Other Paths to Glory (29 page)

‘In the corner, Captain.’ Ollivier pointed past Mitchell’s right shoulder. ‘On the floor in the corner you will find a trapdoor - go and see for yourself.’

From where he had been standing the furthest corner had been in shadow, seeming no different from the rest of the barn except for a rusty iron hook hanging from a staple in the wall at waist-height. But as he moved towards it he could make out the outline of a large trapdoor; it was flush with the floor, but the gap around it was a fraction wider than the gaps between the floorboards. The accumulation of dirt on it was no less than elsewhere, helping to mask it and suggesting that it had not been opened for weeks, but the spread of such camouflage could be achieved in seconds with a few sweeps of a broom.

‘It looks promising, does it not?’ Ollivier prompted him. ‘Then open it.’

Mitchell hesitated. There was a recessed grip at one end, like the hand-hold in a manhole cover, but the size of the thing and its position close to the angle of the corner meant that it would have to be lifted not from the back, but from the side or the front.

‘Go on. Captain. It isn’t too heavy, and there is a hook on the wall to hold it.’

Mitchell had just come to the same conclusion about the hook. He braced his legs and thrust his fingers into the handhold.

In fact the door was by no means light: it was made of the same inch-thick planking as the floor. But it came up all the same, revealing the first treads of a substantial stairway, broad and wide, which fell away into the darkness. The sharp smell of artificial fertiliser rose out of the hole.

‘A cellar,’ said Ollivier. ‘A large cellar, too, with almost the floor area of this barn. You could hide a lot in such a cellar - the Gestapo were pleased when they found that trapdoor back in ‘43. They knew there was a Resistance Group operating in this area and they even suspected its headquarters might be on Hameau Ridge. They had great hopes of finding something down there. They knew they were - how do you say - “hot”? ‘But they didn’t find anything - not a smell, not a trace, although they were very good at finding things … And do you know why they didn’t find anything, Captain?’

Mitchell looked up at him.

‘Because there was nothing to find.’ Ollivier’s smile broadened. ‘When they found that trapdoor they were so hot - they were so close - we were in the palm of their hand, six of us. And yet they could not find us because - because they did exactly what you have done. Captain:
they opened the trapdoor. And when they did that they covered up the
entrance to our hiding place.
’

Mitchell stared at the heavy door which he had hooked on to the wall a minute or two before.

‘They were always so ill-mannered, the Gestapo - close the trapdoor, if you please, Captain - they never thought to close the doors they opened … Good! Now you will see what they obscured in their eagerness to examine the cellar.’

Between the strip of wood on to which the trapdoor’s hinges were screwed and the wall lay a narrow continuation of the wooden floor, four boards wide.

‘It looks as if it’s nailed down, but it isn’t really. Count off the nails from the left,’ Ollivier ordered. ‘The fifth one - when old Jacques Billot came back to his farm in October 1918 there wasn’t one brick standing on another - that’s the one. Pull it up, it’s not firm - ‘

With his finger nail Mitchell scraped the dirt from around the head of the nail, gingerly at first and then, as he felt it move, with a growing sense of excitement.

‘Billot and his son rebuilt their farm all by themselves, you see - that is, his surviving son; the other two had been killed at Verdun. He got round to this barn in 1924 - go on, pull it, Captain - and he came on this shaft when he was digging the foundations for the outer wall - ‘

It was a large nail with a wide flattened head, the sort of thing the local blacksmith might have made. The first inch or so of it came out easily, but then it stopped and as it did so the whole section of floor between the trap and the wall shivered.

‘He was a prudent man, old Billot, his son Pierre was fond of recalling. He remembered the past and he didn’t trust the future -
“
Les Sales Baches
were here in ‘70 and again in ‘14. They’ll be back a third time, you’ll see.” So he decided to make a place for his money and his valuables and his family, a place no one else would know about -
lift.
Captain. It won’t bite you.’

Mitchell took hold of the protruding nail firmly between his thumb and forefinger.

The four short lengths of floorboard came up together to reveal a cavity, a black hole just big enough for a man to squeeze through. At first sight it seemed quite shallow; then, as he levered the boards to one side he saw that a deep shaft slanted away under the wall of the barn, which was supported below ground level on a length of steel girder.

‘Et voila! Old Billot’s handiwork. It beat the Gestapo in ‘43 and it beat our experts in ‘69 just as easily when they checked out this place - I watched them do it. Just like the Germans, they couldn’t resist the cellar … Nothing like a peasant to out-think the clever ones, eh? Not even the farmer who lives here now knows about it, and he’s been in this barn a thousand times.’

‘The farmer who lives here now?’ Audley repeated slowly. ‘So what happened to the Billots?’

‘The old man died in his feather bed in ‘35, and the son - ‘

‘Don’t tell me,’ cut in Audley. ‘Let me guess again … Before a Gestapo firing squad?’

Ollivier smiled.

‘Very good. He was the leader of our Resistance Group, Billot
fils -
we kept our arms and equipment down there in his father’s strongroom. And ourselves too on occasion … in fact I was down there alone the last time, when the Germans raided the farm. For three days I was there, waiting for them to go away, with just a torch and a packet of candles … And that was when I found out where the tunnel went, my David - I was looking for a way out, but I didn’t find one. It was not… very pleasant.’

‘But better than being above ground,’ said Audley drily.

The only survivor of his group
…
And here also was the answer to the question they had brushed aside as being irrelevant back at the Jarras museum: of all the empty houses in France which filled the requirements of a neutral house, security had chosen one with a fatal defect. They had dismissed it as the purest bad luck, but luck hadn’t come into it. It had been Ollivier.

‘And where is the present owner now?’ Audley looked around him. ‘Is he conveniently deaf as well as blind?’

The bogus policeman stirred.

‘
Patron -
‘ the anger was plain now ‘ -
il gagne du temps
seulement.
’

‘Of course,’ Ollivier nodded. ‘Sorel thinks you are playing for time.’

‘He underrates my insatiable curiosity.’

‘But naturally … The farmer is visiting a young woman in Arras. A most attractive young woman who has taken a surprising liking to him - for the time being.’

‘A fortunate coincidence. You seem to have thought of almost everything, Ted. I give you that.’

‘Not “almost”, my David. Everything.’ Ollivier was unsmiling. ‘You were the only risk, but a calculated one.’

‘You’d never know how lucky you’ve been, as a matter of fact. But being in charge of an operation’s security does give you an unfair opportunity to lay on its insecurity.’

Audley gave a small yawn.

‘So let’s get on with the calculated risk, eh?’

‘I was almost about to suggest as much. As I said, I was looking for another way out in ‘43. But I didn’t find one - I found something very different.’

Audley waited very politely for a moment.

‘Am I expected to ask what it was?’

‘On the contrary. I propose to show it to you, my David.’

Mitchell watched Ollivier squeeze himself into the hole. It was a fairly tight fit, but unfortunately not too tight, and when he had almost disappeared the Frenchman twisted round to look back up at them, his face at floor level.

‘There now! You see that you will not find it too difficult, just a little dusty. I will prepare the way for you.’

Ollivier’s eyes met Mitchell’s steadily.

‘And don’t get any ideas about jumping Sorel, Captain. Don’t even talk to him, he won’t understand you and it will make him nervous. Then he might shoot you, and that would be a great pity, eh?’

As Mitchell watched the Frenchman disappear he sensed within himself a curious feeling of unreality. His eyes had been watching, his ears had been hearing; their information was still being relayed to his brain to be analysed. But somehow he couldn’t believe that he was really part of what was happening. It was the man Lefevre who was here, not the man Mitchell; what would happen, would happen to Lefevre, not Mitchell - Mitchell would get up tomorrow morning and pick up the threads of his life, regardless of what happened to Lefevre.

Because Lefevre would be dead, he was very sure - because that promise of safety and survival was a lie and an afterthought betrayed by the whole line of Ollivier’s earlier questions. They had been directed towards one answer and one answer only: the nature of the clue which had led to the knowledge of the tunnel.

But of course there was no clue. Or, at least, Harry Bellamy’s beautiful shotgun was by itself an insufficient clue until added to his own special knowledge of the war and Charles Emerson -and the odds against anyone else being able to duplicate that were infinite. Indeed, that had been the Frenchman’s twin objective in involving Audley: to find out if such a clue existed and then to destroy it.

Mitchell shivered involuntarily as he realised he was staring into the black hole of the shaft. His death was down there. He had spoken his own sentence and authorised his own execution. He was the clue which had to be destroyed.

His death and Audley’s and Nikki’s: that had been the mad glitter in Ollivier’s eye, not the reflection of the naked bulb: they would all be casualties in Ollivier’s war, their innocence or guilt irrelevant because they were the necessary price of secrecy and survival.

No one had seen them come; by morning the pink car would be far away. Once they were underground -

‘I owe you an apology, Paul,’ said Audley conversationally.

‘
Ferme ta gueule,
’
snapped Sorel.

‘Screw you, friend.’

Audley inclined his head towards Nikki, ignoring the man.

‘And I must apologise to you also, mademoiselle. I have been unpardonably stupid.’

Mitchell saw that the expression on the big man’s face belied the gentleness of his voice.

‘Nevertheless … while there is life …’ Audley turned slowly towards Sorel as though calculating exactly how many words would be too many, ‘… there is hope.’

The muzzle of the machine-pistol was now pointing at Audley’s chest. For an instant Mitchell waited for the man to fire, then the muzzle swung slowly back to cover them all again.

He breathed out gratefully. Audley had gone to the limit, to the very last syllable, to risk passing on his message that their lives depended on their taking the first chance that presented itself. But now there could be no more words.

‘Sorel -
je suis pret.
’

The voice from the shaft took him by surprise as he was measuring the impossible distance between himself and Sorel.

‘You first, Captain Lefevre.’

If there had ever been a chance above ground, there was none now.

The shaft was wider than it had seemed from above. Twisting as he remembered Ollivier had done, Mitchell found regular ledges for his toes - a miniature stairway in brick - which prevented him from sliding. At first he could sense rather than see the roof close to his head, but when he looked upwards after having descended ten or twelve feet he could see that it had been arched for greater strength in the same brickwork that was beneath his fingers and toes.

This wasn’t German work. But of course this upper part of the entrance had certainly been blown up by the British assault troops in 1916, like every other bolt-hole along the ridge - except presumably the dugout and tunnel entrances in the Prussian Redoubt and Rattlesnake Ravine which the Germans themselves had probably blown in to isolate the Poachers underground.

So this must be about where the old farmer had rediscovered the shaft while digging out the foundations for his wall or his cellar…

Suddenly his foot hit an obstruction which quivered at the blow. There was a dim light coming from below and in it he could just make out the topmost rung of a ladder lashed to the twisted metal rods protruding from a shattered section of reinforced concrete. The shaft beneath was steeper and timbered; it was nothing like any photograph he had ever seen of German underground work, but then he knew he had never particularly remarked such pictures anyway. Down the timbers to his right ran a collection of wires, two thick old electric cables and a number of what must be telephone wires.

‘Come on, Captain. No time to admire the scenery.’

The voice came from nowhere - from somewhere still some distance below him. He clambered off the brickwork on to the ladder, dislodging a few small pieces of debris which pattered on to the rungs below. His hands were covered in dust and cobwebs which he could feel rather than see: everything was bone dry down here, even the air had a dry, chalky smell about it where he would have expected mustiness. It was like a tomb which had long passed through the stages of rottenness and decay to reach an equilibrium in which all other smells had been neutralised.

He stepped off the ladder on to the firmness of the tunnel’s floor.

‘Call Mademoiselle MacMahon, Captain.’

Mitchell stared upwards. He seemed to have descended an immeasurable distance, so that the real world was even further away than the distant suggestion of light far above him.

‘Very good. Now I want you to stand to the left of the ladder. I have a Sten gun - a gift from Britain thirty years ago, but none the worse for its age, I do assure you. We have any number of them down here, still as good as the day they were made. Turn and face the wall, if you please - that’s right.’