I Can't Begin to Tell You (37 page)

He vanished into the hall.

Kay led Birgit through the French windows and made her sit down in the drawing room. She crouched down beside her. ‘Shall I get you some coffee? Or brandy?’

‘
Fru
Eberstern …’ Birgit was having difficulty speaking. ‘Arne had this.’ To Kay’s horror, she produced the pistol from her pocket. ‘He was trying to hide it when they came.’

Without a second’s hesitation, Kay whipped it out of Birgit’s hand and stuffed it into her sewing bag, which she kept on the floor beside her chair. She raised a finger to her lips to indicate silence.

In the hall, Bror could be heard saying, ‘The accusations are ridiculous.’

Birgit clawed at Kay’s arm. ‘Arne told me to tell you …’

Kay took both of Birgit’s hands in hers. ‘Speak softly. What did Arne tell you to tell me?’

The look Birgit flashed Kay was one of dislike and suspicion of Kay – the Birgit whom Kay had known for so long. ‘He said to tell you that someone at the hospital talked.’

They heard Bror say, ‘Good. That’s settled.’

Kay held up a finger. ‘Listen. What did my husband tell you? He has sorted it out.’

Birgit refused to look at Kay.

Bror came back into the room. ‘Birgit, Sergeant Wulf says he’s very sorry. There’s been a mix-up. Arne will be home shortly.’

‘I’m going to drive you home,’ insisted Kay. ‘No argument.’ She turned to Bror. ‘We have the petrol?’

When Kay bought the car to a halt outside the cottage, a dishevelled, exhausted-looking Arne emerged from the front
door. Birgit choked up with fresh tears and threw herself out of the car.

Arne hugged Birgit hard. Then he pushed her inside.

Kay rolled down the window. ‘They didn’t hurt you, did they?’ She could tell he was badly shaken.

‘
Fru
Eberstern, you must leave the area. There’s too much talk.’ One of his big square hands rested on the door handle.

He was speaking rapidly, far too rapidly. Kay understood.

‘You
are
all right?’

‘I’ve known most of them at the station since they were babies. I just had to remind them that, after the war, they had to live here.’ He added, ‘
Hr
Eberstern helped, too. Please thank him.’

Kay glanced through the cottage window. Birgit was feeding logs into the stove.

‘Birgit has given me the pistol. You don’t need to worry about that.’

‘I would have buried it.’

‘She was frightened for you, Arne. We all were.’

Arne moved his hand and she registered the age spots which mottled the skin.

‘The family is at risk,
Fru
Eberstern. You, especially. They gossip about you.’ He bent down until his face was on a level with hers. ‘Køge isn’t safe any more. Go and hide until the war is over. You and the master. I’ll take care of Rosenlund.’

A sixth sense told Kay to abandon the car at the end of the drive and to approach the house with caution. For a moment she stood still, absorbing the colours and scents which she loved.

Moving as noiselessly as she could, she zigzagged through the trees which lined the drive until the house came into sight.

Parked by the front door was the black car.

Turning, Kay tracked around the side of the house and let
herself in through the kitchen entrance. Kicking off her shoes, she padded down to the drawing room and peered through the crack between the door and its frame.

Hauptsturmführer
Buch and Constable Juncker occupied the space in the middle of the room. From her restricted viewpoint she had a good view of Juncker, but Buch was partially hidden.

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ Bror was saying. ‘I don’t care what your informant says. My wife couldn’t possibly have been planning to smuggle a terrorist into the hospital without me knowing.’

Constable Juncker honed in on the miniature tortoiseshell clock which was on the table beside her chair. Kay squeezed her eyes shut.
No
. With a booted toe, Juncker nudged over the sewing bag. Picking it up, he shoved his hand inside. ‘Sir.’ He held out the pistol.

One small second can contain an eternity. In it, Kay travelled from debilitating craven fear to ice-cold resolve, from the bitter, bitter sorrow of farewell to the explosive excitement that, at last, things were happening.

‘What on earth –?’

No one could mistake Bror’s genuine surprise.

Buch’s response was instant. ‘
Hr
Eberstern, that particular gun is known to be a terrorist weapon.’

‘My wife –’

Bror was struggling. That was good. His unfeigned, unmistakable astonishment was his best defence.

‘Where’s your wife?’
Hauptsturmführer
Buch was, as always, calm and polite.

There was nothing Kay could do except leave Bror to his ignorance. That was all she could do for him.

She fled up the back stairs to her office, where she had everything ready on stand-by. The rucksack by the door had been packed: underwear, dried raisins, bandages and a bundle of
bank notes. She snatched up the jacket and, pausing only to take a final look at a photograph of Tanne and Nils and to touch the larger photograph of Bror with a fingertip, she let herself out onto the outside steps.

Then she was away through the trees and running like the wind.

Tanne and Felix were flown in from Stockholm hidden in the bomb bay of a Mosquito, then driven up to London. They were met by a businesslike FANY who issued them with some badly fitting civilian clothes and money, and conducted them to a hotel near High Street Kensington. For the time being, she explained, they were to lie low and were forbidden to contact any relatives or friends.

There could have been few drearier places in which to hole up than the hotel but they made the best of it by exploring the streets and walking in Kensington Gardens. They spent a lot of time in a local pub, which was a fairly jolly, rowdy, sawdust-strewn place.

Having visited with her mother several times, Tanne was familiar with the pre-war city. What amazed both her and Felix was the variety of uniforms now visible in the streets: Americans and Free French, Poles, Italians and some Greeks. Anyone, they noted wryly, but the Danish.

On their walks they saw severed gas pipes and burst water mains. Here and there they came across pockets of escaped gas, and there was the constant hazard of live electric wires. Many streets and terraces were in ruins. Wherever Tanne looked, there was hardship. London was shabby and fatigued, with the look of a person pushed almost too far – but not enough to give up. It wasn’t fair but its grimy dereliction contrasted badly with København’s solid stone buildings and the jewelled colours of the houses and farms of the countryside.

Tanne had not wavered in her determination to join Felix in his work. ‘Your mother would never forgive me,’ he repeated, more than once.

And,
more than once, it crossed Tanne’s mind that Felix referred frequently to her mother … Freya’s courage, her willingness to adapt, her physical endurance.
Did he love her?
Knowing enough to know that love could arrive in many forms, the question, nevertheless, troubled her and she struggled not to think about it.

She needed to be clever to win the argument about entering the fight and she banked on the fact that Felix was not a sentimental man but a patriotic one. ‘Who do you put first? Your country or my mother?’

It did the trick. Tanne found herself attending interviews in anonymous-looking buildings where she was questioned – ruthlessly, minutely – on her background and motivation, and put through some searching personality tests. Eventually, she was commissioned into the FANYs as a cover, as most of the women agents were. She was issued with a temporary British passport, given details of the bank account opened in her name for her pay and informed that she was to be sent away for training. Her number was D42 and her training name was ‘Pia’.

On a Monday morning, she and Felix caught the ten-twenty train from Paddington, with orders to alight at the third stop after Northampton. She was surprised by the instruction – until she realized that station names were blacked out, which meant that strangers would have no idea where they were.

The train was crammed and they ended up standing in the corridor. She and Felix smoked, and tried to ignore the small horror of the lavatory beside them.

‘English plumbing. It’s dreadful,’ she said.

Such was the crush, her head was practically jammed into Felix’s chest. To avoid pressing into his injured arm, she adjusted her position, only to find that her pelvis was pressing into his hip.

‘You’ll get used to it.’

Tanne was dealing with new and powerful feelings. Had they been stirred up by Felix’s weakness, which she had kept watch
over that night in Ove’s cottage? Or perhaps on the journey on the
Ulla Baden
, during which she and Felix had seen things of each other, in each other, which in peacetime might have taken them a lifetime to discover. For those hours, they had been so physically close – closer than she had ever experienced with anyone – and they had left in her a desire to protect, to hold … and … to love?

‘Will we be seeing each other where we’re going?’

‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘And we won’t be working together. We know too much about each other. Security.’

She knew that he was aware of the position of her pelvis on his hip.

‘We don’t know
everything
.’

He squinted down at her. ‘Are you being funny or crude?’

Exhilarated and almost breathless from the changes in her life, she said, ‘Both,’ and had the satisfaction of hearing him laugh.

It was drizzling when they alighted at the station to be met by a uniformed sergeant from the Buffs – a regiment which played host to the Danish fighters who fetched up in Great Britain. The sergeant was Danish and a man of few words. ‘You’ll be walking. Leave your luggage.’ He issued them with a map and coordinates. ‘Two hours,’ he said. ‘If you don’t make it on the dot, you’ll miss the meal.’

Two hours later, almost to the minute, having negotiated fields, stiles and streams in her flimsy lace-up shoes, Tanne stumbled with Felix up the drive of an old manor house. She knew, she just knew, that it would be cold inside and badly plumbed.

It was.

At the end of the promised meal, the students – as they were referred to – were told to get some sleep. As Felix got up from the table he sent her a look:
Goodbye, Eva
.

Nine students assembled the following morning. Information about the others was, for security reasons, limited, but she
gathered that ‘Lars’ had escaped the previous winter by skiing over the frozen sound to Helsingborg, ‘Otto’ had flown in the same way as they had and two of the others had arrived by fishing boat. The rest had either been living in England or made their way from Europe via Spain to offer their services.

They were thrown in at the deep end.

Run six or so miles before breakfast.

Morning lessons. Morse code. Map-reading. Fieldcraft.

Lunch. In general, this proved marginally better than breakfast.

Afternoon lessons. The group was conveyed by a covered ten-ton truck to an unknown location and abandoned there with only a compass each. ‘Find your own way back,’ was the order. Each day the route grew harder.

Dinner. Sometimes Tanne was too exhausted to eat. Afterwards, drinks were dispensed from the plentiful drinks cabinet. Then bed.

Where was Felix?

Without him, she felt desolate – as if an element vital to her life had been sucked away. Enquiring after him was a mistake and she was brusquely informed it was none of her business.

‘It’s curious how angry you can become when you test your limits,’ she confided to Major Petersen, who was mentoring her. ‘Why?’

‘Because you fail, usually at the beginning. Failure is important. So, too, is finding the anger that will drive you on. Both failure and anger have to be mastered.’

Morning lessons during the second week: how to handle a pistol, machine gun, Sten gun, tommy gun and rifle.

This is the breech. This, the cocking lever. This, the selector button. Get to know them as well as your face. Most of you have never handled a gun.

She thought of the early morning mist wreathing over the Rosenlund marshes. The shining lake. Gleaming, virgin snow and the squat, black shadows cast by the trees. She thought of how in that past life, with a shotgun in hand, she and her father
waited for the ducks to skim over the marsh. Finally, she thought of how she had pulled the trigger without a second thought.

Tanne pointed to the Sten. ‘A savage weapon.’

Major Petersen, who, as ever, was on hand, ran his finger along the skeleton butt. ‘Savage times.’ His voice was flat. ‘But this isn’t too bad for something so improvised. It’s adaptable and deadly.’

He was issuing a challenge:
This is serious. Killing
.

Tanne had to consider the possibility. She must think about the smack of bullet on bone, of flesh torn into ribbons, of bubbling breath and of pain which could be inflicted by her.

Petersen continued: ‘The magazine is inserted horizontally into the left-hand side of the gun, which means you can use it lying flat. But don’t use more than twenty-eight cartridges in the mag, otherwise the automatic feed can jam.’

A mysterious alteration was taking place in her muscles, bones and blood. Leaner, fitter, more physically adept, she thrived on the exhilaration of prolonged exercise.

Who am I doing this for? Denmark?

Yes. Of course I am.

Not entirely.

As for her thoughts, these were changing, too. The old assumptions shared by Aage, Erika and others at university were fast fading. They were too facile, too unsophisticated. Discussing the situation with her fellow fighters, she unearthed in herself stronger political and patriotic allegiances than the easy passions of her student days.

The weather that summer was soft and equable. Whenever she had a moment, Tanne seized the chance to walk through the parkland and gardens, enjoying the vistas of oak trees, sheep, a bowling green, and a peaceful little Saxon chapel tucked into a corner of the park.

Once, homesick and low, she looked across the lawn to the
trees which fringed it and saw someone walking towards her.
Felix
. Tears sprang into Tanne’s eyes and a joy lit her up. She hurried forward to meet him, but it was only Otto.

They had been warned that not all of the intake would survive to the next stage. Late one evening Tanne and four others arrived back from exercise to discover the mother of all rows emanating from the cellar. On investigation, they discovered the rest of the group, half-slaughtered on English beer, shooting pistols at a caricature of Hitler.

They had all passed.

The following morning the groggy group were summoned by Major Petersen. He briefed them that they would be embarking for Special Training School 45. ‘You’ll be allowed out only one day a week and you’re banned from shopping or eating at restaurants within a five-mile radius of the school.’

STS45 turned out to be a castle somewhere in Gloucestershire – a name Tanne had trouble pronouncing – with a staggering number of windows and chimneys. In the grounds there was a shot-down German plane, complete with a swastika and a gaping hole in its fuselage.

Tanne regarded it thoughtfully. Men had probably died a horrible death in there.

A Major Spooner waited to interview the group. One by one, a sergeant marched them into his office.

Major Spooner immediately made plain his dislike of women. ‘You’re quite irregular for this section,’ was his opener. ‘We don’t have to deal with many females.’ He leaned as far back in his chair as possible and took off his glasses as if to blur the awful sight.

By now, Tanne had worked out that Denmark was low on the British agenda. Could the reason be that a dinosaur, masquerading as a man, had been allocated to run this section?

The major hooked the arms of his glasses round his ears. ‘You realize that, at best, you have a ten per cent chance of survival?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘Think about it. If it’s too much for you, you have a duty to tell us.’

‘Sir, do you ask the men the same question? Just out of interest.’

There was a silence. ‘I do. And that is a stupid question.’

‘You want to know about my nerves and my endurance. So do I. That’s what I’m here for.’

He observed Tanne over the glasses. ‘Be careful, number forty-two. You don’t know the half of it.’

Curiously, she felt at home at STS45. There were big fireplaces and big furniture, if badly arranged, and the pictures and displays of china reminded her of Rosenlund. The canteen produced good meals and, in the library, there was a selection of Danish papers and magazines.

The lessons resumed.

Their group joined a number of Danes who, because there had been so few operations scheduled for Denmark, had been kicking their heels at STS45 for anything up to a year. The newcomers had to work hard to catch up with them. Arithmetic. Map-reading. Reconnaissance. Morse. Using German, Finnish and Swedish weapons. Demolition. Every kind of sabotage known to man, including scuttling ships. Burgling. Writing letters in invisible ink. The use of pigeons.

‘Apart from anything else, gentlemen and, er, miss, you will be going home to set up what you might call a sabotage university,’ they were told. ‘You’ll be holding little workshops all over the place. In the fields. In sheds. In piggeries. Got it?’

Also featuring on the curriculum were Unarmed Combat and Silent Killing. Here, she was initiated into various methods, including the Bronco kick: take a flying leap at your opponent then disable him by driving both heels into his body. Or there was the Bone Crusher. Or Mouth Slitting: if you are in someone’s grip, you can stick your thumb in the corner of his mouth and split his cheek.

Would
she ever be able to bring herself to put these methods into practice? And what if she died in the attempt?

In Danish mythology, a heroine who lost her life was spirited away by the goddess Freya to her domain in Asgard, and all was well. How useful myth was. How it tidied and sanitized. In contrast, Tanne was being taught to see that death could be agonizing, violent, often inflicted without justice or due process. She didn’t like to imagine her mother’s grief, and the silence into which her father would retreat, if she were to meet hers.

Their instructor watched over them like babies. ‘Those who fail the exam will have to go right back to the beginning again,’ he warned. ‘Now, you don’t want that, gentlemen and, er, miss. Do you?’

Assassin, spy, saboteur. Tanne was adding to her list of accomplishments.

Her next assignment was STS51 and Parachute School.

The journey from STS45 took all day. A student in the know told them the names of the stations as they steamed past the blacked-out names.

Tanne sat with Lars and Otto, a couple of Poles and a Norwegian. Soon after the train pulled out of the station before their final stop the compartment door slid open. She looked up from her newspaper – and the blaze of light was there for real.

Felix.

He looked a new man. Plus his British officer’s uniform suited him. He jerked a thumb towards the corridor and Tanne leaped to her feet.

‘Whoa,’ said Otto. ‘Do I detect love’s young dream?’