Other Paths to Glory (26 page)

He jabbed a finger towards Mitchell.

‘We’ve got to prove to them that the lid isn’t sealed properly - because I’m damn sure it isn’t.’

Nikki gestured towards the window, through which the red neon lights of the garage sign were now bright against the gathering darkness of the evening.

‘You are running out of time for that - ‘

The outside door banged and there was a sound of hobnailed boors clumping down the passage to the office.

‘Unless you think an apprentice mechanic can give it to you, that is.’

Audley shrugged.

‘Apprentice lads have been known to have sharp eyes.’

The door banged open.

Mitchell’s heart sank:
but not this apprentice,
he thought, taking in Pierre’s vacant expression, which significantly remained unchanged as the lacklustre eyes shifted from Audley to Nikki. If the sight of her couldn’t raise a spark in this shambling creature, then there was no spark there.

‘Come in, Pierre,’ said Audley.

‘Uh?’

Pierre advanced three steps, stooping a little as though the ceiling was close to his head.

‘I want to ask you one or two questions … about Monsieur Etienne Jarras, Pierre,’

Audley said slowly.

‘Uh?’

Pierre frowned.

‘Monsieur Etienne Jarras - ‘

‘ ‘E’s dead.’

‘We know that. You were working with him on the night he died.’

‘What?’ Pierre looked at Nikki. ‘What’s ‘e say?’

Audley cast a hopeless look at her.

‘You were working with Monsieur Etienne on the night he died,’ said Nikki.

‘ ‘E died …’ The boy nodded.

‘You were working with him that night.’

‘On the tractor, we were - Monsieur Morel’s tractor. Wanted it next day, ‘e did … Didn’t get it did ‘e - wasn’t ready, that’s why.’

‘Monsieur Etienne was called out on a breakdown - called on the telephone?’

‘Yeah.’

The small head nodded - big body, big feet, big hands, but small head: it looked as though in assembling Pierre, God had done his best with the left-over parts.

‘Did you answer the telephone?’

Pierre looked at her pityingly.

‘Me? What for?’

Nikki smiled at him dazzlingly.

‘The second time, after Monsieur Etienne had gone, you answered the telephone very nicely, didn’t you, Pierre?’

‘Oh - that time. Yeah. ‘E’d gone though. But ‘e’d got the car goin’, ‘adn’t ‘e - ‘

‘Who?’

‘This other fella. Don’t bother to come, that’s what ‘e says. ‘E’d gone though.’

‘You told him that?’

‘Yeah told ‘im that. ‘E said not to mind “Tell ‘im I called, Pierre,” ‘e says.’

‘He - called - you - Pierre?’ said Audley.

The boy looked at him pityingly.

‘Yeah - well that’s my name, ain’t it.’

Back on the ridge the count-down to the summit was ticking away. Somewhere, in the West or the East or the Far East, the jet engines on military airfields were warming up and the top security men were checking their weapons and their watches. And here there wasn’t one goddamn thing they could do to stop it: their fears and suspicions and fragile clues had led them finally to a moronic youth with an IQ of 70 minus.

‘Ask him -‘ there was a note of weariness in Audley’s voice ‘ - ask him if there’s been anyone like me here - a foreigner. If he works on the pumps he may have filled Emerson’s tank.’

Pierre listened to the question from Nikki with an air of incomprehension. Finally he shook his head.

‘A little man - with white hair - ‘ Mitchell pointed to his head.

‘Uh?’

Pierre ran his oily hand through his own hair vaguely.

‘ - In a grey Jaguar - ‘

‘Aw -
him -
‘
The nearest thing yet to intelligence showed in Pierre’s face ‘ - Jaguar XJ6, that’s a smashing car - I’d like one of them.’

‘He was here?’ said Nikki quickly.

‘In a Jag - sure. A little old fella. ‘E went round the back with the boss - and stayed there jawin’ for hours - made me late for supper, they did.’

‘Round the back?’ echoed Audley.

Pierre jerked a blackened thumb.

‘Round the back,’ he repeated with a touch of exasperation, as one trying to explain the obvious to a simpleton. ‘Made me late for my supper, didn’t they.’

‘A foreigner?’ said Nikki.

‘Yeah. English.’

‘How do you know he was English?’

‘Got “GB” on the back it had, didn’t it, the Jag had - that’s English. An’ right hand drive - that’s English too, isn’t it. Smashing car - had a good look at it while they was round the back. Do zoo on the straight easy.’

Mitchell caught Audley’s eye. The museum’s round the back –

He remembered as he spoke that Captain Lefevre had never visited the Jarras garage, so that he was once more exhibiting suspiciously exact knowledge.

Audley nodded slowly.

‘You go on back and have a look at it, Paul. We’ll join you in a minute or two.’

Nikki frowned, clearly suspicious at Mitchell’s sudden detachment.

‘What are you going to look for, Captain?’

Audley answered before he could speak.

‘We don’t know. But Paul’s an expert and if there is something, then maybe he’ll see it when it won’t mean anything to either of us. So I want him to have a clear run at it first, all by himself.’

Another long shot - and doubly so if those who had silenced Jarras had thought it necessary to check over his possessions. But long shots were all that was left to them. Nikki was looking at him warily. She hadn’t missed the museum slip and she must by now be well aware that Captain Lefevre knew more about Professor Emerson than any casually conscripted outsider ought to know. But before she could register her objection Audley had turned again to Pierre.

‘Now, my lad - who else has been “round the back” with your boss in the last week or two, eh?’

Pierre wiped his nose nervously.

‘Uh?’

He looked bemusedly at Nikki. ‘What’s ‘e on about now?’

Mitchell picked his way gingerly between the piles of rusty scrap metal towards the old Nissen hut behind the workshops.

Memory was a mysterious thing, and his own capacity for recall the most mysterious of all, automatically activated as it was by any chance sight or sound or smell. Here it was the smell, that peculiar mixture of oil and metal and damp earth, so that although it was twilight and he had been this way only once before he still knew exactly where to go. Two years before, almost to the day, he had followed Emerson and Jarras along this same path, between these same heaps. He had scratched his ankle on a projecting piece of metal and had been absurdly relieved that his anti-tetanus booster shot was only a few weeks old … for after all this was the home of gas gangrene, the killer which had horrified the medical corps in 1914.

Back then he had been struck by the irony in that: the researcher struck down by the old war he was studying. But now the irony had caught up with him just as surely, and he was the only survivor of the three men who had come down this path that October afternoon.

The door wasn’t locked, as it had been that other time, but somehow he had expected that. What took him by surprise was the red-gold flash in the darkness ahead of him, the reflection of the neon sign at his back caught on polished brass.

Then, as his fingers found the light switch, the flash activated his memory again so that as the unshaded bulbs blazed he wasn’t ambushed by the gleaming Maxim gun which stood trained on the doorway, the pride and
piece de resistance
of the Jarras Museum.

Time telescoped and the same first thought he had once had on this spot was duplicated: there was enough here to equip a small private army.

Nothing had changed. To the left was the well-stocked rifle rack - Lee-Enfields, Lebels, Mausers, Mannlichers and even a stubby Moisin-Nagent cavalry carbine, strayed from some Russian battlefield; to the right, the light machine-guns, Hotchkiss, Lewis, a twisted Parabellum from a fallen Fokker, and the anachronistic Bren left by the retreating British in 1940.

There was the little old safe beside the desk, still stuffed no doubt with rusty handguns of a dozen different makes; there, above the rifles, the line of bayonets and swords; and there, above the machine-guns, the artistic display of Mills grenades and long-handled
Stielhandgranaten.

Ammunition pouches and moth-eaten webbing; steel helmets of every shape and size and a lonely, faded glengarry; the crude devil’s faces of primitive gas-masks, nightmarish with their blank, fogged eye-pieces; entrenching tools and heavy wire-cutters; and those strange echoes of medieval chivalry, the tank crewman’s chainmail face protector and the iron visor and breastplate of the sniper …

At his feet was a heap of skeletal rifles, nearly unrecognisable with their wooden parts rotted away; when brother Marcel came to clear this place they would go straight onto the scrapheap outside the door, for Marcel shared nothing of his brother’s magpie obsession. It was all junk to him.

He stared round the hut again, aware now of a second thought which had come to him two years ago and which now came to him again even more strongly. Only then it had been sad and now, with the darkness pressing in from outside, it was eerie.

Marcel was right: it was all junk, empty, rusted and useless. It had belonged to the men who were buried in a hundred cemeteries and it was fit only to equip a private army of ghosts.

He opened the drawers of the desk one by one, with a growing sense of the hopelessness of his task.

Boxes of buttons and badges, British, French and German.

A collection of battered tobacco and toffee tins, decorated with flags and cheery soldiers and dreadnoughts and kings and queens…

Nose cones from a variety of shells, some bright and clean, others corroded into unidentifiable lumps of rust…

A carved lump of chalk bearing the badge of the Sherwood Foresters and the date

10-9-16 …

A drawer full of maps, carefully labelled and filed. He rifled through them until he found one of Hameau Ridge and spread it out on the desk-top.

It was a British Army issue, corrected to the end of August, but Jarras had evidently worked hard on it, plotting the trench lines behind the German lines and meticulously marking in the movements of the units which had stormed the ridge. It was even possible to trace the crab-like progress of the tank ‘Euclid’ through the British trenches to the edge of the wood, where it ended with a red crayoned question mark. Poor Euclid had no doubt become an aiming mark for every German gun in the area once dawn had revealed her stalled on the crest.

But there was nothing here which was not already in the history books. The green line which marked the advance of the doomed North Berkshires and unlucky Company ‘D’ petered out in the dead ground beyond the crest with another question mark, while the blue arrows of the other Poacher companies curved leftwards through the wood, over the open ground and into the Prussian Redoubt. Following them, the fierce crimson arrows of the Australian battalions plunged into the two ravines …

Nothing there.

And nothing in the safe either. Even the door swung open at a touch, revealing the jumble of revolvers and automatic pistols in every stage of dissolution. Two years earlier Jarras had unlocked it with a flourish to produce the battered remains of an Austrian Steyr which he had bought from a quarryman that very morning. The Steyr was still there on the top of the pile.

All there and all junk …

He looked up as the doorknob rattled.

And junk to Nikki MacMahon - childish junk. He could see it in her expression as she took in the room - no woman could ever be expected to understand any man’s innocent obsession with weaponry, ancient or modern.

‘Good God Almighty!’ exclaimed Audley, coming to a halt in front of the Maxim.

‘And he was a bachelor - ‘ Nikki’s lip curled ‘ - it is too Freudian for words, I think.’

‘I don’t know about Freudian, but it certainly wouldn’t do back in England,’ murmured Audley. ‘They’d have this lot off him in no time, and he’d likely get six months for possession.’

He bent to examine the gleaming machine-gun.

‘What a beauty!’

Nikki looked down sidelong at him with a flash of amusement instantly extinguished as she realised she was being observed in her turn by Mitchell. As their eyes met he knew that in any other circumstances it might have been a moment of shared amusement - that there was a childish streak in Audley and that they had caught each other noticing it. But the taste of present failure was too sharp for them to share anything now.

Nikki tossed her head arrogantly.

‘You’ve found - nothing?’

She managed to make it sound like an accusation.

Audley looked up from the Maxim, first at Mitchell, then at Nikki.

‘Of course he found nothing,’ he said equably. ‘The age of miracles is long past.’

‘Miracles?’

Audley nodded.

‘Luck, if you like. And we’ve had our share of that, m’dear. If there was anything here - maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t - it’s long gone. Right, Paul?’

They were the childish ones, thought Mitchell. It was the big man who knew his Kipling, and could treat those two impostors, Triumph and Disaster, just the same. That was another lesson to be learnt.

‘The door was unlocked, the safe was unlocked - ‘ he shrugged, ‘ - and I don’t even know what I’m looking for.’

Audley took in the whole hut with one swinging, 36o-degree sweep.

‘Well, they didn’t come for the weapons, that’s for sure.’

‘None of them work, anyway. They’re all rusted up.’

‘Even the grenades?’ Audley pointed to the wall.

‘They’re harmless.’

Mitchell rose from the chair and went over to the grenade display.

‘Tricky things to leave lying around, but Jarras wasn’t a careless man - these haven’t any explosive. And they haven’t got igniters and detonators either.’

He lifted one of the Mills bombs off its hook.

‘Just good for a paperweight, that’s all.’

‘And what the deuce is that?’

Audley pointed to a weapon displayed above the bombs.

‘This?’ Mitchell put the grenade back and reached above it. ‘It’s a sawn-off Lee-Enfield - someone’s taken twelve inches of barrel and six-inches of butt. Used for trench raiding, probably.’