Maxine was cheerful. She made a point of driving fast over bumps because she knew Henderson was feeling the worse for half a dozen brandies. Marc sat in the rear compartment with a German mechanic’s satchel resting on his lap. It contained a reel of solder, a soldering iron and the four precious valves.
Paul was a sobbing mess as he bolted out of the pink house to meet them. He’d tried to wash up and fix the splints on his arm but hadn’t done much of a job. Henderson feared the worst and pulled his gun as he jumped out the back of the truck.
‘I tied him up,’ Paul blurted as he led Henderson through to the kitchen.
Paul wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing and feared that he’d get shouted at, so it was a huge relief when Henderson looked proudly at him.
‘You reasoned all that through by yourself?’ Henderson smiled. ‘And he’s a damn sight bigger than you.’
‘So I’m not in trouble?’
‘Absolutely not,’ Henderson replied, as they arrived in the kitchen together. ‘Sneaking away, stealing my gold. Let’s see what the little bugger’s got to say for himself.’
PT was sprawled over the terracotta floor with a bloody pillow under his head. Paul had bound his arms and legs with washing line and hauled him up the driveway in case his body was spotted by a passerby.
‘That’s Marc’s bag and the suitcase he packed,’ Paul explained, as he pointed towards the kitchen table. ‘I wanted you to see what he’d done, so I didn’t touch it.’
Henderson saw the gold ingots as Marc walked in behind. ‘Traitor,’ Marc spat, furious that PT had planned to steal his bag and his only spare shirt.
The two females were more rational. Rosie was torn between compassion for PT’s pathetic state down on the tiles and loyalty to her distraught brother. Maxine took one look at Paul before rushing to light the wood-burning stove so that she could heat a pan of water to clean his arm and remake the filthy dressing.
‘Why’d you try to leave?’ Henderson bawled, as he hoisted PT off the floor and slammed him down in a dining chair. ‘Guess I was a fool trusting you, eh? Stealing my gold, eh? What were you gonna do? Walk into town and try selling us out to the Gestapo?’
PT’s head rolled forwards. Henderson thrust his chair up to the table to stop him flopping forwards.
‘You gonna tell me straight, or would you prefer me to thrash the truth out of you?’ Henderson shouted.
A string of dried blood and snot hit the wooden table as Henderson closed up behind. The other three youngsters watched nervously from the opposite end of the table.
‘I just wanted out of here,’ PT explained through a bloody mouth. ‘I thought we were going across to Spain. Then yesterday you started talking about spies and fixing radios and stuff. I’m not up for any of that. All I want is a quiet life.’
Henderson grabbed a handful of hair and slammed PT’s head against the tabletop. ‘Why should I believe you?’ he bellowed scarily.
Maxine turned sharply away from the stove. ‘For god’s sake, Charles. He’s a kid!’
‘Why did you try sneaking off?’ Henderson demanded. ‘Why did you steal my gold?’
‘The same reason that carry gold,’ PT sobbed indignantly. ‘There are some things that only gold can pay for: including the gypsy guides who help people across the mountains and into Spain.’you
‘You’re a liar,’ Henderson snarled, keeping up the pressure even though he knew PT was right about the gypsies. ‘You were going straight to the Gestapo in town. You were going to rat on us, grab a fat reward while the Gestapo tortured your supposed friends Rosie, Paul and Marc to death.’
‘Bull crap!’ PT shouted. ‘A quiet life, that’s all I wanted.’
Henderson smiled slightly. ‘The thing is, PT, I can’t trust you any more. I can’t let you go, because you know too much, and I haven’t got any prison to lock you up in. That only leaves me with one real choice, doesn’t it?’
Henderson slipped the pistol out of his jacket and flipped off the safety. PT swivelled his eyes towards the gun in a state of complete terror.
‘You can’t kill him!’ Rosie screamed.
‘Why the hell shouldn’t I kill the little traitor?’ Henderson shouted.
Marc was torn up. He knew what Henderson was capable of and he hated that PT had betrayed them and tried to steal some of his meagre possessions, but PT had been his friend and wrestling partner for the last three weeks and that still counted for something.
‘Please, Mr Henderson,’ PT sobbed, as the muzzle pressed against his bloody temple. ‘I haven’t been into town since the sank. I don’t know where the Germans are, or if they’d pay a reward. And believe me, I wouldn’t go near the authorities. They’d be as likely to arrest me as you.’Cardiff Bay
‘So why’s that?’ Henderson asked.
‘I didn’t win that money gambling,’ PT explained. ‘Check my notebook. It’s in the brown case with a newspaper article folded up inside. That’s who I really am. If you read it you’ll see why I’d never go near the cops, the Gestapo, or anyone else.’
Rosie was nearest the case. She quickly found the notebook and a water-damaged sheet of newspaper folded between the pages. She unfurled it and read the headline aloud, ‘Hunt for tunnel-heist boy continues.’
Beneath the headline was a short article, and a family picture.
‘They must have searched our apartment and found the photo,’ PT explained. ‘That’s the only picture of my family I’ve got.’
‘So you didn’t win the money gambling on board a ship?’ Henderson asked.
PT shook his head. ‘Two cops died in that robbery and the Feds issued an international arrest warrant. If they haul my ass back to the USA I’m as good as dead. I’m on the French-police wanted list, so believe me, I’m the last person on earth who’d go anywhere near the Gestapo or the cops.’
Henderson wiped the bloody muzzle of his gun on a handkerchief before putting it back into its holster. PT gasped with relief, but Henderson shocked him by banging his head against the tabletop again.
‘You’re still a liar and a thief,’ Henderson said. ‘Maybe you wouldn’t have gone to the Gestapo, but you still tried sneaking off with my gold.’
‘What do you want me to say?’ PT shouted desperately. ‘I did what I did. If you’re gonna shoot me, shoot me, you twisted old buzzard.’
‘You’re lucky you’re not a year or two older,’ Henderson snarled, as PT buried his face in his hands. ‘I’ve killed spies, traitors, soldiers and thieves, but I’ve got this little twinge of conscience telling me it’s wrong to blow a fifteen year old’s brains across this nice old table.’damned
Marc and Rosie exchanged relieved glances. Maxine seemed angry at the way Henderson was behaving, but she concentrated on heating the water to clean up Paul’s arm.
Henderson looked at Paul. ‘Is there any more washing line about?’
Paul nodded. ‘Quite a bit.’
‘OK,’ Henderson said, crouching down so that he was speaking right into PT’s bloody earhole. ‘I’m gonna take you out to the garden shed and truss you up. I’m gonna think about your situation overnight. In the morning I’ll come out and let you know if there’s any circumstance under which I can let you live.’possible
Something seemed to be on PT’s lips, but he didn’t say it.
‘What about food and drink?’ Rosie asked.
‘He’s getting neither,’ Henderson said as he wrenched PT up by the scruff of his shirt and shoved him towards the back door. ‘Little hunger and thirst might make him more cooperative over any questions I decide to ask come morning.’
CHAPTER NINE
Henderson set the broken transmitter on the dining table and unfolded a wiring diagram next to it. Paul offered to help, but Henderson was in a mood after dealing with PT and impatiently told him to clear off.
Paul spent an hour sitting in the living room reading a book about Ancient Greece while Henderson crashed about the dining room, his language getting fouler and
fouler.
‘My dad was a salesman for Imperial Wireless,’ Paul said warily, as he stood in the dining-room doorway, studying Henderson’s berry-red face. ‘They had engineers, but my dad would do simple repairs himself, to keep customers happy, and I helped a few times.’
‘If you’re so smart, come look,’ Henderson sighed. ‘You can’t make any more of a hash of this than I am.’
Paul moved towards the huge table. The soldering iron was plugged into the light socket above and the smell of smoke and metal stuck to the air. Henderson had replaced two of the broken valves, but had made a horrible job joining up some damaged wiring.
‘That’s messy,’ Paul said, as he dug his thumbnail under a huge silver blob of solder and picked it away.
‘I didn’t say touch it,’ Henderson growled.
‘You won’t get a good connection if you use that much solder,’ Paul explained, picking more off the end of the loose electrical wire and leaning over to study the wiring diagram. ‘You’ve put it back on the wrong terminal anyway.’
Henderson pushed Paul aside, made a careful study of the diagram and then said, ‘Oh …’
‘You’d have blown all sorts of things if you’d powered up like that,’ Paul said, braving a tiny smile. ‘I built a transmitter two summers ago.’
‘With your dad’s help?’ Henderson asked.
‘Some,’ Paul admitted, as he pulled off another of Henderson’s mis-soldered wires. ‘My dad found a diagram for a simple radio and got me all the parts, but I did the work myself over the summer holidays. Except for a couple of fiddly bits.’really
‘Quite impressive,’ Henderson admitted. ‘You must have only been nine back then.’
‘It’s not that difficult really. As long as you have a wiring diagram and all the right parts. It’s sort of like a jigsaw puzzle, except the end result is more useful than some stupid picture of kittens.’
Henderson watched as Paul lined up the wire with the correct terminal. ‘I’ve only got one good arm, so you hold the wire and solder together and I’ll make the new joint.’
Paul took the hot-tipped soldering iron off its stand, leaned awkwardly over Henderson and fused the wire to the circuit board by melting the end of the solder into a neat metal drip.
‘You need enough to make a strong connection, but use too much,’ Paul explained, as the dot of solder hardened into a strong joint. ‘My dad always said that having little fingers helps.’never
‘I’m sorry I snapped at you before,’ Henderson said. ‘When you asked if you could help, I thought you’d be sitting with your elbows on the table asking me annoying questions. I’m starting to realise that children are capable of a lot more than people give them credit for.’
Paul had felt like an outsider ever since they’d arrived at the house and Henderson’s compliment meant a lot to him. ‘People think I’m stupid because I never say much,’ he explained. ‘But I was always the cleverest in my class.’
‘We live in a technological age,’ Henderson said, smiling. ‘Brains matter more than brawn these days.’
‘I tried to tell myself that every time some bruiser pinned me to the floor in the school toilet,’ Paul answered, smiling back cheekily before eyeing something inside the radio casing and zooming in to study it.
‘There’s your biggest problem,’ Paul said, as he pointed to one of the broken valves. ‘The valve mounting itself is fractured. But there’s that broken radio upstairs in the master bedroom. If we took a valve casing out of there it would probably do the trick.’
Henderson leaned forwards. ‘Are you sure it’s cracked?’
Paul wobbled the top of the glass tube. ‘You can’t see the crack because of all the dust and grease, but you see how much play there is when I jiggle it? It’s doing that because the insulation underneath is cracked. So it’s either got to be replaced or taken out and glued. But even if we’ve got glue, it won’t harden until tomorrow morning at the earliest.’
Henderson shook his head. ‘My transmission window for today is between nine forty-five and ten.’
‘What’s the window for?’ Paul asked.
‘I have a special coded sequence. You take my codeword, the date and run it through a special formula that gives you a radio frequency and transmission time for every day of the year. Someone back in Britain should be listening out for my transmission at that time on that frequency each day.’
‘Who?’ Paul asked.
‘It should be my assistant, Miss McAfferty. Although as I’ve been out of contact for a month she may have been reassigned, in which case her job will have been passed on to the MI5 monitoring centre.’
‘Clever,’ Paul said, nodding. ‘So we’ve got about ninety minutes to get this set powered up.’
‘How do you rate our chances?’
Paul loved the fact that Henderson was suddenly asking him for answers. ‘You’ve already wasted an hour,’ he said pointedly. ‘And I can’t work fast with this arm, but we can give it a go.’
*
Marc glanced up and down the hallway, before looking into the kitchen and whispering to Rosie. ‘Go for it.’
Rosie grabbed a plate, then rushed to the larder. She cut a chunk off the end of a garlic sausage and peeled a few leftover strips from the previous night’s roast chicken before adding an apple, a carrot and two small tomatoes.
‘He’ll want something to wash it down with,’ Marc noted.
As Rosie poured tap water into an enamel mug, Marc opened up the back door and made sure nobody was in the garden.
‘Henderson’s concentrating on the radio,’ Marc said, as they moved out on to the back lawn. ‘It’s only Maxine we have to worry about.’
Rosie gave Marc the mug to hold before she spoke. ‘Maxine hasn’t said much, but she clearly doesn’t like the way Henderson’s dealing with this.’
It was nearly eight p.m. and the sun was in their eyes as Marc led the way down the gently sloped garden towards a tatty metal shed. He turned the padlock key and the door squealed.
PT lay on his back, his head-wound caked in dry blood. His mouth was gagged, his ankles bound and his wrists hooked around a thick wooden post supporting the roof.
Marc approached warily. ‘If I take this gag off, you’ve got to keep the noise down, OK?’
PT nodded and Marc pulled the gag down until it hung around his neck. Rosie could hardly look at the dried blood and the tears welling in PT’s eyes.
‘We brought you some food,’ she said.
PT nodded. ‘What is it, my last meal?’ he asked bitterly.
Neither Marc nor Rosie could answer such a bleak question.
‘I can’t eat it unless you undo my hands.’
Rosie shook her head. ‘I’ll feed you. What do you want first?’
‘Water.’
Rosie held up the mug and a good portion dribbled down PT’s chin as he drank greedily.
He’d drunk nothing since Paul knocked him out eight hours earlier and the drink re-energised him. ‘Why won’t you untie my hands? Or do you both think I’m a traitor too?’
‘Henderson’s being cautious,’ Rosie explained softly.
Marc’s tone was more hostile. ‘Rosie talked me into coming out here, but you ripping me off like that was out of order. You’ve got more than a thousand dollars – all I’ve got is that pigskin bag and a change of clothes.’way
Rosie fed PT one of the tomatoes.
‘I’m a thief,’ PT admitted. ‘If it’s there, I nick it. I’m sorry to say I was brought up that way. I took the gold because I thought I might need it to get into Spain, but I didn’t take all of it. I took your pigskin because I liked it … but you’ve been a mate, so I guess that was plain wrong.’
‘Why’d you run, anyway?’ Rosie asked.
‘I don’t care which side wins this stupid war,’ PT said. ‘I’ve been on the run for two and a half years, stealing from here and there, working a few weeks on a boat or unloading on the docks whenever I get bored. It’s not a b
ad life, but I’ve kept out of trouble by keeping my head down and not taking stupid risks.’
‘If it’s OK here, why did you want to go to Spain with us?’ Marc asked. ‘Why did you come back here when Maxine invited you?’
‘Germans give me the creeps,’ PT explained. ‘And besides, the winters are warmer down in Spain and I feel like a change of scenery.’
‘The Germans seem to be behaving themselves,’ Rosie said. ‘Maybe they’ re not as bad as everyone was saying.’
Marc bared his missing front tooth and glowered at her. ‘Was it decent when the Gestapo ripped that out? Or when they dropped a bomb on your dad?’
‘I know,’ Rosie said, raising her hands defensively. ‘I’ve got as many reasons to hate the Germans as anyone.’
‘I worked a few weeks on the Cardiff Bay’s sister-ship late last year,’ PT explained. ‘A lot of passengers were Polish Jews, crossing the English Channel before heading to America. The stories they told about what the Nazis were doing were horrific. So maybe they’ve got reasons for treating the French OK right now, but I don’t want to stick around and see if it stays that way. And when Henderson started going on about radio transmissions and undercover missions … That’s not for me, and I decided to leave the first chance I got.’
‘Henderson saved my life,’ Marc said. ‘He’s a good guy. He proved that when he had the chance to abandon me at the port and travel on the Cardiff Bay with Paul and Rosie.’
‘He’s good to you, maybe,’ PT sighed. ‘You’re his golden boy, after all.’
‘You stole from Henderson,’ Marc said sharply. ‘You stole from me. It’s your own stupid fault that you’re sitting here all tied up and covered in blood.’
Rosie tried to lighten the mood as she fed PT the last piece of sausage and another mouthful of water. ‘The thing that amazes me is my scrawny little brother knocking you out.’
PT’s mouth was full, so he took a moment to answer. ‘Little swine came out of nowhere.’
Marc laughed. ‘Paul’s weedy. You’re miles taller, and his legs are like little twigs!’so
‘Oh, well.’ PT shrugged. ‘If Henderson puts a bullet through my head in the morning at least I can’t stay embarrassed about it for long.’