A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(144)
The other took Cherokee by the arm and led him briskly away.
Chapter 20
The secondary cottages at the water mill were poorly provided with light because generally Frank didn’t work inside either of them in the late afternoons or evenings. But he didn’t need a lot of light to find what he was looking for among the papers in the filing cabinet. He knew where the single document was, and his personal hell comprised the fact that he also knew what the document said.
He drew it forth. A crisp manila folder held it like a layer of smooth skin. Its skeleton, however, was a tattered envelope with crumpled corners, long missing its little metal clasp. During the final days of the war, the occupying forces on the island had suffered from a degree of hubris that was most surprising, considering the defeats piling upon the German military everywhere else. On Guernsey, they had even refused to surrender at first, so determined were they to disbelieve that their plan for European domination and eugenic perfection would come to nothing. When Major-General Heine finally climbed aboard HMS Bulldog to negotiate the terms of his surrender of the island, it was a full day after victory had been declared and was being celebrated in the rest of Europe. Holding on to what little they had left in those final days, and perhaps wanting to leave their mark on the island as every successive presence on Guernsey had done throughout time, the Germans had not destroyed all that they had produced. Some creations—like gun emplacements—were impervious to easy demolition. Others—like that which Frank held in his hands—acted as an unspoken message that there were islanders whose selfinterest had superseded their feelings of brotherhood and whose actions as a result wore the guise of espousing the German cause. That this guise was inaccurate wouldn’t have meant anything to the Occupiers. What counted was the shock value attached to having betrayal writ large and bold: in spiky handwriting, in black and white.
Frank’s curse was the respect for history that had sent him first to read it at university, then to teach it to largely indifferent adolescents for nearly thirty years. It was the same respect that had been inculcated in him by his father. It was the same respect that had encouraged him to amass a collection which, he had hoped, would serve the purpose of remembrance long after he was gone.
He’d always believed the truth in the aphorism about remembering the past or being doomed to repeat it. He’d long seen in the armed struggles round the world man’s failure to acknowledge the futility of aggression. Invasion and domination resulted in oppression and rancour. What grew from that was violence in all of its forms. What didn’t grow from that was inherent good. Frank knew this, and he believed it fervently. He was a missionary attempting to win his small world to the knowledge he had been taught to hold dear, and his pulpit was constructed from the wartime properties that he’d collected over the years. Let these objects speak for themselves, he’d decided. Let people see them. Let them never forget.
So like the Germans before him, he’d destroyed nothing. He’d compiled so vast an array of goods that he’d long ago lost track of all that he had. If it was related to the war or the Occupation, he had wanted it. He hadn’t really even known what he had among his collection. For the longest time, he merely thought of everything only in the most generic terms. Guns. Uniforms. Daggers. Documents. Bullets. Tools. Hats. Only the advent of Guy Brouard made him start thinking differently. It could actually be a monument of sorts, Frank. Something that will serve todistinguish the island and the people who suffered. Not to mention those who died. That was the irony. That was the cause.
Frank carried the flimsy old envelope over to a rotting cane-bottomed chair. A floor lamp stood next to this, its shade discoloured and its tassel disengaged, and he switched it on and sat. It poured yellow light on his lap, which was where he placed the envelope, and he studied it for a minute before he opened it, drawing out a batch of fourteen fragile pieces of paper.
From halfway down the stack, he slid one out. He smoothed it against his thighs; he set the others onto the floor. He examined the remaining one with an intensity that would have suggested to an uninformed onlooker that he had never pondered it before. And why would he have done so, really? It was such an innocuous piece of paper. 6 Würstchen, he read. 1 Dutzend Eier, 2 kg. Mehl, 6 kg. Kartoffeln, 1 kg.Bohnen, 200 gr. Tabak.
It was a simple list, really, shoved in among the records of purchases of everything from petrol to paint. It was an unimportant document in the overall scheme of things, the sort of slip that might have gone misplaced without anyone ever being the wiser. Yet it spoke to Frank of many things, not the least of which was the arrogance of the Occupiers, who documented every move they made and then saved those documents against the time of a victory whose advocates they would want to identify. Had Frank not spent every one of his formative years right on into his solitary adulthood being taught the inestimable value of everything remotely related to Guernsey’s time of trial, he might have deliberately misplaced this single piece of paper, and no one would have been the wiser. But he would still have known that it had once existed, and nothing would ever obliterate that knowledge.
Indeed, had the museum remained unconsidered by the Ouseleys, this paper probably would have remained undiscovered, even by Frank himself. But once he and his father had grasped on to Guy Brouard’s offer to build the Graham Ouseley Wartime Museum for the education and betterment of the present and future citizens of Guernsey, the sorting, sifting, and organising essential to such an enterprise had begun. In the process, this list had come to light. 6 Würstchen, in 1943. 1 Dutzend Eier, 2 kg. Mehl,6 kg. Kartoffeln, 1 kg. Bohnen, 200 gr. Tabak.