The hospital at night was a sleeping beast. Gabriel knew from his long months of recovery there that by day it was an insect hive, home to a thousand activities, of scurrying, emergencies, screams and laughter. But at night it was a different creature, a great slumbering whale, down whose interior he and Lorelei walked nervously. The shadows inspecting them. The nurse stations little glowing oases. The smell of the disinfectant intensified by night, like lilies. The tragedies also; the silent muffled weeping from beneath blankets. The grotesque shadows cast on walls from men in traction.
They came to a halt in a coffin of a room; narrow and rectangular. A library table topped in black leather occupied its centre. Around the walls were rows of filing cabinets. Above them, a large clock admonished them with ticks. This was the vault where the medical records of every patient ever treated at Platterhof Military Hospital came to moulder. Silently they went to work, each knowing their task as agreed before, back in the apartment in the ruined theatre.
‘We can’t hang about,’ Lorelei said. ‘Iron Arse has her spies. We go in and out and if she asks me next day, I can say I left my handbag behind after duty and I popped in to pick it up.’
She’d hidden it under her skirt and Gabriel, in his nervous state, discovered that as usual before action, he was aroused by small things; this time, Lorelei tucking the handbag into her knickers and jiggling to make it comfortable.
It had been agreed between them that they’d take the records of the Old Hares away with them to study.
‘It’s Emil Maurice’s records I want,’ said Gabriel.
‘I know, but we’ll take the notes on the others as well. Maurice might be the man who made contact with the pastor in Munich, but he might be one of a team like we are. The trigger man, the one with damaged eyesight, might be another Old Hare.’
They’d divided the dozen names between them alphabetically. Now in the gloom they gathered in their crop, sliding out the drawers and lifting the files, while the clock ticked on towards eternity. They gutted the folders and replaced them, putting the paper contents in the handbag that Lorelei had produced, like a semi-erotic magician, from her pants.
Mission completed, they quietly closed the door and made their way out of the sleeping leviathan. When they passed the reception desk, Lorelei held up her handbag to indicate she’d found it. A sleepy nurse smiled back and nodded.
In her apartment, Gabriel discovered he wanted to go where Lorelei’s handbag had been and, laughing at his desire, she’d teased him before finally succumbing. There was a holiday mood between them. After a week of awful tension, the book from London had arrived, delivered by the team’s postman, who was still unknown to Gabriel.
‘Thank God they just got on and sent it without wanting to know why we needed it,’ she said.
Quietly and conscientiously, like a studious schoolgirl, Lorelei had marked up the relevant chapter with a pencil. As she did this, the tip of her tongue stuck out as a mark of her concentration; something Gabriel found unbelievably tender. She made it seem as if the volume had been used for research, with underlinings and ticks. The book had then been put on her bookshelf and they waited. To their relief and delight, they discovered it gone before their excursion to the hospital.
‘I knew they’d search,’ she said. ‘Now we just have to hope they believe the planted evidence.’
‘No reason for them not to,’ Gabriel said.
Lorelei’s smile lit up the room. ‘Then I think we’re home and dry.’