Free Echobeat by Joe Joyce

and waved her cigarette in a metaphorical shrug. ‘You’ve read about all these things.’
    Duggan made a non-committal noise. Yes, he had heard something about these things but it was all vague and distant and dismissed by some as propaganda. ‘It must’ve been difficult coming here. Leaving your friends. Learning a new language.’
    ‘Yes’ she said.
    ‘But you’re safe here.’ They were on Dorset Street, a railway bridge ahead of them. He looked out for Iona Road, knowing it was somewhere near here.
    She gave him a curious glance that he caught. ‘It’s there,’ she said, indicating the turn.
    ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘they can’t find you here now.’
    She gave a bitter little laugh of disbelief.
    ‘All the files were destroyed,’ he added.
    ‘What files?’
    ‘About people,’ he was about to say ‘like you’ but caught himself in time, ‘about people who’ve come here from the Continent.’
    ‘Destroyed by who?’
    Fuck, he thought as he turned into her road. I shouldn’t have told her that: it was probably secret information.
    ‘By the government,’ he said, too late to withdraw it. ‘Sensitive files like that were burned last summer when people thought the Germans were about to invade.’
    ‘That’s true?’ She pointed at a house on the left ahead of them and he let the car coast to the kerb.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Please don’t tell anybody that. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’
    ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ she said in a tone that reassured him. ‘But it won’t matter anyway. There are always people who will tell them such things. Who will help them.’
    Duggan thought of Peter Gifford’s comment about the Friends of Germany dividing up the country between them under German rule. Some of them would be quick to bring an occupying force to Little Jerusalem. And Gerda’s earlier remark that she didn’t live there took on another dimension. Part of her efforts to hide her origins.
    She pushed her cigarette into the ashtray. ‘Don’t speak to me in German again,’ she said.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, taken aback. ‘I know my accent is—’
    ‘It’s not that,’ she cut him short. ‘I don’t want to hear it spoken.’
    ‘What about the café? Mrs Lynch’s?’
    ‘I’ll go there on Saturday. I only want to hear it from Nazis.’
    ‘Okay,’ he said, not really knowing what she meant but relieved she was continuing with the plan. ‘I’ll see you on Monday.’
    ‘Yes.’
    She got out of the car and took a key from her coat pocket and opened the hall door. It was closed before he had finished the first leg of a three-point turn.
     
    The Red House was the busiest he had seen it since the summer’s day when the government had ordered sensitive documents to be destroyed at the peak of a scare about a German invasion. Lights were on everywhere, men in mixtures of dress – uniforms, formal, casual – moved with purpose. The atmosphere was grim.
    Captain Sullivan was in their office before him, grey-faced and dishevelled and looking like he had a premature hangover. He was on the phone, asking someone what height the planes were at when they crossed the coast. Commandant McClure came in, looking fresher than anyoneelse, and sank into a chair beside Duggan’s end of the table. Duggan gave him a quick rundown on what he had seen and heard at the bomb site. ‘Could they have targeted the Jewish area?’ he concluded.
    McClure rejected the idea with a shake of his head. ‘They were at ten thousand feet. Could just about hit the lit-up area of the city from that height.’
    So Griffith Barracks couldn’t have been the target either, Duggan thought.
    ‘But the point is that they did hit the lit-up area of the city,’ McClure continued. He seemed keen to talk through what they knew. ‘First time this has happened. They can’t have thought they were over England since it’s all blacked out. The only places in this part of the world with any lights burning are in this