The Information Officer
Mark Mills
From the No. 1 bestseller and author of Richard & Judy pick The Savage Garden: an atmospheric world war two crime thriller for fans of Carlos Ruiz Zafon and Jed Rubenfeld"You want to know who I am? I'm the last living soul you'll ever set eyes on"Summer, 1942. For the people of Malta, suffering daily bombing raids, the British are the last line of defence against the Nazis. And it is Max Chadwick's job as the information officer to ensure the news the islanders receive maintains morale.So when Max is given proof suggesting a British officer is murdering local women, he knows the consequences of discovery are dire. With the violence on the war-ravaged island escalating daily, he embarks on a private investigation, hidden from the eyes of superiors, friends and the woman he loves.But Max finds himself torn between patriotic duty and personal honour in his efforts to track down the killer… an elusive figure always one step ahead of his hunter.
THE
INFORMATION
OFFICER
MARK MILLS
For Caroline, Gus and Rosie
You have killed a sweet lady,and her death shall fall heavy on you.
Much Ado About Nothing William Shakespeare
Contents
Title Page (#ua1415de2-735e-5156-b512-08ab51c33f40)Epigraph (#u17c0f917-a3d5-51aa-8a5a-d366dca5cbfe)London May (#u714a9466-cf74-5285-bafb-b7e34365a011)Malta April (#ua0a9ac30-9424-5ae1-b6d5-eebea9e4091a)Day One (#ufe984487-6c12-53f1-aa95-51f1b74405f9)He lay stretched (#u0d920717-95d2-509e-8e4e-e2dcfd187743)Day Two (#uc4069ca3-50dd-57eb-8cbe-8b129b45898b)High overhead (#ucab762af-623b-54c5-8c42-a75248eabffa)Day Three (#u3d24c8aa-1363-56bd-9514-1fe9baeb06bb)It wasn't a diary (#litres_trial_promo)Day Four (#litres_trial_promo)The message was short (#litres_trial_promo)Day Five (#litres_trial_promo)He usually wrote (#litres_trial_promo)Day Six (#litres_trial_promo)Tacitus contacted (#litres_trial_promo)Day Seven (#litres_trial_promo)It was perfect (#litres_trial_promo)Day Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Carmela Cassar had sobbed (#litres_trial_promo)Day Nine (#litres_trial_promo)London May 1951 (#litres_trial_promo)The fly-in of new Spitfires (#litres_trial_promo)Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)By The Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
LONDON May 1951 (#u296e1901-f8de-5c3d-b9ec-50e57552a8c9)
Mario was in a good mood.
This wasn’t saying much; he was often in a good mood. It was a legacy from his father—a simple, hardworking man who had drilled into his children the value of giving daily thanks for those things which most took for granted.
Mario cast an approving eye around the restaurant. A prime site a stone’s throw from the Ritz, and after just four short years, a reputation to match the very best in town. Not bad for the son of a shoemaker from a small village in northern Italy. Not bad at all.
The place was empty, just one lone customer at the bar, but it would be heaving within the hour, even in these austere times. He checked over the reservations book, memorizing the names and the table allocations. He prided himself on not having to refer to it once the first diners had arrived. There was the usual smattering of household names with strong views about where they sat. Juggling their wishes was about as hard as his job got.
Table 7 was the first to show. His face wasn’t well-known to Mario—one of the birthdays-andanniversaries-only crowd—but he remembered him as a generous tipper. He wore a good quality suit, its looser cut suggesting one of the new tailors just off Savile Row. He informed Mario that his wife would be arriving separately and requested a Dry Martini to keep him company in the meantime.
The wife was obviously a romantic because a special order had been placed earlier in the day for a bottle of wine to be brought to the table as a surprise. It was a white wine from a small French house and it had arrived by taxi along with written instructions and a generous contribution towards corkage.
It was already on ice, ready and waiting behind the bar. Mario tipped Gregory the wink before taking up a discreet position behind a bushy palmetto to observe the reaction.
The man smiled at the appearance of the ice bucket, but the moment Gregory revealed the bottle to him he fell absolutely still, the blood draining from his face. He looked up at Gregory, speechless, and then his eyes darted wildly around the restaurant. They came to settle on the only other customer—the gentleman seated at the bar. His back was turned to Table 7, but he now swivelled round on his stool.
It was impossible to read the look that passed between the two men, but it crackled with a strange intensity. Poor Gregory was flummoxed. He offered to pour the wine, was ignored, then wisely chose to retire as the gentleman at the bar made his way over, clutching his cocktail. He was tall and balding and walked with a lazy grace.
Another thing Mario prided himself on was his absolute discretion, but this was a conversation he wanted to hear. He drifted towards Table 10, out of sight behind the high banquette but just within earshot, he calculated. He arrived as the balding man was taking a seat.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
There was a soft but unmistakable American lilt to his accent.
‘Where’s my wife?’ said the other man.
‘Don’t worry, she’s just fine.’
‘Where is she?’
‘At home. She thought we should talk.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s true. Call her if you like. Cigarette?’
‘I have my own.’
‘Try one of these—they’re Russian.’
Mario heard the cigarettes being lit and then the balding man say, ‘What’s your secret?’
‘My secret?’
‘You’ve barely aged in ten years.’
‘Nine.’
‘It feels longer.’
‘Does it?’
‘I miss Malta.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘You don’t seem very pleased to see me.’
‘What did you expect? The last time I saw you, you tried to kill me.’
Mario almost toppled a wine glass on Table 10.
‘Is that what they told you?’ asked the balding man.
‘They didn’t have to. I was there, remember?’
‘You’re wrong. I could have killed you. Maybe I should have. I chose not to.’
The other man gave a short snort of derision.
Mario was well out of his depth now and regretting his decision to eavesdrop. Help came in the form of a large party of diners who blew in through the door on a gale of laughter. Mario couldn’t see them from where he was lurking.
‘Isn’t that the actor everyone’s talking about?’ said the balding man.
‘I think so.’
‘I’m not sure a Fedora and a cloak suit a fellow that short. He looks like a kid playing at Zorro.’
Definitely Table 2, thought Mario, swooping from his hiding place to greet the new arrivals.
MALTA April 1942 (#u296e1901-f8de-5c3d-b9ec-50e57552a8c9)
She knew the cemetery well; not every gravestone, tomb and mausoleum, but most. She certainly knew it well enough to tread its twisting pathways with confidence, even on a moonless night such as this. Before the blackout restrictions, she would have been assisted on her way by a constellation of flickering candles, but with the deep darkness as her only companion she still walked with confidence and purpose.
The mellow scent of pine sap came at her clear on the warm night breeze. Tonight, however, it did battle with the rank odour of decay, of putrefaction. Two wayward German bombs—or possibly Italian, now that the cicci macaroni were back—had smacked into the hillside the previous night during a raid, reducing family tombs to rubble and wrenching coffins from the thin soil. Corpses in various states of decomposition had been scattered in all directions, their rude awakening like some dress rehearsal for the Day of Judgement.
It was Father Debono who had drawn this parallel for their benefit at early-morning Mass, and while it was the sort of observation for which he was known, and which endeared him to the younger members of his flock, his willingness to flirt with irreverence was a source of ongoing distrust among the more elderly. Many had furrowed their brows; some had even tut-tutted from their pews.
She knew where her sympathies lay, though. She knew that it was Father Debono, not old Grech and his wizened, holier-than-thou sister, who had spent that day in the thick of it, toiling through the pitiless heat and the inhuman stench to ensure that all the corpses were recovered and reburied with all the proper rites.
Judging from the smell, Father Debono and his small band of helpers had not been able to complete their grim task before nightfall, and she picked up her pace a little at the thought of the rats feasting on flesh nearby. She had always hated rats, even before the war, before the stories of what went on beneath the rubble of the bombed-out buildings had begun to circulate.
That’s when she saw the light up ahead: a flickering flame…the vague contours of a face…a man lighting a cigarette. Then darkness once more.
She slowed, more from respect than fear. With the cemetery doing a roaring trade, it was not the first time she had come across some grieving soul while making her way home from work in the early hours of the morning. She had once heard deep male sobs in the darkness and had removed her shoes so that the unfortunate person would not be disturbed by her footfalls on the paved pathway.
‘Good evening,’ she said quietly in Maltese as she drew level.
He was seated on the low stone wall to the right of the path, and he responded in English.
‘I think you’ll find it’s morning, Carmela.’
She didn’t know the voice, or if she did, she couldn’t place it.
‘Did you make good money tonight?’
He not only knew her, he knew what she did, and she was happy he couldn’t see the colour rising in her cheeks.
‘Yes, not bad.’
‘Oh, but you are, and you know it.’
It wasn’t so much the words as the slow, easy drawl with which they were delivered that set her heart racing.
His small laugh did something to soothe her building apprehension.
‘I was only joking.’
He drew long and hard on his cigarette. In the dim glow of burning tobacco, she could just discern that he was wearing khaki battle-dress: shirt and shorts. This didn’t help much. All the services had adopted it recently, and she was unable to make out the shoulder flashes.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Ah, now I’m insulted.’
It could have been Harry, or Bernard, or even young Bill, the one they all called ‘little Willy’ (before invariably erupting in laughter). But she didn’t feel like laughing, because it could have been almost any one of the officers who passed through the Blue Parrot on a typical night, and this man remained silent, enjoying her confusion, her discomfort, which was cruel and uncalled for.
‘I must go.’
He was off the wall and seizing her arm before she had taken two paces.
‘What’s the hurry?’
She tried to pull free, but his grip was firm, vice-like, painful. She let out a small cry and attempted to twist away. The manoeuvre failed miserably and she found herself trapped against him, her back pressed into his chest.
He clamped his free hand over her mouth. ‘Ssshhhh…’ he soothed.
He spat the cigarette away and put his mouth to her ear.
‘You want to know who I am? I’m the last living soul you’ll ever set eyes on.’
She didn’t need to know all of the words, she understood their meaning. And now she began to struggle in earnest, her thoughts turning to her home, her parents, her brothers, her dog, all so close, just a short way up the hill.
He repaid her efforts by twisting her left arm up behind her until something gave in her shoulder. The pain ripped through her, carrying her to the brink of unconsciousness, her knees starting to give. In desperation she tried to bite the hand gagging her cries but he cupped his fingers away from her teeth. His other hand released her now useless arm and jammed itself between her legs, into the fork of her thighs, pulling her back against him.
His breathing was strangely calm and measured, and there was something in the sound of it that suggested he was smiling.
When she felt him hardening against her, she began to weep.
Day One (#u296e1901-f8de-5c3d-b9ec-50e57552a8c9)
‘Tea or coffee?’
‘Which do you recommend?’
‘Well, the first tastes like dishwater, the second like slurry run-off.’
‘I’ll try the slurry run-off.’
Max summoned the attention of the waiter hovering nearby. He was new—squat and toad-like—some member of the kitchen staff drafted in to replace Ugo, whose wife had been wounded in a strafing attack at the weekend while out strolling with friends near Rabat. Gratifyingly, the pilot of the Messerschmitt 109 had paid for this outrage with his life, a Spitfire from Ta’ Qali dropping on to his tail moments later and bringing him down in the drink off the Dingli Cliffs.
‘How’s Ugo’s wife?’ Max enquired of the waiter.
‘She dead.’
‘Oh.’
In case there was any doubt, the waiter tilted his head to one side and let a fat tongue roll out his mouth. The eyes remained open, staring.
‘Two coffees, please.’
‘Two coffee.’
‘Yes, thank you.’
Max’s eyes tracked the waiter as he waddled off, but his thoughts were elsewhere, with Ugo, and wondering how long it would be before he smiled his crooked smile again.
He forced his attention back to the young man sitting across from him. Edward Pemberton was taking in his surroundings—the tall windows, the elaborately painted walls and the high, beamed ceiling—apparently immune to the mention of death.
‘What a beautiful place.’
‘It’s the old Auberge de Provence.’
Once home to the Knights of St John, the grand Baroque edifice now housed the Union Club, a welcome haven from the hard realities of war for the officer classes. The building seemed to bear a charmed life, standing remarkably unscathed among the ruins and rubble of Kingsway, Valletta’s principle street. With its reassuring whiff of a St James’s gentleman’s club, there was no better place to break the news to young Pemberton. It might help soften the blow.
‘Who’s Ugo?’
So he had been listening, after all.
‘The head waiter.’
‘How did his wife die?’
Max hesitated then told him the story. No point in pretending that things hadn’t turned nasty of late. In fact, it might fire his sense of outrage, winning him over to the cause, although, when it came to it, Pemberton would have very little say in the matter. He wouldn’t be leaving Malta any time soon; he just didn’t know it yet. Another bird of passage ensnared by the beleaguered garrison. Poor bastard.
Max spelled it out as gently as he could. The Lieutenant-Governor’s office had already been in touch with the brass in Gibraltar, who appreciated that Malta’s back was up against the wall. If Pemberton’s services were required on the island, then so be it. Needs must, and all that. Force majeure. First dibs to the downtrodden. You get the picture.
‘I understand,’ said Pemberton.
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely, sir. No objections.’
Max wanted to ask him if he had any notion of what lay in store for him: the breathless heat and the choking dust, the mosquitoes, sandflies and man-eating fleas, the sleepless nights and the starvation rations. Oh, and the Luftwaffe, who, together with the Regia Aeronautica, were intent on wiping the island off the map, on bombing it into oblivion.
‘I never wanted to go to Gib,’ Pemberton went on. ‘It never appealed…as a place, I mean.’
War as tourism, thought Max. Well, that’s one way of coming at it, and probably no better or worse than any other.
‘Malta has a lot to offer,’ said Max. ‘When the history of the war comes to be written, this little lump of rock in the middle of the Med will figure large.’
‘If you’re appealing to my vanity, it might just work.’
Max gave a short loud laugh which drew glances from a couple of artillery types at a nearby table. Pemberton was smiling coyly, faultless teeth flashing in his wide, strong mouth. Matinee idol looks and a sense of humour. Perfect fodder for Rosamund, Max mused. She’ll never forgive me if I don’t offer her right of first refusal.
Pemberton explained (with a degree of candour he would soon learn to curb) that he was sick of being shunted from pillar to post under the protective tutelage of his uncle, a big-wig in the War Office.
‘I should warn you, he won’t be best pleased.’
‘Then you can tell him that Malta has already saved your life. The seaplane you should have flown out on last night is missing.’
‘Missing?’
‘Brought down near Pantelleria, we think. They have Radio Direction Finding and a squadron of 109s stationed there. We won’t know for sure until we hear what Rome Radio has to say on the matter. They talk a lot of rubbish, of course, but we’ve grown pretty adept at panning for the small truths that matter to us.’
Pemberton stared forlornly at his cup of coffee before looking up. ‘I had lunch with the pilot yesterday. Douglas. I knew him from Alex. Douglas Pitt.’
Max had never heard of Pitt, but then the seaplane boys at Kalafrana Bay rarely mingled, not even with the other pilots. They were always on the go, running the two thousand-mile gauntlet between Alexandria and Gibraltar at opposite ends of the Mediterranean, breaking the journey in Malta—the lone Allied outpost in a hostile, Nazi-controlled sea.
‘You’ll get used to it.’
Pemberton’s eyes locked on to Max, demanding an explanation.
‘Look, I’d be lying if I said casualty rates weren’t running pretty high right now. People, they…well, they’re here one day, gone the next.’
When Pemberton spoke, there was a mild note of irritation in his tone. ‘That doesn’t mean you have to stop remembering them.’
Well actually it does, thought Max. Because if you spent your time thinking about the ones who’d copped it, you wouldn’t be able to function. In his first year he had written four heartfelt letters to the families of the three men and one woman he had known well enough to care for. He hadn’t written any such letters in the past year.
‘No, you’re right, of course,’ he said.
Pemberton would find his own path through it, assuming he survived long enough to navigate one.
‘So, tell me, what do you know about Malta?’
‘I know about Faith, Hope and Charity.’
Everyone knew about Faith, Hope and Charity; the newspapers back home had made sure of that, enshrining the names of the three Gloster Gladiators in the popular imagination. The story had courage-in-the-face-of-adversity written all over it, just what the home readership had required back in the summer of 1940. While Hitler skipped across northern Europe as though it were his private playground, on a small island in the Mediterranean three obsolescent bi-planes were bravely pitting themselves against the full might of Italy’s Regia Aeronautica, wrenched around the heavens by pilots barely qualified to fly them.
And so the myth was born. With a little assistance.
‘Actually, there were six of them.’
‘Six?’
‘Gloster Gladiators. And a bunch more held back for spares.’
Pemberton frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Three makes for a better story, and there were never more than three in the air at any one time, the others being unserviceable.’
The names had been coined then quietly disseminated by Max’s predecessor, their biblical source designed to chime with the fervent Catholicism of the Maltese.
‘It’s part of what we do at the Information Office.’
‘You mean propaganda?’
‘That’s not a word we like to use.’
‘I was told you were independent.’
‘We are. Ostensibly.’
Max detected a worrying flicker of youthful righteousness in the other man’s gaze. Six months back, he might have retreated and allowed Pemberton to figure it out for himself, but with Malta’s fortunes now hanging by a thread, there was no place for such luxuries. He needed Pemberton firmly in the saddle from day one.
‘Look, none of us is in the business of dragging people’s spirits down. The Huns and the Eyeties have cornered that market.’
He manufactured a smile, which Pemberton politely mirrored.
‘You’re evidently a bright young man, so I’m going to save you some time and tell you the way it is.’
He opened with a history lesson, partly because Pemberton’s file made mention of a respectable second-class degree in that subject from Worcester College, Oxford.
It was best, Max explained, to take the stuff in the newspapers back home about ‘loyal little Malta’ with a pinch of circumspection. At the outbreak of hostilities with Italy in June 1940, when that sawdust caesar Mussolini threw in his hand with Hitler, Malta was a far more divided island than the British press had ever acknowledged. The Maltese might have offered themselves up to the British Empire back in 1800, but almost a century and a half on there were many who wanted out of the relationship, their hearts set on independence from the mother country. Seated across the table from these Nationalists in the Council of Government were the Constitutionalists, defenders of the colonial cross. Not only were they superior in number, but they had the backing of the Strickland family, who effectively controlled the Maltese press, putting out two dailies: The Times of Malta and its vernacular sister paper, Il-Berqa.
The war had played into the hands of the Strickland loyalists, the first Italian bombs to rain down on the island severely denting the affinity felt by many of the Maltese for their nearest neighbours, a short hop to the north across the blue waters of the Mediterranean. But neither were the Maltese fools—far from it—they could spot a lie at a hundred paces, and many were wary of the Strickland rags, which they knew to be slanted towards the British Establishment.
Hence the Information Office, whose Daily Situation Report and Weekly Bulletin offered up for public consumption a cocktail of cold, factual and apparently unbiased news. In essence, the Daily Situation Report was a scorecard. How many of their bombs had found their mark? And how many planes had both they and we lost in the course of that day’s raids? There were grey areas, of course, not least of all, the often conflicting claims made by the RAF and the Artillery. In the wild confusion of a heavy raid on Grand Harbour, who could say with absolute certainty that a diving Stuka had been brought down by ack-ack fire and not the Hurricane on its tail?
Mediating such disputes had ruined many a pleasant evening for Max, all thanks to the Late Situation Report—an update to the Five O’clock Report which he was expected to put out at 10.45 p.m. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d been summoned to the phone in the middle of an enjoyable dinner party to listen to the tedious bleatings of HQ Royal Artillery and RAF Intelligence, each so eager to stake their claim to another precious scalp.
He thought it best to hold this information back from Pemberton. He certainly didn’t explain that the main reason he’d lobbied the Lieutenant-Governor’s office for an assistant to take over the editorship of the Daily Situation Report was so that his own evenings might remain uncluttered by such irritations.
Instead, he played up his own onerous workload, spelling out in some detail the other activities of the Information Office: the monitoring of enemy radio stations in the Mediterranean; the translation of BBC broadcasts and speeches by the Governor into Maltese; and the production of light entertainments, which, along with the relentless stream of news items, were put out over the island’s Rediffusion system.
‘Gilding the pill,’ said Pemberton distractedly, when Max was finished.
‘Nicely put.’
‘But not propaganda.’
‘Perish the thought.’
‘Well, not ostensibly.’
‘Never ostensibly. Before the week’s out, I’ll be up in front of the Finance Committee fighting to justify the additional expense to the department of one Edward Pemberton.’
No lie there. He would have to make his case, then the Maltese representatives would haul him over the coals, and then they would agree to his demands. In its own small way, this predictable little theatre, played out with tedious regularity, laid bare one of the grander themes of colonial administration: Allow them a voice, then tell them what to say.
‘I think I get the picture.’
‘Excellent. Now, where are you staying?’
‘The Osbourne.’
‘We’ll have to find you more permanent digs. There’s a drinks party later. It would pay you to show your face. We might be able to rustle up something for you.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘If you don’t mind riding pillion, I can pick you up around five.’
‘You have a motorcycle?’
‘Technically, it’s three motorcycles, held together with wire and will-power.’
Pemberton flashed his film-star smile.
Yes, thought Max, Rosamund will be most pleased with her unexpected guest.
She was.
Her hand even went to her hair when she greeted them at the door, something it had never done for Max.
The house sat near the top of Prince of Wales Road in Sliema, just shy of the police station. It was typical of many Maltese homes in that the unassuming façade gave no indication of the treasures that lay behind it. The wooden entrance door was flanked by two windows, with three more windows on the upper floor united by a stone balcony overhanging the street. Perfectly symmetrical, the front of the house was unadorned except for a brass nameplate set in the white stucco—Villa Marija—and a small glazed terracotta roundel above the entrance which showed a disconsolate-looking Virgin clutching her child.
Rosamund was wearing an oyster-grey satin evening gown, and once her hand had tugged self-consciously at her auburn locks, Max made the introductions. Rosamund offered a slender hand, drawing Pemberton inside as they shook, which permitted her to fire an approving look over his shoulder at Max as she did so.
The entrance hall was cool and cavernous, impeccably decked out with antique furniture. A Persian rug sprawled at their feet and a handful of colourful, impressionistic paintings hung from the walls. Pemberton looked mildly stunned.
‘Tell me, Edward, you aren’t by any chance related to Adrian Pemberton, are you?’
‘If he lives in Chepstow Crescent, then he’s my cousin, I’m afraid.’
‘Why should you be afraid?’
‘You obviously haven’t heard.’
‘No, but I can’t wait.’
She hooked her arm through his, steering him across the drawing room towards the large walled garden at the rear of the house.
‘Has he done something terribly wicked? I do hope he’s done something terribly wicked. It would bear out all my suspicions about him.’
Max dumped his scuffed leather shoulder bag on the divan and followed them outside.
Rosamund had three rules when it came to her ‘little get-togethers’. The first was that she personally greeted everyone at the door. The second was that it was unforgivably rude to speculate about the source of the copious quantities of spirits on offer, when it was barely possible to locate a bottle of beer on the island. The third rule stated quite simply that there was to be no ‘talking shop’ after the first hour, to which end she would ring a small hand bell at the appointed time.
‘All week I get nothing from Hugh but barrages and Bofors and Junker 88s. For a few small hours, I’d like to talk about something else, and I’m sure you all would too.’
Hugh was her husband, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Artillery. A mathematician of some standing before the war, it was Hugh who had worked out the intricate calculations behind the coordinated box barrage over Grand Harbour—an impressive feat, and one which had seen him elevated to the position of senior staff officer at RA HQ. In his early forties, he looked considerably older, which played to his private passion—the theatre—making him eligible for a host of more senior roles, which he scooped up uncontested every time the Malta Amateur Dramatic Club put on one of their plays. He was always trying to get Max to audition for some token part to make up the numbers: butler, chauffeur, monosyllabic house guest.
While Rosamund abandoned her first rule in order to parade her new catch around the garden, Max made for the drinks table in the grateful shade beneath one of the orange trees. True to form, there was no one to pour the drinks. It wouldn’t be good for relations if the Maltese staff were to witness the excesses of their brothers-in-suffering. Max was concocting a whisky-and-soda when he heard a familiar voice from behind him.
‘Ah, thou honeysuckle villain.’
‘Henry the Fourth,’ Max responded, without turning.
‘Not good enough and you know it.’
Max swivelled to face Hugh, whose forehead, as ever, was beaded with perspiration. It was an old and slightly tedious game of theirs. Hugh liked to toss quotations at him, usually Shakespeare, but not always.
‘Henry the Fourth, Part II,’ said Max.
‘Damn.’
‘Mistress Quickly to Falstaff. I studied it at school.’
‘Double damn. That makes three in a row.’
‘But only twenty-two out of thirty-eight.’
Hugh gave a little chortle. ‘Glad to see I’m not the only one keeping score.’
‘Speaking of scores, congratulations on your century.’
‘Yes, quite a month. One hundred and two, all told.’
‘One hundred and one; 249 Squadron are claiming the Stuka over Ta’ Qali.’
‘Bloody typical.’
‘Let them have it. Their heads are down right now.’
‘Not for much longer.’
Max hesitated. ‘So the rumours are true.’
‘What’s that, old man?’
‘They’re sending us another batch of Spitfires.’
‘Couldn’t possibly say—it’s Top Secret.’
‘Then I’ll just have to ask Rosamund.’
Hugh laughed. His wife had a reputation for being ‘genned up’ on everything. No news, however trivial, slipped through Rosamund’s net. Given her connections across the Services, it was quite possible that she knew near on as much as the Governor himself. The fact that she had cultivated a close friendship with His Excellency—or ‘H. E.’, as she insisted on referring to him—no doubt boosted her store of knowledge.
‘I’ll be right back,’ said Hugh, grabbing a bottle. ‘Damsel in distress over by the bougainvillea. Trevor Kimberley’s better half. A bit on the short side, but easy on the eye. And thirsty.’
‘We like them thirsty.’
‘Thou honeyseed rogue.’
‘Henry the Fourth, Part II.’
‘Doesn’t count,’ said Hugh, disappearing with the bottle.
Max turned back to the drinks table and topped up his glass. Hugh was right; April had been quite a month—the darkest yet. The artillery might have knocked down over a hundred enemy aircraft, but that was largely due to the more frequent and promiscuous raids. The figures were in, and the Luftwaffe had flown a staggering 9,600 sorties against the island in April, almost double the number for March, which itself had shattered all previous records. The lack of any meaningful competition from the boys in blue had also contributed to the artillery’s impressive bag. There weren’t many pilots who’d logged more than a few hours of operational flying time all month, thanks to the glaring lack of serviceable Spitfires and Hurricanes. Even when the airfields at Ta’ Qali, Luqa and Hal Far pooled their resources, you were still looking at less than ten. The pilots were used to taking to the air with the odds mightily stacked against them—things had never been any different on Malta, and you rarely heard the pilots complain—but what could a handful of patched-up, battle-scarred crates really hope to achieve against a massed raid of Junker 88s with a covering fighter force of sixty?
Things might have been less dispiriting if a large flock of spanking new Spits hadn’t flown in just ten days ago—forty-six in all, fresh from Greenock in Scotland by way of Gibraltar. The US Navy’s aircraft carrier USS Wasp had seen them safe as far as the waters off Algiers, and the fly-off had gone without a hitch, all but two of the batch making it to Malta on the long-range fuel tanks. It had seemed too good to be true. And it was. Field-Marshal Kesselring, sitting safely in Sicily, was no fool. He had obviously got wind of the reinforcement flight and figured it best to wait for the aircraft to land before making his move. Within three days of their arrival almost half of the new Spitfires had been destroyed, and the rest had been put out of action by the Luftwaffe’s intensive carpet-bombing of the airfields.
Kesselring had his man on the ropes and was going for the knockout. He knew it, they knew it. Because without fighter aircraft to challenge the Luftwaffe’s aerial dominance, there was little hope of any supply convoys getting through. And if that didn’t happen very soon, the guns would fall silent and the island would starve. Invasion, an imminent threat for months now, would inevitably follow.
Christ, it was unthinkable. So best not to think about it, Max told himself, topping up his glass once more and turning to survey the garden.
He found himself face to face with Mitzi.
She had crept up on him unannounced and was regarding him with a curious and slightly concerned expression, her startling green eyes reaching for his, a stray ray of sunlight catching her blonde hair. Not for the first time, he found himself silenced by her beauty.
‘What were you thinking?’
‘Nothing important.’
‘Your shoulders were sagging. You looked…deflated.’
‘Not any more.’
‘Flatterer.’
‘It’s true.’
‘If it’s true, then why didn’t you even look for me?’
‘I did.’
‘I was watching you from the moment you arrived.’
‘You were talking to that bald chap from Defence Security over by the bench.’
‘Well, I must say, you have excellent peripheral vision.’
‘That’s what my sports master used to say. It’s why he stuck me in the centre of the midfield.’
‘You don’t really expect me to talk about football, do you?’
‘When Rosamund rings her bell we might have no choice.’
A slow smile broke across her face. ‘My God, I’ve missed you,’ she said softly and quite unexpectedly.
The desire in her voice was palpable, almost painful to his ears.
‘You’re breaking the rules,’ said Max.
‘Damn the rules.’
‘You’re forgetting—you were the one who made the rules.’
‘Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Max.’
‘It’s the best I can come up with under the circumstances.’
‘Now you’re being abstruse.’ She handed him her empty glass. ‘Mix me another, will you?’
‘Remind me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Bandits at one o’clock,’ he said in a whisper.
He had spotted them approaching over her shoulder: Hugh with Trevor Kimberley’s dark and pretty wife in tow.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Mitzi sighed volubly. ‘Another gin-and-French.’
Max took her glass. ‘So where’s Lionel? Out on patrol?’
Hugh was within earshot now. ‘Be careful, old chap, asking questions like that can land a man in deep water.’
‘Hello, Margaret,’ said Max.
Margaret Kimberley nodded benignly and maybe a little drunkenly.
‘I mean,’ Hugh persisted, ‘why would you want to know the details of what our noble submariners are up to?’
‘Besides, I’m hardly the person to ask,’ said Mitzi. ‘Lionel doesn’t tell me anything. One day he’s gone, then one day he’s back, that’s all I know.’
‘It’s all any of us needs to know.’
‘Trevor tells me nothing,’ chipped in Margaret.
Hugh peered down at her. ‘That, my dear, is because your Trevor does next to nothing for most of the time. Take it from me as his commanding officer.’
‘Somehow, Hugh, I can’t think of you as a commanding officer,’ Mitzi chimed, a playful glint in her eye. ‘A genial one, maybe, and slightly inept, but not a commanding one.’
Margaret’s hand shot to her mouth to stifle a laugh, which drew an affronted scowl from Hugh.
‘Bang goes Trevor’s promotion,’ said Max, to more laughter.
A little while later the ladies left together for the far end of the garden. Max fought to ignore the lazy sway of Mitzi’s slender hips beneath her cotton print dress.
‘Entre nous,’ said Hugh, considerably less abashed about admiring the view, ‘all the subs will be gone for good within a week or so.’
‘Really?’
‘Well, you’ve seen the pasting they’ve been taking down at Lazaretto Creek. And since Wanklyn came a cropper…’
The loss of the Upholder a couple of weeks back had rocked the whole garrison, right down to the man on the street. Subs had been lost before, subs driven by good men known to all, men who had once lit up the bar at the Union Club and whose bones were now resting somewhere on the seabed. ‘Wankers’ Wanklyn was different, though. A tall, softly spoken Scotsman with a biblical beard, he was modest in the way that only the truly great can afford to be. With well over 100,000 tons of enemy shipping under his belt and a Victoria Cross on his chest, he exuded a quiet invincibility which others fed off, drew strength from. Not one of his peers begrudged him his star status because he never once played to it; he just got on with the job. And now he was gone, sent to the bottom, a mere human being after all.
As the Information Officer, Max had been the first to learn of the Upholder’s fate. It was buried away in the transcript of an Italian broadcast—a brief mention of a nameless submarine destroyed in an engagement off Tripoli. He had made some discreet enquiries, enough to narrow the field to the Upholder, and then he had sat on the news for a couple of days.
Yes, he had wanted Wanklyn to prove him wrong, he had wanted to see the Maltese packing the bastions again, cheering the Upholder home, straining to see if there were any new chevrons stitched to the Jolly Roger she was flying. But he had known in his bones that it wasn’t going to happen, he had known that what he needed was a couple of days to figure out how to play it, how to soften the blow for his readers and listeners.
But that was then, and this was now, and while he understood that pulling the subs out of the island might be the judicious thing to do, he wasn’t thinking about his job and how he was going to break the news on the island, he was thinking about Mitzi. If the subs were really leaving, then she would be too; posted elsewhere with her husband. Where would they end up? Alexandria, probably. He wrestled with the notion—separated from Mitzi by nigh on a thousand miles of water—but it was too big and unwieldy to get a grip on.
Hugh misconstrued his silence as professionalism. ‘Mum’s the word, but I thought I should tip you the wink.’
‘Thanks, Hugh, I appreciate it.’
‘You’ll find a way to present it in a positive light, you always do.’ He rested a hand on Max’s shoulder. ‘Now go and join the other renegades in the crow’s nest. Freddie and Elliott are already up there. No Ralph, though—he called earlier to say he can’t get away.’
Max did as he was told, eager for the distraction of his friends, the chance to throw a blanket over his feelings. Villa Marija had been occupied by a naval officer before the war, and its large flat roof, still referred to as the crow’s nest, was where the younger crowd generally gathered to flap and caw. Anything under the age of thirty was deemed to be young, and you were never quite sure what you were going to find when you stepped from the stairwell into the glare.
There was usually a pleasing smattering of adolescent daughters in colourful home-stitched frocks, still coming to terms with their new breasts, which they wore with a kind of awkward pride. Circling them, inevitably, would be the younger pilots, barely more than boys but their speech already peppered with RAF slang. They were always taking a view on things—a good view, a dim view, an outside view, a ropey view—or accusing each other of ‘shooting a line’. Enemy bombers were ‘big jobs’, enemy fighters ‘little jobs’; the cockpit was their ‘office’; and they never landed, they ‘pancaked’. The thing they feared most in a flap was being bounced by a gaggle of little jobs from up-sun.
Sure enough, the pilots were there, a bevy of slender young things with flushed complexions hanging on their every word. Others hovered nearby, one ear on the tales of doughty deeds. The airmen were the only ones in the garrison capable of carrying the battle to the enemy, and their stories offered a tonic against the daily round of passive resistance.
Freddie and Elliott were well out of earshot at the far end of the roof terrace. Freddie was making good use of a large pink gin, his face a picture of evident distaste at whatever it was that the tall American was telling him. Max pushed his way through the throng towards them.
‘Gentlemen.’
‘Ah, Maximillian,’ said Elliott. ‘Just in time.’
‘For what?’
‘A little conundrum I was posing to Freddie here.’
‘Is that what you call it?’ grimaced Freddie.
‘Well, it sure is for their commanding officers.’
‘Sounds intriguing,’ said Max.
‘It rapidly becomes disgusting.’
Elliott laughed. ‘I hadn’t figured you for an old prude.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with prudishness,’ Freddie bristled. ‘It’s a question of…well, morality.’
‘Ah, morality…’
‘To say nothing of the law.’
‘Ah, the law…’ Elliott parroted, with even more scepticism.
‘You trained as a lawyer, you must have some respect for the law.’
‘Sure I do. You don’t want to screw with an institution that can send an innocent man to the electric chair.’ Elliott turned to Max before Freddie’s frustration could shape itself into a response. ‘You want to hear it?’
‘Fire away.’
‘It’s very simple. You’re a wing commander taking a break from it all up at the pilots’ rest camp on St Paul’s Bay. You know it? Sure you do, from when Ralph was wounded.’
‘I do.’
‘Then you can picture it. It’s late and, okay, you’re a bit tight. But, hey, who wouldn’t be, after all you’ve been through these past months? Anyway, you’re feeling good and you’re looking for your room. And you find your room. Only it isn’t your room. It’s someone else’s room. And that someone else is in what you think is your bed with someone else.’
‘You’re losing me.’
‘Stay lost,’ was Freddie’s advice.
‘There are two guys in the bed, okay? And they’re, well, I don’t how to put it…’
‘I think I get your meaning.’
‘Of course you do, you went to an English boarding school.’
‘As did you,’ said Freddie, ‘in case you’d forgotten.’
‘And a sorry dump it was too. Anyway, they’re good men, officers, both of them. One’s in your squadron, the other’s not, but you know him. And he’s a first-class pilot, reliable, what you fellows would call a “press-on” type…’ Elliot paused. ‘What do you do?’
‘What do I do?’
‘What do you do?’
‘Well, I order them to desist at once.’
Elliott laughed. ‘I think you can assume they desisted the moment you opened the goddamn door. Do you report them?’
‘Report them?’
‘To the Air Officer Commanding. It’s not a question of morality, or the law, or even of taste. I mean, I’ve never felt the need to place my penis in another man’s dung—’—‘Oh Christ,’ Freddie blurted into his gin—‘but it doesn’t stop me being able to make a judgement on the situation.’
Max thought on it. ‘I don’t report them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Morale. A squadron’s like a family.’
‘You’re ready to lie to your family?’
‘No. Yes. I suppose. If the situation calls for it.’
‘Go on,’ said Elliott. ‘What else, aside from morale?’
‘Well, the two individuals in question, of course. They’d be packed off home and everyone would know why. It would leak out.’
‘An unfortunate turn of phrase, under the circumstances.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Elliott!’ exclaimed Freddie.
Elliott ignored him. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Three differing views. Freddie said he’d report them, you’re a “no”, and I’m for reporting them.’
‘I thought you said three.’
‘There’s a difference between me and Freddie. He’s a moralist. Me, I’m a pragmatist. I’d report them, but only ’cos if I didn’t and word got out that I hadn’t then it’d be my head on the block.’
‘So what does that make me?’ asked Max.
‘That makes you a sentimentalist,’ was Elliott’s sure-footed response.
‘Oh, come on—’
‘Relax, there are worse things to be than a sentimentalist.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Freddie, ‘you should try being a moralist.’
It was good to hear Freddie crack a joke—he had seemed strangely withdrawn, somehow not himself. Max was in a position to judge. They had been firm friends, the best of friends, for almost two years now, and in that time he’d learned to read Freddie’s rare down moods: the faint clouding in the cobalt blue eyes, the slight tightening of the impish grin. They were still there now, even after the laughter had died away and the conversation had turned to Ralph, the missing member of their gang. He was a pilot with 249 Squadron at Ta’ Qali, a burly and garrulous character who had taken the squadron’s motto to heart one too many times: Pugnis et calcibus—‘With Fists and Heels’. Elliott had come late to the party, materializing as if from nowhere around Christmas, hot on the heels of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, but in four short months he’d stitched himself into the fabric of their little brotherhood lorded over by Hugh. He’d even got them all playing poker.
Elliott had a keen ear for scandal and was recounting a lurid story he’d heard from Ralph involving a chief petty officer’s wife and a Maltese gardener when the tinkle of Rosamund’s bell rang around the rooftop.
‘Most of you know what this means,’ she announced from the top of the steps. ‘Turn your minds and your talk to higher matters, to life and to art and, I don’t know, past loves and future plans.’
‘But I was just hitting my stride.’
‘My dear Elliott, I doubt it was anything more than mere gossip.’
‘True, but of the most salacious kind.’
‘Then be sure to search me out before you leave.’
This drew a few chuckles from the assembled company. These died suddenly as the plaintive wail of the air-raid siren broke the air.
Some groaned. They had all been expecting it. Breakfast, lunch and cocktail hour, you could almost set your wristwatch by the Germans and their Teutonic time-keeping.
They turned as one towards Valletta. From the high ground of Sliema, Marsamxett Harbour was spread out beneath them like a map, its lazy arc broken by the panhandle causeway connecting Manoel Island, with its fort and submarine base, to the mainland. In the background, Valletta reared majestically from the water, standing proud on her long peninsula, thrusting towards the open sea. Beyond the city, out of sight, lay the ancient towns and deepwater creeks of Grand Harbour, home to the naval dockyards, or what remained of them.
One of the more eagle-eyed pilots was the first to make out the flag being raised above the Governor’s Palace in Valletta.
‘Big jobs,’ he announced.
‘There’s a surprise.’
‘Where do you think they’re headed?’
‘The airfields, probably Ta’ Qali.’
‘The dockyards are due a dose.’
It was a strange time, this lull before the inevitable storm, the seven or so minutes it took the enemy aircraft to make the trip from Sicily. All over the island people would be hurrying for the underground shelters they had hewn from the limestone rock, the same rock with which they had built their homes, soft enough for saws and planes when quarried, but which soon hardened in the Mediterranean sun.
Had Malta been blanketed with forests, had the Maltese chosen to build their homes of wood, then the island would surely have capitulated by now. Stone buildings might crumble and pulverize beneath bombs, but they didn’t catch fire. And it was fire that did the real damage, spreading like quicksilver through densely populated districts, of which there were many on Malta. The island was small, considerably smaller than the Isle of Wight, but its teeming population numbered more than a quarter of a million. Towns and villages bled into each other to form sprawling conurbations ripe for ruin, and while they had suffered terribly, the devastation had always remained localized.
In the end, though, it was the underground shelters—some of them huge, as big as barracks—which had kept the casualty rates so low. The Maltese simply descended into the earth at the first sign of danger, taking their prayers and a few prized possessions with them. Max liked to think of it as an inborn urge. The island was honeycombed with grottoes, caves and catacombs where their ancestors had sought refuge in much the same way long before Christ walked the earth or the Egyptians threw up their pyramids. The threat might now be of a different nature, but the impulse remained the same.
He could remember running his theory past Mitzi on their first meeting. And he could remember her response.
‘Once a troglodyte, always a troglodyte.’
She had said it in that mildly mocking way of hers, which he had misread at the time as haughtiness.
‘Have I offended you?’
‘Not at all.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s a lovely theory, I’ve always loved it.’
The subtext was plain: Don’t think for a moment that you’re the first person to whom it has occurred.
He knew now that she had been sparring with him, playfully batting his pretentiousness straight back at him to see how he reacted. He had failed that first test, lapsing into silence, obliging her to end his suffering.
‘But to tell you the truth, I’d love it more if I didn’t spring from a long line of Irish potato-pickers.’
The memory of her words brought a smile to his face.
‘We’re about to have seven kinds of shit knocked out of us and you’re smiling?’ Elliott remarked.
‘I think we’re safe.’
Everyone else did too, judging from the number of people abandoning the garden for the grandstand view of the crow’s nest. Max spotted young Pemberton among the stream of souls pouring on to the roof. Too polite to question the behaviour of the other guests, he nevertheless looked very ill at ease. Who could blame him? Common sense dictated that they all seek shelter. A year back they would have done so, but somehow they were beyond that now. Exhaustion had blunted their fear, replacing it with a kind of resigned apathy, a weary fatalism which you were only aware of when you saw it reflected back at you in the shifty expression of a newcomer.
Max caught Pemberton’s nervous eye and waved him over.
‘Who’s that?’ Freddie enquired.
‘Our latest recruit, bound for Gib when we snapped him up.’
‘Handsome bastard,’ said Elliott. ‘There’ll be flutterings in the dovecote.’
‘Go easy on him. He’s all right.’
‘Sure thing,’ said Elliott, not entirely convincingly.
Max made the introductions, with Pemberton saluting Freddie and Elliott in turn.
‘So what’s the gen, Captain?’ Elliott demanded with exaggerated martial authority.
‘The gen, sir?’
‘On the raid, Captain, the goddamn air raid.’
‘I’m afraid I’m new here, sir.’
‘New!? What the hell good is new with Jerry and Johnny Eyetie on the warpath?’
‘Ignore him,’ said Max, ‘he’s having you on.’
‘Yank humour,’ chipped in Freddie.
‘And that’s the last time you salute him.’
Elliott stabbed a finger at his rank tabs. ‘Hey, these are the real deal.’
‘Elliott’s a liaison officer with the American military,’ Max explained. ‘Whatever that means.’
‘None of us has ever figured out quite what it means.’
Tilting his head at Pemberton, Elliott said in a conspiratorial voice, ‘And if you do, be sure to let me know.’
Max’s laugh was laced with admiration, and maybe a touch of jealousy. Anyone who knew Elliott had felt the pull of his boisterous charm, and it was easy to think you’d been singled out for special attention until you saw him work his effortless way into the affections of another.
‘Freddie here’s a medical officer,’ said Max.
‘Never call him a doctor. He hates it when you call him a doctor.’
‘He spends his time stitching people like us back together.’
Freddie waggled his pink gin at Pemberton. ‘Well, not all my time.’
‘Don’t be fooled by the handsome, boyish looks. If you’re ever in need of a quick amputation, this is your man.’ Elliott clamped a hand on Freddie’s shoulder. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Lambert, a whiz with both saw and scalpel. His motto: What’s an Arm or a Leg between Friends?’
Freddie was used to Elliott presenting him as some medieval butcher, and he smiled indulgently, confident of his reputation, his renown.
Pemberton acquitted himself admirably during the brief interrogation which ensued. He judged his audience well, painting an amusing and self-deprecating portrait of his time in Alexandria, his meagre contribution to the war effort to date.
It was then that the first arms started to be raised, fingers pointing towards the north, towards St Julian’s Bay, St George’s Bay and beyond.
An unnatural silence descended on the terrace, ears straining for the discordant drone of approaching aircraft.
‘You’re about to witness a very one-sided show,’ said Freddie. ‘Try not to let it get you down.’
He wasn’t joking. The Artillery had just been rationed to fifteen rounds per gun per day. A Bofor could fire off its quota in all of seven seconds.
The enemy seemed to know this. There was something uncharacteristically loose about the first wave of fighters staining the sky, a lack of the usual German rigour when it came to formation flying. Like a boxer in his prime swaggering towards the ring, the adversary was confident.
A couple of the big guns barked an early defiance, and a few desultory puff-balls of flak appeared around the Me 109s, which had already begun to break for their pre-ordained targets. They swooped in flocks, birds of ill-omen, the real danger following close behind them.
A great staircase of Junker 88 bombers came out of the north, fringed with a covering force of yet more fighters.
‘Christ,’ muttered Freddie.
‘Holy shit,’ said Elliott.
Poor sods, thought Max.
It was clear now that the airfields had been singled out for attention: Ta’ Qali, Luqa, Hal Far, maybe even the new strips at Safi and Qrendi. They all lay some way inland, beyond Valletta and the Three Cities, strung out in a broken line, their runways forming a twisted spine to the southern half of the island.
The 88s shaped up for their shallow bombing runs and a token splatter of shell bursts smudged the sky. Arcing lines of tracer fire from a few Bofors joined the fray. From this distance they appeared to be doing little more than tickling the underbellies of the bombers, but a shout suddenly went up.
‘Look, a flamer!’
Sure enough, an 88 was deviating from its course, streaming black smoke. It climbed uncertainly towards the north, heading for home. This would normally have been the cue for a Spitfire to pounce on the stricken aircraft and finish it off, but the handful of fighters they had seen clawing for height just minutes before had probably been vectored away from the island for their own safety. It was easy to see why. The carpet bombing was well under way now, great pillars of smoke and dust rising into the sky, reaching for the lowering sun.
They all stared in silent sympathy at the remote spectacle. Earlier in the year, Max had been caught in a raid at Ta’ Qali, one of the mid-afternoon specials the Germans liked to throw in from time to time. He had spent twenty minutes lying as flat to the ground as nature would allow him in a ditch bounding the airfield. There had been close calls in the past couple of years—he still bore the odd scar to prove it—but nothing that even approached the deranging terror of his time in that ditch. His greatest fear at the time, strangely, had been of choking to death on the cloud of sickly yellow-grey dust, talcum-powder fine, which had enveloped everything, blotting out the sun, turning day into night. The ground beneath him had bucked like a living thing, and all around him the air had rung to the tune of flying splinters, a lethal symphony of rock and metal overlaid by more obvious notes: the whistle and shriek of falling bombs, the thump and crump of explosions, the staccato bark of the Bofors firing back blind, and the screams of the diving Stukas.
His hearing had never fully recovered, and he suspected that something essential within him had been changed that day, almost as if he were a machine that had been re-wired. It still functioned, though not quite as it had before.
He felt a light touch on his arm. It was Freddie.
‘I need to talk to you,’ he said in a low, confidential voice. ‘Not here. Alone.’
‘Okay.’
‘How’s tomorrow morning?’
Max nodded.
‘Can you come to the Central Hospital?’
‘What time?’
‘Early. How does eight sound?’
‘Barely acceptable.’
‘Meet me at the mortuary.’
Max was obliged to curb his curiosity. Elliott had drifted towards the parapet for a better view of the raid, but he now turned to them and said, ‘Looks like old Zammit’s got himself a new gun.’
Vitorin Zammit lived in the house directly across the street. Well into his sixties, he was a slight and vaguely comical character who had been a regular dinner guest at Villa Marija until the death of his wife the year before. He had amassed a small fortune exporting lace, a business which had allowed him to travel the world widely, and he spoke impeccable English in the way that only a foreigner can. His wife’s passing had hit him hard, and although she had been brought down by the same diabetes which had plagued her for years, he held the enemy unreservedly to blame. He now kept his own company, when he wasn’t caught up in the activities of the Sliema Home Guard Volunteers, through whose ranks he had risen rapidly to become something of a leading light.
He owned a pistol, and when a raid was in progress he was often to be found on his roof terrace taking potshots at the planes. Not only was this a futile gesture, it was in flagrant breach of the regulations. He should have known better, and he probably did, but no one begrudged him his bit of sport. If anyone took exception, Hugh invariably ensured that they came to see things differently.
Sometimes he wore his uniform, sometimes a suit. He never went into battle in his shirtsleeves. Today he was wearing a black suit and a Home Guard armband, and he prowled around his roof terrace like some dark ghost, eyes on the skies, apparently oblivious to the large crowd gathered on the neighbouring rooftop. Instead of his usual pistol, he carried a rifle in his hand.
‘Is that a Lee Enfield?’ said Freddie.
‘Might just as well be a goddamn broomstick for all the good it’s going to do him.’
The last of the bombers were making their runs now, dropping to four or five thousand feet before unloading over the airfields. Resistance was minimal, and they climbed safely away with a covey of fighters assigned to see them safely home. High above, all around, 109s blackened the sky like bees, keeping a wary guard. Their job done, the artillery all but spent, they would soon descend and begin picking over the carcass, making low-level attacks on targets of opportunity. If there was a time to be scared, now was it. Even a residential district like Sliema was fair game.
Knowing this, a few people started to drift below. Most stood their ground, though, eager to see how things would play out. Freddie made a drinks run downstairs. By the time he returned with their glasses the dockyards in Grand Harbour were under attack, the fighters rising into view behind Valletta like rocketing pheasants as they pulled up out of their dives. They couldn’t hope to inflict much real damage with their cannon and machine-gun fire, but they were making a point. He’d heard from Ralph that a 109 had even made a touch-and-go landing at Ta’ Qali the other day, rubbing their noses in it.
Today, pleasingly, this arrogance came at a price. A 109 banking over Fort St Elmo appeared to stagger, then its starboard wing dipped sharply and it spun away. There was no question of the pilot baling out at that height, and it hit the water, throwing up a white feather of spume near the harbour entrance.
‘Welcome to Malta, you sonofabitch,’ said Elliott darkly, as the cheers resounded around them.
Moments later, a couple of fighters swooped on Marsamxett Harbour from the direction of Floriana, flying tight down on the water, setting themselves for a strafing run at the submarine base on Manoel Island. There were no subs to be seen; they had recently taken to sitting out the daylight hours on the harbour bottom.
‘Macchis,’ said one of the young pilots.
He was right, they were Italian planes, blue Macchi 202s. If there was any doubt, the showman-like flourish with which they rolled away after releasing a couple of savage bursts of cannon fire settled the question of their nationality. The Italians were known, and mocked, for their aerobatic flair. Both aircraft made a second pass, their guns churning up the water in neat straight lines as they bore down on the base. They pulled away in a climbing turn to the left, making off to the north, skimming over the stepped rooftops of Sliema.
Their course brought them straight towards Villa Marija, the roar of their engines building quickly to a painful pitch, almost deafening, but not so loud that it drowned out the report of the first rifle shot. Or the second.
Max turned in time to see Vitorin Zammit fire off his third shot, in time to see a portion of the lead Macchi’s engine cowling fall away.
‘My God, I think he hit it,’ someone called.
He had not only hit it, he had done some damage. The Macchi’s engine coughed, clearing its throat, then coughed again, and again, misfiring badly now, a ribbon of black smoke snaking out behind it as it climbed towards St Julian’s.
‘Well, Holy Shit…’ said Elliott.
The trickle of smoke soon became a raging torrent and the Macchi started to lose height, falling well behind its companion.
‘Is it possible?’ Freddie asked incredulously.
‘Oh yes,’ replied Max.
A number of enemy fighters had been brought down over the airfields by rifle fire since the long-suffering ground crews had been issued with Lee Enfields—a gesture intended to boost their morale, no one had expected them to actually hit anything.
It came to Max quite suddenly what he had to do. He glanced over at Vitorin Zammit, who was staring in dumb disbelief at his handiwork, then he grabbed Pemberton by the arm and led him off through the crowd.
‘Where are we going?’ Pemberton asked.
‘To work.’
He lay stretched out on the mattress, naked, staring at the ceiling, the dancing shadows thrown by the small pepper-tin lamp.
He raised his arm and examined it in the flickering light, flexing his elbow, his wrist, his fingers, enjoying the silent articulation of the joints, the play of muscle and sinew beneath the skin.
He was proud of his hands. Men didn’t notice hands. Women did. His mother had. She had always praised him for his hands. Then again, kind words came easily to her, maybe too easily for the compliments to have any real value. She scattered them about her like a farmer spreading seed from a sack.
He saw her now as a young woman: the blue of her wide-set eyes, the arched eyebrows, dark and dense, which she refused to pluck as other women did because Father liked them just the way they were. Or so he said.
My, you’re looking handsome today.
I think that’s the best I’ve ever heard you play thepiano.
The best day of my life? When I gave birth to you.
You’re the best boy in the world.
She came from parents with low intellectual horizons and she used words like ‘best’ a lot.
Maybe that’s what lay at the heart of everything. She had never felt worthy of the world in which she found herself, not worthy of the man who had taken her by the hand and led her into Eden. ‘See all this? This is my world, but now it is yours too.’
But Eden didn’t come cheap, she must have learned that early on, and she had chosen to repay cruelty with kindness. She was known for her kindness. It was what defined her in the eyes of others. No one was unworthy of her selfless ministrations.
He suspected now that some baser urge lay behind her behaviour: an instinct for survival. How could her husband possibly harm such a kind and decent person, such a good wife?
It hadn’t worked, but she had kept the faith. It was hard to respect her for it, but at least it showed a certain determination.
‘You’re the best boy in the world.’
He saw her now, ruffling his hair, smiling warmly down at him, her prominent incisors, the small white scar on her lower lip from the time Father had struck her with a shoe. And he saw what she was doing: one person looking to provide the love of two. The intentions had been good, if ultimately counter-productive. The more she had smothered him with maternal affection, the more Father had felt the need to counteract her ‘damned molly-coddling’ of him.
It was strange that she had never stopped heaping praise upon all and sundry, even after the accident, when there was no longer any need to do so. He also found it strange that she had never taken tweezers to those unruly eyebrows when she must surely have wanted to, when at last she could.
That’s what annoyed him most, he realized—that even when Father was gone, he had managed to live on in her.
He lowered his arm to the mattress and smiled at this thought, a smile of pleasant surprise. When was the last time he had cared enough about anything to be annoyed by it?
It made him feel almost human.
Day Two (#u296e1901-f8de-5c3d-b9ec-50e57552a8c9)
Freddie was almost an hour late for their meeting at the mortuary. When he finally appeared, reeking of iodine, from the bowels of the hospital building, he seemed surprised to find Max still waiting for him.
‘I thought you’d be gone.’
‘I heard what happened.’
‘Yes, a nasty business.’
It certainly was. A passing orderly had explained the situation to Max. A wayward bomb had fallen well short of the dockyards during the early-morning raid and exploded at the entrance to a shelter in Marsa. Everyone had been safely inside by then, but it would have been far better for all of them if they’d stayed at home. The steel doors of the shelter had been blown in, and those not torn apart by the hail of metal had found themselves consumed by the ensuing fireball.
Freddie had obviously made an effort to scrub up after his labours, but had missed a couple of spots of blood on his cheek. Max tried his best to ignore them.
‘I don’t know how you do it.’
‘It’s what I trained for,’ shrugged Freddie.
‘Really? This?’
Freddie smiled weakly. ‘Well, not quite this.’ He fished a lighter and a packet of Craven A’s from his pocket. ‘Sometimes I wish they’d just invade, then it would all stop.’
‘If it stops here, it just gets worse somewhere else.’
‘I suppose.’
They all knew the reasoning; there was no point in going over it again.
‘Do you want to get some air?’ asked Max.
‘No, let’s get it over with.’ Freddie held out the packet of cigarettes.
Max raised his hand, declining the offer. ‘I’ve just put one out.’
‘Take one,’ said Freddie. ‘For the smell.’
Max had been in hospitals before, but only ever to visit wounded friends. Those airy, spotless wards with their ordered rows of beds and their gruff, thick-ankled nurses had nothing in common with the mortuary of the Central Hospital.
It occupied a run of vast and gloomy ground-floor rooms. Their windows were partially shuttered, allowing in just enough light to make identification possible. Corpses carpeted the tiled floors. Some of the bodies were covered, others not, and some weren’t bodies at all.
‘We’re out of blankets, I’m afraid,’ said Freddie, as they picked their way through the first room. He might just as well have been apologizing to a house guest, and his matter-of-factness went some way towards calming Max’s nerves. An orderly in what must once have been a white coat was mopping the floor. He was young; too young, you couldn’t help thinking, to be exposed to such sights. His tin pail screeched in protest as he manoeuvred it around the floor with the mop. It was the only sound. The stench was indescribable.
The second room was almost as large, and the first thing Max noticed was a pile of limbs stacked up in the corner like so much firewood. The next thing he noticed was a Maltese man emptying the contents of his stomach on to the floor. He was being held around the shoulders by a ragged old fellow in a threadbare suit emitting deep and sonorous sobs. They had evidently just identified the body at their feet, and an orderly looked on awkwardly, clipboard poised to register the details.
It was a pathetic sight, upsetting—two broken men bent over a broken body—and Max was relieved when Freddie led him through double swing-doors out of the charnel house and into a long corridor.
‘There are so many.’
‘It’s been a bad week. And coffins are hard to come by, so they lie here for days, backing up.’
‘Some of them are, well, remarkably intact.’
‘Blast victims, snuffed out by the shock wave. Although it often scalps them.’
Their destination was a small room at the far end of the corridor. Aside from a wooden desk in the corner, the room was empty. Max’s relief was short-lived, though; he hadn’t spotted the gurney pushed up against the wall behind the door. A body lay on it—a woman, judging from the bare feet poking out from beneath the piece of tarpaulin which covered her.
‘This is what you wanted to show me?’
‘She was found yesterday morning in Marsa, lying in the street.’ He reached for the tarpaulin.
‘Freddie, I’m not sure I…’ He trailed off.
‘There are some wounds, but I’ve cleaned them up.’
‘What’s this all about? I don’t understand.’
‘You will.’
‘Try me now.’
He was already steeling himself against the long walk back past the silent ranks of damaged and dismembered corpses; the thought of scrutinizing one of them up close filled him with alarm and horror.
Freddie didn’t release the tarpaulin. ‘Max, you’re my friend, and I don’t know who else to tell.’
They looked at each other in silence. Then Max nodded and Freddie folded back the tarpaulin.
The girl was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with an innocent beauty which even the cold pallor of death couldn’t erase. Her hair was long, straight, black as bitumen, and it framed an oval face which descended to an elfin chin. Her lips were large and surprisingly red. Lipstick, he realized. Which was odd. It was in short supply, and not many Maltese girls wore it at the best of times.
Freddie tilted her head to the right and gently drew back her hair. A raw and ragged gash ran from beneath her ear towards her collar bone, widening as it went.
‘Christ…’
Freddie’s hand delved beneath the tarpaulin and produced a jagged shard of metal, twisted and razor-edged. ‘Ack-ack shrapnel. It was still in her when she was brought in.’
It was a common cause of injuries and deaths, the lethal hail of metal dropping back to earth from exploding artillery shells. You could hear the splinters tinkling merrily in the streets and on the rooftops whenever a raid was on, a deceptively harmless sound.
‘She bled to death?’
‘It looks that way.’
‘So?’
Freddie hesitated. ‘I think it was made to look that way.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean these…and these.’
Freddie raised her wrists in turn. The marks were faint, easy to miss.
‘Rope burns…?’
‘Her hands weren’t bound when she was found. And look at her nails.’
They were long, painted red, and several of them were cracked or broken.
‘She fought back. There’s also some bruising around her shoulder and her thighs. Also her labia.’
What a horrible word, it struck Max, enough to extinguish all thoughts of carnality. It was about all he could think as he struggled to take in what Freddie was telling him.
‘You think she was violated?’
‘I know she was violated. And probably by the same man who then killed her.’
‘Freddie, come on, that’s a leap too far.’
‘She’s not the first.’
‘What?’
‘There have been others, two others I’ve seen since the beginning of the year. Not like this, not exactly. One had been crushed by falling masonry, the other one had drowned.’
‘Drowned?’
There were many ways to die on Malta, but drowning wasn’t the first that sprang to mind, certainly not since the beaches had been wired off against invasion.
‘She fell into a collapsed cistern walking home in the dark. At least, that’s the way it looked. Both were sherry queens from the Gut.’
‘Sherry queens’ was Service slang for the Maltese dance hostesses who worked the bars and bawdy music halls which infested the lower end of Strait Street in Valletta, a disreputable quarter dubbed the Gut.
‘Jesus Christ, Freddie, you should have told someone.’
‘What makes you think I didn’t? Apparently the matter is now in the hands of the appropriate authorities.’
‘Sounds like Lieutenant-Governor’s office speak.’
‘You should know.’
He certainly did. The Information Office answered directly to the Lieutenant-Governor and his coterie of self-important lackeys.
‘So why am I here?’
‘Because she had something on her that changes everything. Something in her hand. I had to prise it out. Rigor mortis had set in.’
Freddie reached into the hip pocket of his khaki shorts and handed something to Max. It was a piece of material—a cloth shoulder tab, torn where it had been ripped from a uniform. Enough of it remained, though.
‘Oh Christ…’ said Max.
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
Max’s apartment was a short walk from the hospital through the streets of Floriana. He passed a long line of women queuing for paraffin. There was some kind of scuffle taking place which involved a lot of raised voices. Spotting Max approach, a rangy young woman with fire in her eyes appealed to him in accented English, ‘Tell her she wait like all of us.’
‘You have to wait,’ said Max, without breaking his stride, or even turning to identify the culprit.
His indifference was rewarded with a bank of baleful glares and a couple of mumbled curses in Maltese. He ignored them, too numb to care.
He was still trying to process the information sprung on him by Freddie in the mortuary. Whichever way he came at it, it spelled big trouble. Freddie had taken a certain amount of persuading to keep his findings to himself, at least for a couple of days. It would give Max time to think the matter through properly, make a few enquiries. What those might be exactly, he wasn’t yet sure. Things would become clearer once they knew who the girl was. Her absence couldn’t go unnoticed for long. She probably had family and friends who even now were discussing the dread prospect of doing the rounds of the mortuaries.
Her make-up, the livid nail polish, everything pointed to her occupation. It also pointed to a pattern: three dance hostesses from the Gut—more, for all they knew—not unlucky victims of the war, but of a man who had violated them before killing them. And not just any man, a British serviceman, a submariner. And not just any submarine, the Upstanding—commanded by Lionel Campion, Mitzi’s husband.
He felt in his pocket for the torn shoulder tab Freddie had recovered from the dead girl’s clenched fist. Instinct had told him to ask for it, and instinct now told him to dispose of it immediately. With the proof gone, it would be Freddie’s word against his. Was he willing to trade their friendship for the alternative, the unthinkable?
The Maltese had not wanted this war, it had been called down upon their heads, and their almost childlike faith in the ability of the British to defend them, to ultimately prevail against the forces of evil, had been tested to its limits by the gathering hell of the past few months. After two long years of siege, they knew the truth about their predicament. How could they not know? The truth had been fed to them to shore up their morale—a badge of honour to be worn with pride.
They knew by heart the words of praise heaped on them by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons (and they joked that they’d be happy to swap those words for a few more Spitfires or a ship-load of sausages). They knew that King George VI had awarded them, all of them, the George Cross earlier in the month (and they admired the King’s advisers for their judicious timing). But the fact remained: they were still cut off from the world, alone, surrounded by an enemy intent on starving them into submission and annihilating them from the air. Twice the tonnage of bombs dropped on London during the worst twelve months of the Blitz had rained down on their heads in the last two months alone. It was an extraordinary statistic which conferred on their little island home the dubious honour of being the most bombed patch of earth on the planet. Ever.
Remarkably, in spite of all this, they had barely wavered, making light of their trials. But what would happen if they thought for a moment that they were also fighting an enemy within? How would they react to the news that a British serviceman was picking off their daughters, using the war as a cloak for his crimes? It was impossible to say, but it would change everything in a moment.
As Max turned into Pietro Floriani Street, he drew to a halt. The building at the northern end of the street had taken a direct hit at the beginning of April, collapsing completely, taking much of the adjacent apartment block with it, shearing rooms in half, exposing their contents to the elements and the voyeuristic gaze of passers-by—a sideboard pressed up against a drawing-room wall hung with framed photographs; a towel still draped over the edge of a cast-iron bathtub; an effigy of the Virgin, which, miraculously, had not been toppled from its perch on the mantelpiece by the sudden disappearance of the other half of the room.
It brought to mind the architectural cross-sections he used to run off, slicing through buildings to reveal the guts of his designs. For a fleeting moment he glimpsed himself perched on the high wooden stool, hunched over his drawing board, feverishly applying himself to the task. He wondered what had become of that well-meaning young man dreaming of a bright future in a top firm of architects. It seemed impossible to him that he could have travelled from that to this in such a brief time, from an airy studio in the Architectural Association to a Mediterranean bomb site, from enthusiastic student to cynical military official.
They were dangerous thoughts, the kind that built swiftly to an overwhelming flood, and he pushed them from him before they could.
He gazed at the piece of material in his hand and told himself that his friendship with Freddie wasn’t at stake. Freddie had offered no resistance to his suggestion that he take the shoulder tab with him. If anything, he had seemed eager to rid himself of it. Why was that? One overriding reason presented itself: he was abdicating responsibility to Max. Take this, he was saying, and do with it what you will, because I don’t know what to do with it.
It wasn’t much of a consolation to Max’s conscience, but it would have to do for now. He glanced around him to check that he was alone then tossed the piece of material away. It was lost in the heaped rubble of what used to be 35 Pietro Floriani Street.
He set off at a brisk pace, not wishing to dwell on his actions. At the end of his street, he returned the salutes of the scruffy mob of Maltese boys at their flag station.
‘No worries, Joe!’ they called.
It was about all the English they possessed, that and ‘Speetfire’.
‘Allura,’ Max replied. No worries.
Many of them had older brothers who had been conscripted into the Royal Malta Artillery or the King’s Own Malta Regiment. Eager to emulate their heroes they had rigged a flagstaff from a toppled telegraph pylon. The moment the red ensign appeared above the Castile in Valletta, they hoisted their own scarlet rag for the benefit of their little corner of Floriana. Amazingly, they never abandoned their post, even during an air raid, although they often strayed on to the pitted patch of earth near the bastion wall to play football against the crew of the Bofor gun site—Manchester men who liked the ball at their feet and who weren’t afraid to send a small child sprawling in the dust.
Max’s third-floor apartment at the end of Vilhena Terrace afforded a bird’s-eye view of these contests, and in the evening he would sometimes sit and observe the antics from his balcony, Grand Harbour and the Three Cities providing the backdrop. It was a corner apartment, and the other view, from the bedroom window, was to the north-east, across the open area of ground which separated Floriana from Valletta. Both towns occupied the peninsula and both were well protected from the water by a bewilderment of bastions, but the mighty ditch on the landward side of Valletta proclaimed Floriana’s role as a first line of defence. The Knights of St John had engineered things this way against the possibility of another Turkish invasion of the island and, centuries on, the residents of Floriana were still left with the slightly uneasy feeling that they were disposable, that even in retreat the gates of Valletta, the all-important citadel, might not be thrown open to them. As things had turned out, the Turks never recovered from their first failed assault on Malta—a mere stepping stone to mainland Europe, or so they had assumed—and the impressive fortifications thrown up by the Knights had never been put to the test. Not till now. Now they were useless. What good were soaring battlements against an enemy who assaulted you from the air with bombs? All you could do was cower and pray. The cowering had helped a little, saved a few lives, but the prayers had fallen on deaf ears.
In the past month, German bombs had laid waste to much of what mattered in Valletta, obliging the Governor to flee his palace for his summer residence at Verdala, and causing extensive damage to the Auberge de Castile, the military and administrative hub of the island. The various departments had scattered like chaff before a stiff wind, seeking shelter wherever they could. Max no longer walked to work in Valletta. The Information Office had been relocated twice, from the Museum in the Auberge d’Italie to the old audit offices at the top of the General Post Office building, and then to St Joseph’s, an orphanage for boys in Fleur-de-Lys, up on the hill beyond Hamrun. It was ten minutes inland by motorcycle on a good day, considerably more when the carburettor was clogged with rust from the old petrol tank he’d been forced to scavenge from another machine.
He missed the bustle and activity of Valletta, the snatched lunches with friends at the Union Club or Monico’s, but there were far worse places to work than St Joseph’s. An ancient palace where, according to local lore, Napoleon had stayed during his brief dominion over the island, it had a spacious courtyard at its heart, planted with cypresses, which lent it the calm air of a convent or monastery. The rooms were large and light, the residents welcoming and unobtrusive. To ease their passage into the world, the orphan boys were taught a variety of skills and professions, one of which was printing, and a modern printing press filled a room on the ground floor of the south wing. This was the real reason the Information Office had been assigned to St Joseph’s; it allowed them to run off their daily and weekly bulletins for distribution around the island. The close proximity of the Lieutenant-Governor’s office, which had taken up residence in the Vincenzo Bugeja Conservatory right next door, was an undeniable irritant—snooping and meddling came naturally to the penguins of the LGO—however it was a small price to pay for personal safety. The Luftwaffe might have developed an uncanny knack of divining the exact whereabouts of key military departments, but for now at least St Joseph’s was anything but a first-strike target.
Max glanced at his watch. He should have been at his desk an hour ago, and he could see the papers already piling up in the wire basket on the desk. Maria, his long-suffering secretary, would be fielding the calls and making excuses for his absence. Both would have to wait. There was something else he needed to do first.
His motorcycle was propped against the wall of his apartment building, the foot-stand having rusted away during the hard, wet winter. She was in a temperamental mood this morning, but after much cajoling the engine finally fired. Some of the sweat from his exertions dried off in the wind during the short ride up the hill into Valletta.
Lilian wasn’t in work. Or rather, she had come in early then she had gone out again, chasing up some story or other. Rita couldn’t be more specific, or didn’t wish to be.
Rita manned the front desk at the newspaper offices. She didn’t like Max. This wasn’t paranoia on his part. Lilian, with characteristic candour, had told him that Rita didn’t like him.
‘Well, if you could tell her I dropped by…’
Rita leaned forward, placing her meaty forearms on the desk. ‘Of course,’ she said.
But she didn’t have to.
‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’
It was Lilian, entering from the street. Her long black hair was pinned up in an unruly mess and she was rummaging for something in her shoulder bag.
‘I just wanted to check you got the film.’
‘She got the film,’ said Rita flatly.
Max had dropped the film off with Rita the previous evening, Lilian having already left for the day.
‘How did the photos turn out?’
‘Good. You want to see them?’
‘Have you got time?’
‘Of course. Come.’
When Lilian made for the staircase, Max followed, glancing at Rita as he went. She peered back at him over the top of her spectacles with an impassive expression.
Max trailed Lilian up the narrow stone staircase to the newsroom. She was wearing a short linen skirt, fraying at the hem, which revealed the full glory of her legs. They had an aesthetic dimension, long and slender, tapering to ankles so narrow they looked as though they might break at any moment.
A sudden urge made him reach out a hand and run his fingertips down her left calf.
She gave a small yelp and spun round, glaring down at him.
‘What do you expect if you insist on leading the way?’
‘Then you go first,’ she said.
He squeezed past her. ‘You’ve changed your tune since last weekend.’
‘I was drunk last weekend.’
‘Oh, that’s why you slurred your words when you said, “Don’t stop.”’
It had been their first kiss, and it had taken place under an orange tree in the garden of her aunt’s palace in Mdina.
‘Well, I hope you enjoyed it, because it was the last time.’
As deputy editor of Il-Berqa, Lilian was entitled to her own office. It was a small box of a room, and it had somehow acquired a view of Grand Harbour since Max’s last visit. It took him a moment to realize why. He wandered to the window and peered down at what remained of the church. The dome and the roof had collapsed into the nave, the pillars and arches of which were still standing, as was the greater part of the apse. Despite the destruction, the altar had been cleared of rubble and a priest was dressing it for Mass.
‘Close,’ said Max.
‘No one was killed.’
‘That’s good to hear.’
He turned back in time to see her unpin her hair and shake it out. It fell like silk around her shoulders.
‘Better?’ she asked.
‘You could shave it all off and you’d still be beautiful.’ She cocked her head at him, deciding whether to accept the compliment.
‘It’s true.’
It was. She could get away with it, with her large almond eyes, the sharp, high-bridged nose and full lips. She was of mixed parentage—half Maltese, half British—although her temperament owed considerably more to her Mediterranean blood. He still smarted when he remembered some of the words she’d directed at him, but he’d also shared many a full and proper belly-laugh with her. He suspected that when it came to pure intellect there were few to match her on the island. He knew for a fact that he struggled to keep up.
‘We don’t have long,’ she said. ‘I have to be in Sliema at twelve o’clock and there are no buses.’
‘Sliema?’
‘To talk to Vitorin Zammit.’
‘You’re going to run the story?’ he said hopefully.
‘Felix isn’t sure.’
Felix was the editor, a plump and ponderous little character who didn’t seem to do a whole lot about the place. It was common knowledge that Lilian effectively ran the show.
‘What the old man did is not legal,’ Lilian went on. ‘We don’t want half the island shooting at planes.’
‘I don’t know. The artillery could do with all the help it can get right now.’
She smiled. ‘True. But they’ll shoot at everything, even our own planes.’
‘They’ll have to find one first.’
‘But there are more Spitfires coming.’
‘Where did you hear that?’
‘Is it true?’ she asked.
‘There are always more Spitfires coming. When was the last time there weren’t more Spitfires coming?’
Her eyes narrowed, seeing through his evasiveness, but she let it go unchallenged. Max sat himself on the corner of her desk and lit a cigarette.
‘You have to run this story.’
‘I don’t know, Max.’
‘Let’s see the photos.’
She pulled a folder from a pile of papers and spread a handful of black-and-white photos on the desk. They were almost identical. In a couple of them Vitorin Zammit was shaking the hand of the downed Italian pilot, whose parachute was piled up at his feet, and in all of them a rag-tag band of grinning Maltese stood stiffly behind.
The young Italian was ridiculously handsome, and knew it; he had run his fingers through his thick hair to give his fringe some lift as Max was preparing to take the first shot. Old Zammit’s suit was powdered white with dust from their breakneck dash up into the hills. Wedged in between Max and Pemberton on the back of the motorcycle, he had complained all the way about his abduction, and had only ceased his moaning when they spotted the black smoke billowing from the wreck of the Macchi. It had piled into the base of a low escarpment just south of Ghargur, the pilot drifting to earth in a rock-strewn field nearby, where he had been promptly surrounded by a mob of blue-chinned and bare-footed labourers brandishing sickles and hoes. His relief at the arrival of two uniformed officers on a motorcycle was patent—although he must have known that the Maltese weren’t the lynching kind—and when it was finally conveyed to him through a series of gestures that the old man in the suit had shot him down, he put his pride in his pocket and laughed along heartily with everyone else.
‘This is the best one,’ said Lilian.
She was right. Zammit’s hand was resting on the Italian’s shoulder—a protective, almost tender gesture—and the younger man’s expression was an endearing picture of amused resignation. It was exactly the sort of image the Maltese would respond to—quietly triumphal and tinged with humour.
‘Yes,’ Max concurred.
He could see from Lilian’s face that she was still hesitating, and he knew why. She had crossed swords with the authorities enough times in the past to have developed a reputation as something of a trouble-maker. When the siege was in its infancy, she had fought for the rights of the islanders to dig their own shelters on public property, and she had unsuccessfully championed the cause of the Maltese internees—Italian sympathizers, or so it was claimed—who had been locked up like common criminals at the outbreak of hostilities and who had recently been shipped off to Uganda.
Running a story which might promote illegal behaviour among the islanders could have consequences for her. She was thinking of her job.
‘What he did might have contravened regulations, but look at it—’ Max handed her the photo. ‘This is what we all need right now. A hero. An improbable hero.’
‘I know that. You know that.’
‘Then I’ll report it in the Weekly Bulletin, and you’ll have your excuse to run it. The worst I’ll get is a slapped wrist. Believe me, even the Lieutenant-Governor will see the logic of putting it out there at a time like this.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘Why are you doing this?’
Mistrust, antagonism even, was part and parcel of their professional relationship, and they’d stopped pretending it wasn’t. The Information Office and the only Maltese-language newspaper on the island might make for natural bedfellows, but Lilian’s loyalties were to her own people, whose interests were not always best served by the British policy which Max was bound to promote. This made for an uneasy collaboration, a tentative trade of services. Lilian advised Max on how best to pitch the tone of his publications and broadcasts to appeal to a Maltese audience, and in return she received access to the kind of information she couldn’t hope to get from anyone else. And both remained sceptical about the motives of the other.
Lilian was right to be wary in this instance. Max couldn’t tell her the truth: that he knew a German invasion was imminent, and the signals from the summit were that they’d be fighting to the last man. If they were to stand any chance of turning back the Nazi tide, they needed the islanders at their side, willing and eager to take up arms. Vitorin Zammit in his dusty suit could do more to foster the necessary spirit of resistance than any number of pious speeches put out over the Rediffusion by the Governor.
‘Look, I’m just saying a story like this is good for everyone.’
Lilian wasn’t convinced. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’
If you only knew the half of it, thought Max, images of the dead girl stretched out on the gurney in the mortuary suddenly crowding his thoughts, tightening his stomach.
He crushed out his cigarette against the sole of his shoe, anything to avoid her eyes. ‘There are a lot of things I don’t tell you—can’t tell you—you know that.’
He kept grinding away at the dead cigarette.
‘Max, look at me.’
I can’t, he thought. Because if I do, I’ll see her in you, you in her, and I won’t be able to pretend that it doesn’t matter. I won’t be able to walk away from it.
She waited for him to look up. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said gently. ‘You can tell me. As a friend.’
Oh Christ…
‘You should get going,’ he suggested.
Now she was offended, and he tried to make amends.
‘I’ll give you a lift to Sliema on the motorcycle if you want.’
‘People will talk.’
‘And we can’t have that, can we?’
‘It’s easy for you to say. When you are gone they will still be talking.’
They parted company in front of the building, though not before Lilian announced that he’d been invited to dinner again at her aunt’s.
‘Really?’
‘She liked you.’
‘I can’t think why. I ranted at her for most of the evening.’
‘I know. She said.’
Lilian hurried for St Salvatore bastion in search of a dghaisa to row her across Marsamxett Harbour, and he watched her till the slope of the street had swallowed her up.
He didn’t do too badly. Determined thoughts of the papers piling up on his desk successfully carried him all the way to the Porte des Bombes. But it was here that he found himself swinging the motorcycle around and doubling back into the grid-like streets of Floriana.
He located it almost instantly, which was a relief; he would have been hard pushed to explain what he was doing scrabbling around in the ruins of a wrecked building. It was wedged in a crack between two bomb-spilt cubes of Malta rock. An inch or two to the left and it would have slipped away deep into the rubble, well beyond reach and any hope of recovery.
He dusted off the shoulder tab and stared it, so light in his hand, so inconsequential. It was hard to believe that a shred of cloth could have so much destructive power locked away in it.
High overhead, tall pencils of light stabbed and swept the night sky, sightless, searching for the drone of the lone bomber. Maybe it would drop an egg or two before returning to Sicily, or maybe it would hold back its high explosive for another day. Either way, a different aircraft would take up the baton before long, a relay designed to keep the defenders at their war stations and away from their beds, wearing them down.
Whatever you thought of the Germans—and he was still divided in his thinking—they approached the dirty business of war with a certain imaginative insolence which was hard not to admire.
He turned his eyes back to the pale thread of earth at his feet and set off once more up the slope.
He had always liked to walk, but alone, never in company. Walking was a time for contemplation, for introspection. The idea of tossing idle banter about at the same time had never appealed to him, even as a boy.
He had started going for walks when he was young—an excuse to get out of the house. The hours would fly by in his own company, whole afternoons sometimes, gone in moments, or so it had seemed at the time. He didn’t much care for the countryside, although he probably knew more about its routine cycles than most. He could predict to the week when the buttercups would appear in the meadow, a yellow carpet reaching to the foot of the chalk hills. Or when the jackdaws would start to nest in the chimney pots, scavenging hair from the backs of supine heifers. Or when the Canada Geese would abandon the lake in search of southern warmth.
He observed and he registered these developments, but as a scientist might record the temperatures and quantities and colours of a chemistry experiment: dispassionately, at one remove. If he gathered up and carried home small trophies from his expeditions, it was only to lend some kind of credibility to his wanderings, to throw his parents off the scent.
He always made a point of returning with some keepsake—a fossil or a lump of fool’s gold from the scree in the chalk quarry; the bone of an indeterminate animal, picked clean by predators and bleached white by the sun; the sloughed skin of an adder. To his parents’ eyes, these tokens indicated a healthy interest in the natural world. To him, they were little more than meaningless debris. Until he discovered they held the power to placate his father, to momentarily distract him from his strange and pressing need to mistreat his wife and his son.
On returning from his work in the city, his father would light his pipe and ask to see the latest addition to the collection, and they would wander to the hut at the end of the garden where he housed his cabinet of curiosities. There they would sit and talk together, wreathed in blue pipe smoke, and his father would tell him stories of his childhood, of the remote farm where he had grown up. He professed a love of nature, but it was a strange kind of love, one that led him to spend much of his free time shooting all manner of birds and animals with his friends. And when he wasn’t slaughtering the local wildlife, he would be savagely pollarding trees or hacking back undergrowth. The truth was, his father viewed nature much as he viewed his family: as an unruly force, something to be tamed and mastered with a firm hand.
After the accident—his father dead and buried, truly at one with nature—he took up his private wanderings once more. They were the touchstone against which he was able to test the transformation that had occurred in him. He walked the same paths, clambered high into the canopy of the same ancient chestnut, lobbed stones into the lake to observe the play of intersecting ripples. He did what he had always done and he felt nothing, nothing whatsoever, not even a dim glow of nostalgia.
This scared him at first, and he ascribed the vacuum inside of him to guilt, to the secret he knew he could never share with anyone. He soon came to realize that he was wrong, though. It couldn’t be guilt, because he felt no guilt for what he had done. He was able to play those last moments of his father’s life over and over again in his head and they stirred nothing in him, neither shame nor satisfaction. In fact, he barely recognized himself in the small slice of cinema. It could just as well have been another fourteen-year-old boy sitting in the passenger seat of the swanky new roadster hurtling down the country lane.
His father was always buying new cars, fast cars. They fitted with his ‘work hard, play hard’ ethic, and he drove them hard, pushing them to their limits. When they disappointed him, which they invariably did, he simply replaced them with another one that wouldn’t, although it invariably would. It had been a Saturday morning in early August and they were heading for a race meeting at Brooklands motor course. The events at Brooklands drew a rich crowd, an international crowd, and his father liked to gather there with his friends. Wives and daughters rarely showed their faces. Sons were permitted on the understanding that they were neither seen nor heard. This was fine by the sons, who congregated in front of the green-domed clubhouse before making for one of the circuit’s massive banked curves, where they would spend the remainder of the day sneaking cigarettes in the long grass and silently praying for one of the drivers to misjudge the camber and go hurtling over the edge.
That’s what should have happened that day, what would have happened if he hadn’t reached out a hand and opened the glove compartment of his father’s new car. He was used to his father’s sudden jungle furies, used to being screamed at for some minor misdemeanour. He wasn’t used to being slapped across the cheek. He knew that his father struck his mother, he had seen the bruises on her, but he had always been spared such treatment. Until now. He didn’t cry—he knew that if he cried he was truly done for—but his father saw the tears moistening his eyes and that was enough. The words cut deeper than they ever had before and the shouts increased in volume, competing with the roar of the wind and the scream of the engine.
That’s when he did it. Even now, he couldn’t say what he had hoped to achieve. He certainly didn’t pause to weigh the consequences. It was a purely instinctual reaction. He lunged for the steering wheel and yanked it towards him. The last thing he remembered before the world went black was his hand, pale and hairless beside his father’s on the polished perfection of the wooden steering wheel.
His father died instantly when the roadster wrapped itself around the tree. Some curious law of physics chose to throw him clear at the moment of impact. All this he discovered some days later, when he came to in the hospital. His head was heavily bandaged, but everything else was intact—externally, at least, which was all the doctors cared about. They used the words ‘coma’ and ‘miracle’ a lot. His mother barely spoke. She did what she was supposed to do. She put on her widow’s weeds and consoled her damaged son. But he knew what she was really thinking; he knew she was struggling to come to terms with her liberation. He saw her in a new light, clear and crisp and cold, a winter light. And it wasn’t just her. He saw everything in this new and unfamiliar light.
Others must have detected something in him, because they started to remark on his behaviour. His mother said it was grief. The doctors put it down to shock. One doctor, young and eager to please his superiors, prattled on about some recent case studies of frontal lobe trauma. Apparently, there was evidence to suggest an association between a blow to the front of the head and a diminution in the subject’s ability to feel emotion. Words like ‘emotion’ didn’t sit happily with the consultants, and the young doctor learned a valuable lesson: it’s only a good idea if your boss has had it first.
Enough science had accrued in the intervening years to bear out the theory, but he had known the truth of it at the time. He wasn’t in shock and he wasn’t grieving, he was simply unable to conjure up any feelings. It was as if he were observing the world through the viewfinder of a camera. Some invisible barrier stood between him and the subject of his attentions.
He learned this early on, and he quickly learned to compensate, to fabricate the required responses of a normal person. He must have done a good job, for one day the doctors suddenly announced that he had recovered his wits and was free to go. The bandage was gone by then, the scar on his forehead already healing to a fine fissure.
He sometimes wondered if his mother had seen through his act in those early days, while he was still finding his feet in the new world. He had made mistakes, he knew that. Taking her in his arms on the first anniversary of the crash and weeping on her shoulder was an ill-judged piece of over-acting, but he had learned to refine his performance.
He took to rehearsing when he went for his walks, manufacturing a wide range of reactions: shock, delight, horror, amusement, curiosity, revulsion, wonderment—all the emotions which no longer came naturally to him. He learned to store away jokes and anecdotes for the entertainment of others. Judging which ones to pull out and when had taken longer. Reading your audience was no easy task when you felt no connection with them. It all came down to observation, he realized, and that’s where he concentrated his efforts.
Again, the walking helped. He started to see things which previously his eyes had passed over, not birds and animals and plants, but human patterns. He noticed that the tenant farmer on the other side of the wood, the burly widower, always did his washing on Saturday morning, irrespective of the weather, stringing the clothes up in the barn if it was raining. And the old couple who walked their two wire-haired terriers on the hill most evenings always stopped and kissed each other on the lips before negotiating the stile by the clump of gorse. He also noticed the mysterious black sedan parked in the driveway of the thatched house near the old meadow copse every Tuesday afternoon between the hours of two and four. At four, or thereabouts, he saw a young man, prematurely bald, hurry from the house to the car. And if he crept through the trees round to the back of the house, he could see a woman draw back the bedroom curtains the moment the car was gone.
Her name was Mrs Beckett, he discovered, and Mr Beckett sold engineering equipment around the country, spending much of his time on the road. They didn’t have children. It took him a month or so to build up the courage to knock on the door. When he did, he was pleased with what he saw. Mrs Beckett was more attractive up close, dark and petite and with a lively sparkle in her eye. When he asked if he could trouble her for a glass of water she invited him inside.
The kitchen was large and light and spotlessly clean. He had caught her in the act of making jam, straining fruit through a piece of muslin slung between the legs of an upturned stool. He knew all about making jam but pretended he didn’t, and an hour later he was still there, helping her.
She knew who he was, or rather, she had heard his story from someone in the area. He fed on her compassion, but picked his responses carefully, not wishing to overplay the role of tragic victim, which he judged would not appeal to her. He selected a couple of anecdotes to make her laugh, which she did, throwing back her head and emitting a throaty chuckle. When he finally left, she took his hand and shook it firmly and told him he was a brave and impressive young man. She also told him to stop by again if he was passing on one of his walks.
He left it a couple of weeks before doing so, during which time he toyed with his options, playing them through in his head in all their various permutations. Knowledge might equate to power, but the successful application of that power required meticulous preparation. He had a reputation to preserve, and he needed to be sure of Mrs Beckett’s silence.
He opted for a Thursday. It was a hot and sultry afternoon, a great cathedral of cumulus clouds stirring high overhead, threatening an electrical storm. She was in the garden, pulling weeds from the borders, and seemed delighted to see him. The perfect excuse to take a break, she joked. She poured them both a glass of lemonade from the jug she kept in the larder and suggested they drink it out of the heat, in the cool of the kitchen.
They sat facing each other across the scrubbed pine table, the sweat slowly drying on their skin. It wasn’t a scene he had imagined, but it was close enough, so he set about his business. He told her he was going away for a month with his mother to Bad Reichenhall, a spa town in the Bavarian Alps, guests of some German friends of his father. Herr Kettelmann was a regular at the Brooklands race meetings, and his eldest son, Lutz, had proved to be good company, bright and mischievous and fond of dirty jokes. He pretended to be under-whelmed by the idea of going abroad, dismissing the invitation as a gesture of pity towards a woman whom the Kettelmanns barely knew. She told him not to be so cynical, not to mistake kindness for pity. He lowered his eyes to the table, bowing to her superior wisdom and apologizing for his mean-spiritedness.
And so it continued, just as he had planned it: he, the troubled young soul in search of guidance; she, rising to the role of guide. She was less sure-footed when he turned the conversation to her, her life, her husband. He tried to show interest while listening to her tales of love and marriage and a happiness born in heaven—lies which invigorated him, entitling him to proceed.
When she rose to fill their glasses, he followed her to the larder and told her that he had never met anyone like her. She handed him his glass and told him not to be silly. When he took her hand and raised it to his lips, she snatched it away before he could kiss it. He was tall for his age, more man than boy, and she seemed to sense this now. Pushing past him out of the larder, she said that she had to get back to her weeding before the rain came, and suggested that he hurry home to avoid a drenching. He didn’t reply; he just looked at her. When she asked him firmly to leave, he asked her about the bald man.
The colour drained from her face, but she recovered quickly, pleading no knowledge of a bald man. When forced to concede that he did exist, she claimed that he was her brother. When he enquired if she thought it normal for a woman to spend two hours in a darkened bedroom with her brother every Tuesday afternoon, she began to grasp the hopelessness of her situation. She tried to wriggle off the hook a couple more times, first appealing to his conscience, then defiantly ordering him to go ahead and do his worst. But they both knew that they were edging inexorably towards a trade. She asked him what he wanted for his silence. Something I’ve never had before, he replied.
He might not have known what he was doing, but he was big, and he assumed that counted for something. He knew he was big because he had seen the other boys in the showers at school after games, as they had seen him, and they had remarked respectfully on his size.
It didn’t seem to give Mrs Beckett much pleasure. But he wasn’t thinking of her; he was thinking of himself, watching himself moving in and out of her and wondering if this was what all the fuss was about. Looking to improve on the experience, he manoeuvred her into a number of different positions, which helped a bit. Her passivity gave him no satisfaction, but neither did it hamper his performance. He did what he had come to do then he got dressed and left. He turned at the bedroom door and reassured her that her secret was safe with him. He wanted her to know that he was a man of his word. She was sobbing quietly into a pillow and didn’t look up.
The storm broke as he was crossing the meadow. Lightning scythed the sky, thunder echoed off the hills, and the rain sheeted down in warm torrents, soaking him to the skin. And yet he remained strangely immune to this assault on his senses, caught up in dark thoughts, wondering what he would have to do, just how far he would have to go before he finally felt something stir in him.
He wasn’t to know it at the time, but the answer lay only a little way off, in Bad Reichenhall.
Day Three (#u296e1901-f8de-5c3d-b9ec-50e57552a8c9)
Max was at his desk, taking a red pen to a news item, when the phone rang. He snatched up the receiver distractedly, irritably.
‘Yes?’
‘I know the feeling.’
‘Freddie.’
‘Bad morning?’
‘That new chap we took on, you met him at the party…’
‘Pemberton.’
‘Turns out he thinks he’s Shakespeare.’
‘He’ll learn. You did.’
‘Thanks for that.’
‘Listen, Max, I know who she is.’
Max’s smile died on his lips. ‘The girl…?’
‘She has a name now. Carmela Cassar. Her father was here earlier and identified the body. It’s as we thought, another sherry queen.’
‘You spoke to him?’
‘Don’t worry, I was very discreet.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Yes it is. Have you got a pen?’
Max scribbled down everything Freddie had gleaned, both from the official paperwork at the mortuary and from his conversation with the father. Carmela lived with her parents in the family home on the hillside near Paola, just up the slope from Santa Maria Addolorata Cemetery. She always got back from work late, between one and two in the morning, but in the five months she had been working at the Blue Parrot she had never once failed to return.
Max knew the Blue Parrot, not intimately, and not of late. It was one of the few dance halls in the Gut reserved for officers, which meant that the establishment was slightly more spacious than most, the floor show moderately superior, and the drinks vastly more expensive. He’d been there several times soon after his arrival on the island, when the star attraction, the big draw—the very big draw—had been an act from Hungary.
Budapest Bessie hadn’t been graced with either the build or the poise of a prima ballerina, but this hadn’t prevented her puffing her way through her version of ‘The Dying Swan’ before the disbelieving eyes of Britain’s officer classes. For some reason, veils had been a feature of her routine, he remembered, angina the reason for her sudden retirement from the stage. Ammunition was scarce even back then, but a couple of the shore batteries had been ordered to fire off a salute when the frigate bearing Bessie to a gentler life in Gibraltar had slipped out of Grand Harbour.
Max hadn’t been back to the Blue Parrot since that time, but he could see the flaking gilt of the mirrors in the narrow dining room, the greasy velvet upholstery and the tired palms dotted about the place.
‘Did she work anywhere before?’
‘I didn’t ask. Should I have?’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. Something that doesn’t make sense. She left for work on Thursday afternoon at five o’clock—she always allowed an hour for the walk, apparently—but she wasn’t found till the Saturday morning.’
‘Where exactly was she found?’
‘A backstreet in Marsa. Marsa was on her route home, but she can hardly have lain out there for a whole day without anyone seeing her.’
Max weighed a range of explanations, rejecting each in turn. Only one withstood the test, and it didn’t sit happily in the head.
‘She was held somewhere for twenty-four hours…’
‘It looks that way.’
‘Or maybe she was already dead; he just couldn’t dispose of the body for whatever reason, maybe it was too risky.’
As explanations went, it wasn’t quite as grim as the thought of her being held hostage for those missing hours, with the disturbing images that accompanied it.
‘The rigor mortis suggests otherwise. It was well set in when I first saw her on Saturday around noon. It generally peaks somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours after death, closer to twelve in this kind of heat.’
Which suggested that her life was ended some time on the Friday night. And probably not in Marsa. Marsa was simply the dumping ground. As to where she was abducted, it could have been anywhere along her route home; a quiet spot, most likely. But where did he hold her captive during Friday? And how did he transport her there? The questions were coming in a torrent now.
‘Max, I’ve been thinking. We have to go to someone with this.’
‘The Lieutenant-Governor’s office shut you out last time. What makes you think they won’t do it again? We need evidence they can’t ignore.’
It was a disingenuous response, and he knew it: presenting himself as the champion of truth when all he really wanted was a bit more time to follow through the consequences of a scandal of this scale breaking across the island.
‘Freddie, I just need a day or two.’
‘I’m happy to give it to you. But is he?’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying I don’t want another death on my conscience.’
‘You think I do?’ Max paused. ‘I’m asking you to trust me on this. A couple of days to check some things out. I’ll get straight on to it. I promise.’
Freddie remained silent for a moment. ‘Okay, but you’re on your own. They’ve got me working out of Mtarfa for the foreseeable.’
It was a testimony to Freddie’s skill as a surgeon that he spent much of his time being shunted between the island’s hospitals according to where his gifts were required. There was certainly no lack of call for them.
‘When are you heading out there?’
‘Ten minutes ago. A Beaufighter just pancaked at Luqa. The navigator is pretty chewed up, by all accounts.’
‘I’m going to need the exact dates when the other two girls were found.’
‘Then stay on the line, I’ll be right back.’
Max spent half an hour clearing his desk and briefing the members of his team. They were quite capable of holding the fort in his absence. He was on the point of leaving when the rising dirge of the air-raid siren stopped him in his tracks.
‘Damn,’ he muttered, making for the staircase which led to the roof. Fleur-de-Lys occupied the high ground between Hamrun and Birkirkara, and the zinc-clad roof of St Joseph’s offered one of the finest views on the island: a sweeping 360-degree panorama that took in Rabat and the walled city of Mdina to the west, roosting on their spur of white rock, keeping watch over the parched southern plain, where towns and villages lay scattered like dice on a tabletop. To the east, beyond Valletta and her twin harbours, lay a seemingly endless expanse of viridian green water. The corrugated hills that rolled off to the north beyond Mdina held little strategic importance for the enemy. Almost everything that was of interest to them—the aerodromes, the dockyards and the submarine base—lay within the field of vision of a person standing on the roof of St Joseph’s.
It was a biblical landscape—sunbleached, shadeless, harsh to the eye—broken up into miniature fields by a dense lacework of stone walls. The walls were there to prevent the precious dusting of soil from being blown about by the hot summer winds from Africa. In the winter, the gregale blew in from the north-west, bringing the heavy rains which turned everything to mud.
Right now, though, a brassy sun was overhead, and the first white galleon clouds of the year were gathering over the island.
Max turned as the big guns up on Ta’ Giorni ridge slammed a salvo into the air. Pale puff-balls of bursting ack-ack fire mottled the sky to the north-east, heralding the arrival of a vast and heavily escorted formation of 88s.
It soon became clear that the airfields were about to take another bad knock, and Max could feel his plans for the day slipping away from him. Travelling, like much of life on Malta, was something you did in between raids, and even then you kept one eye on the heavens for the lone marauders who slipped in under the radar screen. The scarcity of petrol had stripped the streets of motor vehicles in the past couple of months, and a lone motorcycle throwing up a cloud of dust was more of an invitation than ever to an enemy pilot with an itchy trigger finger.
He had only been strafed once—on the old dirt road that switchbacked its way between Ghajn Tuffieha and Mdina—but the suddenness and ferocity of the attack were indelibly etched on his memory. One moment he was barrelling along, the wind in his face, the next moment the road in front of him was erupting. The fighter was well past by the time he’d registered it, and it was a further few seconds before his brain was able to make the connection between the dot twisting away into the distance and the strip of earth torn out of the ground across his path. He might have processed the information more rapidly if he hadn’t been so joyously distracted at the moment the attack occurred. Three dream-like days by the sea at Ghajn Tuffieha had dulled his reactions.
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