Eye of the Needle(99)
AN HOUR LATER she was regretting her cleverness.
Trudging through the mud, soaked to the skin, the sleeping child a dead weight over her shoulder, she wanted nothing more than to lie down and die. The booby trap seemed, on reflection, dubious and risky: gasoline would burn, not explode; if there was not enough air in the mouth of the can it might not even ignite; worst of all, Henry might suspect a trap, look under the hood, dismantle the bomb, pour the gasoline into the tank and drive after her.
She contemplated stopping for a rest but decided that if she sat down she might never get up again.
She should have been in sight of Tom’s house by now. She could not possibly have got lost—even if she had not walked this path a dozen times before, the whole island just was not big enough to get lost on.
She recognized a thicket where she and Jo had once seen a fox. She must be about a mile from Tom’s home. She would have seen it, except for the rain.
She shifted Jo to the other shoulder, switched the shotgun from one hand to the other, and forced herself to continue putting one foot in front of the other.
When the cottage finally became visible through the sheeting rain she could have cried with relief. She was nearer than she thought—perhaps a quarter of a mile.
Suddenly Jo seemed lighter, and although the last stretch was uphill—the only hill on the island—she seemed to cover it in no time at all.
“Tom!” she called out as she approached the front door. “Tom, Tom!”
She heard the answering bark of the dog.
She went in by the front door. “Tom, quickly!” Bob dodged excitedly about her ankles, barking furiously. Tom couldn’t be far away—he was probably in the outhouse. Lucy went upstairs and laid Jo on Tom’s bed.
The wireless was in the bedroom, a complex-looking construction of wires and dials and knobs. There was something that looked like a Morse key; she touched it experimentally and it gave a beep. A thought came to her from distant memory—something from a schoolgirl thriller—the Morse code for S.O.S. She touched the key again: three short, three long, three short.
Where was Tom?
She heard a noise, and ran to the window.
The jeep was making its way up the hill to the house.
Henry had found the booby trap and used the gasoline to fill the tank.
Where was Tom?
She rushed out of the bedroom, intending to go and bang on the outhouse door, but at the head of the stairs she paused. Bob was standing in the open doorway of the other bedroom, the empty one.
“Come here, Bob,” she said. The dog stood his ground, barking. She went to him and bent to pick him up.
Then she saw Tom.
He lay on his back, on the bare floorboards of the vacant bedroom, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, his cap upside down on the floor behind his head. His jacket was open, and there was a small spot of blood on the shirt underneath. Close to his hand was a crate of whisky, and Lucy found herself thinking irrelevantly, I didn’t know he drank that much.
She felt his pulse.
He was dead.
Think, think.
Yesterday Henry had returned to her cottage battered, as if he had been in a fight. That must have been when he killed David. Today he had come here, to Tom’s cottage, “to fetch David,” he had said. But of course he had known David was not there. So why had he made the journey? Obviously, to kill Tom.
Now she was completely alone.
She took hold of the dog by its collar and dragged it away from the body of its master. On impulse she returned and buttoned the jacket over the small stiletto wound that had killed Tom. Then she closed the door on him, returned to the front bedroom and looked out of the window.
The jeep drew up in front of the house and stopped. And Henry got out.
34
LUCY’S DISTRESS CALL WAS HEARD BY THE CORVETTE.
“Captain, sir,” said Sparks. “I just picked up an S.O.S. from the island.”
The captain frowned. “Nothing we can do until we can land a boat,” he said. “Did they say anything else?”
“Not a thing, sir. It wasn’t even repeated.”
“Nothing we can do,” he said again. “Send a signal to the mainland reporting it. And keep listening.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
IT WAS ALSO picked up by an MI8 listening post on top of a Scottish mountain. The R/T operator, a young man with abdominal wounds who had been invalided out of the RAF, was trying to pick up German Navy signals from Norway, and he ignored the S.O.S. However, he went off duty five minutes later, and he mentioned it to his commanding officer.
“It was only broadcast once,” he said. “Probably a fishing vessel off the Scottish coast—there might well be the odd small ship in trouble in this weather.”
“Leave it with me,” the C.O. said. “I’ll give the Navy a buzz. And I suppose I’d better inform Whitehall. Protocol, y’know.”
“Thank you, sir.”
At the Royal Observer Corps station there was something of a panic. Of course, S.O.S. was not the signal an observer was supposed to give when he sighted enemy aircraft, but they knew that Tom was old, and who could say what he might send if he got excited? So the air raid sirens were sounded, and all other posts were alerted, and antiaircraft guns were rolled out all over the east coast of Scotland and the radio operator tried frantically to raise Tom.