‘This’ll do,’ Margaret said, rummaging in her bag and producing an old train ticket. She ripped it into pieces and put a piece of the coloured card on the location of each of the houses.
We looked at the map. The pieces of card covered a random selection of properties on the Forest. There didn’t seem to be a pattern.
At the front desk, I gave the clipboard to the wheezing man. He looked dubiously at the list of numbers.
‘How long do you think it’ll take?’ I asked.
He looked at his watch.
‘Two hours.’
*
‘You’re not eating your meat roll?’ Margaret asked, as she finished her own meal.
‘You can have it,’ I said.
‘Sure?’
I swapped plates and she set to work. She was welcome to it. The meat was mostly fat, and the first mouthful had been enough for me.
We were sitting in a dusty church hall, newly repurposed as a ‘British Restaurant’ – Churchill’s name for a communal kitchen – designed to give people a chance to supplement their rations. They were all the rage, and we’d had to queue for twenty minutes to get a table. The food wasn’t worththe wait. A grey concoction designed to make a few pounds of low-quality meat go a long way. I’d eaten enough mutton in the North-West Frontier for any man, so I sat and watched Margaret as she tucked in.
‘How’s your cook doing with your rations?’ I asked, as she put away my portion.
‘I’m going to have to let her go. Can’t afford to pay her.’
‘So what’s the plan?’ I asked. I didn’t see Margaret doing very well, rattling around what I presumed was a massive kitchen in her stately home. ‘Do you know how to cook?’
‘How hard can it be?’ she said. ‘If I can learn to field-strip a Bren gun, I think I can learn how to cook a pork chop.’
‘How much trouble are you in, financially speaking?’
Margaret glared at me.
‘I can take care of myself,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
I returned to reading the paper. The early edition of theArgushad a photograph on the front page. A German officer in handcuffs, being escorted onto a train. The photographer had got a good shot of him. He looked familiar, something about the scar on his face.
‘They found the parachutist,’ I said.
I read the short article below the photo.
‘Bailed out of his plane over the Forest. Wreckage found north of Hartfield.’
I turned the page.
‘Presumably there’s a distinction,’ Margaret said. ‘A parachutist would be someone sent to deliberately jump out of a plane. An invader. A pilot bailing out’s a different kettle of fish. More of a win for us.’
I read the article closely. Understandably, information was sparse.
‘Does it specify whether he was a pilot bailing out or a parachutist?’ Margaret asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Maybe it’s your man, maybe not,’ she said.
She took the paper from me.
