Vagabond (24 page)

He walked briskly, with a good stride.

He showed no nerves, looked around him only when crossing a road. She hadn’t said she would tail him and he might or might not have assumed she would. She thought he had been through fire. There had been a trace of a quaver in his voice when he’d relayed the story of the drill but he’d stayed calm and she thought him almost a hero. His fingers had been shaking when they’d pushed the book of photos, the rogues’ gallery, at him, but there had been no histrionics when he had picked out Malachy Riordan, then Brennie Murphy: ‘A bad bastard, that one.’ She thought she managed him well.

The sunlight was on him.

His wife was a total cow. He deserved better. There was a big hotel ahead. His daughter was another cow. Gaby Davies reckoned Ralph Exton deserved not grief but a medal.

She should have known more about the Russian end but he’d done well for them and was worth the investment. Was she being followed? Did they do counter-surveillance? Riordan wouldn’t hit town until the evening, but did they have other people? She’d done all the checks – doorways, shops, bus and tram timetables near the Pankrác prison – and would have sworn that neither she nor the agent was being watched.

It would be a feather in her cap when she went back to Thames House and the mission was put to bed.

Matthew Bentinick stood up, put a tip on the table and covered it with a saucer against the wind. He walked to the kerb. ‘Come on.’

Danny followed him.

He waved down a taxi. Danny watched. The driver was given a destination and his face warmed. Then Bentinick asked how to get there by metro and bus. The driver gave a clipped answer and sped away.

‘Before you ask, it’s to complete your education, more history. Have we time to go by bus and train? Today, yes. Not tomorrow.’

Bentinick led.

Chapter 8

‘This is it.’

‘The French have one of their own, Mr Bentinick, another village that was destroyed. Is it going to be important?’

‘If not, I wouldn’t have brought you here, Danny.’

The sunshine warmed them. The light fell on a sloping green expanse broken by a few trees, some ornamental shrubs and distant statues. High above, a buzzard wheeled and called. There were small groups of tourists, mourners or the curious. A few held guidebooks and most had cameras. The grass was mown as it would have been on the fairway of any above-average golf course. Danny Curnow knew of similar places close to his home in Caen. Other than the buzzard’s call, the only sounds were from Vaclav Havel airport, the thrust of engines as aircraft powered up. Behind them were a café, a museum and the toilets. They stood on the grass, and Danny understood that Matthew Bentinick would not be hurried. It was where a troubled man might come, sit on the grass or on a bench, be with ghosts and find calm. There was a man-made lake to the right that would have been a reservoir for the village, which had been gone for seventy-two years. There would have been carp in it for Christmas dinners. Danny had known army people who couldn’t see a stretch of water around any of the Irish towns where they worked without imagining what bait would best attract a leviathan. He had never fished. A river ran through Tavistock, had torrents and dark pools – it was said there were salmon in it. Here, a pretty lake, with swans and ducks, was flanked with reeds. An overflow stream cut across the grass at the lowest point. It would have divided the centre of the village. He tried to imagine how life would have been there on 27 May 1942 when the attack had been made on Heydrich. A traditional village in good agricultural country, transport would have been by cart and bicycle. The focus of local life would have been the church, with the school close behind; the community would have consisted of labourers, small farmers and one principal family.

There were places in France that were no different. They straggled along the north coast and had been the location of extreme gallantry and barbarity. He had chosen to live among those sites, and the people who wanted to share the history. The fumes from Bentinick’s pipe wafted to him.

In front of him, down the slope and up the far bank, some of the visitors had brought small children. Two little girls wore floral dresses and their hair in ponytails. Danny wondered if they had a blood link to Lidice, or whether they were just filling an hour before resuming a journey to the airport.

‘How was it?’

‘On which day?’

‘How was it, Mr Bentinick, on the day the sky fell on them?’

He took his time, seeming to savour the moment. His fingers were on the pipe, where the stem joined the bowl. Danny thought that everything Bentinick did was a choreographed performance. A foot was raised, a leg bent, the pipe was rapped against the heel of the shoe, ash spilling from it. The fingers worked in a tobacco pouch, then pressed the threads into the bowl. A match was lit and smoke was carried away on the wind.

‘Am I boring you, Danny?’

‘No.’

‘The church was dedicated to St Martin, founded in 1352. The shell survived from the Middle Ages. There was a village hall and a mayor. The main farmer was called Horak. His family owned land, large buildings and a house. The priest would have wielded the greatest influence on that community, Father Josef Stemberka. Lidice was home to five hundred villagers. For many hours after the event they would not have known of the grenade thrown at Heydrich’s car, perhaps not until the end of the day when people came home from the fields, or collected the children from the school, and the radio might have been switched on. Why should they have feared for their lives? They had cause, but it was tenuous.’

‘Go on.’

‘A farmer’s son had fled years earlier to England. He enlisted in the RAF. It was known he flew with the enemy, and payback time had arrived. They had not, at that time, found the men hiding in Prague. The village was surrounded by troops and sealed off. They took a list of the inhabitants from the mayor’s house. That night the men were separated from the women and children and taken to the church of St Martin. They would sleep there. Come on, Danny. She can do without us at the moment. We’ll be in place when we need to be.’

They went down the hill towards the Horak farm, and the statue of grieving innocents, and to where the foundations of the church were.

He was behind the young woman. To Karol Pilar, her tradecraft was poor.

If she had been on any squad of detectives he had been training to the standards required for the surveillance of organised-crime gangs, he would have failed her. She was insufficiently aware of what was behind and around her, concentrating merely on staying in touch with her target. He would have sent her back to her unit. He smiled as he remembered the cake his wife had made that day for her mother’s birthday.

The four police officers – a sergeant and three constables – had been briefed by their lieutenant on what was expected of them. They had been into the canteen for sausage, bread and cheese, and had drunk some bitter coffee. That southern corner of Poland was dank and wet but the radio said the sun was shining below Jelenia Gora and across the frontier. It was September when autumn rushed in so they were well wrapped up because they would be out of their heated cars. Wroc
ł
aw was their base, and their barracks was in Podwale, on a fine, tree-lined avenue, but the fresh wind was stripping off the leaves. They took two cars and drove out of the yard into traffic. When they reached the main road they would set up the block. They had drawn weapons from the armoury: it was usual in such circumstances, and with the intelligence provided from Warsaw, to have handguns, light automatic machine pistols, CS gas and a ‘stinger’ of chain and spikes to be thrown across the road if a vehicle attempted to break through the checks. They would put on the bulletproof vests, now standard issue for such work, when they reached the designated point. They were experienced men, all with long years in the police, and possessed the wry gallows humour typical of their profession. Some days were interesting and others were dull. Some stood out and others were instantly forgettable. None had any idea how that afternoon would shape. They smoked, and in each car there was grumbling about the failure of government to raise the rates for overtime pay. Then more important matters rose to the surface: the coming weekend’s home game against Lublin, and whether
S
^´
l
a
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sk Wroc
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aw, going well at the start of the season in the Ekstraklasa, their top-ranked league, would win or drop points; there was doubt about the fitness of the principal striker. They took the road from the city towards Jelenia Gora, and were aware that they were part of a major operation in which ultimate control rested with the national police headquarters. Each man trusted his colleagues, and would depend on them if the business became difficult.

Ralph Exton gazed around him and saw her.
What’s a pretty girl like you doing . . . ?

It wasn’t unusual for him to spend time checking faces and locations, the clothes he’d been told they’d wear, the paper they’d be carrying. A terraced garden separated the hotel and its forecourt from a suburban road

Is
that the best you can do?

It was good to watch and bad to hurry. She was in profile to him, strong features and naturally gold hair. She sat upright and didn’t look behind her. The clothes were good. He remembered that in Armagh, city and countryside, the women had looked worn-down and their clothes had been cheap. A stereotypical memory, but it was there. She wore the black business suit he had been told to look out for, a white blouse and a small green scarf knotted at her throat. No other decoration. Where she sat she would have had a good view down the slope to the curve of the river and upstream towards the castle. She smoked. The cigarette betrayed her nerves: as he’d noted at the airport, she took little snatches at it and blew the smoke straight out of her mouth.

Small mercies – as he’d noted at the airport, she was easy on the eye and wasn’t one of the thugs who enjoyed switching on power drills.

They’d not told him her name. He went down the steps and through the upper part of the garden.

She dragged on the cigarette again, stubbed it out on the side of the bench, then flicked it, accurately, towards a rubbish bin. It had been laid down that they would meet at the airport, but if not the airport, then mid-afternoon, the following day, in the garden.

Ralph Exton’s loyalties were governed by the need to keep lit fags off his skin, a drill bit out of his knees and eyes, and avoid being adjacent to a cell door swinging shut. The majority of his loyalty was to himself. He came behind her.

‘Morning. Nice place. I’m Ralph. Good view.’

She spun round. ‘Where were you?’

He had his hand out. ‘I wasn’t given a name.’

‘Frankie. Where were you?’

He said that at the airport concourse she’d stood out and he hadn’t been happy with the place. ‘Can’t be too careful.’ A little shrug.

She stood up, came to the side of the bench and took his hand. Hers was hard, cold and bony. There were thicker shrubs up a little path and a hut where the gardeners would have kept tools. Out of sight. She stopped and faced him. Her face was no longer pretty but lined and hard. There was a snap in her voice. He was to hold out his arms.

Ralph Exton did so.

She frisked him. Armpits, waist and belt area, inside the trouser leg, down to his ankles. Then she unbuttoned his shirt. Fingers against his skin. He asked her if she was forgetting the belt but she didn’t reply. She stepped back, brushed her hands, and left him to do up his shirt.

‘Now you,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your turn – Frankie.’

A blush, almost crimson. Her arms went out. He took his time and did it just as Miss Gabrielle would have done it. Nothing left to chance, each orifice checked. He felt her wince.

‘You finished?’

He stepped back. ‘Yes. Can never be too careful, as we agreed. Five makes very sensitive kit these days, so I’m told. I imagine it’s your first time on the road.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘If you’d been around longer you’d know what I’ve done for your people and the risks I’ve taken.’

‘I was told precious little about you.’

He said, ‘And when the big man comes in tonight, will you strip him down to his boxers? You can never be too careful.’