When he stopped, Joe pushed past to look. He said, “Whadder you know? The goddess of love awaiting her two sooters.”
The unwinking light was looking down on them through a small hole high up in the chalk wall. It was certainly a planet. Which one, Luke neither knew nor cared.
He said, “We’ve both got our knives. We’ll soon have that hole wide enough to wriggle through.”
It took them three long hours.
To start with, they tried standing, in turn, on each other’s shoulders, but this arrangement was uncomfortable for the one below and insecure for the one above. Abandoning the idea, they set to work to cut a step halfway up the wall. One stood on it; the other supported him.
It would have been much easier if they had been dealing with rocks and loose earth, but this was solid chalk. Luke’s knife was the first to break. After that, he went more carefully, using the stump of the blade. Joe, equally careful, made faster progress, cursing steadily as chips of chalk fell down the back of his neck.
Just after Joe had broken his knife as well, Luke said, “I think I could do it.” He replaced Joe on the step, grabbed the edge of the enlarged hole, and heaved himself up and out. Then he stretched down both hands to Joe and pulled him up.
They found that they had come out on the fringe of the forest. Ahead of them the ground sloped down toward the river, hidden by a belt of trees.
And men were advancing among the trees.
They were soldiers, spread out in line. As they came nearer, he recognised the green insignia of the Rifle Brigade. He also recognised the young officer who was directing operations. What was his name? Barnes—no, Baines. He had met him, once or twice, in London.
He came up to Luke, peered at him in some astonishment, and said, “Don’t I know you? Pagan, in the Intelligence Police? You seem to have had a rough night.”
Luke became aware, for the first time, of the state of his clothes. He was covered with chalk dust and earth. His hair was full of it, and it spread down the front of his jacket like a white apron. His last spasmodic effort had cost him two buttons. Joe seemed to have come out with less disrepair.
“I don’t want to hold you up,” said Luke, “but if you could put me in the picture, I think I might be in a position to help you.”
“I was going to ask you to put me in the picture,” said Captain Baines. “Things have been happening so fast since we landed at Boulogne yesterday that we’re all feeling dazed. First, we were loaded onto a train for Amiens. Next stop the front line, we all thought. No. We were shifted onto a train for Étaples. Seems that some sort of emergency had blown up. A report had been received from the Intelligence Police. And it must have been some report! Went up like a hot-air balloon. Colonel Knox-Johnson to Brigadier General Macdonough to General Wilson, which explains why he picked on us, the Rifle Brigade being his old outfit. Apparently, the Germans were threatening Étaples. It didn’t seem possible. However, not to bother. You’re in the army. Don’t ask questions. Same sort of confusion when we got to Étaples. An irregular force, they called it. Down in the forest. Had to be dealt with. Hardly time for breakfast and off we go.”
“You won’t have a lot of trouble,” said Luke. He sounded happy, but secretly he was appalled at the wheels his report had set turning. “It’s a handful of scallywags.”
He explained who they were and where they were. Captain Baines seemed to be in no hurry. He had sat down to listen to Luke, and his men were lying comfortably on their backs. A sergeant walked across and said, “Permission to smoke, sir?”
“I think not,” said Baines. “Too much dry stuff about. Some ass’ll be sure to set fire to it.” And to Luke, “It looks like a pincer movement’s called for. Half the men back by the way you came up. I take it they just have to follow the cotton.”
“I’ll go with ’em,” said Joe. “Pepin’s mum told me not to leave her cotton lying about. She wants it back.”
Luke said, “All right. Then you take the other half of your men to a place I’ll show you. It gives a good view of the village, and you’ll be able to see where you want to assign them. How long will you be?”
“Allow an hour.”
“Is that enough? It seemed to take us a lot longer.”
“Call it ninety minutes. Should be more’n enough.”
“Sounds like a piece of cake,” said Baines. He conferred with a Lieutenant Willoughby, who looked even younger than he. “Zero hour, eight-thirty. I’ll give you a blast on my whistle, which you probably won’t hear. But when you start shooting we’ll hear you all right. Aim for their legs. One volley should do the trick.”
Lieutenant Willoughby, who seemed to be a calm character said, “Eight-thirty. Aim for their legs. Understood.”
“Then we’d better synchronise our watches.”
Luke was back in the badger’s hole they had discovered the day before. He was by himself. Captain Baines, with sixty of his riflemen, had crawled forward in the unobtrusive way that their predecessors had been taught by Sir John Moore and had practised to the discomfort of the French in the Peninsular War. They formed a cordon around the back of Ezé village, facing toward the scrub and bushes that must hide the entrance to the cavern.
He had been observing their manoeuvres for half an hour with admiration and with one eye on his watch.
Forty minutes to go.
He wondered how the other sixty men were getting along – stumbling, in the dark, along the difficult, twisting, underground route. There were points in the three open caves where a step off the direct path could lead to trouble. But with Joe as a guide, surely …
A rustling noise made him look up.
Joe was hoisting himself forward on hands and knees. As he came up, Luke, who had been working out times and distances, said, “How the devil did you get here? You ought to be not much more than halfway along that underground passage.”
“That’s where I oughter be,” said Joe complacently. “But I’m not, am I? Instead, I’m here, so’s to watch the curtain go up.”
“You mean you’ve left Willoughby’s men to find their own way?”
“I don’t mean nothing of the sort. He’s got a bit of sense, that boy. He said to me, why go through the back door when the front door’s open? Just you show me that hole you fell down. I’ll rustle up a bit of rope. When I left them he’d already got about half his men down.”
“We ought to have thought of that ourselves,” said Luke.
After that, there was nothing to do but observe the hands of his watch and fret at the slowness with which they moved. He was desperately unhappy about his report. Had he really painted the situation in unnecessarily black colours? Because if he had, it was he, and not the general, who had played Erich Krieger’s game for him, by taking badly needed troops from the line of battle.
True, Krieger was going to pay for it. By dressing himself in uniform during this last appearance, he might escape being shot as a spy, but there were earlier episodes that were not going to be tolerantly regarded by a court-martial. To have laid such a man by the heels was a partial victory at least.
“Zero hour,” said Joe.
Captain Baines stood up, and the shrill blast of his whistle was echoed by the muffled sound of rifle fire.
“One volley, I made it,” said Luke.
“More’n enough for that poxy crowd,” said Joe. “They don’t fancy long odds.”
Figures were already beginning to appear, stumbling through the bushes. None of them showed any sign of wanting to fight. In one case, a man was hobbling, and two men were half-carrying a third.
Luke counted them as they came.
“Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five. Now, surely …”
But the next to appear were riflemen, rounding up the stragglers.
“What the hell,” said Luke and broke off.
From a cleft a quarter of a mile beyond the village, a motorboat had appeared. Without any difficulty, without even using his glasses, Luke could distinguish the
five figures in the boat: the three-man crew, B.S.M. Forgan, and their old enemy. He was wearing – a final flourish – his cavalry schapska helmet. From the top of it, the plume of a white aigrette fluttered triumphantly in the breeze.
Luke watched him with gall and bitterness. Not a hope in hell of catching him. He could show his heels to any fishing boat. Soon he would be in Spain. Soon after that, if the Spanish ran true to form, back in Germany.
“And God rot him,” said Luke, “with all the honours of war.”
He said this aloud.
Joe, lying beside him, rolled over and said, “Wait for it.”
“Wait for what?”
“Just wait.”
As he spoke, he saw the launch split from inside by a shocking explosion, hurling scattered pieces into the air. Then, as the sound reached them, the launch started to go down into a whirlpool of foam. For a moment, the two halves appeared together, upright, like the separate fingers of a hand, and sank slowly. As the disturbed water settled down, all that remained was a white aigrette feather, tossed around by the subsiding waves.
Luke let out the breath he had been holding and croaked, “How did that happen?”
“That was Pepin,” said Joe. “Diddun I tell you he diddun like the Germans? Shot his father, diddun they? So when he was fetching that pistol for his uncle, he helped himself to a box of cordite. He knew all about cordite, on account of helping his father in the mine. Safe stuff, his father always told him. So long as you don’t upset it.”
“Upset it,” said Luke weakly.
“Two things what upset it most are heat and vibration. So what he planned to do if and when he found the boat was hide the cordite away under the engine. You thought that would do the trick, diddun you?”
This was to Pepin, who had materialised behind them in his usual silent way. He was grinning so broadly that Luke wondered what would happen if the two ends of his mouth met behind his head.
“I dun for the focking boggers,” he said.
“You see,” said Joe proudly, “almost bilingual.”
Michael Gilbert Titles in order of first publication
All Series titles can be read in order, or randomly as standalone novels
Inspector Hazlerigg
Close Quarters (1947)
They Never Looked Inside (alt: He Didn’t Mind Danger) (1948)
The Doors Open (1949)
Smallbone Deceased (1950)
Death has Deep Roots (1951)
Fear To Tread (in part)(1953)
The Young Petrella (included) (short stories)(1988)
The Man Who Hated Banks and Other Mysteries (included) (short stories)(1997)
Patrick Petrella
Blood and Judgement (1959)
Amateur in Violence (included) (short stories) (1973)
Petrella at Q (short stories) (1977)
The Young Petrella (short stories) (1988)
Roller Coaster (1993)
The Man Who Hated Banks and Other Mysteries (included) (short stories) (1997)
Luke Pagan
Ring of Terror (1995)
Into Battle (1997)
Over and Out (1998)
Calder & Behrens
Game Without Rules (short stories) (1967)
Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens (short stories) (1982)
Non-Series
Death in Captivity (alt: The Danger Within) (1952)
Sky High (alt: The Country House Burglar) (1955)
Be Shot for Sixpence (1956)
After the Fine Weather (1963)
The Crack in the Teacup (1966)
The Dust and the Heat (alt: Overdrive) (1967)
The Etruscan Net (alt: The Family Tomb) (1969)
Stay of Execution and Other Stories (short stories) (1971)
The Body of a Girl (1972)
The Ninety-Second Tiger (1973)
Flash Point (1974)
The Night of the Twelfth (1976)
The Empty House (1979)
The Killing of Katie Steelstock (alt: Death of a Favourite Girl) (1980)
The Final Throw (alt: End Game) (1982)
The Black Seraphim (1984)
The Long Journey Home (1985)
Trouble (1987)
Paint, Gold, and Blood (1989)
Anything for a Quiet Life (short stories) (1990)
The Queen against Karl Mullen (1992)
Synopses (Both Series & ‘Stand-alone’ Titles)
Published by House of Stratus
After The Fine Weather
When Laura Hart travels to Austria to visit her brother, vice-consul of Lienz in the Tyrol, she briefly meets an American who warns her of the mounting political tension. Neo-Nazis are stirring trouble in the province, and xenophobia is rife between the Austrians who control the area and the Italian locals. Then Laura experiences the troubles first-hand, a shocking incident that suggests Hofrat Humbold, leader of the Lienz government is using some heavy-handed tactics. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he is unwilling to let one little English girl destroy his plans for the largest Nazi move since the war, and Laura makes a dangerous enemy.
Anything For A Quiet Life
Jonas Pickett, lawyer and commissioner of oaths is nearing retirement, but still has lots of energy. However, he leaves the pressure of a London practice behind to set up a new modest office in a quiet seaside resort. He soon finds that he is overwhelmed with clients and some of them involve him in very odd and sometimes dangerous cases. This collection of inter-linked stories tells how these are brought to a conclusion; ranging from an incredible courtroom drama involving a gipsy queen to terrorist thugs who make their demands at gunpoint.
Be Shot For Sixpence
A gripping spy thriller with a deserved reputation. Philip sees an announcement in The Times from an old school friend who has instructed the newspaper to publish only if they don’t hear from him. This sets a trail running through Europe, with much of the action taking place on the Austro-Hungarian border. The Kremlin, defectors, agitators and the People’s Court set the background to a very realistic story that could well have happened …
The Black Seraphim
James Scotland, a young pathologist, decides on a quiet holiday in Melchester, but amid the cathedral town’s quiet medieval atmosphere, he finds a hornet’s nest of church politics, town and country rivalries, and murder. He is called upon to investigate and finds that some very curious alliances between the church, state and business exist. With modern forensic pathology he unravels the unvarnished truth about Melchester, but not before a spot of unexpected romance intervenes.
Blood & Judgement
When the wife of a recently escaped prisoner is found murdered and partially buried near a reservoir, Patrick Petrella, a Metropolitan Police Inspector, is called in. Suspicion falls on the escaped convict, but what could have been his motive? Petrella meets resistance from top detectives at the Yard who would prefer to keep the inspector out of the limelight, but he is determined to solve the mystery with or without their approval.
The Body Of A Girl
Detective Chief Inspector Mercer is called to the scene when a skeleton of a girl is found on Westlaugh Island in the upper reaches of the River Thames. What appears to be a straightforward and routine investigation, however, leads to unexpected events and a string of unlikely characters, including a lawyer and a one armed garage proprietor. Nothing seems to fit together and it seems the sleepy town holds many secrets. The finale involves two nights of dramatic violence and it isn’t until this stage is reached that the twisted truth finally emerges.
Close Quarters
It has been more than a year since Cannon Whyte fell 103 feet from the cathedral gallery, yet unease still casts a shadow over the peaceful lives of the Close’s inhabitants. In an apparently separate incident, head verger Appledown is being persecuted: a spate of anonymous letters and random acts of vandalism imply that he is inefficient and immoral. But then the notes turn threatening, and when Appledown is found dead, Inspector Hazle
rigg is called in. Investigations suggest that someone directly connected to the cathedral is responsible, and it is up to Hazlerigg to get to the heart of the corruption.
The Crack In The Teacup
Barhaven is on the south coast within commuting distance from London. It is, however, a fairly sleepy place and it seems incredulous that it could be the kind of town where the local councillors could manage to line their own pockets. However, there is something odd about the borough engineers behaviour, and it seems strange that the owner of the local amusement park is unknown, and the Town Clerk himself is acting peculiarly. Enter a young lawyer, who finds himself at the centre of a major campaign against racketeering. The public and the press become involved and it ends with a twist that is totally unexpected.
Death Has Deep Roots
This is a detective and trial story with a complicated plot that will grip the reader. Victoria Lamartine is on trial for the murder of her supposed lover, whom she is accused of having stabbed. There are only five suspects including Lamartine. But evidence that doesn’t fit the police theory of the crime has been ignored, whilst all of the damming evidence is presented in isolation. Intriguingly, whilst the murder was committed in England, all of the suspects somehow have a past connection with France and its wartime underground. However, there now appears to be links to gold smuggling and it is not immediately clear how all of the different pieces of evidence fit together. As always, Gilbert neatly takes the reader to a satisfying final twist and conclusion.
Death In Captivity
A suspected informer is found dead in a collapsed section of an escape tunnel being dug in a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy. So as to protect the tunnel the prisoners decide to move the body to another that has already been abandoned. But then the fascist captors declare the death to be murder and determine to investigate and execute the officer they suspect was responsible. It therefore becomes a race against time to find the true culprit and Captain Henry "Cuckoo" Goyles, a former headmaster, master tunneller and sometime amateur detective takes on the case.
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