Troubled Midnight
Page 12
Tommy grimaced as if saying he didn’t believe Tim Weaving could possibly be such a paragon of virtue and excellence.
“What about his love life, old Tim?” Tommy asked.
“You mean little Emily?”
He nodded. Suzie thought that’s what they mean by nodding gravely. “Yes, Bomber. Yes I mean his love life with little Emily and little Julia and also little Annie Tooks in Knightsbridge. Bit of a Lothario, old Tim, eh?”
“Man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” Puxley smiled, swaying happily in the uncomfortable chair.
“In triplicate?” Tommy asked.
“In quintuplicate if he’s a mind to. Specially these days when the evil Hun’s on the warpath.”
“Be that as it may. Surely there were some objections.”
“Padre possibly. Maybe some of his flock. But who are we to cast the first stone?”
“Know of anyone at all who was deeply offended by Colonel Weaving’s peccadilloes?”
“Narry a one.”
A long pause followed, stretching it seemed almost to infinity.
“Right, Captain Puxley. Like to get Captain Sharp to come in if you wouldn’t mind.”
“‘Nother good bloke, Wilson Sharp.” Puxley said. “Good bloke to have on your side.” He saluted Tommy, but not with the panache Shed Hutt had shown, then set course towards the door on what appeared to be a swaying floor.
“Dennis is checking out Major Hutt,” Ron Worrall said quietly. He had returned to his chair while Branwell Puxley had been regaling them with the tale of his clash with the late lamented Wing Commander Fanning.
“Good show,” Tommy drawled. “Damned good show, Ron,” in imitation of their recent interviewees, indicating that he wasn’t totally enamoured of the officers he had met so far. Suzie felt that wasn’t fair, these men were bloody brave, how would Tommy face up to leaping out of an aeroplane or landing a glider in a hostile field?
Captain Wilson Sharp was tall, tough, bronzed and dark-haired. In the right light you could have called him saturnine, and he appeared to come from the same school as the officers already interviewed, except without any smartness. There was no snappy salute to Tommy, just a raising of the hand, fingers touching just above the right eyebrow. Suzie thought she could be watching him greeting a farmer on his tractor on a winter morning in some Berkshire village.
Sharp, she told herself, had been the officer temporarily in charge while Hutt and Puxley were on leave: so take heed. Tommy asked him if things had been busy while Major Hutt was away.
“We did a little flying in the past couple of weeks,” Sharp’s voice had slight traces of an accent, country, a mild burr, possibly the Hampshire or Berkshire burr, but way back in the mists of time so that it had been overlaid with standard middle class pronunciation. Tommy would know where he was from, for Tommy prided himself on being a real Professor Higgins when it came to accents. He’d certainly suss that Wilson wasn’t top drawer. If he was lucky maybe he’d even place him within ten miles of his native town, village or hamlet. Wilson Sharp certainly did not come from a city, even Suzie knew that.
“Flying eh?” Tommy sounded as though this was an odd thing to be doing from an aerodrome.
“Some of the lads from the previous two courses came back for a refresher on the Horsas: four days, towed take-offs, circuit, cast off and bumps. Chap called Bartlett bent a Horsa. Overshot at Grove and ended up across a road. Sergeant Alexander nearly had a litter of pups sitting next to him. Said he was screaming at him that he was too high all the way down. Didn’t do any good. Then a Sergeant Franks almost accomplished the same thing but Sergeant Long, Chris Long, took over and landed. Next time round Franks did the same thing; bloody useless so we had a long talk and he got himself posted back to 6th Airborne. Did the decent thing, but an absolute prune; useless, but he’ll just about manage to jump and fight.”
Sergeant Franks almost accomplished the same thing. Almost accomplished? Suzie queried to herself.
Sharp raised his face, grinned at Tommy and asked if he could do anything to help.
“Possibly. Actually I’m just checking up reactions to Colonel Weaving’s death.”
Sharp nodded, bobbing his head as if he was an acolyte in church, bowing to the celebrant during Mass. “What can I tell you?”
“He seemed to be well-liked, Tim Weaving.”
“Very well-liked. Couldn’t ask for a better CO.”
“That’s what they all say. Seems too good to be true.”
“No, sir, that’s Colonel Tim. He was just about too good to be bloody true. Did everything a soldier should do. If he’d lived and we’d gone into battle with him every man here would have followed him right into the jaws of hell, and that’s a fact.”
“Jaws of hell, eh? Nasty place jaws of hell.”
“It is, sir. I’ve been there and it’s not at all pleasant.”
For a couple of seconds Tommy looked as though he had been ridiculed. “That’s the style,” he muttered as if he could think of nothing better to say. Then, “What’s that like, Captain Sharp? Jumping out of an aeroplane?”
Sharp gave a little rasping noise from the back of his throat. “Bloody terrifying. Anyone says he’s not frightened of jumping, every time he does it, is either mad or a bloody liar. Like going into action, that scares the blazes out of you, but once you become involved you get on with it: the same with jumping, terrified one minute, then when you’re working the shroud lines, stopping yourself from oscillating, trying to guide yourself in for a soft landing, spilling air out of the canopy, then it’s not frightening any more – except of course when it’s for real and they’re shooting at you from the ground. It’s all a dicey business, Detective Chief Superintendent. Dicey as buggery.”
“Mmm. Once you become involved, you say. What does that mean? Once involved going into action? Mean once you begin killing people?”
“And doing your best not to be killed, yes.”
“What about Colonel Weaving and his lady friend in Wantage?” Tommy reaching the final questions.
Wilson Sharp threw it back in his face, “What about the Colonel and the lady? Never did me any harm so I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“No moral feelings about them?”
Sharp laughed, humourless, cynical, dismissive even. “You ask that while this war’s going on around you? Moral feelings? Ask the kids dead in the Western Desert, or killed on the beaches of Dunkirk or in at cock-up at Dieppe. Ask them if they’ve got any moral feelings about anything. Morals’re too expensive for me. I just don’t have moral feelings any more. Have you thought about the morals of what’s going to be left when it’s finally over: thousands of young men turned out into a cold world trained only in the profession of death. Good for people like you I suppose. Great if you’re a cop.”
Tommy grunted and busied himself with his notebook. Finally he asked, “Night of 14th/15th December, Tuesday and Wednesday?”
“Seems like a thousand years since I’ve been out of camp.”
“Including Tuesday and Wednesday?”
“Including all the days of the week.”
“And everyone else’ll tell me that?”
“Ask anybody. I’ve been here holding the fort for ever.”
Sharp didn’t even wait for Tommy to tell him he could go: just touched his forehead again and walked out, his heels ringing their disgust on the wooden floor.
It took them another hour-and-a-half to talk with the remaining NCOs starting with Sergeant Major Hardy whose voice was far too lardy-dah for any of them. “Did you bloody hear him?” Tommy shrieked when Hardy has left. “More cut glass than Waterford.”
Indeed, the Sergeant Major seemed to have appropriated not a so-called upper class accent, but an accent he had made up for himself. Some of it approximated what is known as upper class pronunciation – ‘girls’ became ‘gels’ and there were odd bits of French littering his speech, notably bouleversé, coupe de foudre and hors de combat.
Monkey Gibbon was wheeled in and proved to have become cocky, having had his moment with Tommy in the Grove Street nick at Wantage. Now he started to call Tommy Livermore ‘Guv’nor’, which Tommy didn’t like; preferred ‘Chief’ which most of the Reserve Squad called him.
“Lay off the ‘Guv’nor’, Monkey,” Tommy told him, “or I’ll lay off the Monkey and call you Sergeant Gibbon, then I’ll see to it that you decline and fall, both.”
Pete Alexander proved to be running slightly to fat; definitely pudgy and seemingly not quite in the same world as Tommy, thinking very hard and struggling with some questions while smiling a faraway smile. Major Hutt’s notes declared that he was a s/h pilot but his conversation belies his skill. Lives in his own head. Tommy said that ‘s/h’ was a very vulgar rating for a glider pilot and Suzie had no idea what it meant.
Alexander confirmed that the Major and Captain Puxley had been on leave and that everyone else from the GPR was highly visible at RAF Brize Norton. On the night of 14th/15th December he had personally eaten in the sergeants’ mess and then gone to the pictures in the Garrison Theatre. “Saw a thing called Road to Morocco with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. That Hope’s a fair caution,” slow and the sly smile again, remembering the film, humming under his breath, ‘Like Webster’s Dictionary we’re Morocco bound.’ Didn’t seem to care a jot that he was being interviewed.
He also told them that Mulfy Mulford and Chris Long had eaten in the mess that night. But when Sergeant Mulford came in – medium height, salt and pepper hair with Hutt’s evaluation saying, ‘straightforward man, obeys orders sometimes without thinking’, the reality didn’t quite marry with the Major’s assessment: Mulford appearing to be nervous to the point of twitchiness.
Eventually Mulford began to hum and hah over the where-were-you-on-the-night-of-14th/15th December question.
“What’s up Sergeant Mulford?” Cathy asked, belligerent and confrontational. “Come on, tell us what’s wrong.”
“Can I get Chris to come in? Chris Long?”
“Will that help you?”
“He’s my mate and we were together that night.”
Long was a short man, a classic ‘Lofty’. Short, curly headed and miserable looking. Tommy got him to bring another chair over and sit next to Sergeant Mulford. Then he went through the whole spectrum of questions, bouncing them from one man to the other. All was straightforward until they again got to the one about where they were on the night of 14th/15th December: the night the Colonel and Emily Bascombe were killed in Wantage.
“We weren’t in the camp.” Mulford blurted.
“We were out,” said Long, very quickly.
“But we were together.” Mulford again.
“What’s your problem?” Tommy asked, doing his gentle voice.
“It’s against standing orders,” Mulford told them.
“Not allowed to sleep out overnight.” Long looked even more miserable.
Tommy again asked what their problem was.
“Well, it’s difficult, sir. It’s something we’d rather not talk about in front of the other blokes.”
“But you were together?”
“Yes, sir. You see it’s a mixed class, women as well as men so the others might think we’re a bit odd. Maybe even think we’re. Well, queer.”
“But we were asked,” Long took up the convoluted story. “We didn’t like to say no. I mean we saw no harm in it.”
Tommy took in a deep breath, “No harm in what?”
“Happened just after we were posted here,” Sergeant Long nodded. “We was down the pub. Brize pub, The White Hart. Met this fellow. Taught art. Taught drawing and painting. Watercolours and oils, both … Name of Morrison.”
“Every Tuesday evening, down the Church Hall. Men and women. Mixed class. Problem was he needed models.”
Tommy chimed in. “So you became nude models for this art class.”
“That’s cold that church hall. Wind whistles round your…”
“There’s nothing wrong in posing as nude models.”
“Well, we didn’t want the rest of the lads to know. They’d have taken the … pi … mick … know what I mean?” Mulford looked definitely self-conscious while Chris Long just shrugged and appeared to be blushing.
“How late did it go on for, the class?” Cathy asked.
“Couldn’t have been all night surely?” Ron puzzled, joining in.
“What else was going on,” Tommy seemed to be smirking. “You said you were out all night.”
“Well, there’s these two Land Girls. Twins.” Mulford didn’t meet his eye. “We call them Topsy and Turvy. Real names’re Topsy and Tessa, and Mr Raines – that’s the farmer they work for – he’s given them one of his tied cottages. They made it really nice … Did it up, got some nice sticks of furniture.”
“And from time to time you’d stay in this cottage?”
“That’s about the strength of it, sir.” From a gloomy Chris Long behaving like Eyore in Winnie the Pooh.
“We stay with them. Sometimes. Not every time…” Mulford about to over elaborate.
“We’ll have to talk to the ladies.” Cathy on her high horse.
“Oh, I don’t think they’d like that,” Long shook his head and looked even more down in the mouth. “See Tessa has this fiancé out in Italy. With the 8th Army.”
“Yeah,” Mulford added. “Fighting like buggery.”
* * *
SADLER KNEW WHO the dangerous ones were. When he’d gone into the room for his interview the snotty plainclothes copper had introduced everybody: his Detective Sergeant with a weird name, Wimerew or something, and a Detective Constable called Worrall. Then the two sitting slightly apart. “My colleagues from the Home Office,” the copper said, flapping his hand wearily towards them, man and a woman: the man tallish and tanned, young with eyes that seemed to bore into you, the woman a nice piece, good legs, neat tits, but had copper written all over her, way she moved and looked. Suspicious blue-green eyes, restless.
They were spy chasers if he knew anything about it. They just sat and listened, watched, the pusher staring at his hands. Didn’t ask questions, but listened and watched intently. Watchers were fucking dangerous and he knew immediately that he’d have to do something about them. Go talk to Linnet. Linnet could fix it, set it up and do it now. Now, now this minute.
There’d be a stink of course and the coppers would be chasing around for days. But how could they possibly find out. If they were any good they’d only work out who Linnet was. Trail’d go cold after that.
Couldn’t touch him, Sadler.
* * *
THE OBSEQUIOUS SERGEANT MAJOR Hardy was hanging around the mess when they finally wound up the little conference following the last interview. Cathy had been told to find out where the Land Army girls lived. “Track ’em down,” Tommy told her. “Embarrass the hell out of them. No doubt it’s all okay, but we’ve got to follow up the nookie.” Tommy being really unpleasant.
He also took Ron to one side and told him to liaise with Dennis Free and check on all the other alibis. “Apart from that strange sergeant major, these are intelligent men. Put all their stories through a sieve. If necessary we’ll come back and take them through it again tomorrow, okay? This is where Colonel Weaving lived and worked and I don’t trust all this best-soldier-whoever-breathed lark.”
Ron was to double check on anything he felt uncertain about.
In the mess bar, Dennis Free, Shirley Cox and Laura Cotter hung around trying to avoid talking to the Sergeant Major who loudly informed Tommy Livermore that there were a couple of jeeps outside waiting to ferry them to the officers’ mess. The way he said it sounded more like, ‘A payer of japes waiting to ferrayew…’
The jeeps were manned by RAF drivers because the GPR had only one jeep, the CO’s tran
sport, usually driven by Monkey Gibbon.
Curry and Suzie climbed into the rear of the second vehicle.
“We’ll give it one drink and a ham sandwich then we’ll ease out,” Curry said. “I’ve got a few ideas of my own and we can always come back with Tommy tomorrow. Priority is getting you to meet Elsie Partridge, right?”
“Whatever you say.”
The mist and fog had burned off leaving a clear cobalt sky, a beautiful morning with a sharp tangy chill in the air. Out on one of the frying pan hard-standings a Wellington ran up its engines, making the air tremble. Someone had said that the Wimpies at the Operational Flying Training Unit at Harwell used Brize as one of its satellite aerodromes.
Suzie couldn’t follow the route to the officers’ mess, and when they finally arrived in front of the semi-permanent building she took a deep breath, looking around in an attempt to identify exactly where they were. The building fronted the main road, some fifty yards away: high barbed wire fences ran along the perimeter, and traffic, mainly military, hummed defiantly past. On the other side of the road, over the hedge, a long and wide meadow sloped up towards a horizon dotted with clumps of trees and, to the right, a group of buildings huddled around a grey stone church.
Suzie took in the view and was just turning away to follow the others into the mess when something caught her eye, a shimmer, unnatural movement among a group of low trees and bushes some two hundred yards up the slope away from the road.
She was aware of the first two cracks and thumps and her mind took in what was happening. Tommy, in an idle moment, had fully explained the theory of crack and thump. It you are being shot at the crack is from a bullet cleaving the air somewhere near you; while the thump is the actual discharge of the weapon.
She heard two cracks and two thumps, followed by a third one.
Then something hit her with force on her back, knocking the breath out of her and she went sprawling to the ground, her head glancing off the jeep’s bonnet. For a few seconds her world filled with electric blue pain.
Chapter Ten
SHE CAME BACK as though from several fathoms, breathless and lying on a leather settee in a neat room with paintings of aeroplanes on the walls, a big fireplace with a marble surround, that seemed out of place, and windows looking out towards the road. In the distance she saw a white coated orderly hovering with a glass on a silver tray. Nobody else around except for Curry Shepherd.