trying to arrange your parachute training through proper RAF channels.’
Marc sighed as he shook himself off and moved towards the sink to wash his hands. ‘But on the train down here, you said Superintendent McAfferty had already tried everything. You said your meeting with Walker was critical.’
‘You’re a sharp little bugger, aren’t you?’ Henderson laughed, as his voice became loud. ‘No pulling the wool over Marc’s eyes, eh? Air Vice Marshal Walker’s a pissant pen-pusher. A bureaucrat! He’s been in charge of the Special Operations Executive for eight months and all they’ve done is push bits of paper around. Walker is incapable of seeing the benefits of anything that he can’t fit into a vellum file.’
Marc looked warily towards the bathroom door, fearing that Henderson’s rant would attract the sniffy doorman. ‘Why don’t you keep your voice down?’ he said nervously. ‘You can’t hit the bottle and give up on everything. If you’d done that in France we’d both be dead.’
‘This is different,’ Henderson explained. ‘On operations it’s you and your wits fighting for survival. I can play that game. But you can’t beat bureaucrats. They clamp down with their fangs and suck your lifeblood.’
‘Calm down,’ Marc said soothingly. ‘We’ll have a snooze up in our room and talk it over with McAfferty when we get home tomorrow.’
Henderson gave Marc a warm smile. ‘You’re like the son I’ve never had, you know that?’
Marc was an orphan and the remark meant a lot to him, but it would have meant a lot more if Henderson hadn’t been roaring drunk.
‘Come to the bar,’ Henderson smiled, as he headed out of the bathroom, barging into the door and crashing it noisily against the wall. ‘We can get pissed together.’
‘I’m twelve,’ Marc pointed out.
Henderson’s wild laugh drew a withering scowl from the doorman as he stumbled back upstairs with Marc in tow.
‘I know the sniffy look on that pompous ass’s face,’ Henderson said loudly, as they reached the stuffed rhino’s head mounted on the first landing. ‘He’ll have me up before the committee on charges of ungentlemanly behaviour.’
Henderson stopped and gave a salute to nobody in particular before starting up towards the next floor. Marc begged him to go upstairs and rest, but Henderson insisted on heading back to the first-floor bar.
Marc felt horrible when he reached their room on the fourth floor. It was spartan and cramped, with two narrow bunk beds against the wall. There was a dilapidated sink and a grimy window which gave a moonlit view over St James’ Square. The only consolation was that the heat rose upwards to this top floor and the warmth was wonderful after standing outside for so long.
Marc caught sight of his face in the mirror and decided to clean off the caked blood and iodine, but the maid who’d straightened the beds had taken the hand towel and not replaced it. He remembered seeing a pile of towels in the shower and toilet down the hall, so he took a short walk and grabbed one.
‘Good god, boy!’ an elderly fellow roared from behind as Marc headed back to the room. ‘This is an outrage!’
Marc turned to see a man with a neat ginger moustache charging out of the bathroom behind him. He wore an army officer’s trousers and a white vest and his cheeks were lathered with shaving foam.
Marc was startled by the shout and instinctively reverted to his native French as he turned around, ‘Pardon, monsieur?’
‘What the devil do you think you’re doing, boy?’ the officer roared. His voice was loud and boy came out like a bullet out of a gun.
‘There’s no towel in my room,’ Marc explained.
‘What?’ the officer yelled. ‘Speak up, speak up.’
Marc realised that the officer was deaf. ‘No towel,’ he repeated loudly, before pointing at the door of his room. ‘The maid took it away.’
‘That’s a bath towel,’ the officer said, as he ripped it from Marc’s hand. ‘Not to be removed from the bathrooms under any circumstance under club regulation fourteen, paragraph nine F.’
Marc couldn’t understand why the elderly officer was so concerned, but apparently he regarded towel theft as a crime comparable to rape or murder.
‘I just wanted to wash my face,’ Marc explained.
‘French, aren’t you?’ the officer said suspiciously.
‘Oui, monsieur,’ Marc said.
The officer’s look of contempt suggested that being French was one of the few things in the world more serious than taking a towel.
‘You can wash your bloody face in that bathroom and use the towel in that bathroom. But you can’t take