The Information Officer - Mark Mills

“Well, now you do.”

“Where can I find baking soda?”

“You can’t. It’s all gone, months ago.”

“Well, thanks for the tip anyway.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Outside in the blinding sunshine, Josef paused to fill his lungs with fresh air and get his bearings. He felt invigorated by the sleep, or was it something else, something he hadn’t felt in a long while? He hadn’t even asked her name. That’s how hopeless he had become in his dealings with women.

He rarely stopped to think about how it had crept up on him, this solitary life of his: the small house in Naxxar inherited from his father, the house that would have gone to his older brother, if Karlu hadn’t given himself to God, turning his back on all worldly possessions. Karlu with his undying faith in man’s ability to rise to the challenge set him by the Almighty; he, Josef, the one with the biblical name, mercilessly hunting down those who failed to measure up.

He used to care about the job, he used to think he was serving a purpose, but now he wasn’t so sure. There would always be others to fill his boots, and yet he couldn’t give it up. It was his excuse for the half-life he’d landed himself with.

Strange that a chance encounter in an air-raid shelter could challenge his weary resignation. He smiled at the memory of her words, playfully defiant: I can’t promise to offer you such generous terms.

A pretty woman, and a funny one too, he mused as he pushed open the door to Griscti’s military outfitters.

The wooden counter ran the full width of the shop, and on the felt panels covering the wall behind it were pinned a dizzying array of caps, berets, badges, and buttons. The cabinets lining the side walls had lost their glass and now stood empty. Behind the counter a dapper-looking man with a goatee beard and pince-nez spectacles was berating a shopgirl for something or other to do with a reel of gold braid. He schooled his features into an unconvincing smile as Josef approached.

“May I help you?”

Josef produced his badge and demanded to see the shop ledger. The manager grudgingly handed it over.

There was no record of a sale of a submariner’s shoulder tab in the past ten days, not since Carmela Cassar had been found dead in the street with the remnants of one in her hand. In fact, the ledger recorded barely any sales since the beginning of the month. This wasn’t so surprising; the soldiers, sailors, and airmen on the island had better things to think about right then than the trim of their battle dress. Ken, assuming that was his name, assuming that he had killed Mary Farrugia before going on to murder two more girls, assuming that he existed at all and that mother hen hadn’t been trying to pull a fast one for the sake of her nephew—

“Have you finished?” demanded the manager.

Josef silenced him with a look, irritated by the distraction, irritated by the number of assumptions driving the case. Facts and evidence were what counted.

He flicked back through the ledger—April, March, February, January …

“Do you have a ruler?” asked Josef.

“A ruler?”

Unprompted, the shopgirl pulled one from a drawer and handed it over.

“Thanks,” said Josef with a smile, taking it from her and using it to tear off the relevant pages of the ledger.

The manager looked stunned by this act of desecration.

“Don’t worry. You’ll get them back.”

TACITUS CONTACTED HIM AT THE USUAL TIME.

He had made a point over the past days of neither broad casting nor receiving, choosing instead to leave the machine tucked well away in its wooden box. He could imagine Tacitus’s frustration, but he couldn’t picture the man behind the code name. He vacillated between an unassuming character, easily underestimated, and a more obvious type in the Lutz Kettelmann mold: tall, officious, blandly handsome. His tastes ran naturally to the former. He liked a dark horse, being something of one himself.

The message brought a smile to his lips. It was the first time that Tacitus had addressed him in English.Silence is not always golden. Tacitus.

He punched his reply into the machine, noting down the enciphered text before transmitting it.And talk is not always cheap. Virgil.

It was a satisfying riposte: a play on the same proverb while at the same time implying that they would have to pay dearly for any more information. He was over his little sulk, now that his plans were back on track, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t punish them for throwing those plans into disarray in the first place.

It was a while before he heard back from them, time to read a couple of chapters of his book. Their request, when it finally came through, was predictable enough. They wanted to know everything he’d learned about the reinforcement flight of Spitfires heading for the island. Did he have an exact date? An idea of the numbers involved? What preparations were under way at the airfields? How did they plan to disperse the aircraft? In short, had they learned from their mistakes last time round, and if so, what new measures were they adopting?

He thought about lying; the idea amused him. One hundred and twenty Mark V Spitfires due at first light tomorrow morning. That would certainly have had Tacitus tearing his hair out, or what was left of it. His preferred incarnation of Tacitus was thin on top.

In the end, he was a good boy, and answered the questions as precisely as possible. He even threw in a bonus, advising that it would be worth keeping an eye on the seaplane base in Kalafrana Bay that evening. A well-timed raid might just kill two birds with one stone—the outgoing governor and his replacement.

When he was done, he packed the machine away and wandered through to the living room. He poured himself a large whisky and wound up the gramophone. Sitting there with a glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other, his thoughts turned to Max—handsome, hopeless Max, torn between two such different women.

Was he even aware of the true scale of the cliché? It was a corny conundrum straight from the pages of Ivanhoe or Daniel Deronda: the young man whose heart is divided between the blond embodiment of his own kind and a creature altogether more dark and exotic. Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot had each chosen to throw a Jewess in the path of their hero. Max, it seemed, had fallen hard for a Maltese of mixed ancestry. He knew that Max had fallen hard because he’d watched them up close and he’d watched them from afar, and the body language was unmistakable.

Max had proved himself a far more capable dissimulator with Mitzi. Even when observing the dumb play of their moving lips across a crowded room, when they’d thought they were alone, he’d been able to detect little of their private history. Almost nothing in their behavior betrayed them. You really had to know what had been going on in order to see it.

He poured himself another whisky and recovered his notebook from its hiding place. If he were any different, he might have been able to sustain his natural sympathy for Max. A part of him even wished it were possible. It wasn’t, though. That became evident as soon as he began to write.

The characters lost their lustre, like wet clay hardening in the sun. Baked, cracked, and flawed, the tiny effigies were hard to care for. He shunted them about, choreographing the final act as best he could. The days ahead would be turbulent and unpredictable. He couldn’t foretell the exact hour when the new Spitfires would fly in, or when the Upstanding would slip away to Alexandria, or where exactly the official duties of the various players, himself included, would carry them during the inevitable chaos.

His meditations were interrupted by the building wail of the siren. Yet another raid, the third of the night. He lit a cigarette, annoyed by the distraction that had caused him to lose his train of thought. Extinguishing the candle, he crossed to the window and pushed open the shutters.

The blue-white fingers of the searchlights groped around the heavens, their efforts thwarted by a low blanket of clouds that played in the Germans’ favor. Before long, he heard the grumbling roar of unseen Junkers approaching. There weren’t many of them, a mere handful by the sound of it. The reason for that became clear a few moments later.

They dropped through the clouds in the hundreds, sputtering into life—bright white, falling silently to earth, dripping phosphorescence, illuminating the underbelly of the clouds. And still they kept coming, hundreds of them, thousands of them, like swarming fireflies, turning night into day, lighting up the whole island now, laying bare the undulating mosaic of the Maltese landscape.

It was a spectacle he’d witnessed before, but never quite on this scale, and it was impressive, almost moving, until you remembered that it was the harmless prelude to a far more devastating display of pyrotechnics. The other bombers, the ones carrying death in their bellies, were already approaching, the air throbbing with the menacing beat of their engines.

The revelation came to him as the searchlights converged on the first wave of planes to break cloud cover: a new ending, a bold and unexpected finale, one at which Max and Lilian would both be present.

DAY SEVEN

UNFORTUNATELY, BUSUTTIL WAS A MAN OF HIS WORD.

He reappeared at Max’s flat at five A.M., exactly twenty-fours after his first visit. He seemed surprisingly perky given that he hadn’t made it home to his own bed, opting instead to pass the night in a shelter in Valetta.

“You’re welcome to stay here, you know.”

“Thank you, but the shelter is okay.”

Max had raided Maria’s secret store of quality tea for the occasion, sneaking home just enough for a small pot.

“She’ll kill me for it.”

“I might do the same,” said Busuttil, the taste sending him into a worrying trance. Once he’d recovered, he got straight to the point, bringing Max up to speed on his findings.

“Ken?”

“That’s what she said. Maybe it’s his real name. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe she was lying. I found nothing at Griscti’s. I’ll try the other outfitters today.”

“Maybe I can help?”

“Of course you can. But be careful who you speak to.”

Busuttil had paid two visits to the Blue Parrot, neither of which had revealed anything of note regarding Carmela Cassar. The other girls she’d worked with had painted a picture of a scrupulously moral young woman who had never associated with clients outside the confines of the club. This didn’t mean there wasn’t more to discover on that front; he’d ascertained that the club was popular with officers from the submarine flotilla. He also intended to pay a visit to Carmela’s parents. He stood a better chance of extracting something from them, which, given the hopeless failure of Max’s visit, wasn’t saying much.

Max had nothing much to offer Busuttil in return besides Freddie’s theory that the killer was left-handed.

“Interesting,” said Busuttil, before adding, “Tell me about Freddie.”

“Freddie?”

“Tell me about him.”

“Why?”

“Because everything starts with him. He tells you. You tell Lilian. She tells me. The story grows. Maybe that’s what he wants. Who do I tell?”

“No one, I hope, until you know exactly what’s going on,” replied Max firmly.

“You never know exactly. What makes a man kill? I don’t know. Do you?”

“I know you’re barking up the wrong tree with Freddie.”

Busuttil shrugged. “I’m very suspicious. I have even asked myself if it is you.”

“Well, it isn’t me.”

It was a slightly sour note on which to end. Busuttil suggested that they meet again at ten o’clock that night to pool their findings, and then he disappeared into the new day.

Pemberton was waiting for Max when he got to work, bursting with barely concealed excitement, although he waited till they were alone before spilling the beans.

“The governor’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Last night. From Kalafrana. Left in a seaplane.”

It was good to know that Elliott wasn’t a total fraud.

“Why are you whispering?” whispered Max.

Pemberton looked crestfallen. “You knew?”

“I got a whiff of it.”

Keep it cryptic, keep the new boy in his place, then find out how the hell the new boy got the jump on him.

“Who did you hear it from?”

“Rosamund, who heard it from Hugh. Apparently he’s known for a couple of days. She was very upset.”

Rosamund had shown up at breakfast at the Copnalls’ house in Saint Julian’s, where Pemberton was lodging. If she was to be believed, the governor of Gibraltar, Lord Gort, was now the governor of Malta, having flown in to Kalafrana on the same seaplane that had then carried the Dobbies off.

Gort was a good man, by all accounts—a tough no-nonsense type—and Rosamund would get over it once she’d secured a place for herself at the new court.

It wasn’t long before the call came through from the lieutenant governor’s office, as Max knew it would. He wandered next door to the Vincenzo Bugeja Conservatory, pushing aside memories of his last visit.

The sight of Hodges perched self-importantly behind his desk brought them flooding back.

“It’s good to see you again, Major Chadwick.”

A pointed comment intended to go over the heads of the other men already gathered there, waiting to be called through. They were standing in a loose huddle, smoking and talking in hushed tones. Max nosed his way among them. There were representatives from Defense Security and Censorship, along with a couple of faces he recognized from the Union Club.

“Heard the news, old man?”

“About Dobbie?”

“Damn shame, if you ask me.”

“Straight out of left field. Didn’t even say goodbye.”

“He’s been poorly for a while.”

“Yes, a bad case of ‘Et tu, Brute?’ from what I hear.”

“Really?”

“Methinks Mabel has been up to her old tricks.”

Mabel Strickland was the editor of the Times of Malta, and a force to be reckoned with. It was well known that her influence extended far beyond the shores of Malta to the corridors of Whitehall.

“Oh goody, a scandal. We haven’t had one of those for a while.”

If you only knew, thought Max.

He stayed well out of the was-he-pushed-or-did-he-jump speculation that followed, which was soon interrupted by the appearance of Colonel Gifford, who summoned them through.

The lieutenant governor rose from his desk to greet them. Despite the suntan, his face appeared drawn and careworn. He didn’t hang about, confirming that Lord Gort was indeed the new governor and commander in chief. In the fullness of time they would all have a chance to meet him, but right then he had his head down with the service chiefs, poring over the preparations for the forthcoming battle. The fly-in of Spitfires would meet with fierce resistance from the Germans, as would the arrival of HMS Welshman the following day. The fast minelayer was going to be making a lone dash from Gibraltar loaded to the gunwales with ammunition, aircraft parts, and food. They were calling it Operation Bowery, and Lord Gort was firmly of the view that nothing should be allowed to distract the islanders during this time. News of his appointment should therefore be kept under wraps for a couple of days, and it was the responsibility of the men in the room to see that his wishes were fulfilled.