Mark Mills - The Information Officer

Max stared at them both. He saw the silent pact that had brought them together and the emptiness hanging between them, the lies. He could change it all in a moment. He could take it from them. He could hand the hurt straight back to Mitzi. It was so easy. Too easy.

“I’ve been seeing a girl in the office,” he said finally. “She’s Maltese. She’s also married. I made the mistake of telling your wife here. It now seems that half the bloody garrison knows.”

“Are you drunk?”

“A little. Enough to crash my motorcycle.”

Lionel edged past Mitzi protectively. “I think you should leave.”

Mitzi placed a restraining hand on Lionel’s arm.

“Freddie,” she said. “I told Freddie.”

There was gratitude in her eyes for the lie he’d concocted.

“When?”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake—”

“Shut up, Lionel.” Mitzi looked back at Max. “A few months ago, maybe more. January, I think.”

Max nodded his thanks, and she turned and wandered back to the bedroom. Lionel wasn’t done with him yet, though.

“You’re a bloody disgrace to your service!”

“Am I, Ken?”

He saw a satisfying flicker of alarm in Lionel’s eyes. “I know about you and Mary Farrugia, and I’m guessing you also brushed with Loreta Saliba and Carmela Cassar.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. They’re all dead. Murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“Don’t worry. I know it wasn’t you.”

He turned and hobbled off down the stairs.

He had never given his service revolver much thought—he strapped it on each morning, removed it before bed—but now he felt naked without it. Finding a replacement wasn’t going to be easy at five o’clock in the morning. There was an obvious place to start, though. It was also on his route.

He was surprised to find the boys at the Bofors gun site near his flat already up and about. They were peering down over the bastion wall into the dark abyss of Grand Harbour. It was another half hour till sunrise, but way to the east, beyond the harbor mouth, the sky was already brightening.

“There!” said one of them, pointing.

It was just possible to make out the dark form of a ship sliding through the gloom toward them.

“It’s the Welshman . She made it!”

There were cheers and slaps on the back, and that’s when they noticed they had company.

“It’s only me,” said Max.

“You see that, sir, the Welshman got through!”

“Cigarette, sir?”

“Cup of tea, sir?”

“Foot rub, sir?”

The joker got his laugh. Max was in favor with the Manchester men since their heroics had been reported in the Weekly Bulletin , as he’d promised they would be.

“Just a quick word in private with Sergeant Deakin, if he’s around.”

“Right here, sir,” came a voice from the darkness.

Max led Deakin a little way off. “I don’t have time to explain. I need to borrow your gun.”

“My gun?”

“Your service revolver. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“You know I can’t, sir. It’s against regulations.”

“It’s a matter of life or death.”

“That’s the truth. The CO’d ’ave my guts for garters if he found out.”

“What if I took it off you by force?”

“You’re welcome to give it a go, sir, but if you don’t mind me saying, you’re not moving too good.”

“Okay,” said Max, “here it is. My friend, my best friend, is probably a German agent. He’s also planning to kill a girl I care very much about. For all I know, she’s dead already. So you see, I’m going to have to give it a go whatever.”

“Holy mackerel,” said Deakin softly. “Are you sure you’re all right in the head?”

“Never better. Actually, that’s a lie. But what I’ve just told you is the truth. You have my word on it.”

After a few moments, Deakin handed over his revolver.

“You’re a good man, Sergeant.”

“Yeah, well, just remember to bring that up at my court-martial.”

The road to the naval hospital at Bighi skirted Grand Harbour on its southern side, taking him through the Three Cities, right past the dockyards. He thought about stopping off and enlisting the support of the military police, but procedures would have to be followed, phone calls made, authority sought. Precious minutes, hours even, would tick by. Besides, the situation might call for the kind of behavior not exactly endorsed by the rule book. He had no problem with that, but officialdom would see things differently.

No, this was a personal matter now—or rather, it had been all along. Only his self-absorption had kept him from grasping that fact earlier. It had been right there in front of him, not just staring him in the face but prodding him in the chest, kicking him in the shins.

The notion that the coincidence had been anything more than just that—the capricious hands of chance at work—had never even occurred to him: a killer on the loose, a crew member from the Upstanding , which just so happened to be the submarine commanded by the husband of the woman with whom he’d been having an affair.

He hadn’t made the connection before because he’d assumed that no one else knew about Mitzi and him. But she’d set him straight on that. Freddie knew; Freddie had known since the beginning of the year. Freddie, who had drawn him into the intrigue in the first place. Freddie, with his talk of left-handers and Have you ever wondered if it’s Lionel? Max could almost see Freddie laughing to himself as he tinkered with their sick little triangle of deceits and clandestine affairs, the puppet master surveying them all from on high, pulling their strings, jerking their limbs. Maybe Elliott had been right, maybe Freddie was a moralist at heart—one who had no scruples when it came to his own behavior.

Where Elliott fitted, he didn’t yet know. Why had he helped Max, nudging him toward the answer? Did he already know the truth? Had he suspected all along? For now, Max was happy to forgo the answers. All that mattered to him was finding Lilian. That one goal consumed him. It also scared him, because he saw just how far he was willing to go to get her back. Freddie had made the rules, and Max was ready to play by them.

The naval hospital at Bighi stood square, squat, and ugly on the tip of the cliff-girt promontory beyond Vittoriosa, near the mouth of Grand Harbour. Like the other hospitals on the island, it had suffered at the hands of the Luftwaffe in the past month. Unlike some of them, it was still operational.

The nurse at the main desk couldn’t say for certain where Freddie was, so she directed Max to the surgeons’ sleeping quarters. This was after she had offered to summon the duty medical officer to check him over, assuming that he’d shown up in search of treatment.

He hobbled his way to the low run of stone huts on the grounds near the east wing of the building. A slumbering doctor, not happy at being woken, directed him to Freddie’s digs two huts down.

Freddie wasn’t there, but his roommate was.

“You just missed him. He’s headed for the docks.”

“The docks?”

“To help with the wounded from the Welshman . She hit a couple of mines on her way in.”

Nearing the hospital, Max had passed a small fleet of ambulances racing down the hill in the opposite direction. This put him no more than fifteen minutes behind, if he stepped on it.

“I’d keep well clear of the docks, if I were you. They’re sure to have a pop at her come sunup.”

As Max hurried back through the grounds to his motorcycle, the first sliver of the new sun appeared out of the eastern sea, illuminating his path.

At first, he thought the Welshman’s precious cargo must be alight. A dense gray-green cloud was rising over the dockyards, spreading like some malevolent fog. He slowed the motorcycle, listening for the accompanying crackle of exploding ammunition, but heard nothing. A smoke screen, he realized, put up to throw off the aim of the enemy bombers. Moments later, he was swallowed up by it.

Chaos ruled along French Creek, much of it caused by the swirling smoke belching from the generators. With visibility reduced to a matter of yards, Max abandoned the motorcycle and set off on foot, searching for the ambulances. The unloading was already under way, and the quayside was a logjam of trucks waiting to bear off the cargo. Men moved through the miasma, appearing and fading like ghosts to a chorus of muffled shouts and orders. These increased in volume as the Welshman loomed into view, long and trim and battle-worn, with streaks of rust staining her flaking paint. She had her own cranes for loading, which was fortunate. Those on the quayside stood broken and twisted like crippled giants.

Max barged a path up the gangway onto the ship. He collared a crewman and asked for the sick bay. A peculiar stillness descended on him as he made his way belowdecks. He felt utterly divorced from the frenetic activity unfolding around him, focused on the imminent confrontation.

Freddie wasn’t in the sick bay, but a man on a bunk with a big bandage on his head mumbled some directions to the forward dressing station where the wounded were being tended to.

A couple of them hadn’t made it. They lay covered in blankets in a corner of the room. The others were on stretchers, patched up and ready to be moved. Freddie was in the thick of things, administering an injection of morphia to a howling sailor whose thigh was swaddled in blood-soaked rags.

Was that how he did it? Was that how he subdued the girls, with pharmaceuticals?

Freddie seemed to sense Max’s thoughts, turning as he got to his feet.

“My God, Max, what are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Hardly the time or the place.”

Freddie gestured the waiting orderlies forward. “Okay, let’s get them out of here.”

Max could only look on as Freddie marshaled his men, leading the party of stretcher-bearers through the belly of the ship. Max brought up the rear, doing his best to keep Freddie in his sights.

The air-raid siren heralded their appearance on the upper deck. This gave them seven minutes at most before the bombs would begin to fall. Somewhere up ahead, lost in the blanket of smoke, Max heard Freddie call, “Clear the gangway! Make way for the wounded!”

Max imagined Freddie slipping away in the man-made fog, but he was waiting at the bottom of the gangway, seeing the party safely off the ship, pointing a path through the torrent of men and clattering carts loaded with crates.

“Where is she, Freddie?”

“What happened? You look terrible.”

“I know it’s you.”

“And you’re not making a whole lot of sense.”

Freddie turned to follow the train of stretcher-bearers across the quayside. Max held him back by the arm. Freddie shook himself free, angry now.

“I don’t know what’s got into you, but there are men there who need attention. So—if you don’t mind—I’ve got a job to do.”

Max hadn’t spotted the ambulances on the quayside because they were parked in the streets of Senglea, just back from the docks. Senglea was a ghost town, long since evacuated by order of the governor. If anything, the smoke sat thicker there than on the quayside, undisturbed by the urgent passage of men.

There were four ambulances in all, but only three were required for the wounded men. Freddie sent them on their way before turning his attention back to Max. They were alone now, and Freddie was still angry.