‘Patrick?’

‘How do you know?’ she shot back, suspicion creeping into her voice.

‘The pub. You were talking about him in the pub. And Donegal. And home.’

‘We thought you were asleep. So you were eavesdropping?’

‘No. Just identifying with someone who wanted so much to be home.’

There was an uneasy silence. The conversation had become very personal, and here she was sitting on a bed swapping intimacies with a stranger.

‘How long will it be before we can get to Ireland?’ he asked.

‘Depends. Our group’s been in hibernation since the war began; for some while your lot was doing a much better job of getting at the British than we could ever hope to do. So it may take us a few days to get hold of the right people. With luck less than a week.’

‘How?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Secret?’

‘Not really. It just depends who we can find at a moment’s notice after five years. We’ll have to blow away a few cobwebs.’

‘I don’t get it. Five years … you must have been still in school.’

A flush of embarrassment came to her cheeks.

‘How many men have you smuggled out?’ he demanded, but her only answer was downcast eyes. ‘Don’t tell me I’m your first?’ He couldn’t disguise his incredulity.

‘My family’s been part of the struggle all my life,’ she said fiercely, fighting against her own awkwardness. ‘I was there when they arrested my brother and locked him away. I sat holding my father’s hand on the night before they killed him. Three Orangemen who found him in an alleyway, called him the father of a Republican pig and shot him where he stood. Not even executed him. They blew his kneecaps away first, then put two into his guts so that he would die, but not too quickly. They made sure he’d suffer first. And made sure my mother would suffer, every day and every night for the rest of her life. Mr Hencke, I know as much about this business as I need to!’

There were no tears but she was shaking all over. Hencke reached out and held her hand to stop it trembling. ‘I’ve already seen what you can do, Sinead No-Name. Believe me, I’ve got no reason to complain. I know. I was there, remember?’ His words thawed through her blushes. Anyway, where else did he have to go? ‘Do your best, that’s all I ask.’

Her best, two nights later, proved to be a dilapidated truck carrying sacks of vegetables and empty fish crates to Liverpool. The sacks gave reasonable cover behind which to hide from prying eyes, the sour smell of fish offering added discouragement to anyone venturing too far into the entrails of the load. But for Sinead and Hencke, hiding in a small compartment crafted out of crates and sacks deep inside the lorry, it meant a night of bone-bruising discomfort. Their hiding place was claustrophobic and dark, and every jolt of the old axles seemed to transmit itself directly through the hard wooden floorboards in spite of the small mattress thrown on the floor. They lay on the mattress, trying to brace themselves against the incessant jarring as they drove through the outskirts of London on to the main Liverpool road. The noise and discomfort made conversation difficult and the enforced intimacy left them both feeling awkward, so they settled back as best they could, bathed in the glow of a flashlight which gave their faces a ghoulish, melodramatic cast.

They were making steady progress north on the A5 through the suburbs of Birmingham when they hit the potholes. They were driving along a stretch of road which had received attention from a Focke Wolf’s bombload in the early part of the war. The surface damage had long since been repaired, but underneath, the Victorian sewers had leaked and grumbled and groaned and, finally, had collapsed. The lorry’s front wheel sank into a deep hole, the steering wheel spun from the driver’s hands and the vehicle was sent skidding across the road before coming to rest, front wing buckled, against a brick wall. From their hiding place they heard one burst of profanity from the driver before other voices crowded round. This was not the first vehicle to come to grief that night on this stretch of road, and with the wartime spirit of camaraderie abounding there were plenty of voices to offer consolation and many hands to help. The tyre had punctured; it would have to be replaced and the crumpled front wing bent out. ‘Should only take us twenty minutes,’ they heard one cheerful voice saying.

They were still feeling their bruises when someone climbed into the back, flashing a torch around in search of the spare wheel. ‘I’ll do it!’ the driver exclaimed, an edge of panic in his words, but already it was too late. While Hencke froze, the girl wriggled as close to him as possible, trying to burrow into his overcoat and make their profile as anonymous as one of the sacks of vegetables. Moments later the beam of a powerful torch began to probe around them, licking like a lizard’s tongue into the corners, bouncing off sacks and trying to peek through the gaps between the fish crates. She squeezed ever more tightly into his body as the light swam around and above them, her body taut, holding her breath, feeling her heart beating like a tattoo against his chest. Then the light disappeared. The tyre had been located; their hiding place had worked.

The repairs, as the helpful stranger had predicted, did not take long. Soon the lorry was ready to proceed, but there were new agonies as they heard the muffled sound of not one but three men climbing back into the cab. God, surely the driver wasn’t offering lifts! It was not until much later they discovered that two soldiers on leave had asked to be taken on to Liverpool and the driver, anxious not to create suspicion by refusing, had been forced to agree.

It was as the lorry was drawing away that they became aware of a more subtle predicament. The load had shifted. Only a little, but as they relaxed their grip on each other and tried to regain their original positions on the mattress they discovered there was no room left. They were stuck, face to face, unable to move because of the load and unable to talk or call for help because of the presence of strangers just feet away. Even the flashlight was too great a risk, so they continued on in darkness, every muscle tensed, their only means of communication being through the touch of their bodies. They were so close she could feel every part of him – the bristles on his chin and neck, the muscles on his sinewy shoulders, the heaving of his chest as he breathed, even the sharpness of his buttons and the bulge of the child’s toy stuffed inside his shirt. Their enforced intimacy had caused his legs to entwine involuntarily with hers, his breath wafted through her hair and down the back of her neck. Every move of their bodies, every bounce of the truck, brought them into fresh contact, and she knew there was no part of her own body which he couldn’t feel or sense. They were close enough to smell each other. She might have expected him to be frozen with embarrassment; she wouldn’t have been astonished had he become aroused and immensely masculine, but all she could sense was self-control. His body was there, beside her and upon her with a muscular thigh stuck between her own, but it was as if he were merely an observer, treating her body with the curiosity characteristic of a surgeon, or a sommelier examining a wine with a sense of professional detachment without any intention of drinking. She tried to wriggle to get herself more comfortable, to let him know she didn’t mind. Several of the boys she knew would have given anything – and had frequently promised to do so – for the chance of being in contact with her like this. But Hencke, as she already knew, was different from other men. He offered no response. He seemed to have built a protective shell around himself and he wasn’t going to break it open for any young girl in the back of a lorry.

They lay like this for another hour, he silent, she lost in the tingling of her senses, before the lorry stopped again to disgorge its unwanted guests. A few minutes later they reached their destination in a quiet siding where the driver was able to remove the press of sacks and crates to release them. As Sinead clambered down she was trembling. From stiffness. From the excitement which the warmth and pressure of his body had aroused within her, and the feelings of guilt which that had caused. From curiosity about this strange man. And, even more, from curiosity about herself.