Jim Siddall had chortled to himself when he’d first heard that back home the old country had acquired its first female Prime Minister. A blond bombshell side by side with the Queen running the show! The new woman — whose name eluded him for the moment — and her Majesty could hardly make a worst fist of things than the old men who’d gone before them. From the pictures he’d glimpsed on the cover of the Times of Malta the new woman, Margaret something or other, was certainly a looker. Everybody in the Mess at Mdina was agreed on that if not a lot else about the new regime in England. Like military men anywhere and at any time in history, they were more interested in the facts on the ground than talk of a new World in the morning. If the ‘blond bombshell’ meant to give them the tools to do whatever she ordered them to do, then all well and good. Otherwise, what had really changed?
“I am forgetting my manners,” Rosa Calleja apologised. “I should offer you a cup of tea. It is very kind of you to come all the way around the island to visit me.”
Presently, the frightened wife and the soldier sat across from each other at the small kitchen table.
“Sam, your husband, doesn’t usually absent himself in this way?”
“No. Never like this or for so long. He goes off all the time. He hates to be around the house. Either he locks himself in his workshop or he goes off in his car but he always tells me when he expects to be back and he’s usually not more than an hour or two late.”
“A workshop?” Jim Siddall asked, knowing better than to badger the woman. His judgement was that she was so worried that she’d tell him absolutely everything she knew in her own time whatever he said or asked.
“There are three old Nissen huts at the end of the road behind the houses. I think they were Messes for the crews of the anti-aircraft batteries guarding the approaches to Fort Rinella and the Grand Harbour during the Second War. Sam rents the one nearest the house. He likes playing with old motor bikes. He had an old Triumph when we first met. He always wanted to take me places on it but he rode like a madman and I was too scared…”
“Has he friends he stays with?”
“Sam has no friends,” the wife complained. “No, that’s not true. He was friendly with a couple of guys who were killed when that ship was bombed in the dock. He was very bitter about that but I thought he’d got over it.”
“What about you?” The former Redcap asked innocently.
“My friends are in Valletta and Rabat. They don’t like to come all the way to Kalkara when Sam is at home.”
“Husband’s with demanding jobs often like to be quiet when they are at home,” the man countered, testing the young woman’s mood.
Rosa Calleja huffed irritably.
The man followed up: “Are you and Sam happy together?”
The young woman blushed deeply and looked away.
“Yes. Who says we are not?”
“I used to be a policeman,” Jim Siddall confessed, guessing this would not be news to Rosa Calleja who had struck him as being an intelligent, probably very well-informed young woman. “If I am to help you find Sam then I need to know about your life together. I need to know if there is any reason he might suddenly do a disappearing act?”
The woman folded her arms across her breasts as if she was cold.
“Our marriage was a sham. After the night of the war my husband found me physically repugnant to him. We hardly talked, and then we didn’t talk at all. I still love him, but…”
Jim Siddall was suddenly getting a very bad feeling; it immediately began to gnaw at his gut.
Wrongness shouted at him.
“Have you looked in at his workshop in the last day or so?”
“No.” The woman shook her head vehemently. “He hates me going anywhere near it.”
“You mentioned a car?”
“He sometimes comes home with a company car. Some dreadful noisy dirty thing from the car pool at the Dockyard Head office at Senglea.”
“Has anybody from Dockyard Security visited you yet?”
Rosa Calleja shook her head.
“No, my friends,” she shrugged, realised she wasn’t making any sense and explained, “the other wives in the houses in the street, they say the police are interviewing everybody in the docks first. Nobody has been out here yet.”
“I was told that Sam wasn’t interested in politics?”
“I think that was why he fell out with his brother. Joseph is very active in the docks.” Rosa didn’t entirely approve of that. “He was angry when Marija got involved with the Women of Malta.” She really, really didn’t approve of her sister-in-law’s notoriety. “People from the Internal Security Department interviewed him several times about that. I think they sent him to talk to her once, maybe twice. Of course, the Heroine of Birgu — Vittoriosa as you English say — wouldn’t listen to a word he said. Marija and her precious principles!”
Jim Siddall paused to collect his thoughts.
Nobody had told him that goons from the notorious, now disbanded ISD had tried to apply pressure to Sam Calleja in a back door attempt to undermine the Women of Malta movement.
“Who else visited Sam last year?” He inquired, not really expecting to learn anything new.
“A British naval officer with a scarred head visited me one day last November.” She squeezed her eyes shut trying to remember his name. “A Commander McNeill. He was a very charming man. Very well-spoken. I was a little surprised when Sam arrived home just afterwards. It was all very strange. They went off for a walk together and I never saw the Commander again. He and Sam shook hands out in the road when they came back from wherever they had been and Commander McNeill drove away. His driver was a blond lady. Funny, I’d forgotten all about that until you asked me that question…”
“That is often the way. One’s memory is a funny thing.”
“You were a policeman?”
Jim Siddall nodded.
“Not all policemen have loud voices and a big stick, Mrs Calleja.” He came to a decision. Before he tried to encapsulate his ‘bad feeling’ about the situation in a report to the Dockyard Security people, he’d have a little nose around. Just to see if there was anything obvious to be found. He’d leave the house to the experts; spare Rosa Calleja that shame a little longer. “Do you mind if I have a little look around Sam’s workshop. You never know, there might be a clue to where he is in there amongst his motor bike stuff. In my experience, there’s often a completely innocent explanation for most apparently mysterious disappearances.”
In this case he didn’t think that was remotely likely but it wasn’t his job to put the fear of god into a young woman who was already worried very nearly out of her mind.
It transpired that Sam Calleja carried the only key to the padlocked workshop with him at all times. Jim Siddall returned to his Land Rover and retrieved a tyre iron.
The three Nissen huts were slowly bleaching in the Mediterranean sun.
The company houses were at the top of the settlement of Kalkara. Narrow streets and picturesque old houses filled the ground sloping down towards the blue waters of the Kalkara Creek. Beyond the Nissen huts the Mediterranean was hazy as distant rain clouds drifted south.
Sam Calleja’s ‘workshop’ was the only one which was padlocked. The adjoining huts looked empty and unused, on the farthest the door hung off broken hinges.
“The local kids play around here all the time,” Rosa said, walking away to peer into the dark inside of the hut with the open door.