“Yes, I suppose I did.” He blew a long cloud of smoke into the draft and lowered his voice. “They say Beauchamp pulled off stunts you wouldn’t credit. Dropped him into France, you know, to stir up trouble. I knew a chap who ran a few of them. Told me one story that made my hair stand on end.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, some village in the occupied zone—not sure where, exactly. Beauchamp’s radio operator happens to be some local girl. Possibly he’s sleeping with her, c’est la guerre and all that, one doesn’t ask awkward questions. Anyway, the girl’s just been taken by the local Gestapo, put in some jail in the next village for questioning. I expect you know what that means.”

“They torture her, don’t they?”

“Yes, and if that doesn’t work they’ll drag in her parents, too, and torture them right in front of her, and by the end of it she’s singing like a canary, as you Americans say, and when she can’t sing any more they put her on the train for the prison camps.”

Davenport paused to suck on his cigarette. Iris couldn’t speak, couldn’t even ask what happened next. The sun had begun to set behind them, and it turned Davenport’s hair a fiery shade of red.

“Now, it so happens they’ve got a plane coming in two nights hence, a supply drop. They fly in on this ruddy old airplane called a Lysander, dark of the moon, collect the reports and drop off radios and money and cigarettes and that kind of thing. And sometimes personnel, too. Land some fresh agents and cart away the ones that have cracked up or had their covers blown. So Beauchamp’s got a plan. He’s going to rescue this girl from prison and take her to the rendezvous and put her on that plane for England.”

The cigarette was finished. Davenport dropped it in the sea and lit another. “You understand it’s his bloody radio operator, his ears and mouth, and who knows what she’s told the Germans by now. Besides which, someone has to keep an eye out for the Lysander, you know, guide her in with the flashlights, make sure there’s no ambush. So Beauchamp heads out to spring this girl out of Gestapo hands and tells his junior to stay. Junior does as he’s told, heads out of that basement and finds a barn, moves somewhere else the next night, and on the third night he heads out to the landing site nice and early, makes his recon, no Germans. Settles back and waits. Finally he hears the plane. Big loud propeller noise, rackety rackety rackety. He takes out his flashlight, signals them in. Ship’s coming to land. Gunfire.”

“But you said there weren’t any Germans!”