Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [130]
Then she saw Tom.
He lay on his back, on the bare floorboards of the vacant bedroom, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, his cap upside down on the floor behind his head. His jacket was open, and there was a small spot of blood on the shirt underneath. Close to his hand was a crate of whisky, and Lucy found herself thinking irrelevantly, I didn’t know he drank that much.
She felt his pulse.
He was dead.
Think, think.
Yesterday Henry had returned to her cottage battered, as if he had been in a fight. That must have been when he killed David. Today he had come here, to Tom’s cottage, “to fetch David,” he had said. But of course he had known David was not there. So why had he made the journey? Obviously, to kill Tom.
Now she was completely alone.
She took hold of the dog by its collar and dragged it away from the body of its master. On impulse she returned and buttoned the jacket over the small stiletto wound that had killed Tom. Then she closed the door on him, returned to the front bedroom and looked out of the window.
The jeep drew up in front of the house and stopped. And Henry got out.
34
LUCY’S DISTRESS CALL WAS HEARD BY THE CORVETTE.
“Captain, sir,” said Sparks. “I just picked up an S.O.S. from the island.”
The captain frowned. “Nothing we can do until we can land a boat,” he said. “Did they say anything else?”
“Not a thing, sir. It wasn’t even repeated.”
“Nothing we can do,” he said again. “Send a signal to the mainland reporting it. And keep listening.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
IT WAS ALSO picked up by an MI8 listening post on top of a Scottish mountain. The R/T operator, a young man with abdominal wounds who had been invalided out of the RAF, was trying to pick up German Navy signals from Norway, and he ignored the S.O.S. However, he went off duty five minutes later, and he mentioned it to his commanding officer.
“It was only broadcast once,” he said. “Probably a fishing vessel off the Scottish coast—there might well be the odd small ship in trouble in this weather.”
“Leave it with me,” the C.O. said. “I’ll give the Navy a buzz. And I suppose I’d better inform Whitehall. Protocol, y’know.”
“Thank you, sir.”
At the Royal Observer Corps station there was something of a panic. Of course, S.O.S. was not the signal an observer was supposed to give when he sighted enemy aircraft, but they knew that Tom was old, and who could say what he might send if he got excited? So the air raid sirens were sounded, and all other posts were alerted, and antiaircraft guns were rolled out all over the east coast of Scotland and the radio operator tried frantically to raise Tom.
No German bombers came, of course, and the War Office wanted to know why a full alert had been sounded when there was nothing in the sky but a few bedraggled geese?
So they were told.
THE COASTGUARD heard it too.
They would have responded to it if it had been on the correct frequency, and if they had been able to establish the position of the transmitter, and if that position had been within reasonable distance of the coast.
As it was, they guessed from the fact that the signal came over on the Observer Corps frequency that it originated from Old Tom, and they were already doing all they could about that situation, whatever the hell that situation was.
When the news reached the below-deck card game on the cutter in the harbor at Aberdeen, Slim dealt another hand of blackjack and said, “I’ll tell you what’s happened. Old Tom’s caught the prisoner of war and he’s sitting on his head waiting for the army to arrive and take the bugger away.”
“Bollocks,” said Smith, with which sentiment there was general agreement.
AND THE U-505 heard it.
She was still more than thirty nautical miles from Storm Island, but Weissman was roaming the dial to see what he could pick up—and hoping, improbably, to hear Glenn Miller records from the American Forces Network in Britain—and his tuner happened to be on the right wavelength at the right time. He passed the information to Lieutenant Commander