The Suicide Exhibition: The Never War (Never War 1) (24 page)

‘But…’ Sarah struggled to disagree with this. Most of what they were investigating was based on supposition and extrapolation. ‘Shingle Bay – they know that happened.’

‘Just a raid – so they would say. The enemy probing our defences.’

‘And what about Hess?’

‘Again, to play devil’s advocate, do we really want to commit valuable resources, money and personnel to investigating the ravings of a delusional misfit who has defected from the enemy and could for all we know be feeding us all sorts of bogus
nonsense precisely to ensure we make those commitments?’

Sarah suddenly felt desperately exposed – could she go back to the ATA after this? What would she tell them? What about the aircraft she had
seen
? ‘Surely we don’t cost the war effort very much.’

‘True,’ Miss Manners agreed. ‘But the problem is, the war effort doesn’t
have
very much.’

Brinkman was making notes as he read through a pile of documents. He didn’t look up when Sarah knocked and went into his office. She waited for a while, coughed politely when he still didn’t look up, and waited some more. Finally, he glanced at her and gave a small nod.

‘We should tell the Americans,’ she said. Best to be direct. ‘I know someone at the embassy.’

‘Why?’

‘They can provide funding. We’d be less dependent on the British war effort, not have to worry about MI5 and SOE and the others grabbing our budget.’

‘You think the Americans would believe us?’ he asked.

She could tell from his tone that he didn’t. ‘We could try.’

Brinkman grunted and returned his attention to the papers on his desk.

‘Is that a “No”, then?’

‘We’re not wasting time and effort telling the Americans. They want to get involved, they can do it properly rather than continually sitting on the fence.’

‘But this is different.’ Sarah said, exasperated.

‘We’re still fighting a war.’

‘Not if we lose our funding we’re not.’

Brinkman sighed. He leaned back in his chair. ‘Thank you for the thought, Sarah.’

He usually called her ‘Miss Diamond’. She was only ‘Sarah’ when he was annoyed.

‘As in “thanks but no thanks” you mean. But look,’ she went on, ‘surely things are different now that Roosevelt and Churchill have signed the Atlantic Charter?’

‘It stops short of bringing the US into the war.’ Brinkman sighed, wiping his hand across his forehead. ‘I’m sorry. Sharing information with the Americans would still be difficult under the best of circumstances. I’m sure it will happen one day, but not yet.’

‘And American funding?’

‘To be honest – not if I can help it. They’d turn this whole operation into a bloody circus.’

Davenport sat in the front and talked to her almost all the way. That at least made Sarah feel she wasn’t just there to act as the driver. Guy dozed in the back, and she knew he’d been at the office most of the previous night finishing up paperwork from a fruitless day interviewing fighter pilots. None of them had seen the UDT they had almost intercepted, but it still had to be written up and filed.

‘It’s on a smaller scale to the French barrow,’ Davenport said, once he had exhausted the latest society gossip. ‘But the design is very similar. From my notes we were able to dig in, avoiding most of the traps and tricks Streicher’s men ran into. Green commandeered a squad from some nearby unit and the ground’s firm enough they could dig quite deep and come up into the central passageway from underneath.’ He mimed with his hand. ‘Clever, eh? My idea, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Sarah said. She couldn’t help smiling.

‘False modesty is
so
affected, don’t you think?’ Davenport said.

‘I’ve not come across it recently.’

Davenport smiled back. ‘If Green and his chaps have been putting their backs into it, they’ll have broken into the main passageway, just shy of the burial chamber itself.’

‘When do they break into that?’ Guy asked from the back of the car, stifling a yawn.

‘Oh they don’t. Green will dismiss the men before that.’ Davenport lapsed into uncharacteristic silence, and Sarah guessed he was recalling the ordeals of France.

‘Had the devil’s own job finding the place last week,’
Davenport said as they drew closer to their destination. ‘The road signs have all been taken away and according to Green about half the population has been moved out of East Anglia. So no signs to follow and no one to ask.’

He seemed to know the way perfectly now, and Sarah guessed he remembered a route as easily as he recalled his lines for a play. Certainly it seemed that once he had read something, Davenport could remember it pretty much verbatim.

Main roads gave way to narrow, winding lanes and finally, they turned off the lane and on to a single-track bridleway. They reached a farm gate, and Davenport got out to open it and allow the car through.

As he pushed open the gate, an elderly woman came hurrying up from the other side of the hedge. Her grey hair blew across her face and she pushed it aside irritably before jabbing her finger at Davenport.

‘Who is she?’ Guy asked, leaning forward in his rear seat.

‘No idea. She’s not happy, though.’

The woman had turned to glare at the staff car, pointing. When Guy opened his window, her glare turned into a smile for a moment. She hurried forward, and Sarah could make out the details of her weather-beaten face and milky eyes.

‘Is that him? It doesn’t look like him,’ she said, her voice a sharp nasal whine.

Davenport caught up with her. ‘No, that’s not him. He’s very busy, but we’re hoping tomorrow. Or possibly the day after.’

The woman turned. ‘I shall want to see him.’

‘Of course. I’m sure he’ll want to thank you personally.’ The woman seemed to stiffen slightly at this. ‘Really? You think so?’

‘I’m sure of it,’ Davenport said.

The woman nodded. ‘Very well then. You can drop me by the barn, I’ll walk from there.’

Sarah watched in surprise as Davenport opened the back door of the car to let the woman climb in. He raised his eyebrows at Sarah before returning to the gate and waving her through.

‘So who are you, then?’ the woman demanded as they stopped to let Davenport close the gate behind the car.

‘Um, Major Pentecross. And this is Miss Diamond.’

‘Hello,’ Sarah said, glancing back and switching on a smile.

The woman did not smile back. ‘They let women drive, do they?’

Davenport opened the door in time to hear this. ‘Oh, indeed,’ he said. ‘And Miss Diamond is very good at it. She flies aeroplanes too.’

‘Does she?’ The words were laced with both admiration and disapproval in roughly equal measure.

‘This is Lady Grenchard,’ Davenport explained as they drove slowly up the track. ‘She owns the land, and indeed the burial mound. She has very kindly allowed us to dig a very small investigative trench.’ He nodded meaningfully at Sarah and Pentecross.

‘They tell me that I can see how it’s going when Mr Carter arrives,’ Lady Grenchard said. ‘Though why the need for all the secrecy I have no idea.’

‘Bureaucracy, I’m afraid. The war, you know.’

Lady Grenchard sighed. ‘This war is so inconvenient.’

Sarah was about to make a sarcastic comment. But the old woman added quietly: ‘They killed my grandson, you know. The Germans.’ She wiped her sleeve over her eyes. ‘The sooner it’s all sorted out and we send them packing the better. I shall be very cross, Mr Davenport,’ she went on quickly, ‘if your people have dug too close to the mound. We respect the dead here. And the legends. I told you about the legends.’

‘Indeed you did.’ Davenport ignored Sarah’s inquisitive glance. ‘And we will be very careful, I can assure you.’

‘What legends are these?’ Guy asked, ignoring the glare this earned from Davenport.

Lady Grenchard was shocked. ‘Hasn’t he told you?’

‘We’re just visiting. Rather short notice.’

‘Local stories about the burial mound,’ Davenport said. ‘Apparently it’s cursed.’

‘Really?’ Sarah said.

‘Oh do tell,’ Guy said. ‘This is all so interesting.’

Lady Grenchard seemed to soften slightly at his request. ‘The legends date back longer than anyone can remember. But the mound is said to be the burial place of an ancient chieftain. He was a tyrant – oh, a terrible man if the stories are true. Dreadful. It is said that if anyone opens the burial chamber, they will die the most agonising death and the chieftain will rise again to claim his former kingdom.’

Guy nodded. ‘How… fascinating.’

‘I put no store in such frivolous stories myself, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘But as the landowner I do have a responsibility to history, and to local superstition and feeling. My father was very much a believer that we should leave well alone. He said that the story was probably a load of tommyrot – that was the word he used. Tommyrot. But if there was even the slightest chance that the smallest part of it might have some grain of truth in it… Well.’

‘Well,’ Davenport echoed. ‘Indeed.’

‘Just here will do very nicely, thank you.’

It took Sarah a moment to realise the woman was talking to her. She stopped the car beside a stone-built barn, and Lady Grenchard got out.

‘You will tell me when he arrives,’ she said to Davenport. Her tone made it clear this was an order rather than a request.

‘Oh I will, I promise.’

He let out a long sigh as they drove on. ‘We’ll have to leave the car at the bottom of the hill. The track peters out after that.’

‘This Mr Carter she’s waiting for?’ Guy asked slowly. ‘Is he…?’

‘Yes. I didn’t want to have to order her to make the land available. That would have garnered all sorts of unwanted attention, and it doesn’t do to upset the local nobility. Could make things a bit sticky.’

‘So you told her Howard Carter was coming to see the excavations?’

‘Together with the promise of a couple of tickets to my next West End play. Though God alone knows when that will be.’

‘Hang on,’ Sarah said. ‘You mean Howard Carter as in the chap who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun?’

Davenport nodded. ‘That’s the one. Luckily, the formidable Lady Grenchard doesn’t seem to be aware of the fact the poor blighter’s been dead for a couple of years.’

The track wound its way down the side of a hill towards woodland. At the edge of the woods a truck was parked – having brought Green and his soldiers, Sarah assumed. She parked the staff car close by, leaving room for the truck to turn.

They made their way on foot through the woods to the burial mound. It was strange walking through the landscape that Sarah had examined so closely on the aerial photographs. When they emerged from the small wooded area, it was to see the grass-covered mound rising up in front of them. It looked just like a small hill, the regular shape visible in the photographs indiscernible at ground level.

As they approached. Sarah could hear a low rumble, like a badly tuned engine. A generator, she realised, seeing thick cables running to a dark maw at the side of the mound. To the side, just where the trees started again, freshly dug earth was banked up in huge piles.

‘She’ll have a fit if she sees this,’ Davenport said.

No one needed to ask who he meant. There was a deep trench cut into the ground on one side of the ‘hill’. It formed a tunnel, leading down into darkness. Wooden posts and lintels held the ground back, and electric lamps were strung between them casting a pale yellow glow through the tunnel.

‘Abandon hope and all that,’ Davenport said, leading them into the tunnel. ‘Mind your heads, it gets a bit low further along. Oh, and there’s a pit we have to get across, no idea how deep it is. Would rather not find out.’

Sarah had visions of having to jump. But the soldiers had laid long wooden boards. They had to cross one at a time so
their weight didn’t break the planks. Even so, they creaked and bent alarmingly in the middle as Sarah made her way quickly across.

The air grew musty and heavy, cloying in the heat and ever-present dust. They seemed to be burrowing deep into the ground. Sarah couldn’t help thinking of the fate of the narrator of
The Coming Race
– his journey underground and what he found there…

‘Nearly there,’ Davenport assured them at last.

Ahead, Sarah could hear the sound of laughter. The tunnel had been rising for a while, so they were walking uphill. Finally it opened out into a wider area, hollowed out from the earth. How far beneath the burial mound they were, Sarah had no idea. Tools were piled up around the edge of the area – pickaxes and shovels, wheelbarrows and buckets. A group of half a dozen soldiers stood or sat in the middle of the open space. Sergeant Green came to greet them.

‘Just got a brew on if you fancy a cup of tea.’

One of the soldiers was pumping the small plunger at the side of a primus stove to build pressure in the metal canister. Once he had done that, he struck a match on the heel of his boot and lit the stove. Water was already starting to boil in a billycan resting on the top of another stove.

‘Come to make the tea, love?’ one of them called across to Sarah.

She forced a smile. ‘In your dreams.’

‘You don’t want to know about my dreams, darling.’

‘Oi!’ Green barked. ‘Show some respect for the lady.’

The soldiers suddenly leaped to their feet – not in response to Green’s words, but seeing the uniformed Guy emerge into the dim light.

‘As you were,’ he said. ‘But the sergeant’s right. Miss Diamond maybe a civilian, but you can behave as if she outranks you. Any order she gives – jump to it. You and your team have done a splendid job,’ he went on, turning to Green. ‘Well done.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Davenport motioned to Green, and the two of them withdrew to the edge of the area where another, wider passageway entered. They spoke in hushed voices for a few moments before Green returned to the soldiers.

‘I’ve told him to send the men back to their base when they’ve had their tea,’ Davenport explained. ‘We can take it from here.’ He pointed to where the opening ended in a smooth wall caked with dust and dirt. ‘The lads widened this whole area. It was just a passageway, leading to that. Through there is what we are after. Assuming it follows the same design as in France, and so far that has been the case.’