Free They Never Looked Inside by Michael Gilbert Page A

the block – no one to signify, that is. Monsieur Bren will bear me out—”
    Monsieur Le Commissaire Bren (known to the French Resistance and later to the whole of fighting France as “Ulysse”) nodded silent agreement from the leather chair by the window.
    “Then this afternoon,” went on Pickup, “he came out much earlier than usual. I wasn’t there, but Sergeant Crabbe was watching. The Major got into his car – it had evidently been parked handy – and after waiting for about five minutes, he started away. Crabbe says he didn’t seem to be following anyone. Flaxman Street and the Square were both empty when he started.”
    “All right,” said Hazlerigg, “I can guess the rest. Sergeant Crabbe lost him.”
    “I’m afraid he wasn’t expecting the car, sir. Major McCann had always arrived and left before on foot.”
    “I’m not blaming you,” said Hazlerigg. “You’ve done very well. I dropped that trail and you picked it up. We’ll just remember to have a car there next time.”
    “If there is a next time,” said Pickup. “I’ve got rather a nasty feeling about this, sir.”
    “Major McCann I know,” said M. Le Commissaire unexpectedly. “He is a man of some resource and valour. Discretion, too. All may yet be well. As your General Wellington said, ‘Let us not cross our bridges before we arrive at them.’ In truth, a difficult feat to perform, even with the maximum of agility.”

II
     
    About this time McCann recovered consciousness. He came to the surface slowly from under the dark waves of pain and oblivion. The clouds thinned, turning first to grey, and then to milky white, and then shredding away altogether. The sun came out about five feet above his head, swinging in great solemn circles, as at the First Creation; then slowing down, and finally stopping and turning into a dusty yellow electric light bulb. McCann moved his head, and immediately wished he had not.
    With infinite care he closed his eyes, laying each lid as gently as a sleeping babe into its downy cot. After a minute he felt better and opened them again. He felt cold, despite the obvious stuffiness of the room, and he was suffering from recurrent attacks of nausea; but his head was clear.
    It was not the first time in his life that he had been knocked out, and he recognised from association most of the distressing symptoms of concussion.
    In a few minutes he either was going to be sick – or he wasn’t.
    A few minutes passed.
    He wasn’t.
    McCann shivered, but in a healthy sort of way, and sat up.
    The first thing he noticed was that his shoes and his coat and waistcoat had gone. Also his braces. He was lying on a camp bed, in the corner of a bare and rather uninteresting little room. An attic, in fact.
    Turning his head to the left he could see the line of the roof and dormer. Turning his head still further he realised, with a certain shock, that he wasn’t alone.
    A white-faced youth, of about nineteen or twenty, was sitting on a wooden chair, its back tilted against the wall, dividing his attention between McCann, a damp cigarette, and a magazine on physical culture.
    McCann had seen the ferret face before, but he was unable for a moment to place it.
    Then recollection came back.
    He remembered his first night of leave, the drinks he had had with Glasgow and Sergeant Dalgetty, the walk home through the quiet streets and squares of Mayfair. This was the youth who had come running past him (and whom, as he recalled now with considerable pleasure, he had tripped up).
    The first step, he felt, towards restoring a moral equality to the situation, was to sit up. He swung his legs cautiously towards the side of the bed.
    The youth spoke.
    “Stay put,” he said.
    The tone which he employed was the tone of a parent armed with both the authority to command and the muscular power to enforce his commands.
    Having said his say, he continued to thumb the pages of his magazine and to draw the last lungfuls of smoke from his