Page 70 of V2

He peered into the viewfinder again. ‘This is test stand seven.’

She sat opposite him, making notes. ‘And those huge oval rings around it are blast walls, presumably, made of earth?’

‘Sand mostly.’

‘How long would it take to process a missile through the test stand?’

‘At the beginning? Eight days, minimum.’

‘And the large building next to it? How high is that?’

‘Thirty metres. It had to be high. We stored the rockets upright.’

‘In the centre of the test stand there’s a channel of some sort …’

‘The duct for the exhaust gases. Seven metres wide.’

After ten minutes, she slid another pair of images across the desk towards him. ‘Perhaps we could move on to these.’

They worked for more than an hour, picture after picture. At first he was curious, then nostalgic, and finally haunted. His life was laid out before him as it had been at the point when he could last call himself truly happy. Everything was in perfect perspective. There was the propulsion laboratory, where he worked with Thiel. There was the wind tunnel. There was his apartment block. There was the launch site. There was the old hotel where Karin lived, and the beach where he swam that last evening.

He sat back and rubbed his eyes.

‘Are you getting tired?’ asked the young Englishwoman. ‘Do you want to take a break?’

‘When exactly were these taken?’

She picked up one of the photographs and turned it over. ‘The twenty-first of June 1943. Two o’clock in the afternoon.’

She passed it across to him. He held it to the light. ‘I remember seeing a plane that June – its contrail, anyway – flying very high. Maybe it was the one that took this picture.’

‘It could have been. There were actually three reconnaissance sorties over Peenemünde that week.’

‘This was so that you could bomb us?’

‘It was. Were you there?’

He nodded. ‘If you could magnify this photograph sufficiently, you would be able to find me just here.’ He tapped it. ‘On the road out of the Experimental Works compound, on the edge of the woods, looking up at the sky.’ He returned the photograph, sat back and studied her. She was pretty, with her auburn hair and blue uniform. His recording angel. ‘This was your job, was it? Watching us?’

‘One of my jobs, yes. First in photographic analysis, then in radar.’

‘Radar?’ That caught his attention. ‘Were you one of the women in Mechelen?’

She was not sure how to answer him, or even if she should answer him.

She said briskly, ‘I think we’ve finished now, thank you. You’ve been a great help.’

She began gathering up the photographs. She was conscious of him watching her.

He said casually, ‘I once fired a rocket at Mechelen.’

‘Did you really? You missed me, I’m afraid.’

‘And you missed me, when you bombed Peenemünde.’

‘Well, that’s good for both of us.’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘This is an absurd conversation.’

He helped her collect up the photographs. ‘It was a very clever idea, to try to calculate the curve. We never thought of it. But of course it was quite pointless.’