Despite Iain Macleod having expressly advised her not to do it, Margaret Thatcher stepped across to her two most vociferous political adversaries.
Enoch Powell, a punctilious man in such things rose painfully from his chair and shook the Prime Minister’s hand. As much as he detested the woman manners maketh the man. His right eye blazed and he held himself as erect as his mauled and remade frame allowed.
“I trust your journey here today was not too onerous, Mr Powell?”
“Not at all, madam,” the tall, thin, gaunt figure assured her in a parody of the distinctive, piercing, reedy voice which had arrested countless meetings and graced so many sessions of the House of Commons before the October War. “I confess,” he added humourlessly, “I did not think this day would ever come. Or if it did, it would come so soon.”
“Why,” the Angry Widow rejoined, her blue eyes glinting with the light of battle, “do you not think that a lady is a fool to nobody but herself if she keeps a good man waiting too long?”
Chapter 28
The acting editor of the Times of Malta, Paul Boffa, felt a little like Daniel must have felt entering the lions’ den as he was shown into the presence of the man he referred to as the ‘Supreme Commander’, or in less sanguine moods, ‘Il Supremo’. His first reaction to his surroundings was one of surprise. He looked around the small, Spartan office. He had expected something grander by far; not a small room filled by a big desk with unprepossessing in and out trays, a big gun metal lockable filing cabinet and hard chairs, one behind the desk, two in front of it. ‘Il Supremo’ was pulling on his uniform jacket as the thirty year old former sports and cultural ‘stringer’ — he had spent much of his time before the October War reporting on football matches, weddings, christenings, funerals and brass band concerts staged by the ‘occupying power’ — shuffled nervously to a halt two steps into the room.
Paul Boffa hadn’t expected the Fighting Admiral to be as tall as he was in his photographs or as he had seemed in the movies visiting the bomb sites after the American sneak attack in December, or later as he worked the crowds like a seasoned politician. The older man was nearly a head-and-a-half taller than the newspaperman.
Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher smiled as he walked around his desk and took his visitor’s hand firmly in his own. His grip was hard and dry and when he spoke he looked Paul Boffa in the eye.
“It was very good of you to come over at such short notice, Mr Boffa,” the older man declared. “I must apologise for my tardiness in not making your acquaintance before now but as you know, things have been a little hectic and we’ve both been a little busy in the last couple of months.”
This was no exaggeration.
Paul Boffa’s boss and most of the senior staff at the Times of Malta had been killed or injured during the 5th December raid. The next day he had found himself head of a small committee — they’d laughingly called themselves the Times of Malta Soviet — of survivors struggling to put out a single broadsheet version of the paper in the following days. About a week after the bombing a representative of the new C-in-C had turned up, unannounced at the paper’s makeshift offices in Valletta and much to everybody’s astonishment asked: ‘Is there anything we can do to help you get back on your feet?’ That was the first time he had met the late Lieutenant James Siddall. The big former Redcap had become the Times of Malta’s unofficial conduit into the heart of the British Administration of the Maltese Archipelago. Jim Siddall had never asked him to slant a story or, in fact, ever mentioned the actual content of the paper. The new policy was that the Maltese press should be ‘free’ and ‘independent’ and if any official or officer under the C-in-C’s command didn’t understand that, then Jim Siddall wanted to know. The next day the warehouse where sufficient newsprint for twenty days pre-war publication of the Times of Malta — the archipelago’s entire stockpile — had been released to the paper for ‘immediate’ use. The stockpile, owned by the British, had been dispensed gratis as a ‘token of good faith’.
Admiral Christopher waved for his visitor to take a seat and the two men settled. The journalist was greedily studying his surroundings for insights into his host. There was no ash tray in the room. No pictures on the wall, just the framed prints on his desk. One might be of the son, the ‘hero of Lampedusa’, he assumed. But what of the other two? He tried hard not to flinch from the great man’s stare.
“We think we’ve got to the bottom of what happened out at Kalkara the other week,” Julian Christopher announced, instantly businesslike. This was a man to man conversation, there would be no dissembling. Or at least, that was what he hoped the younger man would take away from this interview. Sir Richard ‘Dick’ White, the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service — MI6 — had assured him that Arkady Rykov had a particular talent for making apparently intractable problems ‘go away’; in this case his talents had been applied to so comprehensively corrupting and fragmenting the evidence trail, that hopefully, in the coming months nobody would even attempt to make sense of recent events. “I know you were friendly with Lieutenant Siddall and you must be as keen to know exactly what happened as anybody.”
If a thing was too good to be true it probably was too good to be true.
However, knowing this and trusting one’s instincts only took a man so far, so Paul Boffa listened, tingling with anticipation and yet intuitively wary. It was as if he was putting his hand into a box which contained a priceless jewel that was his for the taking; the only problem was that there was a scorpion lurking in the darkness right next to the gem.
“We now believe that Samuel Calleja may have been the innocent dupe of a Soviet-style communist cell. After the murder of Jim Siddall a joint Royal Military Police and Royal Marine Commando operation attempted to apprehend five persons of interest in the inquiry into the explosion at Kalkara and Samuel Calleja’s disappearance. Regrettably, these persons of interest, four men and a woman, whose names I cannot at this time release to you for ongoing security reasons, were heavily armed. When our people went in they opened fire. Two of my officers were killed and several others injured in a booby trap explosion much like that which killed Lieutenant Siddall. Realising they were cornered the terrorists apparently turned their weapons on each other in some kind of bizarre suicide pact.” Julian Christopher sighed wearily. “I don’t know,” he half-groaned sadly, confidentially, “I saw some bad things in the Second War and I know some bad things were going on in the last days of the Empire, especially while we were pulling out, but sometimes, I just don’t understand what gets into people’s heads.”
Paul Boffa heard this as if at a distance while the forefront of his mind digested the message he was being given.
“Samuel Calleja was not a terrorist?”
The great man shook his head.
“We have no evidence to that effect.”
“So he wasn’t involved in the sinking of HMS Torquay?”
“We think that’s unlikely. That’s not to say that he wasn’t forced to give the terrorists access to the ship before he was murdered, or left to die onboard her when she sank. Obviously, somebody had to have given these people access to the dockyard and to the ship, so that the explosive charges responsible for her loss might be placed. Perhaps, he was tortured to reveal the best places to position the charges? We just don’t know and I rather doubt if we ever will know.”