‘I take it,’ Peter asked, ‘that I am sitting in what was your way out?’

‘I was going to drive back to Paris once the cargo was loaded, sell it, and then head home by train.’

‘And now?’

‘Too risky, given we have no idea of the depth of what we are fighting. I’ll have to get rid of it and think of something else. You?’

‘I told you, Cal, I’m sticking like—’

‘I got it the first time.’

‘And you still intend to oversee the loading of the weapons?’

‘That is what I am contracted to do.’

Peter nodded, he had expected no less; in a game fraught with danger, the possibility of dying in the act was a given – in fact, no different to being a serving soldier. Then there was the problem of reputation, quite apart from any sentiment to the republican cause; running guns was as much Callum Jardine’s profession as intelligence gathering was that of Peter Lanchester. You just did not quit when the going got hard if you wanted to stay in the game.

Getting back into La Rochelle, Cal explained, presented little difficulty; they could walk into the suburbs and catch the bus. First the car had to be put behind some trees and then, while they were out of sight of the road, they had to clean themselves up using saliva, a handkerchief and the car’s mirror, though they could do nothing about the foul after-combat taste in their mouths.

Personal clean-ups completed, Peter went to work on the car in the same way he had on that La Rochelle apartment, wiping the steering wheel, door handles and all of the instruments and switches, removing all traces of their fingerprints, Cal watching him silently and in doing so was gifted a sudden realisation, brought about by what was happening now, added to the feeling of curiosity he had experienced prior to abandoning Peter’s apartment that morning.

Peter’s blazer was marked from where he had rolled across the road into the ditch, but apart from that he was more or less all right and a bit of hand brushing removed most of the dried muck. Cal was more scratched and bruised and his shoulder ached, while his shirt, quite apart from the stains, was ripped both at the elbows and the front, which left his companion unhappily lending him one of his spares.

‘Jermyn Street for you, old chum,’ Peter insisted, ‘the minute we get back to Blighty. I’ll be having a few items in replacement on your Turnbull & Asser account.’

Cal was not listening; he was crouched down breaking up the ZB26, laying the parts on the shirt he had just removed. ‘This will have to go in your case, Peter, I’m afraid.’

‘What!’ Peter demanded, looking over his shoulder from the tree against which he was pissing away the last of his two beers.

‘You don’t expect me to just leave it.’

‘Might I point out to you, old chum, that it is somewhat oily, and that shirt of yours is not going to stop it damaging the rest of my kit, not least my cream linen suit.’

‘Still got that knife of yours?’

‘I have.’

Passed over, Cal used it to cut out the upholstery from the back seat of the car, wrapping his broken-up weapon in that before closing the case and handing it over.

‘There you are, Peter, satisfied? Best I carry it, given what it contains. Now let’s get back onto the road and get walking till we find a bus stop.’

‘I’m curious as to how you are going to reconnect with your barge.’

‘So am I.’

The walk was not far, though in still-flat open country at once fraught with the fear that some of their recent opponents might appear. Once in a built-up area it became easier, and having found a stop, they took a hot and crowded bus marked Centre Ville into town.

There was a definite frisson in the air when they got there, people talking and gesticulating, a lot of gendarmes around and the ringing of the traffic-clearing bells of police cars, which forced them into the backstreets and a welcome drink in the dark recesses of a small, dingy and far-from-clean workers’ bar.

‘And to think I always equated you with luxurious living.’

‘We don’t know what connections these sods have, Peter, or yet how they got onto us.’

‘On to you, Cal,’ he replied, pedantically.

‘And I thought you wanted to be part of my gang.’ Cal joked, even if, deep down, he felt Peter to have been the cause of the problem.

‘Can’t afford the laundry bill, old chap, or the seamstress to repair the kit, and that says nothing for the catering.’

‘HMG doesn’t pay you enough.’

‘Understatement, Cal, they pay a pittance.’

At Cal’s insistence, they took another bus to Le Port on the grounds that a taxi was potentially traceable, buying their own billets and sitting apart, with both keeping an eye out for anyone official seeking to board and examine papers.

Once in the port and seeing no sign of anything that posed a threat, they walked up the canal towpath, thankfully with the sun going down and the heat of the day dissipating. His fear of not finding the barge proved to be an unnecessary worry; the men crewing it had stopped outside the basin on the edge of the industrial zone where it joined the canal coming in from the south, before a branch that went through to the commercial port.

His two Basques and the French owner were sitting on the deck, quietly smoking and looking innocent. After a quick look to ensure no one was watching, they approached the barge, jumped aboard and immediately disappeared below into the cramped and stuffy cabin.

‘And now what happens?’ Peter enquired.

‘We wait until the right people have come on shift.’

‘Are you not a little light on muscle for what you have to do?’

‘I am, but thankfully we have you along.’

‘It’s at times like these,’ Peter sighed, pulling out his packet of French cigarettes, ‘that I wish I’d paid more attention at school.’

With nothing much to do till the sun went down, and neither willing to indulge in much more useless speculation as to how the Jeunesses Patriotes had got on to Cal’s cargo, they turned to talking about old times, which tended to sound rosy in retrospect and had been bloody awful in fact.

As subalterns, they had first met in the dying weeks of the Great War at a time when everyone thought the retreating Hun were beaten, but they were not; their retreat was orderly and designed to inflict maximum casualties when, as they often did, they made a stand. Jerry was always forced to fall back but no position or trench was surrendered without a hard and costly fight.

When those times were reprised there was no mention of any deep friendship between the two, more a degree of natural mutual respect, given that first quality had been absent. It was more than just an inability to connect, it being a bad idea to get close to anyone at such a time.

No two men who had lived through those days could discuss them without recalling, even if they avoided mention of it, the losses they had witnessed, both in fellow officers and the men they led; anyone being killed was bad, but a close friend dying could break those who survived, men who lived on the very edge of what could be tolerated by the human spirit.

Both had stayed in the army, Cal for personal reasons, Peter for the lack of a real alternative and, meeting again in the part of Mesopotamia destined to become Iraq, there had been no flowering of friendship at all – Captains Callum Jardine and Peter Lanchester had been on two sides of an argument about the tactics being employed to contain the Arab insurgency.

Peter, like most of his contemporaries, saw nothing untoward in bombing villages or pounding the insurgents and their families with artillery – the end justified the means. Cal disagreed so vehemently he had eventually resigned his commission, though, unable to settle, he had become, almost by accident, a gunrunner and advisor to various freedom movements on guerrilla warfare, much of the art of which he had learnt from his Arab opponents.