived.’
‘A baby?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘By itself?’
‘I don’t know, sir. She’s in a bit of a state so she could’ve imagined it.’
‘Where?’
‘Inside.’
‘Inside the house?’
‘I think so.’
‘Get any residual fuel out of this thing before what’s left catches and blows.’
The corporal nodded and headed off to search among the rubble for something suitable to rupture the Spitfire’s fuel tank.
‘Something wooden, Corporal – no sparks!’
‘Nick?!’
He recognised Teresa’s voice immediately and turned to see his new wife standing in front of a growing crowd of villagers, breathtaking in her wedding dress, despite the rain. Nick looked at the anxious faces of the villagers surrounding his bride.
‘A baby has been heard crying from under the rubble!’ he shouted.
A murmur of dread rippled through the crowd. Someone said, ‘Miriam,’ and others nodded. Someone else said they’d seen her slip out of the wedding service with Bryn, Dr Campbell and Erica, and Joyce Cameron. More nodding. Someone replied that none of the above had been seen at the wedding reception.
From her position in the church grounds, Pat watched as Nick quickly organised the search to find the baby and those buried with it. The police and fire brigade arrived in a strident jangle of bells, and then an ambulance. She looked at her own house and saw that it was clearly badly damaged. A thought flashed into her mind.
Where’s Bob?
She felt a brief glow of hope rise in her stomach at the possibility that he’d been at home when the Spitfire struck, but it vanished as she remembered he had been with her at the reception, that it was he who had caused her to run through these streets.
‘Step away!’
The senior fire officer commanded the crowd as his men began to hose the plane with water to drown any possibility of fire. Once that was completed, firemen and RAF personnel swarmed over the rubble, tossing bricks and timber behind them as they began to dig into the remains for what lay beneath.
‘Quick as you can, boys!’ called Nick. ‘Stop as soon as you think you’ve seen or heard anything!’
Spencer Wilson and two other firemen smashed open the Spitfire’s jammed canopy and carefully lifted out the dead pilot.
Everyone but the search party stopped for the few moments it took to place the limp body on a stretcher, cover the dead boy and put him inside the ambulance.
The silence was broken by Laura Campbell’s pounding footsteps as she ran from the direction of the Observation Post, from where she’d watched the stricken Spitfire’s fatal descent through her field glasses. She wanted to run onto the mound of rubble and start digging with her hands, but women from the WI held her back.
‘They’re
working as fast as humanly possible, Laura,’ said Frances gently. ‘And I’ve absolutely no doubt they will find your parents. Alive.’
Laura stood with the women, tears streaming down her face.
Pat watched another figure slowly make his way up the hill and along the road towards the scene. Bob, leaning heavily on his stick, making no effort to join her. He looked over at their devastated house without a trace of alarm, or even upset. Pat knew that he was already thinking of the insurance money.
For what he’d engineered that afternoon, Pat wanted to walk over to Bob and drive his walking stick through his heart. He looked at Pat and smiled.
He thinks he’s won.
Reaching the perimeter of the crowd of watching villagers, Bob took out a cigarette and matches.
‘Are you an imbecile?’ shouted one of the firemen. ‘Do you not understand the situation?’
‘Sorry. Wasn’t thinking,’ Bob said apologetically, and put away the matches and cigarette.
Suddenly, a shout rose from one of the searchers. Laura recognised the area from where the cry had risen – her father’s surgery. The girl’s heart sank like a stone as she let out a sob of anguish for her parent’s well-being.
Pat looked again at Bob, watching Laura with calm fascination, almost certainly ingesting her pain to use later in his work.
Disgusting parasite. Feasting. It’s all just grist to you.
Held back by a line of policemen, the villagers of Great Paxford inched closer. Nick and his men carefully pulled a dusty form from the rubble with low, urgent words.
Each man, woman and child held their breath as they waited to see who had been exhumed, and whether they were alive or dead.
Chapter 13
Just under a month after a Spitfire had destroyed her old house, Erica stood in the new surgery of her new home on the west side of Great Paxford. The dimensions of the new surgery and of everything in the house were smaller than in the old, and Erica had found it initially hard to adjust in the weeks following the crash. She likened the experience to having her life taken out of an airy box and then squashed into a much smaller one. Sometimes she felt herself bending as she entered a room, though there was really no need. Despite this acclimatisation, Erica had been profoundly moved by the extent to which the women from the WI had left no stone unturned in their determination to help her source a new home, and furnish it.