Island Madness Read Online Free PDF Page A

year.
    “I heard there was a run-in between some artillery men and a couple of the foreigns, and,” he said, “someone got thrown out a window.”
    “A gunner?”
    “No. Just a foreign.”
    Ned dismissed it from his mind.
    “Not a dicky-bird this end.” He patted the bag.
    “About twenty this week, I reckon,” Bernie ventured out loud. “Should be stood up against a wall and shot, the lot of them.”
    Ned walked Bernie back down the stairs. Outside two young girls in white socks and raincoats, hats jammed firmly on their heads, were coming up the road pushing a heavy battered pram. Every day there’d be a bunch of them hanging around the State food stores, darting in and out between the horses’ hoofs and the cartwheels, picking the loose potatoes or turnips that had rolled down into the gutter. Bernie held his cap out as they went by.
    “Come on, missy,” he teased, bending low. “Just one measly spud.”
    The girls giggled past, the pram bouncing precariously on the cobbles. Bernie turned to leave.
    “Fancy a pint later on?” he asked. “I’ll be at the Britannia.”
    One of the oldest pubs on the island, it was one of the few out of bounds for the soldiers. A session in there and you catne away feeling almost normal. Most did, anyway. Since his unwanted appointment no one seetned to want to talk to Ned any more. Except Bernie. Ned shook his head.
    “Better not. I’ve got a late shift on tonight.”
    Bernie, cap back on his head, stuck his hands in his pockets and left, whistling. Back in the office it was time to go through the mail. Though Ned kept his office to himself, when it came to going through the anonymous letters they all took a look. Ned called them up. Peter came first then Tommy, his hands black with grease.
    “The Peril still not going?” Ned asked.
    Tommy shook his head.
    “Perhaps Bernie should take a look,” Ned suggested.
    Tommy had his pride. “There’s no need for that. I can fix it.”
    “That’s what you said last week.”
    The sack was still damp from its journey along the seafront. Ned untied the knot and gave the sack a shake.
    “About twenty, I reckon,” he ventured out loud.
    “How do they do it?” Peter asked, stroking the down on his ginger lip. Last year Ned had seen him playing hopscotch with his younger sisters on the sands at Vazon Bay. Now his outsize adolescent feet lay squeezed into a pair of second-hand boots that had once been the property of one of the policemen currently serving two years’ hard labour in Caen prison.
    “Jealousy and fear,” he told him, “that’s how. Plus a few old scores to settle.”
    “But how do the Post Office tell them from real letters?” Peter persisted.
    Tommy pulled ostentatiously at the corners of his whiskers, as if the thickness of his own beard was evidence of how much such a baby-faced novice had to learn.
    “They’re not that difficult to spot,” he said, warming his backside on the stove. “They’re nearly always written in capitals—to disguise the handwriting—and they’re all addressed to the Feldkom-mandantur.”
    “There’s more to it than that,” Ned added. “There’s a meanness that marks them. That’s the thing they can’t disguise. When you see them, lying there amidst real letters, love letters, bills, notes of condolence, they stick out a mile.”
    He tipped the bundie out onto the table. They were, as Tommy had predicted, all addressed to the Feldkommandantur, scrawled in furtive capital letters, sloping across the surface as if trying to evade the shame of their intent, envelopes, lined notepaper, pages torn out of a child’s scrapbook, folded and stuck down and sent with malice in the heart, most with no stamp. But today Tommy was proved wrong. As Ned stirred the pile with his fingers he uncovered an envelope addressed to him, in handwriting he recognized only too well. How many other notes had she written to him, smuggled out from the fierce protection of her father’s house,