Ormerod's Landing (19 page)

Ormerod pulled in a deep breath. 'Let's go then. It's got to be quick.'

Jacques looked down at the ground. I cannot do this,' he said. He looked around him. I have to look after the house.' His watery eyes returned to Ormerod. 'Also I am afraid,' he said simply.

'So am I,' said Ormerod forcefully. 'But she's got to be got out. She's ...'

'Can you ride a motorcycle?'

'Yes. Just about.'

'You can have that.'

'You won't come with me?'

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'No. I shall join the resistance on the last day of the war. It will be safer then.'

'Bugger you,' said Ormerod. 'All right. Where's the motorbike?'

'It is the machine in the room. With all the other things.'

'That! Does it still work?'

'Of course. I keep it in order.'

Ormerod moved towards the house, hurrying his steps. Jacques followed apologetically. 'If you are caught,' he said, 'you must say that you stole the machine from here. Please. I do not want trouble with the Germans. I have duties to perform.'

Le Mesnil des Champs is one of a group of villages, Le Mesnil -Amand, Le Mesnil Bonant, Le Mesnil-Hue, Le Mesnil Gamier and Le Mesnil Villeman, situated within the triangle formed by the road connecting Villedieu-les-Poëles, Gavreay and the crossroads near Beauchamps. It is an area of small agriculture crossed by a web of minor roads. Le Mesnil des Champs lies almost at the centre of the triangle.

Between the two of them Ormerod and the bailiff pushed the decrepit motorcycle from the main room of the house.

I think I can manage it,' said Ormerod, once they had wheeled it into the sunshine.

'You must,' said Jacques. 'There is no other way.' He pointed out over the landscape, giving Ormerod directions. 'There is a small square at the centre of the village,' he said. 'The police station is there. Go now.'

Ormerod started the machine. It coughed blindly and choked, then coughed again. But it started at the third attempt. He felt it wanting to go. 'Right, I'm off,' he said. 'Thanks for this anyway.'

'It is nothing,' replied Jacques.
'Au revoir.
After this moment, I do not know you.'

He gave a half salute and the deerhound howled as Ormerod departed.

He set off uncomfortably down the overgrown and rutted drive. The machine was awkward but by the time he reached

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the lane outside the walls of the estate he had come at least partly to terms with it.

The lanes were sunny and empty. He rattled along, afraid that at every bend he might be confronted with a farm cart or, much worse, a German armoured car. But nothing interrupted his progress and within fifteen minutes he was astride the stationary machine looking down from a steep hill onto the village of Le Mesnil des Champs. The valley was brimming with sunshine but the roofs of the village were indistinct and smoky. He eased the motorcycle forward and free-wheeled down the steep, sunny road. It was easy on the incline and within two minutes he was among the lanes and gardens on the fringe of the settlement. He dismounted and left the machine against a wall. Children played in the flowers and on the banks of the stream which descended invitingly from the hill he had just left.

He walked cautiously, but not too cautiously, through the tight cottages until they gave out onto an open space in the middle of the village. The stone houses with their vivid window-boxes and flower troughs were arranged placidly around and in the middle of the square were some young men playing football. As he went closer he realized they were German soldiers.

They were a work party taking time off from a hole in the side of the square. He passed close to the excavation and saw they had been working on some electricity cables. Their small truck and their equipment were parked nearby. They were all young soldiers, half a dozen of them, and they had taken their tunics off to play their game. One man was in goal and behind the goal Ormerod could see the entrance to the police station with the French flag and the German swastika hanging together above the main archway. That was where she was.

Attempting to look like an idler he walked around the fringe of the square, watching the impromptu footballers and carefully observing the entrance to the police station. Outside was parked a police patrol car and near this, his back to the wall, was an armed French policeman. He was watching the football too. There had obviously as yet been no particular alarm connected with the detention of Marie-Thérèse. Ormerod

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looked at the gateway. It was wide and completely open,
a good-sized stone arch. First he had to get past the policeman.

Ormerod loitered on the edge of the football game. The
guarding policeman called to him once to get out of the way because he couldn't see the play. Ormerod, hands in pockets,
shuffled yards and waited. The ball was kicked about. The
young men were good at it and enjoying it. Ormerod waited his
chance and then trotted into the middle of the random pitch. The ball was just flying from one wing to the other. He had
been a good footballer. Had he not played against the German
police? As he brought the ball down he shouted one of the German words he had learnt for fun.
'Fusstritt!'
The soldiers, surprised at first at his intervention, laughed loudly at the friendly Frenchman who could play football and shouted a
familiar word. Ormerod brought the ball down expertly, balan
ced it with his toe for a moment, flicked it forward and kicked it from fifteen yards past the goalkeeper.
'Tor!'
he shouted.

The young Germans were astonished and delighted at his obvious skill. The goalkeeper retrieved the ball and gladly
threw it out once more to Ormerod. He trapped it easily and pushed it into the path of one of the players who had begun to run. The soldier struck it hard but the goalkeeper got his hands
to the effort and pushed it out. It ran to Ormerod, he flicked the
ball in an arc to the man on the extreme left and then waited for it to be sent back. The running winger shouted and obli
gingly curved the ball over. Ormerod had been watching the
arched entrance of the police station. He turned to the ball now
and caught it well with his head, sending it curling away and
bouncing into the stone archway.
'Nein, stein,'
he shouted jovi
ally. They all laughed, including the French policeman. Ormerod loped briskly after the ball. The guarding policeman nodded good-naturedly at the Englishman as he trotted into the courtyard. He obviously approved of fraternization. Or
merod flicked the ball with his foot as if to play it against the
interior stone walls, but he allowed it to bounce through the doorway at a right angle and into a flagged corridor, so that to retrieve it he was for a moment out of their sight.

As soon as they could not see him he ran into the building,
closing and locking a heavy door behind him. Quickly he went

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across a corridor and at once into a small office.

A junior German officer was sitting at a desk. A German sergeant and a French policeman were standing near the back wall and Marie-Thérèse was sitting in a chair opposite the German. Her face looked stiff. The officer's hand was on the telephone.

All four turned when he came into the room, gun in hand. Marie-Thérèse jumped from the chair. 'Shoot them!' she screamed.

To his own amazement Ormerod did. Twice he fired his pistol and the explosions filled the small room. The officer pitched forward onto the desk, his fingers gripping the telephone receiver; the sergeant was pinned against the wall by the bullet and slid stupidly down to the floor. Ormerod was not going to shoot the policeman. The Frenchman, horror nailed to his face, tried to raise his pasty hands in surrender. Marie-Thérèse did not hesitate. Rushing forward she pulled the officer's gun from its holster and shot her trembling fellow countryman. He slipped sideways on top of the German sergeant.

Ormerod was horrified. But there was no time for it. Marie-Thérèse picked up a bunch of keys from the desk and ran to the door. She turned the opposite way along the corridor to the way Ormerod had entered. The French policeman who had been outside was banging on the stout inner door Ormerod had locked behind him.

'There's half a dozen krauts out there,' panted Ormerod. 'At the front.'

'They have a car at the back,' she said with stiff calm. She smartly opened another door and they ran down a wooden corridor towards daylight coming over the top of a fanlight window. The girl wrenched the door open and they were in the street. It was unnaturally quiet considering the shooting. A cat scratched itself in the middle of the cobbles and a child regarded them with only minor interest from a garden opposite. A German military car was standing against the building. With some strange feminine acknowledgement she tossed the keys she had taken from the desk at him. He caught them as he ran and then they both jumped into the vehicle.

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It started first time. Ormerod sent the cat scurrying away as he drove the car along the first stretch of street. He knew
where the hill was. A right-hand bend and then another left the
rising road before them. Marie-Thérèse turned and looked
back and down at the sunlit village. The footballers were gath
ered foolishly at the door of the police station. There was no one to give them orders. Otherwise the streets and the square were as quiet as the smoke that eased itself from the stone chimneys of the houses.

'Good, Dodo, it was beautiful,' said Marie-Thérèse squeezing his arm.

'Lucky,' he said. 'Bloody lucky. Another ten minutes and no
body could have got you.'

'You came like an English knight in armour,' she laughed.

'I still don't understand why you had to shoot the Frenchman,' said Ormerod after a week. He had waited for her to offer an excuse, with prompting, but she had said nothing. The matter seemed to have gone from her mind. Now she shrugged.

'He was a traitor. He was working with the Germans.'

'Didn't it occur to you that he had no choice? He's a policeman and a policeman has to obey orders and do what he's told. I know that only too well.'

She sniffed. 'So he was in the way. He would have given a
description.'

He did not believe that it was just that. She had wanted to shoot him. Ormerod lay on the grass beneath a horse-chestnut
tree laden with autumn spikes and rich red leaves, standing out like an explosion against a cool blue sky. Marie-Marie-Thérèse sat on the grass beside him. For seven days they had been hiding and on the run. They had escaped from the small area of Le Mesnil
des Champs as the Germans searched the surrounding fields, hills and hamlets.

They had carefully moved east from the immediate region and they were hiding in the modest forest of St Sever, a place of sharp little hills and dense trees. There was a winter hut for the woodman in an almost concealed valley and they had waited there for three days. Ormerod looked up at the trees and the sky. "When are we going to move?' he said. 'I'd like to

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get towards Bagnoles. Albert Smales may be dead by now. I'll have come all this way for nothing.'

She smiled wryly. 'You would really like to catch him, your Smales, would you not? You have one ambition. I have so many.'

"What
are
you proposing to do next, then?' he asked. 'You're in charge.'

'My orders have come from Paris. I received them at Mesnil just before the police took me in,' she said a trifle stiffly. 'It would not be good for both of us to know everything, but I will tell you that a man will come here. They call him by a code-name, Jean Le Blanc. He will be a great resistance leader. Perhaps it will take a year yet, but he is the one. I have great faith in him. He will put some iron into these people. He will make them resist.'

A bird flew high against the stainless sky and Ormerod followed it with his eye until it had cleared the horizon of the trees.

'Jean Le Blanc was the famous horse of the Perche region,' she said quietly. 'He was the stallion who was the father of the Percheron horses. This man comes from that region. That is why he has taken this name.'

'Have you ever played conkers?' asked Ormerod, gazing up into the trees.

'No. What is conkers?'

'Every English kid knows how to play conkers,' he said.

'I was a French kid, remember?'

'All right. Sorry. I'll show you.'

He stood up in his heavy way and walked down the slope from the tree. Many of the green, spiky horse-chestnut cases had fallen among the dying leaves down there. The interior of the husk was like white velvet. The horse-chestnuts shone as round and smooth as the finest wood. He bent and picked up two, rejected them and carefully selected another pair. 'They have to be exactly right,' he said.

When he turned up the incline again he saw she was smiling indulgently towards him. He returned the smile and went back to where she was sitting. 'We need some string,' he said. 'Or better still ... here ...' He sat down and began to remove the

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laces from his boots. At that moment two German armoured cars and two companies of troops in lorries were moving along the forest road, a mile away and several hundred feet above them.

Ormerod went into the hut, his now laceless boots flapping comically on his feet. He returned with a slim nail and made a central hole in each of the hard chestnuts. Marie-Thérèse watched him with tolerant amusement. The sun striking through the high trees touched her face and neck. The forest stirred. Above them the German soldiers left their trucks and began to move along the rutted hunting rides, the split sunlight making chevrons on their bodies as they advanced. Ormerod threaded the bootlaces through the pierced conkers and secured them with a tight knot at the end. He held them in his hands. 'Choose,' he invited. 'Take one.'