What could I say? Ever since I’d been washed ashore, I’d been trying to do exactly that. But it was one thing to set aside the rituals that had governed my life—and quite another to contemplate breaking one of the Ten Commandments.
Thou shalt not kill. There was no qualifying sentence following those words: nothing to say that it was all right to take someone’s life in certain circumstances, that taking one life was justifiable if it saved many others. And yet thousands of Christians were out there fighting the Germans. They had taken the same moral position as Jack—that defending against evil was justified, even if it meant killing people.
I followed him in silence as he led me away from the path, through overgrown camellia bushes whose branches caught my scarf as I ducked underneath them. Through the flowers and foliage, I glimpsed a wooden structure standing in a clearing. It was a dilapidated summerhouse with a thatched roof, parts of which had slid down the eaves, giving the place the look of an old man in need of a haircut. There was no glass in the windows, and the door was hanging open at a crazy angle, as if it could fall off in the slightest breeze.
“That’s what we’ll use for practice.” Jack pointed to a stack of hay bales a few yards in front of the summerhouse. “Come and stand on the steps and I’ll show you.”
The weapon he gave me looked like a tiny telescope. It was slightly longer than my hand and about two inches wide. “It’s called a sleeve gun,” he said. “You see this ring at the end?”
I nodded.
“You thread a rubber band through it, which goes around your arm, above the elbow. It’s designed to be worn up the sleeve, out of sight. You’re left-handed, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” I was surprised that he’d noticed.
“So, you’d wear it on your left arm. If someone threatens you, you slide it into your hand, point the muzzle, and operate the trigger with your thumb.”
I rolled up the sleeve of my blouse, and he showed me how to affix the rubber band to hold the pistol in place.
“It’s already loaded,” he said. “It has a silencer, so it won’t make a noise. The idea is that you pull it out quickly and when you’ve used it, it will just slide back into your sleeve, out of sight.”
He showed me how to operate the trigger. “There’s not much of a kickback on it, so you don’t have to worry about your arm being forced back when you fire it. You can only fire a single shot. Ready?”
I stared at the bales of hay. My legs were shaking. My arm felt like lead when I tried to raise it. There was a small popping sound as I pulled the trigger, and a puff of dust as the bullet hit the target. As it cleared, a memory of my father flashed before my eyes. He was standing at the kitchen sink with his shirtsleeves rolled up, washing blood off his hands. I was seven years old—too young to understand that he’d been dealing with the aftermath of a grenade attack by the IRA on British soldiers a few streets away from our house. When he’d seen me watching him, he’d turned to me and said: “It takes such a long while to make a man, Alice—and so little time to destroy one.”
Chapter 12
At half past three on Sunday morning, I let myself out of the boathouse. I hadn’t been able to get much sleep. I’d been ready an hour earlier, dressed in the latest set of clothes I’d been given: a man’s long-sleeved undershirt, a thick woolen jersey, and a pair of corduroy trousers with oilskins worn over the top of them. A cap like the one Leo Badger wore completed the outfit. The whole ensemble was even more cumbersome than a nun’s habit. I wondered how on earth real fishermen managed.
I made my way around the rocks to the village. It was tricky in the dark. The tide was coming in, and I couldn’t use a flashlight because of the danger of drawing attention to what I was about to do. Gradually my eyes became accustomed to the dark. The sky was clear and studded with stars. I could see the white foam of the encroaching waves as the tide crept closer.
Above the lapping of the waves I caught a throaty growling sound. The motor launch. Jack had told me they kept it hidden in one of the creeks along the river. “It’s very fast,” he’d said, tracing our route with his finger on a map. “Forty knots. It’ll get us over to New Grimsby in a couple of hours.”
I’d never heard of New Grimsby until then. It appeared as a red dot on the tiny island of Tresco—one of a group called the Isles of Scilly, off the southwest coast of Cornwall. It was where the fishing boat we were to take to Brittany was moored—a real French sardine boat that came over during the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 and had been commandeered for secret missions.