Death

TWENTY-SIX

As Shaw drove, his good eye on the narrow coastal road, Valentine told him everything he’d managed to learn about the Auxunits, the so-called Stay Behind Army, and the standard issue of six cyanide pills. Shaw had picked Valentine up outside St James’ at eight fifteen, as arranged, but had got the distinct impression Valentine had been there some time. He’d been sitting on the semicircular stone steps, his shadow stretching down to the street, a little heap of spent Silk Cut between his feet.

‘And we’re saying these units actually existed, George — they’re not just some Whitehall boffin’s dream?’ asked Shaw, pointing the Porsche East through the docks. Given the state of the inquiry: stalled while they waited for Joe Osbourne’s DNA check, baffled by Paul Holtby’s brutal murder, and with just two days to the chief constable’s press conference, they’d agreed that they could hardly ignore the outside possibility they could track the dugout down.

‘I called the MoD last night, told ’em to send us what they could on these units by email,’ said Valentine. ‘But yeah, they’re for real. Well, they were for real. This coast was heavily fortified — you saw those bronze rails up in the woods above The Circle, by the folly? They’re gun rails, and there’s loads more. Coastal defence. They thought that if the Germans are coming, they’ll come this way. Long, flat, desolate coast, with the road open to the capital. It was our Normandy, waiting to happen.’

Valentine’s normal listless tone had gone and for the first time Shaw thought that for his DS the Second World War wasn’t just a distant memory. For his generation, and Shaw’s father, it was a backdrop to their lives, because their parents had lived through it. Perhaps that was why he seemed more energized by the discovery than Shaw.

‘And who, exactly, is it that says there was one of these units at Creak?’ Shaw asked, trying to think straight, while the road took a vicious double-hairpin bend at Burnham Overy Staithe, sneaking past The Hero — a pub in Chelsea-set blue, with a signboard showing Nelson.

‘Nobody — not officially,’ admitted Valentine. ‘It was popular wartime gossip. They had engineers up there but they were probably building the gun emplacement by the folly. They’d do that, because it makes sense.’ He turned half in the seat to look at Shaw’s profile: ‘They’d put the dugout near something else military so they could cover their steps. There’s no point a platoon of sappers turning up to build a secret underground base, is there?’ He stopped, dragging air into his lungs, disguising the breath. ‘This way, if anyone was seen approaching the spot people would think they were going to the gun, or the pillbox, or the lookout, or whatever it was they’d built above ground, nearby. The rumour was strong enough that when English Heritage took over at the Warrenner’s Lodge a few years ago they did do a survey as part of a maintenance programme. They found fuck all, except a shadow of a brick warren, most of it plugged with clay.’

‘Names — do we know who’s in these units?’

‘Local volunteers and they all signed the Official Secrets Act — and they were paid. But the documentation was all-central, and all of it was destroyed in ’46. A few people broke cover in the eighties and nineties — MoD bloke said they had some cuttings. But basically they kept quiet — it’s like Bletchley Park. They took it seriously; a secret’s a secret. They chose people who could keep a secret. So names are going to be tough.’

Shaw nodded, letting him talk on. He’d never heard Valentine say so much.

‘But we know what the Auxunits were like — the people who ran the network were commandos; they wanted people who knew the local terrain and who could survive on the run: gamekeepers, farmers, field workers. You had to be fit too — so that means they looked at the emergency services. Most were reserved occupations, so there were young men about — police, fire brigade, coastguard. And anyone who could use a gun, so they recruited at shoots, hunts, clubs.’

‘And every one of these units got six of these cyanide pills?’ asked Shaw.

‘Yeah, MoD guy said that was standard practice for anyone working behind enemy lines, which is where they would have been if the invasion had rolled over them. Kind of insurance policy. If you thought you were gonna get caught, and tortured, at least there was a quick way out. That was in everyone’s interests.’

They swung past the end of The Row, the terrace street on which Arthur Patch had lived for nearly half a century. A thin line of smoke still rose from the ruin of the house, and the rest of the street still looked empty. The Porsche climbed the steep hill beyond the village until the Docking Hill wind farm filled the horizon, the vanes of the three giant mills turning lazily. Shaw put the Porsche up on the verge.

They could see the usual group of demonstrators by the gates, where they’d set up a vigil — a circle of candles — for Paul Holtby. Killing the engine Shaw heard a thin dirge on the air being sung by the crowd. Catching sight of the candle flames he thought of Holtby’s skin-white face, smoke pumping out of the ash, and Hadden’s chilling description: human candle.