Free Death In Captivity by Michael Gilbert

thought they were going to push the case so hard I’d have taken some elementary precautions.’
    ‘I don’t think it’s just Byfold,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘I think the truth of the matter is that they want a scapegoat—’
    Baird said, with unusual bitterness, ‘Since when have they become so fussy about a death. And I don’t only mean escaping. You remember last winter when the Red Cross parcels didn’t arrive for two months and we had to live on a minus quantity of Italian rations. How many prisoners did we lose then, from starvation and near-starvation? And young Collingwood, with blood-poisoning, that they wouldn’t even let a doctor look at until it was too late. If they want to investigate anything let them start on that.’
    ‘I expect that the approach of the British Army is making them progressively more tender-hearted,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘What are you proposing to do now?’
    ‘I suggest we wait and see if the case against Byfold comes to anything. It may be just bluff. Something for the record, as you suggest. Meanwhile, we push on as fast as possible with Tunnel C.’
    Colonel Lavery looked anxiously at the home-made calendar on the wall. It said ‘July 5th’.
    ‘How soon do you think you can be ready?’
    ‘It isn’t just a question of digging,’ said Baird. ‘If that’s all it was we’d have non-stop shifts and be out inside a week. It’s the shoring-up of the tunnel, and, above all, the old, old problem of getting rid of the sand. I’ve got an idea about that. If it comes off we might be out in just over three weeks – say twenty-five days.’
    ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Colonel Lavery, ‘because if my reading of the situation is correct, that could be all the time we’re going to get.’

 
5
     
    ‘Life,’ said Rupert Rolf-Callender, ‘is getting perfectly intolerable.’
    ‘Grim,’ agreed Terence Bush.
    ‘They’ll be asking us for another bed-board soon.’
    ‘It’ll be a nice change if they ask for it,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘Last time they just took it. I can’t lie on my bed now without bits of me sagging through the boards. I feel like a lot of shopping in a string bag.’
    ‘You look perfectly disgusting,’ agreed the Honourable Peter Perse who slept underneath him. ‘There’s another of those damned penguins.’
    Through the open door of their room in Hut A they watched in disapproving silence as a large subaltern – a stranger, from Hut C – waddled down the passage. Waddled is the exact description of his gait, since he seemed to find his legs unnaturally heavy, and lifted them one after the other with just the tentative deliberation of a young penguin learning to walk. The ends of his long drill trousers were tied tightly round his ankles, and the calves of his legs seemed to be suffering from a form of shifting elephantiasis.
    ‘Where does he put the sand?’ asked Bush, when this remarkable figure had passed out of sight.
    ‘In our tunnel,’ said Rolf-Callender.
    ‘What?’
    ‘It’s a fact. The Eye-ties have posted a sentry on the outside end, but they just sealed down the bathroom end and left it. The bright boys have got the trap open again and are filling the tunnel up from this end.’
    ‘Do you mean to say,’ said Bush, ‘that those types from Hut C are digging sand out of their tunnel and putting it into our tunnel?’
    ‘It’s all very well talking about our tunnel,’ said the Honourable Peter, who was a fair-minded man, and also enjoyed provoking people. ‘I can’t remember you doing much about it when it was actually being dug.’
    ‘Maybe not,’ said Bush, ‘but if this caper is discovered – God, there’s another of those penguins’ – he got up and shut the door pointedly – ‘if it is discovered, it’s this hut that’s going to suffer. With Benucci in his present frame of mind I can see him shutting off the water and the electric light.’
    The others agreed that this was highly