Shoulder first, I barged through the ramshackle door, dragging Gabriel along with me. He sank to the floor, gripping a nearby window ledge to keep himself upright.
Each of us had a pistol taken from the dead SS men, but Gabriel was in no condition to use his. I drew mine and gave Sandy a couple of shots of covering fire. He came dashing towards us on a zigzag path while bullets whizzed overhead. He sprinted the last few yards and threw himself headlong through the door. As I slammed it shut behind him a bullet splintered the wood.
Streaks of light filtered in through the partially boarded windows, outlining dusty shelves and overturned tables. A pair of empty cupboards yawned at us.
‘She is here?’ asked Gabriel, his face a grimace of pain.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I recognise her men, so she must be with them.’
Sandy and I took a window each on either side of the door, peering through the spaces between the boards.
‘I reckon there can’t be more than half a dozen of them,’ said Sandy, ‘and I’m pretty sure I picked one off.’
His estimate looked right to me, though it was hard to be sure. There were a few trees and bushes out there, and the Germans were clinging to cover, only popping up to let off the odd bullet that smacked the outer walls.
‘Not the best of shots, are they?’ I observed.
Sandy’s eyes scanned the dingy interior and fixed on a small door. ‘It looks like there’s a back way out.’
‘Making a run for it looks chancy,’ I said, glancing at Gabriel who was trying to haul himself to his feet. I leaned down and helped him up, though he could only stand by leaning against the wall.
‘You could get away and find your friend, the marquis,’ he said bravely, ‘but only if you leave me here. I promise you they will not take me alive.’
Painfully he drew his pistol and squinted through the broken window glass.
‘It’s a bit soon for that sort of talk,’ Sandy told him. ‘They don’t look like they’re in any hurry to rush us.’
He stared out to where one of the Germans was lurking behind a tree, steeling himself to advance further. Sandy took aim and chipped a piece off a branch right by his head. The German ducked back and Sandy gave a grunt of frustration. ‘Nearly had him.’
I spotted another man crawling through a patch of long grass and made a hit close enough to send him scrambling back towards his car.
‘We’re going to have to keep reminding them that we don’t want company,’ I said.
‘They’re spreading out,’ Sandy warned.
He was right. The Germans were forming a wide arc, making it harder to keep an eye on all of them at once.
‘Do you think they’re going to make a charge?’
Sandy’s brow furrowed. ‘More likely they’ll try to pin us down while one of them finds a blind side.’
We each took a few more shots, forcing the besiegers to keep their heads down.
‘I’m pretty low on ammo,’ I said, sliding some shells into my gun.
‘Me too,’ said Sandy. ‘We can’t hold them off for much longer.’
‘Gentlemen, my friends,’ said Gabriel, ‘I am sorry you have fallen into this for my sake, but I am honoured to be one of your company.’
He propped himself up on the windowsill, ignoring his injuries and trying to bring his gun to bear. When he fired, unsteady as he was, the recoil almost knocked him over.
‘Listen,’ said Sandy, ‘if you two can keep them busy for a couple of minutes, I’ll see if I can sneak out back and outflank them. The element of surprise may be just enough to give us an edge.’
‘But if they should spot you,’ Gabriel objected.
‘You’ve never watched him stalk a deer,’ I told the young Austrian. ‘A shadow doesn’t move more silently.’
Gabriel was summoning a pained smile when a fusillade hit us. Bullets hacked the door, shattered the remaining panes of window glass, and blasted chunks out of the wooden boards. All of the Germans were firing at once now in a concentrated attack.
Gabriel jerked back reflexively. His injured leg gave way and he tumbled to the floor with a yelp of pain. I was reaching to help him when a bullet smashed through the window and hammered into my right arm. A jolt of agony made me fall to my knees, my gun clattered to the floor, and a red haze covered my eyes.
‘Dick, are you all right?’ I was aware of Sandy crouching beside me.
‘Not so good, I’m afraid,’ I groaned, clamping a hand over my wound.
My arm hung limp and useless, a sure sign that the bone had been shattered. As my vision cleared the hail of bullets ceased and a shaft of light broke from the back of the room. The rear door had swung open, and there stood Beata van Diemen. In her hand was a Mauser machine pistol which could cut all three of us down in the blink of an eye.
‘Drop your weapons!’ she commanded, her voice cutting the air like the crack of a whip.
I had never before seen Sandy turn pale, but now he looked as if he was confronted by a ghost. He saw at once the resemblance I had been so slow to recognise and it froze him on the spot. Then his soldier’s instincts took over and he quietly assessed our situation.
Everything in her posture and the steely gleam in her eye told him she would put a bullet in each of us before he could got a shot off. Carefully he set his pistol aside and displayed his empty hands.
Beata, dressed in a plain black jacket, riding breeches and leather boots, looked every inch the huntress I knew her to be. I understood now that the men out front had merely been a distraction, allowing her to creep round to the rear, and the sudden storm of gunfire had been timed to let her enter unnoticed.
She cast a smile of cold satisfaction over her captured quarry. ‘There will be no more escapes for you, Graf von Falken. And you, Mr Hannay, you are supposed to be dead.’
She eyed me down the long barrel of her gun, as though deciding whether to finish the job now. Then Sandy stood up. The moment the pale light touched his face, her expression changed. Her mouth hardened and her eyes flashed like ice.
Sandy took a single step towards her and the air in the room crackled with the shock of their mutual recognition.
‘I know who you are,’ Beata whispered. ‘You are the man my mother called Greenmantle.’
At the uttering of that name Sandy flinched as if he had been struck by a piece of shrapnel.
‘I was called that once,’ he acknowledged. ‘It was a long time ago and very far from here.’
‘She offered to lay the world at your feet,’ Beata spat, ‘to make you an emperor.’
‘That is the very offer the devil makes from generation to generation,’ said Sandy, almost as if he were channelling the words from somewhere beyond himself. ‘A wise man turns away from it.’
‘Even a wise man cannot escape his fate, Lord Clanroyden. It is a cruel destiny that has delivered you into my hands.’
‘I don’t suppose either of us can escape what the past has done to us,’ Sandy told her solemnly.
He advanced towards her with slow, deliberate steps, like a pilgrim in fearful awe approaching a sacrificial altar. Gabriel and I lay wounded on the floor, mere witnesses to events that seemed to be moving forward with a relentless inevitability.
Beata’s iron composure had been shaken by this unlooked-for encounter, but now she stiffened and levelled her pistol at Sandy. ‘Stay back,’ she warned imperiously, ‘I am quite prepared to kill you right here and now.’
‘I don’t doubt that at all,’ Sandy responded in a voice scarcely louder than a murmur. ‘I suppose it would be only just.’
I watched helplessly as the distance between them closed. There was a terrible, elemental quality to their confrontation, as if they met not in some corner of France but in the middle of a sun-blasted desert with an arid, angry wind howling about them. I could hear Sandy speaking to her in German but so quietly I could not make out the words. It was then that she shot him.
Sandy took the bullet in his chest and paused for a split second before falling forward onto Beata. In the same instant I saw a thin blade slip from his sleeve into his right hand. He drove the knife straight into her heart with all the life that was left in him.
Beata’s mouth fell open, more in disbelief than in fear. The pair of them crumpled to the floor, locked in their fatal embrace, then slipped apart, each stained with the blood of the other. Beata’s dead eyes stared fixedly upward, as if straining for a glimpse of her Valhalla.
I pushed myself up and staggered towards Sandy, falling to one knee beside him. His life’s blood was ebbing away but he reached out and took my hand in his. His fingers already felt cold to the touch. He spoke to me in a ghost of his own voice, his eyes wandering about the room as if in search of someone else.
‘Dick, tell Barbara I’m coming home at last. . . Tell her that I’ll be there ... to watch over her and Diana . . . always.’
With that final breath his hand went limp and slipped from mine. He was gone, untethered at last from the harbour of this world. My heart sank and I felt shaken to the very bottom of my soul.
Gabriel appeared at my side and crossed himself in the Roman fashion. ‘He was a great man.’
‘He was that,’ I responded in a choked voice.
At that very moment the door was kicked open and the first of Beata’s gang stood framed in the doorway with a sub-machine gun in his arms. He took in the scene at a glance and ground his teeth at the sight of his dead mistress. Turning his weapon upon us, he uttered an almost feral growl and began to press the trigger.
I started at the sound of a shot, but it did not come from the German’s gun. It was the crack of a high-powered rifle that sent him toppling over, a jet of blood spouting from his shattered skull.
Behind him his companions cried out in alarm and looked frantically about them. They were aware that they were easy targets for whatever unexpected enemy had surprised them. One by one a series of expert shots from a band of unseen marksmen felled them all in a matter of seconds.
Closing Sandy’s eyes, I lurched over to the door and saw our rescuers hurrying towards us. At their head, dressed for the hunt and carrying a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight, was my old friend Turpin. With him were three other men with lean tanned faces acquired from years of stalking wild game in the woods and mountains of France.
‘By all the saints - Richard!’ the marquis exclaimed. ‘I should have guessed that when the Boche came you would be here to give them a bloody nose.’
We embraced in the doorway and I winced at the pain in my wounded arm.
‘Turpin, I’ve never been so glad to see a man. Another few seconds would have been too late.’
‘We saw the plane from a distance making its attack,’ he said, ‘and assumed the worst. With all haste we followed the sounds of gunfire and spotted the Boche coming at you.’
Gabriel limped over to join us and I introduced them.
‘We shall take you to my lodge and I shall fetch a doctor,’ said Turpin. Then he became grave. ‘But where is Lord Clanroyden?’
Without a word I led him inside to where Sandy lay in the peace that had eluded him for so long.
‘Mon Dieu!’ Turpin groaned. ‘This is a high price to pay.’
‘We can’t leave him here,’ I said.
‘No, we will take him,’ Turpin stated firmly. ‘We shall see that he returns to his home.’