Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [96]
He became a good lover, eventually. He found sex interesting, as well as physically pleasant. He was never a great seducer…the thrill of conquest was not what he wanted. But he was expert at giving and receiving sexual gratification, without the expert’s illusion that technique was all. For some women he was a highly desirable man, and the fact that he didn’t know this only served to make him even more attractive.
He tried to remember how many women he had had: Anna, Gretchen, Ingrid, the American girl, those two whores in Stuttgart…he could not recall them all, but there could not have been more than about twenty. And Gertrud, of course.
None of them, he thought, had been quite as beautiful as Lucy. He gave an exasperated sigh; he had let this woman affect him just because he was close to home and had been so careful for so long. He was annoyed with himself. It was undisciplined; he must not relax until the assignment was over, and this was not over, not quite. Not yet.
There was the problem of avoiding going back on the supply boat. Several solutions came to mind: perhaps the most promising was to incapacitate the island’s inhabitants, meet the boat himself and send the boatman away with a cock-and-bull story. He could say he was visiting the Roses, had come out on another boat; that he was a relative, or a bird-watcher…anything. It was too small a problem to engage his full attention at the moment. Later, when and if the weather improved, he would select something.
He really had no serious problems. A lonely island, miles off the coast, with four inhabitants—it was an ideal hideout. From now on, leaving Britain was going to be as easy as breaking out of a baby’s playpen. When he thought of the situations he had already come through, the people he had killed—the five Home Guard men, the Yorkshire lad on the train, the Abwehr messenger—he considered himself now to be sitting pretty.
An old man, a cripple, a woman, and a child…Killing them would be so simple.
LUCY, TOO, lay awake. She was listening. There was a good deal to hear. The weather was an orchestra, rain drumming on the roof, wind fluting in the eaves of the cottage, sea performing glissandi with the beach. The old house talked too, creaking in its joints as it suffered the buffeting of the storm. Within the room there were more sounds: David’s slow, regular breathing, threatening but never quite achieving a snore as he slept deeply under the influence of a double dose of soporific, and the quicker, shallow breaths of Jo, sprawled comfortably across a camp bed beside the far wall.
The noise is keeping me awake, Lucy thought; then immediately—Who am I trying to fool? Her wakefulness was caused by Henry, who had looked at her naked body, and had touched her hands gently as he bandaged her thumb, and who now lay in bed in the next room, fast asleep. Probably.
He had not told her much about himself, she realized; only that he was unmarried. She did not know where he had been born—his accent gave no clue. He had not even hinted at what he did for a living, though she imagined he must be a professional man, perhaps a dentist or a soldier. He was not dull enough to be a solicitor, too intelligent to be a journalist, and doctors could never keep their profession secret for longer than five minutes. He was not rich enough to be a barrister, too self-effacing to be an actor. She would bet on the Army.
Did he live alone, she wondered? Or with his mother? Or a woman? What did he wear when he wasn’t fishing? Did he have a motor car? Yes, he would; something rather unusual. He probably drove very fast.
That thought brought back memories of David’s two-seater, and she closed her eyes tightly to shut out