The German Numbers Woman Read online

  Green hillside spread up the other slope of the valley, a panorama to calm him. A black and white cow was painted halfway, always the same though sometimes it moved, always when he wasn’t looking. Whenever he opened the curtain there it was, and who carried the animal to another position in the night he never knew. Maybe it wasn’t the same cow, a different one taking its place when the present cow had gorged itself sufficiently on succulent grass it didn’t even have to stand up and search for. Perhaps the cattle had a pow-wow as to who should have the hallowed spot the following day. Being so prized it had to be shared, the riches of the world passed from mouth to mouth. No one cow could be allowed to scoff too greedily at the trough. Well, he’d had more than a good patch in the last few years, and nobody had come to push him aside.

  He put on the radio, a flip of the dial, and the only true music came from the stratosphere, a contemporary rendering of the heaviside quartets tinkling through clear sky and hitting cloud which sorted out the various rhythms. Every note he could get sense out of meant money in the mattress.

  He’d made enough from a couple of Gibraltar trips to buy the house, and put something by. On the way he had taken down the weather in morse from Portishead Radio, and steered them from a storm that might have swamped the boat overloaded with the most head-banging powders on earth. He fiddled with a receiver which a crew member had bought for a tenner in a pub thinking it was an ordinary wireless. Near to home on the return trip Richard had heard jabber from the coast guards, so they knew what coves to steer clear of, which so impressed the Big Man (they called him Waistcoat) that he was promised money whenever he sent in a transcript from Interpol.

  No problem, so it turned out. He was able to let them know when the police would be waiting at Frankfurt for a consignment from Colombia, so the bods on board were advised to come down in a different place, and all was well. The police waiting at Frankfurt had their names, dates of birth, what luggage they had, and how they were carrying the stuff. False bottoms of suitcases was the least of their ingenuity. Somebody must have put in a word for whatever reason, and Richard’s intelligence might indicate who and why, so he didn’t doubt that a few had been snuffed out for their try that went wrong.

  After eight years as a radio officer in the Merchant Service he could get anything that was floating in the aether out of a radio. He was good at it and could do no wrong. Whenever anything useful came up he phoned it through, and they paid him well, money for old rope, just for sitting on his arse and trawling the short waves all day between looking at that picture-book cow noshing the best of green grass on the hillside – a gilded calf if ever there was one. He couldn’t understand why the Mafia and all big outfits of the criminal world didn’t recruit personnel to scour the communication systems of their law-enforcing enemies. It would have made sense and cost little.

  Money unblocked the log-jam of one’s dreams, brightened the nights and days. All the sharp and clever people wanted their share, made a beacon out of themselves hoping money would home in and stick. He’d picked up a long signal from Africa, concerning Sambo Jean-Jacques who was a chauffeur and guard of the secretary of state for defence in Zaire – or some such place – and purloined a hundred million francs by forging his boss’s signature at the local bank when he was away on leave. Jean-Jacques was last seen heading towards Uganda with his girlfriend, false passports in their pockets. Richard hoped he had got clean away, after such ingenuity, and even worked out all possible routes on a Michelin map to see what his chances were, deciding they must be good, despite wireless signals going all over the place trying to stop him.

  He was aware of such power, though often afraid to use it, except for prompt and spot cash. His French was good enough to pick up plain language in morse from the police network in France. It was interesting to hear vital statistics of criminals and their whereabouts. Some villain, he learned, had stolen a car in Nice (a good Mercedes, licence number given) and was on his way to his sister’s in Lille. Her name, address and telephone number were given, so Richard had the power to pick up the phone and in two minutes warn her that trouble was on its way. Schoolboy French would just about run to it. He would whisper that she should try to save her errant brother, except that to do so might be too risky. He was putting himself enough on the line as it was. How could he tell Amanda what he was doing? All she needed to know was that wireless listening was his hobby. A high-tension shock had gone through him only this morning, after a wonderful night of making love. She had even got his breakfast of coffee and rolls, butter and jam, and no one could have done it better.

  ‘The police called yesterday,’ she said.

  The jam turned sour. ‘What the fuck for?’

  ‘Don’t swear, darling.’

  Why not? It was too early for fear not to hit him. ‘Sorry. What did they want?’

  ‘It was about the football field at the end of the lane. Some vandals had sawn through the goalposts with an electric saw, and they wondered whether we’d heard or seen any of them driving away.’

  ‘I didn’t.’ His head had been down on more important matters. The jam tasted halfway good again. ‘Didn’t hear a thing.’

  ‘Neither did I.’

  ‘If I had, I’d have killed the bastards. They should be shot on sight.’

  She poured coffee for them both. He wished she could be like this all the time, but knew he had to earn such brief interludes of care and attention. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t use violent language, though,’ she said.

  ‘I know. Sorry about it. But vandalism like that gets my goat. I hate it. The kids in the village play there a lot. I really would have liked to have caught them.’ He would, except they might have been the ones who did it. They’d have thought lightning had struck. His fists itched. They always itched, from knuckles to wrists, but the knuckles especially, though he resisted scratching. They had got at him personally, whoever had done it. Such destruction was purposeless, sheer spite, enjoyment of the lowest sort, done out of hatred against everyone and everything.

  Apart from that, it put the shits up him to know that the police had called at the house. Maybe they had another reason altogether. ‘What else did they say?’

  ‘Nothing. They were very nice and polite. I almost fancied one of them.’

  ‘You bitch.’

  She was in his arms. ‘But I fancy you most of all.’

  He tuned in, and the signals came through loud and clear, right on cue. Sometimes you had to wait, or search endlessly through the megacycles, because they changed frequency often, maybe to catch you out. It was like watching for fish, but this morning the messages smiled through, every bright sing-song of morse a pound coin dropping into his greedy palm.

  FIVE

  Laura knew when the east wind cometh, when it was close, when it was blathering and grating in the here and now. It meant torment for Howard, but he tried to laugh off its advent, regarding it as inexorable, though devilish while it lasted.

  ‘When the wind is in the east a blind man dances with the beast,’ he said, and probably everyone else did as well, though in a minor key because they could see it coming by the writhing of leaves, as well as dust and rubbish peppering along the streets, while he only got advanced warning from Portishead.

  ‘The beast is on its way,’ he’d say, switching off the wireless, ‘but I’ll try not to let it get at me.’ Sometimes he lost all sense of equilibrium, felt that because he couldn’t see anyone no one else could see him. A gremlin turned the town plan around, making his morning walk as if through treacle, so he stayed at home. ‘Navigation all to cock,’ he would say. At the worst of times she heard him knocking his head against the wall. He thought she couldn’t hear, his door being closed and the morse loud, or everything drowned by the worst of static. But sound carried. There were vibrations, and they passed right through her. He wandered around like old blind Pugh in Treasure Island.

  In one of his worst bouts she had driven him over a hundred miles to an air show at Duxford
near Cambridge. He forgot the nagging wind on climbing into a bomber sat in during the war, and hearing a Wellington and a Harvard. She felt a shiver from his hand at the throaty roar of their engines. He looked up, no doubt saw the picture clear in every detail. Good to know there were things no wind could spoil. By the time they got back the dreaded easterly had veered or dropped.

  Well, she couldn’t do such a trip every month, nor would he let her, half ashamed at having put her to the trouble, the other part consumed by his pleasure at exorcising two devils at the same time. Walking up the steps of home he said: ‘There are times when I can’t get under the make-up of the blind man to the real me underneath. It’s a horrible feeling. But today I could, and it’ll last a long while, thanks to you, my love.’

  ‘We must go again, in a year or two,’ she said. ‘I quite enjoyed it, as well.’

  But this morning he had knocked two of her precious Yuan breakfast cups off the table. Such crockery came in sets, and a gap had to be made good, otherwise it was not only a slight to the eyes as they lay in the cupboard, but a disturbance was felt, as if a splinter of herself was missing, an opening for unwelcome thoughts to come through.

  After coffee she made sandwiches for him to eat at lunch, set him at the wireless to get what solace he could, and walked down the steps to the car. At the China Parade shop near the edge of town she could buy replacements for the cups. She wondered why he had stumbled. Always careful, he must be even more upset than an east wind warranted. Was he getting worse? Losing his sharpness and care now that he was sixty? After the cups were wrapped and boxed she drove ten miles to Bracebridge and collected a replacement for the parlour stove. Her nerves weren’t at their best, either, from the buffeting wind, because she hit the kerb in the village and, hearing bumps under a front tyre, knew it was a puncture, the first since buying the car five years ago. A lay-by was close, and she trundled in to change the wheel.

  A twin-tailed squarish combat plane in camouflage colours came low along the river. Two jet engines were centred on the fuselage between the greenhouse cockpit, either low flying practice or had they rumbled him and were trying to find out what stations he listened to? He didn’t think they had the technology, in spite of what Peter Wright claimed in Spycatcher.

  Rain splashed the windscreen but the pint had been good, safe inside, and not to be got at. Two would have been better, three even more, but to be pulled up and breath tested would draw the eyes of the law on him, and should he be over the level, the misdemeanour might lead towards something bigger. Take care of the small, and no one would rumble anything worse. Anonymity was the rule, to be a fish in water.

  He managed a cigarette without taking both hands from the wheel. An east wind was usually dry but this one had turned the trees jungle green, drizzle from Russia with love. Halfway along the straight he slowed on seeing a car in a lay-by, where a woman was trying to fix a wheel. Well, she had the jack in her hands, turned away, wondering what to do next, not imagining golden boy was homing in.

  She would be alarmed, fear he was a predator with a rape-knife and unbreakable stranglehold. A hundred yards to walk, the view from behind was good, shapely legs, dark brown hair down to her neck, signs promising well for looks and, if not, certainly a presence. He had sometimes followed a woman with the most gorgeous hair, walking rapidly ahead then turning back as if he’d forgotten something, only to find a face like the back end of a tram smash, which phrase his father had often used. An article in the paper said that if you saw a woman walking down the street at dusk or in the dark you should reassure her by crossing to the other side. Give her a wide berth. He wasn’t that much of a gentleman, though neither did he feel himself a villain. He would talk his way in, and put her at ease.

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude. You seem to be in trouble with that wheel.’ Not many marks from Amanda for that, but she had gone to London, and he was his own man today. ‘It won’t take five minutes to change, and then we can both be on our way.’

  This tall woman, seemingly in her forties, turned, put the carjack on the bonnet, a wheel hub by her feet. ‘I’m quite capable. I just can’t quite find the place to put the jack under the body.’

  ‘My wife used to have one of these cars, so I can show you.’ Amanda didn’t, but he felt around and found the place, glad to be helping this cool stately woman who gave him the most calculated weighing-up he could remember. Not much more behind her grey eyes than that, so he immediately felt calm at being near, especially since, in handing over the jack, she seemed to trust him. She needed the expertise, after all.

  The nuts were so tight he had to stamp his shoes down on the spanner, kicking at each till they loosened and could be taken off, which brought on a bit of a sweat. She would never have done it on her own, but for him it was easy, and he slowed down because he wanted to stay a few more minutes near her. ‘Do you have far to go?’

  She told him. ‘I’ve just been to that stove place near Bracebridge. I’ve never had a blow-out before.’

  ‘There’s always a first time.’ A touch of grey on darkish hair added to her dignity, and he could only wonder where it came from. Straight backed, nothing ambivalent about her, English to the bone, she was the type he had never been so close to before. Her sort were usually too knowing to clinch with him, so good behaviour was the order of the day.

  She felt a fool but thought never mind, it would have been awkward struggling with the bolts, and he seemed familiar with such things, not put out either by drizzle and muddy pools around their cars. She considered herself lucky, and smiled, trying not to hover at each phase of the operation.

  ‘I live out near Benefield,’ he said. ‘My wife and I bought a house there two years ago.’

  ‘A nice village.’

  He told her about the goalposts, and the police visit, surprised at rattling on in a way he rarely did with Amanda.

  ‘You seem very efficient at this type of thing,’ she said. ‘It would have taken me twice as long.’

  At least, he smiled. ‘Part of my trade is messing about in boats, and a sailor can turn his hand to anything. Six months ago I went on a thirty-two-footer to Boulogne and back, and we had sails, but the engine broke down, and getting out of the harbour without it would have been tricky, so I set to, and got it going.’ He certainly had, driven by what they had on board, but he couldn’t mention that. He had made a special Consol lattice on the chart so they would know their exact position in poor visibility with regard to the coastguards. He didn’t think it worked, but at least the trip had gone off all right, and paid for a good bit of his BMW.

  ‘You were in the Navy, then?’

  ‘Merchant Service. Radio officer. But I came out. They didn’t pay enough for my liking.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Her façade was broken. Maybe she’d had a brother in the Navy who had been drowned, and he’d touched a chord. She flushed as if he had come out with something embarrassing, so plain was she to read. Or had he shown himself as too mercenary and common? ‘You seem surprised.’

  He had done her one favour, so she could hardly ask him for another, though perhaps that was all the more reason to. ‘No, it’s just that, well, if you were a radio officer, you must know the morse code.’

  Now he was surprised. ‘Read it like a book.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  A funny question. Maybe she would ask him to teach her Brownie group or Girl Guide class. Or perhaps she was an off-duty policewoman, and wanted him to teach signals twice a week to the force – which would lead him quicker to his doom than being breathalysed. He’d often fancied himself as a teacher, but not that sort. No, she couldn’t be in the police, because she would at least be able to change a wheel, unless they had planted her as a decoy for swine who preyed on women in difficulty on the roadside. He looked at the trees, towards the hedge decorated with a plastic bag, at the ditch strewn with tins. ‘But why do you ask?’

  She liked his trim efficiency, medium height, slim build, face w
ith no fat on it, showing features clean and – well – hard in a way, tough you might say, certainly a sailor, now that he had told her. ‘My husband was a wireless operator, in the Air Force.’

  No coincidence. There must have been tens of thousands trained in the old dit-dah. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘He got shot up, at the end of the war.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ He put the hubcap back in place, tapped it with the muddy toe of his shoe. ‘So he’s one of the fraternity.’

  She liked the word. A fraternity. ‘He’s blind, but he gets around all right.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear he’s blind.’ He was. Who wouldn’t be? ‘It happened to many, always the best people.’ That’s what she would like him to say. He wanted to keep her talking, hoped she wouldn’t leave, though they couldn’t stand forever in the mud and grit. ‘There’s a pub down the road. Would you join me for a drink.’

  That damnable east wind blew against her coat. Howard might be taking a nap now, dreaming his dreams, which could never be remembered. No man had invited her for a drink since before her marriage, but it would be impolite to hesitate. ‘Are you sure?’

  He held up his blackened hands. ‘Then I could wash these.’

  Rain, unaccountably, made her thirsty. Strange, that. ‘Yes, all right.’

  Another pint would go down well. Not too much to drive home on. He didn’t know what the attraction was, but he tried not to look at her too intently. Not entirely sexual, either. ‘I can’t go home like this. My wife might wonder what I’d been up to.’

  She had said it, and felt the joy of being young again. ‘I can have a fruit juice, or something.’

  He fastened his blue duffel coat and adjusted the naval-style cap to a sharper angle. ‘I’ll meet you in the parking place. You won’t miss it.’

  In any case, she wanted to use the toilet, the effect of the rain, no doubt. ‘I think it’s only right that I should buy the drinks.’