‘I’m going to need you to get your head in the game,’ Eleanor said, as she stepped out of her dress. She let her slip fall to the floor. Naked, she looked suddenly vulnerable. Exposed. Cook put his arms around her, feeling goosebumps on her skin.
‘You’ve got my full attention,’ he said.
He reached for the curtain pull.
‘Leave them open,’ she said. ‘We can watch.
She crawled into bed, held the covers open, ready for him.
‘I trust I’m not going to end up on the front page,’ Cook said.
77
A clatter of metal woke Ruby. It sounded like someone had thrown a handful of gravel at the roof of the shelter.
Ruby huddled under the thin blanket. She opened one eye, fearing the worst. Some kind of new torture he’d devised for her.
There was a pinprick of light in the curved ceiling. A star. Ruby moved her head and the star disappeared. She moved back and saw it again.
She smelt burning wool, like when she was ironing and she left the iron on a piece of cloth a moment too long. It was coming from her blanket. She kicked out with her legs and heard a small thump as something landed on the floor.
Ruby got out of bed and felt on the carpet. She found it almost immediately – a lump of metal, hot but cooling. It felt like a button mushroom. It must have fallen out of the sky, made the hole in the metal roof.
Ruby got back into bed and pulled the blanket back over her. It was the first night she’d felt cold. Winter was on its way.
What would happen to her? The row of graves answered that question. Girls who’d been taken. Presumably they’d all slept in this bed. Lain awake in fear. Fought back when they could, and suffered when they could not.
Next time he came, she’d fight back. Keep fighting until the end. Him or her.
78
Cook lay in bed, the American journalist asleep beside him. He’d made a mistake. He didn’t know what it was, but he felt the fact of it. It wasn’t the sex. He wasn’t a puritan, and if a beautiful woman wanted him to spend the night in her luxury hotel room he felt it was perfectly reasonable of him to take her up on the offer. But the feeling was there, whether it was logical or not.
Something felt wrong.
He thought back through the day. Taking the bus through the city, retracing the route the girl from the Lyons would have taken. Perhaps that was it – getting into the head of a girl who was almost definitely dead. Showing up at her home, sharing his thoughts with her parents as if he had any right to intrude on their lives. Shattering their dreams that perhaps their daughter had walked a different way home, taken a different bus. Met a chap, perhaps. Walked into a recruiting office and signed up for a war job that had meant she’d been spirited away to the country there and then, hush-hush and all that. Fantasies her parents would have been spinning, rather than face the truth.
Meanwhile, he’d been spinning the same story about Ruby – making up an elaborate work-around, designing a world in which she hadn’t been killed by a German bomb.
Some kind of desire to be the hero, Cook suspected. A life of solving problems when they came along, a patternof expectation teaching him he had the power to over-write what the world had planned, whether it was him walking out of the trenches alive, when so many had fallen, or turning the farm around, when so many were failing. Get lucky a few times, and you start to think it’s you who makes the luck. Who’d said that? Was it Blakeney, his old CO?
Of course, there was the postcard. But that could have been written by someone else, despite Gracie’s faith in it being a coded message.
But who knew enough to know they needed to send it? For all everyone knew, Ruby was dead.
Perhaps it was Gracie who was reading too much into things. The simplest answer was that Ruby really was at the coast with a boyfriend. The odds were she’d walk into the pub in a few days’ time.
Cook slipped out of bed and dressed quietly. He needed to think, and he thought best when he was walking.
*
He breathed more easily as soon as he left the hotel. He took a left into the park. Suddenly it felt important to have the grass under his feet, to be amongst the trees. Instinctively, he headed for the deepest reaches of what could pass as a small wood, where a gentle slope gave the impression of the countryside, and the trees blocked out most of the city.
In the darkness, amongst the trees, he realised others had sought the same escape. Bodies rustled in the autumn leaves, some sleeping, some coupling. He walked on, to the far end of the park, crossed the road.
Hyde Park was larger. Wilder. All he could see was grass and trees. His kind of country.
Cook walked for five minutes, through grass that grew less manicured. As he walked, he became aware of someone following him. He slowed his pace, and his follower slowed. They were good, whoever they were, silent as they walked through the long grass, hardly more than a whisper of leaf on stalk.
