Читать книгу Code Name Verity онлайн | страница 51

‘You’re dead quiet,’ Maddie said.

‘Ich habe einen Platten,’ Queenie announced.

‘Speak English, you lunatic!’

Queenie stopped her bike and climbed off. ‘I have a puncture. My tyre’s flat.’

Maddie sighed heavily. She propped her own bicycle against the verge and squatted in a puddle to look. Queenie’s front tyre was nearly completely flat. The puncture must have happened only seconds before – Maddie could still hear the air hissing out of the inner tube.

‘We’d better go back,’ she said. ‘If we go on we’ll have too far to walk. I don’t have a repair kit.’

‘O faithless one,’ Queenie said, pointing to the entrance to a farm lane about twenty yards further on. ‘This is my plan to scrounge a meal before I meet my contact.’ She sniffed knowingly, nose raised into the wind. ‘A provincial farmhouse lies less than a hundred yards away, and I smell meat stew and fruit pie –’ She took her wounded bicycle by the handlebars and set off up the lane at a determined pace. Land Army girls were hoeing among the cabbages in the adjoining field – no time off for them in the rain either. They had sacks tied round their legs with string and ground sheets with holes in the middle for rain capes. Maddie and the disguised Nazi spy were well-equipped by comparison in their RAF men’s overcoats.

A chorus of vicious dogs began to bark as they approached. Maddie looked round anxiously.

‘Don’t worry, that’s just noise. They’ll be tied up or they’d bother the Land Girls. Is the sign up?’

‘What sign?’

‘A jar of rowan berries in the window – if there’s no rowan in the window I won’t be welcome.’

Maddie burst out laughing.

‘You are daft!’

‘Is there?’

Maddie was taller than her companion. She stood on tiptoe to see over the barnyard wall, and her mouth dropped open.

‘There is,’ she said, and turned to gape at Queenie. ‘How –?’

Queenie leaned her bicycle against the wall, looking very smug. ‘You can see the trees over the garden wall. They’ve just been trimmed. It’s all very tidy and pretty in a wifely way, but she’ll have dug up her geraniums to plant tatties for the War Effort. So if she has something nice to decorate her kitchen with, like fresh-cut rowan berries, she’s likely to do it, and –’