by John Harris
‘It is indeed, and I’m obliged to you, Inspector. It sounds very interesting.’
‘I tried to find out who this Hatcher was.’ The inspector sounded pleased with himself. ‘But there’s no Isaac Hatcher in Chiteley and when I asked at the other villages around, there wasn’t one there either.’
‘This might make you jump, Inspector,’ Pargeter broke in. ‘But your friend Hatcher might well be an enemy agent.’
‘He might?’ The inspector sounded startled.
‘He might indeed. Like your Polish officer. What else do you know?’
‘Not much. But I did find out that this Polish officer was around here on and off until recently. Till they put the restrictions on, I reckon. I traced him to the George in Colchester. He had a camera and he borrowed a bicycle from the porter and said he was going to take photographs to take back to his wife in Lodz. The porter particularly remembered the name because he comes from Lodsworth in Sussex and they exchanged a few words about it.’
As Pargeter put the telephone down, there was a thoughtful expression on his face. ‘I think you’re going to be busy,’ he said to Iremonger. ‘I think I’ve just picked up the trail of our Polish friend again.’
Iremonger was none too willing to let Pargeter disappear just when his organisation was beginning to move, but he was also astute enough to know that Pargeter didn’t stick his delicate nose into things unless they had the sweet smell of certainty about them.
‘Better tell me about it,’ he said.
Pargeter smiled. ‘Do you want poetry readings or facts?’
When Pargeter had finished, Iremonger scowled and lit a cigar. ‘You’d better get over there,’ he agreed. ‘Liz Wint can take over here. She seems to know what ticks.’
Pargeter was about to turn away when he paused. Iremonger looked up.
‘Liz Wint,’ Pargeter said. He looked like a little boy up before the headmaster.
‘What about her?’ Iremonger asked cautiously.
‘She’s a nice girl.’
‘Yeah. I’ve noticed. Also very sexy.’
‘Not exactly a mind like quicksilver, though.’
‘A girl with legs like that doesn’t need a mind like quick-silver. What are you getting at?’
‘She’s very impressionable.’
Iremonger grinned. ‘You reckon?’
‘And I know Americans. Most of them think a mistress is a sort of caste mark – like a big car.’
Iremonger’s grin widened. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, ‘at the number I’ve heard at parties telling a girl that Americans mate young to have children, again in middle age for love, and finally in old age for companionship. It’s a line a general can use as easily as a green lieutenant.’
‘It won’t wash.’
Iremonger smiled. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said.
Pargeter gave him a dirty look as he disappeared, and the American pressed the bell. His heart skidded about a little under his shirt as Liz Wint appeared.
‘You always busy in the evening?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘Sometimes I manage to fight myself free.’
Iremonger grinned. ‘You’re a pretty girl. I like looking at you. Mind me saying so?’
She smiled again. ‘Work it into any conversation you like.’
‘How about a meal tonight?’
‘On service rations, why not?’
Iremonger’s smile widened. ‘Poor old Cuth,’ he said. ‘I wonder how he’ll get by.’
Liz Wint gave him a sharp look. ‘Have no fear,’ she said. ‘He’ll manage. His family have had centuries of practice.’
The detective inspector was waiting for Pargeter when he arrived in Colchester, and promptly offered transport in the shape of an elderly Morris. It chugged a bit and the cold wind blew in round the celluloid side curtains of the canvas hood.
‘I’ve found out a bit more about Hatcher,’ the inspector said. ‘He was known in the local pub at Chiteley, but everybody knew he didn’t live there and always assumed he cycled out from Colchester. He kept to himself and liked to sit and listen.’
‘I bet he did,’ Pargeter observed. ‘Especially if the place was full of talkative American bomber crews. Any idea where he is now?’
‘Not the foggiest.’
There were a few Liberator bombers in the air as they drove between the flat Essex fields. ‘From Asham,’ the inspector pointed out. ‘That’s the aerodrome near Chiteley.’
Over the drum of the car, they could hear the noisy revving of an engine. Then, sharp and staccato, the sound of a machine gun firing at the practice butts came on the wind across the low hedgerows, so that Pargeter, remembering what Hardee had told them, wondered whether the force at Asham was merely a token group to keep the locals guessing.
As they drew nearer the sound, the inspector indicated a row of ugly, redbrick cottages. ‘Chiteley,’ he said.
There was a train among the trees in the distance and, automatically, with an expert’s eye for detail, Pargeter counted the wagons – nineteen of them. A few American airmen with lorries moved alongside them, watched by local girls in flowered dresses.
‘There was a big raid yesterday,’ the inspector said. ‘Fortresses. Magdeburg, I heard. That’s Asham taking what they want, and then the train’ll move off in bits up to Wattisham, Rattlesden and Bury St Edmunds. There’ll be another one in tomorrow.’
He stopped the car opposite the cottages, and what happened next was almost like a scene from a film. One moment Pargeter was watching the villagers talking at their doors and a postman moving down the street with his sack on his back, followed by a dog, then the whole thing came to a stop as if someone had switched off the projector. It was totally unexpected and happened without the slightest warning, and he knew at once that he was standing on the edge of a catastrophe.
There was a terrific jolt that seemed to shake the whole countryside. Then, as he was whirled away by a tremendous hurricane of air, he saw a massive ball of orange flame enveloping one of the railway wagons in the distance. As it swept up, each of the other wagons exploded, almost in unison. The earth quaked and he caught a glimpse of men tumbling and staggering as the ground rose skywards in a coil of dense black smoke, beneath which gushed nineteen separate pillars of flame. Then the long roar of the explosions blended and reverberated into one long blast that stunned him and – awakening the whole countryside north of the Thames and rolling across Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk – hurtled out into the North Sea.
As the sheet of flame climbed skywards, red hands clawing at the heavens, Pargeter found himself in a dry ditch where he’d been flung.
Tremendous waves of noise beat against his ears so that it was like being tied to the clapper of a great bell. A roar like sustained thunder was going on around him but, as he tried to shout, his mouth felt full of cinders, and he was surrounded in inky cotton wool which was rolling up into the sky. Enveloped in a terrific heat, he felt he was asphyxiating in the pall of black smoke and the smell of burnt explosive. Great steel wheels were hurtling through the air like bombs and he saw another orange pillar of glittering flame soaring up.
It was like looking into the muzzle of a blow lamp, and he felt his body lifted again and again and slammed back into the ditch. The trees over his head billowed and swirled and burning fragments came down like glittering bats. Spout after spout of black smoke leapt up, joining with one another like some dark evil forest until it was all obscured in a widening and rising smudge. Pieces of wood and metal, planks and timbers, kept showering down, and he could hear the thuds as they struck the ground; then finally the corrugated iron sheets began to arrive, twisting down like leaves in autumn, slicing backwards and forwards.
As he realised it was all over, he staggered to his feet. Everything – trees, houses, fences, people – seemed to be on fire. Bodies smouldered where they’d been flung by the flash and the blast. As his eyes fell on a bloody torso and the white face of a corpse, he couldn’t understand why they we
re dead and he was alive.
The car in which he’d arrived lay on its side in the field and there was no sign of its hood. Then he saw the inspector climbing out of the ditch further on, and together they started running.
‘I thought it was an air raid,’ the inspector panted as he joined Pargeter. ‘Then, when the ground shook, I thought it must be an earthquake instead.’
A cloud of greenish-ginger smoke was still rising and spreading like a mushroom. Chiteley was flattened, houses leaning against each other like a half-collapsed pack of cards, their roofs in the road in a torrent of fallen slates and bricks. The zone of destruction seemed to stretch for a mile in a vista of shattered bricks and crackling flames. Not a roof remained anywhere. The village was nothing more than a group of half-standing walls and charred stumps of chimneys, its inhabitants still dazed by the colossal explosion that had taken place. Only a lost bewildered dog sniffing at the body of a man propped against a house, his face wearing a surprised look, the front of his scalp raised up like a ridiculous quiff, seemed to be still alive.
Then the survivors began to appear, in a state of shock, staggering, weeping, grasping at Pargeter and the inspector as they helped to pull them clear. Dozens more lay beneath the wreckage of their homes and stunned men were scrabbling in the debris to drag them out. They looked like beaten animals, utterly demoralised.
By the railway track, it was even more ghastly. There were bodies everywhere, some with their garments and hair still on fire. A weeping American airman, dreadfully burned about the face and hands, moaned softly. ‘It was the train!’ he said. ‘It was the goddam train!’
Where the train itself had been was only a charred wasteland. Every tree for hundreds of yards had been stripped of its foliage and most of its branches so that they stood up stark and straight like a lot of poles. The grass was scorched and the track was bent and twisted as if some giant hand had wrenched it up. On the spot where Pargeter had seen the wagons was a deep crater in which rested three separate sets of bogey wheels and the remains of a lorry. Railway huts had been flattened and shelters reduced to twisted sheets of iron. There was no vestige of a road, only heaps of rubble and huge craters.
A few other unhurt people were arriving by this time. They all looked as blank as Pargeter and the inspector, because none of them knew what to do. Then a soldier appeared on a motorcycle, his face shocked, and the inspector grabbed him by the arm.
‘You seen any telephones that work on the way here?’ he demanded.
The despatch rider shook his head. ‘Shouldn’t think there are any for mor’n a mile,’ he croaked. ‘The wires are down all the way.’
The inspector stared at him wild-eyed. ‘That thing got a pillion?’
‘No. But you can sit on the carrier.’
‘Right.’ The inspector turned to Pargeter. ‘If anybody comes along, tell ’em where I am. I’m off to find a telephone that works.’
Pargeter was still there when daylight came the next day. By this time, men from the USAAF base were tramping past, their haggard faces showing what they’d seen. Squads of British engineers, pioneers and infantry, rushed to the spot during the night, were occupied in clearing the place up, though by the look of it Chiteley would never be tidy or green again. An explosives expert had also arrived with a Security man, and Pargeter showed his credentials.
The explosives man was a sour-faced Scot given to keeping his own counsel, and it took some time to persuade him to talk. ‘Aye, it was sabotage,’ he said unwillingly. ‘There was no reason at all why it should go up. The weather couldn’t have been more normal and it was being handled properly. I’m no’ sure how many tons of bombs there were until I see the documents, but I gather there were several separate bangs.’
‘There were nineteen,’ Pargeter said. ‘I saw every one. How was it done?’
‘It’s no’ difficult wi’ a train full o’ bombs,’ the explosives expert said dryly. ‘A charge, a detonator, and a fuse. It would need a long time-setting, mind, or he’d have gone up wi’ it.’
‘He might well have,’ the Security man said. ‘A body was discovered on the edge of the wood. An identity card in the wallet says it belongs to Isaac Hatcher, a farm worker, of Chiteley, but no Isaac Hatcher’s known in Chiteley and the identity card’s one of a batch stolen in London last year.’
Five
It was dark when Pargeter returned to Portsmouth, and there were searchlights over Portland Bill. The control room was empty except for Sergeant Weinberger, who was doing the telephone stint, sitting with his feet on the desk, reading a western. As Pargeter appeared, his eyes widened because Pargeter’s normally immaculate battledress was torn and stained with oil and dirt and what looked like blood, and he was wearing a borrowed cap that was too large for him and rested on a deep bruise that spread from his eyebrow down one side of his face.
‘Jesus, sir,’ Weinberger said. ‘You been in a fight?’
‘Sort of,’ Pargeter said. ‘Where’s Second Officer Wint?’
‘She went off with Colonel Iremonger, sir. What happened? That ain’t your hat.’
As Pargeter headed for his office, the telephone rang and Weinberger yelled, ‘Major! It’s for you!’
Pargeter took the call with an expression of irritation on his face. As he listened, the expression changed to one of gravity. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell Colonel Iremonger at once.’
He put the telephone down and smiled bleakly to himself. ‘Sergeant Weinberger! Did Colonel Iremonger leave a telephone number?’
‘Yeah, Major. He did at that.’
‘Ring it, will you?’
‘He won’t be there now, sir.’
‘I think he might.’
Iremonger was fast asleep when the telephone went, and he sat bolt upright, startled and angry, to snatch at the instrument.
‘Yeah?’
‘We have a call for you, sir.’
Iremonger’s head turned. Second Officer Wint had pulled the pillow down over her head and was keeping her eyes tight shut.
It was Pargeter on the line. Iremonger had guessed it would be. ‘Hello, Iremonger,’ he said. ‘Sorry to disturb you.’
Iremonger glanced again over his shoulder. ‘Thought I’d have a night out,’ he said. ‘Found a bottle of whisky. Decided to sleep it off in a hotel instead of fighting the blackout. What the hell do you want?’
‘The lid’s blown off,’ Pargeter said. ‘Churchill’s got to know about the Fox.’
‘How, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Bushey Park told him. Eisenhower apparently decided that they couldn’t keep him in the dark forever. He says we’ve got to put a watch on all aerodromes, ports and fishing villages, and all units have been told to carry out investigations into all their officers, while lists of deserters have to be checked, and snap raids and equipment inspections have to be made.’
‘For Christ’s sake, we’re doing all that!’
‘I know.’ Pargeter sounded smug. ‘I don’t think we need do it again. I think he’s quite happy now he’s blown off a bit of steam. You can go back to sleep now. But I thought you’d like to know.’
The telephone clicked abruptly and as Iremonger put his own instrument down, he glanced round. The pillow had been lifted.
‘He knows?’
‘He sure does,’ Iremonger snarled. ‘And I dare bet the bastard rang up just to make me feel guilty.’
When Pargeter appeared next morning, Iremonger was already in the office, sitting with his feet on the desk, reading the signals that Weinberger collected for them from Fort Widley.
‘Big air raid Portland Way last night,’ he said gruffly. ‘Goddam noisy.’
‘Yes. I saw it.’ Pargeter bent over his desk, his expression coldly polite. He was wearing his best uniform, Iremonger noticed, but his eyes glittered and he started to whistle ‘The British Grenadiers’ to himself in a shrill dedicated way as he moved about the room, so that Iremonger was pleased to see he was human enough to have a t
emper and that he’d been able to rouse it.
As Pargeter glanced over his shoulder, his face wore its po-faced schoolboy look. ‘Were you with Liz Wint last night?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. Took her to dinner. Mind?’
‘Not really. Free agent. All the same, bloody bad manners.’
‘Why?’
‘Supposed to be friends.’
‘Who? Us?’ Iremonger lowered his feet with a bang. ‘I’d never have known it. You limeys always did have a goddam funny way of showing your affection for your American cousins. Sometimes I feel like something the cat dragged in.’
Pargeter’s whistling had a dogged note about it now. There was no hint of the sly amusement that irritated Iremonger, so that he scowled, disconcerted as he usually was by Pargeter’s offhand manner. Then, as he glowered, Pargeter turned his head and for the first time Iremonger noticed the bruise down the side of his face.
‘Hello, hello,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Some guy been handing them out? You been chasing somebody’s wife?’
‘No.’ Along with his best uniform, Pargeter seemed to have donned a martyred air. ‘I got it near Colchester.’
‘I heard an ammunition train went up round there. Did you blow it up?’
‘No. It blew me up.’
‘It did!’ Iremonger sat up abruptly. ‘Were you there?’
‘Right on the spot.’
‘Christ, Cuthbert, I’m sorry! I was only kidding you along! You know that. Any damage?’
‘Not to me.’
‘I heard there were a lot of people killed. What was it like?’
‘Bit dodgy,’ Pargeter said with a monumental understatement.
Iremonger stared, and of the two it was Pargeter who was the more composed. Iremonger scowled at him, baffled.
‘Well, for Christ’s sake, say something!’ he snapped.
‘What about?’
‘For Sweet Jesus’ sake, there’s just been a disaster! I know there has because I’ve been in touch with Eighth Air Force over a deserter who turned up. And you were there and appear with a face like a goddam choirboy and say only that it was a bit dodgy. For Christ’s sake, it was more than that! People have been killed and, if I know you, you probably won yourself a VC or something rescuing a lot of ’em from under their houses. It’s the sort of goddam nosey-parker thing you would do. For Christ’s sake, give!’