Part 7 (2/2)

'You cannot,' Grillet interrupted brusquely.

'Cannot?' I frowned.

'Colonel les Halles is on the beach with the engineers who arrived last evening,' he said. 'The new machines are being set up. His specific orders. No one can go down there today. Excepting the builders and the colonel himself, that is.'

'What about the women?'

'Confined to their cabins. There is no way to reach them.'

Was he about to inform me that I would be confined to my hut, as well?

I skipped to the next point on the agenda that I had set myself for the day.

'I mean to speak to the company doctor. Where can I find him?'

Grillet's French was rural, his p.r.o.nunciation more heavily accented than the norm, brutal in its directness. 'Le medecin n'est pas ici,' he said.

'Not in the camp?' I repeated.

'He lives in Nordcopp. Three miles inland.'

I was surprised. Did Colonel les Halles allow his officers to live in the town?

'That's half an hour by horse,' I insisted stubbornly. 'However slow the nag may be.'

'The horses are on the sh.o.r.e, as well, monsieur. There's heavy stuff to be moved about down there.' He paused, like a wrestler looking for a better hold. Then, he leapt to the attack again. 'If you want to go, you'll have to walk.'

The trace of a sardonic smile graced his thin lips. I had met this sort of insolence before when working with the French. They might need me, but they were not prepared to help me overmuch.

'Just point me in the right direction,' I said, ignoring the provocation.

He looked inland. 'Follow the track leading out of the main gate. It will take you straight to Nordcopp by way of Nordbarn.'

'Nordbarn?'

Grillet settled the strap of his cap more comfortably beneath his chin.

'You asked about her friends, monsieur,' he volunteered. 'Those women up in Nordbarn used to work down here on the sh.o.r.e themselves. They may have known the woman that you are interested in. And now, monsieur, if you've done with me, I'll have my breakfast.'

He placed his hand upon the door and pushed.

The smell of French bread and toasted corn wafted over me again.

'Will you come, too, sir?'

I peered inside and met the suspicious glances of the French soldiers. They all knew who I was. They also knew that I had just interrogated one of their number. My stomach ached with hunger, but I did not go in.

'Thank you, no,' I said.

I would eat Prussian food.

Nordcopp was not so very far away.

9.

THE SUN BEAT mercilessly down upon my head.

It was three miles to Nordcopp, even less to Nordbarn, according to Grillet, but it seemed like thirty as I tramped along the narrow rutted carriage-track which had brought me to the Baltic sh.o.r.e the night before. Fishermen and the people who worked the local amber were reputed to dwell there, but I saw no man. Grillet had also warned me that the area was rigorously patrolled by French troops, but I did not meet a single soldier.

I seemed to be going nowhere, beating time in the middle of a desolate wilderness, a vast expanse of rolling sand-dunes crowned with withered clumps of stunted gra.s.s. The only sounds that shattered the persistent shrilling of the wind were the sharp shriek of an occasional solitary gull high above my head or the softer piping of an unseen curlew. As time dragged on and nothing changed, I began to wonder whether Moses himself could have led me safely out of that desert.

Then, a stunted laurel bush appeared like a mirage on the horizon.

I reached it, and I saw a stand of slanting ash trees further off. Sheltering in their lee was a cl.u.s.ter of low broken-backed roofs. I counted five huts as I approached, five long buildings covered with salt-blackened thatch that was hanging almost to the ground. They were set in a horse-shoe which enclosed a small bare s.p.a.ce, and leant so close together that the villagers must have heard their neighbours rutting.

Nordbarn.

The settlement was like a primitive fortress. There was one way in and out, a narrow pa.s.sage that pointed towards the coast. That was where the amber came from. That was where the French soldiers came from. In ages past, the Baltic Sea had been the local people's only source of livelihood, the source of all the dangers that they faced. I could only hope that they would not see me in the same menacing light.

My ears were throbbing. The sensation had been annoying me for quite a while, long before I actually saw the place. The noise increased in intensity, the nearer that I came to the village. It might have been the droning of a hive of b.u.mblebees. Or the streets of Lotingen at midday, I recalled ruefully, when the clouds of flies and midges were most bothersome.

Yet, no fly troubled me.

No droning bee was anywhere to be seen.

And suddenly the throbbing ceased.

A wooden shutter was thrown back, a face looked out.

I froze on the spot.

Let them see you plainly, I thought.

They would see a man who had not shaved since the previous morning. A man whose hair was tussled by the wind, and stiff with sand. A man who had slept all night in the rumpled, sweaty clothes that he was wearing. I began to regret my slovenliness. Would I look to them like a magistrate who had the power to conduct an important criminal investigation?

The shutter closed with a bang.

Diffidence was probably normal in that place. Especially knowing that one of their number had been murdered. Then again, there was the fear of strangers which such news might be expected to arouse.

I began to stride more purposefully towards the village.

My German tongue would convince them that I meant no harm.

I pa.s.sed through the gap between the huts and emerged in the heart of the hamlet.

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