LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘What makes you think I didn’t? Apparently the matter is now in the hands of the appropriate authorities.’

      ‘Sounds like Lieutenant-Governor’s office speak.’

      ‘You should know.’

      He certainly did. The Information Office answered directly to the Lieutenant-Governor and his coterie of self-important lackeys.

      ‘So why am I here?’

      ‘Because she had something on her that changes everything. Something in her hand. I had to prise it out. Rigor mortis had set in.’

      Freddie reached into the hip pocket of his khaki shorts and handed something to Max. It was a piece of material—a cloth shoulder tab, torn where it had been ripped from a uniform. Enough of it remained, though.

      ‘Oh Christ…’ said Max.

      ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

      Max’s apartment was a short walk from the hospital through the streets of Floriana. He passed a long line of women queuing for paraffin. There was some kind of scuffle taking place which involved a lot of raised voices. Spotting Max approach, a rangy young woman with fire in her eyes appealed to him in accented English, ‘Tell her she wait like all of us.’

      ‘You have to wait,’ said Max, without breaking his stride, or even turning to identify the culprit.

      His indifference was rewarded with a bank of baleful glares and a couple of mumbled curses in Maltese. He ignored them, too numb to care.

      He was still trying to process the information sprung on him by Freddie in the mortuary. Whichever way he came at it, it spelled big trouble. Freddie had taken a certain amount of persuading to keep his findings to himself, at least for a couple of days. It would give Max time to think the matter through properly, make a few enquiries. What those might be exactly, he wasn’t yet sure. Things would become clearer once they knew who the girl was. Her absence couldn’t go unnoticed for long. She probably had family and friends who even now were discussing the dread prospect of doing the rounds of the mortuaries.

      Her make-up, the livid nail polish, everything pointed to her occupation. It also pointed to a pattern: three dance hostesses from the Gut—more, for all they knew—not unlucky victims of the war, but of a man who had violated them before killing them. And not just any man, a British serviceman, a submariner. And not just any submarine, the Upstanding—commanded by Lionel Campion, Mitzi’s husband.

      He felt in his pocket for the torn shoulder tab Freddie had recovered from the dead girl’s clenched fist. Instinct had told him to ask for it, and instinct now told him to dispose of it immediately. With the proof gone, it would be Freddie’s word against his. Was he willing to trade their friendship for the alternative, the unthinkable?

      The Maltese had not wanted this war, it had been called down upon their heads, and their almost childlike faith in the ability of the British to defend them, to ultimately prevail against the forces of evil, had been tested to its limits by the gathering hell of the past few months. After two long years of siege, they knew the truth about their predicament. How could they not know? The truth had been fed to them to shore up their morale—a badge of honour to be worn with pride.

      They knew by heart the words of praise heaped on them by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons (and they joked that they’d be happy to swap those words for a few more Spitfires or a ship-load of sausages). They knew that King George VI had awarded them, all of them, the George Cross earlier in the month (and they admired the King’s advisers for their judicious timing). But the fact remained: they were still cut off from the world, alone, surrounded by an enemy intent on starving them into submission and annihilating them from the air. Twice the tonnage of bombs dropped on London during the worst twelve months of the Blitz had rained down on their heads in the last two months alone. It was an extraordinary statistic which conferred on their little island home the dubious honour of being the most bombed patch of earth on the planet. Ever.

      Remarkably, in spite of all this, they had barely wavered, making light of their trials. But what would happen if they thought for a moment that they were also fighting an enemy within? How would they react to the news that a British serviceman was picking off their daughters, using the war as a cloak for his crimes? It was impossible to say, but it would change everything in a moment.

      As Max turned into Pietro Floriani Street, he drew to a halt. The building at the northern end of the street had taken a direct hit at the beginning of April, collapsing completely, taking much of the adjacent apartment block with it, shearing rooms in half, exposing their contents to the elements and the voyeuristic gaze of passers-by—a sideboard pressed up against a drawing-room wall hung with framed photographs; a towel still draped over the edge of a cast-iron bathtub; an effigy of the Virgin, which, miraculously, had not been toppled from its perch on the mantelpiece by the sudden disappearance of the other half of the room.

      It brought to mind the architectural cross-sections he used to run off, slicing through buildings to reveal the guts of his designs. For a fleeting moment he glimpsed himself perched on the high wooden stool, hunched over his drawing board, feverishly applying himself to the task. He wondered what had become of that well-meaning young man dreaming of a bright future in a top firm of architects. It seemed impossible to him that he could have travelled from that to this in such a brief time, from an airy studio in the Architectural Association to a Mediterranean bomb site, from enthusiastic student to cynical military official.

      They were dangerous thoughts, the kind that built swiftly to an overwhelming flood, and he pushed them from him before they could.

      He gazed at the piece of material in his hand and told himself that his friendship with Freddie wasn’t at stake. Freddie had offered no resistance to his suggestion that he take the shoulder tab with him. If anything, he had seemed eager to rid himself of it. Why was that? One overriding reason presented itself: he was abdicating responsibility to Max. Take this, he was saying, and do with it what you will, because I don’t know what to do with it.

      It wasn’t much of a consolation to Max’s conscience, but it would have to do for now. He glanced around him to check that he was alone then tossed the piece of material away. It was lost in the heaped rubble of what used to be 35 Pietro Floriani Street.

      He set off at a brisk pace, not wishing to dwell on his actions. At the end of his street, he returned the salutes of the scruffy mob of Maltese boys at their flag station.

      ‘No worries, Joe!’ they called.

      It was about all the English they possessed, that and ‘Speetfire’.

      ‘Allura,’ Max replied. No worries.

      Many of them had older brothers who had been conscripted into the Royal Malta Artillery or the King’s Own Malta Regiment. Eager to emulate their heroes they had rigged a flagstaff from a toppled telegraph pylon. The moment the red ensign appeared above the Castile in Valletta, they hoisted their own scarlet rag for the benefit of their little corner of Floriana. Amazingly, they never abandoned their post, even during an air raid, although they often strayed on to the pitted patch of earth near the bastion wall to play football against the crew of the Bofor gun site—Manchester men who liked the ball at their feet and who weren’t afraid to send a small child sprawling in the dust.

      Max’s third-floor apartment at the end of Vilhena Terrace afforded a bird’s-eye view of these contests, and in the evening he would sometimes sit and observe the antics from his balcony, Grand Harbour and the Three Cities providing the backdrop. It was a corner apartment, and the other view, from the bedroom window, was to the north-east, across the open area of ground which separated Floriana from Valletta. Both towns occupied the peninsula and both were well protected from the water by a bewilderment of bastions, but the mighty ditch on the landward side of Valletta proclaimed Floriana’s role as a first line of defence. The Knights of St John had engineered things this way against the possibility of another Turkish invasion of the island and, centuries on, the residents of Floriana were still left with the slightly uneasy feeling that they were disposable, that even in retreat

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