We were back in the library. Vaughn and I had our brandy and the ladies were sipping sherry. Freddie was pacing around the room, bouncing a tennis ball on the parquet floor. He glugged wine from a bottle. The rest of the party had gone, and the servants had withdrawn.
‘Where were you?’ Miriam asked.
‘Southern edge of my land, give or take.’
‘What was the alignment of the fence?’
‘East to west.’
She rushed to a writing desk, under the window. She pulled down the writing surface and rummaged around in the exposed drawers.
‘Vaughn, where do you keep your pens?’ she snapped.
‘Top right drawer,’ he said. ‘Ink in the inkwell.’
She brought a notepad back with her, and noted down my answers.
‘How long’s the fence?’ she asked.
The field was two hectares. Roughly five acres. A rectangle, the shorter side butting up against the woods. The drainage ditch keeping the livestock from escaping, with the barbed-wire fence as an extra precaution.
‘Hundred and fifty yards, I’d say.’
She drew a rectangle, and annotated it with the numbers.
‘When did you hear it?’
‘Around the same time, give or take,’ I said. ‘Around dusk.’
‘You’re south of us?’ she asked.
‘About five miles.’
‘How loud was the signal?’
‘Similar,’ I said, ‘perhaps weaker.’
‘Show me,’ she said.
46
Margaret drove. We rocketed downhill, losing altitude as we left the Forest behind us. Through the tight bends of Duddleswell, opening up for the long straight down past Fairwarp, past Palehouse Lane.
‘I don’t understand,’ Margaret shouted over the din from the engine and rushing wind. ‘Why are only certain places picking up the transmission? Why not every bit of barbed wire in the country?’
Margaret was a careless driver at the best of times, and as she looked back to Miriam in the back seat, jammed in next to me, the car swerved.
‘Drive,’ I said. ‘Questions later.’
The car sped past Fairwarp church, Margaret peering into the darkness, driving faster than she could see. She’d masked out her headlights according to regulations, only a tiny slit of light allowed, and it turned what was already a hair-raising experience into a pure gamble.
Miriam leant in to me, her mouth to my ear. We were like sardines in a tin, so she didn’t have to lean far.
‘If we can gather as much information as we can about the receivers,’ she shouted, ‘in this case your fence and Vaughn’s fence, we can make some assumptions about the distance and direction to the source of the radio transmission.’
I turned to her. She was still facing me and now we were inches apart. I leant past her face to shout into her ear, our cheeks brushing.
‘Seems like a lot of trouble. The chap on the transmission said he was on the French coast. What’s the value in pinpointing it further?’
