The sergeant shook his head. ‘I reckon all you’ll find is empty French positions and soldiers with tails between their legs.’

As Henderson drove away he heard someone banging on the side of the truck and pulled up. He expected someone to say they’d changed heart and wanted to climb in the back, but instead a skinny lad stepped on to the running board beside Marc and jabbed a sheet of paper through the window.

‘I don’t have an envelope or a stamp, but the address is at the top of the paper and I reckon you’ve got a better chance of getting it to my wife than I have.’

Marc was startled. The soldier seemed more like one of the older lads from the orphanage than someone with a wife.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Marc said.

Henderson shook his head as they drove on beneath the hanging branches. ‘War does funny things to people,’ he sighed. ‘Mad bastards.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The diesel-powered truck had seen better days and the engine became unhappy at anything over fifty kilometres per hour. Henderson had resigned himself to fate and didn’t bother to hurry: if Herr Potente had arrived before his message and taken the children, there was nothing he could do.

Every so often, Marc would climb through to the back of the truck and pass loaves to the hungry soldiers lining the road, but Henderson told him to close the canopy whenever they got into traffic because he didn’t want to risk getting mobbed. They stopped and ate a good meal in Blois, courtesy of a restaurant run by an Englishman who was an old friend of Henderson.

The restaurateur knew a local farmer who had a supply of diesel and Henderson paid two gold ingots for a twenty-litre drum. It was an exorbitant price, but with fuel so scarce he was pleased to have found any at all and now he had enough to drive all the way to Bordeaux.

The sky was turning dark as they crossed the bridge into Tours. Henderson stopped at the first church he came to, but they had to wait a quarter-hour for the evening mass to finish before they could ask the priest for the location of his retired colleague who’d taken in a pair of orphans.

The priest drew directions on a scrap of notepaper and although they were slightly ambiguous, the truck reached the little farmhouse within half an hour. Henderson drove on past the house and switched off the headlamps and the engine as he rolled up to a metal gate. He took out the silenced pistol and spoke to Marc as he replaced the bullet he’d fired earlier in the day.

‘If the Germans intercepted our message they could be waiting for me. So I’ll approach from the side and cut across the field to the rear of the house.’

‘Shall I cover your back?’ Marc asked.