10

A roar came out of nowhere, and we both looked up as a Hurricane momentarily blocked out the stars overhead. Chasing the bomber. I didn’t envy him, trying to follow a dark shape in a dark sky when you’re both moving at hundreds of miles an hour.

‘We’ll have to send for help,’ I said. ‘One of us will have to stay with it.’

I’d given him a way to salvage the operation. He could tell me to go for help, take the machine once I was gone. He’d be a wanted man, but if he was a German spy, he’d have known that was part of the plan. He’d have a contingency.

‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a phone at my place. I can be there in five minutes.’

‘Where are you?’ I asked.

He pointed to the northern slope. There was a glimmer of light.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Bloody door must have swung open.’

‘Go,’ I said. ‘Call Uckfield police. Charlie Neesham.’

There was a low rumble. Quieter than a plane. We listened. It was a car, making its way up a hill. Difficult to locate the source, but it sounded like it was coming from the opposite slope.

A light winked on, then off. The car rounding a corner, perhaps, or someone with a lantern, signalling to the agent sent to pick up the crate.

The light winked on again.

*

I ran down the slope, to where the valley bottomed out with a wooded section that hid a fast-rushing stream. I recognised it. I’d played there as a boy, making dams in the freezing water until I couldn’t feel my feet or hands.

I made my way through the trees, my feet crunching on generations of beech nuts. If there was someone out there hiding they’d hear me coming, but that ship had sailed. I was going for speed, rather than stealth.

An earthy smell told me I was nearing the stream at the bottom of the valley. There was an old railway sleeper forming a makeshift crossing. It was damp, and slippery with moss.

The light showed through the trees again. Either lazy blackout procedure, as Vaughn had claimed for his place, or a deliberate signal. There’d been so much hoo-hah about the blackout it was more likely the second.

I pulled my way through the undergrowth, up a steep slope, slick with rotting chestnut leaves. This was a different landscape to the open slopes of the rest of the Forest – sandy soil, heather and gorse replaced by the rich growth of -ancient woodland, part of the original royal hunting ground that gave the area its name.

There’d been a path here, but it had been neglected. Chest-height bracken blocked my way, and woody brambles caught my clothes. It was slow going.

At the top of the slope, chinks of moonlight shone through the trees. There was a clearing. I neared the edge, but lingered far enough back that I wouldn’t be seen.

A white house glowed in the moonlight, surrounded by lawns. The house was an art deco monstrosity, like the bridge of an ocean-going liner. Every window was blacked out apart from the one I’d seen from the heath. There was a lingering smell of coal smoke from a damped-down oven, incongruous against the modernity of the building.

There was a car by the front door. Big, black, sleek, like something from a gangster flick.

The car idled. A waste of petrol. This wasn’t a driver who was paying for his own fuel, or even worrying about rationing.

I waited and watched. A fox barked. From behind me, the usual rustles of the woods at night, but nothing from the house.

The car door opened, spilling laughter from a conversation in mid flow. Two people climbed out. A woman and a man. They were both well dressed, as if they’d been out for a night on the town.

The woman laughed. There was a muttered response from the man.

‘You’ll be late,’ the driver said. It wasn’t the tone you’d expect from a servant.

‘Not like they can start without us,’ the man said.

They opened the door to the house and stepped inside. The door closed behind them.

The car engine revved quietly and the car sprang forwards in a tight circle, thin beams of yellow light painting the leaves around me before I was left in darkness.

*

The parachute was still there, a reminder that this war was going to be different. Instead of trenches in France and -Belgium, this one was going to be decided on our own soil, and in the air above. We’d known it was coming since the armistice. It had only ever been a temporary pause, a chance for both sides to draw breath, raise another generation of men, fodder for the machine-gun and the artillery shell.

Vaughn’s house was a distant silhouette on the northern slope. It would have taken him five minutes to get there. If he’d phoned the police straight away, they’d be on their way.

The wireless set was too valuable to leave, so I sat in the heather, a lonely guard duty. I’d wait for the police constables, see it safely in their hands before I let it out of my sight.

The parachute shifted in the breeze, the ghost-like shape billowing. The storm’s coming, it seemed to say, and all that you know and love about this country will be destroyed, turned into the mud of the battlefield.