‘Hi,’ she said to Will as he entered, clutching a file under his arm.
‘Hi,’ he said, one eyebrow already cocked.
‘You look half mysterious, half smug,’ Lucy said, lifting her chin. ‘What’s going on?’
‘This. This is what’s going on,’ he said, tapping the file.
‘Are they the photographs you developed?’ She’d expected him to come over this morning with them and when he hadn’t, she assumed they’d either not worked or there was nothing of interest in them.
He nodded. ‘Do I smell coffee?’
She led him through to the kitchen where he put the file on the table and she made him a drink, the kettle still hot.
‘I’ve been …’ he started. ‘OK … How do I say this?’
‘Spit it out,’ Lucy suggested, handing him a fresh mug of coffee.
‘I’m going to show you,’ he said.
He sat down at the table, opened the file and gestured for Lucy to sit next to him. Slowly he lifted the photos from the file and one by one laid them out.
He spread out the black and white images and Lucy looked at each one intently. The first two showed two large gun emplacements at two different locations on the island, the sort of large fixed weapons that could easily shoot an Allied plane from the sky.
There was one of a large concrete outpost that Lucy immediately recognised as the large cylindrical observation tower at Pleinmont and one of what had become a small part of the Atlantic Wall, a grey concrete stretch of wall running all along the edge of the beach at L’Ancresse Bay. She recognised it. A wall to halt Allied invasion. She’d sat on this wall as a child eating ice cream looking at the rust of the metal as it reached the edges of the concrete.
Age or decay or both had administered their might to the next image and it was faded into a sepia darkness. Another was of theairport, littered with planes. As Lucy looked closer she saw the swastika emblems on the tails, the cross icons in the mid-sections.
‘Luftwaffe planes. These were taken in the war. Whoever took these was taking an unbelievable risk. This is spying, surely?’ she said in a mix of awe and shock.
‘It was. Yes,’ Will said, his voice undeniably excited.
In the second-to-last photo, someone, presumably from a first-floor window, had photographed prisoners walking in a line. But not ordinary prisoners or men in uniform who may have been prisoners of war, but ragged, thin, muddy prisoners wearing what could only be described as fragments of clothing that were hanging off them. The image showed them moving – slight blurs around their arms as they swung limply – and thin legs, bandy through malnutrition.
‘This is sobering,’ Lucy muttered.
Will laid out the last one. It was of a man, standing inside the front door of Deux Tourelles, the door behind him firmly closed from prying eyes. He wasn’t smiling, just staring intently, as if he was waiting for something, waiting to check if the photograph had worked, perhaps? Someone had taken the image for him, risking their lives given that civilian cameras had been confiscated so early on in the war.
‘I wonder who this is,’ Lucy said, thinking hard. He looked familiar. Where had she seen him before? She had seen him before. But not looking like this, looking younger. The photograph from the beach. The one taken in 1930. The four on the beach – that was it. Dido, Persephone, Stefan and Jack. She had found this camera inside the house. But what was he doing here, like this, in another photograph taken so many years later? Had this man lived here? Or had he just been a willing co-conspirator for one of the sisters? Her mind whirred.
And then Will said something that made Lucy’s head shoot up from the photographs. ‘I know exactly who it is,’ he said. ‘It’s my grandfather.’
Chapter 32
1943
The sky outside Deux Tourelles was dark. It was time. Persey’s nerves had been on the brink of shattering ever since her encounter with Mrs Renouf, but it was important to all that she held herself together, that she stayed strong, confident that the plan would work. Now was not the time to appear weak. Persey admired Jack. His ability to brush every possible hitch off as unlikely or conquerable was helping Persey more than she’d thought possible.
Dido was on tenterhooks and the two sisters sat down together in the sitting room.
Stefan knocked gently, opened the sitting room door and peered in. ‘Half an hour,’ he said. He was still dressed in his uniform, as usual, which would help if they were stopped. ‘You have telephoned the Durands to give them the signal?’
‘Yes, half an hour ago,’ Persey said. ‘Telephoned, connected, then rung off as planned. Lise knows what to do.’
Stefan nodded and left the sisters alone.
‘Has Jack already left to get the boat?’ Dido asked.
Persey nodded. ‘He should be there by now. The owners were taking it round to Le Jaonnet beach and anchoring it at the rocks for him.’
