by James Philip
Nobody said anything.
Margaret Thatcher and Iain Macleod had devoured the reports from the Royal Engineer survey parties, and last night they had discussed the implications in detail until the small hours of the morning.
“Moreover,” the Home Secretary continued, the River Thames is navigable by sea going vessels up to Tower Bridge, and beyond by smaller craft all the way up to the first weirs at Teddington. All the major bridges over the River Thames are intact and although there are merchantmen, barges and lighters derelict and sunk or grounded at the quays of many of the major London docks the greatest damage is to the buildings surrounding and adjacent to them, and of course to the transportation and communications infrastructure. In this latter regard, the indications are that many, perhaps most of the capital below ground – that is sewers, cableways, passages and many basements and vaults, not to mention much of the tube railways system, although now flooded in Central London – survived the bombing more or less intact. This is important because it means theoretically that, for example, if we put our minds to it the London docks could be restored to full use within a matter of months.”
“What of the rest of the capital?” The Queen asked flatly.
“The survey teams estimate the epicentres of the four strikes – which they now assess as being in the range of three hundred thousand kilotons to somewhere slightly in excess of one megaton, as being Dagenham, Bexley, Barnet and Harrow. The south-eastern quarter of the Greater London Area therefore suffered the least catastrophic damage, and a large number of major buildings are still standing in the centre of the capital including the shell of the Houses of Parliament, albeit severely knocked about...”
Chapter 8
Saturday 18th January 1964
17 Bay Street West, Kalkara, Malta
Lieutenant Jim Siddall, formerly a staff sergeant in the Royal Military Police but for last seven weeks a brevetted officer on the personal staff of Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Wemyss Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean, parked his Land Rover across the road from the neat, sandstone Admiralty Dockyard company house. The former Redcap did not think he would ever get used to the Maltese winter – balmy January days with a warm sun overhead between the showers – but every time he remembered winter in England he inwardly chuckled with smug complacency. Yes, this was the life. Whoever would have thought that one day Mr and Mrs Siddall’s tearaway good for nothing son would be a Political Intelligence Officer on the staff of the most powerful and famous British field commander since Montgomery of Alamein?
It was a funny old World...
He had been pleasantly surprised to receive Marija Calleja’s call that morning. She had come to his pokey office beneath the ramparts of the old citadel walls of Mdina, walking the short distance from St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, situated on the other side of the Cathedral around which so much of the inner fortress was built.
‘I am sorry to trouble you, Jim,’ she had apologised but the soldier had not been in the least incommoded. It was her first visit to his bolt hole and he had been boyishly pleased to see her. ‘My mother is in a state,’ she had explained, a little embarrassed. ‘My sister-in-law, Rosa, my brother Samuel’s wife, called on her in Sliema last night and well,’ Marija had shrugged, ‘she is very worried.’
The pale blue of her auxiliary nurse’s uniform suited the young woman’s slender figure and almond, questing eyes. Her long nutmeg brown hair had been clipped back, and her delicate hands were restless.
‘Nobody has seen Sam since Wednesday afternoon. What with what happened to HMS Torquay, Rosa is beside herself...’
Jim Siddall had persuaded his visitor to sit down, offered her a cup of tea.
‘No thank you...’
The soldier had not had to think very hard about what to do next.
‘How can I help?’ He had asked.
As he had escorted her out of his office Marija had pecked his cheek and he had felt like he was nine feet tall. He still felt at least eight feet tall as he stepped out of the Land Rover and straightened his uniform. The C-in-C ran a tight ship, he liked his HQ to run like clockwork and he was a stickler when it came to uniforms. Jim Siddall had always taken pride in his appearance and the crispness of his uniform; he still painstakingly bulled his own shoes each morning before he reported for duty. He had fitted like a well-oiled cog into the HQ machine and already made a number of new friends in the Officers’ Mess. The C-in-C expected his staff to work ‘as a team’ and made it crystal clear that ‘everybody had to get on with each other’ or he would ‘know the reason why’.
And now Marija Calleja had come to him asked him for help.
Life was good.
Rosa Calleja had been crying. She was a pretty girl of about Marija’s age, a little shorter by an inch or two and fuller-figured with auburn hair and grey-green eyes filled with trouble. She was dressed in a long dress drawn in tightly at her waist, the hem of which danced around her tanned calves. She wore a silver chain with a crucifix pendent. She fingered her wedding ring as she eyed the big man on her doorstep.
“Lieutenant Siddall,” the man introduced himself, at pains not to sound like the military policeman he had been for most of his decade-and-a-half in the British Army.
“Ah, Marija’s friend,” the woman on the doorstep sniffed, on the verge of a flood of new tears.
The tall former Redcap heard himself being referred to as ‘Marija’s friend’ and was so distracted that he hardly registered anything else for several seconds.
“Er, I am on the C-in-C’s staff,” he explained lamely. “Marija asked if I could make discreet inquiries. Er, to ascertain your husband’s whereabouts without causing a stir...”
“He goes off some nights,” the worried wife blurted. “I don’t know where he goes. But he’s never been gone this long without saying something...”
“Perhaps, if we talked inside?” Jim Siddall suggested, knowing how most neighbours usually had gossip antennae specifically attuned to exactly this kind of conversation between a tearful spouse and a representative of the authorities.
Inside the small, cool simply furnished company house it was very quiet. Maltese houses tended to have thick walls, were rarely more than two storeys high and had wooden shutters on south-facing windows to keep out the heat by day. The Calleja’s residence was one of the better company houses, relatively new – post 1945 – with internal bathroom facilities, a small reception room and kitchen on the ground floor, and presumably at least two bedrooms upstairs. Marija had once mentioned that her father was entitled to a similar house – possibly a little grander – but that her mother was fond of the apartment in Sliema, so, as in most things, her father had deferred to his wife’s wishes. Maltese civil society was doggedly Catholic; right up until the moment one scratched beneath the surface crust and discovered that in just as many ways it was positively matriarchal.
Jim Siddall had chortled to himself when he had first heard that back home the old country had acquired its first female Prime Minister. A blond bombshell side by side with the Queen running the show! The new woman – whose name eluded him for the moment – and her Majesty could hardly make a worst fist of things than the old men who had gone before them. From the pictures he had glimpsed on the cover of the Times of Malta the new woman, Margaret something or other, was certainly a looker. Everybody in the Mess at Mdina was agreed on that if not a lot else about the new regime in England. Like military men anywhere and at any time in history, they were more interested in the facts on the ground than talk of a new World in the morning. If the ‘blond bombshell’ meant to give them the tools to do whatever she ordered them to do, then all well and good. Otherwise, what had really changed?
“I am forgetting my manners,” Rosa Calleja apologised. “I should offer you a cup of tea. It is very kind of you to come all the way around the island to visit me.”
Presently, the frightened wife and the soldier sat across fro
m each other at the small kitchen table.
“Sam, your husband, doesn’t usually absent himself in this way?”
“No. Never like this or for so long. He goes off all the time. He hates to be around the house. Either he locks himself in his workshop or he goes off in his car but he always tells me when he expects to be back and he’s usually not more than an hour or two late.”
“A workshop?” Jim Siddall asked gently, knowing better than to badger the woman. His judgement was that she was so worried that she would tell him absolutely everything she knew in her own time whatever he said or asked.
“There are three old Nissen huts at the end of the road behind the houses. I think they were Messes for the crews of the anti-aircraft batteries guarding the approaches to Fort Rinella and the Grand Harbour during the Second War. Sam rents the one nearest the house. He likes playing with old motor bikes. He had an old Triumph when we first met. He always wanted to take me places on it but he rode like a madman and I was too scared...”
“Has he friends he stays with?”
“Sam has no friends,” the wife complained. “No, that’s not true. He was friendly with a couple of guys who were killed when that ship was bombed in the dock. He was very bitter about that but I thought he had got over it.”
“What about you?” The former Redcap asked innocently.
“My friends are in Valletta and Rabat. They don’t like to come all the way to Kalkara when Sam is at home.”
“Husband’s with demanding jobs often like to be quiet when they are at home,” the man countered, testing the young woman’s mood.
Rosa Calleja huffed irritably.
The man followed up: “Are you and Sam happy together?”
The young woman blushed deeply and looked away.
“Yes. Who says we are not?”
“I used to be a policeman,” Jim Siddall confessed, guessing this would not be news to Rosa Calleja who had struck him as being an intelligent, probably very well-informed young woman. “If I am to help you find Sam then I need to know about your life together. I need to know if there is any reason he might suddenly do a disappearing act?”
The woman folded her arms across her breasts as if she was cold.
“Our marriage was a sham. After the night of the war my husband found me physically repugnant to him. We hardly talked, and then we didn’t talk at all. I still love him, but...”
Jim Siddall was suddenly getting a very bad feeling; and it immediately began to gnaw at his gut.
Wrongness shouted at him.
“Have you looked in at his workshop in the last day or so?”
“No.” The woman shook her head vehemently. “He hates me going anywhere near it.”
“You mentioned a car?”
“He sometimes comes home with a company car. Some dreadful noisy dirty thing from the car pool at the Dockyard Head office at Senglea.”
“Has anybody from Dockyard Security visited you yet?”
Rosa Calleja shook her head.
“No, my friends,” she shrugged, realised she was not making any sense and explained, “the other wives in the houses in the street, they say the police are interviewing everybody in the docks first. Nobody has been out here yet.”
“I was told that Sam wasn’t interested in politics?”
“I think that was why he fell out with his brother. Joseph is very active in the docks.” Rosa did not entirely approve of that. “He was very angry when Marija got involved with the Women of Malta.” She really, really did not approve of her sister-in-law’s notoriety. “People from the Internal Security Department interviewed him several times about that. I think they sent him to talk to her once, maybe twice. Of course, the Heroine of Birgu – Vittoriosa as you English say - wouldn’t listen to a word he said. Marija and her precious principles!”
Jim Siddall paused to collect his thoughts.
Nobody had told him that goons from the notorious, now disbanded ISD had tried to apply pressure to Sam Calleja in a back door attempt to undermine the Women of Malta movement.
“Who else visited Sam last year?” He inquired, not really expecting to learn anything new.
“A British naval officer with a scarred head visited me one day last November.” She squeezed her eyes shut trying to remember his name. “A Commander McNeill. He was a very charming man. Very well-spoken. I was a little surprised when Sam arrived home just afterwards. It was all very strange. They went off for a walk together and I never saw the Commander again. He and Sam shook hands out in the road when they came back from wherever they had been and Commander McNeill drove away. His driver was a blond lady. Funny, I’d forgotten all about that until you asked me that question...”
“That is often the way. One’s memory is a funny thing.”
“You were a policeman?”
Jim Siddall nodded.
“Not all policemen have loud voices and a big stick, Mrs Calleja.” He came to a decision. Before he tried to encapsulate his ‘bad feeling’ about the situation in a report to the Dockyard Security people, he would have a little nose around. Just to see if there was anything obvious to be found. He would leave the house to the experts; spare Rosa Calleja that shame a little longer. “Do you mind if I have a little look around Sam’s workshop. You never know, there might be a clue to where he is in there amongst his motor bike stuff. In my experience, there’s often a completely innocent explanation for most apparently mysterious disappearances.”
In this case he did not think that was remotely likely but it was not his job to put the fear of god into a young woman who was already worried very nearly out of her mind.
It transpired that Sam Calleja carried the only key to the padlocked workshop with him at all times. Jim Siddall returned to his Land Rover and retrieved a tyre iron.
The three Nissen huts were slowly bleaching in the Mediterranean sun.
The company houses were at the top of the settlement of Kalkara. Narrow streets and picturesque old houses filled the ground sloping down towards the blue waters of the Kalkara Creek. Beyond the Nissen huts the Mediterranean was hazy as distant rain clouds drifted south.
Sam Calleja’s ‘workshop’ was the only one which was padlocked. The adjoining huts looked empty and unused, on the farthest the door hung off broken hinges.
“The local kids play around here all the time,” Rosa said, walking away to peer into the dark inside of the hut with the open door.
“I should think this whole island is a paradise for kids,” the big former Redcap chuckled as he carefully jammed the crowbar into the door jam. The padlock looked new and formidable so he had determined to have the door off its fragile, rusty hinges rather than try to break the lock.
Satisfied he had worked the lever far enough into the space beneath the upper of hinge, Jim Siddall took a deep breath, and applied pressure. At first there was a groaning of dry wood, then a splintering.
And a soft metallic click.
And then the Nissen hut exploded.
Chapter 9
Saturday 18th January 1964
Camp David, Thurmont, Maryland
James William Fulbright, the fifty-eight year old Missouri-born Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations had been appointed as the late Dean Rusk’s replacement as Secretary of State on Christmas Eve 1963. He was an impressive man physically, intellectually and politically, a man of conviction and surprisingly, contrary views. Many people believed that if President Kennedy had had the nerve to install him at the State Department in the spring of 1961; things would have turned out differently when the Soviets tried to base ICBMs on Cuba. However, that was hindsight and Fulbright was not a man who lived in the past. Which was the main reason he had summoned Walter Brenckmann and cordially requested the new British Ambassador, Lord Franks, to an ‘at home’ weekend with him at Naval Support Facility Thurmond, more popularly known to the man in the street as ‘Camp David’.
Camp David had been the official country bolthole of Presidents of t
he United States of America since 1942. Situated some sixty miles north west of Washington DC in the Catoctin Mountains, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had called it the USS Shangri-La – allegedly because the base was run by the Navy and it put him in mind of the mythical Himalayan paradise described by British author James Hilton in his 1933 novel ‘Lost Horizon’ – but it was Dwight Eisenhower who had set the name ‘Camp David’ in stone during his Presidency in the 1950s. Protected with missionary zeal by the Marine Corps, Camp David was the one place in America where the new Secretary of State knew for a fact that he had an even chance of conducting a private conversation with the two men whom he believed might – at this moment – have the fate of the World in their hands.
Fulbright understood why Jack Kennedy had not nominated him as Secretary of State back in the fall of 1960 in the heady days after his photo-finish election race with Richard Nixon. Nixon had actually carried three more states than Kennedy and only lost the popular vote by a little over one hundred thousand of over sixty-eight million cast. The race had been far too close for comfort and the new Administration had wanted to avoid courting controversy.
Fulbright was a Southern Democrat and proud of it, and his unshakable commitment to multilaterism – no matter that it accorded with the President’s own personal internationalism – would have sat much more comfortably with the expressed foreign policy agenda of a Nixon Administration. Notwithstanding, Fulbright was not a man inclined to waste time chewing over past slights, setbacks or mistakes. Now was his moment and he intended to seize it.