The Information Officer

DAY EIGHT

MAX WOKE WITH A START, UNSURE WHY AT FIRST, THE reason slowly dawning on him.

He struggled to read the luminous dial of his wristwatch—just after five—which meant Busuttil was running more than seven hours late.

Max had been the first to leave the dinner, racing home to make the ten o’clock appointment and managing to stay awake until after midnight before nodding off. He had left the door downstairs unlocked and the one to his flat ajar. It still was.

Maybe Busuttil had been caught in one of the night raids, injured even. It seemed unlikely. The 88s had concentrated all their efforts on the airfields, wave after wave, suggesting that Kesselring had full knowledge of the fly-in and was doing everything in his power to hamper the operation, chewing up the runways and scattering what remained of them with delayed-action bombs.

By seven o’clock, there was still no sign of the detective.

Max left the flat, pinning a note to the door that said he’d gone to work, and giving the phone number. Outside, he ran an apologetic hand over the motorcycle. He had thrashed her on the way home, hurling her around the looping bends of Marsamxett Harbour. He gave her a little shake to check the contents of the tank. Running low on gasoline yet again, but the coil of tubing was tucked away under the seat, ready for some surreptitious siphoning. She started the first time.

There was an air of expectancy in the office. Everyone knew what was coming, but not when exactly. They congregated on the roof of Saint Joseph’s, eyes fixed on the distant ridge where Rabat and Mdina stood shoulder to shoulder. That’s where the Spitfires would come from, out of the west. High overhead, 109s stooged about the skies, keeping watch, biding their time.

By nine o’clock there was still no word from Busuttil, so Max put a call through to the offices of Il-Berqa. Lilian hadn’t shown up at work yet, which was strange. She was usually at her desk by eight at the latest. His next call was to her aunt in Mdina.

“Teresa, it’s me, Max.”

“How nice to hear your voice.”

“Is Lilian there?”

“No, she’s at work.”

She had left early, grabbing a ride down the hill to Ta’ Qali on the pilots’ bus, as she usually did.

“She’s not at work.”

“She must be there by now.”

“Well, she isn’t. No one has seen her.”

“Max, what are you saying?”

He could hear the anxiety creeping into her voice.

“She probably couldn’t get a lift from the airfield into Valetta. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

But he wasn’t sure. Even if she’d been forced to walk all the way—which simply never happened to women with her kind of looks—she would have arrived by now.

He waited half an hour before calling Il-Berqa again and drawing another blank. He could feel the seed of fear germinating in his chest. First Busuttil disappears, and now Lilian. Coincidence? Not if they really were missing. That suggested something far more sinister. He remembered Elliott’s warning: They’ll be watching you closely. Maybe he should have heeded those words of caution more closely. Maybe Colonel Gifford—

No, that theory didn’t hold up. If Busuttil had been pulled in by the authorities and had coughed up Lilian’s name under questioning, why hadn’t there been a knock at his door by now? Why hadn’t his name also come out in the wash?

He heard footsteps outside in the corridor, approaching his office. He hoped that they belonged to Colonel Gifford, or the ginger-haired fellow. He was happy to be dragged off and hauled over the coals if it settled the question of Lilian’s whereabouts.

The footsteps carried on past his door.

He sat there, rigid in his chair, breathless. There was no ignoring the unthinkable: that Lilian and Busuttil had somehow fallen into the hands of the killer.

The phone rang. He snatched at it.

“Yes.”

It was Luke Rogers from the deputy censor’s office with some thoughts on the rewording of a BBC broadcast.

“I can’t talk now, Luke. I’m expecting an important call.”

“I hope you’re not implying that this isn’t,” joked Luke.

Max felt bad about cutting him off without replying, but he was panicking now, struggling to think straight.

Freddie. Maybe Freddie had been hauled in. A call to the naval hospital at Bighi established that he hadn’t been; he was in surgery. Elliott. Elliott would know if they’d been taken into custody. But Elliott was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t at the Ops Room or the Y Service offices, and no one picked up at the Special Liaison Unit. In desperation, Max tried the Union Club. When that failed, he headed for the roof.

The whole office was gathered there by now, and he took Maria to one side.

“I don’t care who it is, but someone has to stay downstairs to man the phones. If anyone calls for me, anyone, tell them to try the Intelligence Office at Ta’ Qali.”

“Ta’ Qali?”

“That’s where I’ll be.”

She looked at him as if he were mad. “You think Ta’ Qali is a good place to be now?”

“With any luck I’m in and out before the party starts.”

Ta’ Qali lay just shy of Mdina, down on the sunbaked plain. He covered the eight miles or so from Saint Joseph’s in about as many minutes.

It had been a while since he’d visited the airfield, and he was shocked by what he saw. Most of the familiar structures had been reduced to jumbled masses of masonry, and charred and twisted heaps of metal lay scattered about the place, barely identifiable as aircraft. It was hard to believe that the place still functioned, and yet hordes of men moved like ants through the shimmering heat. Out on the runways, battle-dressed soldiers bent their backs alongside bronzed and shirtless airmen, filling bomb craters and clearing rubble. Ground crews were putting the finishing touches on the new blast pens that fringed the airfield like some gleaming necklace. They’d been constructed from old gasoline canisters filled with earth, and the bare metal building blocks flashed silver-white in the sunlight, clamoring to be targeted. Out there, somewhere, was Ralph, waiting at his designated pen to relieve one of the incoming pilots of his Spitfire.

The Intelligence Office hadn’t been relocated, even though the small stone building that housed it had lost its roof and most of its walls in the past month. A sheet of tarpaulin had been rigged above the ruins to provide protection from the sun, and a slit trench with a corrugated iron roof had been dug into the ground nearby for cover during a raid.

Harry Crighton was at his desk in his alfresco office, a cigarette glued to his lower lip. He was a rambunctious and foulmouthed Australian flight lieutenant who had taken on the duties of intelligence officer after breaking his neck in a forced landing earlier in the year. He was known for his dogged tenacity when it came to following up fighter claims.

“Holy shit, what the bloody hell are you doing here?” he called, seeing Max approach.

“‘To swear is neither brave, polite, nor wise.’”

“Who said that?”

“My headmaster, but I think he got it from Alexander Pope.”

“Well, I never claimed to be any of those things,” Harry replied with a grin, “so fuck ’em both.”

“Has anyone called for me?”

“What do you think this is, a bloody message service? No, no one’s called for you. And do you have any idea what’s about to happen here?”

“A vague inkling.”

“Pull up a pew and tell me what’s going on, why don’t you?”

Max pulled up a chair and told him almost nothing of what was going on. All he wanted to know was if Lilian had indeed hitched a lift down from Mdina on the pilots’ bus that morning.

“Yes, and a fine old sight she is too at that hour of the morning, I can tell you. Brings a little color to the caravan.”

“Where did you drop her?”

“Where we usually do—by the perimeter track. There’s a small chapel, more of a shrine, I suppose.”

“Did you see anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know—a person, a vehicle, anything?”

“Can’t say I was paying attention. Why?”

“She’s gone missing somewhere between here and Valetta.”

“Are you sure?”

“As good as. She should have been at work more than two hours ago.”

Before Harry could respond, there was a low, building roar of engines from out of the west. This was met with wild cheers from around the airfield as a flock of shapely planes swept into view over the ridge just south of Rabat. They were in formation, four sections of four flying in line astern, wingtip to wingtip, nose to tail.

“Bloody fools,” muttered Harry. “They’re way too tight. Did no one tell them?”

He was right. Tight formations were the kiss of death on Malta. So was line astern. Fortunately, the Spitfires fanned out, entering the circuit, before the first Messerschmitts swooped on them. The 109s came low and fast out of the sun from the direction of Valetta, ripping through a smattering of ack-ack. A handful of Hurricanes from Luqa or Hal Far did a fine job of heading off the attackers. The Hurriboys were an experienced bunch. Battle-hardened (and usually bearded), they prided themselves on the superior maneuverability of their otherwise inferior aircraft, and this advantage served them well in the tussles that now developed over Ta’ Qali. A lunatic chatter of light artillery fire accompanied the spectacle as the Bofors and twin Lewis guns opened up on the enemy.

“Here comes the first,” shouted Harry above the din.

The pilot was struggling to keep his aircraft from lurching about in the eddies of rising heat. The Spitfire hit the ground hard, bouncing and bumping along the pitted strip. A large number eight was emblazoned on its fuselage. A motorcyclist flashing a card with the same number raced to meet it, leading it off toward one of the new blast pens at the southern end of the airfield.

Harry was jumping around like an excited child. “It’s a Mark Vc, with four cannons! Look! So’s the next!”

All sixteen Spitfires touched down without mishap, and all were guided to their pens. The cloud of white dust stirred up by their propellers rolled toward the Intelligence Office, engulfing it, filling Max’s eyes and mouth with grit.

“Which number is Ralph?” Max yelled above the din.

“He came down with a dose of the Malta Dog last night. The CO won’t let him fly. He’s pretty browned off … so to speak.”

Ralph had been more subdued than usual over dinner the night before, only picking at his food, but Max had put it down to nerves, not the pernicious strain of dysentery that plagued the island.

Overhead, through the breaks in the billowing dust, he glimpsed fighter planes wheeling and twisting against the blue. He was trapped. To run for it now would be madness—a 109 could pick him off before he even reached the perimeter track—but the prospect of staying put filled him with a cold and creeping dread. Memories of the last time he’d been caught in a bombing raid at Ta’ Qali blew into his mind. He wasn’t sure he could go through that again and emerge with all his mental faculties intact. How on earth the gunners and the ground crews put up with it—day after day, night after night, month after month—was anyone’s guess.

Harry called in the safe arrival of the sixteen Spits to Fighter Control. Hanging up the phone, he turned to Max, face alight.

“Ops don’t have anything on the table.”

“So what’s that?” said Max as a 109 rocketed by overhead.

“No big jobs. Nothing between here and Sicily.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re not coming.”

“No, but it means they’re already too bloody late. We’ve been working on our turnaround times.”

They certainly had been. The first of the new Spits was back in the air within ten minutes—armed, refueled, and with an old Malta hand in the cockpit.

“Go, you bastard!” yelled Harry as its wheels left the ground. The others weren’t far behind.

Max watched in amazement. At the last fly-in back in April, Kesselring had obliterated most of the reinforcements on the ground soon after their arrival. On that occasion, “soon” had meant anything from an hour to two hours, while the aircraft were in their pens being made ready for combat. Ten minutes was a whole world apart; it was almost beyond comprehension. That’s why Kesselring, their nemesis, the master tactician they all grudgingly respected, had failed to allow for it in his calculations. For once, he had been outmaneuvered. It was good to witness this reversal firsthand. It also offered Max a small window of opportunity.

Even if swarms of 88s were taking off from Sicilian airfields at that very moment, he still had time to make it to Mdina before the bombs started to rain down. The 109s were the problem. Or were they? They seemed to be drifting south, away from Ta’ Qali. And now he saw why. A fresh formation of new Spitfires was flying in from the west, making for the airfield at Luqa.

It was as good a moment as any. If he didn’t risk it now, he was liable to spend the rest of the day cowering in a slit trench.

He seized Harry’s hand and shook it. “Good luck, Harry.”

“You too. Hope you find her.”

It was a terrifying ride, a blind, choking, headlong dash; he was half expecting to be torn apart by cannon fire at any moment. Only when he started to climb toward Mdina did he rise above the dust and the din and allow himself to glance over his shoulder. Max spat the dirt from his mouth and blinked his streaming eyes, cursing himself for leaving his goggles behind at the office in his haste.

Despite his best efforts to turn himself into something vaguely presentable, the maid still recoiled when she opened the front door to him. Teresa had ignored his words of warning relayed by Lilian. A steep stone staircase led from the palace garden up to the bastion wall, and it was here that he found her, out in the open with her daughters, watching events unfold on the plain below. Felicia and Ena scampered up to him. They had seen a motorcyclist tearing up the hill from Ta’ Qali. Had that really been him? What had he been thinking? Was he mad? He could have been killed.

Teresa shepherded the girls back down the steps and across the garden, ordering them to remain indoors from now on. Max was led through to the drawing room. He remained standing, not wishing to soil the antique sofa.

“She’s still not at work.”

“I know. I also know that she went to visit someone in Naxxar a few nights ago. She wouldn’t tell me who.” Teresa raised her hand, silencing him before he could reply. “If you lie to me now, Max, I shall never forgive you. Never.”

“Look, I don’t know who she visited in Naxxar, but there’s a good chance it was a man named Busuttil.”

“Busuttil?”

“He’s a detective with the CID.” He hesitated. “He’s also missing.”

Teresa stared at him. “What have you done?” she said quietly.

“I haven’t done anything. I’m just as confused as you are.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” She wagged her hand irritably at the sofa. “For goodness’ sake, sit down. And give me one of your cigarettes. I think I’m going to need it.”

He spared her the unnecessary details, and she sat in silence, listening attentively to his account.

“It’s still possible the authorities are holding them both.”

“You think? I don’t. I think you were very wrong to involve her.”

“It wasn’t like that. She was keen to help.”

“You stupid boy!” she spat. “Of course she was. Don’t you understand? She would do anything you asked her. She loves you.”

Three simple words spiked with bitter truth. He knew what he had become, but now he saw himself as if through Teresa’s eyes, perched pathetically on the sofa, already groping for excuses: if only Lilian had told me earlier, it would all be different. But there were no excuses, and there was no one else to blame. He had been blind, not just to her feelings, but to his own too. He had made a terrible mistake, and it was one that would plague him for the remainder of his life if he couldn’t rectify it.

“You find her,” said Teresa. “You find her and you bring her back to me.”

His decision to make straight for the Xara Palace at the other end of Mdina was one of expediency. The public phone lines might be out of action because of the raids, but the central phone in the mess would still be functioning.

The palace appeared to be deserted at first, swept clean of all human life. That was because the terrace at the back of the building was jammed thick with spectators—the sick, the injured, Maltese orderlies, and fresh-faced flight lieutenants. There was an exultant edge to the babble of voices passing comment on the dogfights unfolding high overhead.

Max pushed his way through the distracted throng toward the intelligence room at the end of the terrace. It was empty, and he pulled the door closed behind him. Picking up the phone, he spun the handle.

“General staff, please.”

The door swung open while he was waiting. Max didn’t recognize the young man.

“Excuse me, what are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

“I have orders to keep that line clear.”

“And if you’d been at your post, it might still be.”

He was obviously one of the new boys, low on combat experience, tasked with manning the phones to keep him from smashing up one of the new Spits.

“Look, you can’t just come in here—”

“Don’t make me pull rank on you.”

“My orders came from the AOC himself, Major.” The schoolboy smirked. “That’s who you’ll be pulling rank on.”

Max wasn’t in the mood to drag out the conversation.

“Just bugger off. Better still, bugger off and find Ralph for me.”

Ralph’s name was what did it. Ralph was royalty.

For Max, though, Elliott was the one who mattered right then. It was time to call his hand, find out just what he knew, because it was certainly more than he’d been willing to reveal up until now.

Elliott, however, seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. There had still been no sign of him at the Ops Room, or anywhere else for that matter. It was possible that the man who’d answered the phone at the Y Service offices had been lying, but there was no way of knowing. Even if Max took himself off to Valetta, he’d never gain entry to the offices. Access was strictly limited to a select few.

He had just settled on his only course of action when the young flight lieutenant returned.

“Ralph isn’t here.”

“Well, he’s not down at Ta’ Qali, because I was just there.”

“He took himself off to the hospital this morning. No one’s seen him since.”

The Dog could do that to a man, if it bit him hard.

Outside, the heavy artillery opened up, which meant that Kesselring had finally got round to sending his bombers. They were too late to take out the Spitfires on the ground, but just in time to mess up Max’s plans.

“Damn,” he said, pushing past the young pilot onto the terrace.

They came from the northeast and they came in numbers, darkening the sky over Naxxar. The big guns scored a couple of early successes, one of the 88s vaporizing in a ball of fire, another spiraling earthward. A swarm of new Spitfires raced to greet the attackers, engaging with the covering force of 109s. For the past month or more the RAF had effectively been spent as a defensive force, yet here they were, back in action, wreaking havoc. It was a remarkable sight, captivating, although someone still had the presence of mind to call, “Tin hats, gentlemen, if you’re staying out.” Moments later, the first shell splinters started to rain down on Mdina.

Max remained indoors during the raids, pacing with frustration, desperate to be gone. But the planes kept coming, and precious hours ticked agonizingly by. He might have risked it if there’d been less at stake, but if he didn’t survive, what chance did Lilian have? The sporadic whoops and cheers from the terrace suggested that the Germans were receiving a battering, but somehow it didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered.

The last wave of bombers was still droning off to the southwest when he finally mounted his motorcycle. The light was beginning to fade, and he drove carefully through Rabat, eyes scanning the road surface for shrapnel. If he shredded a tire now, well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

He left Rabat by the same road he’d taken with Lilian just a couple of days before, the one that led to Boschetto Gardens. This time, though, he carried on past, following his nose. His sense of direction was notoriously poor—something he’d inherited from his father—but even he knew that Elliott’s cliff-top house lay to the south. He also knew that the only route in and out was somewhere to the east, so if he could just pick up the road he’d taken there from Valetta …

He never got a chance. The motorcycle coughed, sputtered a few times, offered one last burst of speed, and then died on him. He knew the symptoms well enough by now and cursed himself for not having checked the gas tank before setting off from Mdina. He wheeled the machine out of sight behind a stone wall. There were few landmarks of any note to guide him back to the spot, so he snapped off the branch of a carob tree and laid it on the wall. When he was done, he struck out cross-country.

The terrain was as bleak and barren as any he’d come across on the island. It was also treacherous, pitted with abandoned stone quarries, deep and sheer-sided, where a man could easily fall to his death and go undiscovered till all that remained of him were his bleached and broken bones.

The ground rose by slow degrees toward the coast, crisscrossed by ancient cart tracks that had worn neat furrows into the limestone rock beneath the thin coating of soil. He hurried as best he could, racing to beat the failing light. The sun had dropped into the western sea, and twilight was fast giving way to night.

A line of low trees, gnarled and stooped by the wind, stood guard along the narrow ridge where the ground leveled off briefly before plunging sharply away to the sea. Max paused to catch his breath and get his bearings. He had hit the coast just south of the Dingli Cliffs. This was good. It meant that Elliott’s place lay somewhere below him and to his left.

He lost his footing several times during the descent, sliding away on a stream of scree, snatching at bushes to stop himself. Fear numbed the pain of the cuts and grazes. He knew he was close when he hit a band of thick vegetation. Edging his way through the spiny shrubs, he found himself on level ground once more, a rutted trail beneath his feet. He headed left through the gloom and was pleasantly surprised some ten minutes later when he came upon the twisted cypress tree and the narrow track leading down to Elliott’s farmhouse.

He paused to collect his thoughts. There was nothing to be gained, he decided, by storming right in there, and nothing to be lost by having a quick look around before announcing himself.

It appeared at first that the place was empty, closed up, but as he crept across the courtyard, he heard noises from inside the farmhouse, coming from the kitchen: the scrape of a chair against a stone floor, the clatter of cutlery on crockery. And a voice. Not Elliott’s. It was low and gruff and speaking Maltese.

Through a crack in the shutters he saw Pawlu, the stocky fellow he’d met on his previous visit, the one who helped out around the place. He was at the kitchen table, eating by candlelight. Max couldn’t make out who he was speaking to, but that became clear when a deep growl exploded into a chorus of barks.

Max fought the instinct to run. “Hello,” he called. “Anyone at home?”

Pawlu appeared at the kitchen door, gripping the dog by its collar. He held a shotgun in his other hand. The barrels came up momentarily, then lowered again as Max approached.

“Pawlu, it’s me, Major Chadwick. We met before.”

The dog was big and black and of dubious parentage. Pawlu silenced it with a sharp reprimand.

“Is Elliott around?”

“No.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Nice-looking dog,” he lied. “What’s his name?”

“Why are you here?”

“I ran out of gas near Boschetto Gardens. I know Elliott’s got some cans of the stuff in the barn because he filled me up last time.”

“He’s not here.”

“I’m sure he won’t mind me helping myself. I’m in a bit of a fix.”

Max started edging toward the barn. Pawlu moved to block his way.

“It is locked.”

“The key’s under that rock there,” said Max, pointing.

“No. Elliott has the key and he is not here. I’m sorry I cannot help you.”

He wasn’t sorry, and he was probably lying about the key, but he had a gun and a mean-looking dog, and Max was in no position to push the point, not unless he came up with some way of turning the tables. He didn’t care about the gasoline anymore, but he wasn’t going to leave without taking a look inside that barn. Pawlu’s suspicious behavior demanded it.

“Do you at least have a flashlight? I’ll never find my way back in the dark.”

When Pawlu headed back inside the farmhouse, Max loitered at the kitchen door. Pawlu snapped a command to the dog, and it curled up dutifully near the fireplace. That was good. Pawlu then laid the shotgun on the kitchen table, which was even better, before returning to the door with a hurricane lamp.

“Thanks,” said Max.

Reaching for the lamp, he seized Pawlu’s wrist, yanking him with all his force into the courtyard. Almost in the same movement, he pulled the door shut on the charging, snarling dog.

Pawlu had stumbled and fallen to the ground, dropping the hurricane lamp, but he was on his feet quickly.

“What’s in the barn, Pawlu?”

Pawlu didn’t reply. He dropped his head and charged, a bull-necked battering ram, sending Max sprawling back onto the ground. Pawlu was on him in an instant, astride him, pummeling him with both fists, going for the head, working his little arms like windmills. It might have been comical if the fists hadn’t been granite-hard.

Pawlu should have pressed home his advantage; it was a mistake to go for the service revolver at Max’s hip. Max seized the moment, unleashing a scything right that caught Pawlu on the side of his head, knocking him clean off. The revolver skittered away into the darkness.

Max had never been a violent man by nature, but he knew how to box and he was fighting for a good cause. When Pawlu came at him again, he was ready, and he was angry, and he didn’t stop till Pawlu was on his knees, flailing blindly, weakly, like some automaton running down. Max finished him off with an uppercut that laid him out cold.

The dog was going wild inside the kitchen, scrabbling at the base of the door. Max recovered the revolver and stripped Pawlu of his belt, using it to lash Pawlu’s hands behind his back. The key to the barn was in his pocket.

Max lit the hurricane lamp before entering.

“Lilian …,” he called hopefully, working his way through the jumble of hoarded goods.

She wasn’t there.

Busuttil was.

He was laid out on the floor behind a heap of boxes. His hands and feet were bound, he was gagged, and dried blood masked one half of his face. He lay utterly still.

Max stared in abject horror at the spectacle, until he registered the slight rise and fall of the detective’s chest.

Dropping to his knees, Max untied Busuttil. Then he hurried outside and used the same ropes to truss up Pawlu good and proper before dragging him by the heels across the courtyard to the door of the barn. Busuttil was finally stirring, but was in no state to stand, so Max carried him to the entrance and sat him against a pile of boxes.

“Have you seen Lilian?” Max asked.

Busuttil shook his head groggily. He was fighting and failing to come to his senses, as if he’d been drugged.

The interrogation of Pawlu didn’t go much better, even after Max had emptied half a canister of gasoline over him to bring him round.

“Where is she?”

“Who?”

Max lit a match. “You think I care what happens to you? I don’t.”

Pawlu writhed like a maggot on the ground, trying to distance himself from the flame. He claimed to know nothing about a girl. All he knew was that Elliott had asked him to guard the barn, to let no one in there.

If it was a lie, it was a convincing one. Three more matches failed to shake the truth from him, and he was almost weeping when Max tossed the last one away.

“There were two men,” slurred Busuttil.

“You saw them?”

Busuttil shook his head.

“I have to go now,” said Max. “I’ll send help.” He pressed the revolver into Busuttil’s hand. “Try not to shoot them when they get here.”

Busuttil mumbled something that Max didn’t catch.

“What?”

“Ken …”

“What about him?”

“I think he has a mustache.”

Max lost most of the skin off his knees slogging back up the escarpment. It didn’t help, having a hurricane lamp in one hand and a gas canister in the other. He almost discarded the lamp once he was clear of the quarries, which would have been a mistake. He might have been able to find the motorcycle again without it, but he couldn’t have stripped the carburetor down by the light of the moon alone. It was clogged with rust, the tank having run dry. The gods, it seemed, were set on having a good laugh at his expense, and he cursed them at the top of his lungs.

It was a fiddly operation, time-consuming, and it gave him a chance to think things through. Busuttil had mentioned two men. One had to be Elliott, but who was the second? The mysterious Ken who now, it seemed, had a mustache? Max knew only one submariner with a mustache, and that was Lionel. But it was a preposterous notion: Elliott and Lionel in cahoots, a team, killing off girls together. He even laughed at the thought of it.

He strained to find another explanation, anything that would exonerate his friend, but there was no escaping the fact that Elliott had abducted Busuttil, thwarting the investigation, which meant that he sat at the heart of the affair, and had probably done so all along. If anyone knew where Lilian was, then it was Elliott. Finding him, and finding him fast, was the obvious—the only—course of action open to Max.

He was finally able to kick the motorcycle into life. He knew where he was going, and he knew what he was going to do when he got there. He wouldn’t involve the lieutenant governor’s office; they weren’t to be trusted. No, he would go straight to his own kind, to the Combined Operations Room in Valetta. At a time like this, brass hats from all the services would be gathered in the underground HQ. There would be no ignoring his story. How long could Elliott hope to remain hidden once the news had been spread that wide?

Max had passed through Zebbug and was making good time when the German bombers began to unload over the Luqa airfield. It was a heavy and systematic raid, and it lay almost directly in his path. He pulled to a halt, buffeted by the concussions, the bomb bursts ripping red holes in the darkness, blanketing the airfield. He decided to chance it. The road to Valetta skirted the airfield to the north—the direction from which the bombers were making their runs. It was well known that bombs tended to overshoot their targets, and that certainly seemed to be the case now. The southern end of the airfield was suffering badly.

He had the throttle wide open when he saw it—a rogue line of bomb bursts coming at him out of the darkness to his left—and he realized almost instantly that he was done for. The geometry was against him, the leaping trail of destruction destined to converge with his own trajectory a short way down the road, any moment.

He braked hard, the back wheel sliding away from under him. He was aware of a strange feeling of weightlessness, of flying, before a blinding white light snuffed out his senses.