The Safest Place in London (19 page)

Gerald had gone to a tennis party in Ruislip in the summer of '28.

He went with bad grace, determined to hate everyone and everything. Finally Marian Fairfax, at whose house the tennis party was held and at whose behest he had sacrificed his Saturday to motor into darkest Middlesex, took him aside and roundly scolded him. Chastened, smarting but still aggrieved (for what
did Marian Fairfax know of his black heart?) he changed into his tennis whites. Bunny hadn't come and in her place was a girl he didn't know. She was a curious little thing, not pretty, her snub nose almost like a child's and her chin a little too prominent and lips too narrow around a too-large mouth that badly applied lipstick had only accentuated. But she was poised, somehow, with an elegant neck and very fierce, very frightening little eyes that told him she was out of her depth socially and that she minded this very much. The girl—her name was Diana—had been partnered with Eddie Devlin, which was bad luck for her as Eddie always took the whole thing very seriously and made his partner pay if they fluffed a shot. But miraculously the girl was up to it, more than up to it; she matched him shot for shot, whipping out stunning backhands one after another. It was marvellous to see and the most marvellous part was that the girl's fear utterly vanished and she glowed, positively glowed—until Ed sent a ball right at poor Cecily Porter's face in the deciding set and that was the end of that. They had won, Eddie and the girl, but Gerald could see her dismay at the manner of their victory and when Phyllis Devlin caused a nasty little scene afterwards her dismay turned to horror. An outraged horror, he saw; the outraged horror of a very upright, moral person when faced with a bully. And, damn it, Ed
was
a bully. And, as much to his own surprise as hers, Gerald presented himself to the girl shortly afterwards and suggested he drive her home.

It was all a long time ago. A tennis party in Ruislip in 1928.

Where the
hell
was Bani Walid?

Gerald stuck his head out through the Mk VI's turret and scanned the western horizon. What if they should get this far, survive three years of war, only to die like this, blundering about in the desert? He was the commanding officer, it was incumbent on him to keep his men safe, to get them home. He imagined, with unsettling clarity, an ageing and weathered Mrs Enderby many miles away in Northallerton, a woman with broken veins in her legs and bunions on her feet, waiting for her boy to come home. He imagined Endersby's Elspeth working silently and solemnly in the dairy, day after interminable day, waiting for the boy who would never come home. He had a little more trouble picturing Crouch's family, imagining a violent, angry father and a terrified meek woman, Crouch's mother, living in nightly fear of her husband's fists. He imagined the telegram coming to the house and the terrified, meek Mrs Crouch falling into a faint from which she would never recover. He could see it all quite clearly. The longer he spent in the company of Enderby and Crouch the more vivid these images of their families became, and always he pictured them at the moment at which news of their sons' deaths were received.

He would not picture the same scene in his own house, with his own family.

There was something up ahead. Gerald snatched up the field glasses. Yes, a dark, square shape, not a building, too small for that, but definitely manmade.

‘Crouch, north thirty degrees!'

It was a Panzer, unmistakable by its grey colouring. A big old Panzer III just sitting there, alone and abandoned, in a flat and utterly barren area of scree and gravel. Nothing else for miles in
any direction. It was the first intact Panzer they had come across. What was it doing all the way out here? It had a range of only about ninety miles at most, and a top speed off-road of twelve miles per hour. She made the British Mk VI seem like a sports car by comparison. She was larger than their own Mk VI, a five-man vehicle with a three-man turret. At her hull was almost an inch of armour which made her invincible against the Allies' anti-tank guns—if you took her face on. From the sides and the rear she was useless and a well-aimed machine gun could pierce her like a piece of cheese. She was an obsolete model, superseded by the Panzer IV years back, and perhaps that explained her presence out here, for she would not have been risked in battle, would in all likelihood have been abandoned during the final Axis retreat, or taken by those wishing to avoid the advancing Allies.

He gave the order and they trundled warily towards it, pulling up fifty yards short. Crouch switched off the engine and inside the Mk VI no one spoke. After a moment Gerald jumped down and cautiously circled the immobile Panzer on foot. It was caked in a thick crust of sand and the caterpillar tracks were worn almost to shreds, but just below the turret the insignia of the Afrika Korps, a black cross and palm tree, was intact. The turret hatch was closed. Gerald walked over, aware that Crouch and Enderby were watching. The tank was abandoned; he was certain of this. The dust had settled all around it. No tracks were visible before or behind, though the terrain was so scrubby, the winds so quick and intense, that any tracks it might have made—even an hour ago—would long have vanished. He climbed up onto the body and stood for a moment beside the hatch. He was close enough to read the manufacturer's details on the rim:
DAIMLER-BENZ
·
STUTTGART
· 1938. His heart was thudding in his chest, which was odd because the war in the desert was over and he had survived. But his heart was thudding.

He eased open the latch and swung the lid back, brandishing his unloaded pistol as he did so and ducking lest a shot was fired. But no shot was fired. After a long moment he peered inside then jerked back at once as the smell of decaying flesh struck him. He turned away, gagging and choking. Bloody hell, he thought furiously. It had not even occurred to him someone might be dead in there. He stuck his head back inside, this time seeing the driver's seat, the gunner's perch, a damaged radio set.

And a body.

It was slumped over the fuel chamber at the rear of the tank, a gunner in fatigues, arms flung out before him, his cap on the floor at his feet, the side of his head dark red with matted hair and blood. A second wound, on his leg below the knee, was festering, the flesh black and putrid. Gerald pulled his scarf up over his mouth and nose.

‘Crouch! Enderby! Get over here. Let's get this poor bugger out.'

If they were going to salvage the Panzer, and it was not clear to him if they would or would not—it might simply depend on how much fuel it had—they were not going to drive the thing away with a corpse inside.

They came running, Crouch first, Enderby a few yards behind, both with that odd reluctant run of men commanded to do something they really had no wish to do.

‘Looks like a gunshot wound,' said Gerald, climbing down inside the Panzer. His foot kicked a Luger that had been lying on
the floor near the man's cap, sending it skidding away beneath the driver's foot pedals. As it began to cross his mind that the man had pulled the trigger himself, that the gaping wound in the side of his head was self-inflicted, the body let out a groan.

Gerald jumped back, banging his head painfully on the roof. Crouch, who was climbing after him, lost his footing and fell with a sickening thud onto the metal floor. Enderby, still standing outside on the top of the tank, fell back with a shout and disappeared.

‘Bloody
hell
!' cried Crouch, scrambling to his feet and backing away. ‘Bugger's not dead,' he added unnecessarily.

‘Well, he's not exactly going anywhere, is he?' said Gerald, prodding the man with the end of his pistol, which merely elicited another groan. The man was alive, but barely so. ‘Come on, let's get him out, for God's sake!' And they manhandled the fellow feet first out of the turret hatch and then over the side of the tank, where, horribly, they dropped him and he rolled off the tank and onto the ground and lay, face down, letting out a dreadful wheezing whine that was barely human.

Dear God
, thought Gerald. He scrambled down and they turned the man over and lay him on his back. The side of his skull was gone, blown away by the Luger, and there was nothing they could do for him. The other side of his face was quite untouched, and it was the face of a young man badly malnourished and unshaven for many weeks, his skin blistered and destroyed by the desert sun and deprivation. His eyes were wide open though they seemed not to see anything, thank God. Enderby fetched a canteen and they wet his lips, which were cracked and swollen and bloodied, but he was too far gone to notice.

Dusk had come and they were going nowhere, now, till dawn. They broke out their meagre rations and, as the temperature began to drop, huddled on the groundsheet beside the tank and listened as the man made horrid gurgling, drowning sounds in the back of his throat.

‘
Die
, you bastard,
die
!' muttered Crouch in a low voice.

But it was almost dawn before the man took his final breath.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A man had no control over his life. It was daft to think otherwise.

Five months ago the navy had placed Stoker 2nd Class Joe Levin on the corvette, HMS
Polyanthus
, on North Atlantic convoy duty. The
Polyanthus
had already survived a number of transatlantic crossings, cheating death, avoiding—somehow—the U-boats that roamed the northern oceans. The odds were against you. But a stoker spent his life in the ship's engine room shovelling coal. He did not calculate probabilities, he did not plot positions on a chart. That was for other men.

In September of '43 the
Polyanthus
set off from Liverpool, part of a convoy of sixty-five merchant vessels escorted by nineteen warships bound for New York and Halifax.

At the end of his first shift the sun emerged over the stern and Joe smoked a cigarette, gazing at the line of ships that stretched as far as the horizon, and he wondered how the U-boats, patrolling a line south of Greenland and directly in their path, could possibly miss them. The Germans had a new type of torpedo, one that
homed in on the sound of a ship's engine and its propeller. What could you do? Turn off your engine and drift? Or plough on and trust to luck? The stoker was the first to die when a torpedo struck, the last to make it to a lifeboat. And yet some convoys did make it through. He himself had crossed the Atlantic and he had returned. A line of sixty-five ships in an ocean this big was like trying to locate a single star in a galaxy full of stars.

And so it was. Day after day there was no landfall and no sign of anyone or anything. The lashing grey waves merged with the low grey skies so that the war might have ended, the land might have been swallowed up by the ocean, and you would not know it.

Some convoys did make it through.

But not this one. On the sixth day, at a point somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, the U-boats found them. A Canadian ship, the
St. Croix
, was the first to be sunk. The
Polyanthus
, turning back to pick up survivors, was struck next. She broke up and sank so quickly barely a handful of men survived. Clinging to the scorched remnants of their ship through the night, some of the survivors froze to death. The remaining few were picked up at dawn by HMS
Itchen
.

All but two. Two men in a lifeboat were missed. In the darkness and the rough seas, in all the chaos, and as their shipmates were pulled aboard the rescue ship, a stoker and a petty officer watched helplessly as the current took them further and further away. The petty officer, mortally wounded in the explosion, died quite soon after. The stoker, who had been blown clean out of the vessel when the torpedo had struck and who remembered nothing at all of the explosion, now salvaged the dead man's clothes in an effort to keep warm and pushed the man's corpse overboard.

Then he waited to die.

A day later the
Itchen
was hit and sank, along with most of its crew and the few survivors from the
Polyanthus
who had been plucked from the ocean the day before. Stocker 2nd Class Joe Levin, after three days adrift, was picked up by a passing Polish merchant vessel and a week later was recuperating in a Liverpool hospital suffering nothing worse than hypothermia, dehydration and frostbite.

He spent a fortnight in the Liverpool hospital, and while he lay in his bed on the ward with his fingers and toes in bandages, watching the nurses pad softly back and forth and listening to the seaman in the bed opposite scream for his mother, he found himself thinking about the lack of control a man had over his life and the futility of thinking otherwise. He thought about the red-haired nurse with the lilting Highlands accent who worked the night shifts and who smelled of carbolic soap and whose uniform rustled with starch so that he knew she was coming seconds before she entered the ward. At night he dreamed about the dead petty officer whom he had stripped and tipped overboard. He saw the man's bloated corpse lying on the seabed in utter darkness many fathoms beneath the sea, then he saw the corpse picked clean by all the various creatures of the ocean until only a skeleton remained, but the skull still had eyes that watched him, accusingly.