‘Then I’ll say no more.’ He looked up and saw a speck moving across the sky, a golden eagle soaring, lonely and majestic against the eternity of space. Momentarily, it lifted his heart. It was worth coming up here for such a sight alone, but then the joy vanished and he felt the uncomfortable sensation once again that he was being hoodwinked in some way and for some unknown reason.
There was perhaps more to be done up here among these hills and bogs, but not at the moment. He wanted to get to civilisation to talk with the people who knew this area best.
*
They drove to a village a few miles up the coast from Dunbeath. With a population of only a few hundred people, it wasn’t quite big enough to be called a town, but it was a vital herring port and it was close to the hospital where the survivor of the crash had been brought.
The hospital was temporarily housed in the school in the nearby community of Lybster, because the one in Wick had been taken over by the RAF and its patients transferred.
First, they needed lodgings. There were no hotels, but they were told at the little shop that Mrs Orde – Jimmy Orde’s wife – had a couple of spare rooms now that the older boys had gone off to the army, and that she would most likely be pleased of a few shillings in return for bed and board. Corporal Boycott would find a bed at Widow Fraser’s house, just to the north of the straggling village.
Jean Orde lived two doors away from the shop. Her house was larger than some of the other fishermen’s cottages and she was, indeed, happy to welcome Wilde and Quayle for the night, including supper and breakfast. She was a cheerful mother of five children, with three of them – aged from ten to seventeen – still at home. She said she would be pleased to feed her guests, if they wished. She had some mutton and was making a large stew, which would come with mashed potatoes and carrots. Wilde and Quayle accepted the offer.
‘Now then,’ Quayle said when they were alone. ‘First a quick drink and then we’ll call in on the hospital and see whether young Andrew Jack is in any fit state to talk.’
‘Let’s go and see him first, then drink.’
‘I hadn’t taken you for a killjoy, professor.’
The man was beginning to irritate Wilde. ‘I’m not here on holiday, Quayle. I am here as a representative of the President, and I take my responsibility seriously.’
Quayle shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said.
‘I will. I’m going to find the hospital – you do what you want.’
Quayle conceded that he had lost the argument. ‘Have it your own way, old man. As your chaperon, it will be my pleasure to come with you. Don’t want you being taken advantage of by these handsome Scots laddies.’
The hospital was in a grey stone building, just about large enough for its purposes – village schoolhouse in peacetime, hospital in war. A nurse in a blue uniform with a white apron allowed them in on being shown their letters of accreditation.
‘He’s been rather busy today, I’m afraid, gentlemen, so he won’t stand up to much chatting. A couple of air force men came this morning with some official-looking papers, then the young man’s relatives arrived at lunchtime and stayed an hour or so.’
‘How is he?’ Wilde asked.
‘Och, he’s a lot better than he was, but he’s still not a well man. Considerable pain and discomfort from burns. He’s very tired and groggy from the morphine the doctor gave him for the pain in the night, so don’t expect too much from him.’
‘Thank you, nurse.’
‘He’s a very brave man. His clothes were on fire and he had to rip them off. I’m told he also tried to drag the bodies from the flames. Go easy on him.’
‘We will.’
‘He was in his underpants when he got to Helen Sutherland’s cottage, you know, and his face and lips all swollen. He just collapsed, so she wrapped him in blankets and gave him hot milk and biscuits.’
Now he was on his back, blankets and sheets up to his chest, very still, his eyes closed. His hands were outside the bedclothes in front of him, covered in gauze. He was a dark-haired, good-looking man, but his face was singed and torn, either by the impact when his gun turret came adrift and was flung to the ground, by the flames from the wreckage, or by gorse and rocks as he stumbled helplessly across the hillsides.
‘Flight Sergeant Jack?’ Quayle said softly.
Slowly his eyes opened and took in the faces of his two visitors. ‘Aye,’ he said.
‘I am Walter Quayle and this is Professor Thomas Wilde. You won’t remember, but I visited you before. At the time you were sedated and in a deep sleep. Are you feeling well enough to answer a few questions?’
‘I’m to say nothing to anyone.’
‘Really? On whose orders?’
‘My senior officers.’
‘But we are here in an official capacity. I am representing 10 Downing Street and the royal family, and Professor Wilde is here on behalf of the President of the United States.’
‘Aye, well . . . careless talk costs lives.’
Quayle smiled and took out his flask. ‘Where do you come from, sergeant?’
‘I suppose I can tell you that – Grangemouth, not far from Falkirk.’
‘Then you’d like a drop of the water of life, wouldn’t you, young man? We won’t tell the nurse.’
The airman shook his head and winced as the pain struck again.
‘Where does it hurt?’ Wilde asked.
‘Everywhere. My hands are burnt, my feet are raw from roaming barefoot and my spine feels as though it’s been crushed by a piledriver. I’ll tell you that much, but I’ll say nothing about the flight or the crash.’ He paused a couple of beats. ‘Why am I alive? I don’t understand it. All those other poor fellows.’
Wilde forged on with his questions. ‘Do you think it was pilot error? That’s what is being said.’
‘B—’ he began then shut his mouth.
‘For a moment there, I thought you were about to say “bullshit”, flight sergeant.’ Wilde looked into the young airman’s eyes and saw tears welling. As though ashamed, he turned away.
‘I don’t use profanities – and I’m going back to sleep now.’
‘Of course,’ Wilde said. ‘Would it be OK to come and see you again in the morning, perhaps? You might be feeling a little less tired.’
‘No, I’ve said all I’ll say.’ His voice was choked. ‘Are they really all dead? My friends and the Duke?’
*
‘He’s been warned off,’ Quayle said as they walked along the short corridor to the front entrance.
‘Clearly – but by whom, and why?’
‘The RAF, obviously on orders from Whitehall and the Palace.’
‘Strange they didn’t convey the message to you then, Quayle, seeing as you’re their man.’
‘You know, Wilde, I didn’t ask for this assignment. I didn’t ask to be your guide, so please, don’t take that tone with me. It’s not necessary – I’m just a man on the margins doing my best in difficult circumstances.’
‘I know – but you must be able to see as clearly as me that someone is covering something up.’
‘Well, think about it. Just as neither the royal family, nor Number 10 – nor even the RAF for that matter – wants souvenirs taken from the crash site, so neither do they want the survivor giving his version of events before he’s called in to give evidence to the board of inquiry. I imagine the two RAF officers who visited earlier made him sign the Official Secrets Act, though how he managed with two bandaged hands is anyone’s guess.’
Wilde nodded. He had thought the same thing.
‘Above all,’ Quayle continued, ‘the King and Queen are very keen to downplay this whole episode. They are deliberately avoiding a big public funeral because they don’t want the nation to get the impression that they think their loss is greater than anyone else’s.’
‘I understand that.’
‘Come on, it really is time you had a drink. Let’s get Mrs Orde’s supper inside us, then try out the loca
l nightlife.’
*
The local nightlife was a dimly lit fishermen’s drinking den near the harbour. It reeked of smoke and beer and fish. Wilde had a few whiskies, but Quayle had a great deal more and bought rounds of drinks for the herring men who had arrived home safely with their catches.
Wilde wanted to talk to the drinkers in turn, but they were a taciturn lot, and even the distribution of free drinks didn’t seem to loosen their tongues. None of them knew anything about the plane crash and nor did they have any theories, or so they said. And when Wilde tried to advance the conversation to the matter of the searchers and the constables involved in the aftermath, they eyed him with suspicion and turned away.
He was left alone by the beer-wet bar wondering where this was all going, if anywhere. Wondering, too, about the weird testimony of the shepherd boy. Perhaps the body he saw, all wrapped up for flying at altitude and likely damaged by the impact of the crash, had been a man, not a woman. The lad certainly wasn’t bright, and anyone could make a mistake. A voice at his side broke into his thoughts.
‘Och, don’t worry about them, Yankee man. I’ll talk to you.’
Wilde turned to face the newcomer. ‘How do you know who I am?’
The man laughed. ‘Everyone knows who you are, Mr Wilde. You can’t come to a place like this and slide around unnoticed.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Jimmy, Jeanie’s feller.’
‘Ah, you’re Mr Orde?’
‘To the taxman or the pastor, I’m Mr Orde. But to everyone else I’m Jimmy.’
‘Then I’m Tom – and I have to thank you for providing lodgings for Mr Quayle and myself.’
‘Glad of the extra money. Times are hard.’
Wilde already knew from talking to Jean Orde that Jimmy was the skipper of a small trawler. He now discovered that the boat had arrived in harbour later than expected, and that Jimmy had gone home for a bath and some supper. He was almost as tall as Wilde; he had a greying, salt-encrusted beard, a thick mass of uncombed hair and a black and red check shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He smelt rather fresher than some of his companions.
‘Jeanie has been telling me all about you and the Quayle feller,’ he said. ‘It seems you have come a long way to very little effect.’
‘Oh no, that’s not true. I came to pay my respects to a friend of America and I have done that. On top of which, I am seeing some fine countryside.’
‘Aye, it’s a fair place in August. Come back in January and February and tell me what you think.’
‘Have you always lived here, Jimmy?’
‘Why would I leave?’
‘Why indeed.’ It was a rhetorical question. Wilde doubted very much that he would want to leave a place like this if he had been brought up here. He instinctively liked Orde. He was hard, but he wore his toughness lightly.
The Scotsman did his best to read his mind. ‘You’re thinking we’re a mad bunch of savages, eh, Tom? Is that what you’re thinking?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but yes, I’m sure life isn’t easy up here.’
‘Well, if you think we’re hard, then you should meet our womenfolk.’
‘I’ve met your wife.’
‘Then you must know what I mean. I tell you, Tom, you wouldn’t want to cross her if you didn’t want your balls fed to the dog. She’d crack skulls before taking nonsense from any man – and that includes me. I’ve got the scars to prove it.’
Wilde thought of the slender, attractive woman back at their lodgings with three children to care for and two elder ones to worry about, and wondered whether Jimmy Orde might be exaggerating. A picture of Lydia back home in the relative comfort of Cambridge formed in his head; she wouldn’t take any nonsense either, but she might draw the line at cracking heads or castration. She’d find other ways of keeping the men in her life in line. He changed the subject. ‘You know this coastline well?’
‘You don’t want to talk about the women, Tom?’
‘I value my balls.’ Wilde laughed. He was beginning to feel mellow. The smoke and the whisky, the low ceiling of this bar, the blackouts at the window, and the company of this good fellow all conspired to make him feel at ease, if not at home. He ordered more whisky and the barman simply handed over the bottle so that Wilde poured two large ones. They clinked glasses.
‘Here’s to the herring and the end of the war!’ Orde boomed so that the whole bar could hear.
All eyes turned to him. ‘The herring!’
Wilde grinned, then followed the example of his host and downed his drink in one, before pouring two more. ‘Look, Jimmy,’ he said, when the other drinkers returned to their own conversations, ‘would I be out of order in asking you a few questions? I know you’ve all got to be on the lookout for German spies, but, well . . . I want to give as complete a picture as possible of events up here to my president.’
‘Of course you do. And don’t mind the rest of the fellers. They don’t know you, that’s all. But I know when to trust a man – so fire away.’
‘Well, you must have seen RAF planes often enough. You must understand the routes they take and what can go wrong. Have there been many crashes close to here? Has anyone hit Eagle’s Rock before?’
‘Och, the poor Duke and his crew certainly weren’t the first men to come a cropper around the Scarabens and Maiden Pap. I don’t know about the exact location of this one, but it’s a real sadness for me to have to say that there have been many. Far too many, and it’s a terrible tragedy and a waste. You’ll find a fair bit of wreckage lying around up on the hills and mountains. No bodies, though – we give them the respect that’s their due and bring them down for proper burial.’
‘So what causes these crashes usually?’
‘It’s got to be one of three things – inexperienced crew, bad weather or equipment failure. Has to be one of those three.’
‘Or enemy action.’
‘Ah yes, there’s that too. But this is a long way from Germany or anywhere else on mainland Europe.’
‘So if they weren’t shot down and if there was no equipment failure, then that just leaves pilot error or bad weather.’
‘Or a combination of the two. They often go together.’
‘But this crew were experienced. They were among the top RAF men. So I don’t understand why they didn’t go higher or stay over the sea if the fog was that bad.’
Orde ran a hand through his thick mop of hair. ‘This would had been the Tuesday, I’m told. About lunchtime or soon after?’
‘Yes. Why?’
Orde shrugged, then knocked back his whisky. Wilde did likewise.
‘Another?’
‘Go on then.’
Wilde poured two more shots. ‘Cheers,’ he said.
‘Your health, Tom.’
‘So tell me, Jimmy, does the timing of the crash mean something to you?’
‘Och, it’s probably nothing.’
‘Go on.’
He looked around the bar, as if to be sure he wasn’t heard above the deafening din. ‘All right then, there was something that puzzled me a little bit. But don’t go shouting it about, will you?’
‘I won’t.’
‘Well, we were just leaving harbour – perhaps four or five miles east and north of Lybster, heading for a herring ground away from the enemy submarines, we hoped. I was at the wheel and I heard the drone of a low-flying aircraft, but of course I couldn’t see anything because of the fog that day. But you know how fog drifts and swirls, well, it did – and then, for the briefest of moments, I saw a spot of blue sky and a plane – a flying boat, I could swear. Flying low, no more than a few hundred feet maybe. And then, after a couple of seconds, I didn’t see it any more, or give any more thought to it. No one else aboard mentioned anything.’
‘You think it was the Duke’s Sunderland?’
Jimmy looked at Wilde with a curious expression, as though wondering whether he had already said too much, or perhaps fearing that he mi
ght be thought a fool. Then he shook his head slowly. ‘No, it couldn’t have been. The Duke’s plane would have been flying due north and a little eastwards from the Cromarty Firth before turning in towards the land . . .’
‘But that wasn’t the direction of the plane you saw?’
‘I had the boat’s compass before my eyes and I tell you the plane was coming directly from the east.’ He held up his empty glass. ‘Jesus, look, my glass is empty again. How in the name of all that’s holy did that happen?’
Chapter 9
Wilde was pouring Jimmy Orde another double when the fight began. A loud shout from outside, then a series of thuds and cracking of wood. The packed taproom fell silent, then as one they all moved towards the door and tumbled out into the warm night air. Something was happening and everyone wanted to see what it was.
Walter Quayle was lying curled up on the flagstones in an alley at the side of the drinking hole. A fair young man aged about seventeen, wearing a grey woollen hat close around his brow and ears, was kicking at him. Another man, older and weatherbeaten, perhaps the father, was on his knees punching at Quayle’s head.
‘Stop!’ Wilde shouted. ‘Get off him.’ He pulled the younger man away, then tried to drag the older man off.
The man turned to him, fists raised. ‘Aye, you’re one of them, too, are you? Like to touch my boy, eh?’ He lunged forward with a bonecruncher, but Wilde easily parried the blow.
He held up his palms for peace. ‘I’m not going to fight you. I don’t know what this is about, but let’s call it a day before any more harm’s done.’
The man punched again, but Wilde sidestepped it and the man fell forward, stumbling to his knees. All the other drinkers from the bar had made a circle around them and were watching with eager fascination.
Wilde gripped the older man’s arm and helped him to his feet. ‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘No, we’re not OK, mister!’ It was the youth talking, the one with the woollen hat who had been doing the kicking. He was standing, shoulders back, like a dog at bay, but one that didn’t really want to fight.
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