‘What? Sure. An ace. Why?’
I don’t think that he realized why that worried me. I’d seen the Major studying a map before we set out. He had been holding it upside down. I heard Raffles stir in his sleep, and snort.
Cliff asked me just one more thing before we started the let-down over Abbeville. ‘That thing you just said – about Grace flying some trips with you. How come?’
‘The rear gunner – the one you were interested in – you remember I told you how he killed those policemen? Then he went over the hill. Pissed off. Grace had become attached to us earlier. She was billeting with us between delivery flights: they were sending us a lot of new Lancasters down from Ringway. She just stepped in, and took his place. No one noticed the difference. You have no idea how stupidly easy it was.’
‘The ATA must have realized that she was missing?’
‘No, Cliff. That’s the irony of it, now. She’d been grounded by them for beating up Bawne airfield in a bloody Spitfire. They thought she had the twitch.’
‘So that business with the two phoney coppers: Grace was there all the time?’
‘You could say that. Out there on the edge. She helped us cover Pete’s disappearance.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Indubitably.’ I hadn’t used that word since I’d left the squadron.
‘Good gunner, was she?’
‘Yeah. She got one. Bloody good shot.’
PART TWO
France: March 1945
Five
The airfield outside Fécamp had been a grass field used by German fighters during the Battle of Britain. We asked for it back again some time after D-Day, and laid a prefabricated metal runway, made up of steel links. Cliff got it almost right this time, but the track was wet from a morning shower, and caught him out. His approach was a shade too fast. Halfway down the strip, with all three of our wheels on the deck, he applied the brakes and slid out immediately to the left. One main wheel slipped off the metalling and dug in, while the rest of the plane tried to fly on. We did the handbrake left turn, then stopped with a distinctly loud metallic cracking noise, at right angles to the track. This all took place in less time than it’s taken to tell you.
Raffles, not strapped in, ended up on the floor. He muttered, ‘Effing hooray!’ but I’m not sure whether that was out of anger or fear. My strap had dug into my shoulder, almost dislocating it.
Cliff said, ‘Balls!’
An American female voice came over the radio, ‘Cliff, get your heap off the edge of my runway. I have 47s due in twenty-five minutes.’
Airfield control was from a caravan like the one I had known at Bawne: it seemed a long way away, but within a couple of minutes a jeep was moving away from it. A blonde girl in USAAF duds waved to us when she bailed out of it.
Cliff said, ‘Hello, Wendy.’
She replied, ‘Hi Cliff, hi Major . . .’ but she made for Raffles, and gave him a hug saying, ‘How’s my man?’ Then she spotted me, and said, ‘New boy.’
Raffles unwrapped her and said, ‘No. Nothing like that. We’re just giving him a lift to Paris. This is Charlie.’
I said, ‘Hello, Miss.’
‘Hello yourself, Charlie. Welcome to France.’
‘This is my first time over.’
‘Watch those girls in Paris. Come on.’
While we were climbing into the jeep Raffles told her, ‘Mr Clifford did well to keep us on our wheels.’
‘I didn’t doubt him for a minute.’
‘Pleased to hear that, Miss.’
‘You wanna drive me, Raffles?’
Raffles drove. She sat alongside him unwrapping the small brown parcel he’d magicked from somewhere, while James England, Cliff and I squeezed in behind them with our three bags. I looked over her shoulder at her tits, and the parcel on her lap. As far as I could see her tits were great, and the parcel contained several pairs of stockings, a couple of half-bottles of gin and a couple of packs of fat Turkish cigarettes. There was also what looked like an irregular lump of shiny dark brown ear wax, about the size of a thumbnail. The American girl said, ‘Thank you, hon. Will you all be staying tonight? They’ve opened a small estaminet down the road.’
There was a pause. Then, ‘Maybe on the way back, Wendy.’ The Major; at last. That was good: I’d begun to wonder if he’d died. ‘Charlie’s in a hurry to get to Paris.’
‘So was I, when I was his age.’ She turned and gave me the full blast of her smile: her lips were the colour of pumping venous blood. I’d seen some of that splashed around in aeroplanes. She must have been all of twenty-five years old.
Cliff said, ‘I’ll be staying if I can’t hitch a lift back. You can take me instead.’
‘OK,’ the woman said. There was something careless about it. False gaiety.
Halfway back to the control caravan Raffles stopped the jeep, got out and walked away to vomit on the grass.
‘He’s scared of flying,’ Major England said to me. ‘I don’t know why he does it.’
He wiped his mouth on a great handkerchief before he got back in. Wendy leaned over and gave him a hug again.
The caravan was crowded, so I stepped outside. Thirty feet away there was a concrete dispersal pan up against a perimeter hedge. One of those huge Queen Mary trailers sat on it, its load shrouded by a torn camouflage tarp.
I wandered over to it, trailed by Cliff, and pulled back the tarpaulin for a closer look. It wasn’t a large aircraft, but it was more or less all there, except for the radial engine. Its wings and struts had been disassembled and laid on the trailer, strapped to the fuselage. I recognized the horrible little Norseman. Cliff wasn’t paying close attention. The aircraft looked knocked about a bit, but not in bad nick. There were a couple of holes in the front screens which could have been bullets. Nothing
