Always pegged you as a murderer… The words formed unexpectedly in his head, but held no surprise for all that: he’d been expecting them, after all.
“I’d have thought you’d at least have had the decency to come and say goodbye to ‘poor old James’,” he returned with a faint, dry smile.
Never got on all that well with James, truth be told, Phil… The reply came after a short pause, as if there’d actually been a moment’s thought put into the statement. So many things we didn’t agree on…
“Dickhead,” he observed softly with a chuckle and a soft shake of his head, that single, coarse epithet as effective as anything else he might’ve said.
Taking a fountain pen from one of the desk drawers, he tested it once on a piece of scrap paper before carefully entering that last detail in laboriously slow and precise writing: ‘Eighteenth of August, Nineteen Hundred and Forty A.D.’ Once he’d finished, he placed the document aside to dry properly and perused some of the other pieces of new identification he’d pulled out of the satchel. The passport still lay beside him on the desktop, and embossed across the front of it for all to see was the name Phillip Stephen Brandis.
Home Fleet Naval Anchorage at HMS Proserpine
Scapa Flow, Orkney Islands
Monday
August 19, 1940
They’d been allocated a small office for use as a briefing room in a single-storey building near the Ratings’ Mess. With simple wooden tables and chairs, and a hanging movie screen against one wall, it was no more than a few metres square but was more than sufficient for the unit’s purposes in the short term. After a hot shower and a hearty breakfast — his first in a while — Thorne was in a strange mood that next morning as Trumbull found him alone in the room, an hour before a scheduled special briefing. Thorne was seated at a lone chair at the far end of the room with his guitar in his hands, an open photo album and a cup of steaming coffee placed together on the table beside him.
“Here already… and I thought I was early…!” Trumbull began as Thorne looked up, nodding in greeting. “You called the meeting this morning?”
“Yes,” Thorne nodded once more, barely glancing up as he plucked gently at each string in turn and made a serious attempt at tuning the instrument. “Got something to discuss with you guys regarding the Saturday raid.” He frowned as he tried another note and again adjusted one of the tuning keys.
“Did you patch up your disagreement with Eileen?” Trumbull changed the subject without a pause. “I’d hate there to be any bad feeling between two people who’ve been friends as long as you have.”
“Yeah,” Thorne began, almost coughing on the answer to that question as it caught him a little off guard. “Yeah… we… worked out our differences earlier this morning…” Thorne answered uncomfortably, rubbing at his eyes and trying not to crack a smile that was both ironic and, truth be told, a little self-satisfied. “I apologised, and we… came to an agreement of sorts.”
“Good.” Trumbull nodded firmly, blissfully unaware and completely happy with the reply he’d received.
As he finished one last adjustment on the guitar, Thorne finally felt happy with the result and gently strummed a few chords, the notes almost magical to Trumbull’s ears. Throne was also quite pleased at the sound, and was inspired to concentrate a little harder as he glanced over at the photo album and decided what to play next. Taking a deep breath, he gathered his thoughts and wriggled his fingers for a moment before beginning a melody he’d not played in a number of years.
The simple notes that issued from the guitar in that otherwise silent room mesmerised Trumbull much as he’d been the last time he’d heard Thorne play, so many weeks before. This time however, rather than just an instrumental piece, the Australian also decided to sing, and Trumbull found the lyrics equally intriguing and captivating. The words of Dire Straits’ moving love song, Romeo and Juliet, echoed softly within the room and filtered out into the hall through the open doorway, Thorne’s slightly raw but pleasant singing capturing a similar mood to Mark Knopfler’s original and unmistakeable style.
As the song played, Trumbull took his eyes away from the instrument in Thorne’s hands just long enough to pull out a nearby chair and take a seat, and neither man noticed as another three naval ratings and a sub-lieutenant working in nearby offices appeared in the open doorway and looked on, having been drawn there by the unusual music. Thorne knew nothing of what was happening beyond the guitar as he played, his eyes shut tight as he lost himself in the words and music of a song that had once held great significance in his life.
As the lyrics ended and the last few bars played out, the impromptu audience outside the door gave a few appreciative claps and smiles before eventually returning to their workstations once more. Thorne gave his appreciation of their applause with a smile and a faint nod, but there wasn’t the same level of embarrassment he’d felt the first time Trumbull had walked in on him practising the Pink Floyd instrumental. Instead, he carried the air of someone humbly satisfied with his own performance and happy just to take pleasure in the fact that what he’d done had provided some minor enjoyment for others.
“That was beautiful!” Trumbull declared softly, finding it difficult to remove the wide smile from his own face as he spoke. “Just wonderful…! What was that song called?”
“Romeo and Juliet,” Thorne replied as he maintained his own faint grin. “Originally performed by a band named Dire Straits… it’s a song I used to like playing for my wife. Looking back over those photos there made me want to play it again.”
“Photographs, eh?” Trumbull took note of the album on the table for the first time. “Mind if I take a look?” Thorne almost refused the request, but he remembered what Eileen had said the night before… remembered the good advice she’d given him.
“What the hell,” Thorne shrugged. “Go right ahead.”
He lifted the album and passed it to Trumbull as the man rose and moved across to take the chair beside his, the pilot receiving the item quite carefully. It was covered in a strange, synthetic material with a leathery feel, and as he opened it he was pleasantly surprised.
“Colour photographs… I haven’t seen these before…!”
“They’re personal photos… ones I haven’t looked at since we arrived here. Lucky really that I had left them in storage inside the Galaxy — they’d have been lost in the raid, otherwise. Anyway, I thought it was about time I refreshed some of my memories…”
Trumbull turned through some of the pages, studying the photographs held there almost reverently and halting as he came across a much younger Thorne in a flight suit similar to the one they wore when flying the Lightning or Raptor. Thorne was standing beside a large fighter aircraft sporting a similar style of faded-grey insignia that all the aircraft at Hindsight displayed, although this one was of a leaping kangaroo enclosed within an RAF-style roundel.
“That’s an F/A-18 Hornet… it was the fighter I flew during the Nineteen-Eighties.”