There had been moments when he had feared he’d taken on too much. He could admit to that now, now that he was so close and could see it all unfolding before his eyes.
He loved this moment, and he tried to record his almost dizzying sense of anticipation.
Reading back the words, he realized that some things lay well beyond the scope of language.
DAY EIGHT
MAX WOKE WITH A START, UNSURE WHY AT FIRST, THE reason slowly dawning on him.
He struggled to read the luminous dial of his wristwatch—just after five—which meant Busuttil was running more than seven hours late.
Max had been the first to leave the dinner, racing home to make the ten o’clock appointment and managing to stay awake until after midnight before nodding off. He had left the door downstairs unlocked and the one to his flat ajar. It still was.
Maybe Busuttil had been caught in one of the night raids, injured even. It seemed unlikely. The 88s had concentrated all their efforts on the airfields, wave after wave, suggesting that Kesselring had full knowledge of the fly-in and was doing everything in his power to hamper the operation, chewing up the runways and scattering what remained of them with delayed-action bombs.
By seven o’clock, there was still no sign of the detective.
Max left the flat, pinning a note to the door that said he’d gone to work, and giving the phone number. Outside, he ran an apologetic hand over the motorcycle. He had thrashed her on the way home, hurling her around the looping bends of Marsamxett Harbour. He gave her a little shake to check the contents of the tank. Running low on gasoline yet again, but the coil of tubing was tucked away under the seat, ready for some surreptitious siphoning. She started the first time.
There was an air of expectancy in the office. Everyone knew what was coming, but not when exactly. They congregated on the roof of Saint Joseph’s, eyes fixed on the distant ridge where Rabat and Mdina stood shoulder to shoulder. That’s where the Spitfires would come from, out of the west. High overhead, 109s stooged about the skies, keeping watch, biding their time.
By nine o’clock there was still no word from Busuttil, so Max put a call through to the offices of Il-Berqa. Lilian hadn’t shown up at work yet, which was strange. She was usually at her desk by eight at the latest. His next call was to her aunt in Mdina.
“Teresa, it’s me, Max.”
“How nice to hear your voice.”
“Is Lilian there?”
“No, she’s at work.”
She had left early, grabbing a ride down the hill to Ta’ Qali on the pilots’ bus, as she usually did.
“She’s not at work.”
“She must be there by now.”
“Well, she isn’t. No one has seen her.”
“Max, what are you saying?”
He could hear the anxiety creeping into her voice.
“She probably couldn’t get a lift from the airfield into Valetta. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
But he wasn’t sure. Even if she’d been forced to walk all the way—which simply never happened to women with her kind of looks—she would have arrived by now.
He waited half an hour before calling Il-Berqa again and drawing another blank. He could feel the seed of fear germinating in his chest. First Busuttil disappears, and now Lilian. Coincidence? Not if they really were missing. That suggested something far more sinister. He remembered Elliott’s warning: They’ll be watching you closely. Maybe he should have heeded those words of caution more closely. Maybe Colonel Gifford—
No, that theory didn’t hold up. If Busuttil had been pulled in by the authorities and had coughed up Lilian’s name under questioning, why hadn’t there been a knock at his door by now? Why hadn’t his name also come out in the wash?
He heard footsteps outside in the corridor, approaching his office. He hoped that they belonged to Colonel Gifford, or the ginger-haired fellow. He was happy to be dragged off and hauled over the coals if it settled the question of Lilian’s whereabouts.
The footsteps carried on past his door.
He sat there, rigid in his chair, breathless. There was no ignoring the unthinkable: that Lilian and Busuttil had somehow fallen into the hands of the killer.
The phone rang. He snatched at it.
“Yes.”
It was Luke Rogers from the deputy censor’s office with some thoughts on the rewording of a BBC broadcast.
“I can’t talk now, Luke. I’m expecting an important call.”
“I hope you’re not implying that this isn’t,” joked Luke.
Max felt bad about cutting him off without replying, but he was panicking now, struggling to think straight.
Freddie. Maybe Freddie had been hauled in. A call to the naval hospital at Bighi established that he hadn’t been; he was in surgery. Elliott. Elliott would know if they’d been taken into custody. But Elliott was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t at the Ops Room or the Y Service offices, and no one picked up at the Special Liaison Unit. In desperation, Max tried the Union Club. When that failed, he headed for the roof.
The whole office was gathered there by now, and he took Maria to one side.
“I don’t care who it is, but someone has to stay downstairs to man the phones. If anyone calls for me, anyone, tell them to try the Intelligence Office at Ta’ Qali.”
“Ta’ Qali?”
“That’s where I’ll be.”
She looked at him as if he were mad. “You think Ta’ Qali is a good place to be now?”
“With any luck I’m in and out before the party starts.”
Ta’ Qali lay just shy of Mdina, down on the sunbaked plain. He covered the eight miles or so from Saint Joseph’s in about as many minutes.
It had been a while since he’d visited the airfield, and he was shocked by what he saw. Most of the familiar structures had been reduced to jumbled masses of masonry, and charred and twisted heaps of metal lay scattered about the place, barely identifiable as aircraft. It was hard to believe that the place still functioned, and yet hordes of men moved like ants through the shimmering heat. Out on the runways, battle-dressed soldiers bent their backs alongside bronzed and shirtless airmen, filling bomb craters and clearing rubble. Ground crews were putting the finishing touches on the new blast pens that fringed the airfield like some gleaming necklace. They’d been constructed from old gasoline canisters filled with earth, and the bare metal building blocks flashed silver-white in the sunlight, clamoring to be targeted. Out there, somewhere, was Ralph, waiting at his designated pen to relieve one of the incoming pilots of his Spitfire.
The Intelligence Office hadn’t been relocated, even though the small stone building that housed it had lost its roof and most of its walls in the past month. A sheet of tarpaulin had been rigged above the ruins to provide protection from the sun, and a slit trench with a corrugated iron roof had been dug into the ground nearby for cover during a raid.
Harry Crighton was at his desk in his alfresco office, a cigarette glued to his lower lip. He was a rambunctious and foulmouthed Australian flight lieutenant who had taken on the duties of intelligence officer after breaking his neck in a forced landing earlier in the year. He was known for his dogged tenacity when it came to following up fighter claims.
“Holy shit, what the bloody hell are you doing here?” he called, seeing Max approach.
“‘To swear is neither brave, polite, nor wise.’”
“Who said that?”
“My headmaster, but I think he got it from Alexander Pope.”
“Well, I never claimed to be any of those things,” Harry replied with a grin, “so fuck ’em both.”
“Has anyone called for me?”
“What do you think this is, a bloody message service? No, no one’s called for you. And do you have any idea what’s about to happen here?”