“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Oh, come off it. I’ve been with you up on that bloody bridge, remember?”
Kidd said, “After the war, always assuming we win it, and we’re still in one piece, what sort of life will the sea have to offer me? I had it rammed down my throat often enough what happened after the last lot. Greedy owners cutting down on crews, officers selling their souls just to get a berth. It will be worse this time.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure I could take it, starting all over again. And promotion?” He waved one hand and slopped gin over his sleeve. “This lady’ll suit me.” He made up his mind. “And besides, I’m going to get married.”
Fairfax jumped to his feet and reached down to hug him.
“You crafty, secretive old bugger! You’re a lucky chap! Not sure about her, though!”
Kidd grinned self-consciously, glad that he had told him. “It’ll be you next, you’ll see.”
Then he said, “So I don’t want to change things just now.” He gazed at the ship’s crest above the empty fireplace. “She owns a small hotel over the water, in Birkenhead.” He regarded his friend steadily. “I love her. Very much.”
Fairfax had never seen him in so serious a mood before. He thought of Martineau striding ashore without even changing into his proper rig. Once, he might have pitied both of them. Now all he felt was envy.
Martineau ran up the last few steps of the light cruiser’s accommodation ladder and touched his cap in a brief salute to the quarterdeck.
She was only a small cruiser, not unlike the one rammed and sunk by the Queen Mary, but after Hakka she seemed like a battleship.
They were all present. Quartermaster and boatswain’s mate, Royal Marine bugler, midshipman of the watch and various other figures, all of whom reminded him of that other navy, in peacetime, before the brutal ugliness of war. Perhaps that was the navy’s secret strength. Able to hold on to something, tradition, ceremonial, routine; he could not imagine it otherwise.
He was met by a lieutenant, who said, “The Captain is expecting you, sir.” He lowered his voice. “But he asked me to show you to his lobby first. There is a shore telephone call for you.”
Martineau followed the midshipman, his mouth suddenly dry. It was probably someone from Derby House, but he knew it was not.
“In here, sir.” He did not see the midshipman’s eyes as he stood back from a door. He was seeing someone else entirely: the destroyer ace, the man who had won the V.C. after ramming a German cruiser. A man who feared nothing.
He picked up the telephone. She must have heard the sound, and said, “It’s you, Graham.” So close that she could have been in the next cabin, or beside him.
“Are you all right, Anna? Tell me.”
“Yes. I can’t talk about it, we might get cut off. But you know what’s happening, Crawfie told you. She’s quite a dear, just like Naomi said. I didn’t really believe her.”
“I tried to call you again. I wanted to hear you, talk to you.”
“I know . . . they told me. It was a lovely thing to do.” Her Canadian accent was even softer on the telephone. “I was a bit out of it. I’d just heard about poor Caryl . . . I still can’t believe it.”
He heard the catch in her voice and sensed the urgency.
He said, “You’ll be hearing from my mother. I called her. She’d love to put you up.”
There was a long pause, then he heard her exclaim, “She doesn’t even know me!”
Maybe put you up was only a British expression. He said, “I must see you again, soon. So much to talk about, so much to share.”
She said, “In the hospital room.” Her voice broke. She tried again. “You kissed me. I didn’t want you to go.”
“I didn’t want to leave.”
She gasped, as if moving to a different position. “Ouch! That hurts!” Her voice was suddenly stronger. “I didn’t want you to see me like that. I couldn’t even see you.”
“How are your eyes, Anna?”
A longer pause. She was tired, or drugged, perhaps, for the journey to Manchester. Not all that far away, Raikes had said. It was if you were heading up into the ice, to the unseen enemy.
“They’re fine. Really. You mustn’t worry about me. Take care of yourself. Will you do that? For me?”
He gripped the telephone harder to steady himself. How can I tell her? I am afraid. I am afraid.
She said intensely, “You will be careful. Promise me, Graham. I want to see you again . . . so much. You probably think I’m just another nut!” She laughed, and turned away in a fit of coughing. There was another voice in the background. Authority.
He said, “I think you are a wonderful girl, and a very brave one too.”
A metallic voice intoned, “This line is needed, please finish your call.”
She said quietly, “Be very careful. You see, I think I’m in love with you.”
The line went dead, and no amount of clicking would shift it.
Somebody must have helped her to hold on to the line until she knew he was aboard. Crawfie? Or the paymaster twoand-a-half called Nobby?
In her work at Operations she would have known about the Russian convoy proposals, just as she would be aware of the enormity of the risk. Choosing the right measures, the best times of the year, discussions, signals, counter-proposals, with the Admiralty always in the background to stir things up. She had been going on duty that night when the bombs had buried her alive.
Her voice was with him again, as if she had just spoken aloud.
You see, I think I’m in love with you.
And now they were off once more, and she knew where he was going, and, more to the point, what it was costing him.
A steward had materialized out of the shadows. “The Captain is through here, sir.”
She might already be regretting what she had said. But just to see her, to hold her, was like a dream in itself.
The cruiser’s Captain had several other guests, none of whom he knew except by sight. He was able to join in, even to answer questions about the Norwegian campaign, but it was like being an onlooker, someone else playing a part.
She had never spoken of Hakka ’s previous Captain, the one who had wronged her, maybe more than she knew or would admit.
It did not matter. You see, I think I’m in love with you. That was the only thing that did.
It was bitterly cold that night in Liverpool, and some two hundred miles to the south it was not much different. London was settling down, bracing itself for another night of air raids: the river, dockland, which had been flattened in places by the first attacks, or further south, the factories, the warehouses, and the railways.
The air raid sirens had already been sounded; that meant nothing any more. The attack might take the form of high-level bombing, massive incendiary raids to light the way, or a sneak hit-and-run assault on individual targets. The enemy airfields were, after all, only twenty miles or so across the English Channel.
But at Lavender Hill police station it had all the makings of a normal night: blackout shutters in place, the white-painted sandbags piled around the entrance and yard, a fire in the grate, a cat curled up on the station officer’s rug enjoying the heat.
The night duty relief had already been paraded, given their instructions and gone out to their various beats. They were a mixed bunch because of the war and the suspension of police recruitment, old hands and special constables, and a sprinkling of War Reserve men. Enough, but only just.
With his back to the fire and leaning on one elbow, the station sergeant, who would have been retired but for the war, was going through the daily Occurence Book, a fresh mug of tea within easy reach. The cells were almost empty: two army deserters awaiting military escort, a drunk who had been found smashed in a shop doorway sleeping off his booze-up, and a vagrant who needed a bed for the night. The station sergeant could remember when that same man had been an earnest young tailor, a cutter in the factory near Clapham Junction. Then one even
ing he had gone home to his little house in Clapham as usual. There had been no house. No wife, no kids, just a bomb crater. His real life had ended then and there.
In the Job, as the cops called it, homelessness was nothing new, and in wartime it could only get a bloody sight worse.
But in Battersea it was all quiet. So far.
The constable on reserve duty passed through to poke the fire but paused, blinking in the hard gaslight as the station sergeant said, “Give them stray dogs something to eat, will you, Tom? They’ll be collected tomorrow, poor little sods.”
He picked up his pen. “Now then, about that accident down at Arding and Hobbs. Could you get me the book . . .”
He swung round, irritated, as the blackout curtain moved aside and a P.C. in a cape peered in at them.
The station sergeant said, “Bloody raining again, is it?” A glance at the old clock. “What are you doing back, Mason? You only just went out.”
The policeman’s mouth split into a great grin. “I’ve got Jack the Ripper with me, Skipper. Says ’e wants to see you— especially you!” It seemed to amuse him, and the other constable moved closer to share it.
The station sergeant was not amused. It would be a long enough night without this.
Jack the Ripper was the nickname given by the local officers to a man called Roy Harper. A mechanic by trade in a small way, he had, like many others, fallen on unexpectedly prosperous times working in one of the countless factories, some no more than huts, which had blossomed everywhere to help the war effort. And to make far more money than any poor serviceman who would eventually be called to use the product.
Harper chose night work, which was even better paid, but unknown to most people he would often take an hour or so off to visit a prostitute. On one such night not long ago he had been found covered in blood, running from the scene of a savage murder. The station sergeant had seen some of the photographs, and with over thirty years in the Job, he had still been sickened.
The case had gone through magistrate’s court, with Harper protesting his innocence, although circumstantial evidence had been found at the girl’s Chelsea apartment to connect him with the killing.
Harper hardly fitted the part, and without more solid evidence the case had been thrown out without going before a judge. Harper had since become something of a local celebrity, and made a point of visiting the station whenever he could, to offer his “advice.” To the other cops, Jack the Ripper was a joke. To the station sergeant he was not.
He snapped, “Bring him in! Three minutes, then kick his arse out of it, right?”
But when Harper ducked around the dusty curtain he knew something had changed. He was different. No insults, no swagger. If anything, he appeared to be suffering from shock.
The station sergeant took no chances.
“Make it short, Harper, I’m busy. There’s a war on, or haven’t you heard?”
Harper took out a newspaper and spread it on the desk with care. The other policemen moved closer to watch. It was a south London paper, by the look of it a few days old.
There was a photograph of a sailor. From the white ribbon on his uniform, it had probably been cut from a wedding group some time ago.
The headline shouted, COURAGE UNDER FIRE. LOCAL MAN A HERO.
Harper was staring at them, his mouth trembling with what might have been fear.
“I kept telling them, didn’t I? Nobody would believe me, then! ” He held up the newspaper and shook it. “D’you think I could forget, ever? This was the face I saw that night, the man running away from her flat!”
The station sergeant kept his voice low. “Ring around the pubs, Tom. See if you can raise the D.D.I.”
The officer, unwilling to miss anything, said, “The pubs’ll be closed by now, Skipper.”
The station sergeant did not take his eyes from the man on the other side of his desk.
“Pubs are never closed to the C.I.D. I’d have thought you would have known that by now.”
Carefully, almost gently, he took the newspaper, and murmured, “Well, well, there’s a turn-up for the book.”
Harper was backing away, eyes wild.
“Told you! Told you!”
“Let him go. We know where to find him.” He looked down at the cat by the fire. “They’d better not cock it up this time!”
It was not such a bad night after all.
It was cold on Hakka ’s upper bridge on the day of departure, but not unbearably so, and the rain had finally stopped.
This was the first time they had sailed as one complete group, with Zouave, the leader, followed closely by Inuit, Java, and Jester, heading down through the anchorage, hands smartly fallen in forward and aft, the air cringing to the shrill of calls, and the occasional lordly blare of a bugle from one of the larger onlookers. They would make a fine sight for those watching from the shore and aboard the many merchant vessels.
Hakka would follow with Kangaroo, and Harlech, now affectionately known as “the Old-Timer” by the more modern and rakish members of the group.
Martineau stood on the forward gratings and waited. In this berth there would be few of the staff from Derby House who would see them leave, he thought. He noticed that the officers and key ratings on the bridge had discarded their duffle coats and oilskins, and he was glad he had decided to leave his own heavy coat in the sea cabin.
He studied the other destroyers as they followed Zouave past two giant tankers. In each ship, every man from the leading supply assistant, or Jack Dusty, up to the Skipper on the bridge this morning would be going over everything, in case he had forgotten some item which was his personal responsibility.
He looked down at the forecastle again. Fairfax was in the eyes of the ship, the same signalman beside him ready to haul down the Jack, until the next time. On bad days Liverpool could look bleak enough, but it was Monte Carlo compared with Scapa Flow.
He saw Fairfax’s leading hand gesturing with a gloved fist. No mistakes, especially when casting off from a cruiser. Hakka had singled up all her lines, reduced now to head and stern rope, and one spring. He had heard the young navigator’s yeoman, Wishart, asking someone why they were still called ropes, when they were in fact thick, dangerous wires. Nobody had answered.
Wishart was here now, chinstay tugged under chin to anchor his cap in the cold wind. It was probably the only one he had after his confrontation with death in the sea. He had been incredibly lucky that day, which now seemed like a year ago. He was waiting with Midshipman Seton for the navigator’s instructions. Seton looked very pale and was biting his lower lip, troubled about something. His father, the Admiral, maybe? Or the next step in his career? Working so closely with Kidd, he would learn more about navigation and pilotage, and even ship-handling, than he ever would on the bridge of a cruiser or battleship, where he would have had to wait in line.
He saw some seamen running along the cruiser’s immaculate deck, chased by a fierce-looking petty officer. When Hakka took the strain on that head-spring, woe betide anybody who moved too slowly to wedge a rope fender or two between the hulls to prevent damage to paintwork or worse. He leaned out and stared aft. He could see Malt’s square shape by the guardrails, his own party of seamen loosening the wires around the bollards. The Gunner (T) was a good man when it came to creating order from the twisting chaos of incoming wires and springs. Martineau moved back again. A Captain must never be prejudiced.
He put one hand in his reefer pocket and was taken by surprise. It had happened this morning just after Colours, when they all knew that the order to move was not going to be rescinded.
It was a pipe, a good make too. Fairfax had offered it almost shyly.
“I saw you’d lost yours, sir. I was given this a year or so ago.” He had grinned. “Couldn’t carry it off somehow. A quick drag on a hand-rolled Ticklers is about my mark.”
People might be surprised how close those links were. Fairfax had seemed embarrassed, even a little apprehensive that he had stepped
out of line, a diffidence strangely at odds with the man who had taken command of Hakka under fire when his Captain had been killed, and who had volunteered to board the drifting tanker when it was known that U-boats were nearby and they might all have died for it. And he had still been quick enough to use his wits and save the lives of two of his boarding party.
He had added, “I did try it a couple of times, but it’s clean now, sir.”
Martineau had seen Onslow, the yeoman of signals, turn as they had laughed together, and he had answered, “If that’s the worst thing we ever share then I’ll not complain!”
He dabbed the lenses of his binoculars and examined them without noticing he was doing it.
He had telephoned the hospital again and had managed to speak to some junior doctor. Anna had left and would be in Manchester by now, although her heart would still be here, with the ships and the battle she had so wanted to be part of.
He had also called his mother in Hampshire.
“Of course, Graham, I’d be delighted to have her here! But I can’t stop now. I’ve got to rush off and . . .”
His mother kept very busy, with the W.V.S. and several charities as well as helping to organize outings and entertainment for older people who had been evacuated from London. Most of them seemed a lot younger than she was. And she always said, “I’ve just got to rush off and . . .” especially when she did not want to make a decision on the spot. She probably thought he was about to make a fool of himself. He had known very early in the marriage that she had never really accepted or liked Alison.
“Signal, sir. Proceed when ready!”
“Acknowledge.” He walked to the forepart of the bridge again and saw Fairfax look up at him and raise his hand. To the voicepipe he said, “Stand by, Swain!”
“Aye, sir.”
He looked at the masthead pendant, gauging the wind. The cruiser was moored fore-and-aft. She was like Gibraltar; you could not gauge the current from her.
“Let go aft!”
For Valour Page 19