While the wireless operator became demented in grappling with the codes, not knowing that the greatest brain of the universe would be unable to break them, Ingrid the German Numbers Woman sat with her children talking happily to the man at the café on Sunday morning. The benighted sparks of the Flying Dutchman sweated and swore as huge waves lifted and spray battered his cabin, while Ingrid put a chocolate into her mouth, and her new-found boyfriend lit a cigar, and the eternal trio stayed locked into the triangular and mysterious fix, held there by Howard — the only way he could disentangle himself of the German Numbers Woman and her codes and give himself peace.
Laura removed one of the earphones: ‘I got a video from town. Thought some entertainment together might do us good. It’s called Zulu. We can watch it after supper. I’ll tell you the landscape and what’s going on.’
He wanted to stay in the wireless room, but the treat was impossible to resist. To do so would be churlish. She had grown so perfect at describing scenery and action in films that he might as well not have been blind.
She called that the meal was ready. For the first course there was grilled herring fresh from the boats, and a bottle of cold white wine — straight out of the refrigerator. ‘You feed me too well,’ he said.
She took the headset off. ‘You need it, burning your energy at that wireless.’
‘I’ll get fat. I’m putting on weight as it is.’
‘You are,’ she laughed. ‘So much the better for me. Come on, silly.’
He clattered back the chair, stood to hold her for a moment, then let her lead him into the dining room.
FOUR
The field sloping up from the broad canalised river was opaque and dark compared to the luminous streak of water which looked set to run over the banks at the next visitation of rain. Little more than the roof tiles showed, until Richard got to the crest of the opposite rise, white overlapping planks of its walls standing out in the dusk.
Thick grass, rich food to fatten sheep and cattle, bent under his boots, and he wondered when the rabbits would feel the sting of hot shot from the twelve-bore carried by Ken who walked at his own pace behind. Clean Sussex air gusted over the wooded ridge and, closing the gate carefully, Richard paused as the last daylight melted in the meadows to either side of the river.
Ken drew level. ‘It ain’t dark enough.’ They walked along the lane to a position downwind, Ken’s wellingtons squeaking on the saturated grass. ‘Won’t get no darker, though.’
‘I don’t suppose it will.’ Richard’s leather Trickers squelched into ruts and potholes which couldn’t be dodged. He was glad, without knowing why, when a rabbit went shot-free in crossing the track. Last night one ran almost the whole length of the lane before the house, caught in his car beams, as if a jump to safety meant the drop of a thousand-foot cliff. Lit up by the chase, Richard wanted to run the bunny down, but it took the risk rather than be crushed under his tyres, and must have been relieved to find itself alive.
‘Flash a light,’ Ken said softly.
He steadied the eight-volt lamp, till a rabbit lifted its head in the beam, ears flattened. Water in his eyes distorted the image. Hard to make out what it was.
‘It’s something,’ Ken said. ‘Keep the torch on.’ His double-barrelled twelve-bore had been left to him by Group Captain Willis, for looking after his estate, a light and efficient killer of wildlife at seventy yards. Richard had looked at it, a new toy to handle. Daedalus the ancient artificer couldn’t have made one better — if it had been possible in those days.
Ken slid two plastic-coated cartridges primed with black shot into the breeches. In his sixties, he still had the best of eyesight, certainly better than mine, Richard thought. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘It ain’t a rabbit, but blessed if I know what it is.’
Richard’s eyes were still blurred by the wind, and he focused them on Orion’s Buckle and Belt rearing over the wood like buttons on the cloak of an otherwise-invisible man. ‘So what can it be?’
Ken stepped forward and looked across the greying fields. ‘Darned if I know. I’m flummoxed.’ He had whispered in Richard’s kitchen one night over a glass of whisky about having grown up poorer than the poor. In the thirties his parents and four kids had been turned out of their tied cottage, to live in a tent most of one winter in Cotton’s Wood, till the father found another place. ‘I used to look at the stars, and say I’d never live like this again. And I was only ten. People don’t know what poor is these days.’ Which was a preliminary bit of hype for the cunning old rogue to suggest, a few days later, that Richard pay a higher rate for having his garden looked after. Hard to refuse after hearing such a hard luck story. He should try being at sea on a small boat with nothing but a wild gale as an overcoat. Still, he didn’t want to deny Ken’s truth about his appalling childhood.
A phosphorescent glow by a clump of reed grass might be the tail of a rabbit and, if so, Ken was sure to score. Sharp sight and country know-how had put him in charge of a Bren gun section in Normandy during the war, and he had been in some of the worst fighting. After five years in the army he rarely moved beyond a few miles from where he was born, as if the luck of surviving had unnerved him. The only mechanical transport he allowed himself was a bike, though he would go on a bus if his wife was with him. He didn’t smoke, and drank little more than homemade parsnip wine in his cluttered parlour.
A grunt as he fired. The flash and noise sent pigeons rattling in the trees, and Richard felt Ken’s reluctance to dash along the torch’s beam. He must have known there was no rabbit at the end of the light, but Richard’s presence had distorted his judgment. The wasted bullet had gone through a rectangular cake of cattle salt. Luminous in the dazzling light, it lay as if it had been manufactured with a hole in the middle.
Richard brought the gun to his shoulder, and Ken wondered what the silly so-and-so was up to. On his own, he’d have had a couple of bunnies for the pot by now. Not wanting to go home without having fired a shot, Richard squeezed the trigger, and the cake of salt disappeared.
An owl hooted from inside the wood, the letter R in morse. ‘Sounds a bit like them noises I sometimes hear coming from your attic,’ Ken said. ‘All them squeaks.’
Richard broke the gun, stooped to put the empty case into his pocket. ‘That’s just my hobby.’
Mud at the gate had been churned by cattle and tractors. ‘I often wondered,’ Ken said. ‘They used to be spies as did that, didn’t they?’
The wind was fresh, though not cold for October. Weeks of rain had left the fields spongy. ‘In war, they did.’ Richard decided to use earphones all the time from now on, in case the police sent a specialist to snoop in the bushes and listen to what he was taking down. ‘I don’t suppose there were any spies around here. They were caught early, so I read. They hanged them. Or maybe they were shot.’
He hadn’t noted such a vindictive tone from Ken before: ‘Serve ’em right, as well.’
Out of Richard’s unease rose the question as to why he had decided to come out for a night’s shooting with his bumpkin of a gardener. Even harder to say why he was on earth, as if looking at the stars might bring back a long-dead sense of right and wrong.
‘No rabbits’ll be seen on such a night,’ Ken said, on the way up the gravel path to Richard’s house. ‘I’ll be off now, to see what the wife’s got for supper.’
‘I’ll drive you.’
Ken sensed that Richard didn’t care to. ‘It’s only a mile. A walk’ll do me good.’