Return to the Field by Alexander Fullerton

Author:Alexander Fullerton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788630368
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

She woke with it still simmering in her brain. Ends justifying the means, was what it came down to. Also the fact that taking chances with other people’s lives was a lot easier when you didn’t know them.

Didn’t know for certain they existed, even. That was even better.

Might well be frost out there, she thought. A bit late for one – third day of May, God’s sake – but the light in the window had that steely look, and even with the bedclothes right up she wasn’t all that warm.

Nose ice-cold.

Imagining – how one might feel if one heard later – even years later – that some other agent or Résistant had gone to his or her death in consequence of one’s having deliberately withheld the warning about Prigent…

It was a truth which you carried with you always in the field that you could come to a sudden and very unpleasant end not necessarily through blunders of your own but through the carelessness or malfeasance of others. You could be playing your end strictly by the rules, quite unaware that events which would ultimately send you in chains to Ravensbrück were already shaping up elsewhere.

Semi-dozing, seeing this one like a piece of film. Prigent’s surgery door on the Rue de l’Yser. A departing patient: featureless, anonymous. The blonde receptionist sees him out: there’s an exchange of au revoirs, and the door closes. A car’s engine starts – forty or so metres away, up at the cemetery end of the road. It’s a grey Citroën, with two men in it: raincoats, soft hats, leather gloves. The car pulls out smoothly from the kerb and follows, maintaining a certain distance until Prigent’s customer has gone out of sight around the corner. It speeds up then: to round the same corner, then overtake: and for the man gasping as he whirls round, freezing in a moment’s shock then looking frantically for any way to escape, it’s as stunning as an explosion – rocking halt of the grey car that’s bounced on to the pavement ahead of him with its doors flying open and the two men ejecting: their shouts as they grab him…

‘In!’

Flung in like something dead – which he will be, soon. After intervals of pain, humiliation, horror.

She knew. Had been there, once. Was now out of the bed, snatching up her notebook and a pencil, pausing only for a glance out of the window – seeing there was no frost, despite the killing cold in this end of the house – then leaping back under the blankets so as not to freeze while drafting a signal as succinctly as she could make it. After a few crossings-out it ended up as

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