Here Be Monsters

'Everything, Major.' Another smile. 'Why was your investigation unsatisfactory?' He'd know a false smile when he saw one. 'A tragic accident, the newspapers said?'

'Yes.' The eyelids still didn't bat as he realized that she had learned her lesson. 'The French were waiting for me, Miss Loftus.'

'Waiting for you?' Innocent and genuine surprise. 'On the Pointe du Hoc?'

'Nearby.' There was perhaps the faintest suggestion of Lowland Scottish, perhaps from the hard land of the Border, in his voice. 'The local paper suggested that he had come to Normandy for the D-Day gathering, on June 6th. But that was not so. He did not arrive until the afternoon of June 7th. The day of his tragic accident.' He repeated her words without commitment to them.

'Yes, Major?' She must not jump to conclusions. But tragic accidents in this line of country were generally neither tragic nor accidental; and it was only on the very cliff-edge of possibility that this elderly American had come half-way across the world to do alternatively what he could have done much more easily at home, on his own account.

'The newspaper reported him as staying at Bayeux. I traced him to a hotel there. I gave the clerk twenty francs, and he was on the phone before my back was properly turned. I went directly to the Pointe du Hoc. They took me as I was on my way back to Bayeux.'

'Took you?'

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'With the utmost courtesy, Miss Loftus. But without argument.'

She mustn't waste time trying to imagine that scene. 'What did they want?'

'They wanted to know what I was doing.'

Another silly question then. 'And what were you doing?' A hard man like Major Turnbull would have had a cover-story. 'You were stringing for PA? Or Agence-News Angleterre?'

'No, Miss Loftus. There was a DST man in attendance, so they already knew exactly who I was. A simple lie would only have invited trouble.'

That was interesting, though logical - that the Major had a European reputation before Colonel Butler had recruited him, and long before Mr Latimer had sent him back to France.

'So what was your complicated lie?'

He gave her Odin's stone face again, looking down on Grimeby from Baldersby Dale. 'In any period before or after Her Majesty the Queen has been invited to a foreign celebration, if there is a suspicious death we investigate it as a matter of routine, Miss Loftus.'

Phew! 'And what did they say to that?'

'There was nothing they could say. They could not deny that Her Majesty was there on June 6th, in Normandy. And they knew they couldn't question such a story without making an issue of it. Especially not after I'd reminded them of the Vive le IRA slogans they had failed to erase.'

Not bad at all, thought Elizabeth. 'When the safety of the Royal Family was involved, all foreigners expected John Bull to be at his most truculent. 'And they believed that?'

'No, Miss Loftus. If they had believed that I would have said so.' He paused, and as the pause lengthened she felt herself sucked into it.

'So what did - '

'If you will let me finish, Miss Loftus.' He cut her off smoothly. 'They pretended to believe me. And then they were uncommonly helpful and cooperative. They allowed me to interview three witnesses - two Frenchmen and an American youth. The Frenchman had been engaged in clearing up the area, after the previous day's ceremonies. The American youth was the grandson of an officer in one of their destroyers, which gave close support to the American troops who stormed the positon in 1944.' He paused again. 'I take it that dummy2

you are aware of what happened on the Pointe du Hoc, Miss Loftus?'

'Yes, Major.' It might be smarter to feign female ignorance, but there was a limit to what female flesh-and- blood could endure. 'That would be D, E and F Companies of the 5th Rangers. And the destroyer was presumably the Satterlee.'

'Yes.' Not a nod, much less a smile - not even a bloody blink! Even Father had more grace on the rare occasions when she produced the right answer! 'The boy had been delayed by an accident involving the truck in which he'd been hitch-hiking. But he was an excellent witness, observant and intelligent. I have no reservations about him.'

Elizabeth frowned, and plunged over her own cliff before she could stop herself. 'He saw Parker fall?'

'No, Miss Loftus. I did not say that. I neither said it, nor implied it. I said the boy was an excellent witness. If he had seen the man fall then my investigation would not have been unsatisfactory. None of these witnesses saw the man fall. Neither did two adult Americans who were also on the headland at the time. I was shown transcripts of their evidence. All five of them arrived on the scene after he had allegedly fallen - the boy, one of the Americans and one of the Frenchmen almost immediately, within sight of each other, the other two shortly after.' He paused. 'Altogether there were seven people in the vicinity.'

Seven?

'Indeed?' She was not going to be caught so easily again: the as-yet-unaccounted two must wait until the Major chose to summon them. 'Why were you not able to interview the Americans - the adult ones?'

He stared at her in silence for a moment. 'I was told that they had returned to America.

Their evidence was certainly of no significance in transcript. They merely confirmed what the boy and the Frenchman said, but in less detail.'

'Who were they? Why were they there?'

'I was told that they were tourists.'