Читать книгу Code Name Verity онлайн | страница 48

‘I hope you’ve got a tin-opener,’ Queenie said ominously, struggling into her own greatcoat, ‘and a spoon.’

It was astonishing, after ten minutes’ pedalling away from RAF Maidsend, how peaceful the drenched Kent countryside was. It was true that every now and then you passed a concrete gun emplacement or watchtower, but mostly you were just travelling through rolling, chalky fields, green with turnips and potatoes and mile upon mile of orchards.

‘You might have brought your brolly,’ Queenie said.

‘I’m saving it for the next air raid.’

They came to a crossroads. There were no road signs, not one; they’d all been taken down or blacked over to confuse the enemy in the event Operation Sea Lion was successful and the German army came swarming inland. ‘I’ve no idea where we are,’ Queenie wailed. The mechanic’s bike was so big for her that she couldn’t sit down on it; she had to stand on the pedals. She seemed in perpetual danger of falling off, or of being devoured by her enormous overcoat. She had the outraged, distraught look of a wet cat.

‘Use the compass. Keep going east till you find the sea. Pretend,’ Maddie told her, inspired – ‘Pretend you’re a German spy. You’ve been dropped here by parachute. You’ve got to find your contact, who’s at this legendary smugglers’ pub by the sea, and if anyone catches you –’

Under her dripping plastic rain hat, the kind you get in a tiny cardboard box with a flower on it for a halfpenny, Queenie gave Maddie a strange look. It had challenge in it, and defiance, and excitement. But also enlightenment. Queenie leaned forward over the handlebars of her bicycle and was off, pedalling like fury.

At the crest of a low rise she bounded off her bike in one almighty leap like a roe deer away up the glens, and was halfway up a tree before Maddie realised what she was doing.

‘Get down, you daft idiot! You’ll be soaked! You’re in uniform!’

‘Von hier aus kann ich das Meer sehen,’ said Queenie, which is ‘I can see the sea from here’ in German. (Oh – silly me. Of course it is.)