Henderson's Boys: The Escape (15 page)

Freedom was good, Paris was pretty special; but spending half a morning drooling on a pillow and knowing that you didn’t have to get up was the best thing of all. What’s more, the Germans had stopped bombing when the French announced the city’s surrender, so Marc was enjoying his most peaceful lie-in ever when the house shook with such violence that his skull thumped painfully against the headboard.

A great roar erupted over the brow of the hill and when Marc pulled the curtains he saw a vast, mushroom-shaped fireball towering into the sky. But there were no planes and the explosion was twenty times bigger than any bomb he’d seen up to now.

The heat on the glass was intense, and as Marc heard saucepans clattering downstairs in the kitchen and a glass cabinet toppling in the living room, he was astonished to see a dozen people gathered at the bottom of the hill near the church. They held hands over brows to shield the glare, but looked oddly calm – as if they were watching a firework display, rather than facing the random threat of an air raid.

Alarmed and mystified, Marc pulled on his trousers and boots before buttoning his shirt and bounding downstairs. More blasts erupted as he glanced into the living room and confirmed his worst fears about the cabinets.

Although the spare house-key Marc found in Henderson’s study meant he could now use the front door, he still had no right to be in the house and he steered clear of the neighbours.

After ducking under the hedges enveloping the front gate, he looked to the top of the hill and saw that many of the men from the Dormitory Raquel also stood in the street, watching the receding flames. Smaller explosions continued to rumble, and it was fortunate that the wind was carrying the plumes of smoke away from them.

Running might attract undue attention, so Marc walked briskly downhill, patting his pockets for change to make sure that he had enough for an early lunch or late breakfast. Even though, on his daily trips to the cinema, he passed the café whose owner had directed him towards the Dormitory Raquel, he’d never eaten there again because he’d discovered a little place run by an Italian family not far from the church. The food was much better and Livia – the owner’s teenaged daughter – had huge breasts.

Livia, her father, her grandmother and several customers lined up in front of the café, admiring the flames.

‘Marc,’ the elderly grandmother said, smiling brightly. ‘How’s your uncle today?’

Café Roma was frequented by locals, and the first time Marc went inside he’d mentioned that he was staying with a sick uncle, deliberately remaining vague about exactly where he lived. Marc wasn’t proud of the lie, but the old woman called him a
little trooper
and never missed an opportunity to overfill his plate or give him a free glass of her chocolate mousse.

Marc would happily have exchanged all of the mousse in Paris for a single smile from her well-endowed granddaughter, but all Livia ever did was slam down plates and scowl at Marc like he was something stuck on her shoe.

‘My uncle isn’t too bad today,’ Marc said, as he tried desperately to remember yesterday’s lie so that he didn’t repeat it. ‘I gave him a shave and helped him in the bath.’

‘Oh, aren’t you a darling?’ the old lady said, with her ripe Italian accent. ‘I’ve made a fresh batch of meatballs and spaghetti. Would you like to try?’

‘It’s not even eleven,’ the owner noted, but Marc didn’t mind at all. At first he’d been wary of anything beyond the basic soups and stews he’d lived on all his life at the orphanage, but all the food he’d been served in the Café Roma was good, and longstanding connections with local markets and wholesalers meant that the café remained well stocked despite the food shortages.

‘So what’s going on over the hill?’ Marc asked, pointing at the flames.

‘The surrender,’ the café owner explained. ‘Didn’t you know? The Germans will enter the city at noon.’

Marc nodded. ‘I heard that on on the radio last night. So why are the Germans still bombing?’

‘That’s you French, not the Germans,’ the old lady explained. ‘They’re letting the Boche have Paris, complete with all the bridges across the Seine, but even the French Command isn’t dopy enough to hand the Germans their ammunition factories.’

‘Ahhh,’ Marc said, as realisation dawned. ‘I was sleep—erm … I had my uncle in the bath, so I’ve not heard any news this morning. What else are they saying?’

‘Not much,’ the owner said. The sky was still darkened with smoke but the fireball from the massive explosion was burning itself out. The old lady took up the answer to Marc’s question as Livia’s dad followed the first of his customers back inside the cramped café.

‘The army has closed all roads out of Paris to civilians so they can get their equipment out, and the Germans have promised to enter the city in a dignified manner and harm nobody,’ the old lady said. Then her lips thinned and she tossed curls of grey hair off her face. ‘I guess we’ll know in an hour.’

Tours was on the main route between Paris and the south. A few well-placed bombs here could disrupt road and rail traffic through central France and force military supplies and troops to divert hundreds of kilometres through the countryside, causing delay and wasting increasingly scarce fuel supplies.

Ten days of intense bombing had turned the heart of the town into hell, destroying more than a third of the buildings, taking out all of the major bridges and cutting off supplies of gas, water and electricity. There wasn’t an unbroken window within two kilometres of the town centre.

But you didn’t have to venture far into the surrounding countryside for all signs of war to vanish. Rosie and Paul had found refuge in a small farmhouse belonging to a retired priest and his spinster sister. At this moment, Rosie was running at full pelt across a meadow, gaining ground on Hugo, who wore a headdress made from a piece of knotted rag and chicken feathers.

‘Can’t get me!’ Hugo shouted. But he shrieked as he looked behind and saw that Rosie was almost within touching distance.

‘Gotcha, monster,’ Rosie growled, as she grabbed the small boy around the waist and hoisted him high into the air with his legs kicking frantically.

Hugo was grinning and breathless as she put him down. ‘Again?’ he asked.

Rosie liked playing with Hugo because it gave her a chance to act stupid and forget about all the bad stuff. The trouble was, he never wanted to stop.

‘OK,’ Rosie said, putting her hands over her eyes. ‘One last time.’

‘
Three
more times,’ Hugo demanded.

‘Once more, or not at all. I’ve played with you for nearly an hour.’

‘OK …’ the boy huffed, before spinning around and darting off into the long grass.

‘One, two, three …’ Rosie counted, but gave up the pretence once Hugo was out of earshot. It was too hot for all this running around and she was getting a stitch down her side.

She looked across the meadow and immediately noticed Hugo’s head peeking over the top of the ditch. But she knew if she found Hugo too quickly he’d insist on playing again, so she looked mystified for a few moments before starting to stroll towards the ditch.

Hugo sprang up and protested when Rosie got close. ‘You peeked!’

‘So what?’ Rosie teased. ‘What are you gonna do about it, titch?’

‘You’re ugly!’ Hugo shouted, before scrambling up the side of the ditch. ‘And you smell like horse bum.’

Rosie growled dramatically. ‘Oh, you’re gonna get it now.’

Hugo shrieked with delight as he pushed through a hedge and began running up a dirt track. When Rosie got through the hedge – a task far more difficult for a burly thirteen year old than for a boy of six – she was alarmed to see Hugo’s little legs running at full pelt up a steep path covered with rocks.

‘You be careful,’ Rosie said. ‘Come back and play on the grass.’

‘Can’t get me,’ was Hugo’s response.

Rosie didn’t fancy bashing her knee on a rock, so she kept her pace down to a brisk walk. Hugo stopped running and looked back with his hands on his hips.

‘Come
on
, Rosie, you’re not playing properly.’

Hugo cut off the path and dived behind a clump of bushes. A second later he screamed out, ‘OWWWWW!’

Rosie envisaged grazed skin and streaks of blood and ran desperately towards Hugo. But by the time she’d made ten metres she heard Hugo say, ‘What are you hiding up here for?’ in a voice that showed no sign of distress.

Rosie rounded the bushes and saw that Hugo had turned the corner and tripped over her brother’s outstretched legs. Paul was sitting against the trunk of a small tree, with his sketchbook and the wooden case containing his drawing pens and inks on the grass at his side.

‘Are you OK?’ Rosie asked brightly, when she saw her brother. ‘What are you doing?’

Paul wiggled his sketchpad. ‘Flower arranging,’ he tutted.

Rosie wouldn’t usually have stood any lip from her brother, but he’d taken their father’s death hard and had been even quieter than usual in the week since.

‘What are you drawing?’ Hugo asked.

‘Nothing,’ Paul said.

Hugo stepped closer to Paul. ‘Please show me,’ he begged.

Paul clutched the pad close to his chest, but Hugo made a grab and Paul shoved him away angrily. ‘It’s private.’

Hugo tumbled back three steps before falling hard on his bum.

‘Careful, moron,’ Rosie yelled. ‘He’s only six.’

Hugo stood up with his bottom lip rolled out like he was going to cry.

‘I didn’t ask you to come barging over here,’ Paul said indignantly. ‘I just want to be on my own.’

‘I just asked to see your picture,’ Hugo said.

Paul grabbed a corner of his pad with his inky fingers and flung it into the dirt. Hugo stared at it, unable to grasp what it was, but Rosie instantly recognised her father’s face. One side was an almost perfect drawing, but the other appeared twisted, with the eyeball sunk into the skull and a gaping wound filled with maggots in his cheek.

‘You little sicko,’ Rosie shouted. ‘Why have you got to draw him like that? Why can’t you do a nice picture?’

Paul scowled at his sister. ‘Because I don’t feel like making a
nice
picture, fatso.’

Rosie wasn’t fat, but she was sensitive about her stocky build and calling her fat was the easiest way to make her mad.

‘I can’t look at that,’ Rosie shouted, picking the pad off the floor, tearing off the page and ripping the drawing to shreds. She’d expected Paul to fight her, but he didn’t move.

‘Can you go now you’re done interfering?’ Paul said calmly.

If Paul had put up a fight Rosie would have felt OK about ripping up the drawing, but the way he sat there, staring pathetically, made her feel terrible. The drawing must have taken hours.

‘I’m sorry,’ Rosie said sheepishly, as the wind picked up squares of torn paper.

‘If you say so,’ Paul said.

Rosie felt like her brother was dead inside. She wanted to grab him and thump him until he came back to life.

‘Can’t you at least talk to me?’ Rosie begged. ‘I’m hurting too, you know. What is it you want?’

‘We should have gone south, like we agreed in the first place,’ Paul said. ‘Not stayed here with Father Doran and his sister.’

‘It’s safe here,’ Rosie groaned. ‘People were dying on the roads, Paul. Probably still are. Here we’ve got good food, clean water, somewhere decent to sleep …’

Paul shook his head. ‘Dad’s last words were
Find Henderson, give him the papers
. And what are we doing? Sitting on our arses, drawing pictures and playing with six year olds.’

‘Dad would have wanted us to be safe more than anything else,’ Rosie said. ‘We’ve been through his pocket book. We’ve been through every one of the documents in the briefcase, looking for a reference to Henderson, and there’s nothing. No phone number, no address, no details of who he works for.’

‘But people in England would know, Rosie. If we went south and got a boat to England we could contact someone and find Henderson’s assistant: Miss McAfferty.’

‘Probably,’ Rosie said. ‘But even if we make it to Bordeaux – two hundred kilometres on foot, and in this heat – how can we be sure that there’s a boat leaving for England? If there
is
a boat, you can bet your life that there are going to be thousands of refugees trying to get on board.’

Paul shrugged. ‘I didn’t say it would be easy, but I know Dad would have wanted us to try.’

‘No,’ Rosie said, shaking her head. ‘Dad was off his head when he said that. He was bleeding to death. And besides, what about Mum? I know for a fact that she would have wanted us to stay here, where it’s safe.’

Paul’s silence was as close as he’d get to admitting that Rosie was probably right.

‘I’m hungry,’ Hugo said, grabbing Rosie’s wrist and giving it a tug.

‘I’m going back to the cottage,’ Rosie said, as she looked down at Hugo. ‘Yvette should have lunch ready soon. Are you coming with us?’