Peter O'Donnell - Cobra Trap

Modesty smiled. "We'd better not have that on a Sunday. I wonder where he picked up such words. Has he been to England?"

Matilde shrugged. "He came to us here when I was a girl of eighteen. He has never been away." She began to scrape some carrots, her eyes distant, remembering. "It was from June to February before he spoke. There was more English then. He was not well."

It was not easy to follow the old lady's rambling comments. Modesty said, "In what way was he not well?"

"It was his head, of course. He had fallen down a little cliff near Pic de Zarra and cracked his head. My brother Maurice found him," she looked up over her spectacles, "as Old Alex himself found you… how long is it now? Fifty years later."

"So he was not of the family?"

"Not then, no. But naturally he became so."

Modesty sat very still, a strange suspicion growing within her. She said quietly, "Did he tell you his name, Matilde?"

"Ha! It was impossible not to know that, for he said nothing else through all the early days that I nursed him except his name, Alex something, and a number."

"I see." Now the suspicion was becoming conviction. "Are you the only one left who remembers that time?"

"I suppose so. My two older brothers are dead, my older sister married and moved to Pamiers. My nephew Pierre, who is Maurice's son, was only just born."

"So Alex came, and stayed, and nobody since has wondered where he came from?"

Matilde put the carrots aside and began to peel potatoes. "Why should they? For them he has always been here, a part of the farm."

"Yes, of course." Modesty was silent for a few seconds. Then, "Do you remember what he was wearing when your brother brought him home injured?"

The old lady peeled two potatoes without speaking, then put down the knife, wiped her hands on a teatowel and stood up. "Come," she said, and moved towards the stairs. Modesty followed, intrigued yet strangely reluctant, halfwishing she had never asked the first question about Alex. When she hesitated at the door of Matilde's bedroom the old lady beckoned her in, closed the door and moved to a big chest of drawers. Kneeling creakily, she opened the bottom drawer and lifted out several layers of clothes wrapped carefully in tissue paper.

Again she beckoned, and Modesty moved forward to look down into the drawer. Lying at the bottom was a jacket, torn and stained, deliberately stained it seemed, with the buttons removed. But it had once been blue and was of military cut. When she looked more closely she could see where the wings insignia had been removed from above the breast pocket.

Matilde looked up. "He was wearing this," she said.

Modesty knelt beside her. "This was during the war? He was an English airman, shot down over France and trying to escape across the border into Spain?"

"Who knows? He remembered nothing."

"But surely you must have-" She broke off, unwilling to complete the question. "Has he never recovered his memory, Matilde? Even in some small way?"

She shook her head slowly. "After some time he began to work with us. Then to speak. It was like a child learning to speak, in French of course. After two years he was one of us." She hesitated, then reached beneath the collar of the jacket and drew out a tape with two small flat discs on it. "I took this from his neck on the day my brother brought him home."

The workworn old hand trembled a little as Modesty took the tape and read what was stamped on the discs. After a few moments she handed it back and said gently, "Did you never show him this? Or the jacket?"

Matilde replaced the discs and ran a palm over the jacket to smooth out a fold. "I hoped he would marry me," she said. "For years I hoped, but he did not wish. Bloody hell. Now it has long ceased to matter."

Modesty knelt gazing down into the drawer. "Oh, my God," she thought. "Oh, my God."

On the eleventh day of her time at the farm Willie Garvin arrived driving a new Range-Rover and with a suitcase of her clothes and shoes. It was around midmorning. Apart from Beatrice and the two young mothers and the three children, all the family was out working. Willie was fluent in French, his accent far better than in the Cockney English he chose to maintain. Moreover he had a gift for being at home on any level and for being liked by being himself. It had been explained by Modesty that he was neither husband nor partner, simply a close friend of long standing. To Beatrice this was baffling.

"Why are you not married?" she whispered as she stood with Modesty and watched the two young mothers talking eagerly with him, laughing at something he had said. "There is some problem?"

Modesty smiled. "Not really, Beatrice. It's just that we're happy as we are."

"Ha! You English!"

It was an hour before she could get Willie away from the women and children to go with her on the walk she took morning and afternoon now that she was herself again. He was desperate to know what had happened to her, and she told him as they walked to the cave where Old Alex had found her, a kilometre from the farm. When she had finished, and he had seen the cave and the boulder, he leant against the rock wall beside the cavemouth, arms tightly folded, eyes like blue stones, lighting to control the huge fury that possessed him.

She had known it would be so, and that no words could ease his reaction, it would have to run its course. She patted his arm, kissed him lightly on the cheek, then moved away a little and sat on the grassy slope, looking down towards the wooded valley where Alex and Pierre would be working now. After a minute Willie came to sit beside her, taking her hand and touching the knuckles to his cheek. He was a little pale, and his smile was forced, but the rage had been absorbed and dispersed.

"Well, sorting out whoever set this up'll keep me out of mischief for a bit, Princess," he said, still holding her hand. "You got any ideas?"

"Nothing concrete, Willie. Somebody hates me pretty badly, but you could form a club from those people. Most of them you can discount because they're no longer in a position to have me put down. I'd say it's a contract job, but who paid and who took the contract is anybody's guess."

Willie said, "Salamander Four? You cost them fifty grand when you made them cancel that contract for an obscene killing of Steve and Dinah after the Kalivari caper. The money's nothing but they don't like losing face and it's not the first time you've hurt them."

"Salamander's a possible," she agreed, "but I've no idea who they might have contracted to do the job. Could be any one of a dozen groups, there are plenty about these days. They'll be in the Yellow Pages soon."

Willie gazed absently down into the valley. "It's got to be settled, Princess. Will you leave this one to me?"

"No, Willie love, I won't. I agree it has to be settled, but we'll take a lot of care and thought over it. When it's known I survived they'll expect trouble, so let's wait for them to drop their guard a bit. Meantime let's both watch ourselves. Nobody who knows us is going to put me down without being damn sure they have to put you down too." She paused, frowning, then gave a little sigh. "Anyway, there's something else that needs sorting first."

"Something else?" He looked at her curiously. "Here?"

She nodded, troubled. "When we go back for the midday meal you'll meet Old Alex, the man who saved me. He's a lovely character, about seventy-four or five I think, but tough as hickory and with years left in him." She drew a deep breath. "Willie, he's also English, part of a bomber crew I imagine, I don't know the details. They were probably shot down over France around June 1943, and I don't know what happened to the rest of the crew. What 1 do know is that Alex, probably aged twenty or twentyone, was trying to get across the border into Spain when he took a bad fall."