Nobody said anything.
Margaret Thatcher and Iain Macleod had devoured the reports from the Royal Engineer survey parties, and last night they’d discussed the implications in detail until the small hours of the morning.
“Moreover,” the Home Secretary continued, the River Thames is navigable by sea going vessels up to Tower Bridge, and beyond by smaller craft all the way up to the first weirs at Teddington. All the major bridges over the River Thames are intact and although there are merchantmen, barges and lighters derelict and sunk or grounded at the quays of many of the major London docks the greatest damage is to the buildings surrounding and adjacent to them, and of course the transportation and communications infrastructure. In this latter regard, the indications are that many, perhaps most of the capital below ground — that is sewers, cableways, passages and many basements and vaults, not to mention much of the tube railways system, although now flooded in Central London — survived the bombing more or less intact. This is important because it means theoretically that, for example, if we put our minds to it the London docks could be restored to full use within a matter of months.”
“What of the rest of the capital?” The Queen asked flatly.
“The survey teams estimate the epicentres of the four strikes — which they now assess as being in the range of three hundred thousand kilotons to somewhere slightly in excess of one megaton, as being Dagenham, Bexley, Barnet and Harrow. The south-eastern quarter of the Greater London Area therefore suffered the least catastrophic damage, and a large number of major buildings are still standing in the centre of the capital including the shell of the Houses of Parliament, albeit severely knocked about…”
Chapter 8
Lieutenant Jim Siddall, formerly a staff sergeant in the Royal Military Police but for last seven weeks a brevetted officer on the personal staff of Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Wemyss Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean, parked his Land Rover across the road from the neat, sandstone Admiralty Dockyard company house. The former Redcap didn’t think he’d ever get used to the Maltese winter — balmy January days with a warm sun overhead between the showers — but every time he remembered winter in England he inwardly chuckled with smug complacency. Yes, this was the life. Whoever would have thought that one day Mr and Mrs Siddall’s tearaway good for nothing son would be a Political Intelligence Officer on the staff of the most powerful and famous British field commander since Montgomery of Alamein?
It was a funny old World…
He had been pleasantly surprised to receive Marija Calleja’s call that morning. She had come to his pokey office beneath the ramparts of the old citadel walls of Mdina, walking the short distance from St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, situated on the other side of the Cathedral around which so much of the inner fortress was built.
‘I am sorry to trouble you, Jim,’ she had apologised but the soldier hadn’t been in the least incommoded. It was her first visit to his bolt hole and he had been boyishly pleased to see her. ‘My mother is in a state,’ she’d explained, a little embarrassed. ‘My sister-in-law, Rosa, my brother Samuel’s wife, called on her in Sliema last night and well,’ Marija had shrugged, ‘she is very worried.’
The pale blue of her auxiliary nurse’s uniform suited the young woman’s slender figure and brown, questing eyes. Her long nutmeg brown hair had been clipped back, and her delicate hands were restless.
‘Nobody has seen Sam since Wednesday afternoon. What with what happened to HMS Torquay, Rosa is beside herself…’
Jim Siddall had persuaded his visitor to sit down, offered her a cup of tea.
‘No thank you…’
The soldier hadn’t had to think very hard about what to do next.
‘How can I help?’ He had asked.
As he had escorted her out of his office Marija had pecked his cheek and he had felt like he was nine feet tall. He still felt at least eight feet tall as he stepped out of the Land Rover and straightened his uniform. The C-in-C ran a tight ship, he liked his HQ to run like clockwork and he was a stickler when it came to uniforms. Jim Siddall had always taken pride in his appearance and the crispness of his uniform; he still painstakingly bulled his own shoes each morning before he reported for duty. He’d fitted like a well-oiled cog into the HQ machine and already made a number of new friends in the Officers’ Mess. The C-in-C expected his staff to work ‘as a team’ and made it crystal clear that ‘everybody had to get on with each other’ or he’d ‘know the reason why’.
And now Marija Calleja had come to him asked him for help.
Life was good.
Rosa Calleja had been crying. She was a pretty girl of about Marija’s age, a little shorter by an inch or two and fuller-figured with auburn hair and grey-green eyes filled with trouble. She was dressed in a long dress drawn in tightly at her waist, the hem of which danced around her tanned calves. She wore a silver chain with a crucifix pendent. She fingered her wedding ring as she eyed the big man on her doorstep.
“Lieutenant Siddall,” the man introduced himself, at pains not to sound like the military policeman he had been for most of his decade-and-a-half in the British Army.
“Ah, Marija’s friend,” the woman on the doorstep sniffed, on the verge of a flood of new tears.
The tall former Redcap heard himself being referred to a ‘Marija’s friend’ and was so distracted that he hardly registered anything else for several seconds.
“Er, I am on the C-in-C’s staff,” he explained lamely. “Marija asked if I could make discreet inquiries. Er, to ascertain your husband’s whereabouts without causing a stir…”
“He goes off some nights,” the worried wife blurted. “I don’t know where he goes. But he’s never been gone this long without saying something…”
“Perhaps, if we talked inside?” Jim Siddall suggested, knowing how most neighbours usually had gossip antennae specifically attuned to exactly this kind of conversation between a tearful spouse and a representative of the authorities.
Inside the small, cool simply furnished company house it was very quiet. Maltese houses tended to have thick walls, were rarely more than two storeys high and had wooden shutters on south-facing windows to keep out the heat by day. The Calleja’s residence was one of the better company houses, relatively new — post 1945 — with internal bathroom facilities, a small reception room and kitchen on the ground floor, and presumably at least two bedrooms upstairs. Marija had once mentioned that her father was entitled to a similar house — possibly a little grander — but that her mother was fond of the apartment in Sliema, so, as in most things, her father had deferred to his wife’s wishes. Maltese society was doggedly Catholic; right up until the moment one scratched beneath the surface crust and discovered that in just as many ways it was positively matriarchal.