Finn
In the afternoon, after we’d got back from the dinghy sailing, I was sitting on the porch when Philly came down from her rest. She had only eaten half of her sandwich at lunchtime and then said she needed to go and lie down on her bed for a while.
I said no thank you and I would be OK doing some Sudokus for a while.
‘You know, tomorrow is the last day of the camp and we’re going to be doing the expedition to Fort Boyard. You could both come too, if you like.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Today was enough.’
‘OK, well, you could just come and wave us off, if you prefer. I’d love it if you even did that. See how you feel in the morning.’ Then Dad drove away in the car to get back to the harbour.
When Philly reappeared, I asked her, ‘Have you had a long enough pause?’
‘I feel like a new woman,’ she said.
I looked at her. She was still just as old as she had been when she went upstairs.
In fact, she was 1 hour and 12 minutes older.
But I didn’t say that, because Mum once told me talking to ladies about their age is another thing We Don’t Do, after one of her friends said she’d be turning the big 4-0 soon and I said actually she looked a bit older than that, more like the big 4-5.
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘shall we go out on the bikes and look at some more gravestones?’
‘I think I’d better just stay here for the rest of the day, if you don’t mind,’ she replied. ‘Even after a good rest, I’m still feeling a bit wiped out after our exciting morning.’
Then she said she’d been doing some thinking, after our sailing trip, and she’d reached the conclusion she was spending too much time chasing ghosts when she should really be concentrating on being in the land of the living while she still actually was.
She said going out on the dinghy and cycling around the island with me had shown her that, and she thought we’d spent enough time in graveyards.
‘But we haven’t found Ben yet,’ I said. ‘It’s Unfinished Business. You still haven’t got Closure.’
She nodded and her eyes looked a bit cloudy again.
‘Yes, but I don’t think he’d want me to let however many months and years I have left on this Earth pass me by.
There’ve been too many false hopes, too many dead ends, and they take their toll.
When I was out on the dinghy today, I realised I’ve spent too much of my life living in the past. I want to share what time I have left with my family now, especially with my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, making happy memories like the ones we did today.
There’s been enough sadness without continually chasing after more of it.
’ Then she picked up her ancient iPad and opened it up.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Are you going to do a crossword now?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And then we can think about what we’re going to cook for our supper.
I don’t know about you, but all that sea air has given me quite an appetite.
’ I knew that wasn’t true because of her only eating half her sandwich at lunchtime, so I deduced that she was trying to be cheerful and change the subject.
That made me think she was probably feeling quite sad about giving up her search really.
I haven’t given up though. If I’m going to be a War Detective, perhaps my first successful case will be tracking down what happened to Ben. It will look good on my CV when I come to apply for the job.
So I went to my room and wrote out what we know so far. I thought if I treated it like working out a maths problem, I might be able to make some more progress towards finding a solution. Here’s what I wrote ...
Known factors:
We know Ben was captured. Last known to be in Poitiers early in 1944. He was in the prison there and he tried to escape. So they had to find somewhere safer to keep him.
Philly has looked in other possible places in that immediate area and there’s no record of him there.
Philly has also eliminated concentration camps from her search – she checked all the Red Cross records, and he’s not listed there.
Assumptions:
Ben was not executed at Poitiers. (The Resistance people would have found out.)
He was moved to a higher security prison.
During the war, it would have been easier for the Germans to move prisoners to the closest place.
Therefore, looking at the map of France, the highest security prisons within reach of Poitiers were the citadel in Saint-Martin-de-Ré and Fort Boyard.
Furthermore, we can eliminate Fort Boyard because the Germans didn’t use it as a prison during the war, they just used it for target practice.
The ?le de Ré didn’t have a bridge joining it to the mainland back then, it could only be reached by a ferry, so it would have been a good place to bring prisoners if you wanted to make it hard for them to escape.
Hence, given assumptions (1), (2) and (3), and the factors listed above, we can hypothesise that Ben was brought to Saint-Martin.
And then I laminated it and went to tell Philly that I would like to cycle over to Saint-Martin tomorrow morning after all, to watch Dad and Iain and everyone else sail the bigger boat out of the harbour when they leave to go to Fort Boyard.