The Dynamite Room Read online

  They would come when the rain came. Or in the early hours of the morning when everything was dark. Not on a bright, hot morning like this at the end of July. She wished they would come now, if only so there would be a change. On the horizon puffs of clouds stretched out in woolly ribbons across the sky. Seagulls were coming inland. She could hear their cawing as they circled the house. Through the shutter slats she looked around the garden for the bobbing tail of Jeremiah, but the rabbit was not there.

  She was hesitant about entering Alfie’s room again, but she wanted to know if he might come back for her. It wasn’t a dream, that first time; it was too vivid for that. She pushed the door open and stood in the doorway. Then she stepped in and shut the door behind her, leaned across the bed, and, pushing her fingers between the slats at the window, opened them as wide as she could so that he could come in. She stood where she had been standing the night before, her eyes firmly fixed on the wall ahead, the chest of drawers, the bookshelves. She wouldn’t look at the window ledge. She would close her eyes and see if he would come back to her, sitting there as he had been, his wings tucked in, his skin faintly glowing. She pressed her eyes shut.

  “Alfie,” she said. “Alfie…”

  A soft breeze found its way in through the shutters, and there was a gentle ticking somewhere in the house, coming up through the floorboards like the beat of a wooden heart.

  “Alfie?” she said, and she turned and opened her eyes but the bedroom was still empty. The only movement came from mites of dust blowing about in the air.

  They found Eddie’s body in the mudflats just three days after the news of Alfie’s death. His clothes had been neatly folded and placed on the dry ridge—a pale white heel and the crook of an arm sticking up from the mud that he had given himself to, opening his mouth to it, his throat to it, his stomach, disappearing in the night and being taken by the mudflats and marshes like many before. No one spoke about why he had done it.

  His mother had not gone to pieces like Lydia’s mother had. Instead, she had driven to Wales herself in an old Austin Six to tell Eddie’s brother, Arthur, who was lodging in the same street as Lydia, next to the working men’s club. She stayed with the family for two whole days. Lydia saw the both of them out walking on the hills and had felt bitterly jealous.

  She listened to the quiet, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine her mother clattering around in the kitchen, Father reading the paper and listening to Henry Hall’s Guest Night, Alfie swerving on the gravel as he pulled up on his bicycle. She thought of Button coming down the corridor, the sound of his soft footsteps and the rattling of the lamb as it trundled over the floorboards with squeaking wheels. She imagined him at the end of the hallway, wet and dead now from a drowning; the silhouette of him and the lamb, the gas mask over its head. You’ve got to take care of him, her mother had said. But she hadn’t. She had left him. She wondered what the boys were doing to him now that she wasn’t there to protect him, to say No and Stop it and Leave him alone. He didn’t have the words let alone the voice to defend himself. They would taunt him worse than ever. His face seemed to ask for it. His arms and legs begged to be bloodied.

  In her own room she hauled her suitcase out from underneath her bed, then clicked open the catches and lifted the lid. Boys can be such animals, Heiden had said. And he was right. She couldn’t go back to Wales, but she needed to go somewhere.

  She put in clean underwear, socks, and a change of dress, then took a small towel from the spare room where it had been put aside for the soldiers and her toothbrush and toothpaste from the bathroom. She collected a bar of soap, lipstick, blusher, and a brush from her mother’s drawer. For the time being, she shut the case and pushed it under her bed. At the window she looked at the line of seashells laid along it: the rose petal tellin with both halves still attached to each other like a pair of pink wings; half a cockle that her father had varnished for her so that the smear of brown in its ridges looked like caramel. There was a king’s crown, a Florida cone, a Scotch bonnet, and beaded periwinkle, all of which she had found herself somewhere along the shore. She picked up a giant conch that her father had brought back for her from one of his trips abroad and held it to her ear. From within the smooth shining twist of the shell she could hear the breath of the sea.

  On Shingle Street she and Alfie had once found a line of white cockles leading down to the water’s edge. They had followed it over the shingle as it arced around the spreading mats of sea pea and campion, and in between the clumps of kale. With the late afternoon sun still shining, the line of shells had been bright against the shingle, as if glowing in the heat.

  Alfie told her that they’d been laid out by sea nymphs in the dead of night, and for a moment or two she had believed him, or at least had wanted to.

  The line stopped abruptly several feet from the lap and swilling of the waves.

  The tide’s gone out, Alfie said. The nymphs won’t be able to get out onto the shore unless we take the line down to the water.

  So for an hour they scoured the beach for cockles, then laid them out, extending the line right down to the surf so that under the night sky the sea nymphs could follow it up onto the beach and sing and dance on the sand.

  He held the six metal dog tags in the clench of his hand and blew into the curl of it as if he was blowing them good luck. The tin was some distance from the doorstep, nestled into the scuffed gravel, and he had been flicking the tags for almost half an hour but only got one in. He could sense the girl behind him, sitting on the stairs, watching.

  He opened his hand, and with his thumb he positioned one of the tags and flicked it so that it pinged off the side of the tin and into the gravel.

  Lehmann, Kappel, Pfeiffer, and Theissen. If you said the names in order it gave them a rhythm that he would never now forget. The faces of all but Diederich were burned against the back of his head. Five men, with Heiden the sixth, blacking out their faces in the cabin of the S-boat as it had sped out from Zeebrugge. How long ago had that been now? Four nights? Five?

  They had packed and repacked their kit bags, ensuring everything was tightly wrapped in oilskin, then huddled around the table beneath the deck, poring over maps and photographs. Shingle Street. Bawdsey Point. The manor house and radio masts, the fenced perimeters and pillboxes. From behind the twin mounted guns and the cannon, men up on the deck studied the sky for aircraft and the sea for British torpedo boats, binoculars held to their eyes as the boat cut its channel through the water.

  Lowering his head so only the men at the table could hear, he had drawn a tiny cross on the map with the tip of his pencil. If anything untoward happened and they were split up, he told them, he knew of a place near to the landing point where they could reconvene: a house on the edge of a village, nearest the shore and beyond the marsh. He wrote the name lightly on the map and left it long enough for them to read it before he rubbed it out.

  The idea had been like a growth, getting larger and clearer and making him believe in it. He sometimes found himself wanting to laugh at it, at its sheer audacity, because—despite everything—he was here and still alive. Perhaps he had suffered enough and deserved a second chance. When he stepped out of this house again he would have a new skin, his old self rubbed out. Heiden would be dead.

  He stood up from the doorstep and listened, then quietly pulled the pistol from his pocket. He had heard something crack, and something was moving the branches in the undergrowth between the garden and the narrow country lane. His eyes scanned back and forth, until a blackbird burst from the bushes. He raised his pistol as it took to the sky but he did not fire.

  “What was that?” said the girl.

  She was still on the steps behind him, now standing anxiously.

  “Nothing,” he said. “A bird.”

  He sat back down again and rested his elbows on his knees. He could hear the girl edging a few steps lower down the stairs. Her nervousness was making him uneasy.

  It had started with a name on a map and
a memory of a conversation held with an English naval officer. A village called Willemsley. A house called Greyfriars. Sitting with Lieutenant Schöller and the others in that blown-out café on the beach at Dieppe, he had barely been able to take his eyes from the map. How close would they be to this man’s house? A mile maybe? Two at most?

  Greyfriars.

  He picked out another dog tag and flicked it at the can, where it hit the rim and pinged off. Five tags in the gravel. He was beginning to wonder himself why no one had come. He had been here for four days and there had been no sight or sound of anyone but the one single soul wandering around the side of the house and halfheartedly trying the door. The boredom was eating at him, just as it had done in Norway, his mind wandering to places he didn’t want to be taken, to faces he didn’t want to see. A naked boy half-buried in the snow. Vomiting into a gutter outside a railway administration building in Narvik. A knife going deep into a man’s neck. Eva’s dead eyes.

  In the S-boat coming over they had been too caught up in their own personal anxieties to talk much. It would be easier to blank these men out of his head if he knew nothing about them. He didn’t even want to see their faces and yet now there they were, scratched into his mind. When the man called Kappel tried to show him a photograph of his girlfriend in Koblenz, Heiden had looked blankly at the face but said nothing, as if nothing had registered with him at all. Then he turned back to sorting his kit bag.

  I’m just trying to make conversation, said Kappel. That’s all. Fucking asshole.

  They had gathered on the deck—the night was cloudy but serene—and carefully lowered themselves over the side of the boat, slipping into the water. The sea glistened and prickled through their uniforms, catching at their breath. Lights off, engines still and silent as the huddle of hooded silhouettes watched from the side. Then, with a nod and a hand signal, one by one they peeled away from the boat, six men fanning out, their breaststrokes barely etching a ripple. Their rucksacks, strapped to their chests, clung like limpets, their ammunition boots, tied and hanging from their necks, dragging beneath them through the water.

  Heiden looked up again. The storm was closing in; a darkness filling the sky.

  He flicked the last tag and it clipped the edge of the tin and fell, rattling in. He got up and collected the tags from among the gravel and then fished the final one out from inside the can. He shined it against the thigh of his trousers and read the soldier’s number and unit. It was the young German private he’d been with in the dynamite store: Alexander Bürckel.

  It was from the awkward height of the attic window that she saw the bicycle. She doubted herself at first because although the clouds were thickening over to the east and a grayness was creeping across the land, the road itself was still bathed in sun and prone to shimmers and mirages. He might have been a shadow. But as he came closer there was no denying it. It was a man, and he was cycling slowly down the lane towards the house.

  She clung to the lip of the window. The backs of her calves were starting to quiver and the balls of her toes beginning to ache. She lowered herself and then pushed up again to look. As he drew nearer he became clearer, and she became more certain that it was Old Mr. Howe, panniers on either side of the back wheel for his letters, and the basket at the front. There was the gait of the bike as well, the effort of turning the pedals showing his age, and the bike swerving this way and that across the lane as he tried to keep it steady in the heat. She could imagine him puffing and panting beneath his cloth cap, the sweat running down the back of his wrinkled neck, the heat blasting up off the road. She watched him as he came closer and she banged on the window, knowing that from so far away he wouldn’t hear, but she willed him to look up anyway, and see her.

  His progress was slow and the bike wobbled from side to side. As she watched him grow nearer he kept vanishing behind the lines of trees. When he reached the point of the road that disappeared completely from sight, she hurried down the attic steps and then stopped, listening. She couldn’t be sure where Heiden was. She ran to the top of the stairs and leaned over the banisters. The front door was ajar but she couldn’t see him anywhere.

  Her parents’ room offered the best view of the drive, and she ran in and pushed two of the window slats apart so that she could see. She watched the lane, trying to glimpse him through the trees at the edge of the garden, and then he was at the gate and getting off his bike, propping it against a tree, and coming through, his cap deep over his eyes so that she could barely see his face. The sky above him was darkening as he came down the drive. There was something odd about him, about the way he walked in his heavy boots, and it was then, when he was halfway down the drive, that the shot suddenly fired, and his body jerked and turned and fell.

  She pressed herself back against the wall and clenched her eyes shut. Not him. Not him as well. Not Mr. Howe. She felt sick to her stomach, everything tightening to a fist. She could hear Heiden coming from the sitting room downstairs, his footsteps out the door and across the gravel. By the time the second shot came, she was already running down the stairs.

  The branches snatched at her as she pushed through the wood. The sudden rain fell in torrents, soaking her dress to her skin. The storm clouds were so dark that it seemed like nightfall. All she saw through the rain were the dark figures of trees. The man was a murderer. Why had she let herself think he would protect her or care for her, why had she allowed herself to see a gentleness in him that she now knew wasn’t there?

  He’d been crouched over the body on the drive. If he’d seen her or heard her leave, he had let her go; but now she could hear him coming, slipping and stumbling in the darkness behind her. Wait! he shouted. Wait! He would shoot her down. She knew it. A bullet through the back. Or he would slice open her throat, just like the dead soldier they’d found. She’d imagined it so many times. Her body left where she fell. He would let the wood grow over her and bury her so nobody would find her, and there she would rot away and be forgotten. No one would think of her anymore.

  The trees were so densely packed that it was hard to see where she was running. She almost twisted her ankle but saved herself, her hand grabbing at a trunk as she fell, and she carried on running just as she’d run in Wales, the boys coming after her with their sticks. Stop! Lydia! Wait!

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw a glimpse of him through the trees, gaining on her. She was drawing nearer to the coastal lagoons and mudflats and she could see the silvery sheen of the marshes ahead. And then she burst out of the wood into the openness, and abruptly stopped. The reed beds, the salt marshes, and the boggy grasslands were all gone. She wiped the rain from her eyes. Everything was water. Half a mile away on the shore she could see the tips of the concrete blocks, the fencing, the Martello tower to the south. Hanging over the coastline, hundreds of feet in the air, was a barrage balloon tethered with ropes. An explosion boomed along the beach and there was thick smoke. Between her and the soldiers though was nothing but a huge unbreachable expanse of water being pummeled by the rain.

  She looked along the perimeter of the wood but there was no easier way across. Scattered around in the water were raised islands of grass and occasionally the sagging, broken lines of fencing disappearing beneath the surface. She could hear him coming, almost upon her; she couldn’t turn back. She stood for a moment and then waded in. Her feet disappeared into the soft sludge at the bottom, each step sinking deeper until it was almost impossible to pull out. The water came up to her knees and then rose higher with every step so that she struggled to keep her balance. She took another couple of steps forward, hauling her feet out of the mud and keeping her arms high above her. She heard him splashing into the water behind her.

  “Wait! Lydia! Stop!”

  She tried to carry on, hurrying more than ever, but it was such a struggle, and then he was behind her and grabbing at her wrist. She felt an arm around her and they both fell in. He shouted something in German, choking as he went under and resurfaced; and then he lifted he
r up, and she didn’t kick, she didn’t fight—she wrapped herself around him and cried, sobbing into the wet warmth of his neck as he slopped back through the water with her.

  “I had to do it,” he said, panting. “It was to protect us; to protect you.”

  “But Mr. Howe…” She cried.

  “It wasn’t him. It wasn’t anyone,” he said.

  “But it was his bike. I saw it. I saw him.”

  He wiped the rain and mud from his face. “Look at me,” he said. “I don’t know who this Mr. Howe is, but, I promise you, it wasn’t him.”

  He carried her all the way back through the woods, out into the garden and across the lawn to the house, where he set her down, dripping, on the drive. The body of the man lay half-twisted in the gravel. Heiden crouched down next to it and gently rolled it over. The man was wearing Old Mr. Howe’s clothes, but she saw now that he was much younger, the face solemn and rugged, with eyes of such a dark brown color that they seemed almost black. She felt her stomach turn and a sour sick taste rising up into her throat. She didn’t want to look at him but she couldn’t help herself. His mouth was partially open and she saw he had a chipped tooth, almost broken into a fang. She could still smell his sweat.

  Heiden unfastened Old Mr. Howe’s jacket. Beneath it the man wore another. It was little wonder that he had been panting, particularly in the muggy heat. She recognized the Essex Regiment shoulder flash on the khaki blouse, the same that her German soldier had been wearing when he’d first appeared at Greyfriars and the same as the man they’d found in the woods. She watched as he rifled through the man’s pockets, taking out a knife, pistol, bullets wrapped in a white handkerchief, and a tin that had a tiny compass inside.