by Ken Follett
Edinburgh, and he was going to Banff. Said he didn't really want to go
through Aberdeen, as he didn't have a Restricted Area Pass. I'm afraid
I ... I told him not to worry about that. Said I'd vouch for him if we
were stopped. Makes one feel such a bloody fool, you know but I felt I
owed him a favour. He had got me out of a bit of a hole, y'know."
Kincaid said: "Nobody's blaming you, sir."
Bloggs was, but he did not say so. Instead he said: "There are very
few people who have met Faber and can tell us what he's like. Can you
think hard and tell me what kind of a man you took him to be?"
"He woke up like a soldier," Porter said.
"He was courteous, and seemed intelligent. Firm handshake. I take
notice of handshakes."
"Anything else? Think very hard."
"Something else about when he woke up ..." Porter's florid face
creased up in a frown.
"His right hand went to his left forearm, like this." He
demonstrated.
"That's something," Bloggs said.
"That'll be where he keeps the knife. A sleeve-sheath."
"Nothing else, I'm afraid."
"And he said he was going to Banff. That means he's not."
"Really?"
"Spies always lie, on principle. I'll bet you told him where you were
going before he told you where he was going."
"I believe I did." Porter nodded thoughtfully.
"Well, well."
"Either Aberdeen was his destination, or he went south after you
dropped him. Since he said he was going north, he probably didn't go
north."
Kincaid said: "That kind of second-guessing could get out of hand."
"Sometimes it does," Bloggs grinned.
"Did you tell him that you're a magistrate?"
"Yes."
"That's why he didn't kill you."
"What? Good Lord! What do you mean?"
"He knew you'd be missed."
"Good Lord!" Porter repeated. He had gone slightly pale. The idea
that he might actually have been killed clearly had not occurred to
him.
The door opened again. The man who walked in said: "I've got your
information, and I hope it was fuck en worth it."
Bloggs grinned. This was, undoubtedly, the harbour master a short man
with cropped white hair, smoking a large pipe and wearing a blazer with
brass buttons.
Kincaid said: "Come in, Captain. How did you get so wet? You
shouldn't go out in the rain."
"Fuck off," the Captain said. Bloggs was not sure how much of his
anger was real: very little of it, to judge by the delighted
expressions on the other faces in the room.
Porter said: "Morning, Captain."
"Good morning, Your Worship," the Captain said.
Kincaid said: "What have you got?"
The Captain took off his cap and shook drops of rain from its crown.
"The Marie II has gone missing," he said, "I saw her come in on the
afternoon the storm began. I didn't see her go out, but I know she
shouldn't have sailed again that day. However, it seems she did."
"Who owns her?"
"Tarn Halfpenny. I telephoned him. He left her in her mooring that
day and hasn't seen her since."
Bloggs said: What kind of vessel is she ?"
"A small fishing boat, sixty feet and broad in the beam. Stout little
craft. Inboard motor. No particular style the fishermen round here
don't follow the pattern book when they build boats."
"Let me ask you a very important question," Bloggs said.
"Could that boat have survived the storm?"
The Captain paused in the act of putting a match to his pipe. After a
moment he said ? "With a very skilful sailor at the helm maybe. Maybe
not."
"How far might he have got before the storm broke?"
"Not far a few miles. The Marie II was not tied up until evening."
Bloggs stood up, walked around his chair, and sat down again.
"So where is he now?"
"At the bottom of the sea, in all probability, the bloody fool." The
Captain's statement was not without relish.
Bloggs could take no satisfaction in the likelihood that Faber was
dead. It was too inconclusive. The discontent spread to his body, and
he felt restless, itchy, and frustrated. He scratched his chin: he
needed a shave.
"I'll believe it when I see it," he said.
"You won't."
"Save your lugubrious guesswork," Bloggs said sharply.
"I want information, not pessimism." The other men in the room
suddenly remembered that, despite his youth, he was the senior officer
there.
"Let's rehearse the possibilities. One: he left Aberdeen by land and
someone else stole the Marie II. In that case he has probably reached
his destination by now, but he won't have left the country because of
the storm. We already have all the other police forces looking for
him, and that's all we can do about number one.
"Two: he's still in Aberdeen. Again, we have this possibility covered:
we're still looking for him.
"Three: he left Aberdeen by sea. I tn ink we're agreed this is the
strongest option. Let's break it down. Three A: he transferred to
another vessel probably a U-boat before the storm broke. We don't
think he had time, but he might've. Three B: he found shelter
somewhere, or was shipwrecked somewhere mainland or island. Three C:
he died.
"If he caught a U-boat, we've had it. We've lost. There's nothing
more we can do. So let's forget that one. If he found shelter, or was
shipwrecked, we'll find evidence sooner or later either the Marie II,
or bits of it. We can search the coastline right away and survey the
sea as soon as the weather clears sufficiently for us to get a plane
up. If he's gone to the bottom of the ocean we may still find bits of
the boat floating.
"So we have three courses of action to take. We continue the searches
already going on; we mount a new search of the coastline, working north
and south from Aberdeen; and we prepare for an air-sea search the
minute the weather improves."
Bloggs had begun to pace up and down as he spoke, thinking on his feet.
He stopped now, and looked around.
"Comments, queries and suggestions?"
The late hour had got to all of them. Bloggs' sudden access of energy
jerked them out of a creeping lethargy. One leaned forward, rubbing
his hands; another tied his shoelaces; a third put his jacket on. They
wanted to go to work. There were no questions.
"All right," said Bloggs.
"Let's win the war."
TWENTY-THREE
Faber was awake. His body probably needed sleep, despite the fact that
he had spent the day in bed; but his mind was hyperactive, turning over
possibilities, sketching scenarios, thinking about women and about
home.
Now that he was so close to getting' out, his memories of home became
quite painfully sweet. He thought of quite silly things, like sausages
fat enough to eat in slices, and motor cars on the right-hand-side of
the road, and really tall trees, and most of all his own language words
with guts and precision, hard consonants and pure vowels and the verb
at the end of the sentence where it ought to be, finality and meaning
in the same climactic terminal.
Thoughts of climaxes brought Gertrude to mind again: her face beneath
his, make-up washed away by his kisses, eyes closing tight in pleasure
then opening again to look with delight into his, mouth stretched wide
in a permanent gasp, saying "Ja, Liebling, ja ..."
It was silly. He had led the life of a monk for seven years, but she
had no reason to do the same. She would have had ado zen men since
Faber. She might even be dead, bombed by the R.A.F or murdered by the
maniacs because her nose was half an inch too long or run over by a
motor car in the blackout. Anyway, she would hardly remember him. He
would probably never see her again. But she was a symbol.
He did not normally permit himself the indulgence of sentiment. There
was in his nature a very cold streakj and he cultivated it because it
protected him. Now, however, he was within an inch of success, and he
felt free, not to relax his vigilance, but to fantasise a little.
The storm was his safeguard while it continued. He would simply
contact the U-boat with Tom's radio on Monday, and its captain would
send a dinghy into the bay as soon as the weather cleared. However, if
the storm ended before Monday, there was a slight complication: the
supply boat. David and Lucy would naturally expect him to take the
boat back to the mainland.
Lucy came into his thoughts in vivid, full-colour visions which he
could not quite control. He saw her striking amber eyes watching him
as he made a bandage for her thumb; her outline walking up the stairs
in front of him clad in shapeless man's clothing; her heavy breasts,
perfectly round, as she stood naked in the bathroom: and as the visions
developed from memory into fantasy she leaned over the bandage and
kissed his mouth, turned back on the stairs and took him in her arms,
stepped out of the bathroom and placed his hands on her breasts.
He turned restlessly in the little bed, cursing the imagination which
sent him dreams the like of which he had not suffered since his
schooldays. At that time, before he had experienced the reality of
sex, he had constructed elaborate sexual scenarios featuring the older
women with whom he came into daily contact: the starchy Matron;
Professor Nagel's dark, thin, intellectual wife; the shopkeeper in the
village who wore red lipstick and talked to her husband with contempt.
Sometimes he put all three of them into one orgiastic fantasy. When at
the age of fifteen he had seduced a housemaid's daughter in the
twilight of a West Prussian forest, he abandoned the imaginary orgies
because they were so much better than the disappointing real thing.
Young Henrik had been greatly puzzled by this: where was the blinding
ecstasy, the sensation of soaring through the air like a bird, the
mystical fusion of two bodies into one? The fantasies became painful,
reminding him of his failure to make them real. Later, of course, the
reality improved, and Henrik formed the view that ecstasy comes not
from a man's pleasure in a woman, but from their pleasure in each
other. He had voiced that opinion to his elder brother, who seemed to
think it banal, a truism rather than a discovery; and before long
Henrik saw it that way too.
He became a good lover, eventually. He found sex interesting, as well
as physically pleasant. He was never a great seducer, for the thrill
of conquest was not what he wanted. But he was expert at giving and
receiving sexual gratification, without the expert's illusion that
technique is all. For some women he was a highly desirable man, and
the fact that he did not know this only served to make him even more
attractive.
He tried to remember how many women he had had: Anna, Gretchen, Ingrid,
the American girl, those two whores in Stuttgart... he could not recall
them all, but there could not have been more than about twenty.
None of them, he thought, had been quite as beautiful as Lucy. He gave
an exasperated sigh: he had let this woman get to him" just because he
was close to home and had been so careful for so long. He was annoyed
with himself. It was undisciplined: one should not relax until the
assignment was over, and this was not over, not quite.
There was the problem of the supply boat. Several solutions came to
mind: perhaps the most promising was to incapacitate the island's
inhabitants, meet the boat himself, and send the boatman away with a
cock-and-bull story. He could say he was visiting them, had come out
on another boat; that he was a relative, or a bird-watcher ...
anything. It was too small a problem to engage his full attention at
present. Later, when and if the weather improved, he would work
something out.
He had no serious problems. A lonely island, miles off the coast with
four inhabitants it was an ideal hideout. From now on, leaving Britain
was going to be as easy as breaking out of a baby's playpen. When he
thought of the situations he had already come through, the people he
had killed the five Home Guard men, the Yorkshire lad on the train, the
Ab-wehr messenger he considered himself now to be sitting pretty.
An old man, a cripple, a woman and a child ... Killing them would be so
simple.
Lucy, too, lay awake. She was listening. There was a lot to hear. The
weather was an orchestra, rain drumming on the roof, wind fluting in
the eaves of the cottage, sea performing glissandi with the beach. The
old house talked, too, creaking in its joints as it suffered the
buffeting of the storm. Within the room there were more sounds:
David's slow, regular breathing, threatening but never quite achieving
a snore as he slept deeply under the influence of the double dose of
soporific; and the quicker, shallow breaths of Jo, sprawled comfortably
across a camp bed beside the far wall.
The noise is keeping me awake, Lucy thought; then immediately: Who am I
trying to fool? Her wakefulness was caused by Henry, who had looked at
her naked body, and had touched her hands gently as he bandaged her
thumb, and who now lay in bed in the next room, probably fast asleep.
He had not told her much about himself, she realized: only that he was
unmarried. She did not know where he had been born his accent gave no
clue. He had not even hinted at what he did for a living, though she
imagined he must be a professional man, perhaps a dentist or a soldier.
He was not dull enough to be a solicitor, too intelligent to be a
journalist, and doctors could never keep their profession secret for
longer than five minutes. He was not rich enough to be a barrister,
too self-effacing to be an actor. She would bet on the Army.
Did he live alone, she wondered? Or with his mother? Or a woman? What
did he wear when he wasn't fishing? She would like to see him in a
dark blue suit, double-breasted, with a white handkerchief in the top
pocket. Did he have a motor car? Yes, he would; something rather
unusual, and quite new. He probably drove very fast.
That thought brought back memories of David's two-seater, and she
closed her eyes tightly to shut out the nightmare images. Think of
something else, think of something else.
She thought of Henry again, and realized an odd thing: she wanted to
make love to him.
It was a peculiar wish; the kind of wish that, in her scheme of things,
afflicted men but not women. A woman might meet a man briefly and find
him attractive, want to get to know him better, even begin to fall in
love with him; but she did not feel an immediate physical desire, not
unless she was ... abnormal.
She told herself that this was ridiculous; that what she needed was to
make love with her husband, not to copulate with the first eligible man
who came along. She told herself she was not that kind.
All the same, it was pleasant to speculate. David and Jo were fast
asleep: there was nothing to stop her getting out of bed, crossing the
landing, entering his room, sliding into bed next to him... Nothing to
stop her, except character, good breeding, and a respectable
upbringing.
If she were going to do it with anybody, she would do it with someone
like Henry. He would be kind, and gentle, and considerate; he would