The Night Gate - Enzo MacLeod Investigation Series 07 (2021) Read online

  She shrugged it off unconvincingly. ‘I don’t believe in that stuff anyway.’

  ‘Of course not. Why would you? None of us knows what’s going to happen. Especially with the world in the state it’s in now. We’ve all got a cloud hanging over us. It’s called war.’ They walked some way before he spoke again. ‘When my training’s over and I get deployed on some mission, I don’t expect to come back. I hope I do. But I’m not going to be thinking about that. I’m going to be focused on getting the job done. And if I come back in one piece, they’ll send me off on another. Like those brave young men dying in the skies over the south of England right now, the only reward for staying alive is getting sent out to risk being killed all over again.’ He shook his head. ‘In wartime, we can only live in the moment, George. But it’s not a bad way to live your life at any time.’

  She nodded mutely, and they walked in silence for some minutes. Beyond the dunes they could see the ocean rushing in across the wide, naked expanse of golden sand. It was no more than a foot deep, frothing and gleaming turquoise in the afternoon sun.

  ‘What are they training you for?’ she asked at length.

  ‘No idea. And I couldn’t tell you even if I knew.’

  ‘What kind of training is it?’

  ‘Same as you girls, I imagine, but tougher probably. Armed and unarmed combat. How to stay alive. To kill your enemy before he can kill you.’

  Suddenly she stumbled and fell in the sand, and he stooped quickly to help her to her feet.

  ‘Silly!’ She laughed and brushed the sand from her slacks, and found that he was still holding her arm. Straightening up, her face was very close to his, and she searched the depths of those blue, blue eyes in search of the soul that lay behind them. He returned her gaze, unblinking, and his intensity frightened her. Had they held the look a moment longer, she was sure they would have kissed. But she forced herself to break eye contact and turned to wade off again through the dunes. In a handful of strides he was at her side again.

  There was a tension between them now that almost crackled in the wind. She was frightened to look at him.

  ‘Are you scared?’ she said finally.

  ‘God, yes.’

  She looked at him quickly and saw that he meant it. She was surprised. Big boys didn’t admit to being scared. ‘Me, too,’ she said.

  ‘But I’m good,’ he added. ‘At what I do, I mean. So the other fella should feel a lot more scared than me.’

  The tide was fully in now, and in the far west there were clouds gathering along the horizon. The girls had long ago packed in the kite-flying, and they were lying on the machair in the lee of the jeep, soaking up the sun. Joan and Rebecca were smoking, watching how the wind made the ends of their cigarettes glow, and whipped the smoke from their mouths.

  Georgette and Alasdair had been gone for over an hour and Mairi was becoming agitated. She kept glancing at her watch and scouring the dunes for any sight of them. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Relax,’ Alice said. ‘They’ve probably found a sheltered spot somewhere and are having wild sex.’

  The others laughed, but Mairi didn’t smile. ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’

  Joan dunted her. ‘Hey. Calm down, Mairi. It’s what boys and girls do.’

  ‘He’s my brother,’ she said through clenched teeth.

  Rebecca said, ‘He’s a big boy, Mairi. I’m sure it wouldn’t be his first time.’ But Mairi just scowled.

  It was fully fifteen minutes or more before they saw the diminutive figures of Georgette and Alasdair making their way back through the dunes. They were arm in arm and laughing, and chatting away like they’d known one another all their lives.

  Mairi scrambled to her feet. ‘Where have you been?’ She ran suspicious eyes over them both. ‘You’re covered in sand.’

  Georgette began brushing the golden grains self-consciously from her clothes and shaking them from her hair. ‘We found a sheltered spot on the far side of the headland and just lay in the sand talking.’ She looked at Alasdair. ‘Didn’t we?’

  Alasdair said, ‘Didn’t realise it had got so late.’ He checked his watch. ‘We’d better get back.’

  Joan and Alice and Rebecca exchanged looks and cast envious glances at Georgette as they all piled into the jeep. But Mairi managed somehow to squeeze herself between Alasdair and Georgette in the front, scowling at her French friend as her brother swung the jeep around and accelerated along the track towards the road.

  The drive back seemed to take longer than the journey there, and spirits which had so soared earlier in the day were dampened now. There was very little conversation, and each of them was aware of the cloud bank moving in from the west. What had once seemed like innocent white clouds bubbling along the horizon had darkened and assumed a portentous air, laden with the promise of rain.

  Sunday blew a hoolie, as Mairi described it to the others, black clouds rolling off the moor from the west, lashing Stornoway with relentless rain that darkened the stone of the castle. By Monday morning the wind had died down, but the rain still fell in a steady, monotonous tattoo.

  The girls stood in a knot at the rear of the castle. They were all soaked through and depressed to be back, even before Sergeant Connolley sent them off on their three-mile run through the woods, laden once more with weighted rucksacks. When they returned he took Georgette’s rucksack and loaded it with more stones and told her to do it again.

  ‘I did warn you we’d need to double up on your training, Pig Nall,’ he said. ‘And who knows what two days off will have done to your fitness.’

  Mairi and Rebecca, and Joan and Alice, glowered at him in the rain, but Georgette hefted the rucksack on to her back and set off without a word.

  At lunch they sat once again in silence, a shadow having fallen somehow over their sense of togetherness. And they couldn’t help but be aware of the animated conversation going on at Connolley’s table on the far side of the dining room.

  ‘I’m sick of it,’ Alice said suddenly. ‘This isn’t what I signed up for.’ She had been recruited, she’d told them, by an uncle who wasn’t really an uncle, but a good friend of her father’s, because of her language skills and physical fitness. She was a member of a local harriers club, and had won a steeplechase somewhere. Connolley had let her off lightly last week because of her ankle, but she was back now on full training.

  ‘I suppose,’ Joan said, ‘that any of us could quit any time we wanted.’

  Alice shook her head. ‘I couldn’t let my dad down. He’d be mortified.’

  And Georgette knew that even if she wanted to, there was no way she could quit.

  After lunch they assembled as usual on the lawn in front of the castle. It had stopped raining finally, but a bruised and battered sky hovered low over Stornoway and held the threat of more to come. The Minch lay brooding darkly beyond the town, the colour of polished pewter.

  ‘Pig Nall, step out!’ Connolley barked, and Georgette moved sullenly forward to join him. He turned towards the others. ‘The fastest way to end an unarmed fight is to disable your opponent. Any way you can. None of you girls is likely to be able to knock anyone out. But you want to aim for your opponent’s face, hit him as often and as hard as you can. That serves three purposes. First, a good head shot will stun anyone. Second, it’ll put him on the defensive. Third, it’ll knock him off balance. But here’s the thing to remember. A skull is hard as hell, and will do as much damage to your hand as your hand can do to it. So aim for the softest spot. Anyone know what that is?’

  ‘The nose,’ Mairi said.

  ‘Right. A good blow to the nose will bloody him and bring tears to his eyes so that he can’t see you properly. So we’re going to take a look at how to cut through your opponent’s defences to achieve a face strike.’

  He half turned towards Georgette and was completely unprepared as she leapt from his
blind side on to his back, legs locking around his midriff. Her right arm crooked itself instantly around his neck, her right hand locking on to her left bicep, her left hand pressing hard against the back of his head. By pulling her elbows together she was able to bring huge lateral pressure to bear on both sides of his neck.

  Caught on the turn, Connolley was off balance, and the unexpected weight of her on his back caused him to stumble and fall. Fortunately for Georgette they landed side-on, before he managed to roll on to his back, trapping her beneath him. But her legs were still firmly crossed around his middle, and no matter how he bucked and kicked, he couldn’t break the lock she had on his neck.

  His weight on top of her was crippling, but she knew she only had to hold on for a few seconds more. Ten at most and he would start to lose consciousness, the blood supply to his brain from the carotid arteries cut off by her chokehold.

  She heard the girls screaming, uncertain whether they were cheering her on, or shouting at her to stop. She felt the fight going out of the sergeant, and knew that a black cloud was descending on him. A second or two more and he would be gone. A second or two more than that and he would be dead.

  She released her hold and tried to push him away. For a moment he was like a dead weight. Then he coughed and sputtered, gasping for breath, and rolled over to pull himself to his knees, leaning forward on clenched fists. Georgette staggered to her feet, standing over him, breathing hard, exultant. ‘You’re right, sergeant,’ she shouted at him. ‘No man expects a girl to be able to upend him. And maybe that’s his weakness.’

  He turned a murderous face towards her. ‘You damn near killed me, you fucking bitch.’

  Georgette looked towards the castle and saw Connolley’s fellow NCOs at one of the tall windows. They weren’t laughing now. She looked back at the sergeant. ‘You’re fucking lucky I didn’t.’

  Beer bubbled in the necks of short brown bottles as the girls chinked the glass and tipped back their heads to suck down the cold frothing liquid. Nothing had tasted quite so good to Georgette in a very long time. They were huddled together in her attic room, the rest of the castle asleep now. Somehow Mairi had managed to smuggle in five bottles that Alasdair had acquired for them, and this was the first chance they’d had to be all together to drink them since the incident that afternoon.

  Training had been abandoned for the rest of the day, and Georgette summoned to the colonel’s office on the first floor. He had delivered what he imagined was a dressing-down as she stood to attention. But she’d barely heard a word. Wasn’t listening. In retrospect the only things she could remember were his whining voice telling her that she was only here as a favour for the French, and that she was an ungrateful little minx. She didn’t care any more. Making her run six miles a day with stones on her back and throwing her repeatedly on to wet grass in front of the castle was not going to make her any more capable of performing the task de Gaulle had set her. She was glad to have humiliated the bully Connolley in front of his peers, and in front of the girls. He had so richly deserved it.

  But she had learned something, too. Something about herself that scared her more than she would admit. That she was capable of killing another human being. A few seconds longer and the sergeant would have been dead, and she knew that she had actually wanted to do it.

  In the end, though, she was happy that she hadn’t. To him, the humiliation was probably worse than death, and it would live with him for the rest of his days.

  ‘Where the hell did you learn to do that?’ Joan whispered, full of admiration.

  Georgette grinned and glanced at Mairi. ‘Your brother,’ she said.

  Mairi frowned. ‘Alasdair?’ She was incredulous. ‘When?’

  ‘Saturday. On the beach beyond the dunes.’

  Rebecca’s jaw was gaping. She said, ‘We thought you and he were . . . you know . . . ?’

  Georgette laughed. ‘I’m sure that was what Alasdair was hoping for, too. But I made him spend the whole hour teaching me that chokehold. It’s called a figure-four variation, apparently. One of the things he was taught in training. We did get up close and personal. I mean, I spent half the time with my legs wrapped around him. But maybe not in quite the way he’d imagined.’

  Mairi burst out laughing, to a chorus of shooshes from the others, and her hand shot to her mouth to mute her mirth. She was clearly relieved. When she got herself under control again she said, ‘George, where did you learn to swear like that?’

  ‘My mother,’ Georgette said. ‘She was Scottish.’

  Georgette lay awake in the dark, tired and strangely fulfilled, but unable to sleep. The events of the day were going round and round in her head, and she couldn’t help but speculate on what tomorrow would hold for her.

  As so often happens when you think you can’t sleep, it creeps up on you unawares. A banging on her door startled her awake, and she wondered how long she’d been out. It was still pitch-dark, and she blinked the grit from her eyes as the banging came again. ‘Pig Nall,’ a man’s voice came from the other side of the door.

  She slipped from the warmth of her bed, shocked by the cold linoleum beneath her feet, and opened the door. The young private who had first shown her to her room stood in the corridor. He wore a thick camouflage jacket over his fatigues, and a beret pulled down over an unsmiling face.

  ‘Pack your bags, Pig Nall, you’re leaving.’

  ‘What? Now?’

  ‘Now.’

  It took Georgette less than ten minutes to dress and pack her few belongings in the battered old cardboard suitcase she had arrived with just a week before. There was no time for more than a splash of water on a face drawn by lack of sleep, and pale with the cold.

  She hurried along the gloomy attic corridor after the private, and struggled to keep up with him on the stairs as he took them two at a time down to the ground floor.

  ‘Where am I going?’ she called breathlessly at his back.

  ‘Ferry leaves in half an hour.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard.’

  All along the hall, night lights reflected off its polished surface, and darkened kitchens smelled of stale cabbage. A truck was waiting for her behind the castle, its engine idling loudly in the dark, belching clouds of toxic carbon monoxide into cold night air to be whipped away by the wind.

  A light shone in the cab, and the same driver who had picked her up at the quayside leaned down to give her a hand up into the passenger seat. His skin was yellow by the light of the cab, and his eyes puffy from lack of sleep. He grinned, though. ‘Hello again, mam’selle. Been a naughty girl, I hear.’

  Georgette settled her case on her knees as the private slammed the door shut behind her. ‘Have I?’

  ‘Gave some sergeant’s arse a good kicking, so they say.’

  She smiled palely. ‘Maybe he deserved it.’

  ‘Bet he did.’ He ground into gear and swung his truck through a semi-circle and headed off between the trees on the strip of potholed tarmac that wound through them down to the town. Leaves fell like snow in his headlights. September was stating its case for an early winter.

  Blackout Stornoway huddled in darkness, and moonlight made the rippled surface of the inner harbour seem almost alive. By the time they reached the outer harbour, the first light was discernible in the east, and by the time she was aboard, the whole eastern sky was ablaze. Banks of cloud close to the horizon lay in long dark baubles of blue and grey, set against a wash of red that reflected itself like fire on the water. Almost as if the island were putting on its best show to bid her farewell.

  The crossing was rough, but not as bad as the outward journey, and she sat inside, squeezed into a corner trying to keep warm and catch some sleep.

  It was mid-morning and fully light by the time they reached Mallaig, and she had to wait until the afternoon for the connection to Fort William. Several hours spent
in the station buffet there gave her time to think about the future. Where she was going and when. No one had given her the least idea of what the next days might hold. Just onward instructions at each stop, to be followed to the letter.

  Depression settled on her like dust in a still room. There was nowhere she could go to seek comfort. No one in whom she could confide, or share her fears. The impossible task that de Gaulle had set her. The dangers that awaited when finally they dropped her into occupied France. With her father, and now her mother, both dead, she was a twenty-eight-year-old orphan. There was no such place as home. No family into whose bosom she could escape. She had only herself to rely upon. She wondered if she had ever felt so small and so alone. A cork bobbing in an ocean of uncertainty, being carried along by forces over which she had absolutely no control. And it occurred to her with a stab of sadness that she would never see Mairi, or Joan, or Alice or Rebecca again. Or Alasdair. Fate had brought them together for one short week in this first year of the war and would deliver them in different ways, and different times, into uncertain futures. Who knew which, if any of them, would survive. But Georgette was the only one whose future had been seen clouded by darkness in the eyes of the old lady in the blackhouse at Uig, and she shivered with disquiet, pushing the thought to the very back of her mind.

  The night train to London delivered her early into Euston Station. She thanked God that there was, at least, time for her to get back to her mother’s house in South Kensington, to take a bath and change and pack fresh clothes, before being picked up early that evening and taken to some unrevealed destination.

  The soldier who came to her door this time was French. But he was sullen and untalkative as he drove her out of the city and almost due south towards the coast. They frequently passed military vehicles on the road and Georgette sat beside him in the passenger seat of the black Citroën stealing occasional glances in his direction. He looked no more than twenty-three or twenty-four, stranded in a strange land, while his mother country had been occupied by a barbaric foreign invader. He could have been no happier about it than she.