I spoke to Henderson again and we set up an emergency meeting in Mannstein’s office. We were going to offer him safe passage to Britain, but when I got there I walked into the reception and bumped into our German friend from the apartment, along with two of his colleagues.
‘Mannstein wasn’t too pleased to see us. He didn’t say much, but I got the impression that he thought we’d messed him around too much in the past and he would be happy to sit back and wait for the Germans to invade so that he could work with them.
‘When I left with Henderson I mentioned that I knew a young salesman who worked in Mannstein’s office – I’d put in a good word for him back when I was on friendly terms with Mannstein and helped him land the job. As luck would have it the young fellow is a Jew and he was desperate to head south before the Boche arrived. I caught up with him just before he quit and left town with his family.
‘He let me copy his keys to Mannstein’s office and workshop. I got up at three a.m. this morning and drove over there. The security system was virtually non-existent, but unfortunately our German friends were expecting us. As I was coming back to my car with the documents they jumped me. Luckily I had my knife at the ready and I managed to stab one and knock the other out.’
Rosie and Paul shared an incredulous glance. They were both impressed and shocked by their father’s story. With his flamboyant dress and soft manner he’d never struck them as the type of man who kept a knife at the ready.
‘If I’d done things by the book I would have killed them both,’ Mr Clarke went on. ‘But I didn’t, which was a damned fool thing because they knew who I was and that almost led to them killing all three of us back in the apartment.’
As Mr Clarke said this he turned and smiled at his daughter. ‘But you saved us, sweetheart.’
Rosie shook her head. ‘Not before he killed Madame Mujard though.’
‘No,’ Mr Clarke said, nodding solemnly. ‘That terrible murder was my fault, and it was totally unacceptable to put you two in such danger too.’
‘Don’t keep apologising,’ Paul said. ‘You did your best.’
Mr Clarke smiled wryly. Paul never spoke much, but that only made his words count for more when he did. ‘All I know is that if your mother’s up there watching over us, I’d be fairly certain that right now she’s standing with her hands on her hips wishing she could yell at me.’
CHAPTER NINE
Marc wheeled the director’s bike away from the cottage and kept low as he rushed through the field of wheat behind the orphanage. He had money, transport, a knife and a pigskin bag stolen from the director into which he’d stuffed tins of food and a can opener which he’d vowed to figure out later. Clothing, however, was still a problem.
Marc wore nothing but the blood-spattered shorts in which he’d emerged from bed. Fortunately the nuns were scrupulous in washing the orphans’ ragged clothes, and shirts and trousers had been left to hang overnight on half a dozen crisscrossed washing lines. Everyone was on the opposite side of the house, either attending the wounded soldiers or forming part of the human chain passing buckets and saucepans of water to douse the blazing barn, so it was easy enough to strip trousers, under-shorts, socks and two white shirts from the line.
Shoes were trickier. Besides the stinking rubber boots he wore for mucking out the dairy shed, Marc only owned a pair of fifth-hand canvas plimsolls that were too small. He always threw them off and ran barefoot as soon as he was out of school, and they were completely unsuited to a long journey.
However, some of the older boys were apprenticed to work for local tradesmen and needed proper boots for their work. Marc had always coveted a pair of boots, especially in the winter, when bare feet or soggy canvas plimsolls were painfully cold. On the other hand, he didn’t want to steal an older boy’s boots, partly because the director would probably call the boy careless and beat him for losing them and partly because boots were about the most valuable thing any orphan owned. If Marc ever came back he’d have more than just the director to reckon with.
But Marc couldn’t make it to Paris without