Winter of the World

They went outside and got into a grimy Renault van with the name of an electrical goods store on the side. As they pulled away, the driver asked Lloyd if he was married. A series of unpleasantly personal inquiries followed, and Lloyd realized the man had a fascination with other people’s sex lives. No doubt that was why he had agreed to take Lloyd: it gave him the chance to ask intrusive questions. Several of the men who had given Lloyd lifts had had some such creepy motive.

‘I’m a virgin,’ Lloyd told him, which was true; but that only led to an interrogation about heavy petting with schoolgirls. Lloyd did have considerable experience of that, but he was not going to share it. He refused to give details while trying not to be rude, and eventually the driver despaired. ‘I have to turn off here,’ he said, and pulled up.

Lloyd thanked him for the ride and walked on.

He had learned not to march like a soldier, and had developed what he thought was a fairly realistic peasant slouch. He never carried a newspaper or a book. His hair had last been cut by a brutally incompetent barber in the poorest quarter of Toulouse. He shaved about once a week, so that he normally had a growth of stubble, which was surprisingly effective in making him look like a nobody. He had stopped washing, and acquired a ripe odour that discouraged people from talking to him.

Few working-class people had watches, in France or Spain, so the steel wristwatch with the square face that Bernie had given him as a graduation present had to go. He could not give it to one of the many French people who had helped him, for a British watch could have incriminated them, too. In the end, with great sadness, he had thrown it into a pond.

His greatest weakness was that he had no identity papers.

He had tried to buy papers from a man who looked vaguely like him, and schemed to steal them from two others, but not surprisingly, people were cautious about such things these days. His strategy was therefore to steer clear of situations in which he might be asked to identify himself. He made himself inconspicuous, he walked across fields rather than take roads when he had the choice, and he never travelled by passenger train because there were often checkpoints at stations. So far he had been lucky. One village gendarme had demanded his papers, and when he explained that they had been stolen from him after he got drunk and passed out in a bar in Marseilles, the policeman had believed him and sent him on his way.

Now, however, his luck ran out.

He was passing through poor agricultural terrain. He was in the foothills of the Pyrenees, close to the Mediterranean, and the soil was sandy. The dusty road ran through struggling smallholdings and poor villages. The landscape was sparsely populated. To his left, through the hills, he got blue glimpses of the distant sea.

The last thing he expected was the green Citroën that pulled up alongside him with three gendarmes inside.

It happened very suddenly. He heard the car approaching – the only car he had heard since the fat man had dropped him off. He carried on shuffling like a tired worker going home. Either side of the road were dry fields with sparse vegetation and stunted trees. When the car stopped, he thought for a second of making a run for it across the fields. He dropped the idea when he saw the holstered pistols of the two gendarmes who jumped out of the car. They were probably not very good shots, but they might get lucky. His chances of talking his way out of this were better. These were country constables, more amiable than the hard-nosed French city police.

‘Papers?’ said the nearest gendarme in French.

Lloyd spread his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘Monsieur, I am so unfortunate, my papers were stolen in Marseilles. I am Leandro, Spanish mason, going—’

‘Get in the car.’

Lloyd hesitated, but it was hopeless. The odds against his getting away were now worse than before.

A gendarme took him firmly by the arm, hustled him into the back seat, and got in beside him.

His spirits sank as the car pulled away.

The gendarme next to him said: ‘Are you English, or what?’

‘I am Spanish mason. My name—’

The gendarme made a waving-away gesture and said: ‘Don’t bother.’

Lloyd saw that he had been wildly optimistic. He was a foreigner without papers heading for the Spanish border: they simply assumed he was an escaping British soldier. If they had any doubt, they would find proof when they ordered him to strip, for they would see the identity tag around his neck. He had not thrown it away, for without it he would automatically be shot as a spy.

And now he was stuck in a car with three armed men, and the likelihood that he would find a way to escape was zero.