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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Also by John Gardner
Praise for John Gardner
About the Author
Copyright
For Trish,
again and always.
‘The blind impersonal nature of the missile made the individual on the ground feel helpless. There was little that he could do, no human enemy that he could see shot down.’
Winston Churchill on the V-Weapons
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is the fifth volume of a projected six books set during the Second World War, starring the young policewoman Suzie Mountford.
It is also my 52nd book, and written in my 80th year – though I don’t know what that’s got to do with the price of eggs.
I should say that the Royal Marine NCOs, Colour-Sergeant ‘Tubby’ Shaw and Sergeant Harvey, who appear in the closing chapters of this tale, should not be confused with the late Colour-Sergeant ‘Tubby’ Shaw and the excellent, if taciturn, Sergeant Harvey, who whipped Y9 Squad through basic drill at the Royal Marine Depot, Deal, in the early spring of 1945. I should know; I was in Y9 Squad. At the time, the war was still being fought, yet at Deal we were even taught the ceremonial Feu de joie, which Tubby Shaw called the Foo Dee Joy, as all surviving members of Y9 will recall.
John Gardner,
Hampshire, 2006.
CHAPTER ONE
Suzie’s brother James flinched as the explosion shuddered through the walls of his sister’s sitting room high above Upper St Martin’s Lane. The curtains puffed – windows open to stop bomb blast from shattering glass.
‘Damn!’ said the convent-educated WDI Suzie Mountford. Then to her brother, ‘It’s OK, Jim … Fine, don’t worry.’ Looking up from her teacup, concerned, glancing at the military style watch she wore on her left wrist.
Three minutes past twelve noon exactly.
‘Bloody doodlebugger,’ Tommy Livermore growled. ‘Third today. That wasn’t as close as it sounded. On a calm day…’
‘Shut up, Tommy, we know. On a calm day the sound is carried over long distances causing the aural illusion of the explosion being closer than it really is.’ Suzie spoke as though quoting from a manual.
Up to that point the conversation, when it wasn’t about the fighting in Normandy, was about the V-1 doodlebugs, flying bombs. Failing that, in recent days the talk had been of the attempt to assassinate Hitler in his headquarters at Rastenburg in Prussia, a few weeks previously, on 20th July.
All of them, at that moment, felt the disturbing ripple under their feet. Suzie, sitting near the door, felt it through her thighs and bottom as though someone had repeatedly pummelled her. It was not an unpleasant sensation.
For a moment, Lieutenant James Mountford, Royal Marines, thought he was back on Sword beach over a month before, going in with the second wave of 41 Commando on D-Day. He heard the explosions as he reached the surf line, the Sherman tanks with their flails slashing, clearing the mines from the sand: the heavy inhuman whoosh of the flame-throwers ahead. Then he saw the bullets kick up the sand and felt the terrible gouging drill into his right foot, suffered as the bones were snagged apart and again as a further bullet ripped like an electric shock into his left shoulder, spinning him down into the surf, rolling him as though he was a piece of driftwood, blacking him out and disorienting him until Marines Page and McDermott lifted him bodily from the foam and dragged him up to the dressing station already set up among the dunes.
This he relived in a fraction of a second, standing back from the window, right foot encased in plaster, left arm in a sling. He was in battledress, with the Royal Marines Commando flashes on his shoulders, the triangled dagger below, parachute wings and the Combined Ops flash on his right sleeve. He leant on a walking stick and looked sickly white, his eyes sad as those of a frightened puppy.
It was Sunday – second week of August – and they had discharged him from hospital that morning, so he rang Suzie to find she was back in London: she’d been away on cases, twice with Tommy, in recent weeks: before D-Day up to Manchester, following and interrogating a soldier suspected of throttling a prostitute in London, in a flat above Beak Street, Soho. Then there was the case in Sheffield where a young housewife, Doris Butler, had been bludgeoned to death in her kitchen on the night of 5th/6th June. The husband had been on leave but had long gone back to his unit and by 9th June was dead in Normandy. Tommy told Shirley Cox and Laura Cotter to root around and look for a boyfriend; there had been some footprints and a lot of cigarette ends behind bushes at the far end of the woman’s little garden, someone watching the house. ‘Boyfriend,’ Tommy reckoned. ‘Boyfriend driven mad by the husband being home and sleeping with his wife. Came down most nights to watch them move around the house, put the blackouts up, go to bed. Hubby goes back to his unit and the bloke nips in. They have a fight – “You said he never touched you!” Bang! Over and out,’ there, in Sheffield, the United Kingdom’s steel capital. Tommy raised his eyebrows and corrected himself in a mutter, ‘No, look for boyfriends, plural. I think our Doris rang the changes: had round heels.’
Later that day, James Mountford was going on to Larksbrook. Their mother, Helen Gordon-Lowe, was coming to collect him, together with the dreaded stepfather, the Galloping Major, who got petrol from God knows where. All the time.
Suzie found it odd that when the war had started her brother was still at school; now here he was in her flat, an officer wounded on the beaches of Normandy.
A Maren, as they called Wrens attached to the Royal Marines, proudly wearing a blue beret with the red flash and the RM Globe and Laurel cap badge, had picked up Jim in a jeep and driven him up from the military hospital on the outskirts of Oxford.
‘Thought all the jeeps were in France now,’ Jim said.
‘Not this one, sir. Wouldn’t float so they left it with me.’ She glanced at him cheekily and liked what she saw. Marens often twisted young RM officers round their little fingers and other parts of their anatomies. By the time they got to Upper St Martin’s Lane and Suzie’s flat, Jim had discovered her name was Emily Styles. She came from New Malden, in Surrey, and he’d also got the telephone number of the Wrenery from her, plus her home number in case she was on leave. ‘If the excuse is good enough I can always charm a jeep out of the chiefy,’ she told him. ‘No problem. I’ll just give your name – it’ll be in the register for a month. I can easily tootle down to Newbury.’ She would have taken him today, but he’d told her his mum was coming for him, so she had to make do with helping him up to his sister’s flat, letting the back of his hand brush hard against her left breast as she did so.
&nb
sp; Now, up in Suzie’s living room, he felt dejected, could’ve been with the Maren instead of his fun-defying stepfather, Ross Gordon-Lowe, hero of World War One, firewatcher extraordinary, dull as a tarnished cap badge.
‘Cheer up, Jim. You’re a hero now,’ Tommy grinned at him.
‘Hero my arse. Commissioned for less than four months, commando course, parachute course then off to 41 Commando. Two minutes on the beach and I’m shot to buggery.’
‘At least you won’t get a medal for it like the Yanks.’ American troops received the Purple Heart medal for getting wounded, and this was looked upon with derision by members of HM Forces.
‘In the last lot they called it getting a Blighty.’ Tommy winked at him. In the first war getting a Blighty meant getting a wound that sent you home, got you out of the trenches. ‘Your sister got a sort of Blighty last year.’
Suzie didn’t see the wink; she had turned away, squinting at the little mirror in her handbag held at arm’s length, checking out the new lipstick she’d acquired: Cyclax Velvet Grape. Also, she’d had her hair done in Sheffield and was persuaded to have her eyebrows plucked. Still couldn’t get used to it: wondered if it was too much.
Tommy saw her back stiffen. ‘Joke, heart,’ he chuckled. Then, to Jim, ‘Got herself promoted without taking any exams. Jammy girl, eh?’
‘Not funny, Tom,’ she snapped.
‘Not sitting where I am, heart.’
Suzie didn’t bite, wanted to claw his eyes out but knew it wasn’t worth it. She was starting to learn about damping down her temper and this was a particularly irritable wound, Tommy nibbling away at last year’s still-festering sore.
Last year, ’43, there had been a ginormous split when Suzie was moved from the Reserve Squad to an intelligence unit, the War Office Intelligence Liaison Department, on special duties. Tommy had no say in the matter that was seen to be temporary, but Tommy, being the Honourable Tommy Livermore, threw a sort of childish paddy, saw shadows where there were none, and devious moves where none existed. The result was a real divide, an incomprehensible falling-out with Suzie learning more about Tommy than was good for her.
In the end, of course, Tommy had crawled back, pleading for a return to the status quo, but every now and then he gave her a sharp dig just to remind himself of how bad it had been.
Suzie’s promotion had come with the move to WOIL and she had been allowed to keep the rank of Woman Detective Inspector after she returned to the Reserve. This still appeared to rankle with old Dandy Tom and she didn’t really know why: thought he’d have been proud of her.
They had a scratch lunch. There was always a supply of ham, bacon and eggs, from the home farm at Tommy’s parents’ estate, Kingscote Grange: ‘Where Tommy cut his molars on the old silver spoon,’ Suzie told people.
So today they had poached eggs on toast because Suzie hadn’t had the patience to do a proper Sunday lunch and her mother had told her not to worry as they planned to take everybody to the Savoy that night for dinner before they drove back to Newbury. If you had money you could still eat in places like the Savoy at almost pre-war standards; and the Galloping Major always seemed to have money. Another thing that puzzled Suzie.
Not that it mattered because as soon as they arrived Ross Gordon-Lowe, full of self-importance, announced that they couldn’t stay after all. ‘I have a parade tonight.’
‘What’s he going to parade?’ Suzie muttered to her mother. ‘Going to march through Newbury with that little moustache – bayonets fixed and drums beating? His moustache got the freedom of Newbury, has it? That what it’s about?’
‘ARP evening church parade, Suzie. Don’t tease him, you know how important it is to him,’ and Helen entered the drawing room setting eyes on James in his cast, sling and some sticking plaster on his face. ‘Oh, my poor darling, what have they done to you?’
‘Slipped in the bath, Mummy.’ He gave his most winning smile, the one that seemed almost to slip off his face, wondering why his mum and the major hadn’t driven over to Oxford to see him. He’d been there long enough.
They stayed for a cup of tea, Ross Gordon-Lowe constantly taking surreptitious peeps at his watch, which made Suzie angry. Her friend Shirley Cox, woman police sergeant in the Reserve Squad, had recently had an affair with a married man. ‘Thing that really narks me is after we’ve done it he keeps sneaking peeps at his watch,’ she said. ‘Like he can’t wait to get home.’
They stayed for a cup of tea – the Galloping Major only drank half – then both Tommy and Suzie helped get Jim down to the car.
Helen shot her eyes towards Ross and hissed at Suzie, ‘Try to understand, darling. He gets petrol for being a warden. Has to keep his end up.’
Suzie thought she’d like to keep his end up, but didn’t specify where. She hadn’t completely forgiven her mother for marrying him so quickly following the tragedy of her father’s death in an unnecessary road accident. Hardly a week went by when she didn’t think of that terrible day, even though she now knew the other things, that her dad hadn’t left them well provided for which was why Helen had married the artful Gordon-Lowe. The thought of it made her shudder.
They’d just got back into the flat when the telephone started to ring – Tommy’s special phone that rang when people asked for, or dialled, his home number in Earls Court.
He spoke for some five minutes and came out to find Suzie making more tea in the kitchen.
‘Don’t make yourself too comfortable, heart, we’re in work.’
‘Lift that barge, tote that bail. Where to this time?’
‘Odd one. Don’t know really. One of those V-1s this morning. Uncovered something, Billy says. Local law wants us over there.’ He looked puzzled. ‘Brian’s picking us up. Told him to bring Ron and your friend Shirley.’
Billy was Billy Mulligan, Tommy’s executive sergeant, cooked the books, kept track of time and motion. Brian was Tommy’s driver, rumoured to have worked at Kingscote for Tommy before he was even a detective, let alone a detective chief super. Ron was DS Ron Worrall, good at crime scenes and taking the snaps, and Shirley Cox was, well, Shirley Cox, old chum from her days in Camford Hill nick.
‘Bet Emma’ll insist on coming along for the ride.’ She gave him a sideways look and began to perk up her lipstick.
‘Shouldn’t wonder,’ Tommy gave what they called his terrible smile.
Emma was WDS Emma Penticost – their second attempt to replace the irreplaceable Molly Abelard now gone to glory and much missed.
* * *
Suzie later maintained that, for her, this was the worst year of the war, eclipsing even the horrors of the Blitz in ’40 and ’41. D-Day, 6th June 1944, came and went – the largest invasion force in history jumping the English Channel in an attempt to drive the Nazi occupation forces out of Europe. With it there was a sense of euphoria. They had waited since 1940 to return to the Continent, and once the Allied armies gained a toe-hold in Normandy people wrongly imagined that everything would be downhill to victory.
Exactly a week after the D-Day landings came the secret weapons: the V-weapons, the vengeance weapons, which could not, at first sight, be stopped. It was the beginning of a period which to the war-weary inhabitants of southern England was psychologically much worse than the days of the Blitz.
The code word for a flying bomb was Diver; for a rocket it was Big Ben. They were a major secret in 1944 Britain. The general public didn’t have a clue and it was not thought advisable to warn them of the horrible surprise, but word had been dribbling in from occupied Europe since the summer of 1943, and members of the underground resistance in France, together with the slave labour put to work on launch sites, had kept a steady stream of intelligence reaching the secret corridors of the Air Ministry and the War Office in London.
The Royal Observer Corps knew all about Diver and Big Ben, and on the night of 12th/13th June, just a week after the D-Day landings, Observers Woodland and Wraight at Observer Post Mike Two saw an object with flames spurting fro
m its tail crossing the coast near Dymchurch, a couple of miles west of Folkestone. They later reported that it sounded like a Model T Ford negotiating a steep hill. On spotting it, Woodland lunged for the telephone linking them with their centre in Maidstone. ‘Mike Two – Diver, Diver, Diver!’ He shouted, then gave the course of this first flying bomb heading for London: the first Fiesler 103 to give its correct designation.
Observer Post Mike Two was suitably situated on top of a Martello Tower. Martello Towers are dotted along Britain’s south coast, originally erected as watch points for another possible invasion – the one planned by Napoleon Bonaparte in the early nineteenth century.
About five minutes later that first flying bomb’s engine stopped and it hurtled down to explode in an open field.
The second one to cross the coast that night – torpedo-shaped body with a ton of amatol in the nose, stubby wings and a pulse jet engine mounted at the rear above the tail – landed in a potato field, but the third exploded in Bethnal Green, taking out a railway bridge and two houses, killing six people including nineteen-year-old Ellen Woodcraft and her eight-month-old son, Tom.
So began the sinister and successful V-1 assault on the south of England. The man at the sharp end of the attack was Colonel Max Wachtel, a serious, no-nonsense former artillery officer, now the man in command of Flak Regiment 155(W). Wachtel had supervised the training of the launch crews: a tireless hands-on organiser who at one point was forced to grow a beard to disguise himself in an attempt to mislead the resistance organisations which had spies everywhere.
That first weekend of the V-weapons saw a steady stream of Fi 103s reaching the capital. St Mary Abbot’s hospital in Kensington was badly damaged, and there were incidents in Battersea, Wandsworth, Streatham and Putney.
On the Sunday came a horrific direct hit – at 11.20 a.m. a 103 struck the Guards Chapel of Wellington Barracks, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace, just as the congregation stood to sing the Te Deum. Fifty-eight civilians and sixty-three service personnel died and over seventy more were seriously injured.