Ned bit his lip. “Terrible.”
Helmut nodded. “We sleep now with our rations in our room. Cakes, butter, sausage—all next to the hairbrush.” He fumbled in his pocket. “A smoke, Herr Luscombe?” he offered, handing back a battered packet. Ned accepted it gratefully. He had exchanged his last coupon for a second-hand bicycle tyre.
“Thanks.” He made to pass the packet back. Helmut waved it away with an expansive gesture.
“Finish them. I am on leave next week. Amsterdam.”
Ned slipped the cigarettes in his jacket pocket. “Nice. I’ll come with you if you like.”
Helmut laughed. “For sure. But first you have to have the right uniform. A British policeman—no good.”
“I haven’t got a uniform. I’m plain-clothes, remember.”
“Ja, I know. A policeman without a uniform.” He shook his head, as if he found the combination an impossible one to comprehend.
“Where are we going?” Ned asked.
Helmut shrugged his shoulders and then deciding to take matters in his own hands said, “Torteval. Gull Bay. The Dortmann Battery.”
“Gull Bay?”
The coast around Torteval was a restricted area and had been since ‘41—a rabbit warren of naval gun emplacements, bunkers and anti-aircraft guns.
Helmut nodded.
Ten minutes later the car bumped up the red packed-earth drive. Light was creeping over the sea, grey and cold. On the cliff's edge stood the old red stone fort, now burdened with barnacles of roughly edged concrete. Soon the whole area would be a blaze of colour from the flowering gorse and the heather, but now there was just the wind tugging at the stunted winter growth. Wedel turned the car quickly, spinning the rear wheels on the dirt. Dortmann Battery. Lentsch stood by the sunken entrance, set deep into the rock, the cold wind tugging at his greatcoat. Beside him stood the officer who had lectured him earlier that morning, Captain Zepernick. Ned ducked into the stern breeze and hurried over.
“Major,” he shouted. “What seems to be the trouble?”
Lentsch didn’t seem to want to answer him. Captain Zepernick made to continue but Lentsch held up his hand, clearing his throat to prepare both himself and Ned for what he had to say.
“I have some news for you, Inspector.”
“Yes?”
“It is not good news. Not good at all.” He looked up, biting back the words. “It’s Isobel, Inspector.” He gestured inside. “She is dead. In there. They have killed Isobel.”
As Ned waited for Lentsch to continue, it seemed to him that the island had been waiting for a moment like this, when the two tides of Guernsey’s life would meet in an inevitable rip tide. He felt an anger rising within him, wondering what particular complicity had brought these two men together, whether it was one or both of them who might be responsible. Isobel dead! He could not quite envisage that, Isobel and death, although, until the coming of the letter, he had not considered Isobel as ‘alive’ for some time. She had passed beyond his world, lain with another species, mutated into an unwelcome and possibly lethal hybrid of war. The letter had made her human again, one of them. The Germans were not human. The foreigns were not human. Knowing this helped them survive.
“Isobel?” he said. “Dead? But how?”
Lentsch hesitated, then spoke.
“She was found early this morning.” He nodded. “Inside there.”
“Here? I don’t understand. This is out of bounds.”
The Captain looked embarrassed. “Each bunker has a shaft, for emergencies,” he explained. “She was found, lying at the bottom of such a thing.”
Ned ran his fingers over his face. He could imagine what had happened. Caught by a group of drunken soldiers no doubt, raped and beaten to death. He thought again of that fierce little man and the peculiar personal tragedies that this island had visited upon him.
“Has her father been told?” he asked.
Lentsch nodded. For a moment Ned was nonplussed.
“Then what do you want me to do? Make a formal identification?”
“Come and see for yourself,” he demanded, picking up his own.
The Captain led the way, ducking his head as he stepped through the squat entrance. Above the desk by the door ran an inscription. Ned raised his eyes to it. Kom in unsere Kassematte, da. Kriegst Du Keine vor die Platte it read.
“You read German?” Lentsch asked.
Ned shook his head. “Some of the phrases in the Star, that’s all. Not that they’re all that use full.”
Lentsch nodded. “It means ‘Come into our casement and you won’t get hit’.”
Ned followed him in. Facing him was a straight corridor some thirty foot in length and nine foot high. The walls were lined with cream-painted lockers, on which were perched numbered helmets. Further down he could see the tall outline of a rifle rack. Hushed voices could be heard coming from a darkened room at the end, low and nervous. Boots rang out on metal, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the bright light, something set in the middle of the far floor seemed to swing round. A young man swam into view, leaning back on a slatted metal seat, his legs stretched out in front like a child’s on a playground roundabout, his arm resting on the huge apparatus of a gunsight. Ned was looking directly into the gun room. The soldier looked up and saw Ned looking back at him. They were the same age, Ned guessed. The gunner spoke to an invisible companion. The door swung to, but did not close. Captain Zepernick beckoned him through.
“This way.”
Ned followed him into a chamber running off to the left.
“This is where the gun crew abide when on duty,” the Captain explained. “It is where she was found.”
Ned looked round. To his immediate right running along the wall were nine bunks in tiers of three. Two more, with a field telephone at the foot of the lower one, were on the wall to his left. Facing him stood a thin cupboard; then, along the back wall, a table and stove. On the adjoining wall another steel door and next to it a fierce black contraption with concertina piping that snaked along the ceiling and out through a hatch above his head. He stared at it wondering what it could be. Lentsch caught his eye again.
“Air pump,” he said, “for gas attack.”
The Captain coughed deliberately, as if to remind Lentsch of the company he was keeping. Ned continued with the questions.
“How tnany men work here?” he asked.
“Usually four, three men and an officer,” Lentsch answered quickly.
“And last night?”
“Three. Is that not correct, Captain.”
Zepernick nodded.
“The Lieutenant left last night at the start of his leave. But he is due to report in at ten o’clock this morning to arrange a passage to the mainland.”
Although military in materials and colour, the men had clearly tried to make the place as comfortable as possible. A home-made chess set with crude square-cut figures stood on a little table, while pictures of families and girlfriends were propped on a lintel above, over which loomed an elaborate cuckoo clock wreathed in heavy wooden leaves. On the inside door of the wardrobe, which was full of uniforms and boots, were pasted a collection of mildly obscene outdoor photographs, girls in suspenders, girls playing leapfrog, girls squinting in the sun with their hands coyly protecting their private parts. None of them were exactly pin-up material; they were all too thin or too short or too old. They all had that same, faraway look in their eyes, as if, despite the smiles and the poses, they were only half there. From the torn scraps sticking out from a number of drawing pins, some, probably of a more explicit nature, had been hastily removed. For his or their superiors’ benefit? Whichever, by now they’d be nothing more than ashes in the stove. In the centre of this gallery was pinned a cartoon of a trouserless Winston Churchill. Winston was kneeling on all fours, the famous V of his fingers drawing into his mouth a Jew’s circumcised and syphilitic penis, while, at the other end, a laughing Uncle Sam decked out in a top hat spiked with dollars sodomized him with mirth. The Jew and the American’s hands met in gleeful celebration over his gross, compliant form.