22

Mrs Leckie had called it the works. I’d pictured a factory of some sort. Maybe a workshop. Brick or concrete. Corrugated--iron roof. Rusting detritus.

There was a fence, with a gate, guarded by a sentry.

Beyond the fence, there was a brand-new building. Brickwork, with decorative detailing. Twice the height of a house and wider than my biggest barn. It had tall windows flanking a large loading door, designed to fit a lorry.

I sat in the trees and watched. Based on my experience so far, and what Mrs Leckie had said, I didn’t expect to have to wait long. I wasn’t disappointed.

After ten minutes, the large door opened inward. It was too dark to see anything inside, compared to the brightness outside. A lorry nosed out, through the door, which closed behind it. The gate was opened, and the lorry headed off. The gate closed, and all was quiet.

Five minutes later, the sequence was reversed. A lorry roared up the hill, pulled up by the sentry at the gate. Papers were checked, jokes exchanged, the gate opened. The lorry pulled in, waited on the concrete forecourt in front of the looming building, the large doors opened inward, and the lorry drove in.

For the sake of completing the cycle, I sat for another twenty minutes until the doors opened again, and the lorry emerged.

The building must have been spacious inside. The lorry had gone in forwards, and came out forwards. That meant there was space inside for it to turn. If a lorry had tried to turn inside my barn, it could conceivably do it, but only if the whole place was empty.

I decided to follow the fence around the back, to see what else I could find out.

The fence was new, and endless. Concrete uprights every ten feet, angled out at the top. Taut barbed wire, threaded through the concrete posts, every six inches. The wire was new. Give it a few months and it would take on a dull patina. A year and it would start to rust.

I pushed my way through the undergrowth, alternately in leafy shade and blazing sun, thinking about who would want the Leckies out of their house. Mrs Leckie thought her house was owned by Kate’s family, but Kate had refuted that. She was an administrator. A property manager. So who was -paying Kate’s wages and issuing the orders? Was it -connected to the works? Perhaps someone wanted her out to create a security cordon. Mrs Leckie said the works were hush hush, which meant the War Office. But the -Ministry wouldn’t mess about with hiring hoodlums as middlemen, it would send a grey-faced civil servant with official paperwork. If it needed to evict someone, that person would be evicted. No arguments. No shotguns on either side.

If it wasn’t the government that wanted the Leckies’ house, who did? Was it someone who might be interested in knowing more about the works? Someone who might like to count the number of delivery lorries being driven past the cottage, or even to sabotage whatever was happening inside that large brick building?

Perhaps the answer was the simple one – money. People were anxious to move out of the big cities, as the fear of bombing or invasion grew every day. Presumably there was a big demand for quiet cottages tucked away in the country.

The first thing I learnt from my walk along the fence was that I wasn’t the first to do so. Grass had been trodden down, more damage than a deer would make. Halfway around, I found the clincher, two cigarette butts. Someone had stood here and looked through the fence. Blakeney, my former CO, always said that successful reconnaissance was fifty per cent showing up, fifty per cent paying attention, and fifty per cent not smoking. Harder than you’d think for the average soldier.

Since my predecessor had chosen this spot as the one in which he lingered, I did the same. He’d chosen well. I had a good line of sight through the fence to the apparently idyllic and undisturbed Forest, while behind me was dense undergrowth. I was unlikely to be surprised from my flank or rear.

The land inside the fence was a significant size. I’d long since left behind the brick warehouse. The fence hadn’t felt like it curved, and I’d walked a mile along it so far. I looked along it to my right, and I couldn’t see a point at which it changed course inwards. It could easily run for another couple of miles before it reached the woods in the distance. Likewise, if I looked straight ahead, I couldn’t see any sign of fence. No glints of sunlight from the shining barbed wire. No freshly cut trees, removed to keep the fence line straight. Call it four miles wide, and another four miles across. Sixteen square miles would make it the largest piece of enclosed land in Sussex.

At the centre of it all, one feature stood out, silhouetted against the sky. A clump of towering Scots pine. More than a mile distant from me, but it still looked tall. From close up those trees would look like giants, a couple of hundred feet tall. They might have even been redwoods, brought back from America hundreds of years ago. Such clumps were a regular feature of the Forest. Wherever you went, they -followed you, always there on the horizon.

‘ Gustav Siegfried Eins. Hier ist Gustav Siegfried Eins .’

I dropped to the ground. Not much cover in the low heather, a foot if that, but better than standing like an idiot in the open. Whoever it was, I’d almost let him creep up on me.

The voice repeated again. The same sentence.

‘ Gustav Siegfried Eins. Hier ist Gustav Siegfried Eins .’

Then silence.

No footsteps. No responses from any other voices. It sounded like someone was making a transmission.

The parachutist.

I raised my head above the level of the heather and looked around. Next time he spoke I’d be able to get more of a sense of where the voice was coming from.

‘ Gustav Siegfried Eins .’

The voice seemed to come from in front of me, but looking through the fence all I could see was an expanse of heathland, rising gently to the clump of trees in the far -distance. A few birch trees. He could be hiding in the shadow of one of those. Perhaps he had a transmitter rigged up in a tree, or maybe even between trees.

I stood up. I’d been standing before, so my position was already blown. He hadn’t shown any inclination to shoot me. It would have given away his own position.

I needed to get inside the enclosure. Whether I’d been spotted or not, I needed to get closer to the trees. If he shot at me, at least he’d prove his existence. I’d take my chances on his accuracy.

‘ Gustav Siegfried Eins. Hier ist— ’

I put my hand on a strand of barbed wire, testing the -tension. I put my boot on the bottom strand. It took my weight. As long as I didn’t put my hands on the barbs, I could climb it. The top would get a bit hairy – I’d have to climb outwards. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

But then I stopped, as I realised what had happened. The voice had stopped abruptly.

I took my hand away from the wire. The voice returned.

‘— Siegfried Eins .’

I waited for the next transmission. As soon as it started, I put my hand on the wire, and the sound stopped. I took it off, and the sound returned.

*

Two shots echoed across the Forest, in quick succession. I winced, and listened for any sign of the bullet hitting near me. But there was nothing, just the echoing retort of the shot.

Something was wrong. The gun was wrong.

A double-barrelled shotgun, twin triggers, designed to let the sportsman get off two shots while tracking a flying bird.

Nobody sends an advance scout with a shotgun. They’d give him a rifle for this kind of thing. A pistol or a revolver for close-up work.

I thought of the Leckies’ house. Stan, sitting in his chair, shotgun by his side, ready to defend his home. Mrs Leckie, on her knees in the grass, keeping an eye on the road.