Page 61 of V2

The room broke up into separate conversations. Barbara turned to Kay. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I think I ought to go back and see if the house is still standing.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘No, I’ll be fine.’

The smoke from the V2 was like an optical illusion. The faster she hurried towards it, the further it seemed to recede, as if it were a malevolent spirit beckoning her on. Alarm bells sounded occasionally, but only faintly, and always far away. By the time she reached the Vermeulens’ street, it was obvious the rocket must have landed well outside the centre; it might even have fallen short of the town altogether.

She opened the garden gate and walked up to the front door, rang the bell and waited, then tried the door. Locked, of course. She remembered how Arnaud had retrieved the key from the lintel the night before. She stood on tiptoe and felt along the smooth stone until her fingers touched metal.

Inside, the house was silent and empty; dim even in the daylight. Standing in the hall, with its shadowy religious decorations, she felt nervous, like a thief. She went into the kitchen. The dishes had all been cleaned and put away; everything was straight and tidy. She retreated back to the hall, considered taking a look inside Dr Vermeulen’s study but decided against it: that would have been too much like trespassing. She climbed the stairs to her room.

The curtains had been drawn open. On the bed – her perfectly made WAAF bed – there was a slight depression, as if someone had sat on it. She looked in the wardrobe at her clothes, then sat at the desk and opened the drawer. Her slide rule was there, and her logarithm tables, and the sheets of calculations she had practised on her first night. However, the pages were not precisely as she had left them. They were slightly disordered. Most people would not have noticed, but she was trained to spot such things.

It was like using the stereoscope at Medmenham. You examined a single photograph and the picture was flat. You laid another beside it, taken a fraction of a second later, and the images leaped up at you in 3D. Gazing down now at the desk drawer, everything that had happened over the past two days acquired a new perspective. For almost a minute she sat calmly, remembering every tiny detail: incidents that had meant nothing by themselves but that together made up a different picture. The reluctance of the Vermeulens to take her in. The photograph of the dead son placed face down on the desk in the study. The Nazi salute in the waterfront bar. Arnaud’s nervous glances at the ceiling while they were making love. The empty food cupboard. The lingering smell of cigarette smoke outside the back door that morning.

She rose, left the bedroom and walked along the passage to the landing, then began to climb the stairs to the second floor. She guessed that the room directly above hers must be at the rear of the house, on the left. The door was half-open. Inside, the sheets on the single bed were tangled, as if someone had been tossing and turning in a fever. There was a strong male smell of sweat and stale cigarettes. Piles of books. A first-aid box, its lid open, containing rolled bandages, gauze, lint pads, a bottle of antiseptic. On the dressing table, a tin of the Fray Bentos corned beef she had presented to Madam Vermeulen, empty, with a spoon stuck in it that had been licked clean. She opened the dressing table drawer. A small grey identity card, like a passport, with 3. SS Panzer Division ‘Wiking’ written on the outside, and on the inside a picture of a young man remarkably like Arnaud, made out in the name of Guillaume Vermeulen, with his blood group, the signature of his commanding officer, and a purple swastika stamp.

Although her heart was thumping, her mind was cool and sharp. Guillaume was not dead. He had fought for the Germans. He was in hiding – wounded, by the look of it. He would not dare show his face out of doors. Therefore, while the others might have gone out, he must still be in the house. He would almost certainly have heard her knocking at the front door, heard her come in, heard her go into the kitchen and come upstairs.

Slowly she turned around, half expecting to find him behind her. But the doorway was clear, so too the landing and the staircase. She descended to the first-floor landing and peered over the banister down into the hall. The black-and-white tiled floor was deserted. He was unlikely to be in any of the other bedrooms, so either he was in the parlour or – more likely, given how cold and unused the parlour seemed – he was in his father’s study, probably listening. She calculated the distance to the front door. She could make a run for it, but that might bring him out to intercept her. Better, then, to walk normally. She looked around for anything she might be able to use as a weapon, but there was nothing she could see. Very well. She squared her shoulders. Go.

She descended the stairs, crossed to the front door, opened it and stepped outside. The key was still in the lock. She locked the door and replaced the key on the lintel. The study window looked out over the garden. The curtains were drawn. She could imagine him behind them, the heavy material parted slightly, watching her. She suppressed her instinct to hurry and walked carefully across the grass. She was halfway to the gate when it opened and Dr and Madam Vermeulen came in with Arnaud.

They stopped in surprise. She advanced towards them. ‘You’re all safe,’ she said. ‘Thank goodness for that.’

Dr Vermeulen said coldly, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I came to see if you were all right.’ Her voice sounded strangulated, high and false, so she added, rather too brightly, ‘Where did the rocket land, do you know?’

Arnaud was looking at her intently. ‘We went to see but we couldn’t get close. It seems to have hit a field.’

‘That’s a bit of luck.’ She managed to smile at him. ‘Well, as long as you’re safe. I’ll see you all this evening.’

They were blocking the path. She made a move to leave, and for an instant she thought Arnaud would stop her. He seemed to be trying to weigh her up. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that would be good.’ He stood aside, and an instant later she was through the gate and out into the street.

In the square close to the cathedral, she flagged down a British army jeep – a corporal and two privates. It swerved across the cobbles and braked. The corporal said, ‘Yes, ma’am. Is everything all right?’

‘I believe there is a German soldier hiding in a house near here.’

19

AT THE HEART OF THE regiment’s launch zone, midway between Scheveningen and Wassenaar, in the flat landscape of woods and dunes about two kilometres from the sea, lay the Duindigt racetrack – an eight-furlong oval course, with three stands, built before the Great War. It was here that the mass funeral ceremony for Lieutenant Stock’s launch troop was to be held.

Graf had not wanted to go. Four days after the raid on Peenemünde, in a hastily dug cemetery next to the railway line, more than a hundred coffins had been lowered into a communal grave; he hadn’t even known which of the plain wooden boxes was Karin’s. But how could he use that as an excuse, especially to himself? The deaths of the men were his responsibility as much as anyone’s. It was his duty to pay his respects. So once the V2 had been fired at Mechelen, and after the launch crew had packed up the site, he found himself slipping into the front seat of Seidel’s Kübelwagen, with Sergeant Schenk and a corporal in the back, and setting off to the racetrack.

By the time they arrived, the dilapidated stands, with peeling paintwork and patches of rotted timber, were nearly full. A thousand men had been turned out, willingly or unwillingly: the headquarters troops, who administered the regiment; the technical troops, who unloaded the missiles from the trains and prepared them for flight; the fuel and rocket troops, the launching troops, and all the other ancillaries – drivers, maintenance men, signallers, cooks, flak men, firemen, radio operators – who had been consigned to this deserted stretch of coast in order to fire rockets at the English. They sat in sombre rows, listening as the regimental band played a selection of hymns.

The sky was high, grey, clear; no sign of the RAF. On the sandy track, overgrown with couch grass, half a dozen chairs and a microphone had been set out on a low platform. A Protestant pastor and a Catholic priest sat next to one another. Twelve coffins were lined up in front of it, each draped with a swastika flag and bearing the dead man’s cap. An honour guard stood to attention beside them. The sight of those lonely caps in conjunction with the mournful music had a dismaying effect on Graf. It had been exactly the same at Peenemünde. He took off his hat and wiped his eyes on his sleeves.

Seidel looked at him with concern. ‘Are you all right, Graf?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

They climbed the steps of the stand and found the last few empty seats. The men rose to let them pass. Just as they sat, Kammler’s Mercedes drove onto the racetrack. It made its way slowly in front of the stand and pulled up in front of the coffins. The front passenger door opened and Kammler stepped out. From the rear came Colonel Huber and another tall SS officer. The three arrivals lined up in front of the coffins with their backs to the spectators and extended their arms in the Nazi salute, then mounted the platform and took their seats. Respectful in the presence of the dead, they removed their caps. The easterly wind that had been blowing since before dawn lifted the edges of the swastika flags and ruffled the thick blond hair of the second SS officer. He raised his hand to smooth it back, and Graf would have recognised him by that familiar gesture alone, for he must have seen it a thousand times in the past – on the windswept derelict ground of the Rocket Aerodrome in Berlin, on the test ranges at Kummersdorf, on the North Sea beaches of Borkum, on the Baltic foreshore at Peenemünde, on the central Polish plain of Blizna …

There was a roll of drums. Everyone stood. The band struck up ‘Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden’, the soldiers’ lament. A thousand voices joined in the words: