“In war it is not always possible to keep one’s promises,” he admitted. “We expected the war to be short. Now it is long. The island’s significance, its specifications, have changed. To begin with it was to be an example of what the British could expect when we had won the war. This is what it will be like when you find us in the Cotswolds and Coventry and your town spa of Bath. This is what you will hear, this is what you will read, this is what you will see, marching down your streets. Though what is yours will be ours, we will respect it, strengthening all that is good, weeding out all that is corrupt. But now it has changed. The islands have become mixed up in the whole sorry plot. Now they are part of the military strategy.” He cleared his throat before changing the subject. “There is something else I must say before we arrive at her house. Though her death at the hands of an islander would be purely a civilian matter, there is the matter of her father. Working for the Organisation Todt he holds the honorary rank of major and comes under military jurisdiction.”
“Even though he’s English?”
“He is also Dutch, Inspector, and did much work, roads, bridges and so forth, before…” he gestured in front of him, “all this happened. His work here is of the utmost importance. He and Major Ernst.” He crossed the two long fingers of his right hand. “You know Major Ernst?”
“Only by sight. A stout gentleman.”
Lentsch grinned. “You are too polite. A little fat man, who I am told has to wear a corset under his uniform. If that is what you can call it.”
Ned sidestepped as best he could.
“I wouldn’t know about that. He likes to be on parade though, he and his men. Out in all weathers, gymnastic displays, marching up and down the Esplanade. They’re quite good once you’ve got over their spades.”
He drew a picture of an upended shovel on the condensation, then quickly rubbed it out. Lentsch sighed.
“He and van Dielen had been dining together last night, reviewing the fortification plans.”
Ned nodded, as if hearing this Information for the first time. “Are they not ended, then?” he asked.
Lentsch bridled sufficiently to let Ned know he had overstepped the mark.
“The Organisation Todt does not come under my jurisdiction. It answers only to the military.” Now it was his turn to draw upon the steamed up window, and from his reluctant fingers came the overelaborated letters Org. Todt, with the winged eagle perched in between, clutching its founder’s name in its talons. Lentsch circled it, then rubbed his picture out too, but in enmity rather than in haste. “It is a most powerfiil organization,” he warned, “and gaining strength at every turn. Major Ernst does not want you brought into this. He would like everything to be dealt with by the Geheimnis Polizei, to let the Captain go to work on whoever he sees fit.”
“And you do not?”
“The Captain is less mindful of the island’s sensibilities than I. He and his men would start jumping on suspects like a pack of dogs. The goodwill we have built up over the last three years would vanish in a matter of hours. We need the cooperation of the civilian population, Major Ernst more than anyone. He cannot rely on conscripted labour alone.” Lentsch faced Ned. “You are lucky you live here. Anywhere else in Europe and hostages would have been shot already. This is not the way for Guernsey. We must preserve what we have already achieved. Believe me, there are amongst us many who love your islands.”
Ned felt his anger rising again. “Including Alderney?” he said. If Guernsey and Jersey could be compared to prisons, Alderney had taken on the mantle of a condemned cell. In the winter Alderney was surrounded by a low and menacing mist, keeping sound and sight at bay, but on the long nights of summer, when they went to bed with Alderney’s still and distant image fading in the closing light, those living near the common claimed they could hear the faint chorus of Alderney’s suffering skimming over the water. Sometimes it was low in tone, like a solitary hymn sung in an empty church; at others it was as the thrashing of tethered beasts caught in a stable fire. Lentsch was unperturbed.
“Even Athens had such places,” he reasoned. “For every Parthenon there is a charnel house and someone to stoke the furnace; for every poet a slave, for every philosopher a captive whore.”
“Is that what your plans are?” Ned asked. “To turn us all into whores and slaves?”
“We are all whores and slaves here, singing for one supper or another, doing as others bid us for want of courage, in the name of greed or expediency. For myself, I do not wish to see Guernsey change at all, though there are others stationed here with different plans. Help me with this and they may not have their chance.”
As they drove past Saumarez Park they came up against a column of Todt workers on their way to work, about thirty of them, boys and old men mostly, shuffling along, feet bare or wrapped in torn rags, hunched against the morning cold, each one carrying a tin bowl in their shackled hands. A Todt official marched alongside them, exhorting them to sing and to piek their feet up.
The group split in two and shuffled past. As he looked out through the windscreen Ned caught sight of a young boy, dressed in a dusty jacket and a pair of red pantaloons. With his dark eyes and his lips blue with cold, he looked more like a lost clown than a conscripted labourer. Where on earth had he got that outfit from? he wondered. Suddenly the boy jumped up on to the bank scrabbling about in the grass. Two others followed. The Todt official, puiling at his belt, sprang forward and began to beat them apart with a home-made whip fashioned out of a stick and four strands of leather. As they clambered back down Ned could see the boy had the best part of a dead rabbit in his hand. He held it triumphantly in the air before sinking his teeth into it. Ned could feel his stomach turn. The boy raised his head and looked into his face. There was no expression. Ned looked to the floor. Lentsch stared straight ahead.
“Animals,” they heard Wedel mutter. The column moved on, out of sight.
Five
You could barely see it from the surface, though there were plenty of clues to tell you that there were more than moles working away under the soiclass="underline" the endless supply of trucks moving along the connecting roads, the brute mouths waiting in the woods to swallow you up, the bare-bricked ventilating shafts set in the middle of vacant fields. If you put your head down one of those dark, plummeting holes you could hear the sound of hard-pressed men shouting and grunting behind the grind and clank of wheels, sniff the dank smell of oil and earth and, yes, the wet slippery scent of fear rising out. Then you would might know that beneath the buttercups and tufts of couch grass lay the largest and most complex structure existing in the whole of the Channel Islands. Ah, the solid rock of Guernsey.
He found that by lying on his back and pressing his feet against the roof of the tunnel he could push the cart along the rails like the old man had suggested. The old man had lived on the canals, and in the early days, when they’d had the will to talk, he had told him of his years working on the coal barges, crisscrossing Europe and the long low tunnels that ran through his working life.
“Me and the wife would lie on the barge roof and walk ‘em through,” the bargee had recalled. “No matter what the weight. Longer than the night itself some of them tunnels. We’d take a rest halfway and lie there in the pitch dark, not a sound around us, except the water dripping and the craft nudging one another. Maybe the splash of a rat somewhere.” He’d poked him in the ribs. “It’s where all our sprats got started. Didn’t matter how dark it was. We knew what we was looking for.”