"Masterton, Graham - The Devils of D-Day" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

I was only about a half mile down the road, though, when I saw the sign that said Pont D'Ouilly, 4 km. I looked at my watch. It was only half past four, and I wondered if a quick detour to look at the old cousins' haunted tank might be worth while. If it was any good, I could take a photograph of it tomorrow, in daylight, and Roger might like it for his book. Roger Kellman was the guy who had written the history for which I was drawing all these maps, The Days After D-Day, and anything to do with military memorabilia would have him licking his lips like Sylvester the cat.

I turned off left, and almost immediately wished I hadn't. The road went sharply downhill, twisting and turning between trees and rocks, and it was slithery with ice, mud and half-frozen cowshit. The little Citroen bucked and swayed from side to side, and the windshield steamed up so much from my panicky breathing that I had to slide open the side window and lean out; and that wasn't much fun, with the outside temperature well down below freezing.

I passed silent, dilapidated farms, with sagging barns and closed windows. I passed grey fields in which cows stood like grubby brown-and-white jigsaws, frozen saliva hanging from their hairy lips. I passed shuttered houses, and slanting fields that went down to the dark winter river. The only sign of life that I saw was a tractor, its wheels so caked with ochre clay that they were twice their normal size, standing by the side of the road with its motor running. There was nobody in it.

Eventually, the winding road took me down between rough stone walls, under a tangled arcade of leafless trees, and over the bridge at Ouilly. I kept a lookout for the tank the old cousins had talked about, but the first time I missed it altogether; and I spent five minutes wrestling the stupid car back around the way it had come, stalling twice and almost getting jammed in a farm gateway. In the greasy farmyard, I saw a stable door open, and an old woman with a grey face and a white lace cap stare out at me with suspicion, but then the door closed again, and I banged the 2CV into something resembling second gear and roared back down the road.

You could have missed the tank in broad daylight, let alone at dusk in the middle of a freezing Norman winter. Just as I came around the curve of the road, I saw it, and I managed to pull up a few yards away, with the Citroen's suspension complaining and groaning. I stepped out of the car into a cold pile of cow dung, but at least when it's chilled like that it doesn't smell. I scraped my shoe on a rock by the side of the road and then walked back to look at the tank.

It was dark and bulky, but surprisingly small. I guess we're so used to enormous Army tanks these days that we forget how tiny the tanks of World War II actually were. Its surface was black and scaly with rust, and it was so interwoven with the hedge that it looked like something out of Sleeping Beauty, with thorns and brambles twisted around its turret, laced in and out of its tracks, and wound around its stumpy cannon. I didn't know what kind of a tank it was, but I guessed it was maybe a Sherman or something like that. It was obviously American: there was a faded and rusted white star on its side, and a painting of some kind that time and the weather had just about obliterated. I kicked the tank, and it responded with a dull, empty booming sound.

A woman came walking slowly along the road with an aluminium milk pail. She eyed me cautiously as she approached, but as she drew near she stopped and laid down her pail. She was quite young, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, and she wore a red spotted headscarf. She was obviously the farmer's daughter. Her hands were rough from pulling cows' udders in cold dawn barns, and her cheeks were bright crimson, like a painted peasant doll's. I said: 'Bonjour, mademoiselle,' and she nodded in careful reply. She said, 'You are American?' 'That's right.'

'I thought so. Only Americans stop and look.' 'You speak good English.'

She didn't smile. 'I was au-pair in England, in Pinner, for three years.'

'But then you came back to the farm?' 'My mother died. My father was all alone.' I said, 'He has a loyal daughter.' 'Yes,' she said, lowering her eyes. 'But I expect I will go away again one day. It's very solitaire out here. Very lonesome.'

I turned back to the grim brooding bulk of the abandoned tank. 'I was told this was haunted,' I said. 'At night, you can hear the crew talking.' The girl said nothing.

I waited for a while, and then turned again and looked across the road at her. 'Is that true, do you think?' I asked her. 'That it's haunted?'

'You mustn't speak about it,' she said. 'If you speak about it, it turns the milk.'

I glanced down at her aluminium pail. 'You're serious?

If you speak about the ghosts in the tank, the milk goes off?'

She whispered, 'Yes.'

I thought I'd heard everything, but this was amazing. Here, in modern France, an intelligent young lady was whispering in the presence of a beaten-up old Sherman tank, in case her fresh milk curdled. I rested my hand on the tank's cold rusted mudguard, and I felt as though I'd found something quite special. Roger would have adored it.

'Have you heard the ghosts yourself?' I asked her.

She quickly shook her head.

'Do you know anybody who has? Anybody I could speak to?'

She picked up her pail, and started to walk off down the road. But I crossed over and kept pace with her, even though she wouldn't look at me, and wouldn't answer.

'I don't want to be nosey, mam'selle. But we're getting a book together, all about D-Day and what happened afterwards. And this seems like the kind of story I could really use. I mean it. Surely someone's heard the voices, if they're real?'

She stopped walking, and stared at me hard. She was quite pretty for a Norman peasant. She had that straight nose you see on nth-century women in the Bayeux tapestry, and opalescent green eyes. Underneath her mud-spattered jerkin and her sensible skirt and her rubber boots, she had quite a noticeable figure, too.

I said, 'I don't know what you've got to be so sensitive about. It's only a story, right? I mean, ghosts don't exist, right?'

She kept staring. Then she said, 'It's not a ghost, it's different from that.'