The Dynamite Room (20 page)

He nodded as if he already knew, and they pushed on through the bracken, picking their way over broken branches and bits of rubble, trying not to stumble down animal holes or catch their ankles on trailing brambles. She glanced behind her but the wood had already swallowed them, and there was no sign of the garden or Greyfriars. He could kill her in these woods, she thought, and no one would ever know.

He turned and waited. “What's wrong? Come on—keep up!”

She hurried to catch up to him and tried to smile but couldn't. She imagined her body lying half-buried beneath the bracken, a single bullet hole in her back.

They walked in silence, side by side. His eyes scanned the trees and looked up into the branches. Sometimes he stopped and turned his head to one side to listen.

In a small clearing they walked through a cloud of mites. She swung her bucket at them, but they seemed to swarm around her even more furiously, and yet they took no notice of him.

After a while they stopped. She was hot and tired and feeling faint, and they found an uprooted tree to sit on. Only now that she'd put the heavy bucket down did she see that inside it was crawling with baby spiders.

“In Norway I used to make up tunes in my head,” he said, “whenever we had a long way to march. It was the only thing that kept me walking.”

“Was it very cold?”

“Yes. Bitter cold and blizzards. I was trapped in the mountains for five days,” he said. “A few of us got separated but we managed to find somewhere to hide out from the storm, but it was still bitterly cold. Some sort of shed: a concrete floor and a couple of windows. We had a smaller room too, just about big enough for a couple of men to lie in. From the window in there you could see the railway line across the gorge. We used to take turns to sleep there. We had some shelter quarters and some lining to lie on. You had to do whatever you could to keep warm.”

He bent to push his finger into the top of his boot and rubbed at his ankle, and then rolled his wounded shoulder as if trying to loosen it. She let her toes scuff over the dried leaves and dead twigs and watched him. He was reminding her more of her father every day, making her longing for him to come home even more unbearable, wanting him to return and wrap his arms around her and tell her,
Hey, missy, don't cry.

For ages they sat there until she started to feel afraid again, and then he said, “Look, there's a face in the branches up there, made out of leaves.” He pointed. “Can you see it?”

But although Lydia looked she couldn't see anything.

“You speak very good English,” she said.

“My grandmother,” he told her. “I spent my holidays with her and my grandfather in Bavaria. She would only speak to me in English. She was born near Cambridge, I think. And then I lived in London for a while too. My uncle had an apartment in Bloomsbury and I stayed with him. He was a journalist for a German newspaper. I spoke no German at all when I was there—only English. I suppose I wanted to—how do you say?”

“Blend in?”

“Yes…exactly.”

“What did you do in London?”

“I studied,” he said. “At the Royal College of Music actually. It was rather good.”

“Do you play an instrument then?”

“Of course.” He laughed. “They would not have let me in if I didn't. I play the cello.”

“Oh, Alfie wanted to play the cello but he ended up with the violin,” she told him. “My parents said it was too expensive.”

“They are,” he said. “I was fortunate. My grandfather left me some money when he died. I bought mine with that. It was him that first taught me, in a way. He taught me how to play the saw.”

“A saw?” she said. She almost laughed. “That you saw things with?”

“Yes,” he said. “What's so funny? It has to be a special type, of course, not an ordinary saw, although you can still play them too. It's quite like a cello really. But…well…” He maneuvered himself so he was sitting sideways on the trunk and facing her. “A cello hums to you, you see, but a saw, a saw is different. A saw sort of…sings.”

She smiled at the thought of it. She might write a story about it one day: a man with a singing saw.

“It's pretty here, isn't it?” she said. “Don't you think?”

“Yes,” he said. “I'm rather fond of England. It's very serene and stately. The hills. The rivers and the streams and the woods. So pretty…the Home Counties, the Cotswolds…have you been?”

She shook her head. “How long were you in London?”

“Not long. Two years. There was a lot of trouble in Germany then. They were burning books at the universities. It wasn't a good place to study. Everyone thought there was going to be civil war and my mother thought I'd get caught up in it, just like my father had done. She wanted me to be safe somewhere, so I came to England. Even when she wrote and told me all that was happening back in my homeland—the Olympics and the autobahns, the air force, all that—she didn't want me coming home.”

“But you did?”

“Yes. I felt I had to. They were recruiting. It was my duty. And anyway, I felt cut off from Germany. I wanted to go home.” Then, as if he'd suddenly remembered, he pulled something crumpled from his pocket. “Sorry, I have been meaning to give you this,” he said. “I found it in the shelter. I presume it's yours.” He handed her the story,
The Incredible Adventures of the Tiny Princess.
She felt her face redden.

“Oh,” she said. “I thought I'd lost that.”

“Well, it was down the side of the bench,” he said. “I hope you don't mind, but I read it. It is very…” He fumbled for the word. “…creative.”

“It's silly really,” she said. “I wrote it ages ago. I'm much better now.”

“My grandfather used to tell me stories,” he said. “Fairy tales and folk stories. He used to carve scenes out of wood…” He trailed off and she looked at him, waiting, and then he said, “Do you know the tale of Bearskin? About a young soldier who after a war has ended makes a pact with the Devil?”

She shook her head.

“The Devil says that he will make the poor soldier rich if he does not wash himself or cut his nails or his hair for seven years and wears the skin of a bear.”

“What happens? Does he beat the Devil?”

“You will have to read it and see. I think you might like it. It's Brothers Grimm. It was my grandfather's favorite. He liked magical stories like that.”

“Do you believe in magic then?” she said.

He smiled. “That depends on what it is.”

“What about angels?” she said.

“Angels?” He rubbed at his ankle again and tidied the bottom of his trouser leg. “You seem to have an obsession.”

“You don't have to see them,” she said. “Sometimes they're like a tiny light. Or you just know that they're there. They live in heaven and only come down when you need them. They leave something behind sometimes too, like a clue, so you know that they have been there.”

“What have you run away from?” he said, the question coming from nowhere. “You ran away from something, didn't you? What was it?”

She picked up the bucket and tipped it on its side and started knocking the rim against the ground, trying to dislodge the spiders. She didn't want to carry it now in case they crawled up her arm.

“Where were you? Were you evacuated?”

She bashed the bucket a couple more times and then gave up. Six or seven tiny spiders still clung stubbornly to the bottom.

“What happened?”

She looked at him. She supposed it didn't matter now. “We all got sent to Wales,” she told him. “Everyone from school. Even Button and he'd only just got here. I don't think they know what to do with children anymore. They keep shunting everyone around. It's like nobody wants us.”

“Who is Button?” he said. “What sort of name is that?”

“I don't know. He's just a boy. He had to come with me. He's from Poland.”

“So why did you run away?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. I didn't like them in Wales. They were mean.”

“And this Button, where is he now?”

She shrugged again.

“You left him there?”

When she didn't answer he asked her again—
You left him there?
—and she nodded. She thought she might cry.

“They were horrid to him,” she blustered. “All the Welsh boys.”

“What do you mean?”

And she told him how they used to tie Button up, how they beat him with sticks, how they liked it when he cried, and how one time—the worst time—they'd taken him to the brook and pushed him in and held his head under until he almost drowned.

“And when I tried to stop them, they said they'd get me; they were going to drown me for real one day.” And that, she said, was why she had run away. She had been scared.

“Boys can be animals sometimes,” he said.

Lydia nodded. And now she'd left Button in Wales with them, and after everything she'd promised her mother. She hadn't looked after him at all; she'd left him there on his own.

Overhead came the chuttering of a plane. He lifted his hand for her to stop and they looked up through the branches, holding their hands up to the sun as it seared through the leaves. He pointed. “There,” he murmured, but she couldn't see.

“Is it one of yours or ours?” she asked.

He said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the plane, following it between the gaps in the leaves.

“Come on,” he said, “we need to go. No more talking.”

They walked for a couple of minutes in silence, listening to the scrunch of their feet and watching a lapwing darting between the trees, disappearing, then zipping past again.

As they got nearer to the edge of the wood and the marshes, he made her wait, hiding in the ferns with one of the buckets, while he walked on ahead with the other two.

She watched him, his back arched, pistol in his hand, as he moved from tree to tree so quietly. She put her hands over her mouth. He had said once that he could hear every sound and every breath; he could hear the beat of her heart. She turned back to see if anyone was coming, straining to listen in case she heard footsteps that weren't his.

When he got to the edge of the wood she saw him crouching down, leaning forward with his shoulder against a tree, and holding a tiny pair of binoculars to his eyes. He scanned the thin stretch of marsh and the coast for what seemed an inordinately long time. She picked at the ferns as she waited, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on him. Now that they were still and silent she could hear crackling gunfire and distant booms far off, yet still quaking through the ground beneath her. She needed to pee.

She looked at the large clump of ferns and then pushed her way in, first just one step and then another, crushing some of the leaves down beneath. She could still see him through the mesh of foliage even if she squatted. She took another step in but as she did her foot stepped on something hard that shifted out from beneath her so that she fell. She looked to see what it was. It was the heel of a boot, and it was attached to a leg. And then she saw that it was a body, face down on the marshy soil.

Lydia shrieked.

He came running, scrambling, pushing his way through the ferns towards her and picking her up and onto her feet.

“What is it?” he shouted. “What is it?”

The body was covered in dried blood. It looked as if something had dragged it out from a hole in the ground. It had the same shoulder flash on its uniform as the Essex Regiment. The legs of it were torn where something had dug the body up and scratched and ripped at it; a hand still sticking up out of the dirt, the fingertips gnawed and frayed.

“Don't look,” Heiden said. “Come on, we need to get the water and leave.”

“No,” she said. She wiped at her eyes. “No, I want to go back. I want to go now. What happened to him?”

“I don't know. It doesn't matter.”

“Has someone shot him? Did someone shoot him?”

He bent down beside the body and carefully turned it over. He studied it for a moment, then stood up again. “He's had his throat cut,” he told her. “Come on now, we need to get the water.”

But she was already pushing her way through the ferns and running, stumbling, back towards Greyfriars.

He called out as he chased after her, suddenly, surprisingly, using her name. “Lydia!” he yelled. “Lydia, stop!” But Lydia would not.

She watched him sitting at the window, peering through the slit in the blackout fabric with pistol in hand. He'd been there for half an hour already and he hadn't moved, not even to stretch a muscle or relieve some cramp. He wasn't human. He was something else, made by German scientists. He looked like flesh and blood, she thought, but inside he was mechanical. He'd said himself that he could shoot a moving target at fifty yards. He probably had X-ray vision.

He'd easily caught up with her in the wood, abandoning the buckets as he ran after her so that now they too were lost.

“Now do you see why you mustn't leave the house?” he had said. “They are all around us. We have to be more careful.”

And, indeed, he had even thought he'd seen a figure—a man in uniform, he had said—disappearing around the side of Greyfriars as they had returned through the wood to the house and were almost setting out across the lawn. He had made her wait, hidden way back in the trees, whilst he had gone to investigate, but after several minutes he had come back saying that it was nothing. And she wondered whether he was telling the truth, or whether there really had been someone snooping about, a German or a Brit.

Sitting in the dark again, she felt as if she'd been thrown back into her cage. She had cried herself out so that now her stomach hurt, all the muscles in her aching as if every organ was clenched and clasped tight. She kept seeing the dead body and those blackened fingertips. So Heiden had been right—there were men stalking through the trees; men with guns and knives who slit people's throats, men perhaps even coming right up to the house, up to the door and trying the handle, trying to see if anyone was there.