“I’m afraid you didn’t cover your tracks very well, my darling.”
Kruze lit a cigarette. “We were very different. I was young and so was she. End of story.”
Penny shook his arm lightly. “She hurt you. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “A little. I hurt him more.”
“Your grandfather? He meant a lot to you, didn’t he?”
“Yes, I suppose he did, the stupid old so-and-so. After my parents died, he raised me as his son — and that’s not easy for an old man. My father had no brothers or sisters and his own wife had been long gone, way before I was born. It was just him and me, from my early teens to the day I left the farm in Mateke. Looking back, they were good years.”
They reached the edge of the park and paused to get their bearings, before plunging down a darkened side street that led to the station.
She said: “Don’t you think they were for him too? If he was the man I think he was, he would have understood.”
“Penny, how can you know? He was a Rhodesian, born on the family homestead and buried there seventy-six years later. A tough, sinewy old man who’d seen three-quarters of a century filled with nothing but heat, a business that just about broke even and a social life that consisted of having the neighbours over for a drink at Christmas, so long as they could be bothered to make the two-hundred-and-fifty mile round trip. You don’t find people like that in the towns and villages of Kent or Gloucestershire.”
Her eyes flashed. “I know what he was like. He was honest, professional, sometimes moody, proud, arrogant even. He’d be awkward, a fish out of water with people of his own kind, but he would enjoy a drink with the boys after a day’s work. He’d be hard with anyone who didn’t pull his weight, but he’d walk through hell to save a man who was good and true.”
He had not seen her this angry, even on the Ministry steps the day before. The memory of it made him smile.
“Damn you, Piet. I’m right, aren’t I?”
When he spoke the smile was gone. “I take it all back. How did you know?”
“Somehow I knew he would have been just like you.”
He paused in the street for a moment and looked into her eyes. “You’re a remarkable woman, Mrs Fleming.”
“I believe guilt is a wasteful, destructive emotion. And if I’m right about your grandfather it’s a luxury he would never have allowed himself.”
“You seem to know him better than I do.”
“I want to get to know you” she said, urgency and frustration in her voice.
They rounded a corner and he saw the dim glow of the sign for the Underground station almost at the end of the street. The journey was almost ended and she didn’t even know when or whether she would see him again.
“You’ll be going back when this is all over, I suppose,” she said, turning the question away from the immediate future.
She thought it ironic that in under two days she had probably got behind his eyes as no one had in a long time, yet a moment before they parted, she didn’t know the answer to the one question that mattered most to her.
“This place, the air force, they’ve been home for five years. What’s there to go back for?”
She stopped him by the entrance to the station. “I’m surprised at you, Piet. The one way to assuage any remorse you may still have would be to go back and run that farm.”
He walked over to the window and bought two tickets, one for Waterloo, the other for Marylebone.
“I belong here, now,” he said, turning to face her.
“Is that what you really believe?”
They passed through the barrier and paused at the point where their paths divided.
“Don’t run away, Piet,” she whispered and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
She disappeared down the steps, the sound of her fading footsteps drowned by the sudden approach of her train.
Dawn was breaking over Chrudim when Malenkoy’s platoon found the Freikorp’s last camp. One of the other patrols had stumbled across the clearing several hours before and had guided Malenkoy and his Siberian search party to the spot over the radio.
The young officer who had first come upon the scene had described the situation to Malenkoy, but he had not prepared the major of tanks for the carnage that surrounded the long-extinguished camp fire.
Malenkoy fought to control his heaving stomach as he surveyed the mutilated bodies of the SS terrorists. Two of the five corpses had lost limbs, a third had no head. The sight of it chilled his body beneath the thick sheepskin polaschubuk he wore over his uniform.
He strolled to the middle of the clearing and raised his head to the clear, ever-lightening sky, trying to suck in cool mountain air that was not polluted by the stench of death that already pervaded that lonely place.
SS shits. Whatever had happened, they deserved it.
His bitterness came not from his own brush with them the day before, but from the memory of what the SS had done to the people of his country, especially in the two years that it had taken to retreat from Stalingrad to the edges of Berlin. Malenkoy looked quickly down at the cadaver of the youngest. He looked like any one of his fellow graduates from the academy all those years ago.
Malenkoy glanced up at the sky once more and muttered an oath that went unremarked by a group of Siberians who were standing nearby, joking together in some unintelligible tongue. To what depths had the human race sunk over the last four years! It was obvious, even ten years ago at the academy, that war would come to Europe, but the totality of the conflict had not been imagined by anybody at the time. He had thought about it before, but now the feeling boiled in him so strongly that he wanted to shout it out. How could men do this to each other?
A lieutenant appeared and handed him a muddy, bloodstained piece of cloth, ripped from the tunic of one of the SS. Malenkoy wiped away the grime to see the faded, but unmistakable colours and pattern of the British flag. He let the badge fall, grinding it into the mud with his heel.
He had heard tales from comrades who had fought along the front about the exploits of the Britische Freikorps, but he had dismissed the reports as the exaggerations of men who had been too long fighting a tough and ruthless enemy. Now he could scarcely believe that the soldiers who had attacked him on the forest track were men whose brothers were fighting the common Nazi enemy less than seventy kilometres from where he now stood, according to the latest reports back at HQ. Total war. It had got to the point at times where he was uncertain who the enemy really was.
Malenkoy left his thoughts behind and returned to the present. A nagging feeling told him that it was not over, that there was something very wrong about the scene before his eyes. He turned to the officer who had escorted him to the clearing.
“Search these bodies for papers. Anything that gives further clues to their identity, I want to see it.”
The younger man screamed, waving his PPSh sub-machine-gun excitedly at his troops who immediately set about searching the pockets of the dead.
Was it possible that these were not the men who had attacked him yesterday? It had to be unlikely that there were other SS units operating in the vicinity, but where was the one who had stood unflinching in the road while he had fired off a whole magazine in blind terror? It had to be the headless one. Malenkoy walked over to the monstrous form and looked it over from the boots to the shoulders, trying not to let the Siberians see his revulsion. He thought hard for several minutes, before calling over the junior officer who had just barked the orders.
“How tall would you say this man was, Comrade Lieutenant, taking into account, of course, that he was once in possession of a head.” The junior officer flashed a glance at Malenkoy which showed he did not know how to handle his superior’s sarcasm.