A Game for Heroes

I thought he might blow then, but he simply turned on heel and walked out stiffly followed by Grant.

Henry didn’t say a word, so I walked to the far end of the verandah, closed my eyes, pulled out the knife, turned and threw it. It hit the post no more than an inch from the first mark.

‘Satisfied?’ I demanded.

He sighed and went to retrieve it for me. ‘Circus tricks, Owen. Schoolboy games.’

‘Three months, Henry, three months of my life I spent learning to do that on that farm in Brittany with my left leg in splints. The autumn of 1940. As I recall rather vividly, parachute packing wasn’t all that it might have been in those days.’

‘What are you playing at, Owen? Why ride Fitzgerald so hard?’

‘Because it pleases me – because I feel like it. If you don’t approve, you could always find somebody else.’

He wasn’t smiling any longer, even that perpetual, sardonic little quirk of his was missing for the first time since I’d known him.

‘What is it, Owen? What’s wrong?’

I held up the knife. ‘Schoolboy games, Henry? To you perhaps, sitting behind that desk of yours scheming and planning, paper all the way. I’ve killed five times with this little item. Give that a thought sometime when you’re having your tea break.’ I snapped the knife shut and slipped it back into my pocket. ‘I’ll see St Martin now and I’d like you to stay.’

He left, white-faced, and I opened the cupboard under the box seat and found half-a-bottle of Scotch and an enamel mug that didn’t look any too clean, but I’d drunk from stranger vessels than that in my time. The whisky burned through to the bone and I had another.

I was sitting on the verandah rail lighting a cigarette when Henry entered with St Martin. He looked pale and ill, a good ten years older than when I’d last seen him and there was hatred in his eyes. If I’d paid heed to it, I suppose things might have turned out differently, but then, you can never be certain of anything in this life.

I poured some whisky into the mug and handed it to him. He took it without a word and I asked Henry to get the maps. There was an Admiralty chart of the general area of the Golfe de St Malo and a pre-war ordnance survey map of St Pierre. A certain amount of information had been added to it in indian ink: gun installations, strong points and the like, presumably obtained from St Martin. I pulled the wicker chair forward to the table and motioned him into it. ‘I’m going to ask you some questions now and I want clear and accurate answers. Understand?’

He nodded and we went to work. Mostly, he was simply confirming what Henry had already told me, but we covered everything step-by-step because I wanted to know exactly what I was getting into.

The picture which emerged was a reasonably gloomy one. All beaches were mined which was only to be expected and a landing of any sort seemed impossible, which was already indicated by the information on the map.

‘Only one place I can think of.’ He stabbed his fingers at the peninsula that jutted into the sea in the south-east corner of the island.

‘The Devil’s Staircase?’

‘You could do it if the tide was right and it ought to be.’

‘But the cliffs must be three hundred feet high at that point,’ Henry said.

St Martin nodded. ‘That’s why they haven’t any defences there. Don’t reckon to need none.’

‘And they don’t know about the Devil’s Staircase?’

He shook his head. ‘If they did, I’d have known for sure.’

I explained quickly to Henry. ‘At low tide it wouldn’t be possible, but a twenty-five-foot rise puts you level with a hole in the cliff face that take you into a fissure inside going all the way up.’

‘I must say it still sounds something of a performance,’ he observed.

‘I’ve done it before.’

‘In daylight, presumably?’

I shrugged that one off and moved on to discuss the exact location of each of the civilians still left on the island. Doctor Riley was living in the town and Ezra Scully still resided in his old cottage by the lifeboat station at Granville on the south side of the island.

‘Don’t know how he does it,’ St Martin said. ‘All on his own like that. The other cottages at Granville have stood empty since 1940.’

‘Jethro Hughes and son – they’ll still be at the Manor Farm?’ He nodded and I went on, ‘and Miss de Beaumarchais?’

‘At the Seigneurie – at the Manor House as always.’

Which surprised me, but I was on dangerous ground here and I think he knew it. I contented myself with asking whether she had anyone billeted on her.

He shook his head. ‘No, her father wouldn’t have that. Insisted on his rights as Seigneur and the Jerries met him more than half-way. They didn’t want any trouble, see? After the old man was killed they offered her a cottage in town, but she refused.’

I left it at that. ‘What about the frogmen?’

‘They moved in about five months ago after most of the islanders had gone to Guernsey. There was thirty of them when they first came.’

‘Who was in charge?’

‘A young lieutenant called Braun was supposed to be, but he was drowned second week there, not that he ever counted for much. It was Steiner all the way from the first – Sergeant-Major Steiner!’

I could feel the hollowness inside me, the coldness uncoiling and poured myself another drink. ‘Tell me about him.’

‘What do you want to know?’ I think it was then that I realized he hadn’t liked Steiner at all, which was something in the German’s favour. ‘You takes your pick with him. Even the governor, the old general used to treat him with kid gloves and he was SS.’

‘What is so special about him?’

‘I don’t know. To start with he just doesn’t give a damn for anyone. Spends half his time sketching and painting all over the island and speaks English better than you do. One of the Pioneer corporals once told me that he’d been to college in London, and that his father – no, his stepfather, that was it – was a big man back home.’

I turned to Henry who was already opening his briefcase. ‘We checked all the London Art Colleges. There was a Manfred Steiner at the Slade from 1935–37. We managed to trace a couple of his tutors with very little difficulty.’ He produced a paper. ‘Do you want to read it?’

I shook my head. ‘Tell me.’

‘He was born in 1916 and his father was killed in the last year of the war. Prussian family – the kind who usually go into the Army. His mother married again when he was ten. A man called Otto Furst.’

‘Furst the industrialist? The arms manufacturer?’

‘That’s him.’

‘Do you think Steiner could have been working as a spy, amateur variety before the war?’ I asked. ‘Plenty of these so-called students were.’

‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s this sergeant-major thing that I find so puzzling.’

And he was right. Considering Steiner’s background, it was all wrong, but there was little to be gained from any further discussion and I moved on to other things.

The governor, old General Muller, had been killed in some kind of accident about a week before St Martin had fled, which had left his chief aide, an SS Colonel called Radl, as acting governor. St Martin had plenty to say about him, the word swine figuring largely in his description, which left me with the distinct impression that Colonel Radl was a hard man.

I made a few notes on the map, stared at it speculatively for a moment then nodded, ‘All right, that’ll do me, Henry. Get rid of him.’