The Dynamite Room (28 page)

Heiden looked up again. The storm was closing in; a darkness filling the sky.

He flicked the last tag and it clipped the edge of the tin and fell, rattling in. He got up and collected the tags from among the gravel and then fished the final one out from inside the can. He shined it against the thigh of his trousers and read the soldier's number and unit. It was the young German private he'd been with in the dynamite store: Alexander Bürckel.

It was from the awkward height of the attic window that she saw the bicycle. She doubted herself at first because although the clouds were thickening over to the east and a grayness was creeping across the land, the road itself was still bathed in sun and prone to shimmers and mirages. He might have been a shadow. But as he came closer there was no denying it. It was a man, and he was cycling slowly down the lane towards the house.

She clung to the lip of the window. The backs of her calves were starting to quiver and the balls of her toes beginning to ache. She lowered herself and then pushed up again to look. As he drew nearer he became clearer, and she became more certain that it was Old Mr. Howe, panniers on either side of the back wheel for his letters, and the basket at the front. There was the gait of the bike as well, the effort of turning the pedals showing his age, and the bike swerving this way and that across the lane as he tried to keep it steady in the heat. She could imagine him puffing and panting beneath his cloth cap, the sweat running down the back of his wrinkled neck, the heat blasting up off the road. She watched him as he came closer and she banged on the window, knowing that from so far away he wouldn't hear, but she willed him to look up anyway, and see her.

His progress was slow and the bike wobbled from side to side. As she watched him grow nearer he kept vanishing behind the lines of trees. When he reached the point of the road that disappeared completely from sight, she hurried down the attic steps and then stopped, listening. She couldn't be sure where Heiden was. She ran to the top of the stairs and leaned over the banisters. The front door was ajar but she couldn't see him anywhere.

Her parents' room offered the best view of the drive, and she ran in and pushed two of the window slats apart so that she could see. She watched the lane, trying to glimpse him through the trees at the edge of the garden, and then he was at the gate and getting off his bike, propping it against a tree, and coming through, his cap deep over his eyes so that she could barely see his face. The sky above him was darkening as he came down the drive. There was something odd about him, about the way he walked in his heavy boots, and it was then, when he was halfway down the drive, that the shot suddenly fired, and his body jerked and turned and fell.

She pressed herself back against the wall and clenched her eyes shut. Not him. Not him as well. Not Mr. Howe. She felt sick to her stomach, everything tightening to a fist. She could hear Heiden coming from the sitting room downstairs, his footsteps out the door and across the gravel. By the time the second shot came, she was already running down the stairs.

The branches snatched at her as she pushed through the wood. The sudden rain fell in torrents, soaking her dress to her skin. The storm clouds were so dark that it seemed like nightfall. All she saw through the rain were the dark figures of trees. The man was a murderer. Why had she let herself think he would protect her or care for her, why had she allowed herself to see a gentleness in him that she now knew wasn't there?

He'd been crouched over the body on the drive. If he'd seen her or heard her leave, he had let her go; but now she could hear him coming, slipping and stumbling in the darkness behind her.
Wait!
he shouted.
Wait!
He would shoot her down. She knew it. A bullet through the back. Or he would slice open her throat, just like the dead soldier they'd found. She'd imagined it so many times. Her body left where she fell. He would let the wood grow over her and bury her so nobody would find her, and there she would rot away and be forgotten. No one would think of her anymore.

The trees were so densely packed that it was hard to see where she was running. She almost twisted her ankle but saved herself, her hand grabbing at a trunk as she fell, and she carried on running just as she'd run in Wales, the boys coming after her with their sticks.
Stop! Lydia! Wait!

She glanced over her shoulder and saw a glimpse of him through the trees, gaining on her. She was drawing nearer to the coastal lagoons and mudflats and she could see the silvery sheen of the marshes ahead. And then she burst out of the wood into the openness, and abruptly stopped. The reed beds, the salt marshes, and the boggy grasslands were all gone. She wiped the rain from her eyes. Everything was water. Half a mile away on the shore she could see the tips of the concrete blocks, the fencing, the Martello tower to the south. Hanging over the coastline, hundreds of feet in the air, was a barrage balloon tethered with ropes. An explosion boomed along the beach and there was thick smoke. Between her and the soldiers though was nothing but a huge unbreachable expanse of water being pummeled by the rain.

She looked along the perimeter of the wood but there was no easier way across. Scattered around in the water were raised islands of grass and occasionally the sagging, broken lines of fencing disappearing beneath the surface. She could hear him coming, almost upon her; she couldn't turn back. She stood for a moment and then waded in. Her feet disappeared into the soft sludge at the bottom, each step sinking deeper until it was almost impossible to pull out. The water came up to her knees and then rose higher with every step so that she struggled to keep her balance. She took another couple of steps forward, hauling her feet out of the mud and keeping her arms high above her. She heard him splashing into the water behind her.

“Wait! Lydia! Stop!”

She tried to carry on, hurrying more than ever, but it was such a struggle, and then he was behind her and grabbing at her wrist. She felt an arm around her and they both fell in. He shouted something in German, choking as he went under and resurfaced; and then he lifted her up, and she didn't kick, she didn't fight—she wrapped herself around him and cried, sobbing into the wet warmth of his neck as he slopped back through the water with her.

“I had to do it,” he said, panting. “It was to protect us; to protect you.”

“But Mr. Howe…” She cried.

“It wasn't him. It wasn't anyone,” he said.

“But it was his bike. I saw it. I saw him.”

He wiped the rain and mud from his face. “Look at me,” he said. “I don't know who this Mr. Howe is, but, I promise you, it wasn't him.”

He carried her all the way back through the woods, out into the garden and across the lawn to the house, where he set her down, dripping, on the drive. The body of the man lay half-twisted in the gravel. Heiden crouched down next to it and gently rolled it over. The man was wearing Old Mr. Howe's clothes, but she saw now that he was much younger, the face solemn and rugged, with eyes of such a dark brown color that they seemed almost black. She felt her stomach turn and a sour sick taste rising up into her throat. She didn't want to look at him but she couldn't help herself. His mouth was partially open and she saw he had a chipped tooth, almost broken into a fang. She could still smell his sweat.

Heiden unfastened Old Mr. Howe's jacket. Beneath it the man wore another. It was little wonder that he had been panting, particularly in the muggy heat. She recognized the Essex Regiment shoulder flash on the khaki blouse, the same that her German soldier had been wearing when he'd first appeared at Greyfriars and the same as the man they'd found in the woods. She watched as he rifled through the man's pockets, taking out a knife, pistol, bullets wrapped in a white handkerchief, and a tin that had a tiny compass inside.

He walked over to the bicycle and opened up the panniers on either side of the rear wheel, pulling out undelivered letters and dropping some of them there on the drive. When he was done he came back and searched again inside the man's clothes.

“He had a pack,” he said. “He must have hidden it somewhere.”

She nodded. “What was his name?”

He told her. Diederich.

“Was he German?”

“Mm,” he said.

“But what was his real name?”

He was still rummaging around, undoing the man's belt and feeling around the waistband of his trousers. He pulled out three more bullets.

“His Christian name,” she said.

“I don't know,” he said. “It doesn't matter.” He looked at her. “Lydia, listen, I had no choice. You do understand that, don't you?”

She said nothing as he hauled the man up so that he could feel around the back of him.

“What happened to the marshes?” she said. “All that water…”

“Flooded,” he said. “They've done it to stop gliders and tanks from landing.”

“They did it on purpose?”

He did not answer but let the body slump back into the gravel. He slipped the bullets into his pocket. Then he unbuttoned the man's shirt and pulled out a dog tag from around his neck. He took it in both hands and snapped it in two; then replaced the chain inside the man's shirt and did the buttons back up. He tucked the half tag he'd removed into his pocket; then he glanced at her over his shoulder.

“You need to change your clothes. You're wet through,” he said.

She sat on the edge of the bath, the door locked and a chair wedged beneath the handle. The rain was easing off, pattering at the window, and inside the bathroom was gloomy. She was covered in fresh cuts and grazes; everything seemed to sting.

For a while she cried silently to herself. She couldn't do this anymore. She couldn't be on her own. She thought about Alfie and whether he was lying under clods of earth in France somewhere or maybe scattered into pieces or maybe nothing but dust blowing across an empty field. She prayed for him and for her father because if there was a God and he was a good God, he would send her father back to her. He wouldn't take her father and mother as well as Alfie. No God could be that cruel.

Eventually she went downstairs in clean clothes and stepped out onto the soggy doormat. The last drops of rain were being wrung from the sky, plopping with a dull
putt putt
into the tin can in the gravel. The sky was gray and miserable but the air felt fresh at last.

He had dragged the body across the lawn and under the trees, and now he was digging out a hole with her father's old shovel. His clothes were soaked and darkened by the rain, and his face, hands, and arms were covered in mud. He looked more like a creature than a man. He turned his head and glanced at her; then he dug the shovel in deep and levered out some soil. She wondered if she should help him. There should be some sort of ceremony. They should say a prayer at least, make a cross, ask God for forgiveness; but she knew that Heiden wouldn't and that she couldn't either, and only when the hole was deep enough and she'd watched him push the body in with his foot did she step back into the house.

Now she sat within the dark folds of the wardrobe and reached her hand out into the darkness in the hope that Button was there. The truth was this: if the boys hadn't hurt Button they would have hurt her. That was what she had told herself and made herself believe. It was the reason why she'd let them do it sometimes, and why she had abandoned him. And now it was her that was abandoned; this was her punishment.
What goes around comes around,
her father had said.

She sobbed quietly into her knees. She could hear the soldier in the bathroom and clamped her hands over her ears. She didn't want him in her thoughts. She didn't want him in the house. She didn't care for him anymore. She wanted him to disappear—not die but to never have existed—and take all the bad things that he'd done away with him.

After a while she came out of the wardrobe and stared blankly about the room, the space made for men who she wished would hurry up and come. And yet one man
had
come and Heiden had shot him. A German. A Nazi. One of his own. She slumped face down on her mother's bed and tried to make herself cry again, but she couldn't even do that. She clamped her mouth to the mattress and tried not to breathe, but even suffocation was impossible.

She could hear him, his feet heavy on the floorboards. Cupboards banging shut. Footsteps in and out of the house, hurrying. Things being thumped into the wall. After a while she could bear it no longer and had to get up and see what he was doing, but the house was quiet and dark again, all the blackout boards put back into place, shutting the light back out as if it had never been allowed in at all.

She found him in the kitchen, where he had lit two oil lamps. Handing one to her, he started off down the hall. She hurried after him up the stairs, and by the time she had caught up with him he was in the bathroom, his shirt draped over the side of the bath. He was studying the wound in his shoulder as if he had only just noticed it. He glanced at her and then turned his attention back to the wound.

“We're leaving,” he said. “So pack what you need.”

She stared at him. “Where are we going?”

“Come on,” he said. “It's time.”

He had woken with a jolt. The concrete floor of the annex room was frozen beneath him. He felt the grit and dust under his hand. He had been dreaming of Eva, of lying next to her, stroking her; his fingers still tingled with the memory of her skin.

He listened for the gale outside but heard nothing and looked up from the floor. The window above him cast a trapezoid of light on the wall. He sat up, listening to the silence—the storm now gone—and shook out the coat he had been lying on. He was stiff and cold and aching. Through the window the sky was bright and everything was smothered in snow. In the distance the Ofoten Railway line slowly etched its way round the mountains. He scanned the track but there was no sign of any life.