Death In Captivity (29 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ said Goyles. He was certainly walking well behind the other two. ‘I must be getting jumpy.’

After that he closed up a bit, but not much.

Their route lay, as the woodmen had explained, diagonally across three broad valleys. The first two were in German hands, patrolled, but not held. There were German posts on the road which crowned the second ridge and this was the danger spot.

The third valley was No-man’s Land. Beyond it was Trivento, held by neither side, but visited, so it was said, by British patrols.

Short of the second ridge they called a halt. A thin drizzle of rain had started, but at that stage this did not worry them so much as the fact that they were walking, blind, into what they knew was a patrolled line.

They were crossing a vineyard and they found a small shelter. It was the sort that is used before the grape harvest by a Watchman, and was now empty. Except for the low doorway it was completely covered and once they were inside Byfold risked the use of his torch whilst he and Long took a quick look at the map.

Goyles sat on the couch in the corner and said nothing. It was difficult, in the dim light, to be certain whether the moisture on his face was rain or sweat.

‘I should say it’s a toss-up,’ said Long at last. ‘We must be just below that wood – it runs right up to the ridge.’

‘We can’t go through the middle of it,’ said Byfold. ‘It would take too long and would make too much noise. On the other hand, the edges of it are just the place for a post.’

They sat in the darkness listening to the steady patter of rain on the vine-leaves. It felt warm in the hut – warm and deceptively secure. Long broke the silence.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that it’s the moment for a reconnaissance. It had better be me.’

There was no denying that. Byfold was still lame and Goyles was almost blind in the dark.

I’ll be about half an hour,’ he said.

‘Don’t get caught,’ said Byfold.

Goyles said nothing. Long looked towards him curiously for a moment. They were dim shapes to each other in the dark ness. Then he turned, ducked to the entrance, and was gone.

Goyles got off the bed, moved across the hut, and stooped to look after him. They heard Long’s steps as he moved away, then silence. A single white Verey light went up from the ridge ahead of them, curved over in a lazy arc, burning as it fell. Byfold saw Goyles’ face for a moment, and was shocked. ‘What is it?’ he whispered. ‘What’s up?’

‘Roger,’ said Goyles. ‘I’ve got something to say, and I reckon perhaps I’ve got twenty minutes to say it in. Will you save the questions for afterwards?’

‘You can say almost anything in twenty minutes if you give your mind to it,’ said Byfold quietly.

‘All right. Here goes—’

As he spoke his whole personality was changing. The lassitude of the last few days was slipping from him. It was like a boxer stepping out of his corner at the sound of the bell.

He spoke for some time. His voice ran on and on in the darkness. He was unravelling a long and tangled skein, but he had done it so often before, in his own mind, that he had no need to fumble.

When he had finished, Byfold said, ‘If that’s right, Cuckoo, what are we waiting for?’

‘We’re waiting for Long to come back.’

‘Waiting for—?’

‘Look here,’ said Goyles. ‘Why do you think I haven’t run away twenty times before? Every time I’ve thought about it I’ve sweated – but since we’ve played the hand so far, we’ll play it out. We’ve got to hear what he’s going to say. It’s our only way of being quite sure about this last bit.’

There was another silence, and in the silence they both heard the ‘clink’ of a stone moving under a metal-shod boot. Then Long was coming down the path and into the hut.

He was breathing fast.

‘I’ve got the dope,’ he said. ‘The left side’s no good – there’s a proper reception committee up there. It’s an ackack post, I think, but there’s an infantry section there, too. The right-hand side looks okay. I didn’t go across, but I poked my nose out and it looked clear.’

Byfold got up so that he was standing in front of Long. Goyles was directly behind him. ‘This ought to be the last act, oughtn’t it?’ said Byfold.

‘It’s practically the curtain,’ said Long.

On the word ‘curtain’ Goyles hit him on the back of the head with the bottle he had been holding in his hand. There was a dry splintering as bone and bottle broke together. Long fell on to his knees and folded slowly forward. Before his face touched the floor Goyles and Byfold were out of the hut and moving fast up the hill.

Half an hour later Goyles and Byfold were sitting under an overhang of rock in a moderately dry river bed. They had crossed the road, with every confidence, on the left of the wood. They were now six hundred yards down the hill, on the further side of it. Verey lights were going up – but from behind them.

‘Better sit tight till the fuss dies down,’ said Goyles. ‘They won’t find us now unless they fall over us.’

‘Do you think the reception committee’s still waiting for us on the other side of the wood?’

‘Could be,’ said Goyles. ‘Long may have got up to them again by now.’

‘You don’t think you killed him?’

‘I don’t think so. I hope not – I certainly didn’t mean to.’

‘Why not?’ said Byfold. ‘The bloody swine—’

He was still confused by it. To him there were still two different people. There was ‘Tony’ whom he had liked and trusted, and there was ‘Long’ who, for his own ends, had cold-bloodedly tried to walk them into a trap.

‘You’ll get used to the idea in time,’ said Goyles. ‘Remember he was a German. Remember he was doing a job.’

‘He was doing a job all right,’ said Byfold. Another thought struck him. ‘What about Grim and Alec—?’

‘That stuck in my throat,’ said Goyles, ‘until I’d had a word with Hugo. Hugo was quite certain that no one gave them away. I must say I believed him. When you come to think of it, why should Long have betrayed them? He wasn’t an anti escape expert. His job was intelligence. As a matter of fact he tried like hell to stop it – he even came to see me about it in prison.’

‘And I suppose that pulling out Coutoules’ finger-nails was part of the job?’

‘Curiously enough,’ said Goyles, ‘not only did he not join in torturing Coutoules but, so far as the evidence goes, it was his arrival that stopped the party. As I was saying just now he got out of the window of the cooler and on to the roof at about eleven o’clock that night. The wireless was full on – I’ve had several versions of this, and they all more or less tally. About five minutes later – that’s to say, about the earliest moment that Long could have got off the roof and down into the carabinieri block – the wireless stopped. So either his arrival restrained Benucci and his fellow jokers – or Coutoules was dead. Either way it lets him out.’

‘You may be right, Cuckoo,’ said Byfold. ‘I just find it difficult to be as dispassionate about it all as you are. I suppose it’s this business of leading us up the garden path. I take it that that S.A.S. man he told us he’d met was all hooey?’

‘Complete invention, I should say. He had to leave us to prepare the reception committee this end. Then, if it was to work, he had to lead us by the right route—’

‘He led us all right,’ said Byfold. ‘Like little children he led us.’

‘I’m not making Long out to be any better than he was,’ said Goyles. ‘But we were part of his job – and whilst he was on the job, nothing else mattered. What he had to do was to get us all captured – at the last possible moment. If I hadn’t known what I did about him, it would have come off very nicely – half an hour ago.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then we should all have gone off to a prison camp in Germany – with a perfect background, and a wonderful bad-luck story. “Long? Good chap, Long. You heard what he did in Italy. Walked for fifty days and got picked up as he was actually crossing the lines.” ’

‘I see,’ said Byfold. ‘And were we going to be with him – or were we going to be “shot resisting capture”?’

‘Oh – I think we were going to survive all right. After all, we were part of his cover story. Besides, everything being equal, I think he quite liked us. And you’ve got to remember—’ Goyles broke off and eventually Byfold said, ‘Remember what?’

‘He did save my life in that tunnel. I thought of that too before I hit him.’

There was another silence. The fuss behind them seemed to be dying down. The rain had stopped and a freshening wind was rolling up the clouds.

‘How long have you known all this?’ said Byfold at last.

‘It’s hard to say. I think I was quite certain about a week before we left camp. I was pretty sure before. In fact, when you thought about it at all, it was so damned obvious that I imagined everybody would jump to it. It was the finding of that microphone that saved him, really.’

‘Saved him?’

‘Well, it put off the evil day. It was pretty plain by then that things were getting back to the authorities – really secret things – things that only half a dozen people knew about. As soon as we found the microphone everyone said, “Of course. That’s the explanation.” Only it wasn’t. Just think of some of the actual things that did get back. I don’t mean general information about the progress of the Hut C tunnel – of course Long kept Benucci posted about that – but actual and concrete facts. Do you remember when you went down to bury Coutoules for a second time in the Hut A tunnel? Do you remember coming out and telling Long all about it – he was just back from the cooler? Do you remember what the Italians started to do when we gave them the tunnel – the usual drill – they roped it off and started breaking down the roof. Almost immediately you told Tony the story that stopped. Instead, they got
inside
the tunnel and started taking photographs, showing how you’d brought the roof down with that pole – all that scientific stuff. That was a small thing, and I can’t say it stuck out a mile, but I remembered it afterwards. The next thing was my effort to see that sentry, Biancelli. Apart from the Escape Committee, Long was the only person who knew about it. It had to be stopped, of course. Give me five minutes free conversation with Biancelli and I’d have known

everything. He and Marzotto had the only post that was near enough to where Benucci and Co. took the body of Coutoules over the wall that night to be certain what was happening. No doubt one or two of the other posts could see that something was up, but they’d each had a “carib” put alongside them, remember, to keep their eyes exclusively on the job. Even that time – when the answer was practically handed to me on a plate – I didn’t see it. Then, you remember the plot to rescue you? That was obviously given away. I suppose everybody assumed that Benucci had picked the details up on his hidden microphone. That was nonsense. The plot wasn’t hatched in Baird’s room. It was originated and discussed in Colonel Lavery’s room.’

‘And that was when you realised—?’

‘No. What finally showed me the truth was Potter. Poor little Potter. His crime was that he had been to the school that Long was meant to have gone to, and at about the same time. I suppose he chose Shelton because it was a small school, and the chances were in favour of there being no contemporary of his in the camp. Potter
was
interrogated in Colonel Baird’s room remember, and everything that he said went straight over the wire to Benucci. As soon as he said he’d been to Shelton he had to be got rid of – which he was, fairly smartly – and that was what ultimately and finally gave me the truth.’

Everything was very quiet now.

Byfold and Goyles got stiffly to their feet. They made their way down the stream bed, and over the river at the valley bottom. It felt like crossing the finishing line at the end of a long race. They set their faces up the last hill and walked forward slowly but without undue precaution.

The wind had blown the clouds off, and ahead of them a single bright star was showing.