Murdo's War Read Online Free PDF Page B

moment and repressed a smile.
    Mr Smith took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one up. The backs of his hands were covered in a mat of golden hairs. He looked quizzically across the table at Hector and drew a deep breath.
    ‘I suppose I’ve got to come to the point sometime. I want a few things bringing across from Island Roan, and I hoped you and I might come to some arrangement. I need a boat.’
    ‘Island Roan!’ Hector exclaimed. ‘I’m afraid someone’s been misleading you, mister. The last people came away from Island Roan the year the war started. There’s nothing there now but empty houses and a few sheep.’
    ‘I know that.’
    Hector regarded the man opposite him afresh. ‘You mean you’ll be taking something there first?’
    Henry Smith shrugged. ‘Maybe. It depends what things are like over here. And if I can get a boat.’
    ‘Mm.’ Hector’s distaste was obvious. ‘What is it, black-market goods – clothes, tinned meat, chocolate – stuff like that?’
    ‘No, it’s not stuff like that. I’m not a profiteer, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s... machinery, as a matter of fact.’ A look of shrewd intelligence flickered across his pale eyes and then was gone. ‘I don’t exactly want it spread across the front pages, but I’ll tell you something about it anyway. Then you can see if you’re interested.’
    Hector settled back a little and laid one leg across the other. ‘Well, if you want the Lobster Boy I’ll need to know more. Hearing does no harm – not with me, anyway.’
    ‘As I said, I don’t exactly want everyone to know about it. I can rely on you to – er...’
    The muscles stirred along Hector’s bristly jaw, his nostrils widened a fraction. Murdo felt a shiver up the back of his neck.
    ‘I’ve got a factory down in Oxford,’ said Mr Smith, ‘and we’re doing some work on a new type of engine. Runs on paraffin. I don’t need to tell you how important that could be with the war as it is right now. Ten years I’ve been working on it. Anyway, the only other people doing the same work was a Norwegian firm, Thörsen’s of Stavanger. When the Germans over-ran Norway in 1940, old Edvard Thörsen hid his records and data, and took all the prototype machinery to a secret place down the fjord. The Germans aren’t always too nice in their methods – the Gestapo, anyway – and they caught hold of a couple of Thörsen’s managers and... well, they talked. Thörsen himself was hiding, but word got to him and they shifted the stuff to a new spot out in the Lofoten Islands. A real underground job.
    ‘Things quietened down a bit after that, but the Germans never forgot and a month back, quite by accident, they got a new lead. They weren’t slow in following it up either; not with an engine like that at the end of it. Edvard Thörsen had to run for it. They moved the engines to another part of the islands, and he got a message out to me on one of those Shetland fishing boats. I didn’t know him very well, although I’d met him at conferences, of course, and he knew I was working along the same lines. He said that he believed it was only a matter of time before the Germans found the machines, and wanted to get them out of the country. He asked me to take the work over and develop it as a joint effort in my factory.’
    ‘Why bring the machine parts across?’ Hector said. ‘Why not just the drawings? They could drop the machinery in the fjord.’
    ‘It would take months to cut new moulds and set up the plant. A year at least. He was a great engineer. I haven’t seen the figures yet, but I understand it’s a magnificent engine, and from what he wrote the experimental work was finished. I’m nowhere near that stage.’
    ‘He was a great engineer?’ said Hector.
    ‘Yes. A fortnight ago the Gestapo caught up with his wife and himself. First he shot her, then he shot himself. They’d agreed about it beforehand. He was a leader in the Norwegian