The House At Sea’s End

As usual, Rebecca is flipping between several internet sites, looking for material. She’s expert at cutting and pasting. Nelson hopes this will be enough for the A-Level examiners. She’s too quick for him though, scanning to and fro, highlighting, dropping in text files, finding clip art-

‘Hang on a second!’

‘What?’ She pauses in mid click.

‘That last site. Something about the war.’

‘Oh… do you mean ilovehistory.com?’

‘Possibly. Can you go back?’

Obligingly, Rebecca finds the page and makes it large enough to be seen by his decrepit eyes.

The coastal defence, he reads, was to include fifty tons of fuel, to be blown up in the shallow waters of the North Sea. This operation drew on fire ships used by Drake against the Armada…

He goes into the kitchen to ring Ruth, switching on the kettle as he does so. She takes a while to answer and sounds hassled. He can hear Katie crying in the background.

‘Ruth. Did you get the results back from the material? That you found in the barrel.’

‘Yes. I sent you a report.’

‘Tell me again.’

‘It was gun cotton. Cotton dowsed in nitric and sulphuric acid. The material’s immersed in the acid and then dried. Makes it extremely flammable.’

‘I bet.’

‘Apparently when it’s lit it produces an almighty blast. Jules Verne uses it in one of his books to power a space rocket.’

‘And what was in the other barrels?’

‘A mix of adhesive tar, lime and petrol.’

The beach at Broughton Sea’s End, thinks Nelson, as he drinks his tea, was one massive depth charge. The Home Guard had prepared a welcome for possible German invaders that would have blasted them into space. Was that the work of Ernst, the clever scientist? A German who had lived most of his life in Broughton Sea’s End. A German determined to do all he could to defeat the Nazis. Maybe he was a German Jew… Nelson knows that all sorts of people were interned at the start of the war – old people, youngsters, Jews, communists – people who had no reason on earth to side with the Nazis. Why was Ernst living in Broughton in the first place? And why did he have such a close bond with Buster Hastings? Buster kicked up such a fuss that he was released. Why was Buster so determined to have Ernst on his side?

And why hadn’t the defences been set off when the six Germans actually landed? The men had been shot from a few feet away, there was no sign of a struggle. Somehow Buster and his mostly ageing troops had been able to overcome six soldiers in their physical prime. But, having done that, why kill them? Surely they could just have taken the men prisoner? He’s no military expert but isn’t it important to take prisoners so you can interrogate them? The German commandos never gave up their invasion plans. Their secret died with them, buried under the cliffs until the sea itself exposed it.

Nelson is still sitting in the kitchen when Michelle comes home, tired from working late and distinctly put out to find that no-one has started supper.

After supper, Michelle and Rebecca settle down to watch CSI Miami – female bonding over mutilated body parts – and Nelson escapes back to the study. He types Second World War Invasion into the search engine and soon the screen is full of lurid stories: beaches black with bodies, the seas aflame, U-boats full of severed limbs, secret German bases off the Irish coast, 30,000 bodies burned beyond recognition washed up on the South Coast. Nelson enjoys a conspiracy theory as much as the next man (once, Cathbad almost convinced him that the Americans had never landed on the moon), but as a policeman he does require just a trace of evidence. It’s all very well saying that the authorities have covered everything up but could an invasion on this scale really have been hushed up? In a place like Broughton this would, effectively, have meant buying the silence of everyone in the village.

But what if this is exactly what happened? What if, amidst all the hysteria, the Germans did land one small expeditionary party in an isolated Norfolk cove? There they met, not sleepy villagers and bemused fishermen, but a tightly controlled army unit prepared to kill.

He is about to call it a night when, scrolling down a site called ‘Flame Over Britain’, he comes across this paragraph:

The plan was simple. Under cover of darkness several aged tankers, their holds full of combustible fuel, would head across the channel to the enemy invasion ports of Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne. At the entrance to these ports, the tankers would be abandoned by their skeleton crews and detonated. The subsequent blast would turn the sea into a burning sheet of flame. This operation, which became known as Operation Lucid, actually started life with a more sinister moniker – Operation Lucifer.

Lucifer.

CHAPTER 20