Mark Mills - The Information Officer
There was an air of expectancy in the office. Everyone knew what was coming, but not when exactly. They congregated on the roof of Saint Joseph’s, eyes fixed on the distant ridge where Rabat and Mdina stood shoulder to shoulder. That’s where the Spitfires would come from, out of the west. High overhead, 109s stooged about the skies, keeping watch, biding their time.
By nine o’clock there was still no word from Busuttil, so Max put a call through to the offices of Il-Berqa. Lilian hadn’t shown up at work yet, which was strange. She was usually at her desk by eight at the latest. His next call was to her aunt in Mdina.
“Teresa, it’s me, Max.”
“How nice to hear your voice.”
“Is Lilian there?”
“No, she’s at work.”
She had left early, grabbing a ride down the hill to Ta’ Qali on the pilots’ bus, as she usually did.
“She’s not at work.”
“She must be there by now.”
“Well, she isn’t. No one has seen her.”
“Max, what are you saying?”
He could hear the anxiety creeping into her voice.
“She probably couldn’t get a lift from the airfield into Valetta. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
But he wasn’t sure. Even if she’d been forced to walk all the way—which simply never happened to women with her kind of looks—she would have arrived by now.
He waited half an hour before calling Il-Berqa again and drawing another blank. He could feel the seed of fear germinating in his chest. First Busuttil disappears, and now Lilian. Coincidence? Not if they really were missing. That suggested something far more sinister. He remembered Elliott’s warning: They’ll be watching you closely. Maybe he should have heeded those words of caution more closely. Maybe Colonel Gifford—
No, that theory didn’t hold up. If Busuttil had been pulled in by the authorities and had coughed up Lilian’s name under questioning, why hadn’t there been a knock at his door by now? Why hadn’t his name also come out in the wash?
He heard footsteps outside in the corridor, approaching his office. He hoped that they belonged to Colonel Gifford, or the ginger-haired fellow. He was happy to be dragged off and hauled over the coals if it settled the question of Lilian’s whereabouts.
The footsteps carried on past his door.
He sat there, rigid in his chair, breathless. There was no ignoring the unthinkable: that Lilian and Busuttil had somehow fallen into the hands of the killer.
The phone rang. He snatched at it.
“Yes.”
It was Luke Rogers from the deputy censor’s office with some thoughts on the rewording of a BBC broadcast.
“I can’t talk now, Luke. I’m expecting an important call.”
“I hope you’re not implying that this isn’t,” joked Luke.
Max felt bad about cutting him off without replying, but he was panicking now, struggling to think straight.
Freddie. Maybe Freddie had been hauled in. A call to the naval hospital at Bighi established that he hadn’t been; he was in surgery. Elliott. Elliott would know if they’d been taken into custody. But Elliott was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t at the Ops Room or the Y Service offices, and no one picked up at the Special Liaison Unit. In desperation, Max tried the Union Club. When that failed, he headed for the roof.
The whole office was gathered there by now, and he took Maria to one side.
“I don’t care who it is, but someone has to stay downstairs to man the phones. If anyone calls for me, anyone, tell them to try the Intelligence Office at Ta’ Qali.”
“Ta’ Qali?”
“That’s where I’ll be.”
She looked at him as if he were mad. “You think Ta’ Qali is a good place to be now?”
“With any luck I’m in and out before the party starts.”
Ta’ Qali lay just shy of Mdina, down on the sunbaked plain. He covered the eight miles or so from Saint Joseph’s in about as many minutes.
It had been a while since he’d visited the airfield, and he was shocked by what he saw. Most of the familiar structures had been reduced to jumbled masses of masonry, and charred and twisted heaps of metal lay scattered about the place, barely identifiable as aircraft. It was hard to believe that the place still functioned, and yet hordes of men moved like ants through the shimmering heat. Out on the runways, battle-dressed soldiers bent their backs alongside bronzed and shirtless airmen, filling bomb craters and clearing rubble. Ground crews were putting the finishing touches on the new blast pens that fringed the airfield like some gleaming necklace. They’d been constructed from old gasoline canisters filled with earth, and the bare metal building blocks flashed silver-white in the sunlight, clamoring to be targeted. Out there, somewhere, was Ralph, waiting at his designated pen to relieve one of the incoming pilots of his Spitfire.
The Intelligence Office hadn’t been relocated, even though the small stone building that housed it had lost its roof and most of its walls in the past month. A sheet of tarpaulin had been rigged above the ruins to provide protection from the sun, and a slit trench with a corrugated iron roof had been dug into the ground nearby for cover during a raid.
Harry Crighton was at his desk in his alfresco office, a cigarette glued to his lower lip. He was a rambunctious and foulmouthed Australian flight lieutenant who had taken on the duties of intelligence officer after breaking his neck in a forced landing earlier in the year. He was known for his dogged tenacity when it came to following up fighter claims.
“Holy shit, what the bloody hell are you doing here?” he called, seeing Max approach.
“‘To swear is neither brave, polite, nor wise.’”
“Who said that?”
“My headmaster, but I think he got it from Alexander Pope.”
“Well, I never claimed to be any of those things,” Harry replied with a grin, “so fuck ’em both.”
“Has anyone called for me?”
“What do you think this is, a bloody message service? No, no one’s called for you. And do you have any idea what’s about to happen here?”
“A vague inkling.”
“Pull up a pew and tell me what’s going on, why don’t you?”
Max pulled up a chair and told him almost nothing of what was going on. All he wanted to know was if Lilian had indeed hitched a lift down from Mdina on the pilots’ bus that morning.
“Yes, and a fine old sight she is too at that hour of the morning, I can tell you. Brings a little color to the caravan.”
“Where did you drop her?”
“Where we usually do—by the perimeter track. There’s a small chapel, more of a shrine, I suppose.”
“Did you see anything?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know—a person, a vehicle, anything?”
“Can’t say I was paying attention. Why?”
“She’s gone missing somewhere between here and Valetta.”
“Are you sure?”
“As good as. She should have been at work more than two hours ago.”
Before Harry could respond, there was a low, building roar of engines from out of the west. This was met with wild cheers from around the airfield as a flock of shapely planes swept into view over the ridge just south of Rabat. They were in formation, four sections of four flying in line astern, wingtip to wingtip, nose to tail.
“Bloody fools,” muttered Harry. “They’re way too tight. Did no one tell them?”
He was right. Tight formations were the kiss of death on Malta. So was line astern. Fortunately, the Spitfires fanned out, entering the circuit, before the first Messerschmitts swooped on them. The 109s came low and fast out of the sun from the direction of Valetta, ripping through a smattering of ack-ack. A handful of Hurricanes from Luqa or Hal Far did a fine job of heading off the attackers. The Hurriboys were an experienced bunch. Battle-hardened (and usually bearded), they prided themselves on the superior maneuverability of their otherwise inferior aircraft, and this advantage served them well in the tussles that now developed over Ta’ Qali. A lunatic chatter of light artillery fire accompanied the spectacle as the Bofors and twin Lewis guns opened up on the enemy.
“Here comes the first,” shouted Harry above the din.
The pilot was struggling to keep his aircraft from lurching about in the eddies of rising heat. The Spitfire hit the ground hard, bouncing and bumping along the pitted strip. A large number eight was emblazoned on its fuselage. A motorcyclist flashing a card with the same number raced to meet it, leading it off toward one of the new blast pens at the southern end of the airfield.
Harry was jumping around like an excited child. “It’s a Mark Vc, with four cannons! Look! So’s the next!”
All sixteen Spitfires touched down without mishap, and all were guided to their pens. The cloud of white dust stirred up by their propellers rolled toward the Intelligence Office, engulfing it, filling Max’s eyes and mouth with grit.
“Which number is Ralph?” Max yelled above the din.
“He came down with a dose of the Malta Dog last night. The CO won’t let him fly. He’s pretty browned off … so to speak.”
Ralph had been more subdued than usual over dinner the night before, only picking at his food, but Max had put it down to nerves, not the pernicious strain of dysentery that plagued the island.
Overhead, through the breaks in the billowing dust, he glimpsed fighter planes wheeling and twisting against the blue. He was trapped. To run for it now would be madness—a 109 could pick him off before he even reached the perimeter track—but the prospect of staying put filled him with a cold and creeping dread. Memories of the last time he’d been caught in a bombing raid at Ta’ Qali blew into his mind. He wasn’t sure he could go through that again and emerge with all his mental faculties intact. How on earth the gunners and the ground crews put up with it—day after day, night after night, month after month—was anyone’s guess.
Harry called in the safe arrival of the sixteen Spits to Fighter Control. Hanging up the phone, he turned to Max, face alight.
“Ops don’t have anything on the table.”
“So what’s that?” said Max as a 109 rocketed by overhead.
“No big jobs. Nothing between here and Sicily.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re not coming.”
“No, but it means they’re already too bloody late. We’ve been working on our turnaround times.”
They certainly had been. The first of the new Spits was back in the air within ten minutes—armed, refueled, and with an old Malta hand in the cockpit.
“Go, you bastard!” yelled Harry as its wheels left the ground. The others weren’t far behind.
Max watched in amazement. At the last fly-in back in April, Kesselring had obliterated most of the reinforcements on the ground soon after their arrival. On that occasion, “soon” had meant anything from an hour to two hours, while the aircraft were in their pens being made ready for combat. Ten minutes was a whole world apart; it was almost beyond comprehension. That’s why Kesselring, their nemesis, the master tactician they all grudgingly respected, had failed to allow for it in his calculations. For once, he had been outmaneuvered. It was good to witness this reversal firsthand. It also offered Max a small window of opportunity.
Even if swarms of 88s were taking off from Sicilian airfields at that very moment, he still had time to make it to Mdina before the bombs started to rain down. The 109s were the problem. Or were they? They seemed to be drifting south, away from Ta’ Qali. And now he saw why. A fresh formation of new Spitfires was flying in from the west, making for the airfield at Luqa.
It was as good a moment as any. If he didn’t risk it now, he was liable to spend the rest of the day cowering in a slit trench.
He seized Harry’s hand and shook it. “Good luck, Harry.”
“You too. Hope you find her.”
It was a terrifying ride, a blind, choking, headlong dash; he was half expecting to be torn apart by cannon fire at any moment. Only when he started to climb toward Mdina did he rise above the dust and the din and allow himself to glance over his shoulder. Max spat the dirt from his mouth and blinked his streaming eyes, cursing himself for leaving his goggles behind at the office in his haste.
Despite his best efforts to turn himself into something vaguely presentable, the maid still recoiled when she opened the front door to him. Teresa had ignored his words of warning relayed by Lilian. A steep stone staircase led from the palace garden up to the bastion wall, and it was here that he found her, out in the open with her daughters, watching events unfold on the plain below. Felicia and Ena scampered up to him. They had seen a motorcyclist tearing up the hill from Ta’ Qali. Had that really been him? What had he been thinking? Was he mad? He could have been killed.
Teresa shepherded the girls back down the steps and across the garden, ordering them to remain indoors from now on. Max was led through to the drawing room. He remained standing, not wishing to soil the antique sofa.
“She’s still not at work.”
“I know. I also know that she went to visit someone in Naxxar a few nights ago. She wouldn’t tell me who.” Teresa raised her hand, silencing him before he could reply. “If you lie to me now, Max, I shall never forgive you. Never.”
“Look, I don’t know who she visited in Naxxar, but there’s a good chance it was a man named Busuttil.”
“Busuttil?”
“He’s a detective with the CID.” He hesitated. “He’s also missing.”
Teresa stared at him. “What have you done?” she said quietly.
“I haven’t done anything. I’m just as confused as you are.”
“Oh, I doubt that.” She wagged her hand irritably at the sofa. “For goodness’ sake, sit down. And give me one of your cigarettes. I think I’m going to need it.”
He spared her the unnecessary details, and she sat in silence, listening attentively to his account.
“It’s still possible the authorities are holding them both.”
“You think? I don’t. I think you were very wrong to involve her.”
“It wasn’t like that. She was keen to help.”
“You stupid boy!” she spat. “Of course she was. Don’t you understand? She would do anything you asked her. She loves you.”
Three simple words spiked with bitter truth. He knew what he had become, but now he saw himself as if through Teresa’s eyes, perched pathetically on the sofa, already groping for excuses: if only Lilian had told me earlier, it would all be different. But there were no excuses, and there was no one else to blame. He had been blind, not just to her feelings, but to his own too. He had made a terrible mistake, and it was one that would plague him for the remainder of his life if he couldn’t rectify it.
“You find her,” said Teresa. “You find her and you bring her back to me.”
His decision to make straight for the Xara Palace at the other end of Mdina was one of expediency. The public phone lines might be out of action because of the raids, but the central phone in the mess would still be functioning.
