With the arrangements for the air show still fresh in my mind, I told him all about Sunday’s plans. How it was my first public display. How nervous I was already at the thought of all those people watching. How much I’d picked up from my six weeks away in Florida. Mention of Florida brought a flicker of recognition to Ralph’s face and I found myself taking him through the training I’d done. The outings in the Harvard. My first solo in the Mustang. Even that hot, grey afternoon I’d flown into a tropical thunderstorm and only survived a lightning strike thanks to my very own Good Shepherd. The memory brought me to a sudden full stop. It was Harald who had done that. It was Harald who had saved my life.
‘Harald? You remember Harald? Harald Meyler?’
Ralph had his eyes closed. For a moment, I thought he’d gone to sleep or - even worse - lapsed back into unconsciousness. I was aware of a nurse beside me. Normally busying from job to job, she was standing there, watching him.
Finally, Ralph’s eyes opened again.
‘Harald?’ Another try. ‘Harald Meyler?’
I swear he nodded. I swear it. I bent a little closer, remembering our trip to Chicago. Karel Brokenka. Why on earth hadn’t I mentioned him before? The prize catch in Ralph’s research trawl? Ellie B’s most distinguished pilot?
‘I went to see him,’ I told Ralph. ‘We flew up there, to Chicago. Karel, Ralph. Karel Brokenka.’
The name drew another tiny nod of recognition. I described our visit to the lakeside nursing home and then went over Karel’s story, telling it the way the old man had done, second by second, the Mustang plunging after the 109, reeling it closer and closer until the moment came to pull hard on the firing trigger and watch it disintegrate in the gunsight.
A hint of a smile ghosted over Ralph’s face and it was then that I remembered the post I’d picked up at his bungalow. The airmail envelope had come from the German archives. If we were lucky, it might contain a photograph of Ellie B’s one and only kill.
I took the lift down to the car park. The envelope was still on the passenger seat. Back at Ralph’s bedside, I opened the gummed flap at the top. The covering letter had come from an assistant called Gundren Hensch. Attached to it were three photos. I removed the paperclip, spreading them across the bed.
The first showed an Me 109 drawn up in front of a hangar. The canopy was open and the cockpit was empty. There was snow on the ground and tyre tracks everywhere. The second photo was more formal, a squadron or perhaps a larger unit of pilots, three rows of rather drawn faces, staring at the camera. I turned the photo over, hoping for a guide to a particular face, but there was nothing on the back.
I picked up the third photo. It was black and white, like the rest, but this time there was a single face staring out. He was standing beside an Me 109, the same plane and the same snow as I’d seen in the first shot. The pilot was wearing a long, double-breasted leather coat, but despite the cold he was bare-headed.
I stared at the face, meaning to show the photo to Ralph. For a long moment, everything seemed to go very quiet. I shut my eyes, then opened them again, looking down at the man in the leather jacket. I’d seen this face only a month or so ago. It had been there in the house in Florida, in the Casa Blanca, mounted in Monica’s pretty little frames, and it had been there as well in Harald’s study, propped against his laptop, the night I’d found him asleep. The same deep-set eyes. The same aggressive tilt of the chin. The same look of gaunt exhaustion.
Very slowly, I turned the photo over. This time, there was a name. Reinhard Mehler. Staffelkapitan. Killed in action, 1 January 1945.
Chapter nineteen
It took me most of the evening to find the card that the detective had left me, way back in February. His name was DC Perry. I was sure of it. And he’d told me to ring if there was anything he could do to help.
I called him on the mobile phone number he’d scribbled on the back of his card. By the sound of it, he was sitting in a pub. Very briefly, I explained what had happened. I told him about Harald, about recent developments in Jersey, and finally about the photograph from the Bundesarchiv. Staffelkapitan Mehler had gone down at the hands of Karel Brokenka. That’s why Harald had subjected the old man to such a grilling in the Chicago nursing home. That’s why he’d wanted to know every last detail of Brokenka’s finest moment. Harald’s father had been killed by our Mustang.
DC Perry seemed confused.
‘But you say the Jersey police are handling it?’
‘That’s right. An Inspector Roper.’
‘Then it’s his case, his call. Why phone me?’
‘Because I’m frightened.’
He was at Mapledurcombe within the hour. We sat in the kitchen and drank red wine while I went through it all again. My husband was dead. Harald had killed him. As far as I was concerned, he still wanted my plane and he still wanted me, and he just wasn’t the kind of man who ever entertained the remotest possibility of failure. According to Roper, he’d disappeared. But what was likely to happen next?
‘He’ll be arrested.’
‘Who by?’
‘Depends where he is. It might be the Yanks. It might be the Russians. Or he might turn up in Europe somewhere…’ He shrugged. ‘There’ll be a warrant out for his arrest. Then you have to go through all the extradition procedures. It can take months. Years sometimes.’
‘But will he be locked up? Behind bars?’
‘For murder?’ He nodded. ‘Almost definitely.’
Almost wasn’t a word I liked, and I pressed him harder still. What if he came back to this country? What if he turned up on the Isle of Wight?
Perry laughed.
‘After all the evidence he’s left behind him? He’d have to have a death wish to do that.’
Perry left long after midnight. I’d been meaning to ask for some kind of police protection but the way he seemed so certain that Harald wouldn’t be paying any surprise visits rather dissuaded me. Maybe he was right. Maybe Harald would be mad to risk coming back.
Saying goodbye at the front door, Perry had the grace - rather late in the day - to sympathise.
‘Try and put it behind you,’ he said, ‘Sort out something to take your mind off it.’
We were standing beside the oil painting of the Mustang. Briefly, I told him about the Goodwood air show.
‘Sounds perfect.’ Perry was still hunting for his car keys. ‘I might even pop over myself with the kids.’
Two days later, a little before three in the afternoon, I was sitting in the Mustang, the canopy open, the sun beating down from a near-cloudless sky. My slot time for the show was 15.18. In ten minutes’ time, I’d have to fire up the engine. By 15.15, I’d be airborne.
The crowd were still swirling round the flight line, the dads with their cameras and their long lenses, the mums pushing buggies, the sniggering adolescents open-mouthed at the sight of a woman in a man’s aeroplane. The airfield manager had been right. Ellie B was attracting a great deal more than her fair share of attention.
Earlier, at the prompting of the show’s organisers, I’d done a longish interview with a video crew from one of the local TV stations. They’d positioned me carefully in front of the big four-bladed propeller and asked me endless questions about how difficult it must be for a mere woman to cope with so much horsepower. I’d done my best to explain about the ATA girls who’d ferried these planes around during the war but they hadn’t listened, and in the end I’d given them the toss of the head and shots of me climbing into the cockpit that they’d so desperately wanted. The big story was little Ellie Bruce in this most macho of aeroplanes. Anything else was strictly for the birds.
The big story. I smiled to myself, wondering whether they’d ever know just how close they’d come to a real headline. The morning after DC Perry’s visit, I’d phoned Dennis in Jersey. At first, Dennis had been slow to see the implications - to recognise how neatly all the ends tied up - but as soon as I’d reminded him about the way that Harald Meyler had first stepped into ou
r lives, I could hear the eagerness in his voice.
‘He wanted to buy the plane outright, yeah?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he bid silly money?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Because he already knew the history. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Absolutely. The rebuild had been in all the specialist mags. There were photos too, with the plane’s production number. Harald must have been looking for the aircraft for years. It happened to be us that found it first.’
‘But Adam wouldn’t give him sole ownership?’
‘Or even a majority share. So there had to be another way.’
On the phone, Dennis had whistled - a long, slow whistle that signalled disbelief as well as excitement. Would anyone be so crazy about an aeroplane that they’d kill for sole ownership? Wasn’t that pushing obsession a bit too far?
‘It wasn’t just a plane, Dennis. It was the plane that had shot down his father. Harald was the only son. His mother told me that. He inherited a debt. He had to make restitution.’
‘You mean a debt of blood?’
A debt of blood. I thought of the phrase now, watching the Spitfires that preceded my own display running in from the east, four abreast. One by one they peeled off into long, climbing turns, and as the last soared upwards, I thought of Harald’s pre-flight briefings, the way he’d thrown down the gauntlet, daring me to join this strange brotherhood of warriors. Fighter pilots always keep the score, he’d said. Too damn right.
‘So he killed Adam to get his hands on the Mustang?’
‘Partly, yes.’
‘And you.’
‘Yes.’
At this point, Dennis had gone quiet. He was making notes. He needed the photo of Harald’s father. He’d be talking to Roper in the morning. If the issue was motivation, then I was right. No one said no to Harald Meyler. Not unless they wanted to end up at the bottom of the English Channel.
The Spitfires were back again, in long-line astern this time. They slow-rolled in front of the crowd, one after the other, and I could hear Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance blasting out over the tannoy system.
This morning, Dennis had called back. Roper, he said, had been showing the video pictures to Steve Liddell and at last the young engineer had begun to talk. Michelle had been right about the security system. Steve had installed it because of the hangar fire, but after Adam had gone missing, it was days before he got round to reviewing the tapes. When he’d seen Harald planting the device in the Cessna and double-checked the date and the time, he’d drawn the obvious conclusion and then used the pictures to persuade Harald to bale him out with the insurers. That was blackmail, of course, but for the time being, Steve Liddell was back in business.
As a precaution, Steve had lodged a copy of the cassette with Michelle, knowing that she too had a financial link to Harald and might need to keep him in line. That was a neat twist, but I wasn’t at all sure about the wisdom of what Steve had done. In the short term, certainly, he was back on his feet but one day I knew that Harald would get round to settling that debt too. Dennis was right. Harald Meyler wasn’t someone you’d ever mess with. Not unless you had some kind of death wish.
‘Did Roper mention the photo at all?’
‘What photo?’
‘The one I found in Adam’s desk. The one of Michelle.’
‘Yeah.’ Dennis had laughed. ‘Turns out you were right. It was a shot from Liddell’s album. He wrote on the back and Meyler planted it for you to find.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because you’d be his for the taking. Betrayed by your husband. Mega upset. Flat broke. Three good reasons for falling into the bastard’s arms. Clever, huh?’
I sat in the Mustang, staring out. The Spitfires were coming to the climax of their display, edging inwards into the Missing Man formation, their own tribute to the pilots who’d lost their lives in the Battle of Britain. On the tannoy, Elgar had given way to Churchill’s recorded voice, booming out over the heads of the watching crowd. The four Spits were flying slowly down the display line and the sight of the hole in the formation reserved for the missing pilot brought a lump to my throat. I thought of Adam’s memorial service and the lone Mustang as it breasted the down behind the little church, Harald up there at the controls. Afterwards, he’d winged the plane over, heading out to sea with my precious floral tribute. What had he been thinking about? Was there any hint of remorse? Of regret? Or was this just another test he’d had to put himself through? To prove that there was only room, in the end, for one top-dog?
Only Harald knew the answer to these questions, but when I asked Dennis for the latest news - whether or not he’d been arrested yet - he, like DC Perry, said it was only a matter of time. Harald had too much profile, too many international deals on the go, to simply disappear. Sooner or later he’d surface, and when that happened, the rest of it would be a formality.
‘They’ll really lock him up?’
‘Bound to.’
‘You’re absolutely certain?’
‘I guarantee it.’
The thought of Harald behind bars was some small consolation, and I watched the Spitfires breaking formation, thinking about his mother, Monica, back in the chill, shadowed spaces of the Casa Blanca. What would she make of it all? And what would she do without him?
The lead Spitfire rolled lazily off the top of a loop and then swooped down towards a landing. The pilot was an old friend of Adam’s, and I glimpsed a blur of white as he flashed past, waving to the crowd. I reached for the transmit button.
‘Goodwood Tower, Golf Papa India. Clear start?’
‘Golf Papa India, roger. Your display slot remains fifteen eighteen.’
I steadied the check list on my knee and began to go through the start-up procedure. One of the marshallers had shepherded the crowd back into the public enclosure and when the prop was clear I pushed the start switch. The big Merlin coughed a couple of times and then burst into life, and I tightened my harness, knowing that the next few minutes would demand my total concentration. The weather had brought a big crowd and I was determined to do the Mustang justice. Harald Meyler was at last behind me. Solo, in Adam’s precious aeroplane, it was time to settle some debts of my own. A woman could do this. A woman could fly like any man. Just watch.
I slipped the brake and inched the throttle forward. Bumping out over the grass, I weaved the Mustang left and right, aware of the crowd behind me. It was a calm, hot, cloudless day, virtually no wind at all, and we were taking off towards the west. I pulled the Mustang to a halt and went through the run-up checks before turning on to the runway. The canopy was still open and I could hear the commentator briefing the crowd as I did a last left-to-right scan of the instruments. Ellie B had seen active service with the mighty Eighth Air Force, he was saying. Her amazing range had taken her further than any other Allied fighter and the day Goering saw a Mustang over Berlin was the day he knew the war was lost.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Ellie B…’
Over the growl of the Merlin, I heard the faint ripple of applause.
I’d been meaning to give the commentator a copy of Ralph’s research but in the confusions of the last week or so it had somehow slipped my mind. Just as well, I thought, reaching for the throttle again. The last thing I needed was yet another reminder of Karel Brokenka’s finest hour.
‘Goodwood Tower. Golf Papa India. Request take-off.’
‘Golf Papa India. Take off at your discretion. Runway two four. Surface wind calm.’
I gave the seat harness a final tug, kissed the tip of my left forefinger and then reached for the throttle. I kept my toes on the pedal-ends while the revs built up, then slipped the brakes. Ellie B responded like a true thoroughbred. A third of the way down the grass runway, I lifted the tail. Seconds later, we were airborne.
The undercarriage retracted, I kept her low until we flashed over the grey ribbon of racetrack that marks the edge of the airfield. Then I raised the flaps and pulled hard on the
stick, winging over into a steep climbing turn. Below me, away to the left, I could see the jigsaw of streets around Chichester Cathedral. Ahead was the startling white of the grandstand overlooking Goodwood racecourse. The airfield was down to the right now, the sun dancing over the thousands of windscreens in the car park. Between the car park and the flight line, the dark mass of the crowd.
I throttled back, taking my time, waiting for the diving turn that would bring me racing across the airfield for the run and break that opened my display. I’d been practising exactly this manoeuvre over my home field back in Sandown and I knew how important it was to get the run-in exactly right. Leave the turn too late and I’d flatten the dive way before I was anywhere near the airfield. Wing the Mustang over too early, and I’d be in danger of overshooting.
I had my eyes fixed on a line of glasshouses about a mile east of the airfield. When they were in line with the cockpit, I smacked the stick over hard and squeezed in plenty of right rudder. For one glorious moment, the Mustang was vertical on its starboard wing. Then we were slanting down in a shallow turn while I trimmed and re-trimmed as the airfield rotated towards us. When the orange display line markers were perfectly aligned, I straightened up, checking my height and speed. The needle on the altimeter was dropping through 750 feet. With maximum boost Ellie B was nudging 330 m.p.h. At 400 feet, I levelled out, aware of the perimeter racetrack flashing past beneath. Perfect, I thought. Just perfect.
I sneaked a look at the crowd. They were down to the left, a blur of upturned faces. At 330 m.p.h., everything happens very fast, and seconds later I was hauling the aircraft up into the long climbing turn that fighter pilots use to shed speed. My next manoeuvre called for a slow pass, plenty of flap, undercarriage down, giving the punters a chance to have a proper look at my beautiful horse. I was still waiting for the speed to fall off when I saw something streak past. It happened again. Then a third time. I gazed at the little dots of yellow light as they disappeared in front of me. Under any other circumstances, I would have sworn they were tracer bullets.
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