I didn’t feel I could ask him straight away, though. Lars hadn’t said a word to nice, friendly Mrs Collins and he still hadn’t lifted his eyes from the floor.
So I said, “Hello, Lars. My name’s Jakob. This is Åse. And this bookworm here—” I gave Freddie a nudge, because he had his nose in the Morse code manual “—is Freddie.”
Lars didn’t reply. He just picked up his fork and started to eat.
I knew he understood English, but maybe he didn’t like talking in his second language. So I tried Norwegian.
Well, darn me! He just continued eating, shovelling the food in as fast as he could.
Then Åse had a go.
“Hi, buddy!” she said. “We’ve been training this morning. You’ll be doing explosives with me. It’s a bit like school – you sit at a desk and do the maths to calculate the charges. But making the bombs and moulding the explosive is good fun.”
Lars ignored her and carried on eating.
Åse gave me a Look.
I tried again. “You’re lucky you’re not doing signals like Freddie and me. You have to learn all about transmitters and accumulators and codes. And Morse is a real headache – we’re having to listen to hours of little bleeps.”
And Lars just continued eating – fork to mouth, fork to mouth, fork to mouth.
I felt like a fool. People who don’t talk often have that effect on me. I just hear myself blethering away and I sound so empty and stupid.
We didn’t know what to do. Åse kicked Freddie under the table and, at long last, he glanced up from his book. Freddie isn’t normally very tuned in to people, but he looked at Lars and seemed to understand. “You can have second helpings,” he said. “Just go up to the hatch and ask Mrs Collins.”
Immediately Lars sat up and swept his hair back from his face. He was deathly pale and completely covered in scratches. His lip was swollen and I could see stitches to the side of his mouth. A large dark red graze ran all the way from his right cheekbone down to his chin. But that was only the superficial stuff.
It was his eyes that were really shocking.
He’d got the wild, hollow-eyed look you get in cornered animals. He didn’t seem to be in the same room as us at all. He was somewhere else, where something unimaginable was passing before his eyes and burning itself deep into his mind.
Then, suddenly, Lars shook his head and seemed to bring himself back to the present. He rose to his feet and walked briskly over to the serving hatch.
“Cripes!” said Åse. “Did someone just step over his grave?”
Jakob P. Stromsheim
28TH NOVEMBER 1942, DRUMINCRAIG HOUSE
I’m sitting by the library fire again – this chair is so comfortable I don’t think I’ll ever get out of it. But back to today’s training…
After lunch Sergeant Sneyd, who seems to get scarier every time I see him, led us out to an old barn in the grounds for our first combat lesson. “I call this my Bluebeard room,” he said as he unlocked the door. “Ha-ha-ha!”
And, in the half light, the barn did look very sinister. Hanging from the ceiling were six naked tailors’ dummies. They were rather battered and had small Xs drawn on them with an ink pen.
“Right, everyone!” bellowed Sergeant Sneyd – he was in his element – “Look sharp! Shoulders up! Backs straight! Chop-chop-chop!” He looked us up and down contemptuously. “Have any of you done any boxing or wrestling at school?”
Freddie and I nodded.
Sneydy gave a snort and continued, eyes flitting from side to side. “Well you can forget that fancy stuff! Forget your Japanese strangleholds and your spinal dislocators. And you can also forget about fair play. When it comes to a fight for life and death you’ve got to go for the vulnerable bits of the body – the eyes, the crotch, the back of the neck, the base of the throat. Today you will learn to kill your enemies outright. Without firearms. This is war, not sport.”
He narrowed his eyes, raised his hand above his head and swirled it through the air like a cutlass. “This,” he said, “is a deadly weapon. If used correctly it can kill, paralyse or break bones. But—” and his hand moved so fast that I couldn’t even see it “—speed is of the essence.”
After that, Sergeant Sneyd showed us how to flex our hands and where to strike an opponent (hence the little Xs drawn on the dummies), using the base of the hand, which is stronger than the fist. For some moves we had to keep our fingers spread out, ready to jab into an opponent’s eyes or mouth. Sergeant Sneyd is a very dirty fighter.
We practised the moves in slow motion first, then, once we’d mastered a pattern of a few strokes, we sped up, doing four, then five, then six hits in quick succession.
The dummies were made of hard plastic. After the first few blows my whole hand was tingling, but as I got faster, I found my hand hurt much less.
Meanwhile poor Freddie had already scraped the skin off his knuckles and Åse was having problems because she’s so small. If she wanted to hit her dummy on the head or neck she had to make a huge flying leap into the air.
As for Lars – well, he did nothing. He just stood watching us with a faraway look in his eyes. Sneydy turned to him and glared.
“Where are you, lad? Cloud cuckoo land?” he shouted.
Lars stared at the far wall.
“Cat got your tongue?”
Lars didn’t reply.
Sneydy came up very close to Lars’s ear. I don’t know what he said, but Lars jerked to attention. Then, with his head slightly on one side, he looked at the dummy. At the back of the barn lay a German helmet. Lars walked over to the helmet, picked it up, returned and placed it on his dummy. Then he took three steps backwards.
I barely saw what happened next, but suddenly Lars charged forward and landed a ferocious blow on the dummy’s chin. There was a loud crack as the dummy jerked backwards on its wire hanger and the neck joint broke apart. The German helmet clattered across the barn floor and so, too, did the dummy’s head.
We all stopped what we were doing.
Lars, his head bowed, returned to where he’d been standing. Sneydy looked at the headless dummy and clicked his tongue approvingly.
“We’re now going to move on to pair work,” he said, as if nothing had happened. “Remember, all the moves are to be performed fast and with certainty. But please be careful. This is a practice session. Understood? No Brownie points if you kill your sparring partner or hospitalize him.”
“Or her,” added Åse in a semi-whisper.
“Button your lip, Miss Jeffries!” shouted Sneydy – and he was really bellowing now. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir!” chorused everybody except Lars.
“Understood, Petersen?”
Lars didn’t react.
“Petersen!”
Lars looked up slowly and nodded.
Jakob P. Stromsheim
29TH NOVEMBER 1942, DRUMINCRAIG HOUSE
I’m in the kitchen – Mrs Collins has just served us a sneaky elevenses of custard tarts – but I’ll continue with what happened last night.
I was completely worn out by the combat lesson, but we still had orienteering to do, followed by drill. And after that the Colonel decided to cram in some shooting practice.
For supper Mrs Collins made a huge fish pie, with blackcurrant crumble for pudding. It was so delicious that I had thirds and afterwards I could barely prise myself out of my chair. Eventually I lumbered upstairs and I had just enough energy to fold up my clothes before I crept into my freezing cold bed. Then I found I was too tired to sleep.
My mind was racing. I thought about Mother, wondering if she was eating properly. She’s had no appetite since Father went missing. And I never hear her laugh. I think she misses Father so much that she’s not really living any more, just mimicking the motions. I’m sure she only keeps going for my sake.
Since I wasn’t going to start snoozing any time soon, I decided to write her a letter. I switched on the reading light and was rummaging in my drawer
for some notepaper, when I had a strange feeling that I was being watched.
I turned round. In the bed next to me, Lars was lying slumped over the edge of the mattress, one hand trailing on the floor. His head was on one side and his eyes were staring straight at me.
I waved a hand, but Lars didn’t blink. His expression was glassy. His body was completely still and his face very pale.
He looked like he was dead.
“Lars!” I called out.
There was no reply.
Dear God! I got up and ran round to his bed. I grabbed him by the arm and shook him hard. His head jolted backwards and his body tensed up. He looked at me with utter horror, then he screamed. He screamed very loudly.
Freddie sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes and then, just as suddenly, Lars stopped screaming. He looked at me as if I was a madman.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were ill. Is something the matter?”
Lars shook his head. Then he put his hands over his face and sat crouched over, very, very still.
When he finally lifted his head from his hands he spoke quietly and in Norwegian. “Sorry,” he said. “I was dreaming. I thought you were someone else.”
“Lars, do you always sleep with your eyes open?”
But Lars didn’t reply. He just turned his head to the wall.
Åse Jeffries
1ST DECEMBER 1942, DRUMINCRAIG HOUSE
Day three of Druminhell House and I’ve finally worked out survival tips for life here:
1. Avoid eye contact with the Colonel. Look at him and he remembers you are there and will “volunteer” you for some extra task.
2. Avoid anything whatsoever to do with Sergeant Chop-chop-chop.
3. Make friends with Mrs Collins. She has limitless supplies of sugar and cocoa powder.
I’ve also discovered what’s in my bedroom cupboard!
It all started this afternoon. After lunch we were told to go to the library, where Mrs Collins had lit a fire. Here Colonel Armstrong introduced us to a bandy-legged little man called Albert, who was pink and slightly bent and looked just like a shrimp.
We sat down and the Colonel told us the shrimp had a very special lesson to teach us.
The man then unrolled a soft canvas case about as long as my hand. Inside was a set of fine metal pincers and funny elongated hooks and probes which he laid out on the table.
He was here to show us how to pick a lock (the shrimp has, apparently, “done more ’ouses than we’ve ’ad ’ot breakfasts”). And like so many of the things we’ve learned here, lock picking sounds incredibly exciting but the reality is a bit more humdrum and you need to put in hours of practice and hard slog.
The shrimp got going pretty quickly. First he showed us some pictures of the inside of a standard deadbolt lock. The mechanism is made up of a series of pins that move up and down, rather like piano keys. If you want to pick a lock you have to wiggle and waggle your pick into the keyhole, find each of these pins (normally there are five), nudge them into the right position and then swivel the whole lock round.
Bingo! The lock opens.
We all had a go. I’m usually good at fiddly things, but this was darned hard. You have to concentrate all the while and visualize the inside of the lock as you wiggle away. One false move and all the pins come crashing down and you have to start again. I found it helped if I shut my eyes and kind of let my fingers think for me. After the second or third go I began to get the hang of it. The shrimp even said I had a good set of fingers on me and wondered if I might “help him out on a job” one day. The Colonel didn’t think that was at all funny.
“Don’t get above yourself, Albert,” he snapped.
Anyway, the shrimp seemed to have taken a shine to me, so I asked him – quietly, so the Colonel wouldn’t hear – if I could keep my lock pick so I could practise. He gave me a quick nod and I hid the pick up my sleeve.
The minute the lesson was over I went straight upstairs to my bedroom to get into that creepy cupboard. The lock was a bit rusty but, after a couple of tries, I was in. The stink of mothballs would have felled a rhino, but I breathed through my mouth and plunged in. I found three fur coats in dust covers and four large cardboard boxes marked fragile, but there were no nests or droppings or other signs of the mysterious scrabbling beasts.
Well, at this point, I just had to open one of the boxes, didn’t I? I lifted the cardboard flaps up and…
Yeuch! Yeuch! Yeuch!
I took a great gasp of horrible mothball air.
The box was filled with rows of DEAD RATS!
They were laid out really neatly – like apples in the grocers – with cardboard under each layer. Each little rat was carefully wrapped in tissue paper with its tail sticking out of one end and its snout out of the other.
I opened the next box. More rats. And the next box. Even more rats. And the next box…
Then I did some sums. The first box I opened had twelve rats on each layer and (though I didn’t delve too far) I think there were five layers.
12 rats x 5 layers = 60 rats in a box.
60 rats x 4 boxes = 240 rats.
That is A LOT OF DEAD RATS!
I unwrapped one of the rats and had a look at it. It felt kind of hard in the middle, but maybe that was rigor mortis – when the body goes hard after death. The horrible bald, pink tail was still as floppy as a worm though.
I turned the rat over and saw there were neat little stitches all along the underbelly. Jeez! The rat had been stuffed.
Is this the Colonel’s hobby? After we’ve gone to bed does he sit up with Sergeant Sneyd lovingly stitching up dead rats? I wouldn’t put it past them.
And why stuff the rats? Do the mad English have special dead rat shops? I wouldn’t put that past them either…
I’m in bed now and I’ve put all the boxes back in the creepy cupboard. This discovery hasn’t dealt with the mystery scratching sounds, but I realize the noise must come from behind the cupboard. It’s probably rats in the wainscot. Maybe they’re relatives of the dead rats in the boxes and have come to pay their last respects.
Åse Jeffries
2ND DECEMBER 1942, DRUMINCRAIG HOUSE
This morning there was more of that weird horizontal rain. I know Scotland is meant to be beautiful and all that, but it’s so darned miserable. They wouldn’t know the sun here if it bit them in the backside. (You may wonder why somebody who is half-Norwegian is complaining about a bit of cold, but Norway’s different – there it’s a bright, sparkly, magical kind of cold.)
Anyway, as always happens when the weather becomes unspeakable, the Colonel pointed his long nose in the air and rubbed his hands together and announced it was time for a “wee stroll”.
We were outside for four hours. FOUR HOURS! We marched in single file along a mountain ridge with a twenty-metre drop on one side. I was just behind the new boy, Lars. He’s a real Mr No-Smiles-No-Chat. He walks quicker than a mountain goat and clearly has leg muscles of braided titanium – he never ever stops for a breather. But I wasn’t going to be outdone by a boy, so I ended up almost running to keep up.
When we got back, Mrs Collins was standing at the front door.
“Drop scones for the children in the library,” she said, giving the Colonel a thunderous look.
There was a huge fire in the library, and a tray piled with scones and fruit cake. We ate and ate and ate – even Fred got to the point where he’d had enough. And afterwards, while we were slouching around in the armchairs, I told Jakob about the rats.
He didn’t believe me. So just to prove it to him, I went to my bedroom, got the lock pick out of my toilet bag (where I’ve been hiding it), unlocked the cupboard, took out a rat and brought it downstairs. Then I crept up behind Jakob’s armchair and dangled the rat under his nose.
He laughed, reached up and grabbed it. Then he threw the rat to Fred, who gave a little yelp of surprise and flung it straight into the fire.
A second later:
WHUMPH!<
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An almighty explosion shook the room. Red-hot embers flew in all directions, window panes cracked, books came crashing down off the shelves and evil black smoke poured out of the fireplace. There was a horrible smell of burnt hair.
The library now looked like this:
Fireplace: entirely black.
Carpet: entirely covered in ash.
Armchairs: entirely covered in ash.
Fred: also covered in ash, spectacles wonky and blackened, no eyebrows.
Then the Colonel came in. He seemed curious, rather than angry. He certainly didn’t look shocked or surprised – maybe people blow themselves up all the time at Drumincraig.
“Well, well, well,” he said quietly. “What happened?”
“Err … sorry, ummh, we – ahem – threw something in the fire,” I stumbled.
“My dear Miss Jeffries, what precisely did you throw in the fire?”
“Err,” I replied in a little rodent-sized voice, “a rat.”
“Ah,” said the Colonel in a well-that-explains-everything tone of voice. “Was it, by any chance, a stuffed rat from your bedroom cupboard?”
“Yes, sir,” I said in a teensy, weensy mouse-voice.
“Hmm…” The Colonel rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “From the locked bedroom cupboard that you were told to leave well alone.”
“Yes, sir.” My voice was positively gnat-sized now.
Colonel Armstrong gave me one of his beady looks. “You do realize, Miss Jeffries, that the rat had twenty–five grams of plastic explosive in its belly?”
“Oh, crikey!” I said. I’ve done enough explosives training to know that twenty-five grams is a good-sized charge. These rats weren’t just fun and games fireworks.
There was a slightly awkward pause, and then Jakob asked what we had all been wondering.
“Sir? Why was the dead rat stuffed with explosives?”
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