One Shot Kill (7 page)

Eugene’s plan had involved riding the coal train fifty or sixty kilometres to wherever it got to at daybreak. Then they’d have used their wits to make their way to Paris, but they’d hoped to find themselves in a lightly-policed rural area with immaculate documentation and all their major headaches behind them.

Rosie had no idea if she’d be able to get Edith aboard the slow-moving train on her own, she had no way of making up false documents and with a fever setting in, Edith urgently needed to see a doctor.

*

Rosie felt too edgy to eat, but she forced herself to nibble fruit and cheese as it grew dark.

‘Time to wake up,’ she said gently, as she crouched over Edith.

The skinny body had its head resting on Rosie’s backpack. She nudged Edith several times, but nothing happened. Rosie was wary of inflicting pain and there was hardly any part of Edith that wasn’t injured, but after a third nudge Rosie grabbed Edith’s shoulder and rolled her on to her back.

‘We have to leave or we’ll miss the train.’

As Edith’s body moved, Rosie felt an extraordinary blast of heat. Edith was like a little furnace. Her dress was soaking, and while Rosie didn’t have a medical thermometer it didn’t take one to see that Edith was burning up. She put her thumb against Edith’s eyebrow and slowly raised the lid. The pupil reacted to the sudden change in light but she didn’t wake up.

Rosie found the pulse in Edith’s neck and counted fourteen beats in six seconds. You’d expect a hundred and forty beats per minute if you’d jogged a couple of kilometres, but Edith’s heart rate should have been under half that after four hours’ sleep.

Rosie felt overwhelmed by the responsibility that had fallen on her. The trickling stream was deafening and trees seemed to loom over her like ghosts.

Notes

4
 
Gendarmes – French civilian police officers.

The railway line bisected the landscape, making it easy for Rosie to find in the dark. She’d taken a single horse and ridden slowly. She was lucky not to sight trouble, because it would have been impossible to go faster with Edith slumped unconscious over the saddle behind her.

Just after midnight a fully-laden coal train began shaking the ground Rosie sat on. It wound down the hillside at more than twenty kilometres an hour, curving around a large S, designed to ease the gradient when it climbed back up.

Rosie squatted as close to the track as she dared. She’d imagined square-sided trucks like the wagons on her brother’s clockwork train set, but much to her relief, these wagons carried coal in V-shaped pivot-mounted skips, enabling them to be emptied rapidly by tipping. At one end each wagon had a metal platform used to access and maintain the mechanism.

‘I’m so thirsty,’ Edith said weakly.

Rosie almost missed her voice over the clattering train, but dived into the trackside bushes where she was lying and allowed her to drink greedily from a canteen.

‘You’re doing great,’ Rosie lied, stroking Edith’s hair as she raised her head to stop her choking.

‘I’m seeing funny shapes,’ Edith said.

‘It’s the fever. You’re delirious.’

The train seemed endless and by the time fifty coal wagons passed Edith had drifted back into unconsciousness.

Rosie had no idea how long it would take for the train to offload and steam back, but Eugene had expected it well before sunrise. She sat beside Edith, cradling her head and envying the carefree horse munching grass a few metres away.

It was near 3 a.m. when Rosie heard the first rumblings of the train heading back. Edith couldn’t hold on, so Rosie aimed her bag on to the platform of a passing wagon, then grabbed Edith off the grass and needed all the muscle she’d built up in training to sling her over her shoulder.

Jumping aboard was precarious, but Rosie got a foot on a metal step and steadied herself by grabbing a metal rung used for climbing inside the container. After lying Edith out on the metal platform and tucking her under the angled side of the coal skip to make her invisible, Rosie crawled along the ledge at the side of the wagon to retrieve her backpack from two wagons up.

She had no problem getting there, but the train crested the hilltop as she turned back. Noise and vibration grew as the train picked up speed. The pack made it hard to balance and she had to pull herself in desperately as overhanging branches thrashed the side of the wagon.

When the ordeal was over, her heart was belting. She was black with coal dust, and even more alarmingly the increased vibration had moved Edith’s body several centimetres, leaving her head poking off the metal platform.

‘Quite an adventure,’ someone said.

Rosie jolted with fright as she saw two white eyeballs peeking over the end of the skip in the next wagon.

‘You’re better off using the foot holds,’ a boyish voice explained. ‘Climb through the skip and out at the other end.’

Rosie went for her pistol, making the eyes panic and drop back into the skip. ‘How’d you get here?’ she yelled. ‘What are you after?’

‘How’d you get a gun?’ the voice asked back. ‘Don’t shoot me. I was trying to help.’

Rosie thought before answering. Someone this young was probably no threat, but unlikely to be travelling the middle of the night without company.

‘What are you doing here?’ Rosie asked.

‘Nabbing coal,’ the boy explained, his voice now echoing from deep in the skip.

‘Are you alone?’

The boy considered this question for a few moments before answering. ‘I’m alone. Will you shoot me if I stick my head back up?’

‘Not unless you try something,’ Rosie said.

But she felt vaguely ridiculous saying this, because the coal-black creature that swung its leg over the side of the truck was ten years old at most.

‘I saw you jump on,’ the boy said. ‘Never hang off the sides like that. We’re coming up to some tunnels. They’d have caught your luggage and minced you.’

Rosie nodded as the boy landed on the platform with a clank. He wore tattered trousers and boots held together with twine.

‘I’m Justin,’ the boy said, as he studied Edith. ‘Your friend looks bad.’

‘She’s sick,’ Rosie said. ‘Are you running away, or something?’

‘I would if I didn’t have a mum and three sisters to feed,’ Justin said. ‘This is my work. I sneak into a loaded wagon on the way out. On the way back I work along all the skips, collecting the lumps of coal. Every wagon has a few bits that don’t get tipped out.’

‘Quite a scheme,’ Rosie said.

‘I can sell you coal if you want it,’ the boy said, as he scratched his matted hair. ‘I do OK, but the dust makes you itch like a
bastard
.’

Edith laughed, because it was kind of cute hearing this little lad swear. ‘I don’t need coal.’

‘I could swap coal for food if you haven’t got money.’

‘You must come from somewhere,’ Rosie said.

‘Course,’ the boy said. ‘But you didn’t tell me your name when I told you mine, which is being evasive.’

He made
evasive
sound important. As if it was the new word he’d learned in school the week before.

‘I’m Rosie,’ Rosie said, though she realised she should have lied. ‘Do you ever get caught?’

‘Loadsa times,’ Justin said. ‘The driver and guard let me be, but the railway police bash me up if they catch me.’

‘Sounds rough.’

‘Tunnel,’ Justin said urgently, before taking a quick breath and burying his face inside his jacket.

Rosie didn’t understand why until they plunged into pitch darkness. The blast of steam from the engine billowed around the tunnel, and air currents blew up a storm of coal dust off the wagons. She began coughing, then made things worse by rubbing her eye with a blackened finger.

Justin sounded exhilarated when they came out. ‘You’ve gotta take a deep breath when you see a tunnel. It’s actually fun once you get used to it.’

Rosie didn’t see the appeal as she hunted blindly for her water and blinked the grit out of her eye. Then she remembered Edith and turned anxiously to see what the tunnel had done to her.

‘Did your friend fall off the horse or something?’ Justin asked.

Rosie couldn’t tell whether the dust had affected Edith. But she was starting to realise that Justin might be more than an irritation.

‘So where do you get off the train?’ Rosie asked.

‘She needs a doctor,’ Justin said, as he went down on one knee and studied Edith more closely.

‘I know she does.’

‘You’ve got a gun,’ Justin said. ‘She’s got whip marks on her arms, and that looks like a cigarette burn on her neck. Did you kidnap her?’

Rosie sounded irritated. ‘Answer my question. Where do you get off the train?’

Justin smirked. ‘You’re not answering my questions either.’

Rosie put her hand on the gun. ‘That’s because I’ve got this and you haven’t.’

‘I suppose that’s true,’ Justin said, as he sat down on the platform cross-legged. ‘I get off the train near my house. There’s a water tower where the train has to stop and fill up. I live right by it.’

‘She’s going to die if I don’t get her to a doctor quickly. Is there a doctor near where you live?’

‘You can walk to the doctor in town.’

‘She doesn’t have documents,’ Rosie said. ‘Are there checkpoints?’

Justin backed up a little, scared, impressed and confused all at once. ‘You’re on the run from the Boche, aren’t you? Tunnel coming up in a second!’

This time Rosie put a wet rag over Edith’s nose and mouth before pulling her jacket up over her face. This tunnel was longer than the first and when they emerged there was a blacked-out town silhouetted in a valley below the tracks.

‘I can pay if you help me find a doctor,’ Rosie said, as she showed a ten-franc note.

Justin looked offended. ‘You think I’d take money for helping a sick person?’

‘And is your doctor a good person? Can we trust him?’

‘Her,’ Justin said, as he shrugged. ‘I think she’s OK. I went once when I went deaf and had to get my ear syringed. Mum was broke, but the doctor said pay something when you can. Have you ever had your ear syringed? It’s
so
loud, cos they’re shooting water right in your lughole.’

Justin’s mix of street-smarts and boyishness lightened Rosie’s mood after bleak hours with nothing but dark thoughts for company. She reached into her backpack and passed over a stick of high-energy chocolate.

‘Suck it or it’ll break your teeth,’ Rosie said. ‘It’s survival rations. Like they give to RAF pilots, in case they get shot down.’

Justin beamed as he peeled the foil off the chocolate and tried biting a corner off.

‘Bloody hell,’ Justin said, before bursting out laughing. ‘Tunnel!’

Apart from nightly rides on the coal train, Justin didn’t travel much. When Rosie quizzed him about where they’d be getting off he gave the name of somewhere that wasn’t on her map and said that the local farmers sold goods at a market in Rennes. But he’d never been there himself, so he wasn’t sure how long the journey took.

Still, anywhere near Rennes was well out of the military zone. Rosie had to take a punt on finding Edith a doctor who wouldn’t report her to the Gestapo wherever she wound up, which made sticking with Justin at least as good a choice as any other.

It was near dawn as the train left its single track and merged into the regular railway. Rosie hoped they’d soon pass a station, which would give her a better fix on her location, but within a minute the wagons shuddered to a halt and the brawny steam engine began refilling its water tank.

‘You’ve gotta run in case there’s railway cops,’ Justin explained quietly. ‘Go down the embankment. I’ll meet you at the bottom.’

Water gushed from the tower twenty wagons ahead as Rosie lobbed her backpack through trackside bushes. While she bent to pick Edith up, Justin had clambered inside a coal skip and began hurling out sacks, each filled with as much coal as he could lift.

The embankment was too steep to navigate with Edith over her shoulder, so Rosie slid down on her bum, left Edith at the bottom then went back for her pack. When she returned, two little girls were dragging coal sacks over a weed patch, while the youngest – who looked about three – stood with hands on hips gawping at Edith.

‘Don’t touch,’ Justin said, before dumping his smallest sack of coal at the little girl’s feet. ‘Drag that back to the house, before I kick you up the bum.’

The girl knew the threat was a joke and poked her tongue out at her big brother.

Rosie picked Edith back up, while Justin burdened himself with Rosie’s pack and dragged a coal sack with each hand. Home was a terrace of three tatty cottages, less than fifty metres from the tracks.

‘Don’t leave me behind,’ the tiny girl ordered, making Justin look back and blow a big fart noise at her.

‘I’m telling Mummy!’

‘Tell her,’ Justin said cheerfully. ‘I don’t care.’

The coal sacks were piled in the hallway as Rosie entered through the back door. A huge hole in the roof sent dawn light down a staircase sprouting moss, and Rosie noted that the three girls looked exactly like their big brother.

‘Dump Edith in the armchair,’ Justin told Rosie, then grabbed his oldest sister, who was eight. ‘Agnes, run into town and get Dr Blanc.’

‘Say that Justin is hurt,’ Rosie added, as she put Edith down. ‘Don’t say anything about us being here.’

Agnes looked at her brother for confirmation.

‘Do
exactly
what she says,’ Justin said firmly.

‘Who are they?’ the girl asked warily. ‘What will Mummy say?’

Justin pointed at Edith, then raised his hand threatening a slap. ‘That girl could die. Just get Dr Blanc, and
don’t
let that nurse fob you off, even if you have to bite her.’

As Justin knelt down to unlace his boots, he told middle sister Aimée to fetch him a bucket of water to wash with, then told little sister Belle that she was a good girl for helping bring in the coal, and gave her a square of the high-energy chocolate.

‘Suck don’t bite, and
don’t
tell your sisters,’ Justin said.

He then moved in to kiss Belle, but she backed off yelling, ‘You’ll make me dirty!’