The Darkest Hour (17 page)

He stared at the old man and said, “Why haven’t they just killed you? What’s the point of going to all this trouble?”

The old man smiled again and pointed a finger at Rossett before cackling, “As if you didn’t know. I’m not daft, you know?”

Rossett shook his head and leaned back on his box, allowing his back to rest against the damp wall and closing his eyes for a moment.

“Humor me. Tell me, why haven’t they . . . we . . . killed you?”

Chivers shook his head and smiled again.

“I’ll tell you what you already know, just for conversation like. You lot won’t kill me ’cos I knows where the guns are.” The old man sat back proudly, crossed his arms, and tapped his left foot, enjoying the conversation, as if he were in a pub bantering with his old friends.

“What guns?”

“You know what guns. You know what guns I mean all right.”

“Humor me.”

“Our guns, the communist guns and explosives. You want me to tell you? Well, you can piss off, ’cos I ain’t going to.” Chivers tapped his hands on his knees as if he were playing imaginary drums, then fished in his pockets again for his tobacco, chuckling to himself while shaking his head.

Rossett watched the old man and briefly wondered if Chivers had been on his own for too long and had gone mad. He leaned forward and spoke softly. “I thought you said I was the resistance?”

Chivers opened the pouch and placed the cigarette makings carefully on his lap before looking back up at Rossett and speaking slowly, as if explaining to a child.

“You are . . . but we are the proper resistance, we’re the communists. We are the ones fightin’. You lot are the bleedin’ government-in-’iding lot, and you want our guns because you lot are runnin’ out of ’em. Bleedin’ Yanks turned their backs on you now Roosevelt is dead. Churchill has run out of chums, ’asn’t ’e? The fat bastard.”

“So you’ve got the guns?”

“Yeah, we’ve got the bleedin’ guns. Comrades in Russia are making them and risking their lives getting them ’ere for us even though they need them for their own struggle back east.”

“And you know where they are hidden?”

Chivers looked up from rolling his cigarette and winked a watery eye at Rossett, who, in turn, found himself half smiling back, bemused to find himself taking a liking to the old man.

“Too right, sunshine, I got ’em ’idden after we got ’em off the ship. Nobody knows where they are ’cept me, and if you think I’m tellin’ you where they’re at, you can piss right off, ’cos knowin’ where those guns are is keepin’ me alive.”

Chivers gave Rossett a toothy smile and folded his arms triumphantly. Rossett shook his head and looked back toward the door. He’d had a long day, eventful to say the least. What had started out as a routine roundup had turned into one disaster after another, and he suddenly felt tired beyond belief.

He looked at the boards and sacks that made up Chivers’s bed and decided he needed to sleep. Chivers, as if reading his mind, unfolded his arms and moved toward the bed defensively.

“You ain’t ’avin’ my bed.” He quickly sat down on the boards, like a child protecting his favorite toy.

“I don’t want it.”

Rossett stood and checked the orange boxes. They were wide enough to sleep on if he laid them end to end. They wouldn’t be comfortable, but they would be drier than the hard floor, and with fewer fleas than Chivers’s dirty sacks.

He laid them out, watched by Chivers, who was now lying down. After a moment or two, Rossett finally lay down and pulled his coat around his chest, exhaustion caving in his head like the heaviest of hammers.

“Why are you stuck down ’ere?” Chivers said across the room and through the gloom.

“I made a mistake.”

“What kind of mistake? It must’ve been a bad one to get you stuck in ’ere.”

“It was the worst mistake a man could make.”

“Go on?”

“I started thinking again.”

Chapter 25

R
OSSETT HADN’T HEAR
D
a key in the door or the sliding of a lock. The first he knew of anything was when the boot hit hard into his left temple. Reflexes had done most of the work for him, and he’d half turned his head and rolled off the boxes onto the damp floor. He was almost at a crouch when someone else slammed something into his kidneys from behind, and the best he could manage in reply was a halfhearted shrug before the pain shorted out his brain and he fell to the floor completely.

Whoever was attacking him was carrying battery-powered torches, and they seemed to flick around him like spotlights as the kicks rained down. He covered his head as best he could and tried to turn this way and that in an attempt to put his own legs between him and the hobnailed boots that seemed to be coming from all directions.

The weird thing, he thought, was the silence. Whoever was upon him hadn’t spoken a word, and neither had he. This was a disciplined attack.

After what seemed an age, but was probably only a minute, the attack stopped. Rossett lay still on the floor, covering his head, carrying out a mental audit of his body.

He was sore, but no major damage seemed to have been done. Either his attackers were amateurs or they were experts who hadn’t wanted him incapacitated.

He guessed they were experts who didn’t want to have to carry him to the interrogation he knew was coming next.

Rossett was an old hand at this sort of thing; he knew the drill. He didn’t lift up his head. He could hear the deep breathing of his attackers, and he imagined them standing above him waiting for him to look up so they could start again.

He wasn’t that stupid. He could wait.

Unfortunately, Chivers couldn’t.

“Cowards! Three onto one fella!” Chivers shouted from his bed. Rossett inwardly sighed as the kicks started again, this time with less fury, but the pain was greater as they hit home on flesh that was starting to bruise from the first assault.

Rossett tried to stay focused, to find a pattern in the kicks to enable him to twist into them, but there wasn’t one. Each man was waiting his turn to land the perfect blow. Rossett was tiring and his back screamed in pain as he rolled around like an upside-down tortoise. Finally, he broke the silence of the attack by shouting out, more in frustration than anger.

It surprised him that his shouting halted the attack, and he wished he’d done it earlier.

The cell fell silent again. A second passed until he heard more footsteps entering. He raised an elbow to allow himself to peek an eye out of his protective cocoon of wrapped arms and saw a pair of polished shoes next to the heavy docker’s boots in the doorway.

Whoever was in charge had arrived. Rossett tried to look out into the hallway beyond the feet. He’d been hooded when they brought him in, and he needed to get an idea of what lay beyond if he was going to find a way out.

He didn’t get long to carry out his survey. Somebody emptied a bucket of freezing water over his head, so cold it caused him to gasp and arch his body backward. Immediately, the kicking started again, this time for only a few seconds, before he was dragged to his feet, still gasping from the dowsing and the beating.

Someone pulled back his arms and Rossett shook his head trying to clear the water from his vision. He expected a punch in the face or stomach, but it didn’t come. Whoever was holding him from behind had him pinned well, so that his arms couldn’t move an inch.

He hung his head and tried to suck in some air. His body ached, but he didn’t think any ribs were broken. He felt his left eye swelling after the initial kick, but even that was superficial. He didn’t think he was bleeding; the only wetness was the ice-cold water that was running down his back.

The torches shone into his face, and Rossett knew what they were doing, disorienting him. He’d been through this before, years ago, in another place, worse than this. He knew what came next, interrogation, and he was ready. He hoped they would take him out of the cell to do it. He guessed they would. It would be part of the game, keep him guessing. He knew the rules: he’d played this game many times before, on both teams.

A face appeared in front of him, close up, with foul breath.

“Time to ’ave a little chat, chum.” The face broke into a smile and then a laugh.

Rossett head-butted it, feeling teeth bite into his forehead. Suddenly the room exploded into action again, and in a moment he was on the floor once more, kicks and, this time, punches slamming home. He heard Chivers shouting for them to stop just before he passed out, a sense of cold satisfaction passing through his brain. He’d lost the fight but won round one; they’d lost discipline and he had outwitted them.

Chapter 26

H
E CAME TO
as they dragged the hood off his head, which lolled, too heavy for his neck, off to the side. He struggled to focus as the two men who’d carried him in left the room and slammed the door shut behind them. After a moment, clarity returned and he realized he was sitting on a metal chair, in a room lit by a solitary electric bulb that hung from the ceiling. He noticed that the bulb wasn’t heavy enough for the thick cable it was attached to and that it sat at a slight angle, defying gravity.

He shook his head, then regretted the action as the room swam and his forehead ached.

The chair he was sitting on was in the middle of the room, and he could feel handcuffs pinning his wrists behind his back. He didn’t try to stand up, guessing that his hands were threaded through the chair frame. He looked at the door, this one just a domestic wooden one. Across the room there was a boarded-up window. At least, this time he was certain he was above ground. No point putting a window in to look at a sewer.

The room was square, brick walls with a brick ceiling and a flagstone floor, probably in the same warehouse as the dark cellar where he’d just been.

As he looked around, Rossett’s head throbbed. They’d given him a good beating. He flexed his face and it felt numb. He squinted and tried to wiggle his nose, which didn’t feel broken although it was blocked. He guessed it had bled, and when he looked down at his raincoat his guess was confirmed. A fat, damp streak of thick black blood was down the front of the coat, with some on his suit and shirt. It must have been leaking out while he was knocked out and sitting in the chair.

He traced his tongue across his teeth feeling for a gap. There wasn’t one, although he did find a sore spot that must have been a split in his lip.

Those fellas had given him a good beating.

He tried to guess how long he had been out for, but realized he didn’t have any reference other than the pain in his wrists from the cuffs he’d been straining against, which wasn’t too bad, so he hadn’t been out long.

He looked back at the door and wondered if they were watching him. He tried to hop the chair around a little bit to see if there was anything on the wall behind him, but gave up when his ribs cried out for him to stop.

Maybe a few were cracked, after all?

He sighed and breathed in deeply, feeling the pain rise up from his right side. Yes, at least one was cracked. It felt like a knife was being twisted, and he sighed and hung his head. Maybe he hadn’t won the first round, after all.

The sound of the door opening caused him to lift his head again.

A docker entered the room carrying a small wooden table. He glanced at Rossett but didn’t speak, merely set the table down in front of Rossett and then walked around the chair and tugged on the handcuffs, checking that they were still tight.

He walked out of the room and closed the door, leaving Rossett to study the table in front of him. It was made of rough wood, bare except for a steel U-bolt that had been placed through the center, almost like a four-seater café table, marked with stains he didn’t like the look of.

Rossett sat in silence for a while, staring at the table, trying to imagine what was going to happen next. He guessed they were making him wait in an effort to confuse him, to unsettle him, to weaken him.

The only reason they would be going through this process was to question him, and that was the puzzle. What would they ask him? They must have known he was just a low-ranking copper. What could he offer them other than information they probably already knew?

Whatever they wanted to know, Rossett was sure of one thing: he wouldn’t be leaving the warehouse alive if they had their way. They would view him as a collaborator, and that was a death sentence unless he could escape or convince them otherwise. He looked around the room again and realized he didn’t hold out much hope of either.

The door opened and three of the dockers walked in. Rossett recognized one of them as the one he’d head-butted. The man had a split in his top lip about half an inch long, and Rossett thought he spotted a gap behind it where a tooth had once been.

He expected another beating, but the men merely stared at him for a moment until one of them produced a Browning pistol from his pocket, cocked it, and rested it against Rossett’s bruised left temple.

“Don’t try anything else or I’ll kill you. Understood?”

Rossett nodded silently as the pressure of the pistol increased fractionally against his head.

The other two men walked behind him, and Rossett stared at the table as he felt the handcuffs being unfastened. His right wrist remained shackled, and he meekly allowed it to be pulled around in front of him and secured to the U-bolt that was fastened through the table.

He held his other wrist behind his back, aware of the gun and not wanting to do anything unless he was told. Once the handcuff was clicked shut around the bolt, the pressure of the muzzle decreased and the three men stepped back toward the door. Rossett allowed his free hand to drop to his side in an effort to let the blood flow again. The small room was suddenly claustrophobic as Rossett felt the eyes of the dockers bore into him.

He slowly lifted his gaze to the men, who stared blankly back. Even the one with the split lip seemed disinterested. They were obviously waiting for someone or something. Rossett felt uneasy. The men he had taken for rough dockers now had the appearance of disciplined guards. He risked another look, then lifted his hand to his handcuffed wrist and rubbed it.

“I’m sorry about the lip,” he said to the guard with the split lip, who simply ignored him, staring straight ahead. “Do any of you want to tell me what is going on?” Again, none of the men looked at him, so Rossett sat back in his chair and stared at them.

For a moment, he considered picking up his chair and throwing it, but he decided he didn’t want another kicking, and even though the table wasn’t that big, it was too unwieldy to serve as a weapon. The room fell silent except for the nasal breathing of the man with the split lip. Rossett gingerly touched his nose looking for a break, but all he found was dried blood and soreness. For a moment, he thought one of the men smirked, so he smirked back.

A good five minutes of silence passed before the door opened again and Leigh entered, smoking a cigarette and carrying a mug of tea, which he placed in front of Rossett.

“Cup of char, old man. No sugar, I’m afraid,” Leigh said warmly and smiled as he slid the mug across.

It was the first time Rossett had seen the resistance man since he’d been dragged out of the Austin and had a bag shoved over his head when they arrived at the docks.

Rossett picked up the tea with his free hand and took a drink, happy to take whatever he was offered as a means to sustain him.

“Not worried we’ve drugged it?”

“It wouldn’t matter if you had. I’ve got nothing to hide, and if you were going to kill me you already would have,” Rossett replied, still holding the mug close to his face.

Leigh smiled and remained standing as one of the guards briefly left the room and then returned carrying another chair, which he set down on the other side of the table from Rossett.

This is it, thought Rossett. This is where they torture me. He took another drink in an effort to ready himself.

Leigh still didn’t sit; he simply took out some cigarettes and placed them on the table with a lighter.

“Help yourself.”

Rossett looked at the smokes and then back at Leigh.

“I know what you are doing.”

“I’m not doing anything, old man, I’m not that sophisticated. If I had my way you’d be dead in the river by now. I’m just following orders.”

Leigh smoked his cigarette in an effete manner, wafting it in front of his face as he spoke, his other hand resting on his hip.

Rossett took it all in.

“So you’re not the boss? Who is?”

“You’ll find out soon enough, old man. Patience. Just drink your tea, there’s a good fellow.”

Rossett glanced at the three dockers, who stood impassively, unmoving behind Leigh. They were definitely military men, disciplined, and Rossett wondered if they were some of the commandos he’d heard rumors about. Wild men dropped in from Canada, operating independently and causing havoc wherever they could.

Some people saw them as heroes, but Rossett had also heard stories of entire villages being executed after raids on local garrisons of Germans. Innocent people just trying to get by, innocent people dragged into a futile fight with the Germans and then executed while the ones who caused the trouble got away scot-free.

Suddenly the tea tasted bitter, and he put the cup down.

“Are you lot commandos?” he asked, but got no reply. They just stared straight ahead, only Leigh giving the merest of hints by raising an eyebrow. “I’ve heard your lot have caused hundreds of civilians to be executed with your little games.”

One of the dockers glanced at Rossett, then resumed staring at the far wall.

“I thought so. Cowards, the lot of you. Hit and run and let others bear the consequences. Too scared to stand and fight. Was it you lot who bombed King’s Cross? Murdered women and children? Blundering around with rucksacks full of explosives in the hope of killing someone who mattered?”

“We’re fucking freedom fighters, mate,” blurted one of the dockers, breaking ranks before Leigh could silence him.

Rossett flexed on the handcuff, causing it to crack loudly against the U-bolt.

“My fucking wife and son, you bastard, my fucking wife and son!”

Rossett rose out of the chair as far as the handcuff would allow, and the two dockers took half a pace forward toward him. Leigh didn’t move except to raise his hand to stop the dockers from advancing any farther.

“Sergeant, please, sit down, have a cigarette, and calm yourself.” Leigh gestured to the seat and nodded sympathetically at Rossett. “Please, take a seat.”

Rossett looked first at Leigh and then at the dockers before slowly sinking back down to his seat. He reached for the cigarettes without taking his eyes off the dockers, took one out, and lit it.

“How do you sleep?” Rossett finally asked Leigh.

“I might ask you the same. They call you the Jew catcher, don’t they?”

“I don’t kill women and children.”

“Don’t you, dear boy? Hmm, interesting.” Leigh stared at Rossett over his cigarette, his casual words barely making up for the dead eyes that fixed Rossett’s. “That’s not what I heard.”

Rossett flicked his cigarette straight into Leigh’s face, causing the other man to flinch and turn away. Rossett started to rise from his chair again, but before he could reach over the table, the dockers had descended on him and pushed him facedown onto the wood, restraining him with such force that Rossett was certain his arms were about to break.

“Gentlemen, please!” Leigh called over the din of the struggle. “Please, at ease, come on, at ease.”

Rossett felt the weight lifting from his back and arms, and he looked up from the tabletop at Leigh.

“Sergeant, can we be civilized for a moment?” Leigh asked, and Rossett found himself nodding in agreement.

Leigh waved his hands to the dockers and they finally stood back from Rossett, who raised his head off the table, wiped his mouth, and inspected his fingers for blood. He glanced at the dockers and then looked back at Leigh.

“Three of you with a handcuffed man?” Rossett spat onto the floor and then wiped his mouth and checked his fingers again. “Take these cuffs off and I’ll break your fucking necks.”

“Don’t rise to the bait, gentlemen; the sergeant is trying to provoke a reaction.” Leigh turned to Rossett and smiled again. “Do be quiet, old man, there’s a good fellow.”

“Fuck off, you ponce,” Rossett replied. “I’ve seen your kind when I was doing some proper fighting, all airs and graces on the surface, but as soon as it gets nasty you’re nowhere to be found. There were enough of you lot in France, and you all made sure you got home before me and my mates.”

Leigh theatrically rolled his eyes.

“Now, now, there is no call for that, is there?” was all he said before taking another drag on the cigarette.

Rossett could see that, although Leigh was affecting the casual air, his words had stung him. He was about to launch another volley when the door opened again and an older man entered, dressed in black tie, almost as if he’d come from a night at the opera. The new man carried a brown leather bag that had the look of a doctor’s case in one hand and a handkerchief in his other.

He nodded and then sat in the waiting chair opposite Rossett. He placed the case on his lap, popped open the catches on the top, and peered into it, only once looking up at Rossett and nodding before returning to his search.

Rossett wondered what the man was looking for, and briefly imagined some extreme torture device, but all that emerged was a thermos flask and a brown paper folder containing some files and documents.

The man nodded to Rossett as he placed the bag on the floor and then opened the thermos. Into the metal cup that acted as a lid, he poured a misty hot liquid that sat steaming on the table.

“Do we need all these men in here, Leigh?” The man’s voice sounded heavy, much heavier than Rossett thought it should. Leigh nodded and two of the men left the room, leaving just one, who resumed his position by the wall.

“You will call me Windsor,” the man said to Rossett as if addressing a child. Rossett didn’t reply. “It isn’t my real name, before you ask.” He wiped his nose with the handkerchief and opened the folder in front of him.

“I wasn’t going to ask,” Rossett said quietly, but Windsor ignored him and carried on.

“You are John Henry Rossett, ex–Coldstream Guards, where you attained the rank of sergeant. Military medal, Distinguished Service Cross, and the Victoria Cross. I should salute you, or rather your medal, but I’m afraid I could never salute a traitor to the king.” Windsor read from the file, only looking up at the end of his statement. “You joined the Guards in 1939 at the outbreak of war, leaving the Metropolitan Police to do so. You served with the BEF in Belgium and then France and finally England during the invasion. You were taken prisoner of war in 1941 and interned in France for three years before being released to take up your old job with the Met. You were married and had one son. Both your son and wife were killed in the King’s Cross explosion of 1942.”