Vagabond (8 page)

‘But would he come?’

‘Of course he would. Those people who think they’ve quit, they wait a year for the call to come back. The hallmark of the lonely ones is that the work is never out of their system. A bit of protest, which you ignore. They dream of being wanted. It won’t be a problem.’

‘Find him for me. Dig him out of wherever he ran for cover.’

She killed the screen, blew him a kiss and left him. He thought he’d brought ‘fun’ to her day, which she’d value.

Matthew Bentinick remembered the call-sign of Vagabond, could picture the face and recall the fury he’d felt when the man had walked out on him – the best man he’d ever had.

He drove steadily and well. Dusty had done the usual fine job of engine-tuning. There were no clouds on Danny Curnow’s horizons, and he felt good. The next day he would walk again with heroes.

It was what they always did on the last evening before the journey to France. Their bags would be packed and the little padlocks fastened. They would have told the neighbours where they were going and been uncertain whether the visit to the battlefields and the graves was a holiday or a pilgrimage.

By now they’d have taken the dog to the kennels or to their daughter’s.

And word would have been passed from those who had used Sword Tours before that the driver was excellent, reticent but knowledgeable and full of respect for the places he would take them to. Those who had been with Mr Curnow spoke of an inspirational experience with him.

Matthew Bentinick looked her in the eye. ‘It won’t be nailed down until tomorrow, Gaby. The position is this. Other sections answering to different priorities are unwilling at such short notice to proffer a replacement for Woolmer so I have to look elsewhere. There’s a fellow we once used a bit, and—’

‘He’ll be my back-up?’

‘A good job description. Back-up and general support.’

‘It’s my show.’

‘How could it be otherwise, Gaby?’

Silly little cow, so naïve.

‘Thank you, Matthew.’

‘Good luck.’

She let herself out. He imagined that she would not have been five paces down the corridor before she’d punched the air. The message came onto his screen. The Dragon told him where he would find the man who had used the call-sign of Vagabond, but he’d be changed.

He chewed hard, then reached for the phone.

It was wet, which was usual for the little port and marina of Honfleur. There wasn’t a cruise liner in and the streets were almost deserted, the cafés empty, rain dripping from chairs, tables and parasols. The floodlights had failed to illuminate the walls and turrets of the castle keep that guarded the harbour entrance. It was an expensive town and ripped off tourists, but in the galleries a few would produce credit cards and buy a painting of the wave crests and shores of the Baie de Somme.

Each Sunday evening Danny Curnow hung about a gallery, in a side-street close to the church of St Catherine. She worked there on a Sunday afternoon, helping to catalogue and clear the invoices into files, and the owner rewarded her with prominent window displays of her work. Danny knew what time she’d turn off the lights, lock the door and leave. She was Hanna.

He could have set his watch by her punctuality. She was thirty-five, tall, blonde, and had spent her childhood in the cod communities of the Lofoten islands. Rather than gut fish, marry a trawler owner and go to the funerals of suicides who hadn’t been able to cope with Arctic Norwegian winters, she had gone south and ended up in the French town a few years before it had become popular – and painted.

He was drawn there each Sunday, and each Tuesday, when he came back to the town – sandwiched between the afternoon on the pebble beaches of Dieppe and the morning on the fields where the paratroops had landed at Merville – with his Sword Tours customers.

He followed her.

She was nearly beautiful, and maybe nearly talented. He accepted neither qualification. To a portrait photographer or an artist, her chin was too prominent and her hips too pronounced, while her work was at the lower end of collectible. To him, the woman who pocketed the key and set off down the pavement was both beautiful and talented. He was in doorways and shadows. From that gallery he had purchased all the pictures that covered his bedroom walls in Caen – the room was a shrine to her work. Dusty never remarked on it and neither did Lisette or Christine. His passion for the pictures and their painter was his own. Hanna had no idea that he bought her work and kept her stock moving.

Because of the rain, she walked briskly.

On a warmer, drier evening, she might have turned the other way and strolled along the esplanade, past the gardens, towards the open sea. It hurt Danny Curnow when she went that way. Off to the right from the main entrance to the gardens there was a small, secluded corner. It seemed guarded by twin sculpted lions, as high as Danny’s waist. Past the lions there were old stone benches and an ornate fountain. That was where they had split. The tipping point had been his commitment to her. She had said, ‘Would I have to share you, Danny, with the cemeteries? Would I be in second place to the dead?’ He had not answered.

She didn’t know of his past, or of his scars, or of men who now rotted in Irish graveyards because he, Danny Curnow, had played God with their lives. She didn’t know that he had been a soldier in the front line of a dirty, cruel war fought without dignity. Survivors had crept in anonymity away from that conflict and didn’t boast of what they had achieved. The war had eased back from the headlines, not through noble victory but mutual exhaustion. She knew nothing of it, but she had learned that a man whose company she enjoyed hid among the graves of the fallen. Why did he not ‘move on’?

He would have had to give up the house in Caen, the friendship of Dusty Miller, the company of Lisette and Christine, and would have had to walk away from the minibus, Sword Tours and the small groups who stood every Monday to Friday on the sites of past battles. He needed them. He couldn’t have explained it to her. She had turned and gone. He could have followed her but had not. He could have run and caught her by the castle or let her go as far as the rue de la République and the town’s war memorial, almost to the little street where her home was, and had not.

She had said to him, ‘You know what I see in you, Danny, what I value in you? It is what you do not share with me. The past weighs on you. A man must have sensitivity and humanity if he cares so greatly for the sacrifice of those who died here. I like that in you, and sometimes I think I love that in you. But you don’t give me anything back, Danny – nothing. I wish you well.’

He could have come up behind her, stopped her, held her and dried her tears. Instead he had walked back to the hotel where the customers were and talked to them about the next day, what they would see, as if no skewer had turned in his gut. It was no problem for a man trained in surveillance to follow a woman who had no inkling that she was being tailed.

She went into a mini-mart. She came out with a plastic bag holding a litre of milk, maybe some tins, and a wine bottle. It was important that he should know what she bought and whether she was cooking that night just for herself or for someone else. He stayed behind her and she turned into the narrow street beloved of visitors for the hydrangeas in pots by the front doors and the prettily coloured window shutters. He worried that she wouldn’t need to get out her key, that the door would be opened and a man would greet her. Now his breathing sagged in relief. She let herself in, and was alone because the lights went on.

Those years before, when Hanna had challenged him, Danny Curnow had stayed silent because he hadn’t dared to do otherwise. He was tainted. To walk with the dead was the debt he paid. He drove out of the town and took the road that would bring him to Dunkirk. In the morning he would meet – as he did every Monday morning – his clients.

Chapter 3

He parked the minibus in the secure yard at the back of the hotel. The rain had eased but the wind had strengthened. For the last week there had been gales with heavy showers, but this Sunday evening at the start of autumn it was blustery, leaves blowing around him, as he went into the wide square.

He felt at ease. Danny Curnow enjoyed his solitary meals on the evening before a trip began. He walked purposefully across the wide space, hair tugged, trousers flat against his legs and the tang of the sea in his face. He always went to the same place for his meal and the canvas covers over the outside seating rippled noisily. He glanced up – always did – at the high plinth in the centre of the square, topped by the statue of Jean Bart, a seventeen-century admiral, who’d scrapped with everybody who’d had a ship afloat in those times. In the town he was revered, but elsewhere he was regarded as coarse and ill-educated, if a skilled commander. He knew such men. His career in the Force Reconnaissance Unit had brought him face to face, in conflict terms, with guerrilla leaders of quality. They had been dedicated in a way that the salaried soldier rarely was. They had been targets for those operating out of Gough: it had been Danny’s job to see them dead. Tough work, hard slog. And he had quit. He always thought, when he arrived in Dunkirk on a Sunday evening, that Jean Bart had been a peasant fighter, one who had employed unpredictable tactics, which were not taught in any lecture theatre. Before he had walked away, he had killed such men. Some said he had ‘danced on the graves of brave men’. He had turned his back. His country was now populated by middle-aged counter-intelligence officers who had worked for myriad agencies across the Irish Sea, knee deep in the sewage of an undeclared war. They were alone, and he thought the isolation was cruel but unavoidable. And who cared? Nobody.

In front of him the bistro was brightly lit, the church behind it.

It was the right place to start. The walls of the church tower were pocked with artillery strikes, bomb shrapnel and bullet scars. Dunkirk would be the start, each week, of the journey he made. Danny Curnow, out of the regular military, could have been a ‘soldier of fortune’ or could have trained to be a teacher in an inner-city school for children with special needs; he could have gone into a factory to watch employees for signs of pilfering and ‘shrinkage’. He could have gone on the courses and become an inspector enforcing building regulations and going after cowboys. He could have done anything. ‘Anything’ for him had been the ferry to France, then making himself available to Sword Tours. ‘Anything’ was being at the wheel of the minibus, knowing the routes and the parking places. ‘Anything’, most critically important, was keeping watch over the dead.

It was an obsession with him and some might have called it dangerous to his health. A solitary man, he lived alongside an old war but being close to it gave him a sort of comfort. Honfleur, for two more evenings, was behind him.

Across the road there was a second church, rebuilt after the bombing, then the town’s memorial to the casualties of the Great War, and of those late-spring days seventy-four years previously. He was close to the bistro and seemed to hear the blast of shells, the scream of dive bombers and the whine of rifle bullets.

He was greeted. The staff knew him well. Because, the next day, he would bring the tour’s clients there for lunch, he was favoured. A couple of times each year the patron offered a Sunday-night meal on the house, but he always declined politely. It was Danny Curnow’s way. No one in the bar – the owner, his mother who guarded the till, his nephew, who led the kitchen staff, or his two daughters, who served the tables – knew anything of his past.

He greeted them with a cool smile and was led to a table that gave him a view of a football match on the TV. He would have soup, a thin-cut steak, a side salad, then local cheese and a beer. He did not have to order.

Dusty Miller had cursed all evening. And, rare for him, he had snapped at Christine. What time did he want his supper? How the hell should he know? Had he washing to go into the machine that night? No idea. When would he have finished retiling the shower cubicle on the second floor? When he was ready to finish it. He had sworn. He had not had his dinner but had stayed in his room. He had not brought washing down to the machine. He had not finished sticking tiles to the back of the shower unit. Christine, in her twenty-ninth year, was an attractive woman, with fair hair. Once a month or once a week, she slipped into Dusty’s room, eased aside the bedclothes and slid in beside him. They would make clumsy love and she would be gone before dawn. They never expressed their affection for each other in the presence of her mother or Danny Curnow. It was, in the simple terms of Dusty Miller – a boy from the Lancashire town of Clitheroe, a soldier at sixteen, then a dogsbody at Gough with FRU, and protection for Desperate – about as good a life as he could have had. He didn’t suffer from the wounds in the mind of the man he near-worshipped. His life was almost perfect, and what he had he owed to Danny Curnow. He expressed his gratitude often enough, not that it was acknowledged.