The Information Officer

Whatever you thought of the Germans—and he was still divided in his thinking—they approached the dirty business of war with a certain imaginative insolence which was hard not to admire.

He turned his eyes back to the pale thread of earth at his feet and set off once more up the slope.

He had always liked to walk, but alone, never in company. Walking was a time for contemplation, for introspection. The idea of tossing idle banter about at the same time had never appealed to him, even as a boy.

He had started going for walks when he was young—an excuse to get out of the house. The hours would fly by in his own company, whole afternoons sometimes, gone in moments, or so it had seemed at the time. He didn’t much care for the countryside, although he probably knew more about its routine cycles than most. He could predict to the week when the buttercups would appear in the meadow, a yellow carpet reaching to the foot of the chalk hills. Or when the jackdaws would start to nest in the chimney pots, scavenging hair from the backs of supine heifers. Or when the Canada Geese would abandon the lake in search of southern warmth.

He observed and he registered these developments, but as a scientist might record the temperatures and quantities and colours of a chemistry experiment: dispassionately, at one remove. If he gathered up and carried home small trophies from his expeditions, it was only to lend some kind of credibility to his wanderings, to throw his parents off the scent.

He always made a point of returning with some keepsake—a fossil or a lump of fool’s gold from the scree in the chalk quarry; the bone of an indeterminate animal, picked clean by predators and bleached white by the sun; the sloughed skin of an adder. To his parents’ eyes, these tokens indicated a healthy interest in the natural world. To him, they were little more than meaningless debris. Until he discovered they held the power to placate his father, to momentarily distract him from his strange and pressing need to mistreat his wife and his son.

On returning from his work in the city, his father would light his pipe and ask to see the latest addition to the collection, and they would wander to the hut at the end of the garden where he housed his cabinet of curiosities. There they would sit and talk together, wreathed in blue pipe smoke, and his father would tell him stories of his childhood, of the remote farm where he had grown up. He professed a love of nature, but it was a strange kind of love, one that led him to spend much of his free time shooting all manner of birds and animals with his friends. And when he wasn’t slaughtering the local wildlife, he would be savagely pollarding trees or hacking back undergrowth. The truth was, his father viewed nature much as he viewed his family: as an unruly force, something to be tamed and mastered with a firm hand.

After the accident—his father dead and buried, truly at one with nature—he took up his private wanderings once more. They were the touchstone against which he was able to test the transformation that had occurred in him. He walked the same paths, clambered high into the canopy of the same ancient chestnut, lobbed stones into the lake to observe the play of intersecting ripples. He did what he had always done and he felt nothing, nothing whatsoever, not even a dim glow of nostalgia.

This scared him at first, and he ascribed the vacuum inside of him to guilt, to the secret he knew he could never share with anyone. He soon came to realize that he was wrong, though. It couldn’t be guilt, because he felt no guilt for what he had done. He was able to play those last moments of his father’s life over and over again in his head and they stirred nothing in him, neither shame nor satisfaction. In fact, he barely recognized himself in the small slice of cinema. It could just as well have been another fourteen-year-old boy sitting in the passenger seat of the swanky new roadster hurtling down the country lane.

His father was always buying new cars, fast cars. They fitted with his ‘work hard, play hard’ ethic, and he drove them hard, pushing them to their limits. When they disappointed him, which they invariably did, he simply replaced them with another one that wouldn’t, although it invariably would. It had been a Saturday morning in early August and they were heading for a race meeting at Brooklands motor course. The events at Brooklands drew a rich crowd, an international crowd, and his father liked to gather there with his friends. Wives and daughters rarely showed their faces. Sons were permitted on the understanding that they were neither seen nor heard. This was fine by the sons, who congregated in front of the green-domed clubhouse before making for one of the circuit’s massive banked curves, where they would spend the remainder of the day sneaking cigarettes in the long grass and silently praying for one of the drivers to misjudge the camber and go hurtling over the edge.

That’s what should have happened that day, what would have happened if he hadn’t reached out a hand and opened the glove compartment of his father’s new car. He was used to his father’s sudden jungle furies, used to being screamed at for some minor misdemeanour. He wasn’t used to being slapped across the cheek. He knew that his father struck his mother, he had seen the bruises on her, but he had always been spared such treatment. Until now. He didn’t cry—he knew that if he cried he was truly done for—but his father saw the tears moistening his eyes and that was enough. The words cut deeper than they ever had before and the shouts increased in volume, competing with the roar of the wind and the scream of the engine.

That’s when he did it. Even now, he couldn’t say what he had hoped to achieve. He certainly didn’t pause to weigh the consequences. It was a purely instinctual reaction. He lunged for the steering wheel and yanked it towards him. The last thing he remembered before the world went black was his hand, pale and hairless beside his father’s on the polished perfection of the wooden steering wheel.

His father died instantly when the roadster wrapped itself around the tree. Some curious law of physics chose to throw him clear at the moment of impact. All this he discovered some days later, when he came to in the hospital. His head was heavily bandaged, but everything else was intact—externally, at least, which was all the doctors cared about. They used the words ‘coma’ and ‘miracle’ a lot. His mother barely spoke. She did what she was supposed to do. She put on her widow’s weeds and consoled her damaged son. But he knew what she was really thinking; he knew she was struggling to come to terms with her liberation. He saw her in a new light, clear and crisp and cold, a winter light. And it wasn’t just her. He saw everything in this new and unfamiliar light.

Others must have detected something in him, because they started to remark on his behaviour. His mother said it was grief. The doctors put it down to shock. One doctor, young and eager to please his superiors, prattled on about some recent case studies of frontal lobe trauma. Apparently, there was evidence to suggest an association between a blow to the front of the head and a diminution in the subject’s ability to feel emotion. Words like ‘emotion’ didn’t sit happily with the consultants, and the young doctor learned a valuable lesson: it’s only a good idea if your boss has had it first.

Enough science had accrued in the intervening years to bear out the theory, but he had known the truth of it at the time. He wasn’t in shock and he wasn’t grieving, he was simply unable to conjure up any feelings. It was as if he were observing the world through the viewfinder of a camera. Some invisible barrier stood between him and the subject of his attentions.

He learned this early on, and he quickly learned to compensate, to fabricate the required responses of a normal person. He must have done a good job, for one day the doctors suddenly announced that he had recovered his wits and was free to go. The bandage was gone by then, the scar on his forehead already healing to a fine fissure.

He sometimes wondered if his mother had seen through his act in those early days, while he was still finding his feet in the new world. He had made mistakes, he knew that. Taking her in his arms on the first anniversary of the crash and weeping on her shoulder was an ill-judged piece of over-acting, but he had learned to refine his performance.

He took to rehearsing when he went for his walks, manufacturing a wide range of reactions: shock, delight, horror, amusement, curiosity, revulsion, wonderment—all the emotions which no longer came naturally to him. He learned to store away jokes and anecdotes for the entertainment of others. Judging which ones to pull out and when had taken longer. Reading your audience was no easy task when you felt no connection with them. It all came down to observation, he realized, and that’s where he concentrated his efforts.

Again, the walking helped. He started to see things which previously his eyes had passed over, not birds and animals and plants, but human patterns. He noticed that the tenant farmer on the other side of the wood, the burly widower, always did his washing on Saturday morning, irrespective of the weather, stringing the clothes up in the barn if it was raining. And the old couple who walked their two wire-haired terriers on the hill most evenings always stopped and kissed each other on the lips before negotiating the stile by the clump of gorse. He also noticed the mysterious black sedan parked in the driveway of the thatched house near the old meadow copse every Tuesday afternoon between the hours of two and four. At four, or thereabouts, he saw a young man, prematurely bald, hurry from the house to the car. And if he crept through the trees round to the back of the house, he could see a woman draw back the bedroom curtains the moment the car was gone.

Her name was Mrs Beckett, he discovered, and Mr Beckett sold engineering equipment around the country, spending much of his time on the road. They didn’t have children. It took him a month or so to build up the courage to knock on the door. When he did, he was pleased with what he saw. Mrs Beckett was more attractive up close, dark and petite and with a lively sparkle in her eye. When he asked if he could trouble her for a glass of water she invited him inside.

The kitchen was large and light and spotlessly clean. He had caught her in the act of making jam, straining fruit through a piece of muslin slung between the legs of an upturned stool. He knew all about making jam but pretended he didn’t, and an hour later he was still there, helping her.

She knew who he was, or rather, she had heard his story from someone in the area. He fed on her compassion, but picked his responses carefully, not wishing to overplay the role of tragic victim, which he judged would not appeal to her. He selected a couple of anecdotes to make her laugh, which she did, throwing back her head and emitting a throaty chuckle. When he finally left, she took his hand and shook it firmly and told him he was a brave and impressive young man. She also told him to stop by again if he was passing on one of his walks.

He left it a couple of weeks before doing so, during which time he toyed with his options, playing them through in his head in all their various permutations. Knowledge might equate to power, but the successful application of that power required meticulous preparation. He had a reputation to preserve, and he needed to be sure of Mrs Beckett’s silence.

He opted for a Thursday. It was a hot and sultry afternoon, a great cathedral of cumulus clouds stirring high overhead, threatening an electrical storm. She was in the garden, pulling weeds from the borders, and seemed delighted to see him. The perfect excuse to take a break, she joked. She poured them both a glass of lemonade from the jug she kept in the larder and suggested they drink it out of the heat, in the cool of the kitchen.

They sat facing each other across the scrubbed pine table, the sweat slowly drying on their skin. It wasn’t a scene he had imagined, but it was close enough, so he set about his business. He told her he was going away for a month with his mother to Bad Reichenhall, a spa town in the Bavarian Alps, guests of some German friends of his father. Herr Kettelmann was a regular at the Brooklands race meetings, and his eldest son, Lutz, had proved to be good company, bright and mischievous and fond of dirty jokes. He pretended to be under-whelmed by the idea of going abroad, dismissing the invitation as a gesture of pity towards a woman whom the Kettelmanns barely knew. She told him not to be so cynical, not to mistake kindness for pity. He lowered his eyes to the table, bowing to her superior wisdom and apologizing for his mean-spiritedness.

And so it continued, just as he had planned it: he, the troubled young soul in search of guidance; she, rising to the role of guide. She was less sure-footed when he turned the conversation to her, her life, her husband. He tried to show interest while listening to her tales of love and marriage and a happiness born in heaven—lies which invigorated him, entitling him to proceed.

When she rose to fill their glasses, he followed her to the larder and told her that he had never met anyone like her. She handed him his glass and told him not to be silly. When he took her hand and raised it to his lips, she snatched it away before he could kiss it. He was tall for his age, more man than boy, and she seemed to sense this now. Pushing past him out of the larder, she said that she had to get back to her weeding before the rain came, and suggested that he hurry home to avoid a drenching. He didn’t reply; he just looked at her. When she asked him firmly to leave, he asked her about the bald man.

The colour drained from her face, but she recovered quickly, pleading no knowledge of a bald man. When forced to concede that he did exist, she claimed that he was her brother. When he enquired if she thought it normal for a woman to spend two hours in a darkened bedroom with her brother every Tuesday afternoon, she began to grasp the hopelessness of her situation. She tried to wriggle off the hook a couple more times, first appealing to his conscience, then defiantly ordering him to go ahead and do his worst. But they both knew that they were edging inexorably towards a trade. She asked him what he wanted for his silence. Something I’ve never had before, he replied.

He might not have known what he was doing, but he was big, and he assumed that counted for something. He knew he was big because he had seen the other boys in the showers at school after games, as they had seen him, and they had remarked respectfully on his size.

It didn’t seem to give Mrs Beckett much pleasure. But he wasn’t thinking of her; he was thinking of himself, watching himself moving in and out of her and wondering if this was what all the fuss was about. Looking to improve on the experience, he manoeuvred her into a number of different positions, which helped a bit. Her passivity gave him no satisfaction, but neither did it hamper his performance. He did what he had come to do then he got dressed and left. He turned at the bedroom door and reassured her that her secret was safe with him. He wanted her to know that he was a man of his word. She was sobbing quietly into a pillow and didn’t look up.

The storm broke as he was crossing the meadow. Lightning scythed the sky, thunder echoed off the hills, and the rain sheeted down in warm torrents, soaking him to the skin. And yet he remained strangely immune to this assault on his senses, caught up in dark thoughts, wondering what he would have to do, just how far he would have to go before he finally felt something stir in him.

He wasn’t to know it at the time, but the answer lay only a little way off, in Bad Reichenhall.

Day Three

Max was at his desk, taking a red pen to a news item, when the phone rang. He snatched up the receiver distractedly, irritably.

‘Yes?’

‘I know the feeling.’

‘Freddie.’

‘Bad morning?’

‘That new chap we took on, you met him at the party…’

‘Pemberton.’

‘Turns out he thinks he’s Shakespeare.’

‘He’ll learn. You did.’

‘Thanks for that.’

‘Listen, Max, I know who she is.’

Max’s smile died on his lips. ‘The girl…?’

‘She has a name now. Carmela Cassar. Her father was here earlier and identified the body. It’s as we thought, another sherry queen.’

‘You spoke to him?’

‘Don’t worry, I was very discreet.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Yes it is. Have you got a pen?’

Max scribbled down everything Freddie had gleaned, both from the official paperwork at the mortuary and from his conversation with the father. Carmela lived with her parents in the family home on the hillside near Paola, just up the slope from Santa Maria Addolorata Cemetery. She always got back from work late, between one and two in the morning, but in the five months she had been working at the Blue Parrot she had never once failed to return.

Max knew the Blue Parrot, not intimately, and not of late. It was one of the few dance halls in the Gut reserved for officers, which meant that the establishment was slightly more spacious than most, the floor show moderately superior, and the drinks vastly more expensive. He’d been there several times soon after his arrival on the island, when the star attraction, the big draw—the very big draw—had been an act from Hungary.

Budapest Bessie hadn’t been graced with either the build or the poise of a prima ballerina, but this hadn’t prevented her puffing her way through her version of ‘The Dying Swan’ before the disbelieving eyes of Britain’s officer classes. For some reason, veils had been a feature of her routine, he remembered, angina the reason for her sudden retirement from the stage. Ammunition was scarce even back then, but a couple of the shore batteries had been ordered to fire off a salute when the frigate bearing Bessie to a gentler life in Gibraltar had slipped out of Grand Harbour.

Max hadn’t been back to the Blue Parrot since that time, but he could see the flaking gilt of the mirrors in the narrow dining room, the greasy velvet upholstery and the tired palms dotted about the place.

‘Did she work anywhere before?’

‘I didn’t ask. Should I have?’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. Something that doesn’t make sense. She left for work on Thursday afternoon at five o’clock—she always allowed an hour for the walk, apparently—but she wasn’t found till the Saturday morning.’

‘Where exactly was she found?’

‘A backstreet in Marsa. Marsa was on her route home, but she can hardly have lain out there for a whole day without anyone seeing her.’

Max weighed a range of explanations, rejecting each in turn. Only one withstood the test, and it didn’t sit happily in the head.

‘She was held somewhere for twenty-four hours…’

‘It looks that way.’

‘Or maybe she was already dead; he just couldn’t dispose of the body for whatever reason, maybe it was too risky.’

As explanations went, it wasn’t quite as grim as the thought of her being held hostage for those missing hours, with the disturbing images that accompanied it.

‘The rigor mortis suggests otherwise. It was well set in when I first saw her on Saturday around noon. It generally peaks somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours after death, closer to twelve in this kind of heat.’

Which suggested that her life was ended some time on the Friday night. And probably not in Marsa. Marsa was simply the dumping ground. As to where she was abducted, it could have been anywhere along her route home; a quiet spot, most likely. But where did he hold her captive during Friday? And how did he transport her there? The questions were coming in a torrent now.

‘Max, I’ve been thinking. We have to go to someone with this.’

‘The Lieutenant-Governor’s office shut you out last time. What makes you think they won’t do it again? We need evidence they can’t ignore.’

It was a disingenuous response, and he knew it: presenting himself as the champion of truth when all he really wanted was a bit more time to follow through the consequences of a scandal of this scale breaking across the island.

‘Freddie, I just need a day or two.’

‘I’m happy to give it to you. But is he?’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying I don’t want another death on my conscience.’

‘You think I do?’ Max paused. ‘I’m asking you to trust me on this. A couple of days to check some things out. I’ll get straight on to it. I promise.’

Freddie remained silent for a moment. ‘Okay, but you’re on your own. They’ve got me working out of Mtarfa for the foreseeable.’

It was a testimony to Freddie’s skill as a surgeon that he spent much of his time being shunted between the island’s hospitals according to where his gifts were required. There was certainly no lack of call for them.

‘When are you heading out there?’

‘Ten minutes ago. A Beaufighter just pancaked at Luqa. The navigator is pretty chewed up, by all accounts.’

‘I’m going to need the exact dates when the other two girls were found.’

‘Then stay on the line, I’ll be right back.’

Max spent half an hour clearing his desk and briefing the members of his team. They were quite capable of holding the fort in his absence. He was on the point of leaving when the rising dirge of the air-raid siren stopped him in his tracks.

‘Damn,’ he muttered, making for the staircase which led to the roof. Fleur-de-Lys occupied the high ground between Hamrun and Birkirkara, and the zinc-clad roof of St Joseph’s offered one of the finest views on the island: a sweeping 360-degree panorama that took in Rabat and the walled city of Mdina to the west, roosting on their spur of white rock, keeping watch over the parched southern plain, where towns and villages lay scattered like dice on a tabletop. To the east, beyond Valletta and her twin harbours, lay a seemingly endless expanse of viridian green water. The corrugated hills that rolled off to the north beyond Mdina held little strategic importance for the enemy. Almost everything that was of interest to them—the aerodromes, the dockyards and the submarine base—lay within the field of vision of a person standing on the roof of St Joseph’s.

It was a biblical landscape—sunbleached, shadeless, harsh to the eye—broken up into miniature fields by a dense lacework of stone walls. The walls were there to prevent the precious dusting of soil from being blown about by the hot summer winds from Africa. In the winter, the gregale blew in from the north-west, bringing the heavy rains which turned everything to mud.

Right now, though, a brassy sun was overhead, and the first white galleon clouds of the year were gathering over the island.

Max turned as the big guns up on Ta’ Giorni ridge slammed a salvo into the air. Pale puff-balls of bursting ack-ack fire mottled the sky to the north-east, heralding the arrival of a vast and heavily escorted formation of 88s.

It soon became clear that the airfields were about to take another bad knock, and Max could feel his plans for the day slipping away from him. Travelling, like much of life on Malta, was something you did in between raids, and even then you kept one eye on the heavens for the lone marauders who slipped in under the radar screen. The scarcity of petrol had stripped the streets of motor vehicles in the past couple of months, and a lone motorcycle throwing up a cloud of dust was more of an invitation than ever to an enemy pilot with an itchy trigger finger.

He had only been strafed once—on the old dirt road that switchbacked its way between Ghajn Tuffieha and Mdina—but the suddenness and ferocity of the attack were indelibly etched on his memory. One moment he was barrelling along, the wind in his face, the next moment the road in front of him was erupting. The fighter was well past by the time he’d registered it, and it was a further few seconds before his brain was able to make the connection between the dot twisting away into the distance and the strip of earth torn out of the ground across his path. He might have processed the information more rapidly if he hadn’t been so joyously distracted at the moment the attack occurred. Three dream-like days by the sea at Ghajn Tuffieha had dulled his reactions.