While waiting for the kettle to boil she walks back into the room, to the window and the view of the besieged harbour and the glittering sea beyond. The room is beginning to smell of this strange assortment of packages, a damp sweetness clinging to the silk, an odd sourness too, like stale sweat. In previous times it would have smelt of cigar smoke and port. She talks, not to her husband, nor her dead niece, nor her dead sister (none of whom she misses), but to the man whose spirit had captured her heart all those years ago but who in the last eighteen months had been supplanted by another. If only she had been younger! If only the Major had been older! It was easy to see why he had found Isobel attractive, less easy to fathom his affection. Mrs Hallivand had flirted with a hundred different Lentsches in her time. If she’d been her niece’s age, Isobel wouldn’t have lasted more than a week. As it was, with barely any competition in sight, she’d had an uninter-rupted run, and where there might have been doubts, the language had saved her. Like any foreign man equipped with an English that was both precise and elegantly correct, when faced with a willing young woman with good looks and passable manners, the Major had taken any display of weakness in Isobel’s character as simply an example of his own inadequate hold on her native tongue. And there were so many reasons why she deserved him and her niece did not. Their love of literature, their understanding of art, the intelligent delight they both took in those flirtatious conversations that only lovers can sustain. She was still good-looking, she still had sparkle and, if she chose to wake it, there still lay within her that hard, unforgiving sexuality to which so many young men had once been drawn. But the Major had chosen Isobel, and Isobel was gone and now she has returned to the man who understood her best. The Major’s appeal was not only transitory, but misplaced. He meant nothing to her now.
The kettle starts to sing. Mrs Hallivand makes the tea, and using the milk from the stone bottle pours herself a cup. Bringing the cup back into the room she bends down and with her hand scoops up a palmful of crystals. It is an obscene amount to hold, to let run free. Raising her hand she Iets it flow through her fingers. She thinks of all the islanders queuing in the buffeting winds, waiting for their pitiful gram of this and their pitiful gram of that. The sugar sparkles fresh and light, a radiant white in this brown and solemn room, fairy dust from an angel’s wand caught in a beam from a distant star. She thinks of the long glittering evenings of her reckless youth; the murmur of voices in the ballroom below: the starched dress shirt and how it had glowed in the dark as she pressed her breasts, oh her lovely breasts, against it, reaching for one more illicit embrace. The white drifts down, to the floor and around her shoes. The light hurts her eyes. She could be skiing on the slopes above Wengen or walking barefoot on Deauville sand. She could be seventeen again, standing by the bay windows, watching the snow drift over the Parisian rooftops, waiting for her Peter Pan to lead her astray. She looks out, potion in hand, waiting for the sweet dreams of the liquid to cool.
A figure appears in the doorway. She turns.
“You’re early,” she says. “There’s some tea in the pot if you want.”
“Well?” he says. “How did it go?”
“He doesn’t know anything.”
Albert grunts and walks to the table.
“Got you something.” He hands her a large tin.
“Custard! Where how on earth did you come by that?”
“Never you mind. Take it. Got something else too.” He digs into his pockets again. “Razor blades. Fifty of them.” He pulls out a little box and shakes the contents into the pickling jar. He holds it to the light. “This’ll take the wind out of his sails.”
Mrs Hallivand holds her cup tightly.
“I’m frightened, Albert,” she says. “Isobel has made it much more dangerous. I don’t know if I can go on.”
Albert steps up and shakes her hard.
“Do as you’re told, you silly woman. We’ve not long now.”
Eight
Five o’clock in the evening and Tommy Ie Coeur came back to the station in a bad mood. Van Dielen had still not returned and his feet were frozen. He showed Ned the holes in his boots.
“A lot to carry, these pins,” he said. “No warmth to this coat either. Be the death of me, this job.”
“Your problems are soon to be at an end, Tommy,” Ned replied, handing over the Captain’s note. “In a couple of weeks’ time they could run you at Ascot.”
He made Tommy a mug of tea before walking down to the Royal Hotel, now Feldkommandantur Headquarters, to tell Lentsch of the day’s developments. Not that there was much. Her neck had been broken, grabbed and twisted round hard, like a gamekeeper might a bird or rabbit, that’s what the police doctor had pronounced. She was still alive probably when the cement had been pressed into her mouth and up her nose, but limp and helpless, like a rag doll. Death by suffocation or dislocation? Dr Meecham hummed and hawed. He was out of his depth. Seeing as the one the Home Office usually sent was unavailable, perhaps Lentsch could send for a pathologist from France?
Outside the Royal, Wedel was polishing the bonnet of Bernie’s car. Though the ‘Royal’ had been taken down and a German notice hung in its place Ned was pleased to see that the old AA sign still hung below the little wooden balcony. A couple of workmen stood underneath, painting the window frames. Although he recognized them, as he approached they looked to their work, ashamed for all three of them. Wedel lifted his hand in acknowledgement. Ned nodded.
“I thought you were going on leave?” he said.
Wedel winced. “Kaput,” he said, looking up to the first floor.
“That’s a uniform for you.”
More men were working inside, ladders and buckets of white-wash blocking the corridor. A guard showed him up to Lentsch’s office on the first floor. Despite the desk and two flags guarding the other trappings of authority, the dagger, the candlesticks and the ornate silver inkstand, the room, with its faded flowered wallpaper and obligatory chipped washstand tucked away in the far corner, still looked like a mid-priced bedroom with a faulty tap and a partial view of the sea. Above the mantelpiece hung the inevitable portrait, garlanded by a profusion of dark ferns woven round the frame as if he was peeking out through the gloom of a Silesian glade. Ned tried to imagine who would spend the morning fashioning such an absurd decoration. That was the difference between their two nations. Both held their leader in awe, depended on his strength and vision to carry them through, but while the British trusted Churchill, even admired him, they didn’t worship him. No one would bedeck a picture of his ugly flab with bits of leaf and twig.
Lentsch appeared in the doorway, his eyes red.
“I see you are admiring Wedel’s handiwork,” he said, fighting to keep his voice under control.
“What?”
“The decoration. It is our leader’s birthday. April 20th. All Germans celebrate.”
Ned smiled. “He’ll be pleased, then, to know you’ve gone to so much trouble. Smartening the place up, too.”
“Yes. The soldiers also.”
“You’re not the only ones.” Ned showed him the Captain’s letter. Lentsch read it quickly.