heights.
At that moment it would have been as easy for him to go back as it was to climb that roof. Easiest of all was to stay put, but that wasn’t an option.
He wiped his clammy palms on his trousers, stood up and started to walk. He’d seen builders walk up roofs, shouting to their mates, stopping to light a cigarette, laughing. Laughing, for God’s sake! If they could do it, so could he. But the roof was wet and a tile moved under his foot. In near panic he slipped, regained his balance, and flung himself up the last couple of feet to the ridge pole. Weathered by years of sun and rain, the cement crumbled under his hand. In sheer desperation he shifted his grip and lunged over the apex of the roof, facing the man-made. red-tiled valley of the roof of the house next door.
His breath came in huge, unsteady gulps. Beneath him lay, like the promised land, the slope downwards to the flat parapet which joined Frau Kappelhoff’s to the Kolhmeyers next door. He half-climbed, half-slid down and sat on the parapet, shifting only to make sure he was out of sight of the Kolhmeyers’ attic window.
The rain drifted down, he was filthy from the climb and his fingers were numbing with cold, but as he lit a cigarette and relaxed, leaning against the slope of the roof, sheer relief made him as happy as he’d ever been in his life.
The April evening in that northern latitude was long and cold. Anthony put on his socks and shoes, bitterly regretting the warm coat, hat and gloves which he’d left in Frau Kappelhoff’s hall. He tried to make sense of the noises from the street below. A hubbub of shouted orders came up to him. They were taking Cavanaugh’s body away.
Anthony didn’t know why Terence Cavanaugh was in Kiel. There were certain questions which simply weren’t asked by people in their situation, but he’d liked the man. He’d had a reckless, to-hell-with-it attitude which Anthony, surrounded by careful Germans, found immensely refreshing. God only knew why Cavanaugh was in the war. He wasn’t, as Anthony was, fighting for his country. He was an American, a neutral.
Cavanaugh didn’t hate Germany and had mixed feelings about England but he had, as he’d told Anthony, a real nose for trouble. The war was shaping up to be just about the biggest load of trouble anywhere on earth and he wanted to be part of it. Well, thought Anthony, smoking his cigarette down to the butt, he certainly got his wish, poor devil.
Feet crunched in step below. There were a lot of troops about, an abnormal number, in fact. Kiel, the home of the High Seas Fleet, was always well patrolled, but this was excessive and Anthony wondered why. It was with an odd stab of surprise he realized they were looking for him.
At long last, when he was thoroughly chilled, the evening turned to dusk. Very, very stiffly he climbed up to the Kolhmeyers’ window. It was closed, of course. Anthony’s first thought was to slip the catch with his pocketknife but his fingers were too clumsy to open the blade. He wrapped his fist in a handkerchief, smashed the glass and, seconds later, was standing in what was obviously, from the sparse furniture, a servant’s bedroom.
From far below came the sound of a piano. He remembered that Mrs Kolhmeyer was musical. He crept down the attic stairs and gently edged back the door. The music, one of the more rumbustious bits of Wagner, increased. There was no one about, as he had hoped at this time in the evening. With only a bit of luck all the Kolhmeyers would stay in the drawing room. He stole along the corridor to the head of the stairs.
The sound of the piano swelled and he shrank into a bedroom. Someone had come out of the drawing room. Were they coming up the stairs? A woman said something about coffee. Anthony breathed a sigh of heartfelt relief.
He couldn’t go out of the front door and the back door was in the kitchen. At least one of the Kolhmeyers’ two servants would be there. He listened intently for a moment, then slipped down the stairs into the hall.
The door to the drawing room was ajar but the door to the dining room was closed. The piano still played but there was a sound as if a fairly bulky someone had got up from their