The Information Officer. Mark Mills

prevented her puffing her way through her version of ‘The Dying Swan’ before the disbelieving eyes of Britain’s officer classes. For some reason, veils had been a feature of her routine, he remembered, angina the reason for her sudden retirement from the stage. Ammunition was scarce even back then, but a couple of the shore batteries had been ordered to fire off a salute when the frigate bearing Bessie to a gentler life in Gibraltar had slipped out of Grand Harbour.

      Max hadn’t been back to the Blue Parrot since that time, but he could see the flaking gilt of the mirrors in the narrow dining room, the greasy velvet upholstery and the tired palms dotted about the place.

      ‘Did she work anywhere before?’

      ‘I didn’t ask. Should I have?’

      ‘Anything else?’

      ‘Yes. Something that doesn’t make sense. She left for work on Thursday afternoon at five o’clock—she always allowed an hour for the walk, apparently—but she wasn’t found till the Saturday morning.’

      ‘Where exactly was she found?’

      ‘A backstreet in Marsa. Marsa was on her route home, but she can hardly have lain out there for a whole day without anyone seeing her.’

      Max weighed a range of explanations, rejecting each in turn. Only one withstood the test, and it didn’t sit happily in the head.

      ‘She was held somewhere for twenty-four hours…’

      ‘It looks that way.’

      ‘Or maybe she was already dead; he just couldn’t dispose of the body for whatever reason, maybe it was too risky.’

      As explanations went, it wasn’t quite as grim as the thought of her being held hostage for those missing hours, with the disturbing images that accompanied it.

      ‘The rigor mortis suggests otherwise. It was well set in when I first saw her on Saturday around noon. It generally peaks somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours after death, closer to twelve in this kind of heat.’

      Which suggested that her life was ended some time on the Friday night. And probably not in Marsa. Marsa was simply the dumping ground. As to where she was abducted, it could have been anywhere along her route home; a quiet spot, most likely. But where did he hold her captive during Friday? And how did he transport her there? The questions were coming in a torrent now.

      ‘Max, I’ve been thinking. We have to go to someone with this.’

      ‘The Lieutenant-Governor’s office shut you out last time. What makes you think they won’t do it again? We need evidence they can’t ignore.’

      It was a disingenuous response, and he knew it: presenting himself as the champion of truth when all he really wanted was a bit more time to follow through the consequences of a scandal of this scale breaking across the island.

      ‘Freddie, I just need a day or two.’

      ‘I’m happy to give it to you. But is he?’

      ‘What are you saying?’

      ‘I’m saying I don’t want another death on my conscience.’

      ‘You think I do?’ Max paused. ‘I’m asking you to trust me on this. A couple of days to check some things out. I’ll get straight on to it. I promise.’

      Freddie remained silent for a moment. ‘Okay, but you’re on your own. They’ve got me working out of Mtarfa for the foreseeable.’

      It was a testimony to Freddie’s skill as a surgeon that he spent much of his time being shunted between the island’s hospitals according to where his gifts were required. There was certainly no lack of call for them.

      ‘When are you heading out there?’

      ‘Ten minutes ago. A Beaufighter just pancaked at Luqa. The navigator is pretty chewed up, by all accounts.’

      ‘I’m going to need the exact dates when the other two girls were found.’

      ‘Then stay on the line, I’ll be right back.’

      Max spent half an hour clearing his desk and briefing the members of his team. They were quite capable of holding the fort in his absence. He was on the point of leaving when the rising dirge of the air-raid siren stopped him in his tracks.

      ‘Damn,’ he muttered, making for the staircase which led to the roof. Fleur-de-Lys occupied the high ground between Hamrun and Birkirkara, and the zinc-clad roof of St Joseph’s offered one of the finest views on the island: a sweeping 360-degree panorama that took in Rabat and the walled city of Mdina to the west, roosting on their spur of white rock, keeping watch over the parched southern plain, where towns and villages lay scattered like dice on a tabletop. To the east, beyond Valletta and her twin harbours, lay a seemingly endless expanse of viridian green water. The corrugated hills that rolled off to the north beyond Mdina held little strategic importance for the enemy. Almost everything that was of interest to them—the aerodromes, the dockyards and the submarine base—lay within the field of vision of a person standing on the roof of St Joseph’s.

      It was a biblical landscape—sunbleached, shadeless, harsh to the eye—broken up into miniature fields by a dense lacework of stone walls. The walls were there to prevent the precious dusting of soil from being blown about by the hot summer winds from Africa. In the winter, the gregale blew in from the north-west, bringing the heavy rains which turned everything to mud.

      Right now, though, a brassy sun was overhead, and the first white galleon clouds of the year were gathering over the island.

      Max turned as the big guns up on Ta’ Giorni ridge slammed a salvo into the air. Pale puff-balls of bursting ack-ack fire mottled the sky to the north-east, heralding the arrival of a vast and heavily escorted formation of 88s.

      It soon became clear that the airfields were about to take another bad knock, and Max could feel his plans for the day slipping away from him. Travelling, like much of life on Malta, was something you did in between raids, and even then you kept one eye on the heavens for the lone marauders who slipped in under the radar screen. The scarcity of petrol had stripped the streets of motor vehicles in the past couple of months, and a lone motorcycle throwing up a cloud of dust was more of an invitation than ever to an enemy pilot with an itchy trigger finger.

      He had only been strafed once—on the old dirt road that switchbacked its way between Ghajn Tuffieha and Mdina—but the suddenness and ferocity of the attack were indelibly etched on his memory. One moment he was barrelling along, the wind in his face, the next moment the road in front of him was erupting. The fighter was well past by the time he’d registered it, and it was a further few seconds before his brain was able to make the connection between the dot twisting away into the distance and the strip of earth torn out of the ground across his path. He might have processed the information more rapidly if he hadn’t been so joyously distracted at the moment the attack occurred. Three dream-like days by the sea at Ghajn Tuffieha had dulled his reactions.