The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson

       About the Publisher

Book One Outlaws of the Mind

       Chapter 1

       30th October 1940, London. Night 54 of the Blitz.

      She was running, running as she had done before in her dreams, except this wasn’t a dream, even though with the flares dropping, as slowly as petals, and the yellow light, and the dark streets with the orange glow on the skyline it could easily be a dream, a horror dream.

      She flinched at a tremendous explosion in a nearby street, staggered at the shudder in the ground, nearly ploughed into the paving stones face-first, legs kicking back wildly. She pushed up off a low wall at the front of a house and her feet were slapping against the pavement again. She ran faster as she saw the Auxiliary Fire Service outside the house. New hoses uncoiled from the engines and joined the spaghetti in the black glass street as they trained more water on the back of the house, which was no longer a house but half a house. The whole of one side blown away and the grand piano with two legs over the startling new precipice, its lid hanging open like a tongue lapping up the flames, which set off a terrible twanging as the fire plucked at the piano strings and snapped them, peeled them back.

      She stood there with her hands over her ears to the unbearable sound of destruction. Her eyes and mouth were wide open as the back of the house collapsed into the neighbour’s garden, leaving the kitchen in full view and oddly intact. A hissing noise of escaping gas from the ruptured mains suddenly thumped into flame and burst across the street, pushing the firemen back. There was a figure lying in the kitchen, not moving and with clothes alight.

      She jumped up on to the low wall at the side of the house and screamed into the blistering heat of the burning house.

      ‘Daddy! Daddy!’

      A fireman grabbed her and hauled her roughly back, almost threw her at a warden, who tried to hold her but she wrenched herself free just as the piano, the piano that she’d been playing to him only two hours before, fell from its precipice with a loud crack and a discord that reached into her chest and squeezed her lungs. Now she saw all the sheet music going up in flames and he was lying on the floor at the foot of the wall of fire, which the AFS where hosing down so that it hissed and sputtered, but didn’t go out.

      Another crack and this time the roof dropped, spitting whole window frames into the street like broken teeth, and crashed down on to the floor below, shedding great sledges of tiles which shattered on the pavement. There was a momentary pause, then the roof smashed through to the next floor and, like a giant candle snuff, suffocated the flaming music, crushed his supine body and dropped him amongst shafts of flaming timber into the bay window of the ground floor.

      The warden lunged at her again, got a hold of her collar, and she wheeled round and bit his wrist so that he flinched back his hand. She’s a wild one, this black-haired, gypsy-looking girl, thought the warden, but he had to get her away, poor thing, get her away from her daddy burning in the bay window in front of her. He went for her again, got her in a bear hug, her legs flailing, lashing out and then she went limp as a rag doll, bent in the middle over his arms.

      A woman, white-faced, ran up to the warden and said that the girl was her daughter, which confused him because he’d seen the man who she’d been calling Daddy and the warden knew that the man’s wife was dead in the kitchen.

      ‘She’s been calling for her daddy in the house there.’

      ‘That’s not her daddy,’ said the woman. ‘Her father’s dead. That’s her piano teacher.’

      ‘What’s she doing out here, anyway?’ he asked, getting official. ‘The All Clear hasn’t sounded…’

      The girl wrestled away from her mother and ran down the side of another house and into the garden, lit by the still falling flares. She ran across the yellow lawn and threw herself into the bushes growing against the back wall. Her mother followed. Bombs were still falling, the ack-ack was still pumping away on the Common, the searchlights swarming over the black velvet sky. Her mother was screaming at her, roaring over the noise, screeching with fright, savagely begging her to come out.

      The girl sat with her hands over her ears, eyes closed. Only two hours before he’d held her hands, told her she was as nervous as a cat, stroked each of her fingers, squared her shoulders to that same piano and she’d played for him, played like a dream for him, so that he’d told her afterwards he’d closed his eyes and left London and the war and found a green meadow in the sunshine, somewhere where the trees were flashing with red and gold in the autumn wind.

      The first wave of bombers moved off. The ack-ack fell silent. All that was left in the cold autumn air was the roar of the conflagration and the hiss of water on burning wood. She crawled out of the bushes. Her mother grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her backwards and forwards. The girl was calm, but her face was set, her teeth gritted and her eyes black and unseeing.

      ‘You’re a stupid girl, Andrea. A stupid, stupid girl,’ said her mother.

      The girl took in her mother’s white raving face in the dark and yellow garden, her face hard and determined.

      ‘I hate Germans,’ she said. ‘And I hate you.’

      Her mother slapped her hard across the face.

       Chapter 2

       7th February 1942, Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s East Front HQ, Rastenburg, East Prussia.

      The aircraft, a Heinkel III bomber refitted for passenger use, began its descent over the vast blackness of the pine forests of East Prussia. The low moan of its two engines brought with it the bleakness of the vast, snow-covered Russian steppes, the emptiness of the gutted, burnt-out railway station at Dnepropetrovsk and the endlessness of the frozen Pripet marshes between Kiev and the start of Polish pine.

      The plane landed and taxied in a miasma of snow thrashed up into the darkness by its propellers. A coated figure, huddled against the icy blast, slipped into this chill world from a neat hole which had opened up in the belly of the aircraft. A car from the Führer’s personal pool waited just off the wing tip and the chauffeur, collar up to his hat, held the door open. Fifteen minutes later the guard at the gate of Restricted Area I admitted Albert Speer, architect, into the military compound of Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters for the first time. Speer went straight to the officers’ canteen and ate a large meal with appropriate wolfishness, which would have reminded his fellow diners, if they’d had room for empathy, just how difficult it was to keep the latest far-flung corner of the Third Reich supplied.

      Two captains, Karl Voss and Hans Weber, intelligence officers in their mid twenties attached to the Army Chief of Staff, General Zeitzler, had been standing outside stamping their feet and smoking cigarettes when Speer arrived.

      ‘Who’s that?’ asked Voss.

      ‘I knew you’d ask that.’

      ‘You don’t think that’s a normal question when somebody you don’t know walks past?’

      ‘You forgot the word “important”. When somebody important walks past.’

      ‘Piss off, Weber.’

      ‘I’ve seen you.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Let’s get back,’ said Weber, chucking his cigarette.

      ‘No, tell me.’

      ‘Your problem, Voss…is that you’re too intelligent. Heidelberg University