The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (6 page)

She laughed at that. ‘I really don’t know what organisation it is. I find it hard to be loyal to something so nebulous.’

‘So what do you think you are doing here?’

‘I’m afraid you are better equipped to answer that than I am.’

Occasionally, to escape the watchful eyes and the attentive ears, she went out alone for a walk, loving the empty solitude of the place in the elongated dusk and prepared even to brave the midges. At least, she reasoned, out here I’m on my own. At least I can think.

Time passed, with that curious relativity that brought Ned’s physics to mind: relative time, elastic time, the hours of
discomfort stretching out like days but the whole passage of the course compressing from days into what seemed like mere hours. They did weapons training – pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns, a dozen different types of each. They learned to prove a weapon, to strip it and assemble it, to charge a magazine and load it, to fire from the hip and the shoulder and prone. The shooting range was a simulacrum of a town street, built among the outhouses, with targets that were the silhouettes of malignant men that appeared momentarily and at random, pulled up by an artifice of levers and pulleys. The students ducked and weaved, turning this way and that, firing from the centre line of the body, arms out straight.

‘Don’t aim,’ the instructors told them. ‘Instinct is what we want. Like pointing with your finger.’ They talked of Fairbairn and Sykes, twin deities of this strange world of killing. The Fairbairn-Sykes position: ‘Square on to the target, legs apart, knees flexed. Raise the weapon to face level, both eyes open, the weapon obscuring the target. Then two shots in quick succession. Double tap. Bang, bang! If you don’t kill him with the first shot, you kill him with the second.’

Marian found she could do it, that was the strange thing. Gun in hand she could weave through the shooting range and hit the targets with unerring accuracy. ‘That’s right!’ the instructor cried. ‘Show the gentlemen how to do it.’

Emile explained that he had once been a superb shot – even competed at Bisley – until something mysterious had happened in Africa and he had lost his edge as a result. ‘But you’re not bad,’ he conceded grudgingly. ‘Not bad at all.’

After weapons training they were induced into the mysterious world of demolition by a man with the joyous expression of a child with fireworks. ‘
Plastique
,’ he said, showing them a lump of oily putty. ‘As stable as chewing gum, as explosive as TNT.’ They handed it from one to the other. It smelled of almonds. ‘Detonate it properly and it’ll bring down bridges. The resister’s best friend,
plastique
.’ Quite why he used the French
name was never clear. Did this strange stuff originate in France? As though to help answer that question, he took the lump back and kneaded it into a shape that made the men laugh and the two women blush. And then, to demonstrate its stability, he tossed it on the fire, where the stuff burned and fizzed with a festive flame. Then he took them outside to a bunker among the outhouses and showed them how to tamp the explosive, how to wire up the detonator and finally, with a joyous shout as he wound the induction coil, how a few ounces of plastic could blow a car axle to pieces.

‘Then there are the time pencils.’ He held them up like a child showing his collection of bangers. ‘Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty, thirty. You make your selection, twist the stem to break the capsule and Bob’s your uncle.’

Time pencil. Again she thought of Ned, something he might invent, a pencil that could mark out the passage of time, a pen that could recall the past and predict the future, a quill that might consign the present to oblivion.

Dear Ned
, she wrote.
I hope you are quite well. Here they work our fingers to the bone but in a strange way I am enjoying myself. When we get leave at the end of this course maybe I can get to London to see you.

But she had little time to think about him. Here there were people of far greater curiosity than her scientist brother, men who knew how to kill and destroy, like the instructor in close combat, a middle-aged man with a brush of short, ginger hair and the gloomy manner of an undertaker. He delivered a first-aid course in reverse – how to cut the brachial artery with a knife slash to the forearm, how to dislocate the knee with a single stab of the foot, how to snap a man’s spine by dropping him across your knee, how to inflict the maximum damage in the minimum time. You could render a man helpless with a handclap to both ears, knock him unconscious with a matchbox, kill him with an umbrella.

‘Remember this: you don’t want to get into a fight, but if you
have no choice then you want to get out of it as quick as possible. The quickest way is to kill your opponent. I’m sorry if that offends the ladies’ sensibilities, but that’s the fact of the matter.’

It did not offend Yvette’s sensibilities: with all the devotion of an acolyte committing to a new religion, she loved silent killing. She loved the heft of a knife in her hands, the wicked gleaming tongue of steel with the initials of the designer at the base of the blade:
THE F-S FIGHTING KNIFE
, it said, the plain truth engraved there without any euphemism. Fairbairn and Sykes again. The hilt lay softly in her hand, balanced between thumb and forefinger like a conductor’s baton. ‘I could kill with this,’ she murmured.

They practised on one another with dummy weapons, and what started as self-conscious play-acting grew close to the real thing, something tense and terrific, as though a life depended on it. And Yvette showed the way, approaching her victim from behind, as quiet as a cat. The rest of the course watched, breathlessly, something that was at once compelling and obscene: the small woman moving, the sudden pounce, the knife striking down into the shoulder, right behind the collarbone where the subclavian artery lay deep among muscle and connective tissue, where, if you got it right, the victim would die within four seconds.

Marian lay awake and thought about killing. Killing in the abstract was fine. Killing at one remove, killing in theory. She remembered the Filter Room, a dozen WAAFs crowding round the table in the early evening with the calls coming through from the radar stations. The girls in a scrum, reaching out over one another to put tokens down on the map like gamblers at the roulette table placing their last bets. The excitement as single plots became dozens, became hundreds, tracks identified and called, pointing out across the bulge of East Anglia and heading
towards the sea, each single plot being seven men and that meant seven lives. Seven times seven hundred. Five thousand lives, give or take. They’d march soundlessly across the board and disappear beyond the edge of the known world and the girls would wait, smoking, drinking tea, chatting in a desultory fashion while the killing went on, distant killing that you couldn’t see and couldn’t hear, the pulverising of the German cities. But what the ginger instructor was proposing was different: killing when you could feel the man’s throat beneath your arm, his breath on your cheek, his blood on your hands. How do you do that?

‘Oh, it would be no trouble for me,’ Yvette assured her. ‘I think I would enjoy it.’

If it wasn’t death, it was destruction. How to blow a door, put a car out of action, destroy a train. She found herself paired with Emile. He always knew everything about it even before the lecture had begun. ‘Used to work on the railways in the Congo,’ he explained when they were being taught how to sabotage a railway line.

‘Was that before or after the mines?’

‘That’s a complex question.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s not even one I want an answer to.’ But she got an answer nevertheless, the precise chronology of his career as mine engineer, railway engineer, construction engineer, any kind of engineer you might wish for. ‘It was a tough life showing the blacks the way forward.’

‘You and Mr Kurtz, you mean?’

That puzzled him. It was always a triumph to puzzle Emile. ‘Kurtz? I never met anyone called Kurtz.’

She hated him. She didn’t often hate people, but she hated Emile.
One of the people on our course is a pompous KA
, she wrote to her father the next day.
The kind you abhor
.

They practised wireless telegraphy and Morse code regularly, tapping on the key with nervy fingers and trying to take down the irritating buzzing into a coherent sequence of dots and
dashes.
The boat will dock at Dover on the fifteenth
.
The Test Match will result in victory for Australia
. Daft messages like that.

‘Each operator has his own fist. As individual as handwriting.’

Hands stammered on the Bakelite knobs. Arthritis, they called Morse keying: like arthritis it brought a painful tension in the wrist, aching carpals and metacarpals, stiff and inflexible fingers. ‘Accuracy is everything. Accuracy and speed. Lives may depend on it. Perhaps even yours.’ Flimsies passed back and forth from instructors to students, misreadings underscored in blue crayon.

She keyed, without a mistake: