He touched her. ‘You’re cold. Won’t it wait?’
‘No—oh, no! You’ve got to know everything before he… before we’re found.’
‘ He? Who’s he?’
She was quiet a long time. Hip almost spoke and then thought better of it. And when she did talk, she seemed so far from answering his question that he almost interrupted; but again he quelled it, letting her lead matters in her own way, in her own time.
She said, ‘You found something in a field; you had your hands on it just long enough to know what it was, what it could mean to you and to the world. And then the man who was with you, the soldier, made you lose it. Why do you suppose he did that?’
‘He was a clumsy, brainless bastard.’
She made no immediate comment but went on, ‘The medical officer then sent in to you, a Major, looked exactly like that Pfc to you.’
‘They proved otherwise.’
He was close enough to her to feel the slight movement in the dark as she nodded. ‘Proof: the men who said they were with him in a plane all afternoon. Now, you had a sheaf of files which showed a perturbation of some sort which affected proximity fuses over a certain area. What happened to them?’
‘I don’t know. My room was locked, as far as I know, from the time I left that day until they went to search it.’