Damned Good Show (7 page)

Meanwhile, 409 Squadron's Hampdens waited on the tarmac hardstandings. Their crews hung about, listening to the wind-up gramophone grinding out the hit songs of 1939, “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “This Can't Be Love,” “South of the Border Down Mexico Way,” “Two Sleepy People.” The morning papers were eagerly seized but they had little to report except stuff about Poland, and everyone knew that the Poles were total goners. Hitler and Stalin had carved up the country between them. Was that part of a deal to make Hitler's eastern border safe? Probably. Cunning bugger, Hitler. Sweden announced it was neutral. Was that news? Probably not. Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland were neutral. Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey were neutral. Italy
and Spain were neutral. Ireland was neutral. Someone bought a record of “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and the crews played it and sang it until the joke wore thin. This was turning into a very unsatisfactory war.

Silk was not on standby duty the day that Flight Lieutenant McHarg was declared fit and came into the Mess.

German measles had not been kind to him. He looked gaunt and grim. Also angry. He hated waste, and that included waste of time. He had joined the RAF as a boy apprentice in 1922. In the years between the wars the Treasury kept the Armed Forces on a very tight budget. McHarg learned that the road to promotion demanded a mean and miserly grip on stores; ideally, nothing should be used. He was good at that. Even so, it was twelve years before he got commissioned: a pilot officer at the age of twenty-eight. Now he was thirty-three, and dealing with aircrew who were pilot officers at nineteen. They knew nothing of tradition. They treated his bombs as cheaply as boiled sweets. If they met a strong headwind on their way home, or if an engine began coughing, they cheerfully jettisoned their load in the sea. McHarg and generations of armaments officers had carefully guarded those bombs ever since they were stockpiled at the end of what McHarg called the Great War. The aircrew thought him an old man. That amused him. With his bare hand he could unscrew the most corroded fuse on a bomb faster than they could open a bottle of lemonade. They were children.

Silk observed McHarg from the opposite side of the Mess and decided that he didn't look happy. It could mean anything. Silk went off to find Sergeant Trimbull in the Motor Transport Section.

Trimbull said he was fairly sure that Flight Lieutenant McHarg had not been near his Bentley since he got over the measles. Of course he couldn't be positive.

“The car may be a bit muddy,” Silk said. “A wash and a polish would be nice.” Trimbull sucked his teeth. “My Hampden needs an
air test this afternoon,” Silk said. “Can you get away for an hour or two?”

“Easily, sir. Wash and polish. As good as done.”

“Splendid.” The sun was shining. “Perfect day for stooging around England. Um … You might find the odd footprint on the back of the Bentley.”

“Don't worry about it, sir. Will we be doing any practice gunnery?” Silk was about to say
Probably not
when Trimbull added, “Only I've always had an ambition to fire one of those machine guns.”

Silk thought of what the Bentley had been through. “This is your lucky day, Sergeant.” Neither man smiled: conspiracy was a serious business. “Not a word to McHarg, of course.”

“Of course, sir.”

The bombers were dispersed around the edge of the airfield as a safeguard against enemy attack; nobody noticed Trimbull, in borrowed flying overalls, climb into the Hampden. He had never flown before. The takeoff, twice as bumpy and ten times as loud as he expected, made his heart race with excitement. The climb was alarmingly steep; his ears popped; the countryside was shrinking into a toytown world. Trimbull was fascinated. The bomber was so narrow that when he stood behind Silk, his elbows brushed the fuselage. He began to count all the gauges and switches and indicators crammed onto the instrument panel and overflowing down the sides, reached twenty-five, saw a dozen more and gave up.

Silk found a field of cloud and made fun of it, skimming the surface, rushing down slopes, charging up hills. Then they were over the sea. It looked as if it had been spray-painted a deep metallic blue. Silk found a fluffy cloud and flew slowly around it while Trimbull, installed in the upper gunner's position, raked it savagely with bursts of fire while the real gunner guided his arm. Trimbull enjoyed watching the tracer bullets most of all. They streaked like red devils. Silk flew home at a hundred feet, hurdling the power lines, while Trimbull gripped the pilot's seatback and flexed his knees and silently cheered. Altogether, a successful trip.

At Clifton College, Langham had won prizes for his English essays. His sentences grew like ivy. They were rich with subordinate clauses and parentheses; his handling of the semi-colon was masterly. Often his sentences ran until they made complete paragraphs. He could qualify a statement five different ways without breaking sweat. But he couldn't write a letter to Zoë Herrick. He tried, and immediately felt swamped by a flood of remembered lust. If he put this hunger into words, his writing became a scribble and then an exhausted scrawl. He gave up. He telephoned her. Easier. Also more dangerous.

“Darling!” she said. “How sweet of you. By the way, you forgot to take your underpants.”

“Damn … Look, chuck them out.”

“Never. I'm wearing them. Not as nice as you next to the skin, but I suppose a girl has to make sacrifices. There's a war on. Have you been looping the loop in your sexy Spitfire?”

“Actually, there's been a bit of a change. I'm off Spitfires. We're flying Hampdens now. Twice as many engines, and a ton of bombs. Plus a crew to boss about. So I'm frightfully high-powered.”

“What fun. I had a dog called Harrington when I was small.”

“Not Harrington. Hampden.”

Brief pause. “Harrington. King Charles spaniel. I should know, darling, he was my bloody dog.”

He let her win. “What are you up to? Apart from my underwear.”

“If I were apart from your underwear, darling, I'd be stark naked.”

“Ah.” His loins gave a small leap. “I know a few pilots who wear their girl-friends' silk stockings on a long flight. Keeps the legs warm.”

“Precious, you may have the pick of my lingerie the instant we're married. Are you free a week on Wednesday? Lincoln cathedral, two o'clock. The bishop got a special license for us. He's my godfather, he swore to protect me from the flesh and the devil but nobody said anything about Spitfire pilots.”

“That's because we're unspeakable.” Let her think he flew a Spitfire. What harm could it do?

Silk lay stretched on a sofa in the Mess anteroom, engrossed in a paperback called
A Bullet for Your Pains.
He was within a page or two of discovering whodunit when a servant presented Flight Lieutenant McHarg's compliments and requested Mr. Silk's presence in his office on a matter of some importance.

This had never happened before.

McHarg was at his desk. He pointed to a straightback chair without looking up. He was reading a typewritten report and following every word with his forefinger. Silk looked around the room, and saw framed photographs of McHarg and his Bentley everywhere, so he looked at the floor instead. McHarg finished reading and stapled the pages with a crash of his fist that made Silk jump. “What doesn't grow on trees?” he demanded. His voice was still grounded in Glasgow.

“Fish,” Silk said. “Footballs. Fountain-pens. I give up.”

But McHarg had lost interest. He plucked at a hair in his left nostril until he detached it and rubbed his fingers together to dispose of it. “You carried out an air test, Mr. Silk,” he said, and sneezed so violently that his torso convulsed. “During the flight, your upper gunner expended two drums of ammunition.”

“That's right.”

“An air test is not a gunnery exercise.”

“True.”

“So this was a case of negligent discharge of ammunition.”

“On the contrary. I authorized it, for the defense of the airplane.”

“Against which enemy machine? None has been reported over England.”

Silk relaxed. “That's where we differ. Any fighter that comes sniffing around me is hostile, in my eyes. That's what happened. A Spitfire pilot came too close and I told my gunner to scare him off.”

“You attacked a Spitfire.”

“Damn right I did. Didn't you hear of the Battle of Barking Creek? Three days after the war began, a bunch of Spits went up to intercept raiders in the Thames estuary. The Huns were actually Hurricanes but that didn't stop the Spits shooting down two of them, did it? Well, my Hampden looks a lot like a Dornier 17. I don't trust fighter pilots.”

“Two drums.”

“Yeah. Very nosey, he was.”

“You didn't report this.”

“What's the point? I couldn't identify the bastard.”

McHarg spent a long time staring at him, before he said: “I don't like negligent discharge. The man who squanders bullets can't be trusted. Ammunition doesn't grow on trees.”

“That's a relief,” Silk said. “I was beginning to think it might be footballs after all.”

He walked back to the Mess, where a noisy party had developed, with Langham at its center. “The wedding's definitely on, Silko! Lincoln cathedral, Wednesday week, fourteen hundred hours. My popsy fixed it. Isn't she clever? You're best man.”

Silk took him aside. “I think Black Mac knows something. I could tell from the way he looked at me. He's got eyes like corkscrews.”

“Blast his eyes! We've got
real
corkscrews. Have a drink.”

“That bloody Bentley.” Silk took a glass. “How does a sweaty armaments officer come to own a Bentley, anyway?”

“Won it in a raffle. Who cares? Drink up, Silko.”

In fact McHarg had bought it for a song when it was a wreck, and then spent ten years restoring it. He had never married. The Bentley responded sweetly and without argument, went where he steered it, and was admired by all. No woman could compete with that. The Bentley was his life's companion.

When half a dozen pilots were posted to 409 Squadron from an Operational Training Unit, the adjutant organized their rooms and their servants and then took them to the station commander's office.

Group Captain Rafferty always gave an introductory talk. He liked to impress on new officers that 409 was rather special, that it had a bit of swank. He had given the talk so often that it was well-polished.

“Shakespeare was right, as usual,” he told them. “Here we are on this sceptered isle, as he put it. This fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war. This precious stone set in a silver sea, which serves it as a moat defensive to a house, and so on and so forth. Rattling good stuff. Makes Hitler sound like a rag-and-bone man shouting in the street. Now, the current task of this squadron is to protect the moat, so let's take a closer look at Shakespeare's silver sea.”

Rafferty strolled over to a wall map of England and northern Europe.

“Between us and the Hun lies the North Sea. I'm sure you're familiar with it. It has some disadvantages. It's damned cold, damned windy, damned wet. It has one advantage: it's damned big. You can have as much of it as you like.” That got a brief laugh. “At the moment, our job is to patrol a short beat—the German coastline between Holland and Denmark. A hundred-plus miles. But to get there you fly nearly four hundred miles. No landmarks in the sea, so good navigation is important. Get your sums wrong and you might overfly Holland or Germany. This will be indicated by anti-aircraft
fire. If you observe shellbursts in your vicinity, make an excuse and leave. You are searching for ships, not shrapnel.”

He talked about the Roosevelt Rules, about neutrality, about the crucial importance of positively identifying warships as German before dropping any bombs. He talked of what to do if British antiaircraft guns shot at them: fire off signal flares in the colors of the day. “You never know,” he said. “It might work.” But stay well away from the Royal Navy, he said. Sailors were notoriously quick on the trigger, and he had scars from the last war to prove it. As for German fighters: they never went to sea. But if you met a Hun, keep in close formation and your gunners' crossfire should make him think twice about attacking.

This was useful stuff, but not thrilling. So Rafferty ended on a note of brisk patriotism. “I envy you chaps,” he said. “You've got the best bomber in the world. Best crews. Fighting for the best country. I began with Shakespeare, so I'll end with him. Henry V, before Agincourt, sees his army. ‘This happy breed of men,' he says. And Henry knew what they were fighting for: ‘This precious stone set in a silver sea.' Of course we won! How could we lose? And with chaps like you, we'll win again.”

That seemed to go down well. A few men actually smiled.

“Any matters arising?” he said. Feet shuffled. Somebody coughed. “Anything? Anything at all.” Silence. “Well, then …”

“One small thing, sir.” A tallish officer took a pace forward. Strong features. Thick hair. Deep, confident voice. “Those lines from Shakespeare. They're not
Henry V
. They're
Richard II.
Act two, scene one.”

“Oh.” Rafferty was taken aback. “Not Henry, you say. But still … um … relevant, surely?”

“Not relevant to Agincourt, sir. Wrong century.”

“I meant relevant to
patriotism,”
Rafferty said smoothly. “To
England.”

“Relevant to treachery,” the pilot said, “if Shakespeare is to be believed. But of course the king doesn't speak those lines. He's not present. The speech comes from his uncle, John of Gaunt.”

The officers relaxed; they were enjoying this. Rafferty was outgunned. He gestured: carry on.