Five Boys (11 page)

Aldred had pumped out “Let Us with a Gladsome Mind” and “Lord of Mercy and of Might,” and the Romans had marched in and back out again, when the Reverend Bentley’s voice dropped by the best part of an octave and he whispered, “Let us pray.” Aldred put his hands together, closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his fingertips. He had often wondered why children prayed with such devotion while their parents just linked a few indifferent fingers and stared at the floor. He wondered also how the Reverend Bentley prayed at all with such swollen fingers, but the man obviously managed, for his prayers would sometimes last upward of five minutes and cover a whole host of things.

On this particular Sunday they included a reference to a leaking roof (which might have been real or metaphorical), a fallen tree (likewise) and some ginger biscuits which had arrived in the post from a sister in Salisbury. The reverend’s meditations could last so long and meander so wildly that Aldred would sometimes be tempted to steal an illicit peek of light, but when he heard the reverend mention the Focke Wulf’s attack on the village he felt the powerful beam of celebrity swing onto him and squeezed his eyes even tighter shut.

Thanks were given that no one in the parish had been seriously injured. One could only guess, the reverend said, whether the pilot had been dispatched with orders to terrorize the citizens of the South Hams or had simply added it to his itinerary. The Reverend Bentley then informed the congregation that he had been out that morning, following the path of bullet holes up and down the lane, and made a rather startling discovery. The reverend paused. Aldred stared into his own deep well of darkness and tried to imagine what it might be, and when the reverend finally continued his voice was so quiet that when Lillian Minter turned her good ear toward the pulpit the rest of the congregation did the same.

There were bullet holes in the war memorial, the reverend told them. Bullets in the monument to the Great War’s dead. What kind of man, he asked, would show such contempt for the fallen? What kind of man, he demanded, would strafe a village street? And, in an uncustomary fit of fire and brimstone, he suggested that for those who regarded themselves as being above the law of God, Judgment Day would prove a rude awakening.

But his pronouncements were wasted on Aldred, whose eyes had popped open at the first mention of bullet holes in the war memorial and when the reverend moved onto other prayerful considerations his organ pumper was left far behind. The congregation said their amens without him, the reverend announced the next hymn and Mr. Mercer plucked at the string and the hanky twitched behind the organ but Aldred Crouch just stared into space. Time and again, Mr. Mercer held down the opening chord of “The Saviour’s Head Was Crowned with Thorns,” without a whisper coming up from the organ’s great arsenal of pipes. The only sound was the light clatter of his fingernails tapping the keys, and the whole service had lost its way when either the hanky or the congregation’s embarrassed silence finally managed to get between Aldred and the war memorial. He leaped to his feet, grabbed the lever and started pumping. Pumped harder than he had ever pumped before. And, like a gramophone cranked back up to speed, the organ groaned into life, the bones of a tune were thrown to the congregation and the great cogs of Sunday morning turned again.

The journey back through the graveyard seemed to take forever and along the way Aldred had to weather a terrible, if wheezy, tirade. But the moment the organist let go of his shoulder and gravity was pulling the old man back into his chair, Aldred was off like a shot toward the war memorial with his key flailing about his ears.

A small crowd had already gathered around it. Some old fellow was pointing his walking stick up at the bullet holes, as if he might take some credit for picking them out. Aldred forced his way through to the front until he could see the
holes himself, then stood and stared at them with what he hoped was the same sort of expression as the one-legged servicemen looking into the hole in the ground, and the harder he stared at the spidery cracks in the stone the more convinced he became that they spelled out some strange message of their own.

C
ONSIDERING THE
incredible commotion when the Focke Wulf went over, the only wonder was that it didn’t leave more carnage in its wake. The few people who actually saw the plane fly down the high street were unanimous in their opinion that if it had been any lower it would have trimmed off all the chimney pots.

The post office had been in full session, with Miss Pye telling her customers in the strictest confidence about a suspicious pregnancy out in Tuckenhay, and Mrs. Mercer was crossing the road to join them when she heard what she thought, at first, was a lorry hurtling down the hill—a lorry which must have taken the brow above the church at such a lick that its wheels had left the ground. Then suddenly the lorry had wings and was heading straight for her. And was nothing like a lorry at all. She saw the road erupting toward her. Heard the rattle of gunfire. Then she was scrambling over her own garden wall and throwing herself headfirst into her own lupines to get out of the way.

Naturally, the Boys were delighted that their village had been singled out for such malevolent attention, but couldn’t help but feel that the occasion would have been better distinguished by a fatality or two. If the pilot had only swung by when the powwow at the post office was dispersing he would have had plenty of old folk hobbling
about the place. Then there would have been stretchers and blankets and bandages, and ambulances racing up and down the lanes.

They gathered by the war memorial late on the Sunday afternoon to gaze at the runes of the bullet holes. Someone suggested getting a ladder so that they could run their fingers along the tiny cracks and crevices, but no one could be bothered to go and look for one. Then they set off down the lane, from one bullet hole to another, like a tour around old Pompeii, with Bobby and Aldred newly promoted to second lieutenants alongside Finn and Hector, and Harvey and Lewis bringing up the rear.

They came to a halt outside the Mercers’ cottage. A few bits of the drystone wall were still scattered in the lane and Hector turned one over with his boot and wondered aloud how things might have turned out if Mrs. Mercer had failed to find a foothold or been pushing her one-lunged husband in his wheelchair and had had to abandon him.

Lewis was pointing to the broken lupines, indicating the area where Mrs. Mercer had landed among them and the likely path of her flight, when there was a violent rapping at one of the windows and the boys looked up to see Mrs. Mercer herself shaking a bandaged fist at them. For a couple of seconds they stood their ground, as if they had been doing nothing wrong and were determined that they had every right to be there. Then they turned and, engaging one another in rather self-conscious conversation, shuffled off down the lane.

On the whole, the village tended to tolerate the Captain’s odd little habits. If he wanted to lock himself away all day with his boats and bottles then that was his business. Harvey’s
mother reckoned she was about as much of a captain as he was and the one time Hector’s father tried to coax some nautical anecdote out of him he swore you could see him piecing the story together as he went along. But if sitting hunched over a tray all day was considered quite harmless during peacetime, doing so on a Sunday when the country was at war was something else again. Some of the Boys had heard their mothers use the word “unpatriotic” to describe such behavior and as their own attitude toward the man alternated between ridicule and suspicion it wasn’t long before they managed to link the Focke Wulf’s visit with the Captain’s semaphore.

Bobby and the Five Boys met one night around the back of the graveyard to discuss the possibility that they had a Nazi sympathizer in their midst. Establishing the Captain’s guilt took only a matter of seconds. What took a little longer was agreeing to a suitable response. Lewis proposed setting fire to the Captain’s cottage, and for a while they all sat around and imagined the flames spewing from the windows and the old man trapped inside. Finn and Hector were in no hurry to oppose the idea, knowing that sooner or later one of the other boys would voice their concerns, and it was Lewis who eventually pointed out that any incriminating charts or codebooks would go up with the Captain and the proposal was put to one side.

Other offensives were bandied about—there was much talk of tunnels and rope with hooks attached to the end of it—but all the Boys wanted to do was break into the Captain’s cottage and have a snoop around. It was generally accepted that the attic room from which he sent his semaphore was probably the heart of his operations, where all his files and papers would be stored, and from that point on
the discussion concentrated on how they might make their way up to it and what they might be likely to find.

Aldred was all for forging a letter from Miss Pye, full of hints and promises, with a map and directions to some far-flung tryst. Finn suggested luring him out into the garden and hitting him over the head with a brick. The longer they waited, they knew, the more chance there was of common sense prevailing, so they resolved there and then to break into the Captain’s house on the night of his next semaphore, which would enable them to find out who he was sending messages to. Hector proposed that Bobby should be the one to do it. It would, he said, be a sort of initiation, although the word meant nothing to Bobby or any of the other Boys.

Bobby was so relieved to be on the same side as the Five Boys that any misgivings he had about creeping up on the Captain were swept away. If the old man was stupid enough to draw attention to himself, he thought, then he would just have to face the consequences.

Bobby was a bag of nerves all day Tuesday and hardly touched his supper, which got Miss Minter worrying that the Five Boys had been at him again, and as he crouched in the alley by the Captain’s cottage at eight o’clock what little food he’d managed to get down him threatened to come back up.

Aldred was on the roof of the church tower with his imaginary binoculars directed at the Captain’s cottage. The moment the light went on in the attic he dropped to his knees, crept over to the far wall and put his head through the parapet.

“He’s there,” he whispered down into the darkness. “He’s
there.”

Lewis saluted and set off across the graveyard. He’d been standing among the gravestones for the last five minutes and was glad to be leaving them behind. He marched down the path but covered the last few yards on all fours, as agreed in the briefing, and popped his head above the gate. He waved at Harvey, who was crouched beside the war memorial, and when he waved a second time Harvey spotted him and waved back.

Finn leaned against the corner of the Captain’s cottage and Harvey was aware that he could easily have strolled right over to him, but dutifully crawled around the base of the war memorial and waved in Finn’s direction until he disappeared down the side of the house.

Bobby was wearing Aldred’s balaclava. It was meant to help him sneak about the place without being seen but seemed to be doing nothing but generate a great deal of heat and make his ears itch, and he was still debating whether to take if off and put it in his pocket when Finn came jogging down the alleyway.

Hector was right beside Bobby and patted him on the shoulder.

“You ready?” he said.

Bobby nodded, took a breath and headed toward the Captain’s porch.

He must have got to his feet a bit too fast after so much crouching. Ail the blood which should have been in his head seemed to be slopping around in his boots. But he kept his eyes on his destination and tacked his way toward it like a drunk. And once he was inside the wooden porch he paused and hung off the door handle for a few seconds to try and recover himself.

He must have opened that door half a dozen times during
his first few days as an evacuee and when he thought of all the cakes and peculiar conversation he’d shared with the Captain a wave of shame threatened to wash him away, but he threw his weight into the door, and the door popped open. Then he was in the Captain’s parlor, with the Captain nowhere to be seen.

As he closed the door behind him Bobby felt as though he was shutting the door on his own prison cell. He tiptoed into the room, stood and looked around for a moment before crawling into a corner and hiding behind an armchair. He drew his knees up to his chin and studied the weave of the material a few inches from his face to try and calm himself, but his head felt as if it was boiling and Aldred’s balaclava was now damp and heavy with sweat.

“What if he smells me?” Bobby thought. “What if he smells me hiding in his house?”

It had been agreed that Hector and Finn would count to a hundred before knocking, so that Bobby would have enough time to hide away, and as he sat there he was sure he could hear them slowly reeling off the numbers out in the alleyway. The bottled ships were stacked all around him and Bobby thought of all the work that had gone into them. Then he imagined the tiny ships lying wrecked on the floor in a sea of shattered glass and the Captain standing among them, heartbroken. He reached a hand out and lifted down the nearest bottle, and was still looking in at all the flags and the tiny cannon hatches when Finn and Hector began to hammer at the door.

They must have got themselves all fired up because they hammered a second time before the Captain was even halfway down the stairs. Bobby saw him go by, pulling his dressing gown around him, and as soon as he heard the
door open and Hector and Finn start talking, Bobby crept out and headed for the cover of a table, with the neck of the bottle still gripped in his hand. He got to his feet and set off up the stairs, watching each plimsolled footstep, expecting a loud creak with every one, and was so preoccupied with the stairs that when he reached the attic he thought he must have entered the wrong room.

There were no radios, no charts, no Nazi banners. Just the telescope balancing on its tripod and a couple of boxes up against a wall. He crept forward, could still hear Heck and Finn blathering away far below him. He bent over, put his eye up to the eyepiece and squinted into it. A second later he recoiled, blinking. Stared at the floor, bewildered, before putting his eye back to the telescope.