Page 45 of The Dark of the Moon
He’s over in the other corner, next to one of the ornate family graves. When I reach him, he points to a small stone alongside it, set low to the ground. It’s chiselled with a single word:Inconnu. But what’s odd about it is that someone has tucked a sprig of white heather into the ground in front of it. A sprig that appears to have been plucked from my own war grave offering.
Finn bends down and picks it up, handing it to me. And as I take it from him, a clattering sound makes me look over towards the wall. The old man has dropped his rake. He’s simply standing there, watching us intently. Time seems to stand still, the mist-shrouded island holding its breath.
And then, slowly and very deliberately, the old man raises his hand and salutes.
His accent is thick and difficult to understand. Kendra’s French is better than mine, so she’s able to translate.
‘He’s asking whether we’re looking for someone. A man who was on the island in 1944.’
Up until that point in the conversation, it could have been anyone. But then he says, ‘A prisoner, who had been a British pilot.’ And so I know. I can hardly take in his words at first, but then a certainty creeps over me, as if the sun is burning away the mists of doubt as well.
Finn is positively fizzing with excitement. ‘We’ve found him, Philly! We’ve found Ben!’
‘Do you think it really could be him?’ asks Kendra.
I try to stay calm. From my time working as a War Detective, I’ve learned to proceed with caution. It’s vital to examine every piece of evidence, to rule out all other possibilities before you can definitively confirm the identity of remains in an unknown grave. But I must confess, I feel it more and more strongly as I stand there. This is where Ben lies, where he’s been through all these years of searching. I have to rein in that instinct though. Just because hope makes you long for something to be true doesn’t make it so.
I look from Kendra’s face to Finn’s, their eyes filled with the same sense of hope that is making my heart beat faster. I recognise that feeling – I’ve seen it written on the faces of so many others down the years, all those other families longing for a conclusion to their own investigations. I’ve also seen hopes dashed. Often, I’ve had to disappoint people with the news that it wasn’t their loved one who’d been found, or that we still didn’t have enough evidence and couldn’t conclusively say it was the one they were looking for. Those were the worst verdicts I had to deliver – knowing I was sentencing families to more years without a conclusion to their grief, no end to the not-knowing. So I remind myself again that we need to proceed with caution. It takes an effort, but I pull myselftogether and begin to formulate the questions we need to ask, the further evidence we need to gather.
The old man introduces himself as Philippe Bertaud – presumably a descendent of the many Bertauds whose names are inscribed on the graves that surround us in the little cemetery. When I tell him my name, he takes both my hands in his. He must be about my age, I think, and his face is deeply lined, weathered by a lifetime in the sun and the wind. His eyes are kind as he looks into mine. ‘Madame Delaney,’ he says. The words on his lips make my heart rate quicken again as I wonder whether mine is a name he’s heard before. ‘I have been waiting for you for many years. Come to my home and I will explain everything.’
We go there straight away, the five of us. Finn can hardly contain himself. He keeps running on ahead and then coming back to walk with us, impatient at the slowness of our pace. We turn in just before the orchard with the donkeys. They raise their broad heads to look at us again with their big, lustrous eyes, surprised at the return of this unexpected gaggle of people.
Monsieur Bertaud ushers us in through the door of his cottage and motions to us to take a seat at the table in his kitchen. Its surface is covered in a piece of oilcloth, old but well-scrubbed. He pulls up a chair for himself and then looks across directly at me.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘What can you tell me about my husband?’
He rests his hands on the ancient oilcloth. I notice how gnarled they are, leathery with years of exposure to sun and wind, the joints of each finger as lumpy as oak galls. And then he tells us his story, which Kendra translates for Finn’s benefit.
‘I met the man in 1944. He was one of the prisoners of warles Bocheshad brought to the island, to be held in the citadel. At the time, I worked with my father in the salt pans, where he was the foreman. Each day, we went to rake the crystals into piles and skim the finerfleur de selfrom the surface of the ponds. We loaded ourbaskets and put them on the back of the donkeys to bring them to the town. We were forced to deliver it all to the Germans, who needed it for their armies, and they paid us a pittance. Those were hard times.
‘One day, two guards brought a contingent of about a dozen prisoners to the marshes. These men were to be made to work there as a punishment. The guards told us the men would help rake the salt and load the baskets, just as we did, but then they would be made to carry their full baskets on their backs, walking the miles back to Saint-Martin alongside the donkeys, used like beasts of burden. My father and I felt sorry for those poor wretches. They were malnourished, their ribs clearly visible through the tears in their shirts, stomachs distended with hunger. They were covered in sores and scratches, too, and the biting flies and mosquitoes soon added to those open wounds. The work was hard enough, without the added obligation to carry those heavy loads for miles at the end of a long day.’ He pauses and shakes his head, remembering.
‘The guards were vigilant at first, overseeing every move the men made. But as the weeks wore on, they grew bored of having to stand there among the marsh flies in the wind and the heat. So they would sometimes leave my father in charge and go off to the shade and shelter of a nearby blockhouse to smoke their cigarettes and play cards. Those times gave us the chance to speak to the men, to try to find out where they were from and how they’d ended up on the Île de Ré. We’d give them what food we could spare. Usually, it was no more than a crust of stale bread or a pear from the orchard, but they devoured those scraps as if they were a great feast.’
He raises his head and looks at me directly, his dark eyes as kindly as those of his donkeys. ‘I remember your husband well, Madame. His head was shaven, as was the case with all the convicts, but I could see his hair must have been dark. And his eyes were clearand blue,comme le ciel. The colour of the sky above our heads and the sea out beyond the dunes.’
Finn can’t contain his excitement at this point. ‘You see, Philly,’ he interjects. ‘It was definitely him!’
I smile and nod at him. ‘So far, so good,’ I say, still forcing myself to stay calm, to try to think clearly and objectively. ‘It still doesn’t prove it’s Ben in that grave though.’ Then I gesture to Philippe to continue.
‘I liked that man in particular. He had a spirit that couldn’t be broken. He told us his name was Ben. He didn’t tell us his surname, though. I suppose it was best we didn’t know. He said he’d been a pilot, and so I asked him why he wasn’t wearing a uniform – or at least what was left of one – like the other military prisoners. He told me he’d been involved in a special mission, so he’d worn civilian clothes in case he was captured. Which he was. But that meant they didn’t believe he was just a pilot when they questioned him at the Gestapo headquarters in Poitiers. They accused him of being a spy. When he tried to escape from the prison there, that only made them all the more convinced. He said they’d given him what they called their special treatment, which definitely wouldn’t have met any of the codes of conduct governing prisoners of war.’
I must have flinched then, imagining how Ben must have been tortured, because Philippe stops and says, ‘I’m sorry, Madame. Perhaps I’m telling you too much?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I want to know the truth. It’s very important. Please tell me everything you remember.’
‘He told me, too, that he had a wife and twin babies back home in England, a son and a daughter. That his only wish was to escape and get back to them so he could also carry on doing his bit to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible. I remember how determined he was. I had the sense that nothing the Germanscould do to him would break his resolve. No matter how heavy the baskets of salt he had to carry, he walked tall and held his head high.
‘One day, when the Germans had disappeared off to the blockhouse for another cigarette break, Ben asked my father and me whether we could help him. He had a plan to get away. It was autumn by then, the days growing shorter, and coming up to a full moon, so the tides were stronger. He wanted to take a small boat and use the tide to help carry him out to sea. He said he thought he could row to Spain, if the wind was in the right direction. We told him that plan was madness, he’d never make it, and the Germans would surely execute him for trying. But then my father said we would help him, with a slightly different plan. We’d get him the boat and he could use the tide to carry him out into the ocean under cover of darkness, but only as far as one of the marker buoys for the lobster pots. The Germans allowed local fishermen to take their boats to sea, as long as they handed over their catch, just as we did our salt. What they didn’t realise, though, was that out at sea under cover of darkness, the fishermen were running a line of communication for a Resistance network. They’d rendezvous with Spanish boats and hand over messages and letters, to be delivered to the Allies. My father said he could get word to his brother, who was one of the fishermen, and my uncle would pick Ben up, transferring him to a Spanish boat out at sea.’
He pauses again, making sure we are still listening. Four pairs of eyes are fixed on him with complete concentration, and I think Finn is so intent on the story he’s almost forgotten to breathe.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘Tell us.’
‘We had a small rowing boat, which we used around the marshes, so the guards weren’t suspicious when we pulled it up into the dunes alongside the salt pans one day. By then, the weather was turning. A cold wind began to blow from the north and the Germans grumbled even more about having to be on duty at themarsh. We chose a day when the moon was just past fullness, when the tide would begin to go out in the late afternoon just as dusk was falling. It was an overcast evening, too, dark clouds gathering, but that also suited our plan as the moonlight wouldn’t illuminate the little boat as it was carried out into the Atlantic. We told Ben he’d be swept out beyond the lighthouse and there, once he was past the point, he’d find three creel floats, positioned in a triangle. He should row to them and wait for the fishing boat to pick him up. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. He’d have to row hard to fight the tide and the waves, and with the night overcast he’d have only the beam from the lighthouse to help pick out the buoys. But if anyone could do it, it was him. We knew he had both the strength and the determination.
‘As the working day was ending, Ben slipped away. We knew the guards would do a quick headcount from the shelter of their blockhouse, so I took off my overalls – I was wearing some old clothes underneath them, the same bleached-out colour as Ben’s – and shouldered a basket of salt. Once they’d made sure the men were accounted for, it would be easier for us to conceal the fact that one man was missing as we led the others and our donkeys into town to deliver the salt. The Germans wouldn’t bother counting again until the baskets had been dropped off and the prisoners were re-entering the prison, by which time Ben would be long gone.’
