On the third page she wrote,
Norfolk, Salford. Letter to Darling missing. What was in the letter?
Having written this, Lane sat back. Of course. This was key. She hadn’t really taken it in when they were with Salford’s widow because his death and her condition took precedence. Sandra had said it must have been the letter that brought Darling here, and in her own confusion, Lane had thought Darling had received the letter, but never told her. But of course, it wasn’t the letter that brought him here. It was some arm of the British government.
She continued the Norfolk entry.
Salford killed by a train, apparent suicide. Wife said he was troubled, but not troubled enough for suicide. Accident? Suicide? (Why?) Pushed?
Halfway down the page she wrote “Sussex” and underlined it and then added “Belton.” She hoped she would have something of purpose to put there. She sat back and moved the flowered curtain slightly to look onto the street. It was quiet. Most people would be home listening to the wireless, preparing for an early bed for the resumption of their working week on Monday. A man stood on the street smoking and talking to a woman, who laughed at something he said and leaned in to get a light. Perhaps they were lovers, lingering for extra moments before she had to go home to her parents. It looked continental somehow, not English. She frowned. What was it about him? And then, deciding she was being paranoid, she closed the curtain.
She turned back to her papers. Paris, of course! She wrote “Paris” on the top of a fourth page, feeling a surge of hope. Paris was where Salford saw someone who looked like a fellow crew member, only to discover it wasn’t, but he was “preoccupied” for some time after.
Was there a time sequence here? Of course, the plane crash starts it, 1943. Then the trip to Paris, three months ago, Sandra said, so in March. Letter stolen in May? Someone was watching him. Was it because of what happened in Paris? Lane contemplated what was fact and what was supposition. She took another sheet of paper and wrote “Timeline:”
—1943: Crash of Lancaster in France. Death of Evans and Jones.
—March 1947: Salford sees what he thinks is a crew member in Paris. He’s wrong. (Is he?)
—May: A letter goes missing from Salford’s desk.
—June: Darling summoned to England, accused of killing Evans in ’43.
—June: Salton commits suicide.
Written like that, the events seemed to Lane to be connected. She thought back to what she had said to Higgins. Something started this sequence of events, and she believed it was Paris. There was, she thought, a strong suggestion of a cover-up. Impediments to their trying to help Darling began to loom large in her mind. Watson refusing to talk to her, the War Office seeming unwilling to give them information, except for the sudden change of heart of someone who thought she knew Lane (Could this be an unwitting ally? Could she be of help again?), Darling not only being denied the bail that had been agreed to, but also being moved away, and finally and horrifically, the death of Salford.
It was past midnight, and she began to feel an awful combination of being desperately tired and completely wound up. She put her pencil down and stacked the papers. She would let the information percolate and then see Higgins first thing. God, she hoped he had news of Darling. She settled into bed and turned out the light. She tried to let the darkness and her own tiredness take her into sleep, though she could feel her mind churning. She prayed she would not have one of her bad nights, disturbed by panic and nightmares.
With a rush of adrenaline she sat up, her heart pounding. But it was not the rush of formless anxiety that sometimes assailed her. It was a cold, solid, concrete thought. All her vague suppositions that intelligence could be involved crystallized. The only entity that had the capacity for this kind of cover-up, for this kind of deadly intrusion into people’s very homes and lives, was Special Branch.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HIGGINS SAT GAZING AT THE papers Lane had presented and pursed his lips. After a very long interval he said, “This is very serious, what you are suggesting.”
Lane knew only too well how serious it was.
“I mean,” continued Higgins, “I see how you reach that conclusion, but we have to be very careful, don’t we? We neither of us know anything about the activities or methods of the intelligence branch, and if they are involved, we have very little hope of penetrating their reasons for this particular activity.”
I know! Lane wanted to scream. I know all about them. But she could say nothing. She was bound, yet again, by the Official Secrets Act, which forbade her to even reveal that she herself had been in intelligence. She tried to be patient before Higgins’s rather patronizing remarks on the subject. He was right about one thing though: they did have to be careful.
“If not intelligence, then who? I ask myself,” Lane said.
“Well, some ordinary criminal could be trying to cover up a crime, I suppose.”
“An ordinary criminal would not have the power to spirit away the accused, overturn a judicial order for bail, indeed, compel a completely innocent man to cross the bloody Atlantic and then bung him in jail on trumped-up murder charges. And possibly nobble and murder witnesses. It’s absurd.” Lane got up and paced, stopping to look out the windows onto the staid and ancient beauty of Middle Temple Lane, busy with barristers to-ing and froing, nursing and shaping the fallout of a thousand dramas that had been acted out in the streets of this old city.
“And I ask myself, Mr. Higgins, I ask myself, would they be able to solve their problem by eliminating Darling?”
“Surely not, Miss Winslow. You seem to be taking this whole thing to an unnecessarily dark and overdramatic place. I told you, the judge himself assured me that Darling will be produced on the trial date. There must be something much simpler at work here.”
She turned and looked at him. “Yes. You’re right. It is simple. We mustn’t lose sight of that. All of this is to obfuscate one thing. But what is that thing? And why do they need Darling to be the villain of the piece?”
THE WINDOW SNAPPED open and the same guard who had spoken with Darling earlier said, “Visitor.”
Darling stood up and stretched, and then moved his fingers through his hair. He’d been allowed to shave under supervision, but he nevertheless felt stale and unkempt, outside and in. He tried to clear his brain to respond to this unexpected circumstance. “Who is it?”
“Am I your social secretary? No idea. You’re to come with me.” The guard was obviously in a less jocular mood than he had been. He pushed the window shut again, and Darling heard keys clanging against the lock as the guard wrestled the door open. Darling felt a momentary lift at the idea of getting to walk somewhere, anywhere, but he was not a man for unnecessary hope, and knew that his visitor was unlikely to be either his lawyer or Lane. He found himself, after all too short a walk along a semi-darkened corridor, in a small room with a table and two chairs on opposite sides, one of them occupied by Sims, who was thinner than Darling remembered and looked like he was a martyr to indigestion. He was frowning at some papers. He barely glanced up as Darling sat down.
“I have one or two more questions.”
“Good afternoon, I think. I’ve rather lost track in here.”
“I still don’t completely understand why you shot your gunner in cold blood. According to the witness, you began to pull him to safety, and then when there was a burst of enemy fire, you shot him and made a run for it. I’m trying to understand that behaviour. I just want you to explain it.”
Darling sat back and rubbed his eyes, unsure of what to say to this declaration.
“Nothing to say?” Sims said. “Hardly surprising. Indefensible, what you did. His parents will be happy to see a conviction. Feeling very betrayed, they are.”
“I hoped after our last conversation that you’d have found out more about why this is happening. I’m disappointed that apparently you’ve either not tried to, or you tried and could find out nothing. The fact remains that I did not shoo
t Rear Gunner Evans.”
A dyspeptic smile crossed Sims’s face momentarily and then it was gone. “You can say that all you like, but I have a witness statement that is irrefutable. And a bullet matching those in your revolver. I was really hoping you’d tell me the truth—it’s the least his parents deserve, don’t you think? Let’s say you weren’t just trying to save yourself. Any number of other possibilities might, in a certain light, be convincing. For example, he might have been insubordinate, done something to jeopardize the other men. Or, you could have deemed him too injured to save and wanted to put him out of his misery. That would not be first time on a battlefield. Or was it something more personal? Had he insulted you, or slept with your girl?”
Darling closed his eyes and then opened them again. Inspector Sims sat opposite with an expression that mingled certainty and contempt. It was clear to Darling that Sims believed he had killed Evans. It meant that he believed his informant’s information to be unassailable, or, for reasons best known to himself, he had to get a conviction quickly.
“Inspector Sims, as handy as these excuses would be, first of all, it is very unlikely I would shoot a man in any of those circumstances, and second, and more importantly, I did not shoot him at all. That business of the bullet coming from my revolver, for example, is nonsense. I shot once during that skirmish and hit an advancing enemy soldier.”
Sims rapped the table in front of him impatiently with his knuckle. It must be abundantly clear to this man, Sims thought, that he was not going to get out of this, and yet, here he was, clear-eyed and calm, repeating the same old line. Sims was convinced of his guilt, but it rankled that he could not fully understand the motivation. A crime was incomplete for him when he couldn’t understand why someone committed it in the first place. If he could not understand it, it was, in his mind, a denial of justice. It meant that crime was random and could not be defended against. Perhaps he could get at it if he got the whole story again. Darling might slip.
“Look, why don’t we just go through the events again. Start again at the beginning and just tell me everything you remember.”
Even knowing that it would likely do no good at all to either question this man or tell him a story that would contradict his version of events, Darling knew he must make an effort on his own behalf. He went through, for what seemed to him the hundredth time, the events on the night of the crash. He tried, as he told the story yet again, to see if there was anything new in it that he had forgotten, left out, or thought was trivial, especially with regard to Evans. Darling was at the front of the plane, trying to control the landing, minimize the damage. He had no knowledge of how Evans had gotten out, though it was obvious it would have been through the gunner cage.
Darling concluded, “I was told that he’d been injured, and I wasn’t surprised. Any crash is the most punishing on that rear section. I was happy to see him still alive. We, that is, Anthony the engineer and I, moved him away from the plane, near where the other men had gathered, and then we came under attack. I shouted at the men to run and stayed back to hold off the Jerries. I fired one shot, and I felt that gave me time to leg it and join the others. I wanted to put Evans over my shoulder and take a chance at escape, but I saw that he was dead. I hadn’t much time, but I’d seen already when we moved him that he’d been shot, and I thought he must have succumbed or been shot again in the attack.”
“That’s a fine tale, I must say. Only trouble is, you’ve again left out the bit where you shot Evans, and you haven’t told me why. So, why would a commanding officer shoot his own man? That’s the thing that keeps going around in my head. Here’s an idea: Did you deliberately bring the plane down and he knew?”
Darling ignored him and frowned. “That’s what puzzled me on the night! I remember now. I expected Evans would have been in bad shape because he’d have been banged up by the accident, but I could see that he had a bullet wound when we first moved him. It just didn’t register till now. The Germans didn’t start firing till after. They must have seen us in the light of the explosion and realized we’d survived.”
Sims leaned forward on the table, clasping and unclasping his hands and regarding Darling. “So, let me get this right. You’re claiming someone else shot him? And you’ve just ‘remembered’ this?”
“Look, Inspector. I can see that you really believe I did this thing and that you would believe it only if you had evidence that has convinced you of it absolutely. I’ve been in your shoes countless times, believe me. And mostly I’ve been right, as I’m sure you have. But sometimes I’ve been terribly wrong. And you’re wrong now. I didn’t shoot him, but someone did, and I thought that someone was a German. It was too dark to analyze where the shot had come from, but I didn’t question it. We were under fire.”
“The problem is that it was one of ours. The bullet. And you were the one seen firing it.”
Darling sat silently, the ramifications of what he was saying slowly dawning on him. “One of ours? Are we certain? That opens up the unthinkable possibility that one of the men on the flight shot him.”
“Well, ‘Inspector,’ good to see you’re finally catching up.”
“I’m catching up on why you think it was me. But the bullet was not mine because I didn’t shoot him, and the witness statement is either false or mistaken. If you are the man I believe you to be, you will make sure you have it right. You will make sure you find the man who shot Evans because, if you don’t, I will be hanged, and whoever did do it will walk out scot-free. I don’t think an error like that will sit well with you.”
Sims opened his mouth to speak. This time Darling put up his hand.
“And I don’t think you will like learning that you have been made a dupe. If I didn’t shoot him, someone else did, and someone, somewhere, is trying to bring the full extent of the law to bear on pinning it on me. I don’t believe any of the men on that flight have the power or the means to engineer what’s happening to me. That means someone higher up is involved. What you need to find out, Inspector, is who, and why you have been dragged in to help with a cover-up of something higher up the chain.”
Sims stood up, shaking his head. “Unbelievable,” he said, and went to knock on the door of the room. The door was opened, and he turned and looked at Darling. “Just answer me this, Darling. Where was Anthony?”
“I thought he’d taken cover with the rest, but he was quite near me, covering me. We got away together. First-rate man. Why?” But that was a question he would be left to fester over back in his cell because Sims put on his hat and left without another word.
Oxfordshire, April 1943
“THIS LOCKER FREE?” Anthony said. He was leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest looking at Watson.
Watson glanced around, but the others had already started up for the briefing. “What are you doing here, then?”
“One of your mates is sick and they picked me. Doesn’t that take the biscuit?” Anthony smiled and reached over to touch Watson’s fingers where his hand was now tensely gripping the door of his locker.
Watson snatched his hand away. “For God’s sake, not here! You don’t know me, do you understand?”
“All right, all right, keep your hair on.” Anthony turned and pulled the door of his locker open. “It’s a turn-up, though isn’t it? We always said we’d die together, and this might be our chance.”
Watson, his head hidden by the locker door, suppressed a giggle and then he closed it and looked at Anthony, a begrudging smile animating his face. “Did you bring enough smokes?”
“That I did,” Anthony said. “We better go get briefed. I’ve heard Darling’s the bee’s knees, even if he is Canadian.”
“That he is,” said Watson.
LANE SAT IN the Circle Line underground, rocking sideways as the train took a curve. She was on her way to the Donaldsons’, leaving Higgins to petition the Canadian High Commission. Her plan had been to follow up on Sandra’s suggestion that they go see Belton in Sussex,
but now she wondered if they should just focus on finding Anthony. If intelligence was behind what was happening, they must already know that she was trying to get more information. They’d probably been following her right from when? The War Office? Someone there would have reported to them that she and Higgins had been there. The woman officer who had helped her? Had she been instructed to play along with whatever she asked? She shook her head at this thought. She was certain that she’d been ready to send them away with a flea in their ear, but something changed her mind. She knew Lane, had seen her during the war, something. And now in the daylight, Lane could not disregard her uncomfortable thought the night before that there was something about the man outside her window.
Someone at the War Office, then? Report any funny comings and goings with regard to these ex-airmen. To whom? And the ever nettlesome question, why? They had to decide if they should try to outrun the long arm of the intelligence branch, or go right into the maw and try to find out what was happening. What if she and Sandra and Rudy did fetch up at Belton’s door? If they were being followed, would they be arrested? Or worse, would something happen to Belton himself?
Perhaps finding Anthony was the right idea. The train slowed as it approached Euston. She would get off and walk the rest of the way. Once on the street, her brain was whirring. What if they bought train tickets to Sussex but sneaked off in the car to wherever Anthony was? There was probably a rule about trying to track down and talk to a prosecution witness, but they had to find out why he was saying Darling killed Evans. If they were being followed by Special Branch, they could get them to follow the wrong lead by pretending to go on the train to Sussex. Oh my God, she thought. I’m mad! I’m beginning to think like them again. In any case, it was nonsense. They had no idea where Anthony was, so that was hare-brained to start with. But she couldn’t let it go. By the time she arrived at the Donaldsons’, she was clear.
It Begins in Betrayal Page 14