They’d tried to speak to him — Major General Horace Phelps — yesterday afternoon and carried on trying to locate and secure an interview with him until they’d given up shortly before midnight. They’d missed most of the drama in the Bay that afternoon and evening; the way that HMS Cavalier had braved further mines and gone alongside the stricken carrier, adding her pumps to the fight against the rising water while she cross decked the Marines of 4 °Commando onto the minesweeper HMS Castleton and a host of smaller vessels. By the early evening all the Marines and most of the carrier’s crew had been carried ashore, leaving only a skeleton salvage gang onboard the great ship. Earlier, around dusk a Spanish gunboat had strayed into Gibraltarian waters and been chased away by two lightly armed Air Sea Rescue launches without a shot being fired.
“You still haven’t told me what you were up to in Malta,” Clara, the blond woman asked the man who was currently bearing papers that ‘proved’ he was William Drayton McNeill, the Deputy-Director of Naval Intelligence (Middle East Command). “I don’t mean the normal stuff. But what was that business with the woman leading the protesters outside the gates of HMS Phoenicia?”
The man shrugged, stared down across Algeciras Bay.
“How high do you think we are?” He asked, idly.
“I don’t know, a thousand feet. Maybe more. You didn’t answer my question?”
“No, sorry.”
“You knew they were about to relax the State of Emergency Laws as phase two of the preparations for implementing Operation Homeward Bound. So what did you say to her?”
“Operation Homeward Bound isn’t the only option,” the man replied, dodging the question. He sighed. “I interviewed Miss Calleja under false pretences because I wanted to establish if she was biddable. For what it is worth I don’t think she is. I tried the standard code words on her but she didn’t react.”
“Oh. She doesn’t know about her brother then?”
The man carried on staring out across the panoramic, breathtaking vista of Algeciras Bay. He shook his head.
“No, she’s got no idea at all.”
“That’s families for you,” the woman quirked. “It turns out that the brother of the saintly little virgin of Vittoriosa-Birgu is a Red Dawn killer.”
The man frowned at her.
“What?” She asked, fluttering her eyelids.
“Marija Calleja is a good person,” he shrugged. “The saddest thing is that she’d love her brother no less even if she knew what he was.”
Clara threw him a thoughtful look, concerned by the suddenly maudlin tone of his words. “You didn’t explain who this Peter person is that she’s been writing to for years?”
“Lieutenant Peter Julian Christopher. He’s an electronics expert on one of the Navy’s fast air detection destroyers. HMS Talavera. A sister ship of two of the ships we saw in Sliema Creek. You know, the one’s with the huge lattice masts and the big bedstead aerials.”
“Oh,” she muttered, not knowing whether to be disappointed by this blandly delivered response. “Oh, I see.”
“No, my dear,” the man said, shaking his head. “You don’t see. Lieutenant Peter Christopher is the son of Vice-Admiral Julian Christopher, the commander of the British Pacific Fleet and the man behind Operation Manna.”
Suddenly, Clara understood.
The brother of the pen friend to with whom the son of the famous British admiral had been corresponding for half his life was a key member of Red Dawn in the Maltese Archipelago. She’ read a couple of Peter Christopher’s letters to Marija Calleja, and half-a-dozen of her replies. The pair were hopelessly smitten, one with the other for all that they’d never met, let alone laid a finger, platonic or carnal one upon the other. He was a dashing young officer on a destroyer, the son of an illustrious father, she the heroin of the siege of Malta; it was a fairy tale romance waiting to be publicly, cruelly poisoned. The brutal unfairness of it made her vision g a little misty. She sniffed back a tear.
“I shouldn’t have asked,” she said hoarsely.
Despite the sunshine it was cool on the mountainside and Clara wished she’d brought a coat. She shook her head, reminding herself that she’d come to Gibraltar in pretty much what she was wearing and she didn’t actually have a coat. Every night she rinsed her underwear — oh how she longed for lingerie — and hung her smalls up to dry while she slept. Some mornings her washing had to dry on her. The things she did for her country! Or, at least, the things she thought she was doing for her country…
Sleeping with a man whose real name she didn’t know wasn’t one of the things she did for Queen and country, or out of any sense of patriotic duty. No, she slept with him because she liked sleeping with him. Occasionally he was intense, angry, usually he was gentle and tender and so patient she had to put a hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming in delight. Last night they’d lain side by side, she pressing back against him, he penetrating her slowly, nibbling her ear lobes. They’d slept the sleep of the truly weary and only the bright morning sunlight falling on their naked bodies had awakened them to another, dangerous day.
“Why her? Why Marija Calleja?” She’d asked him about the young woman before and he’d parried her questions. Now that he seemed prepared to open himself to her a little she wanted to know more. Whatever he’d claimed she suspected that she was the real reason they’d spent so many weeks in Malta and she wanted to know more. She had to know more.
“Ah, now there’s a question!” The man whistled softly. “When Marija was five years old she was buried in a bomb shelter in Vittoriosa,” he paused, corrected himself, “the Maltese call Vittoriosa Birgu. Practically everybody else in the shelter was killed when a direct hit collapsed the buildings above it. They didn’t dig her out for nearly two days and when they got her to hospital they discovered that her left leg and her pelvis had been crushed. They took her to the Naval Hospital at Kalkara where the doctors didn’t think she’d survive the night. But she did, and the next night, and the next. The Hospital did its best for her but her injuries were so severe as to cripple her for life. She spent the first couple of years after the bombing lying immobilised. Basically, the doctors had set what bones they could and left her body to heal itself. Her family took her home and that would probably have been that unless a certain Surgeon Captain Reginald Stephens hadn’t stumbled across her case papers and on an impulse, gone to visit the kid.”
“Just like that? Just out of the blue?”
“No, not just like that. It seems the man was on a crusade. He’d had a pretty good war, reputation wise and so forth but he was one of those chaps who’d come out of the Second War with an itchy conscience. When he got to Malta just after VE-Day he single-handedly took it upon himself to improve the medical treatment of children on the island. Anyway, he persuaded Marija Calleja’s parents to allow the kid to come back to Kalkara for tests and observation. Observation, X-rays, whatever tests doctors do in these cases. It so happened that Reginald Stephens was — on account of his war work, presumably — one of the leading orthopaedic surgeons in the Navy, and perhaps, anywhere in the world at the time and he’d been experimenting with all manner of new techniques to put ‘broken’ people back together. He was a real pioneer, a one off English eccentric in some ways, but a genuine pioneer and Marija Calleja eventually became his first and greatest triumph.”