Clara raised an eyebrow. While the man had been doing what he did — other than that he was a spy she only had the vaguest idea what he really got up to, she was window dressing and once or twice his getaway driver — he often gave her watching briefs, or asked her to tail, or flirt with persons of interest. On Malta he’d asked her to follow Marija Calleja and several times she’d watched the women protesting at the gates of HMS Phoenicia and ridden the bus with the young woman to Mdina-Rabat. Clara had once fallen back on her half-forgotten training as a nurse to visit the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women to inquire if there were ‘any vacancies for Naval Officer’s wife’ like herself, who ‘was fed up sitting around waiting for my husband to get back from sea’. The Director of the Hospital, Doctor Margo Seiffert had impressed Clara. The older woman was pleasantly businesslike and utterly in command of her small ship. She’d taken Clara on a tour of the Hospital. If Clara wished to help out at the Hospital they’d work something out; the only fly in the ointment was that as the wife of a serving officer Margo could only employ her if the Navy gave her ‘a permission’.
“Marija Calleja’s injuries can’t have been that bad,” she objected thoughtfully, picturing the slim young woman she’d seen walking unaided with apparent freedom of movement, and standing holding that banner ‘IS THIS THE WAY YOU TREAT YOUR FRIENDS’ for literally hours on end opposite the gates to Manoel Island.
“It took about twenty operations, several of them major, to put her back together again,” the man retorted. “When the operations were over she had to learn to walk again. Think about that. Having to learn to walk again!”
Clara conceded the point.
He never told her who she was following or watching; only if by following or watching a target she was placing herself in danger.
“Margo Seiffert was Reginald Stephens principal surgical assistant at Kalkara throughout most of the period when Marija Calleja was being treated.”
“Okay. Okay, I get it that Marija is some kind of local heroine…”
“Oh, more than that.”
“Was that why that Redcap sergeant was sniffing around her all the time?” Clara demanded.
“No, I don’t think so. Staff Sergeant Siddall is a bit of an enigma. He’s still married to a woman in Southampton. Or at least he was until two or three months ago. For all I know the poor woman could have starved or died of disease since the last time anybody checked. I think it is more personal with Mister Siddall. To me his general demeanour towards Marija suggested he has appointed himself the young lady’s personal guardian angel.”
Clara groaned in frustration.
“Do you ever say what you actually mean?”
“Hardly ever, no.” The man smiled wanly. “Some things are best not hurried, don’t you agree?”
Clara suppressed an urge; well, two urges. The first was to slap his face. The second was to kiss him. She’d been fascinated and not unnaturally, horrified by the patchwork of scars, mostly superficial, on his lean torso. The newer, visible marks on his scalp when he wore is hair cropped had been fully healed when they first met so she’d known he’d lied about being too close to a window when the Ankara bomb went off.
“You ought to trust me by now,” she complained.
“I do trust you. I trust you implicitly. I’ve never trusted anybody in my whole life the way I trust you, Clara. That’s why I won’t tell you anything that’s likely to get you killed. Not until this is over.”
“When will that be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Commander McNeill! Third Officer Porter!” Yelled a huge red-faced, sweating Royal Marine. The man was weighed down with ammunition pouches, had a long-barrelled sniping rifle slung over one shoulder and was hefting a Sten Gun. The sub-machine gun virtually disappeared into his bear-like tanned hands.
The Marine marched the two officers through the checkpoint setting a ferocious ground devouring pace straight up the hill towards a hut built next to a broad cave opening into the citadel. Whereupon, he passed them on to another Marine, this time a slim, youthful second-lieutenant. He too carried a Sten Gun.
“Follow me please.”
It was cool and very quiet inside the mountain.
The passages through which the trio walked looked hand-carved and very old. Presently the narrow tunnel — barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side — opened into progressively larger chambers lined with various types of fixed 25-pounder artillery and what looked like fixed and unfixed rounds for 3.7 inch heavy anti-aircraft guns. Other passages led off deeper into the rock. The whir of generators seeped out of one opening and low voices from another, the sound of machine tools and drills reverberated further into the warren. Coming to a flight of broad wooden steps that gave the appearance of disappearing into a dark void some fifteen feet above their heads the subaltern stood aside and indicated for the man and the woman to go ahead of him. Clara went first, holding her skirt tight to herself in an exaggerated show of modesty, the men following. At the top of the stairs there was a steel superstructure supporting a walkway along one wall of another cavern. At a gesture from their escort the man and woman walked along the decking to the left and entered an airy cave which was open to the elements on one side.
They’d come out another hundred or so feet higher than where they’d been kept waiting at the checkpoint. The view across Algeciras Bay was growing hazy in the afternoon sun.
“The most peculiar thing happened the other day,” a quiet, sardonic voice asserted in a musical, lilting Welsh baritone out of the darkness of the inner cave. An ursine, balding man of indeterminate middle years with pink ears that seemed to extend absurdly far out from the rest of his head rumbled unhurriedly into the daylight. The man was wearing the uniform of a Major and there were red Staff badges on the lapels of his crumpled and apparently ill-used khaki battledress tunic. He stopped directly in front of the man and the woman. Silhouetted against the light his large, protuberant ears giving him the look a character in a cartoon. “Yes indeed! There I was minding my own business wondering if that plane you were on would be the first one the Dagoes would shoot up as it landed and after all the shooting died down what’s the first thing I see when I stick my head over the parapet? A sight for sore eyes, I can tell you!” The man chuckled and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. A metal lighter clicked twice, flamed. He lit his cigarette. “I won’t offer you a smoke; I know neither of you indulge in the filthy habit.”
Clara looked first to the man who’d been her constant companion, lover, friend and protector the last year. When he gave her his blank face and avoided her gaze she turned back to the fat man.
“You know who we are?” She asked, stupidly.
“Oh, yes,” he retorted affably, pausing to take a long lazy drag on his cigarette. “You are masquerading as Third Officer Camilla Porter and your friend, or should I say, fellow traveller, is currently wearing the mask of a certain William McNeill, late of Gravesend. Late, as of course, are most of the residents of that particular year-old hole in the ground. He won’t have told you his real name.” The man perched his cigarette between his lips, scratched his left ear with his left hand and withdrew a silver whistle from his right hand tunic pocked. Reluctantly removing the cigarette from his mouth he raised the whistle and without another word blew a long, shrill ear-splitting blast.