by Bill Mesce
He was still notating the cards when the stenographer who had taken Markham’s statement knocked on the door. Harry sent the sergeant back to a warm bed after relieving him of the sealed envelope containing his copy of Markham’s confession.
Harry went down the hall to the latrine, the envelope tucked securely under his arm, threw water on his face, then returned to his office and propped himself against one of his file cabinets, the open documents on top of the cabinet before him, a fresh cup of coffee nearby. He did not want to risk sitting and possibly lapsing into another doze.
Now, that quiet, deferential Midwestern voice came back to Harry as he read over the deposition, freckled with erasures and typos, evidence of the steno’s own fatigue and Ryan’s command for haste. It was a remarkable document in which Markham — to use Harry’s wry exaggeration — ”confessed to everything but the Chicago Fire and Teapot Dome.”
Harry was still mulling over the deposition when there came a knock at the outer door. It was one of the mail clerks with a sealed manila envelope from Scotland Yard. Harry signed for the envelope, shooed the messenger out, and closed the door behind him.
Harry sat at his desk with his coffee, Markham’s confession, and the Scotland Yard documents in front of him. He rang the Annex switchboard and had them put him through to Van Damm’s BOQ, where he was told that Major Van Damm had — unsurprisingly — spent the night in the G-2 complex. Harry rang him there. While he waited for the G-2 staff to find Van Damm, Harry opened the envelope from the Yard. Inside were two smaller, sealed envelopes. Harry opened the first, saw autopsy sketches, and set it aside. Fie was opening the second when Van Damm came on the line.
“Hey, Voss, what’s up?”
“Did I wake you up?”
“Up? I haven’t been to bed yet. What can I do you for?”
“When I was talking to your Captain Dell, he said something yesterday about a radio monitoring station on the coast.”
“We’ve got a chain of ’em up and down our side of the Ditch. You want to know if we got something on the Monday raid, right? Gimme an hour and meet me in the officers’ mess. I’ve been living on doughnuts and Hershey bars for days. I gotta have me some real food.”
Harry rang off and opened the second envelope. It contained a preliminary ballistics report. According to the Yard, investigators had retrieved over a hundred spent bullets from the exterior, interior, and grounds of the Gresham cottage. They had also recovered a similar number of ejected shell casings. Another seven bullets had been extracted from O’Connell’s ship.
SUMMARY:
Casings — Preliminary comparison between random sample of twelve recovered casings and casings from test firings show marked similarity in ejector markings. Indicates casings came from one or another of the eight .50-caliber automatic weapons mounted on Ship #1 (Markham’s).
Gresham Residence — Preliminary comparison between random sample of 12 identifiable bullets recovered from structure interior, 12 from structure exterior,
12 from vicinity, and bullets from test firings show several points of similarity in rifling indicating bullets fired from one or another Guns #1-8 on Ship #1.
Victim Ship — Four of the seven bullets recovered malformed on impact preventing effective identification comparisons. Bullet recovered from fuselage bears rifling marks consistent with Ship #1 Gun #4. Bullet recovered from engine area bears rifling marks consistent with Ship #1 Gun #5...
All of which eliminated the possibility that any of Markham’s actions were some sort of cover for Anderson.
Reluctantly, Harry turned to the autopsy report. He skimmed through the neat block paragraphs and the anatomical sketches: “...Victim received five bullet wounds from a point above and behind to the right at a descending angle of between 30 and 40 degrees with a similar transverse...signs of having been inflicted by a large-bore, high-powered weapon at close range...pierced body armor at back, completely transiting body and exiting body armor at front...severe tangential tissue damage along each projectile path indicating high velocity and malformation caused by impact on body armor...cause of death attributed to grievous gunshot wounds...”
The text was cold and inanimate, the diagrams a poor cartoon, but as Harry’s eyes flicked from one square of text to the next, his mind’s eye saw the pale young man on the Gresham bed, still damp with blood and seawater.
He tossed the autopsy report aside, tossed his reading glasses after it, leaned back in his chair and rubbed his burning eyes, then absently flicked the stub of his cigarette out the window. Down in the court, a pair of PFC’s were watering the sunflower planters in front of his building. The cigarette floated by. “Hey!” one of the men shouted angrily, and Harry leaned away from the window so they wouldn’t see him.
He forced himself ahead, continuing to fill out his little index cards as he worked his way through the materials on his desk. After a bit, the outside office door rattled. He assumed it was Nagel, shouted at him — or whoever it was — to come back in an hour, and answered the puzzled mumbling that followed with another demand to go away, all without looking up from his cards.
When the cards were done he spread them out on the floor, then propped his elbows on his knees, and let his eyes ramble about the splayed cards. He bent over, wheezing, and moved them about, rearranging them, hoping that — as in the past — the connections would emerge, slowly and vaguely at first, then with growing clarity.
This time, however, the magic didn’t happen. The cards sat there obstinately separate, like pieces from a half-dozen different puzzles tossed randomly together.
Albert Markham’s killing of Dennis O’Connell bespoke a man acting out of pique, but what Harry knew of Markham suggested a man who didn’t act out of pique. It was a rash and desperate act by a man who, from what Harry had thus far learned, didn’t act rashly, or desperately. In the wake of the German raid on Donophan, presumably distraught over the loss of dozens of comrades — including his friend Frank Adams — Markham was capable of putting together an attack marked — in Van Damm’s words — by “a nice, simple elegance.” Even his confession came across as well thought-out, well reasoned, carefully addressing every point and question that had arisen over the course of the investigation thus far.
But it was just that last point that so troubled Harry: The confession was too well thought-out, too well reasoned, and too carefully answered every question.
Whatever piece would bring all the rest together into a picture that made sense, Harry didn’t have it. Or, he considered, maybe it was there, sitting plainly in front of him, but he was just too tired to see it. Where — and at what — hadn’t he looked?
Before Markham had been brought in for his deposition, Harry had had a few minutes with Ricks and Grassi in which they’d given him a quick catch-up on what they’d compiled that day on the men involved.
Harry picked up his phone and had the Annex exchange first ring Grassi’s office, and failing to get an answer there, his quarters. While the phone rang — and it rang a long time before a groggy Grassi picked up his end — Harry parked the receiver on his shoulder, scooped up his cards from the floor and tucked them inside his jacket, then locked the two Scotland Yard reports and Markham’s deposition in his file cabinet.
“Would it kill you to let me get even five minutes of shut-eye?” Grassi grumbled when Harry identified himself. “Can’t this case spare me those five lousy minutes?”
“No,” Harry answered. “Earlier tonight, you told me — ”
“This morning, Boss. That was this morning, when all good lawyers should’ve been snug in their — ”
“You said something about O’Connell. Something about a girlfriend...
Still half asleep, Grassi spoke through a yawn: “I did?”
*
“I said,” Major Van Damm repeated, trying to speak through a mouth filled with an oversized bit of fried egg sandwich, “you look like you could use a shave.”
Harry self-consciously rubbed hi
s stubble-roughened chin. “I can imagine.”
Van Damm hadn’t swallowed before he began on the second of the two sandwiches on his plate. “’S just nice to see somebody in worse shape than me.”
“Anything I can do.”
They had found a quiet corner of the officers’ mess. Remembering Van Damm’s cigars and unshowered scent, Harry had picked a table by the window.
“Those radio intercepts,” Harry began.
“What radio intercepts? There were no intercepts. Not from the Angel flights. ‘Course, that’s no big surprise. First order of business for them would’ve been maintaining radio silence.”
Harry flipped through his note cards. “Markham says that O’Connell radioed him — while they were over the target, over this fuel dump at Helsvagen — and requested permission to abort.”
Before Harry had finished his sentence, Van Damm was shaking his head. “We didn’t pick it up. That doesn’t mean he did, that doesn’t mean he didn’t. It just means we didn’t pick it up. They were a hundred and forty miles away, deep in the grass. Routine jamming, atmospherics — ”
“Markham also says he radioed O’Connell to ditch just off the coast — ”
Van Damm washed the last of his sandwich down with a slurp of coffee. “It’s not just a matter of range. It was hot, it was humid. All in all, a pretty lousy day for radio transmission. It’s not like we have this sponge that soaks up everything that’s in the air. You get some, you lose some, OK? The only traffic we picked up was out of Helsvagen and that was pretty blotchy.”
“Out of Helsvagen? You mean from the Germans?”
Van Damm nodded. “’Bout what you’d expect. Reports they’d been hit, requests for help. Sounded like they’d been hit as hard as we thought. They were asking for everything: field hospitals, kitchens, tents, clothes, blankets, firefighting equipment, the whole shopping list, soup to nuts. And they weren’t quiet about it, either. The calls went out uncoded. They don’t usually like us picking up on bad news, so for them to put out a call like that in the clear, they must’ve been really hurting. Things quieted down by night; probably re-established hard-line communications they lost in the raid. One thing I could kick myself for, though.”
“What’s that?”
Van Damm slumped back in his chair, licking streaks of yolk from his fingers. He sighed contentedly. “Damn, I needed that. You got a smoke? I left my cigars back at the office. I could really use a smoke right now.”
Remembering the noxious episode in Van Damm’s office, Harry would’ve lied if he’d had one. “You were saying?”
“Oh, yeah. Remember me saying we’d originally pegged the kraut personnel count at about two hundred, right? And my Spy Brigade guess was that it was probably less by now?”
“Right.”
“Well, spank me, I missed that one by the proverbial country mile. From what we could pick up, the Germans at Helsvagen were reporting casualties in the neighborhood of four hundred plus.”
*
Thanks to Harry’s shortcomings in map-reading, his drive from London to Lewes was longer and more winding than it need have been. Six times, he pulled his jeep to the side of the road, grappled with his map, and looked vainly for landmarks along the tree-lined lanes that crossed the downs, each frustratingly like another. Then, reminiscing mournfully over the precision-engineered Rolls-Royce of the night before, he arm-wrestled the rebellious stick shift into gear and off he rambled.
Still, the ride was not altogether unpleasant. The day was bright, the colors of the fields and trees, and the cows and sheep, quite vivid, the terrals that gently rocked the jeep were filled with the sweet smells of earth and pasture. There was something liberating about being far from the gray stoneworks of London and the even more drab uniform-filled corridors and court of the Annex.
Close to noon Harry finally drew up in front of a millinery shop on one of Chillingham’s side streets. He tapped on the dusty shop glass and a woman’s face hove into view: a porcelain-white orb marred by the black slash of an eye patch. Grassi’s quick brief hadn’t mentioned an injury and, for a moment, Harry was not sure how to react. He produced a well-meaning smile and spoke slowly and loudly, moving his lips in exaggerated fashion so even if she couldn’t hear him through the glass, she could read his lips. He pointed at her and asked, “Elisabeth McAnn?”
She nodded with a smile — it surprised him that a young girl’s face marred by that square of black cloth could smile — glanced at her watch, then held up five fingers.
He nodded and toddled off, found himself a news kiosk, bought a pack of Players for lack of anything American, then staked himself out a lamppost and lit himself a cigarette. When Elisabeth McAnn touched his elbow, he was nearly asleep.
“I think you’re on fire,” she said.
Harry batted at the smoldering cigarette caught in the folds of his jacket. He refrained from cursing in front of her and forced a smile. “Just mildly scorched,” he said, frowning at a burnt smudge. As his eyes came up from his jacket he saw that she was leaning heavily on a cane.
“Miss McAnn, I want to thank you for seeing me on such short notice. I know this isn’t the best time. I mean, please accept my condolences about Lieutenant — ”
She smiled tolerantly, and interrupted him. “Major Voss, is it? How did you get here? Did you drive? You must’ve been on the road for hours. I’m sure you could do with something to eat. There’s a fair little tea shop round the corner if that’s all right?”
“I’m not too sure anything’s going to sit well on my stomach. Rough night.”
She noted his haggard appearance with a nod and her smile turned sympathetic. “Frankly, I’ve been feeling a bit off myself, but I should have something. Do you mind...?” She raised her arm, and Harry thought she was offering it to him as some ladylike gesture, but when he took it, she leaned heavily against him, limping as she walked, hanging the cane in the crook of her arm.
The tea shop was small and quiet, just a few tables, each decked with a fresh daisy in a water glass. The matronly little woman behind the counter came over to their table, nodding a familiar maternal smile at the girl.
“Early lunch today, dear?”
“Just some tea and dry toast, please.”
“And the gentleman? We have a plate of dainties you might like.”
“Just tea, please.”
“We only have saccharine, I’m afraid.”
“That’s fine, thanks.”
The woman waddled off behind the counter. The girl pulled an empty chair close, hung her cane on the back, and propped her bad leg up on the seat, rucking her skirt up a few inches. Harry took care not to let his eyes wander to the exposed knee.
“On the phone you said you were from the Judge something-or-another,” she said. “I’m afraid I didn’t take it all in.”
“It sounded like I woke you up. Sorry.”
She nodded it away as a trifle.
She was young, he thought, but he wasn’t quite sure how much so. He’d take in the smooth skin, the slight cushion of baby fat in her cheeks, and think she wasn’t yet twenty, but then focus on that black square over a missing eye and think she was years older...or should have been. She had a pleasant face made striking by the contrast between its whiteness and the jet hair that fell straight round her face to her shoulders, the sharp slash of matching eyebrows, and the one eye, brown but so dark as to look black. There was a lilt to her voice, a subtle un-English cadence.
“I’m with the Judge Advocate’s Bureau.”
“That sounds threateningly legal.”
“I’m a lawyer with the Army.”
“Oh,” she said, raising her eyebrows slightly.
Elisabeth McAnn had a knack, Harry told me, of seeming, at first, as ingenuous as one would think natural for such a young girl. But in that eye was a sharpness, a shrewdness, a knowing. And, just beneath any other feeling, easy to tap...a sadness.
“And you’re looking into his death, is that it? I
was told he was killed in a crash. I didn’t know there was anything...” — a flicker of a mocking smile here — ”...requiring the attention of, well, of you.”
“There’s just been some questions over the crash — ”
“Nothing you can discuss, of course.”
Harry blushed.
“Security and all that,” she said.
He looked to her for any sign of rancor, but she merely seemed amused at his discomfiture. “I wish I could tell you more — ” he began.
Again, that dismissive nod, that it wasn’t important. Or maybe just not unexpected.
Harry sat awkwardly silent for a moment, hesitant to push on.
She took the lead. “Since I obviously know so little, Major, I don’t see how I can help you.”
“I’m just trying to learn a little more about Lieutenant O’Connell. I understand you two were, well...”
She nodded, amused again, smiling, again.
“I’m kind of surprised to see you back at work so soon. I thought you’d take a few days...”
“To mourn? Life marches on.”
“So they say.”
“Stiff upper lip and all that. Head up, give out with a verse or two of ‘There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover’ and press on, eh?” She said it casually, but Harry saw a cold flash in that one dark eye. “Well, that’s the English way, they say. That must be my problem. Not quite English through and through.”
“Irish, right? I could hear it.”
“My Da,” and the word touched that easy-to-reach sadness. She passed it off with a quick sigh. “Mum was from over here. We came over before the war. Da was a collier at one of the mines, then the mine closed. Mum had a brother who said he could get Da a job in a shoe factory In Coventry. Now, there is no more Coventry.”
