Betrayal (8 page)

Then, too, there was Jimmy—Captain James Allanby. Mary knew he had ordered this, that he must be watching her from the top of that bloody keep. He'd see the books and wonder about them, would hate her for having never paid the slightest attention to him at any of the staff do's. Arrogant—did he think that of her? Did he not sense that she had instantly come to feel there wasn't something quite right about him?

A lone woman, dressed almost as she'd been the other day. The brown velvet jacket was a favourite. It went with so many things and it had lots of useful pockets, had been brushed thoroughly, brushed of its seeds and burs, brushed to that sheen only a good quality of velvet can possess. Didn't it compliment the beige skirt and sand-coloured knee socks, her brown Oxfords, her eyes most of all?

Still there wasn't a sign of anyone—not up on the battlements of the enclosing walls, not anywhere within the bailey below them. Nothing, either, from the many tall windows of the castle house proper, but would the sun and the drifting clouds not block those out with glare or reflections?

Access to the keep was either from within the castle via the second storey, or by the stone staircase to a forebuilding that went up to that same floor. Mary took the latter because she'd been told to, but paused only once to look back across that wasteland.

Cannon were positioned at the four corners of the parade square. A flagpole stood in its centre. Five flags then—at least five. She picked out three of them. The wind … the wind atop the keep must be gusting hard.

Reaching the iron-studded, oaken door at last, knowing how heavy it would be, she set the books down to use both hands and brace a foot against the sill. A rush of cold air hit her, she being momentarily blinded by flying dust. Straining now, she pulled the thing open and struggled to retrieve the books, finding this all but impossible unless she threw a shoulder against the door.

It slammed so hard behind her, the sound of it reverberated in the emptiness, making her cringe and hurry on beneath a high stone arch whose portcullis hung above her like a grill of iron teeth set to come crashing down, a lesson in castles for which she might once have been grateful. Boiling oil and hot boulders or iron-tipped arrows would have rained through the murder holes, though this was only a pseudo-Norman castle, not a real one, but was Jimmy watching her through one of them? Would he cut the string and search through the books, he and Major Trant and Colonel Bannerman, the three of them in front of Hamish?

The corridor was nearly seventy-five feet in length, and at the end of it, more stairs began again and it was still so very silent, it made her shudder.

Jimmy was waiting on the battlements some eighty feet above. The wind was freezing. It drove the flag above him to desperation, and at first he didn't say a thing, and she thought then that it really was all up for her, but she wouldn't beg, not even for Hamish's sake.

A Vickers machine gun covered the bailey. One of the merlons had been taken down so as to widen the embrassure and give the thing a greater field of fire. Sandbags helped to buttress the gun and its crew of three.

Two sentries, armed with Lee Enfields, stood to attention in the wings. Was she to be arrested?

‘Well, Mrs. Fraser, good of you to have come. Major Trant thought you might like the view. I hope you're not dizzy.'

‘Jimmy, why this? Why up here? What's happened?'

She was looking positively ill. Allanby hesitated, asked harshly of himself as he had many times before, Why the bloody hell did Hamish Fraser have to have a wife like this?

Her eyes were moistening rapidly—was it simply because of the wind, he wondered, or because she was afraid of what she'd been up to? ‘The prisoners are confined to their barrack rooms until further notice.'

‘Then why the machine gun?' demanded Mary, seeing nothing in his gaze but the brutal emptiness of an accuser.

‘They're allowed an hour of exercise under Sergeant Stuart's command—push-ups, calisthenics, a forced run of three miles around the compound.'

The bailey and its ring road. ‘I see,' she said, turning away to look out over the place and catch glimpses of other machine guns and other sentries on the high points, on subordinate towers and along the battlements of the intervening walls. Had they always been up here? Had there always been so many, and why would Jimmy let her see them if he knew she was meeting Erich Kramer in secret and would be bound to tell him?

‘They've threatened to break out, have they?' she asked, unable to keep the sarcasm from her. Like Fay Darcy, Jimmy had chosen to stand directly behind her, the gun crew and sentries hearing everything, of course, because normal conversation was impossible and one had to all but yell.

‘They've hanged an innocent man, Mrs. Fraser. A man who had no use for their Nazi doctrines and was strong enough to have said so.'

‘An informer?' she asked too swiftly, biting back the tears, knowing that it really was all up for her.

She was still clutching her latest bundle of books by its string. A gust of wind flung her hair about, she still not turning to face him. Crying now, was she? he wondered. Allanby knew he wanted to break her, wanted to smash that infernal pride. ‘That husband of yours has threatened to take his bitching to London, to a higher authority than the British High Command in Belfast. To put it bluntly, he wants to mollycoddle murderers—Nazi swine, Mrs. Fraser. There's a war on.'

‘And some of them have been pretty badly wounded.'

Must she always rankle him? ‘Our authority can't be challenged. There is the law of the land to be obeyed. British law.'

‘Then why let me in?'

Allanby wanted to shriek, ‘Look at me, damn you!' but would hold himself in check and every bit as erect. ‘Because, as a measure of our good faith, and in hopes one of them will come forward, the colonel's decided to allow the library to be reopened three afternoons a week.'

‘From two until four?' she asked, knowing Hamish must have raised hell.

‘On market days.'

Stung by this, Mary turned to angrily face him. He
couldn't
have known she had agreed to meet Nolan and the others on those days. He couldn't! Yet still there was that emptiness. Jimmy was watching her far too closely. A raw, tough, and unfeeling man when it came to war, and this
was
war, but had they been using her all along to find things out? Had they? ‘The conditions, Captain? What is it you people want of me?'

Allanby noted the distress and the bitterness—she had realized well enough that she'd naively repeated things overheard, but he'd not smile in triumph, not yet. He'd take her by an elbow and guide her over to one of the merlons, would force her to look straight down. ‘That you say nothing of this meeting either to those bastards in here or to that husband of yours, and that you will report everything to me that you see and overhear.'

‘My German's useless.'

‘You studied it at college. I've seen you suddenly turn when things were said by them.'

‘My first in third-year university classics and modern languages is far too rusty. Besides, I simply won't do it.'

‘I didn't think you would.'

‘What's that supposed to mean? A deal … some sort of deal?'

‘Make of it what you will.'

‘Wait and see what happens—is that it, Jimmy?'

Her lower lip was quivering; her cheeks were tightening. By God it was good to have her like this. He'd break her, he really would but would only say, ‘Yes, wait and see.'

Mary went first, she hurrying to keep ahead of him, the two of them pitching down the stairs and along each length of corridor, faster now, their steps resounding until she was practically running. At any moment she knew she'd burst into tears, would throw the books down and …

Allanby snatched at an arm. Missing it, he tried again and managed to yank her to a stop, her chest rising and falling in panic, she struggling to find the will to face him.

Only as her chest eased, the tears plain enough, did he let her have it. ‘Colonel wants to see you in the staff common, madam. You're to come along now.'

Bachmann … The Leutnant zur See must have told them everything.

Tea—the real stuff—had a seductive quality about it. When taken clear the way she sometimes did, it looked like bog water but was warm and that was supposed to reassure a person who was in trouble with the law, was supposed to make her feel that things might not be so bad if only she would loosen her tongue, and yes, the colonel really did have his supplies of tea.

All the prelims were over, the intros so to speak, the false bantering, the too many hellos and mock surprise at her entry. Colonel Bannerman was sitting in one of the heavy leather armchairs the British Army had found for his use, Major Trant in another, and Hamish … Had it been Hamish who had put the cup and saucer into her hands?

It had been the orderly. A plate of sugared biscuits—ginger perhaps—was passed, she shaking her head, Hamish saying, ‘Now, Mary, at least try one. Mrs. Bannerman made them especially.'

For what? For this inquisition? Hard as bullets they were and therefore to be dunked, she letting him and the others return to their talk, they all stalling—holding back the worst until the last and keeping it in so as to make her suffer all the more.

The bundle of books was now on a side table nearest Major Trant who liked to use a short, ivory cigarette holder and to cross his knees when observing trapped women.

Trant was in his early fifties—fit like all the rest of them except for the colonel. He had very dark brown eyes and no sense of humour that she could ever discern. None of that searching emptiness. No, Trant always knew beforehand exactly which direction to take and what the subject was thinking.

He was an expert in interrogating prisoners of war. It was his specialty. Inadvertently she must have given him lots she'd overheard, fool that she'd been.

The chin was narrow, the jaw and cheeks cleaved upwards in a
V
to the small, but still cauliflower ears he'd belligerently earned in the ring at Sandhurst. The brow was narrow, the dark black hair short and crinkly, the nose aquiline, one might have said had it not been broken, the eyes of medium spacing but small and darting under jet black brows that were thin.

There were sun blotches—he'd spent time in the Far East, had been a liaison officer attached to the Hong Kong police force, it was said. A man of medium height but one who always seemed to be at eye level with whomever he was addressing. Trant didn't ‘talk' in the normal sense of people who are at ease with themselves and with one another, at least not that she had ever witnessed. He ‘addressed,' his colonel in particular.

In another life and at another time, Colonel Dulsin Bannerman, ‘Dulsey' for short, would have been the epitome of a country squire. Something out of Fielding perhaps.

Robust and short, the uniform stretched at the buttons, he was bound in by the Sam Brown belt. Bannerman tried to please everyone. He liked an ‘easy ship,' liked his accounts to be ‘square.' He had the bluest eyes of any man she had ever encountered—far bluer than Erich's or even those of Liam Nolan, of that unnatural blue that signals something wrong in the character, something hidden.

The short blond, carefully trimmed hair was now faded, washed-out and turning to the very pale grey he had accepted long ago. A man of some sixty-seven years and past ‘retirement.'

Snatches of their conversation came to her. The British had airfields and army and naval bases in Northern Ireland. There was a training camp for ‘special forces.' The factories and shipyards in Belfast were back to normal, or nearly so. Nothing worth listening to. Just dross to lull her for the big event, but then, suddenly out of the blue as it were, and from the colonel, he having poured himself another cup of tea and reaching for another biscuit, ‘Are we agreeable, Dr. Fraser?'

The doctor set his cup and saucer aside,
and
his pipe, Mary realizing that for the first time ever in her thoughts, she had referred to Hamish as ‘the doctor.'

‘Colonel, I want two periods of exercise for them each day and a return to their games of soccer.
Och
, it takes the steam out of them, man. You know it yourself. Am I no' right, Major?'

‘Dr. Fraser, we've got to find the killer, or killers, of that man. London won't have it otherwise. Orders are orders,' said Trant.

‘But surely locking them up won't work? Put them off their guard. Loosen up.'

‘Admit that Second Lieutenant Bachmann was an informer, that it?' went on Trant.

‘Yes. He was one of theirs. They …'

‘Had a right to exercise their own brand of justice?' demanded Trant, uncrossing his knees and getting up to slosh tea, bloody tea, all over the carpet.

But not on his precious uniform, thank God.

Hamish wasn't going to back off. Mary could see this at a glance. ‘These men are prisoners of war,' he said. ‘Under the articles of the Geneva Convention, I ask again that you allow them sufficient exercise
and
food,
and
recreation to maintain normal health. I also want my patients transferred to civilian hospitals where they can get the proper prostheses and physiotherapy. You can't keep those poor men waiting forever!'

‘Damn it, man, there's a war on,' shouted Trant.

Had he met his match? wondered Mary. Hamish drew himself up—the colonel knew what he was about to say but did Hamish deliberately let him intercede?

‘Now, now, gentlemen. A compromise, isn't that right, Mrs. Fraser? A happy medium, with some privileges being withheld until such time as …'

‘As hell freezes over?' demanded Hamish. ‘I meant what I said, Colonel. I'll go to London if necessary. I'll see the prime minister himself.'

‘A fat lot of good that'll do,' snorted Trant.