Died in the Wool

At this point, Br’er Fox, you’ll raise your eyebrows and begin to look puffy. You will say that so far I’ve presented a very scrubby case against this young man. I agree. If he had come to trial we’d have been on tenterhooks, but as you have seen by the report, Grace did not come to trial.

It was with the object of forcing an exposure that I lay for him. I let him know that I proposed to hunt for the candle which Albert Black threw into the pens. This evidently shook Master Douglas. We’ve found the candle and it has got his prints, but of course they wouldn’t have been conclusive evidence. However, he’d probably decided I was a nuisance on general grounds, and that my liquidation would be to the greater glory of the Fatherland.

When I said I’d go to the annex for my cigarette case he made one of his snap decisions. He would follow me, get the branding iron from the wool-shed, apply the proved method, and send me down-country with the crutchings. Losse, wearing my overcoat, came in for the cosh.

I was now pretty sure of Grace. By dint of a rigmarole so involved that I myself nearly got bogged in it, I induced him to tell the others that I’d be working in the shed all night, and, at the same time, to believe himself that I was going to do no such thing. He had been interrupted by the stretcher party in his first attempt to return and tidy up any prints he’d left. And he must have left some when he fetched and replaced the branding iron. Persuaded that the shed would be deserted, and alarmed by my elephantine hints of clues to be discovered at daybreak, he made his fatal slip. He waited until he thought I was asleep, and then up he came to go over the ground for himself. He took off his slippers (he’d dried them at the drawing-room fire after the assault on Losse) and polished the wool-shed floor. He had another go at the branding iron which he’d already wiped on my overcoat. Then, harking back to his earlier intention, he gouged out the existing candle stump, leaving no prints on it, and dropped it into the pens. He then climbed into the pens and scuffled a branch between the slats until he’d covered the new candle end. It was odds on we’d find it before the one that Albert Black had chucked into the pens nearly a year and a half ago.

I’d counted on a show-down and got more than I bargained for.

It all happened quickly and, until the last moment, very quietly. It was a rum scene. I flashed the torch on him and he blinked and peered at me over the partition while Markins scudded across the shed looking for a fight. There wasn’t one. Boxed up in there, he hadn’t a hope. The whole affair suddenly became very formal. Grace drew himself up to attention and waited for me to make the first move. He didn’t speak. I was never to hear him speak again. I gave him the official warning, told him the police would arrive in two hours and said that if he liked to give his parole under temporary arrest we’d all move to warmer quarters.

He bowed. He bent stiffly from the waist. This made an extraordinary impression on me because in that moment, when he was queerly lit by two torches, Markins and I having turned both ours upon him, I saw him as a Nazi. He would now, I thought, play the role to which he was naturally suited. He would be formal and courageous, a figure from a recognizable pattern. He would exhibit correct manners because these are the coachwork of the Nazi machine. He would betray nothing.

Then I saw his hand move to his side pocket.

His eyes widened and his lips were compressed. I yelled out: “Stop that!”

If he’d been slower I’d have gone with him. As it was I’d got my foot on a beam in the partition, but it was still between us. It seemed to belly out and hit me amidships in a flare of white light. The last sensation I had was of an intolerable noise and of my body hurtling through space and striking itself crazily against a wall. I was, in effect, blown into the middle of next week. He went considerably further and is now among the eternal Herrenvolk.

There wasn’t much left. However we did find enough to show how he’d provided for the last emergency. His work on shells may have given him the idea but I fancy he was under orders, in event of a final exit, to take me with him. We found the wreck of a cigarette case showing traces of an explosive and a detonator that had been wired to a torch cell. The cigarette case, we think, was in his breast pocket and the cell in his side pocket.

We shall never hear the story of his engineering days in Germany, of his association with other correct and terrible youths. We shall never know what oaths he took or to what intensive training he submitted himself before he was sent back to await the end of 1939 and the moment when he would enlist with our forces and begin to be useful.

Fabian Losse talks of building a new wool-shed.