As he stood on the roof, lungs pumping in the cold air, the sea already seemed far below, the villa hidden behind its high privet hedges. Looking around, though, he immediately noticed the white Pallas parked behind the sea wall two hundred yards along the beach. The car was the same colour as the Citro’n they had hired in Cherbourg, and Ogden took for granted that it was their own vehicle. A tall man in a hunting jacket was steering a woman companion along the broken ground behind the wall. They approached a wooden boathouse at the end of a slipway above the beach, and Ogden could see clearly the patterns of the woman’s musquash fur and recognize her gesture as she reached a gloved hand to the man’s elbow.
Ogden stepped down into the stairwell. Watching them calmly, his shoulders hidden by the parapet, he knew that he had deliberately encouraged Angela and Richard Foster to come together. His own solitary walks, the private excursions he had made to the D-Day museum at Arromanches, had been part of a confused and half-conscious attempt to bring matters to a head and force a decision on himself.
Yet when he saw them unlocking the door of the boathouse together, briefly embracing in the sunlight as if openly trying to provoke him, Ogden felt a profound sense of loss. He knew too that the months of self-control had been wasted, and that from the beginning he had deluded himself that all was well.
Without thinking, he turned quickly from the parapet. With luck he could pack, call a taxi and have caught the ferry from Cherbourg before they returned to the villa. He started to run down the concrete steps, lost his footing on the damp diagonal sills, and fell backwards down the stairway on to the floor of the barbette ten feet below.
Sitting in the half-light against the wet concrete wall, Ogden massaged his bruised hands. By luck he had been able to protect his head, but he could feel the raw skin of his arms and shoulders. Some sort of viscous oil stained his fawn trousers, and a leather button torn from his jacket lay like a burst chestnut at the foot of the stairway. Immediately to his left was the embrasure of the fire-sill, the quiet beach below. There was no movement from the boathouse, and the white Pallas was still parked behind the sea wall.
At this moment Ogden realized that he was not the only person keeping a close watch on the beach. Six feet away from him, almost hidden by his grey uniform in the shadows behind the parapet, a man lay against the concrete wall. He was resting on one elbow, face turned towards the open sea, and at first Ogden assumed that he was dead. His blond hair had been bleached to an almost arctic pallor. He appeared to be no more than nineteen or twenty years old, his pale skin stretched across the bony points of his face like wet parchment around a skull.
His thin legs, encased in a pair of heavy boots and ragged serge trousers, stuck out in front of him like poles strung with rags. Lying diagonally across them, its long barrel supported by a bipod, was a light machine-gun, stock pressed against the young man’s right shoulder. Around him, arranged like the decor of a shabby military display, were an empty mess tin, a spent ammunition belt, the half-rotted remains of a field pack and webbing, and a greasestained ground sheet.
A few feet from Ogden, lying on the fire-sill within his reach, was a spring-action flare-pistol of a type he had seen only the previous afternoon in the D-Day museum at Arromanches. He recognized it immediately, like the uniform and equipment of this young Wehrmacht soldier whose corpse he had stumbled upon, in some way preserved by the freezing air, or perhaps by the lime leaking from the hastily mixed concrete. Curiously, the machine-gun still appeared to be in working order, a spiked bayonet fitted under the barrel, the butt-stock and receiver greased and polished.
Confused by this macabre discovery, Ogden had already forgotten his wife’s infidelity. He was about to pick up the flarepistol and fire it over the parapet in the direction of the boathouse. But as his bruised hand touched the frozen butt Ogden became aware that the young soldier’s eyes were watching him. Of a blanched blue from which almost all pigment had been washed away, they had turned from the beach and were examining Ogden with a tired but steady gaze. Although the soldier’s white hands still lay passively at his sides, his right shoulder had moved against the wall, swinging the machine-gun fractionally towards Ogden.
Too frightened to speak, Ogden sat back, taking in every detail of the German’s equipment, every ammunition round and piece of webbing, every pore in the cold skin of this young soldier still defending his blockhouse on Utah Beach as he had done in 1944.
After a moment, to Ogden’s relief, the machine-gun barrel turned towards the sea. The German had shifted his position slightly, and was once again scanning the beach. His left hand moved to his face, as if he were hoping to transfer a morsel of food to his mouth, and then fell to the floor. A ragged bandage circled his chest, covering a blackened wound partly hidden by his tunic. He took no notice of Ogden as the latter climbed to his feet, both hands pressed to the wall as if frightened that it might collapse on him at any time.
But as Ogden stepped over the machine-gun a white claw moved across the floor, about to seize his ankle.
‘HOren Sie…’ The voice was flat, as if coming off an almost erased recording tape. ‘Wieviel Ulir ist es?’ He looked up with a kind of exhausted impatience. ‘Verstehen Sie? Queue heure…? Aujourd’hui? Hier?’ Dismissing Ogden with a wave, he murmured, ‘Zu viel Larm zu viel Larm…’
Pulling the stock of the machine-gun into his shoulder, he stared along its barrel at the beach below.
Ogden was about to leave, when a movement on the beach caught his eye. The boathouse door had opened. Richard Foster stepped into the sunlight, and swung his arms lazily in the cool air as he waited until Angela appeared thirty seconds later. Together they walked across the dunes to the parked Pallas, climbed into the car and drove off.
Ogden paused by the staircase, watching the young soldier with the machine gun. He realized that the German had seen neither Foster nor his wife. The boathouse and sea wall were hidden from him by the parapet of the barbette. But if he recovered from his wounds, and moved forward to the edge of the fire-sill By the time he reached the villa ten minutes later Ogden had already decided on both the tactics and strategy of what he knew would be the last military action of World War II.
‘Have you seen the blankets from the children’s room?’ Angela flicked through the inventory, her sharp eyes watching her husband as he played chess with himself by the sitting-room window. ‘I didn’t bother to check them when we arrived, but Mme Saunier insists they’re missing.’
Ogden looked up from the chessboard. As he shook his head he glanced at the blockhouse. For the three days since his discovery the suspense had become exhausting; at any moment he expected a wounded Wehrmacht soldier to appear on the roof among the wheeling gulls, a pink blanket around his shoulders. At lunch he had changed his place, sitting by himself further down one side of the table so that he could keep the blockhouse under observation.
‘Perhaps they were never there,’ he said. ‘We can replace them.’
‘They were here all right. Mme Saunier is scrupulous about this sort of thing. She also said something about one of the decanters. David, are you in a trance?’
Irritably, Angela pushed her blonde hair from her forehead, then gave up and picked up her coat. Richard Foster was waiting by the car in the drive, one of the two shotguns they had hired cradled under his arm. Ogden noticed that he had taken to carrying the weapon everywhere with him, almost as if he detected a change of atmosphere in the villa. In fact, Ogden had gone to strenuous lengths to maintain the good humour of the first days of their holiday.