“Leave us please,” Air Vice-Marshal Daniel French directed the Redcaps without raising his voice, briefly looking up from the maps strewn across the room’s one significant piece of furniture, a workbench. He was flanked by several senior officers.
One asked: “Shall we make ourselves scarce for a few minutes, sir?”
“Yes, if you would. Find Miss Pullman a chair please, she looks all in. And would somebody find her a hot drink.” He eyed the woman’s chaffed red and puffy wrists with irritated dismay before looking her in the eye and quirking an apologetic grimace.
Rachel had obediently settled in the hard wooden chair scraped across the floor for her use. The door to the room, which must once have been the old hangar’s former flight office, clicked shut behind her.
Dan French hauled himself to his feet and came around his desk. He pulled up a second chair and sat immediately before his guest so close that they could converse in low tones. He leaned towards her, rubbed his brow and made a conscious effort to look Rachel in the eye.
She had never met the man in whose hands her life — quite literally — now lay. She had no idea if Julian Christopher had ever mentioned her mission on Malta, or even the existence of somebody remotely like her. Communications with England would be difficult right now; nothing she said could be checked for many hours, perhaps days and she had no real feel for how much trouble she might be in. Life on Malta was cheap if one was identified as a traitor. What had happened yesterday could not have happened without the collusion of a significant number of enemy fifth columnists, agent provocateurs, spies and traitors having stabbed the British and the Maltese people in the back. In Mdina while she had been down in the bowels of the Citadel she had caught snatches of conversation among the weary Redcaps, soldiers and Malta Local Defence Volunteer (MLDV) men guarding the prisoners in the cells around her. The British had their blood up and in the aftermath of battle the previous day; and stories about drumhead courts, summary executions and gruesome ‘rough justice’ were already in general circulation.
Air Vice-Marshal French was a handsome man of slightly above average height, his hair was short, well-groomed and his uniform, although creased and specked with dust and ash, was neat, trim like the man himself. He sported a neatly trimmed moustache. His eyes, green grey, were thoughtful and betrayed no sign of the anger or shock he must still have been experiencing.
The woman looked the Acting Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces on the Maltese Archipelago in the eye and was surprised to find an absence of hostility, and little or no sign of obvious mistrust. Having never been this close to the former Lancaster pilot; she now noticed the suggestion of grey at his temples and the worry lines he usually hid with a winning smile. A smile specifically designed to suggest to people who did not know him very well that he had not a single care in the world.
Rachel returned his intent scrutiny.
She knew that Daniel French was popular with his men and was respected if not liked by the leaders of the two largest Maltese political parties, the Labour Party and the Nationalists. He had established a reputation for dealing fairly with local people; his was a calm head, a firm hand on the tiller as he stood on the burning deck.
“I apologise for your incarceration, Miss Pullman,” he declared, eyeing her bruised and swollen bare wrists again for a moment before resuming his scrutiny of her face.
With the matted dry blood in her hair and a puffy left eye — she had walked into something during her killing spree without noticing it — she looked as if she had been in the ring with a prize fighter.
Incongruously, at this moment this troubled her more than somewhat.
She hated to look a mess when she was in the company of an interesting man. The airman had been Julian Christopher’s deputy but he had never been in the Fighting Admiral’s shadow.
“My name is not Clara Pullman,” she confessed, quirking a rueful smile.
“No?” The man waited. He had a million and one other horribly pressing things to do but he waited patiently for her to continue.
Grace under pressure.
“My name is Rachel Angelika Piotrowska,” she told him. Involuntarily she again half-smiled. “My mother and father always called me their little Angel. As a girl I was always Angelika.” Having opened her mouth she found it hard to stop talking. “Rachel was for my father’s mother. His family never approved of my mother. Too Russki, you see. Despite her being half-Jewish. There’s no such thing as being half-Russki; or half-Jewish. Or at least not where I was born. My mother always had too many old-fashioned airs and graces. Or that’s what everybody said.” She forced herself to shut up. “I’m talking too much.”
The man shrugged, in no hurry to betray his own agenda.
“What happened to your parents?”
“My father was a political journalist so the Soviets took him away one day and I never saw him again. My mother was one of over a hundred women and children driven into a church in Lodz which the Nazis set fire to. Some of the kids jumped from the first floor windows to escape the flames. The Germans bayoneted them to death. Leastways, that was what I think happened. I’d escaped the ghetto by then so I only know what people told me months later. It took me several years to accept that I was never going to see my father or my mother again.”
Dan French arched an eyebrow.
He said nothing, which must have been hard for him.
Rachel sighed, shuddered involuntarily.
“I have worked for the British since 1947,” she said flatly, too exhausted and too beaten down to lie. “The last time I spoke to the Director General of MI6 in Lisbon in December I told him I was finished. But he persuaded me to come back to Malta,” she shrugged, blinked back a stray tear before she collected her wits anew. “I knew it would end badly. Arkady had got into my head, you see. Everything got too personal and well, I couldn’t be who and what I was supposed to be any more. That was why Julian Christopher had his own people watching Arkady. He knew he couldn’t trust me. I couldn’t run away, of course. Where can you run on Malta? So I ran away inside my head. I really was a nurse once,” another shrug of her shoulders, a sniff and she forced herself to sit upright, “so I tried to be one again.”
“You had no inkling that what happened yesterday was going to happen?”
She shook her head.
“No. I think Arkady knew he was blown. Sending him back here to reel in his own network was too much even for a monster to bear. It would have been kinder almost to have taken him back to England, pumped him full of truth serum or whatever Dick White’s inquisitors use these days, and quietly put a bullet through his head when it was all over. Kinder, and a lot less problematic,” she concluded resignedly.
“For whom?”
“For everybody.” Rachel had wondered again what Julian Christopher had told his friend about her. “You knew about Arkady?”
The man nodded.
“But not me?”
“No, you were something of a conundrum. Obviously, I took it as read that you were a spook,” Dan French conceded, “but otherwise I knew nothing about you. Who will vouch for you, Miss Piotrowska?”
Rachel smiled; she could not stop herself smiling.
The man who found himself in command of all British and Commonwealth Forces on Malta held up a tired hand. He had just asked one of the least intelligent questions he had ever asked. She would not or could not answer his question and he had known it before he opened his mouth.