A stocky man ran out of the house. He had a revolver in his hand. I started up. Frenchy had the passport out. I grabbed it and waved it at the man with the gun.
"Full passport!" I yelled.
He stood staring at the back of the car. He didn't even dare snarl.
"What makes you think they're watching the hotel?" she asked.
I told her about Godfrey.
She frowned. "I must be right about having to run."
"Are you sure it isn't this legacy they say you've inherited?"
"I've only got one aunt and she's broke. Besides, why should your brother get involved in such a silly little business?"
"Because your father's so important. Or perhaps Papa just wants you home and made up the aunt business to cover up the fact that you're his no-good daughter who's drifting about in occupied territory, dragging the family name in the mud behind her."
"Could be. It's not though. I'm still not sure — you'll have to believe me. In the past I've been — well — important. It's to do with that, I know."
"What sort of important?"
She began to cry, great, racking sobs which bent her double.
"Don't ask me — oh, don't ask me."
I got hard-hearted. "Come on, Frenchy. Why should I break the law for you?"
"I don't want to remember — I can't remember," she gasped.
"Nuts. You can remember if you want to."
"I can't. I don't want to."
I passed her my handkerchief silently. How important could she have been — at 20 years old? She must have been at school until a couple of years ago.
"Where did you go to school?" I asked, more to pass time than anything.
"I was at the Berlin Gymnasium for Girls. When I was 13, I — they took me away."
Then the tears stopped and when I glanced at her, she had fainted. I pushed her back so that she was sitting comfortably, and drove on.
As dark came we reached Histon, just outside Cambridge, and spent the night in the car, parked beside a hedge, inside a field.
When I woke next morning there was a rifle barrel in my ear.
"Oh, Gawd," I said. "What's this?"
A hand opened the car door and dragged me out. I lay on the ground with the barrel pointing at my belly. Above the barrel was a red face topped by a trilby hat. It wasn't a copper anyway.
I glanced sideways at the car. Inside, Frenchy was sitting up. Outside another man pointed a rifle at her temple, through the open window.
"What's all this about?" I said.
"Who're you?" the man said. "Sebastian Lowry and Frenchy Steiner," I said.
"What're you here for?"
"Just riding — "
The gun barrel dropped. The man was looking at his friend.
Then I saw — Frenchy had her passport out.
He touched his hat and retreated quickly, mumbling apologies. So I got back in the car and we snuggled up and back to sleep.
When we woke up, we had coffee from the flask, and a sandwich. Then we walked round the field. One or two birds cheeped from the bare hedges and our feet sank into ploughed furrows. It was silent and lonely. We walked round and round, breathing deeply.
We sat down and looked out over the big, flat field, sharing a bar of chocolate.
Frenchy smiled at me — a real smile, not her usual tense grin. I smiled back. We sat on. No noise, no people, no grimy, cracked buildings, no cops. A pale sun was high in the sky. The birds cheeped. I took Frenchy's hand. It felt strange, to be holding someone's hand again. It was warm and dry. Her fingers gripped mine. I stared at the pale, pointed profile beside me, and the long, messy blonde hair. Then I looked at the field again. We started a second bar of chocolate. Frenchy yawned. The silence went on and on. And on and on.
I was staring numbly across the acres of brown earth when Frenchy's hand clenched painfully on mine.
Slowly, from behind every bush, like the characters in some monstrous, silent film, the cops were rising. On all sides, over the bare bushes came a pair of blue shoulders, topped by a helmet. They rose slowly until they were standing. Then they moved silently forward. They tightened in.
Frenchy and I rose. The circle closed. To keep in the centre we had to move over to the road. Slowly they drove us out of the field, past our car, through the gate and on to the road. No one spoke. All we heard was the sound of their boots on the earth. Their faces were rigid, like cops' faces always are.
Coming through the gate, we saw the reception committee. Three of them. My friend Inspector Braun, all knife-edged creases and polished buttons, and brother Godfrey. And then a short fat man I didn't know. He was wearing a well-cut suit and power, as they say, was written all over him, from his small, neatly shod feet, to his balding head.
Frenchy stepped up to the group. "Hullo, father," she said in German.
"Hullo, Franziska. We've found you at last, I see."
Godfrey smirked. Extra rations for good old Gottfried tomorrow. Maybe the Iron Cross.
So I thought I'd embarrass him. "Hi, Godfrey, old man."
"Morning, Sebastian." How he wished I wasn't shaking his hand. "We're parked up the road. Come on."
So we walked up the road to the shiny blue car that would take us back to God knew where — or what.
How silently they must have moved. What bloody fools we'd been not to get away after those two farmers had copped us. Godfrey and friends had probably had bulletins out for us all morning.
I sat at the back, between Godfrey and the Inspector. Frenchy was in front with her father and the driver.
"It's nice to know officialdom has its more human side," I remarked. "To think that deputy security minister, a CID Inspector and 50 coppers should all come out on a cold winter's morning to see a young girl gets the legacy that's rightfully hers."
Godfrey said nothing. He merely looked important. From the way Braun didn't grip my arm and the driver didn't keep glancing over his shoulder to see who I was coshing, I got the impression this wasn't a hanging charge. There was a sort of alligator grin in the air — cops taking home a naughty under-age couple who had run off to get married — not that cops did that kind of little social service job these days, but, wistfully, they kept trying to make you think so.
But what was the set-up? In front Frenchy had given up talking to her father — he cut every remark off at source. Why? No family rows in public? Frenchy, what I could see of her, looked like a girl on a cart bound for the scaffold. Her father looked like a man determined to knock some sense into his daughter's flighty head as soon as he got her home. Godfrey merely looked pontifical. Braun looked official.
Frenchy tried again. "Father. I can't go — "
"Be quiet!" said her father. Godfrey was listening hard. Suddenly I got the picture. Godfrey and Braun didn't know what it was all about. And Frenchy's father didn't want them to.
It must be really something, then, I thought.
There was silence all the way back to London. What about me? I thought. I'm just not in this at all. But I bet it's me who takes the rap. The car stopped in Trafalgar Square. Frenchy and her father got out. He hurried her up the steps of the Goering Hotel. Her eyes were burning like coals.
Then Godfrey and Braun pulled me out. "You'll be in a suite here till we decide what to do with you," Godfrey said in a low voice. "Don't worry. I'll do what I can to help."
I won't say tears came to my eyes — I knew just how far he would go to help. I said goodbye to him and Braun led me up the marble steps. The place was crowded with neat soldiery. We were joined by the hotel manager and two coppers. We went up to the top storey and I was shown my suite. Three rooms and a bathroom. Quite a nice little shack, although somewhat Teutonically furnished. It was elegant, but there was the smell of loot about it. You kept wondering which bit of furniture covered the bloodstains where they'd bayonetted the Countess and her kids one morning.