by Thomas Wood
I panted and dribbled as I lay in the undergrowth, staring up at my target building, this time with no need for the use of the binoculars. It was bigger than I thought it would look this close up, with three reasonable sized windows upstairs, two downstairs and an old, battered front door that didn’t look as though it was able to fit in its frame properly.
I was right, all the windows were still remarkably intact, although they all looked incredibly fragile and ready to give out if someone was to cough in their general direction.
The window on the left-hand corner of the upstairs was the room that had the light on, and I could tell that the lamp was in the far corner of the room, with an ivory coloured net curtain draping from the window, presumably to keep the light in and prying eyes out. The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t help but think that Joseph had sent people to die here before, it all seemed so well thought out.
As I began to relax a little bit more, my body sinking further into the brambles with every exhale of breath I, as well as the surrounding area was suddenly plunged into a darkness, as the lamp in the window was suddenly extinguished, nothing to give any kind of light, except for the few stars that winked at me from between the clouds.
I craned my neck upwards to look to the sky for a few moments, marvelling at how quickly the molten lava of the sunset morphed into the sobering blackness that it had now become. The clouds rolled overhead creating a starless, moonless canvas above me, the silvery light of the moon trying earnestly to peek out from the edges of the wispy clouds, but to no avail.
There was nothing now, except a perfect blackness, that begun to close in around me the longer that I sat there, as if I was trapped in some sort of box, with no way of finding a way out or being rescued from it. As I began to become more uncomfortable with the suffocating lack of light, my leg began bouncing up and down as I lay on my stomach, out of a nervous nausea that washed over me, but also down to a desire to keep the blood in my limbs moving, in case I had to make a run for it.
I imagined what it must have been like in that house for Joseph, now plunged into a brilliant darkness as black as the soul of the devil himself. I wondered whether or not he would be terrified right now, or if the adrenaline that I knew he housed somewhere in his body was working its magic and keeping everything in order.
I admired him, the more that I thought about it, as I wasn’t too sure that I would have stepped out of my comfort zone as far as he had done, especially if it could’ve ended up with me being killed brutally.
I kept my gaze fixed firmly on the window from where the glow of the lamp had emanated from a few seconds before, and I was certain that I saw the ivory curtain twitch gently as someone pulled at its corner, to look back down the track, in the direction that he had just come.
I suddenly felt very uneasy as I recalled the number of times he had glanced over his shoulder on the approach, and now here he was, with his passenger in tow, still stealing a look back down the road. I wondered if he had been talking to anyone behind him, and that I had missed them in the dark because of my obsession with the figure, or maybe they had crashed through the trees on the other side of the path. There was even a possibility that there was an entire garrison a little further down the road, and the figure was merely waiting for them, before guiding Jameson out to meet them.
My leg trembles began to increase dramatically the more consideration I gave to the fact that Jameson had been set up. I even began to repulse myself as I entertained the thought that there was a chance for me to get out of there. It wasn’t too late for me. No one, other than Jameson knew I was there.
And, if he was about to die soon anyway, then I wouldn’t have to live with the disapproving looks or the obvious disappointment in his voice the next time I saw him.
The longer that I sat there, thinking of ways to excuse myself from this service, the more radical the ideas became and the possibility of me taking one of the ways out grew more likely.
To dispel the thoughts that I had started to harbour in my mind, I decided now would be the time to go in, or at the very least, start readying myself to go in. That way I was less likely to bottle it, or that’s what I told myself anyway.
My pistol was firmly in my hand, but I made sure that Jameson’s was ready, with a magazine in the well too, just in case the situation called for more than one gun-wielding lunatic.
The next phase of my plan was to enter the building, hoping to find Joseph there with Jameson. Then, I would simply confront the man, wait for the Germans to inevitably begin arriving just to confirm, before putting a bullet in between his eyes, which would be difficult, owing to the fact that they were so close together.
If it wasn’t Joseph in there, the plan would pretty much stay the same, just with my pistol being used to try and extract as much information about Joseph, before trying to get out of there in one piece. If that was going to happen, then it would be unlikely we would ever be able to hunt Joseph down, but at least I had a chance of escaping with my life.
As I began to untangle myself from the brambles that I had become ensnared in, the thought crossed my mind that maybe if Joseph wasn’t in there, then the figure who was with Jameson was the real traitor. I had started to doubt whether or not Joseph had been the German informer, but I had no other leads at this moment in time, so he had become my only fixation, something which I began to kick myself about.
Regardless of who was on the other side of the door with Jameson, I still had about fifty yards of open ground to cover, over an exposed road that could have machineguns lined up at one end, to create an almost perfect firing range, just waiting for the idiotic moving target to emerge from the bushes to be mown down.
I began scanning the trees that surrounded the left and the rear of the house, for any signs of movement once again. I knew that Louis and his son would be in there somewhere, hopefully with a few others, ready to face action once again, for the madman that Louis for some reason had an unwholesome amount of faith in.
I knew that whatever happened, I would need to be quick here, I needed to be in and out of that building within a matter of seconds, otherwise the inevitable German search party would begin to rain bullets down on us as if we were taking a shower.
That was if Joseph Baudouin had betrayed us at all, he might not even have been the traitor. Either way, as I lifted myself painfully from the bed of thorns that had started to penetrate my skin, leaving bloody little pockmarks all over me, I realised that it wasn’t going to be too long before I found out what Joseph had in store for me.
15
The thorns that had spiked their way into the fibres of my clothes seemed reluctant to let their grip go, only eventually giving it up when they were ripped from my clothes under the sheer force, or torn from the stem from which they flowed.
Within seconds, the pain that they had caused me was all but forgotten, as I heaved myself up and onto the balls of my feet, the burning in my thighs returning once again with a vengeance as I squatted over the shrubbery.
I checked that my secondary pistol was tucked comfortably in between my waistband and the leather belt, giving it a slight wiggle to make sure that it wasn’t going to come loose as I charged across the open ground.
Picking up my primary pistol, I gave the magazine a little shake to make sure that it hadn’t somehow ejected itself, before sliding the top slide back halfway, to make sure I didn’t have a double feed, or something else that could jam my gun. Even a half second pause while you tried to unjam your pistol was all that it took for an enemy solider to put at least three bullets inside you, by which time you would be cursing yourself for not double, and triple checking just before you went in.
Everything seemed to be exactly where I wanted it to be so, keeping my eyes fixed firmly on the netted window, I began to deliberately walk my way out of the undergrowth, bringing my knees up as high as my chest, so that I didn’t trip or make any unnecessary noise.
As soon as I was clear of the bramble
s, I began to run, legs slightly bent to project a slightly smaller profile than the one that I would do if I was to stand upright. My pistol was clamped tightly in between both of my hands, tucked into my chest slightly, as it began scanning the darkness. Wherever my eyes went, the end of my pistol went with it.
I felt nothing as I covered the ground between the bushes and the house. There was no pain in my legs as I ran, there was no thoughts of what might be waiting for me on the other side of the door, or who might be there. It was just me and my surging limbs, carrying me from one side of the road to the other.
I raced between the empty space in the wall, where a gate used to be hinged on at the side, as my footsteps began stomping around louder than bullets, as they fell onto the cobbled stone of the garden pathway.
The perimeter wall around the building was quite strict, with not much of a distance between it and the house itself. In fact, there was only room for about four long strides before I found myself clattering into the front wall of the house. I realised that I had made an error in allowing the house to take the full force of my sprinting bodyweight, particularly at the thought that all of the windows would soon come shattering down all around me as the vibrations took hold.
But I was there and, as I began to look round at the hill that I had climbed down, I realised that it had been an even more perfect vantage point than I had thought. The ground just before, where we had squatted, rose up gently, meaning that we were hidden by a natural lip in the ground. In fact, we could probably have lit a fire up there and still been relatively safe from being spotted.
There were no sounds from any corner of the wilderness, not from the east, where I presumed the Germans would arrive from, nor from the north or the west, where Louis and his men had hopefully laid themselves out.
More worryingly, there was no noise whatsoever originating from inside the cottage, which concerned me greatly, especially as there was no way that the two of them had been in there long enough to have run out of things to say to one another.
With one final, grand sweep from left to right, I assured myself that no one was going to be coming in after me, so began to turn into the cottage itself, preparing myself mentally for what might lie on the other side of the door.
I’d heard no struggling as I had made my way over the road, and certainly nothing since I had been pressed up against the wall. But I supposed it was still possible that the figure had wasted no time in taking a knife to poor old Robert’s neck, or maybe even strangling him with a piece of wire. It would explain the eerie lack of noise that I could hear from the outside.
I gave the door a gentle push, with no give in the sodden, rotting wooden door as I did so. With a more invigorating barge with one of my shoulders, the door gave way with a slight groan, causing me to sink to one knee and bring the pistol right up into my eyeline.
I found myself staring down a bare old hallway, the floorboards in a similar condition to the old wooden door, with no distinguishing features that set this place out as anyone’s home in particular.
Slowly, trying my best to conceal my huge, clumpy footsteps from bouncing off the walls, I padded my way into the cottage, finger nervously hovering over the trigger, pistol still up in the aim.
To my left was a door, which upon entering must have been a living room at some point, but was now nothing more than a spider’s mansion, webs clinging to every corner and one or two trying their best to stretch right the way across the width of the room. There was no way that anyone had been in there, all the cobwebs seemed totally undisturbed and untouched by human hands, so I ducked out as quickly as I’d gone in.
I proceeded down the hallway, passing a small door on the right-hand side, which must have been an under stairs broom cupboard of some sort, judging by the shape of it. It was then that I realised that the staircase ran along the right-hand side of the building, doubling back on the way that I had come in, so the top of the staircase was just above the front door.
Directly ahead of me was the open door which led to a long, galley type kitchen right the way along the back of the building. There were signs of life in here; pots and pans, knives and forks, even the odd upended tin can, none of which looked like it had been used recently. The kitchen, however, was clear, as was the larder and small utility room.
I retraced my footsteps back into the hallway, intending to clear the upstairs in much the same way I had done the down, hoping that before too long I would discover where Jameson and the figure were.
There was still a distinct lack of any noise emanating from the upstairs rooms and as I looked up the staircase, examining each step one by one, I realised why.
I saw his feet first, but as I continued to look upwards, the rest of his slim, gangly body came into view. Robert Jameson did not have the conventional body of a soldier, he was tall and very slim, the kind of slim where you would be able to make out individual ribs if he was to stand before you topless. He cared far too much about the way he looked for a soldier, his slicked back brown hair almost black due to the amount of Brylcreem that he liked to slap on. He’d used it so much back in Britain that it seemed that now, although he hadn’t used any for days, there was enough remnants of the stuff to still pull of the sharpest of looks.
It was his full head of hair that I found myself staring at, his body perched on the third step down from the top, his head buried in his hands as he continually sighed heavily. He clearly wasn’t cut out for this game, he was far better suited to being back in the office, where the confidence that he gained from being behind a desk, manifested itself as arrogance, cockiness, to the point where I had despised the bloke when I had first met him.
Being out there, in the field however had exposed his weaknesses, his inability to adapt to the situation that he now found himself in. He kept his head firmly in his hands, even as I tried to whisper to him, to let him know that I was there.
I kept my pistol raised, aiming just above Jameson’s head, in anticipation of someone suddenly emerging from the landing area. I was feeling increasingly uneasy the more that I stood there on the bottom step, staring up at my friend who was apparently crumbling.
Maybe he had been set up? Maybe the figure had snuck out while we didn’t have our eyes on the house, and I began thinking about whether the back door had looked used recently or not, but I couldn’t recall.
“Jameson,” I hissed. “Jameson.”
He was only a matter of feet away from me, and yet somehow, he couldn’t hear what I was saying, he simply sat there, sighing. I decided that I had no other choice but to risk it, to try and squeeze past him on the stairs and find out what was going on.
Gradually, I used the noise of his sighing to cover the creak in the stairs, which pushed themselves forcefully out from the brittle carpentry that seemed to stand so firm, despite all of the neglect.
As I drew closer to him, still keeping my pistol aimed well above his head, I realised that he wasn’t sighing at all, instead he was muttering something over and over, never wavering in its variation but always the same tone, the same words.
“Jameson,” I rasped, trying one last time, “Robert, come on. What’s up?”
Finally, as I reached out a hand to place on his shoulder, his head shot up, as if he was a Jack in the box that had suddenly had the final crank of the handle.
“Alf,” he said forlornly, in a hushed-up tone so quiet that I practically had to put my head next to his mouth so that I could hear him. His eyes were bloodshot and weary, almost as if they were far too tired to cry now. As if he had noticed me staring, he pinched at them, rubbing them so hard I thought that he might accidentally push them out the back of his head.
“We got it wrong Alf. We messed up.”
“What? What do you mean? What’s happened?”
“He’s in there,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the left-hand room at the top of the stairs. “Put the gun down though. He’s being reasonable, he just wants to talk to us.”
&nb
sp; “Well, you better come with me then mate, come on,” I said, trying to heave him up by his armpit, which got a reluctant obedience. I kept him behind me, so that if it did kick off, hopefully he would have the common sense to pull the pistol out of my belt around my back, which made it easily accessible to him. But I somehow doubted that he would be feeling up to it right now.
I began to edge my way up the stairs one by one, making sure that Jameson was following me like he was meant to.
“We got it wrong Alf. If we’ve got that wrong, what else have we got wrong?” He was becoming more and more erratic, which wasn’t good at all. I knew that this wasn’t his ideal environment, but if he carried on this way, he was going to get a decent slap around the face to make sure he pulled himself together.
“He is British Alf. He is a British soldier. What if we’ve got it wrong? What if Joseph isn’t involved at all?”
I tried to block him out completely as I made my way up the stairs, as he was doing nothing to help me stay focused on what I was meant to be doing right now. There was no point in carefully climbing up the stairs anymore, as Jameson had made it quite plain to whoever was up there that we were on our way up anyway.
I took the stairs faster, before gliding over the landing, and into the room on the left-hand side of the staircase, the room where the signal had been given. In the corner of the room, as far away as possible from the window as it could get, was a small gas lamp, which explained why the light had not flicked on for several seconds after the figure had entered the building.
I looked around the room, pistol still raised as I clocked a silhouette leaning against the wall, pulling the veiled cloth ever so slightly so that he could peek down the road. He was waiting for something to come in.
As I caught a glimpse of what he could see from his vantage point, I realised that he would have a perfectly clear view of both Jameson and me as we legged it down the hill. He hadn’t shot at us yet, which was always a bonus in my book.