Winter of Discontent (13 page)
“I HOPE HE’LL BE ALL RIGHT,” I SAID AS JANE TURNED THE CAR around and headed back to the road. “Nice man.”
Jane nodded. “Bill respected him. Fine officer, he always said. Evenhanded with the men.”
“That matters a lot. I’m glad I got to meet him. He won’t be with us much longer, I expect.”
“Didn’t look good, there at the end.”
“No. And I don’t know that what we got was worth the trouble, for him, I mean. He didn’t tell us anything new, really.”
“Said why he was flying low.”
I smiled. “Yes. Stanley’s a bit prejudiced, isn’t he? I’m inclined to believe Merrifield’s version. There was one question I wanted to ask, but I really couldn’t keep him any longer. Do you know where Bill was imprisoned? Which camp, I mean?”
“Colditz. Not one of the worst ones, and nothing like the concentration camps. Not a Buchenwald, or an Auschwitz, or a Dachau. But bad enough.”
“They were all bad. I saw some photos once, at the Imperial War Museum. Dachau, I think it was, when it was liberated. Thousands of men lying naked, the dead and the near-dead together. They were no more than skeletons with skin. You could count their bones. The captions said most of them died later, despite everything doctors tried to do. I had nightmares for weeks after looking at those pictures. And if Bill had been Jewish …”
We drove back to town in silence.
“Tea?” said Jane when she had parked her car in her drive.
“Thanks, but I need some thinking time. Unless you’d like company? Today must have been hard on you, reliving Bill’s horrible experiences.”
Jane nodded. “Yes. But worth it if we can get at the truth. Go home and do your thinking.”
“Right. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything useful.”
Alan came to give me a hug as soon as I’d hung up my coat. He knows me so well he seldom needs to ask about my moods. He questioned me only with a look, to which I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.
“What have you been doing with yourself all day?” I said, mostly to avoid any other subject. “I feel like I haven’t been home for weeks.”
“Addressing Christmas cards.”
“You’re kidding!”
He pointed to the pile of cards on the hall table, stamped and ready to mail.
“Good heavens! I didn’t know men even knew how to do that. I hope you didn’t forget to write notes to—”
“Notes to everyone present and correct. I’m a very exceptional man, my dear. I hope your American friends can read my handwriting”
“They probably won’t be able to, but they’ll think it’s charming even so. Just the way they do with a British accent. Well, for that, my dear exceptional man, you deserve an extraspecial tea. Let’s see what we can find.”
I made a quick batch of scones and opened a carton of clotted cream. We don’t usually indulge in such treats, but any husband who takes over the Christmas-card chore deserves to be pampered. I’d worry about his cholesterol level later.
Alan kept up a babble of remarks about this and that during tea. I replied absently, and suddenly interrupted. “Alan, is there any way to trace the men who were held in a particular POW camp in Germany during the war?”
He had been talking, I think, about his grandchildren. He blinked and redirected his train of thought. “Frankly, I doubt it. The Germans destroyed sheafs of records at the end of the war. Sorting things out when the camps were liberated was a nightmare, and after all these years …” He sighed and shook his head. “You’re thinking of Bill Fanshawe?”
“Of the men who were in there with him, yes. He spent most of the war in Colditz, and I have the feeling that any secrets he might have taken to the grave with him would have dated from there.”
Alan nodded slowly. “They were places for secrets, certainly. Escape plans, sabotage plans, assassination plans … desperate men will do anything they can to try to improve their lot. There were thousands of heroes in those camps, you know. Men who helped others to escape, often at the cost of their own lives. Men who tried to hide Jews destined for the gas chambers. Men who smuggled German war secrets out to Allied forces. There were even some Germans who were so revolted by the conditions in the camps, the atrocities, that they secretly helped the prisoners. When they were discovered, they were shot at once as traitors, of course.”
“And I suppose there were the other kind, too. Turncoats. Men who traded secrets to the enemy in return for favors.”
“Yes, unfortunately. There are always a few. They didn’t last long if the other prisoners found out about them.”
“But suppose, just suppose, that Bill found out about one of them and didn’t do anything about it, for whatever reason.” I was warming up to my theory. “Suppose he was too ill to act, or it happened just before the camp was liberated. What would he have done with that knowledge?”
Alan considered. “Do I recall that he was in pretty bad shape when the camp was liberated? Physically, I mean?”
“I got that impression. He’d broken some bones when he bailed out of the plane, and they were never properly set until after the war. Merrifield said he was sent to a hospital. I imagine most of the men were, though, a field hospital at least. There at the end of the war most of the prisoners were starving, weren’t they?”
“In some of the camps, not all. Certainly there was greater need for medical attention than the Allies could easily provide, but they did what they could. However, what I was getting at was that Bill was probably in no condition even to remember details from the camp, much less do anything about them. If he knew something about one of the other prisoners, I’d think he would have reported it to the proper authorities as soon as he could.”
“Me, too. But just suppose he didn’t, for whatever reason.”
“If I were you I wouldn’t pose that supposition to Jane.”
“Why not?”
“Because it sounds a great deal as if you’re suggesting blackmail,” said Alan, draining his cup. “More tea?”
“But—I wasn’t—how could you—” I spluttered. Alan refilled my cup.
“I don’t think that’s what you were thinking. I said it sounded that way. And you have to admit it’s a possibility. Far-fetched, but possible.”
I sat back to think about that. “All I meant was that if Bill knew something that might hurt someone else, that someone might have come to get him. And that might explain why he—Bill, I mean—was in that terrible tunnel. He was hiding. And the effort, along with the fear, was too much for him and he collapsed.”
“Almost equally far-fetched, I’d say. You’re supposing that someone Bill knew in a prison camp nearly sixty years ago was still alive, knew where Bill lived, knew that Bill carried this secret with him, somehow divined that Bill might reveal it, and—what? Threatened Bill with bodily harm? Didn’t threaten but merely turned up, and put the wind up poor Bill?”
“Hmm. I haven’t thought it out, have I? But, Alan, you’re a policeman. You’ve known stranger things to happen. You said it yourself: desperate men will do anything.”
“Indeed. It’s only that I doubt that a man of Bill’s age, or older, would be all that desperate about anything.”
“Reputation?” I said dubiously.
“Perhaps.”
I sighed. “Anyway, it doesn’t look like anything I could possibly follow up. The police could, maybe, but they’re not dealing with Bill’s death right now.”
“And your theory doesn’t explain why the museum and Walter would be involved. That’s what the police are worried about.”
“You’re right.” I sighed again. “Okay, so it’s back to Bill’s old friends, I guess. You know, I started this with the idea of helping Jane deal with Bill’s death, and I’m not at all sure it’s been good for her. It must be pretty devastating to have the wartime stuff raked up over and over again.”
“Jane’s tough, Dorothy. I think it may be harder on you, in a way. Don’t forget that everyone in England had some personal tragedy in that war. I doubt there was a soul who escaped, who didn’t lose a husband or a brother or a son or a cousin or at the very least a home. My favorite uncle was killed at Dunkirk, my cousin was badly wounded, and we lost every chicken we owned in a bombing raid. Oh, you may well laugh, but it was serious for us! The point is that we’re used to war stories, very personal ones. They’ve lost most of their ability to shock. They’re new to you.”
“New and extremely unpleasant. I think, as Scarlett said, I’ll think about that tomorrow. Tonight I’m going to wrap presents.”
But of course I couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop gnawing on the possibility that something could be learned from Bill’s fellow prisoners, if only we could find them. The fact that finding them was probably impossible was frustrating in the extreme.
The next day, Saturday, the fickle weather changed again. I woke up cold, and when I looked out the window, a few snowflakes caught the light of a streetlamp. The sky was still dark, but the earth was beginning to lighten under a powdered-sugar dusting of snow.
Alan was still asleep, but I was wide awake. Snow! Real snow for Christmas! Maybe I’d get Alan to go with me to London and do some proper shopping, Harrod’s and all that. I dressed and went downstairs to make coffee. The kettle hadn’t even boiled when the phone rang.
“Saw your light,” said Jane. “Had an idea last night.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t sound keen, do you?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Jane. It’s just that the snow has put me in a Christmas mood, and I wasn’t thinking about anything else. What’s your idea?”
“Been talking to men about Bill’s war. How about a woman?”
“What woman? Bill didn’t have another girlfriend, did he?”
“Had lots. Good-looking he was in those days. Picked me. Wasn’t what I meant, though. There’s a WAAF still alive—”
“A waif?”
“WAAF. Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.”
“Oh, of course. Yes, a WAAF?”
“Who knew Bill. Fancied him. Stationed at Luftwich. Lives in Lowbridge. Feel like a trip over there today?”
I abandoned my vague ideas of Christmas shopping. I had more than a week left, after all. “Sure. Why not? Only—”
“Only I drive. Right.”
We arranged to leave about nine, which gave me two hours to finish my Christmas list and a grocery list, feed Alan and the cats, and wonder what a superannuated WAAF could tell us about Bill and his war that might be of any help.
THE SNOW HAD STOPPED BY THE TIME WE SET OUT, BUT THE streets were a little slippery. I was profoundly glad that Jane was driving. I’ve had more experience on wintry roads, true, but she’s much more familiar with English traffic. “Do you think we’ll get any more?” I asked, looking out the window at the already melting snow.
“Telly said rain and fog tonight.”
“So much for my Christmas snow.”
“Might get some yet. Never can tell, this time of year.”
“Yes, the only predictable thing about English weather is its unpredictability. Jane, tell me about this woman. What did she do in the war? The WAAFs didn’t fly, did they?”
“Good grief, no!” Jane was so startled she veered into the right lane and narrowly escaped being mowed down by a beer truck. (Or “brewer’s lorry,” but I still tend to think in American.) “Women didn’t go into battle. She was in Ops.”
I sighed. “Jane, much as I hate to cramp your style, you really are going to have to translate for me. Standard English I can manage okay. Wartime shorthand, no. I presume you’re not saying she had something to do with growing hops.”
Jane hooted. “That lorry’s got beer into your head. Ops, not hops. Not lost my aitches at this stage of my life. Short for Operations Room. Don’t know from my own experience exactly what she did. Never was in the military myself. Believe it had to do with those huge maps on tables, with little airplanes to move about showing where real ones were. Always looked in the movies like a children’s game.”
“I expect she’ll tell us. Anyway, what’s her name?”
“Barbara Price.”
“Miss or Mrs.?”
“Miss, definitely.”
“Was she an officer?”
“All women were officers. The respect factor, y’see.”
“Oh, come to think of it, all the women in the American military are officers, too, or were back then, anyway. Okay, what’s she like?”
“Let you see for yourself.”
And not another word would Jane say, from which I deduced that she didn’t like the lady.
Jane had evidently telephoned to Miss Price to say we were coming, because she answered the door of her cottage attired, on a Saturday morning in December, in a tight black silk dress, high heels, and lipstick. She had probably been pretty, in a blowsy sort of way, when she was young. Now her once zaftig curves had run to plain fat, and her complexion had faded. Her hair, however, was a defiant red and her earrings large and green.
“Oh,” she said with a note of disappointment, looking at the two of us. “I thought you said Mr. Nesbitt would be coming.”
“Held up at the last minute,” Jane said, not meeting my eye.
“Well, never mind. Come in, Miss Langland, Mrs. Nesbitt.”
“It’s Mrs. Martin, actually. I kept my name when I married Alan.”
Miss Price giggled. Actually giggled, as if she were eighteen instead of eighty-something. “How very American of you. Come in, let me take your coats. I’ve just put the kettle on, tea won’t take a minute.”
Nine in the morning was not a time when I usually wanted tea, but Miss Price looked like the sort of woman who could enjoy a nice cuppa at any time of the day or night. I looked around me, trying to learn more about her. The cottage was immaculately clean, but crowded with ornaments, touristy kitsch from all over Europe. I spotted a brass Eiffel Tower, a china Coliseum, and no fewer than three cuckoo clocks before I even sat down. The room was hot, all three bars of the “electric fire” glowing in a corner of the room.
Our hostess came back carrying a heavy tray laden with pot, cups and saucers, milk and sugar, and a large plate of biscuits and mince pies, and then looked around for a place to put it. “Oh, dear. Miss Langland, would you mind moving the aspidistra? The floor will do nicely, thank you so much. I so seldom entertain that I quite forgot I had put that plant on the tea table. Now, milk and sugar, Mrs. Nes—Mrs. Martin?”
“Yes, please, quite a lot of milk and two lumps.” I had an idea that tea in this house would be very black and very strong. For the sake of my stomach, I needed it diluted as much as possible. “No, nothing to eat for now, thank you. The mince pies look lovely, but I’m trying to watch my weight.”
“Oh, well, if you’re sure, but do help yourself to anything you like.” She sounded a trifle offended. It was a bad start to the conversation, but I really could not eat cookies and rich tarts at that hour, and she’d have been more upset if Id taken them and left them on the plate.
“It was such a surprise to hear from you, Miss Langland,” said our hostess. “It must have been years since we’ve talked. I did want to say how sorry I was to hear about Flying Officer Fanshawe. I’d heard you’d got close to him again, and it must have been a shock for you. I took quite a fancy to him when he was first posted to Luftwich, you know. Of course he never so much as looked at any of us WAAFs. He carried your picture in his pocket, and I was told there was one hanging on the wall of his room as well. Of course I wouldn’t know about that personally!” She giggled.
Jane said nothing, and Miss Price looked affronted. “I suppose you wanted to talk about him? You weren’t very clear when you called.”
“It was more that we wanted to get a picture of what Bill’s war was like,” I said. “He never talked much about it to Jane, or anyone else, it seems. For a start, I wondered just what you did in the RAF. Jane tells me you were in the Operations Room, but I don’t know what that implies.”
Miss Price relaxed a little, happy, as people almost always are, to talk about herself. “Oh, it was a very responsible job, very. The men weren’t actually keen on letting women do it, at first, but of course the men were needed in the planes, weren’t they? And at command posts, naturally. So we were taught to control the flights.”
“When you say control …”
“Air traffic controller, they’d call us today. We tracked the planes on radar—our planes and the enemy—and directed our pilots by radio until they could see the German planes. When we weren’t on the radio—that was rather nerve-wracking, and we couldn’t do it for terribly long stretches—we’d plot the positions on the map table. We knew at all times where everyone was, unless they got out of radar range. I think I may say that we did as much to keep our boys safe and help them destroy the enemy as any support staff. They couldn’t have done without us, really, though of course we were in very junior positions. I do sometimes think the officers at command level took us quite for granted, but the boys knew what we did, and were grateful to us.
“Oh, I well remember how it used to be when they came home from a mission. Dead tired, of course, and cold. Even in the summer it was cold in the planes, because of the altitude. They’d go first to the mess for hot tea and a meal, but quite a number of them would always come in and thank us for what we’d done. Sweet boys, they were, and so many of them never …”
She stopped talking and blew her nose. I had been wondering why she’d never married. Perhaps she’d just told me. I thought it was time to change the subject. “How many men were there at—Luftwich, was it? I mean officers and enlisted men, all of them.”
“Well, it varied, of course. There weren’t as many at the beginning of the war as later on. At the peak height, we had five squadrons, and we were terribly overcrowded. The aerodrome had been built to accommodate two.”
“And a squadron would be—”
“Ten to eighteen aircraft,” she replied promptly, “each with a crew of at least four. Two pilots, a wireless operator, and a tail gunner.”
“So that would be … let’s see, fifty to ninety planes … at least two hundred men, perhaps closer to four hundred.”
“You’re forgetting the flight lieutenants and the squadron leaders and the wing commanders and the mechanics and cooks and batmen and the rest of the ground staff, and, of course, us WAAFs. Luftwich was a big place.”
“I can see that. How many of those people did you know?”
“Well, the flight crews, of course. And the chief controller, our boss. Not the higher-ups. We knew them to speak to, but we weren’t on what you’d call friendly terms. A squadron leader or whoever was someone to salute and respect, not someone to get pally with.”
“I suppose you knew Wing Commander Merrifield? I gather Bill usually flew in his crew.”
“Yes, I knew him.” She picked up the pot. “More tea?”
“No, thank you. What was Merrifield like? He was a career officer, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. A stickler for rules, ambitious, not friendly.”
“You didn’t like him.”
She sniffed. “It wasn’t my business to like or dislike any of the men, or the officers. I worked with them, I got them where they needed to go and home again.”
I switched tacks again. “I suppose there were a lot of secrets to be kept around the base—the airfield, I mean.”
Miss Price sniffed at the foolish remark. “It was wartime. Everything we did was secret. Of course that didn’t keep the men from talking about it when they shouldn’t. We WAAFs heard a lot we weren’t supposed to, but we were safe, and the men knew it. They had to talk sometimes. It’s human nature.”
“What sort of things? I can’t imagine they’re still secret. The war’s been over for nearly sixty years.”
“Some things might be. Anyway, I swore not to tell, and I’m not going to tell. Most of it doesn’t matter anymore, where missions were going and that, but there were other things … no, my lips are sealed. And why do you care, anyway?”
I shrugged apologetically. “Just idle curiosity, I suppose. Everyone likes to think they know things other people don’t. But what I’m really trying to do is fill out the picture of Bill’s war.”
“Why?” she demanded. “Are you writing a book or something?”
I laughed. “No, but Bill was planning to do a special exhibit that highlighted what Sherebury men and women did to help win the war. At the museum, you know. Mr. Merrifield contributed some materials to it, I know. I thought perhaps I could help a bit by writing some narrative about Bill.” St. Peter chalked up another lie to my account, but I’d piled up so many by now that I didn’t think one more mattered much. “So tell me, did the men have much free time? I mean, I suppose they formed close friendships and did things together in their time off.”
“Of course. It happens in wartime. But the men learned not to get too close to anyone, because you never knew …”
You never knew when your best friend might not come home. “What about romances? Surely some of the WAAFs and some of the male officers fell for each other.”
“We were not encouraged to fraternize with the other officers. They were our superiors, you know.”
“I’ll bet that didn’t stop the women.”
“Well—no, not entirely. But a lot of hearts got broken, because the women weren’t always able to keep the friendships casual. And when the men didn’t come back … do have a biscuit.”
That was the second time she’d warned me off. I put two and two together. She didn’t like Merrifield. She had, I was pretty sure, fallen in love with someone who hadn’t come back. Could it have been one of the men killed when Merrifield’s plane was shot down?
Jane, who had sat silent, now spoke up. “Bill said you’d got engaged. To one of the other pilots.”
Miss Price looked at her coldly. “And when did he say this, if I might ask?”
“Letter. Just before he was shot down.”
“Well, if he had written to you later he might have told you that my fiance was in the plane that day, and was killed. James was a pilot himself, and the best pilot in the squadron, but he was flying tail gunner that day because a lot of the men were out sick with the flu, and the mission was important. So he died. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”
The bitter question was directed to me. “I’m sorry, I never—”
“James Little was a wonderful man, wonderful! We would have been happy together. We neither of us ever looked at anyone else once we’d seen each other; it was love at first sight. And he had just as much courage as any of them, and more than most, and more patriotism than the lot of them!”
I tried to calm her vehemence. “I’m sure he did. I didn’t mean—”
“And as for that exhibition—if you’re not making it up—I hope you’re planning to use the things I contributed, memories of James. I can’t imagine any exhibit will be worth seeing if it’s just some rubbish Merrifield’s dug out of his attic. His concern in that war was looking after himself, and they didn’t give medals for that.”
After that, the room seemed more stiflingly hot than ever.
We left as soon as we decently could. I took my coat off before I got into the car. “Freeze to death,” was Jane’s comment.
“Not me. I’m too ashamed and embarrassed. Why didn’t you warn me about the hornet’s nest I was stirring up?”
“Wanted you to see for yourself. War’s been over for longer than most people in this town have lived. Still bitterness.” She pulled onto the main road into the traffic, heavy on a Saturday morning close to Christmas.
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