Eye of the Needle(80)

Faber was watching the dog when it stopped, listened for a moment, and then raced off at a tangent.

Tom had been watching too. “Bob’s found something,” he said.

The jeep followed the dog for a quarter of a mile. When they stopped Faber could hear the sea; they were close to the island’s northern edge. The dog was standing at the brink of a small gully. When the men got out of the car they could hear what the dog had heard, the bleating of a sheep in distress, and they went to the edge of the gully and looked down.

The animal lay on its side about twenty feet down, balanced precariously on the steeply sloping bank, one foreleg at an awkward angle. Tom went down to it, treading cautiously, and examined the leg.

“Mutton tonight,” he called.

David got the gun from the jeep and slid it down to him. Tom put the sheep out of its misery.

“Do you want to rope it up?” David called.

“Aye—unless our visitor here wants to come and give me a hand.”

“Surely,” Faber said. He picked his way down to where Tom stood. They took a leg each and dragged the dead animal back up the slope. Faber’s oilskin caught on a thorny bush and he almost fell before he tugged the material free with a loud ripping sound.

They threw the sheep into the jeep and drove on. Faber’s shoulder felt very wet, and he realized he had torn away most of the back of the oilskin. “I’m afraid I’ve ruined this slicker,” he said.

“All in a good cause,” Tom told him.

Soon they returned to Tom’s cottage. Faber took off the oilskin and his wet donkey jacket, and Tom put the jacket over the stove to dry. Faber sat close to it.

Tom put the kettle on, then went upstairs for a new bottle of whisky. Faber and David warmed their wet hands.

The gunshot made both men jump. Faber ran into the hall and up the stairs. David followed, stopping his wheelchair at the foot of the staircase.

Faber found Tom in a small, bare room, leaning out of the window and shaking his fist at the sky.

“Missed,” Tom said.

“Missed what?”

“Eagle.”

Downstairs, David laughed.

Tom put the shotgun down beside a cardboard box. He took a new bottle of whisky from the box and led the way downstairs.

David was already back in the kitchen, close to the heat. “She was the first animal we’ve lost this year,” he said, his thoughts returning to the dead sheep.

“Aye,” Tom said.

“We’ll fence the gully this summer.”

“Aye.”

Faber sensed a change in the atmosphere: it was not the same as it had been earlier. They sat, drinking and smoking as before, but David seemed restless. Twice Faber caught the man staring at him.

Eventually David said, “We’ll leave you to butcher the ewe, Tom.”

“Aye.”

David and Faber left. Tom did not get up, but the dog saw them to the door.

Before starting the jeep David took the shotgun from its rack above the windshield, reloaded it, and put it back. On the way home he underwent another change of mood—a surprising one—and became chatty. “I used to fly Spitfires, lovely kites. Four guns in each wing—American Brownings, fired one thousand two hundred and sixty rounds a minute. The Jerries prefer cannon, of course—their Me109s only have two machine guns. A cannon does more damage but our Brownings are faster, and more accurate.”

“Really?” Faber said it politely.

“They put cannon in the Hurricanes later, but it was the Spitfire that won the Battle of Britain.”

Faber found his boastfulness irritating. “How many enemy aircraft did you shoot down?”

“I lost my legs while I was training.”

Faber glanced at his face: expressionless, but it seemed stretched as though the skin would break.

“No, I haven’t killed a single German, yet,” David said.

Faber became very alert. He had no idea what David might have deduced or discovered, but there now seemed little doubt that the man believed something was up, and not just Faber’s night with his wife. Faber turned slightly sideways to face David, braced himself with his foot against the transmission tunnel on the floor, rested his right hand lightly on his left forearm. He waited.

“Are you interested in aircraft?” David asked.

“No.”

“It’s become a national pastime, I gather—aircraft spotting. Like bird-watching. People buy books on aircraft identification. Spend whole afternoons on their backs, looking at the sky through telescopes. I thought you might be an enthusiast.”

“Why?”

“Pardon?”

“What made you think I might be an enthusiast?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” David stopped the jeep to light a cigarette. They were at the island’s midpoint, five miles from Tom’s cottage with another five miles to go to Lucy’s. David dropped the match on the floor. “Perhaps it was the film I found in your jacket pocket—”

As he spoke, he tossed the lighted cigarette at Faber’s face, and reached for the gun above the windshield.





26




SID CRIPPS LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AND CURSED under his breath. The meadow was full of American tanks—at least eighty of them. He realized there was a war on, and all that, but if only they’d asked him he would have offered them another field, where the grass was not so lush. By now the caterpillar tracks would have chewed up his best grazing.