Betrayal (12 page)

‘My dear?' he asked, indicating the couch. He would set her hat, coat and scarf nearby, so as to have them in sight. ‘You were saying, Mary?'

Always he had addressed her as Mrs. Fraser. ‘It wasn't right of Captain Allanby to have done what he did, Colonel. Hamish and I are very upset. My husband …' The blue eyes widened in mock anticipation. ‘Colonel, my husband has gone to Belfast to lodge a formal complaint. He'll cross over to England if he has to. Hamish
will
see the prime minister. He won't stop until things are set right and that girl looked after.'

Travel was far from that easy, and she knew it, but even so one should affect the grimacing, fatuitous smile of a squire who had just lost out on the purchase of a beagle bitch. One should offer her a cigarette, knowing she didn't use them and that this would unsettle her further, then put the carved sandalwood box back on the coffee table so that she could see the camels on its lid, the one mounting the other.

Her knees were primly together, giving no sight of leg beyond that which hands and tartan skirt couldn't hide. She was wearing the velvet jacket again, had a rather splendid cairngorm pin in silver at the throat. Fraser? he wondered. Older men so often made fools of themselves with younger women, and she half the doctor's age. ‘You mustn't take what happened too seriously, Mary. Captain Allanby was just doing his duty. This Nolan must be apprehended. The Darcy woman is a part of it, and they did terrify that girl of yours. We mustn't forget that, must we?'

‘And Caithleen's uncle and cousin, Colonel? Did they have to beat the Jesus out of them? The Jesus. That's what people are saying.'

He'd best shrug, then, and gush a little, best get her even more agitated. ‘These times are difficult. War is war, and never easy.'

He'd a hand on her knee, and damn him for looking at her the way he was! ‘Colonel …'

‘Tea, I think,' was all he said. The adjutant brought it, the colonel indicating that she was to pour when steeped. Facing each other, they waited.

He'd give her time, thought Bannerman. He would show her that she was like warm putty in his hands. ‘Now, Mary, what's all this you've been hiding from us? Captain Allanby is certain you …'

‘Jimmy's got it all wrong, Colonel. I've nothing to hide. How could I possibly have?'

Bannerman let his gaze move appreciatively over her. He would make her think that given the right incentive there might be merit in a little extramarital dalliance. Yes … yes, that's what he'd do, knowing it would unsettle her all the more. ‘I must say you look particularly fetching. The rough weather suits. You've a divine blush.'

‘Colonel, what is it you want with me?'

He would choose not to answer, would take a sip of the tea she'd just poured and ask for the sugar she'd forgotten to offer. Real sugar, no less.

It only flustered her all the more. ‘You're upset with us, Mary, and needn't be. Friends, that's what we are. Friends in house. Hamish will be turned back. You know it as well as I do, so let's get that out of the way.'

‘And Caithleen?' she asked, looking up from her cup to see him staring at her as a man does a woman he's about to seduce. ‘Colonel, that girl will be killed if she stays in Ireland.'

‘An O'Neill,' he said, as if savouring the last name and not the tea. ‘The girl could be got out, I suppose. Of course, if you …'

Sex—was this what he wanted of herself? It was, thought Mary. Flustered, she said silently, Oh damn, what the hell am I to do?

‘A job in a munitions factory,' he said, drifting off into thought himself. ‘Manchester, I should think, or Sheffield. After the hair grows in—couldn't have it otherwise, now could we? She could work as a domestic, though, for a few months. Now there's a thought. Yes, by heavens she could. I've a sister in Nottingham. Gwen would be glad to have this girl of yours. She'd be just the thing.'

‘Colonel, exactly what are you asking of me?'

‘In return?'

No smiles now, no phony airs or pompous colonel stuff, just the business of a squire who knew what he wanted. ‘In return, yes,' she said, setting her cup and saucer aside and waiting for it now.

Bannerman knew he was surprised that she had even condescended to listen and not bolt from the bloody office. He hadn't lost the touch then, had played her right into the trap he'd set for her, she now so unsettled, those lovely eyes of hers found it hard to even face him. ‘That's a nice pin you're wearing. A cairngorm, is it?'

‘Yes. Hamish bought it for me before … before we were married.'

‘Getting on well, are the two of you?' he asked. He'd now play the father confessor.

‘Hamish and I have always got on, Colonel. We're two of a kind.'

That so? he'd ask with lifted eyebrows, but the look she gave in return was steady and only then did she say, ‘Of course.'

‘Of course
what
, my dear?' he blandly asked.

Mary reached for her cup and saucer, had to have something to hang on to. ‘Only that we do get on, Colonel. I love my husband very much and wouldn't want to hurt him in any way.'

Oh my, oh my, she'd given him her answer after all. ‘Then you'll tell me everything, won't you?'

Flustered—angry with herself for having let him lead her on and showing it, Mary heard herself saying sharply, ‘There's nothing to tell. How could there be?'

Captain Allanby had been so certain the woman was up to something behind their backs. Everything that had happened to the O'Neill girl pointed that way, but then Jimmy had it in for Mrs. Mary Ellen Fraser. Burned before the bed, as they say. Love was such a damned silly thing. Sex … now sex was something quite different. Over in an instant after a good ramming.

‘What books did you bring this time?' he asked, catching her unawares and causing her to momentarily glance at them, revealing an anxiety one could only find troubling.

Again those puffy eyelids with their faded brows were lifted in question. Mary knew she was trapped. ‘A Dumas,' she said emptily. ‘
The Man in the Iron Mask
.
Tom Sawyer
,' she went on for there could be no stopping now. ‘Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason
; Thackeray's
The Virginians
, and … and a Dickens.
A Tale of Two Cities
.'

‘You'll not mind if I take a quick look through them, will you? It's just a formality. You do understand?'

She mustn't hesitate. ‘Please do. You can borrow any of them if you wish. Perhaps Mrs. Bannerman might like one.'

She wasn't going to let him reach those books alone, though, had quickly set her cup and saucer down and had got up. ‘I'll just get the scissors, then, shall I?'

Mary knew he had caught her out, that he'd planned it all along. In a way she was glad it was over. The strain of the last few days had been almost more than she could bear. By the time Hamish got back from Belfast, she'd be in prison—safe perhaps from Fay Darcy and the others.

Bannerman had handed the scissors to her and she'd not even realized it.

‘Now, now, my dear, you mustn't think we're so bad. Captain Allanby means well, but he has his orders just as I have mine.'

Then cut the bloody string for me! she wanted to scream, but all he said, she turning from him now to hide her tears, was, ‘We need to know everything you can tell us about Erich Kramer and what he's been up to. That suit?'

One had best take her by the shoulders and play the father figure, felt Bannerman. ‘This chappie, the Second Lieutenant Bachmann, Mary. He was so useful to us. It's a pity they had to hang him, a great pity. Now run along, there's a good girl, and do your stuff.'

Their steps rang hollowly in the empty corridors. Again not another soul was about. Where once she and the guard might have passed groups of men smoking and chatting, or simply hanging about, there was only the emptiness of a castle vacated by its baron and cleaned out by the auctioneers.

The library was in an anteroom off the far corner of the great hall, in what might, in Norman days, have been called a bedchamber. The passageway Erich and she had last used ran from this chamber to another and smaller one. From there, another corridor led to a spiral staircase that gave access to both the floors above and those below, but—and this was important—that staircase wasn't the main one.

Try as she did not to dwell on it, Mary knew that Jimmy Allanby must have deliberately left those corridor doors open.

She and the guard came to the foot of the spiral staircase but went straight on past it. She'd lost the button up there and Jimmy had somehow found it. They had put two and two together and had agreed to turn a blind eye for a while and use her even more than they'd already been doing.

There was nothing else she could conclude. Jimmy would keep that button until needed.

Button, button … As she and the guard hurried away to the main staircase, each step echoed up the word and Mary saw herself in that corridor, saw Erich yanking at her blouse and felt the button pop off and roll away.

It was such a simple thing. Dear God, what was she to do? She was caught between the British Army and the IRA. If she refused the latter, they'd strip her naked and cut off her hair before tarring her and showering on the feathers; if the former, they'd see her arrested for treason.

And Erich? she asked. Erich
couldn't
be in love with her. How could she go through with the things they all wanted of her—Fay Darcy and Kevin O'Bannion; the colonel and Major Trant and Jimmy Allanby; and Erich … yes, Erich most of all?

Must she betray her country?

‘Mrs. Fraser, m'am. We're here.'

‘Wha …? Oh. Oh, thank you, Corporal. About an hour suit?'

She was as white as a sheet. ‘An hour it is then, m'am.' He touched his cap and left her, didn't hang around as they usually did.

The great hall was huge—some sixty feet in length, by forty-five in width. Erich and his group had measured it as they'd measured everything else. They'd drawn up plans of the castle, knew things she suspected the British didn't even know.

Secret plans that were kept hidden in the metal tubes of their bunks—this much she did know, for she'd overheard it once. And yes, those locations had probably been changed again and again.

Galleries at the ends of the upstairs corridors gave out on to the great hall. The hearth was massive and smoke-blackened but its chimney was hidden and didn't run all the way up to the vaulted ceiling some forty feet or so above because it was, after all, not a Norman castle but something far, far newer than that.

The hall was empty of furnishings, empty too, of the men, each of whom would wear those rescued bits and pieces of their uniforms as badges of their heroism and measures of their rank.

Mary knew she would have had to smile at them had they been here talking, giving her smiles of their own and the appreciative looks of young men who'd been without a woman for some time.

Men who knew—some of them in any case—that she and Erich Kramer had been lovers. Had been—yes, that was the way it would have to be.

As she started out to cross the hall, her steps echoed up from the squared parquet of white-and-red Venetian marble, and when she came to its centre, she was forced to stop.

‘Where are the men?' she asked.

Trant heard her voice as if from the hollowness of a cannon barrel. He had come to stand in the farthest gallery from her. But was he gazing down upon her like the lord of the manor? he wondered. It felt like that, up here in the gods as it were, she looking alone and lost with that bundle of books clutched to her as if about to drown.

Allowing a trace of jocularity, he said, ‘The men will be along in a moment. It's good of you to have come so promptly.'

‘Why promptly?' she wanted to shout up at him. ‘Are they still under house arrest?'

‘Still being stubborn, I'm afraid,' he said, not leaning on the balustrade but placing his hands lightly there as one of the Norman kings might have done, she the Irish serving wench he would use.

Trant wasn't after her body, though, only her mind and what she could divulge. Did castles always breed suspicion, intrigue and contempt? she wondered.

As he continued to look at her, Mary passed beneath, knowing now that they
had
agreed among themselves: Trant, the colonel, and Jimmy Allanby. Jimmy.

Setting the bundle of books on the library's table, she hurried to the corridor to yank on the door's handle, realizing that Trant had made damned sure it would be locked and off limits.

Had he the button?

They were all around her now, she existing on two levels, the one so friendly and outgoing—she had to keep up the mask of that—the other bleak.

The line-up was long and stretched well out into the great hall. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to take out books. Usually Oberleutant Werner, a first lieutenant, helped at the desk. A pilot in the Luftwaffe, Philip had been shot down over the Channel and had been fished out of the water. One of the lucky ones, he'd always say, but today he wasn't here, and she kept wondering why.

There'd still been no sign of Erich. The Thackeray still sat on her left, her hand always straying nervously to it. More than once, far more, someone had tried to pick it up. The Dickens was gone, the Mark Twain—all the rest of what she'd brought in.

Franz Bauer stood waiting. A Leutnant zur See just like Second Lieutenant Bachmann had been, Bauer had been one of U-121's officers, still was for that matter.

‘Captain wants to speak to you,' he said in his broken English while handing her a book to be stamped out, any book. Mary had never liked him, had always thought him a bit uncouth and not to be trusted.

‘I can't come. Not today. Tell Erich he must come here and that's all there is to it. I've got something for him. Next? Oh, hello, Helmut. How's the arm coming along?'