A Dead Man in Malta (13 page)

Chapter Nine

Sophia and Felix had discovered soon after they met that they had problems in common. One of these, of course, was their projects, which weighed on them increasingly as the time for delivery approached. The other was that they both came from families whose lives were determined by a nearby hospital. The one thing that both of them were resolved on was that when they grew up their own lives would be different: they were both firm that they would have nothing, but nothing, ever to do with hospitals.

In Felix’s case the issue was simple: should he become a doctor or not? His father was a highly successful ophthalmologist who found his work completely satisfying and saw no reason why Felix shouldn’t find that, too. Felix’s mother had harboured an ambition in early life to be a doctor herself. That ambition she had had to set aside because of family objections but much of her life now was devoted to compensating for it by other means. As far as Felix was concerned, she differed from her husband only in the idea—she was not narrow—that Felix might become an obstetrician rather than an ophthalmologist.

Felix, however, was having none of it. As he had pointed out to Seymour when he had met him in the Upper Barraca Gardens, his father didn’t seem to have much of a life. He went off unpleasantly early in the morning and came back ridiculously late in the evenings. He was always busy and never seemed to have time to do anything interesting. What sort of life was that? Where, asked Felix, gloomily aware of the burden of his project pressing upon him, was freedom?

This was an issue for Sophia, too. Her mother worked all hours in the hospital dispensary and her father, who was a steward on one of the Navy ships, often wasn’t there at all. The burden of minding the younger children often fell on Sophia. While she didn’t mind this, up to a point, there were frequently other things that she wanted to do. Besides, looking around her, she had the uneasy feeling that what she was seeing was her future, that this would go on being her life after she left school. Life was suddenly threatening to narrow down. Where was freedom?

Behind this, too, for Sophia, there were other, larger issues of freedom, issues you became aware of, she said to Chantale, as they walked together through the Barraca Gardens, only when you had a foreign power occupying your front garden. No doubt Chantale had had exactly the same thoughts when she was growing up in Morocco. (Chantale, who had, was not, however, entirely happy with Sophia’s assumption that all this, in Chantale’s case, must have been centuries in the past.)

Sophia herself was determined not to allow herself to be boxed in, in any of the ways apparently destined for her. The trouble with older people, she confided, was that they accepted things too readily. Her family, for instance, had all finished up working for the British, mostly in the hospital. Even Uncle Paolo had done his stint. Well, she would not. She would show them. And especially her grandfather, who persisted in asking what she would do for money, a question which, in Sophia’s view, showed the mentally circumscribed state of the older generations in Malta.

Not that she minded her grandfather, really. Her arguments with him, and the desire to prove him wrong, had been a great spur to her intellectual advance. And, no doubt, to his.

What, then, asked Chantale, slightly terrified, was Sophia herself thinking of doing when she left school?

Well, said Sophia, she thought she might become a journalist and expose the iniquities of British rule. And then she might stand for the Council and expose them again.

Felix had been slightly terrified too, when Sophia had confided these ambitions to him. It sounded all too much like his mother.

Big questions made Felix uncomfortable. No doubt big questions were raised during his history lessons. But somehow the flow of the lesson passed over them and the last thing that would have occurred to Felix was that they were real questions. But now, suddenly, according to Sophia, they were real and all about him. They even surrounded his project. What Felix had hoped to spend his time on was working out how the little bits of metal that together formed a Hospitaller Knight’s coat of mail were joined together. But now, according to Sophia, the Knights Hospitaller were just a bunch of thugs! It was as if his project had suddenly leaped up and kicked him in the face!

And behind this, as always with Sophia, there were lots of other questions. What were the Knights
doing
in Malta? What right had they to be there? And what were the British doing in Malta? And what right did
they
have to be there? Felix was a logical boy and had to admit the force of these questions. Clearly, he had some thinking to do. He felt he had moved on a long way since he had arrived in Malta.

Sophia, too, felt that she had moved on in her thinking. It wasn’t that she had abandoned her position of general rebellion: it was just that it was turning out to be more complicated than she had supposed. While she was still committed to denouncing the British, somehow there didn’t seem much point in denouncing Felix. He so clearly did not know any better. It was obviously a case less for denunciation than for re-education, which, generously, after consideration, she was prepared, in Felix’s case, to undertake.

But were the British all like that, she wondered? In which case, she had a big job on her hands.

The balloons had long left the Marsa racecourse but the grey patch of Herr Kiesewetter’s deflated balloon still remained, guarded by an indolent policeman. The two technicians also remained, required to stay by police and court order. When Seymour got there they were sitting moodily beside the lifeless grey.

‘Still here?’ said Seymour brightly.

‘Still bloody here,’ said one of the technicians, the older one, George.

‘And likely to stay so,’ said the other technician, Joe. ‘At least for the next few years. Until they get this sorted out.’

‘No movement?’ said Seymour, although he knew there was no movement.

They shook their heads. It was an unsatisfactory position for them to be in. They were allowed a little money by the Governor for food and lodgings and necessary expenses, some of which the Maltese authorities hoped to recover from the Germans but that would require negotiation and that could continue for a long time. Meanwhile, the technicians sat and contemplated their problems.

‘No one else here?’

‘They’ve all gone on to Stuttgart. That’s where the next big ballooning event is taking place.’

‘And we won’t be there,’ said Joe.

‘And you would have been there?’

‘Oh, yes. Kiesewetter liked us. We’ve got a good reputation, you know.’

‘There are others who’d like us,’ said George.

‘But not if we’ve got to stay here,’ said Joe.

‘Reputations go,’ said George.

‘If you’re not around,’ said Joe.

‘It may not be long,’ said Seymour encouragingly.

They looked up with interest.

‘You’re getting somewhere, are you?’ asked Joe.

‘Somewhere,’ said Seymour.

They shrugged.

‘So what are you doing here today?’ asked Joe.

‘Checking on the things I missed the first time,’ said Seymour.

They laughed.

‘That’s what you’ve got to do,’ George said. ‘Check, check and check again.’

‘Which you did,’ said Seymour.

‘Which we did.’

‘And yet someone slashed the balloon.’

‘We’ve gone over it a hundred times,’ said George, ‘asking when it could have happened, I mean, we were here the whole time.’

‘That morning,’ said Joe. ‘We started early. Before seven. Didn’t even wait for breakfast. Got here and stayed here.’

‘Until lunch, when we went off for a pint.’

‘We were practically done by then.’

‘Just a few things left,’ said George, ‘which we knew we could do in time for the launch.’

‘And there was supposed to be a policeman on guard,’ said Joe.

‘We reckon that’s when it must have happened. We reckon he wandered off.’

‘Bloody Maltese!’ said Joe.

‘He swears he didn’t. That Inspector gave him a right going over but he was adamant he’d been here all the time. And kept his eyes open the whole time.’

‘To be fair,’ said Joe, ‘he could have been round the other side.’

‘It doesn’t matter to other people as much as it matters to us.’

‘We’d checked just before leaving,’ said Joe. ‘Gone over it with a fine-tooth comb. Every inch. There was nothing—I’ll take my oath!’

‘We left it four-fifths inflated. We just needed to top it up a bit when we got back. Wouldn’t take a moment.’

‘And the thing is,’ said Joe, ‘it looked all right. When we got back. You can tell, you know. Just by the look of it. If you’re really experienced. But it looked all right.’

‘He must have done it,’ said George, ‘just before we got back. So when we inflated, it wouldn’t have been apparent.’

‘Not at first. It would have gone up all right, and looked pretty good. It was only after a bit that you would have noticed.’

‘And we did notice,’ said George. ‘I said to Joe: “That doesn’t look right!”’

‘I thought he needed to open the valve. And I reckon he thought that, too, because we saw him look up and then start fiddling with it.’

‘But by then the rent was stretching and opening up. Quickly. So he had to think about coming down.’

‘Which he did. And managed all right. He was good, in his way, was Kiesewetter.’

‘One of the best we’ve had.’

‘No flies on him. He always knew what to do.’

‘And, of course, he did get it down all right,’ said Seymour.

‘Died in the hospital,’ said George.

‘Bloody Maltese,’ said Joe.

Seymour went over to the solitary policeman left guarding the remains of the balloon.

‘Seymour,’ he introduced himself. ‘From London. Scotland Yard.’

‘I know,’ said the policeman. ‘I’ve seen you with Lucca.’

‘Were you here guarding at the launch?’

‘Not exactly here,’ said the policeman. ‘Over there.’ He nodded towards the bandstand.

‘You were keeping an eye on the band?’

‘That’s right. One of them.’

‘How many were there?’

‘Two and a half.’

‘What was the half?’

‘Marsa. But they don’t count, really. Besides the other. They’re tiny. But they wanted to be here. They’re nothing, though, compared with the others.’

‘Birgu, Valletta—was there another one from the Three Cities?’

‘No. Just Birgu.’

‘Was there any trouble this time?’

‘No, no. People’s minds were on the balloons.’

‘No trouble, but a hell of a noise? Was that it?’

The policeman smiled. ‘Dead right. That was it.’

Mrs Wynne-Gurr was pushing on with her programme. This afternoon the St John Ambulance ladies were meeting a local branch for tea and cakes and profitable discussion and then they were going on with the branch to observe it performing its duties at a local football match. The match, as usual in Malta, was being played in the evening when it would be cooler.

Chantale was not very interested in football, nor, for that matter, in tea and cakes with the local ladies but, having committed herself to the Ambulance, she felt she had to go along. Mrs Wynne-Gurr had allowed them a free morning and Chantale had proposed to spend it with Seymour. A swim and then coffee? And then, perhaps, a gentle stroll through the streets of Valletta?

No such luck. Duty, as Mrs Wynne-Gurr reminded them at the end of the tea and cakes, called.

Chantale’s spirits revived slightly when they got to the football ground. It was a lot smaller than the Marsa racetrack, just a local field, and there was a friendly hum about it. The crowd was just over a thousand and included many children and mothers. Even here, though, there was a band.

Only one, however. Chantale hoped that indicated that there would be less of a spirit of rivalry and hence fewer serious cases for the St John Ambulance to deal with.

She was stationed this time quite near the band. When the local ladies had put up their two tables, and erected a little tent that they had brought, there was time to look round. The ladies began chatting with people in the crowd whom they knew. Chantale looked over towards the band. There were people there that she knew, too, some of whom had been at the Ferreiras’ picnic at Marsa. There was Uncle Paolo, for instance, this time with a trumpet held up before him. And there, yes, was Luigi, also with some sort of brass instrument. Yes, thought Chantale, that was right, for this would be the, or a, Birgu band, to which they both belonged.

Paolo saw her looking at him and said something to Luigi and they both smiled and gave her a welcoming toot on their instruments. Everything was more relaxed than at the Marsa racetrack.

The band began to play, with gusto but without giving the impression, so marked at Marsa, that they were playing
at
someone.

Of course, they were playing against someone here, too, thought Chantale: the British Navy. But there was less edge to it because there was less sense of an opposition. There were sailors here, dotted about in the crowd, but so few of them that they were almost invisible, and, certainly, inaudible against the band.

Seymour had been counting the sailors, too. He was standing next to Inspector Lucca, whom he had encountered at the entrance, keeping an eye open for potential trouble-makers.

‘But there’ll be no problem tonight,’ he said to Seymour. ‘There are too few from the Navy, and there isn’t a band to stir them up. You really need two bands to get the crowd going. This is too easy for the Birgu band. So they’ll be holding back, even though it’s the British.’

The sides were evenly matched and not at all unskilful. ‘Good game,’ said Inspector Lucca, at half time. ‘Could go either way. I think I’m going to wander around. If there is any trouble, this is when it will be. And at the end, of course, depending on the result.’

The St John Ambulance had barely been called on. During the half-time break several ladies came up from the crowd and chatted. Chantale suddenly found that Paolo and Luigi were beside her.

‘Not so busy today?’ said Paolo.

‘
Much
quieter,’ said Chantale.