Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [28]
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The Doctor was looking out from the third-floor window, rage and sorrow surging across his face. Wolff watched him staring down into the square. By now, the bodies would have been cleared away, life would have returned to normal. There was nothing to see but workers scrubbing away the blood.
When this ‘Doctor’ spoke, his voice was low.
‘There was no need. Why?’
Wolff was dismissive, and he replied in German,
‘Because I can.’ He smiled as he saw the Doctor’s reaction.
Outrage, indignation, horror. In many ways the Doctor was extraordinary: he was an exceptionally intelligent man, the bruise around his mouth was already healing, and most remarkable of all he didn’t seem remotely worried about his arrest. Yet his reaction to witnessing the massacre was tiresome and predictable. The usual, impotent, rage.
Mindless sympathy for the weak, knee-jerk concern for the unimportant. No sense of history.
‘Your accomplice killed a German soldier, Herr Doktor.
You crossed the line first.’
‘You just don’t see it, do you? You killed six innocent people. Men and women who had done nothing.’ The Doctor strode towards him, menace in his eyes. Wolff remained where he was. They were alone in the room together. Wolff turned to face him. Even when Wolff was sitting down, the Doctor was barely taller than him.
‘They, or people like them, harboured you.’
‘I arrived this morning and went straight for the beach.’
‘If you did that, then you were acting on information passed on by an islander. The sentence stands.’ Wolff broke eye contact. The Doctor hovered at his shoulder, unsure how to respond. Before he could continue, Wolff spoke, ‘Herr Doktor, I would have shot you on the beach without a second thought, like a stray dog’ — he paused as an amusing thought crossed his mind — ‘and if I had, then there would have been no need for those people down there to have died.’ The Doctor showed no signs that he appreciated the irony, so Wolff continued. ‘You know of Oskar Steinmann?’
‘Yes. The torturer.’
‘The art collector. The professor of philosophy. The chess grand master. The family man. Steinmann is many things.’
‘I don’t doubt it. Just as you don’t deny it.’
Wolff smiled. ‘Steinmann wants to talk to you about what was down on the beach. Your plane leaves at six-thirty. It’s only a short trip to Granville. You’ll find out there exactly what Steinmann is.’
George Reed glanced out of the window. It was getting dark again: it was nearly time to pull down the blackout curtains, ready the searchlights, brace oneself for the air-raid sirens.
Soon, on both sides of the Channel, the bombers would leave their concealed hangars, setting out on carefully prearranged flight patterns with their fighter escorts. They wouldn’t pass each other mid-Channel. The British squadrons would head out over the North Sea to the industrial centres of the Ruhr and the Rhine; the German bombers would head across the Channel, targeting the ports and the factories of the Midlands. On the great round table in the centre of this room, lines of toy planes marked the routes of the German bombers as they flew straight through the grey hatched areas of radar coverage, past the antiaircraft batteries marked by red pins and the airfields marked in yellow. Their targets were easily visible on this map, green pins indicating where clusters of barrage balloons were concentrated. The same went for the British, little model Wellington bombers lining the route to Europe, but on this side the pins only marked where defences had been discovered by spies, reconnaissance flights or bitter experience. Next to the huge map, tally charts mapped the estimated damage to industrial sites and compared the number of lost planes on each side. The rows and rows of statistics on those sheets reminded George a little of Wisden’s Almanac. The great round table was almost a huge watch face
— its hands wave after wave of bombers, sweeping