Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [42]
“Do we want to start a hue and cry?” Bloggs said doubtfully.
“No. For now, let’s tread softly. If we put the thing in the newspapers he’ll get to hear of it and vanish. Just send the photo to police forces for the time being.”
“Is that all?”
“I think so. Unless you’ve got other ideas.”
Parkin cleared his throat. “Sir?”
“Yes.”
“I really would prefer to go back to my unit. I’m not really the administrative type, if you see what I mean.”
“You’re not being offered a choice, Sergeant. At this stage, one Italian village more or less makes relatively little difference—but this man Faber could lose us the war. Truly.”
11
FABER HAD GONE FISHING.
He was stretched out on the deck of a thirty-foot boat, enjoying the spring sunshine, moving along the canal at about three knots. One lazy hand held the tiller, the other rested on a rod that trailed its line in the water behind the boat.
He hadn’t caught a thing all day.
As well as fishing, he was bird-watching—both out of interest (he was actually getting to know quite a lot about the damn birds) and as an excuse for carrying binoculars. Earlier today he had seen a kingfisher’s nest.
The people at the boatyard in Norwich had been delighted to rent him the vessel for a fortnight. Business was bad—they had only two boats nowadays, and one of them had not been used since Dunkirk. Faber had haggled over the price, just for the sake of form. In the end they had thrown in a locker full of tinned food.
He had bought bait in a shop nearby; the fishing tackle he had brought from London. They had observed that he had nice weather for it, and wished him good fishing. Nobody asked to see his identity card.
So far, so good.
The difficult bit was to come. For assessing the strength of an army was difficult. First, for example, you had to find it.
In peacetime the Army would put up its own road signs to help you. Now they had been taken down, not only the Army’s but everyone else’s road signs.
The simple solution would be to get in a car and follow the first military vehicle you saw until it stopped. However, Faber had no car; it was close to impossible for a civilian to hire one, and even if you got one you couldn’t get petrol for it. Besides, a civilian driving around the countryside following Army vehicles and looking at Army camps was likely to be arrested.
Hence the boat.
Some years ago, before it had become illegal to sell maps, Faber had discovered that Britain had thousands of miles of inland waterways. The original network of rivers had been augmented during the nineteenth century by a spider web of canals. In some areas there was almost as much waterway as there was road. Norfolk was one of these areas.
The boat had many advantages. On a road, a man was going somewhere; on a river he was just sailing. Sleeping in a parked car was conspicuous; sleeping in a moored boat was natural. The waterway was lonely. And who ever heard of a canal-block?
There were disadvantages. Airfields and barracks had to be near roads, but they were located without reference to access by water. Faber had to explore the countryside at night, leaving his moored boat and tramping the hillsides by moonlight, exhausting forty-mile round trips during which he could easily miss what he was looking for because of the darkness or because he simply did not have enough time to check every square mile of land.
When he returned, a couple of hours after dawn, he would sleep until midday, then move on, stopping occasionally to climb a nearby hill and check the outlook. At locks, isolated farmhouses and riverside pubs he would talk to people, hoping for hints of a military presence. So far there had been none.
He was beginning to wonder whether he was in the right area. He had tried to put himself in General Patton’s place, thinking: If I were planning to invade France east of the Seine from a base in eastern England, where would I locate that base? Norfolk was obvious: a vast expanse of lonely countryside, plenty of flat ground for aircraft, close