Convoy Read Free Page B

had been no warning; no rings. Was Exton her married name?
    ‘He was a pilot,’ she said. ‘Killed in an accident. It was a long time ago.’
    She spoke in a curiously flat, unemotional voice. If she was my widow, Yorke thought, I would have liked her to have continued wearing my wedding ring, even if on the other hand. ‘…A long time ago.’ And obviously the memory still hurt. She was still in love with – well, a ghost. No living man could compete with that; the Rupert Brookes always stayed gilded youths, never to be supplanted, never ageing, or becoming unpleasant, their personalities never changing; flies in amber.
    ‘I’m afraid this is a gloomy conversation, even for a bus,’ he said.
    ‘You’d prefer soft lights and sweet music and the air thick with tobacco smoke and night-club prices?’ she asked.
    ‘Or sitting on a five-barred gate along a country lane. Or on a rock watching the waves breaking on a shingle beach.’
    ‘Why shingle?’ she asked. ‘Why a five-barred gate?’
    ‘There are lanes and gates around Willesborough. I like the sound of water rolling the pebbles, and the nearest beach is shingle. At Hythe,’ he added. ‘Probably with barbed wire on it now, and land mines, but…’
    Sister Scotland looked round and Clare caught her eye and got up. ‘You know Willesborough?’
    ‘Yes, fairly well. Fine old windmill, one of the best in the country.’
    As Clare walked away he did not say that Ashford, into which Willesborough merged, was the railway centre of Kent and one of the Luftwaffe’s main targets, and the windmill was white and enormous and the sort of thing a bolting German bomber pilot was likely to aim at, just for the hell of it.
    He saw down to the right, through trees now bare of leaves, Leeds Castle sitting four-square like a fairy-tale fortress in a great oval moat. A castle had stood there for more than a thousand years – the first made of wood and built, if his memory served him, at the time of William the Conqueror, and the present one, now a mellow stone, creamy and smoothed by the centuries. Another potential target for a bolting German pilot; a thousand-pounder in the middle of that should kill the gardener and his wife who served as housekeeper, and a dozen ducks; a victory Goering’s boys could hardly afford to miss. From up here on the main road the water in the moat seemed calm and a faint blueish-green as though distilled by age.
     
    It was just three months ago; exactly twelve weeks the day after tomorrow. August, long days and short nights, not the time of year for destroyers to be steaming close to the Bay of Biscay, not with Junkers and Dorniers using those French airfields around Brest.They were reckoned to have a range of 1200 miles – five hundred out, two hundred to play with and five hundred back.
    Death passed by so smoothly, just as Leeds Castle had slid into sight through the trees. You did not always have to see it; if you were reading a book or had been asleep it could pass unnoticed and touch someone else. The signalman had come up to the bridge and handed the page from the signal pad to the captain who read it and walked over to the chart.
    Yorke had seen him glancing at the latitude and longitude scales and then putting an index finger on the chart – on a position well into the Bay of Biscay.
    ‘Number One – here a moment. We have some trouble with the Teds.’
    ‘The Teds’ – a relic of the Aztec ’s recent time in the Mediterranean and her association with the Italians, mainly ferrying them as prisoners. The Italians had no love for their allies, and their word for Germans, Tedeschi , provided the Royal Navy with an obvious abbreviation; a change from the usual ‘Jerry’.
    The captain smoothed out the signal for him to read. It was from the Admiralty and came ten minutes after the Aztec had herself picked up garbled signals from a ship being attacked in the Bay.
    The captain, Lt Cdr Henry Bascombe, was a deceptive man: at first