“I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I said I was really quite a nice person?” She queried, entirely rhetorically. The way the Redcaps had been looking at her the last few hours she took it for granted that they had heard about the trail of death she had left across the Citadel the previous afternoon at the height of the battle. “Yesterday was the first time I’d killed anybody for ages,” she added, wanly. Afterwards, she realised this was probably not the most reassuring thing she could have said or a thing that was remotely likely to set either man at his ease. Feeling a little dizzy with tiredness, with her head aching and with her mind churning with doubt, guilt and not a little self-loathing, her shoulders sagged. “The last time I did anything like that was when I was fighting with the partisans in Poland twenty years ago.”
The two Redcaps stared at her like she was mad.
But she needed to talk, to confess her sins.
“I was thirteen when I killed my first German.”
“Miss Pullman,” the older of the two Redcaps growled, “you don’t want to be telling the likes of us anything. I don’t know if you did what they said you did yesterday or whether that’s any reason for you to be locked up. But I know you don’t want to be talking to us about it. Not if you know what’s good for you.”
She leaned against the wall, slid slowly down onto her haunches.
Old habits die hard; you never turned your back on a guard.
“My name is not Clara Pullman,” she said dully. “I was christened Rachel. That was in Lodz. The Germans were sloppy when they drove us into the ghetto. Skinny boys and girls like me, slipped in and out every night. Of course, they killed us if they caught us. But before they caught us we started killing them. That’s what you do with Nazis. You can’t argue with people like that; you can only kill them.”
The older of the Redcaps motioned for his partner to stay outside the cell. His large frame blocked the door. He made no attempt to back out and lock that door. There were flecks of grey at his temples and a thoughtful world-weariness in his dark eyes as he listened, watching the woman like a circling hawk.
“Lodz? So you‘re Polish, miss?”
The woman nodded.
“My mother was Jewish. Not religious, you understand. Just Jewish, so she could never forget she was not like everybody else,” she twitched a grimace to accompany the revelation. She had always shared her mother’s otherness and her sense of not ever wholly belonging wherever she was. “The Soviets took away my father when I was eleven. I never saw him again. When the Germans came they put us all in the ghetto. There was nothing to do, nothing to eat. Killing fascists became our play. One night I slipped out of the ghetto as I did most nights; the next morning the SS had put up new roadblocks, new barbed wire and I couldn’t get back inside. I never saw my mother after that day.”
“Rachel?” The Redcap mused. “That’s a nice name…”
“So was ‘Clara’. I liked being ‘Clara’. In fact I liked being Clara Pullman so much I forgot who I really was.” She hesitated. “No, perhaps not. In my head I’m still that skinny thirteen year old Jewish girl on the run from the Germans.”
“How did you survive back then?”
The woman looked at the Redcap with new respect.
That was adroit; the way he suddenly changed the whole tenor of our little chat! Maybe he was more than just a Redcap, maybe he was a real policeman like Marija’s dead friend Jim Siddall?
“I joined the resistance,” she replied lowly, aware of the cool, clammy air for the first time and feeling the chill of it sinking into her bones. “I didn’t look Jewish, I was a kid and I could get into and go places the adults wouldn’t dare go near. I became a courier, later I became an assassin. I had a natural gift for it and in time of war, people recognise these things.”
She shut her eyes, rested the back of her head against the unyielding stone wall behind her. She felt so tired, things were blurring, and her thoughts were horribly transported into a past she wished so desperately to forget.
“One day my luck ran out, of course. I was captured. I thought they would torture me and shoot me; all they did was beat me up. I was skin and bones; they thought I was a boy so they didn’t rape me. They sent me back to the nearest Gestapo field headquarters but there was a big Soviet offensive about then and I ended up in a train — well, a cattle truck — on the way back to Berlin. I was left for dead at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp when the SS marched most of the other inmates to their death ahead of the advancing Red Army. I looked so dreadful even the Russians didn’t rape me until two months later.”
The Redcap sucked his teeth, remaining silent.
Outside in the corridor there were women’s voices.
Chapter 17
Seamus McCormick dropped the tailgate of the old Bedford lorry — which was decked out in the camouflage livery of the Black Watch — stepped back and stood easy. The young subaltern commanding the bored, tired, disinterested Territorials searching the cars and lorries which had parked up in the inspection area as they came off the ferry from Larne, obviously did not see the point of checking Army vehicles. Nevertheless, the officer, a pale kid who looked like he was just out of school was still trying to do everything by the book.
He shone a torch on the crumpled document McCormick had handed him.
“These poor fellows were killed in Omagh?” He asked, thinking aloud rather than asking a question.
“Sorry, sir?”
“Nothing. Nothing, corporal.” The boy went to the back of the truck and shone his torch inside at the four coffins lashed down within. “Bad business,” he muttered, thrusting the docket back at McCormick. “Carry on.”
Seamus McCormick fought back the urge to sigh with relief.
He had told the others to keep their mouths shut whatever happened. While he sounded and looked like what he was pretending to be, a Scot in uniform, neither of the other men fitted the bill. They looked like good Catholic boys wearing uniforms that made their skin itch and their consciences ache, and if either of them opened his mouth they would shout “IRA!”
The squaddies guarding Holyhead docks looked dozy, half-asleep but nothing was likely to wake them up so quickly as a Dublin accent and they were all fingering loaded L1A1 SLRs — Self-Loading Rifles — and probably had standing orders to shoot first and ask questions later.
“Yes, sir!” McCormick snapped to attention and threw a crisp salute. Instantly, he turned to his companions. “Put that gate back up and get onboard. Sharply now!”
The Bedford revved hard, struggled to climb out of the port up onto the A5 London Road. That was when a man knew he was back in the old country; when all roads led to London. Except, these days, they did not, of course. London no longer existed, unlike British tyranny which it transpired no amount of Soviet bombs could eradicate from the face of the Earth!
“Piece of piss!” Frank Reynolds, the younger of McCormick’s two ‘bodyguards’ chuckled in the darkness.
Seamus McCormick changed gear and let the Bedford coast down the shallow incline towards the causeway carrying the road from Holy Island to Valley on the main island of Anglesey.
“We could hit a roadblock any time,” he cautioned. “When we get to the Menai Bridge they won’t wave us through like they did back in Larne or that kid did just now. They’ll crawl over every inch of this pile of scrap. If we get unlucky they’ll take each of us inside and look at our papers with a magnifying glass.”