Under the Radar

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Suddenly Gavin himself broke into his thoughts. ‘AEO to captain, I’m getting the boat now. We’ve swapped IDs. In three minutes I’ll deploy Oilcan. We’re to carry on straight to target without any evasive measures.’

  ‘Roger. Keith, did you get that?’

  ‘Roger, Captain,’ said Coswood. His right hand was light on the control handle’s pistol grip as he disengaged the autopilot. ‘Basically, we carry on as we are while Gavin back there works his electronic miracles.’

  ‘A hundred nautical miles to target . . . now,’ said Bob Mutton. ‘Flying time to target ten minutes, thirty seconds.’

  ‘Got you, Baa,’ said Keith, his eyes on the Machmeter beneath the coaming directly in front of him.

  Five minutes later Rickards came back. ‘Hey, Boss, this gizmo works. They got us twice and they’ve lost us twice. They’re still hunting. And that’s when we’re going straight and level with no countermeasures . . . Hang on; they may have got us again.’

  There was some more silence broken by Vic Ferrit. ‘We’re nearly over them, Boss.’

  ‘Five seconds,’ said Bob. ‘Course and altitude corrections coming up.’

  In response to these Keith Coswood began a slow right-hand bank as his left hand eased back the power to seventy-five per cent. The Vulcan could be felt slowing as it lost speed and height.

  Amos said: ‘AEO, keep an eye out for Yogi 2.’

  ‘Got him, Boss. About ten miles behind and climbing. Our heights will intersect in a few minutes but with this separation maintained.’

  The exercise proceeded uneventfully. The two aircraft swapped altitudes and repeated the run. Coswood took Yogi 1 down to five hundred feet and for the first time the two pilots caught a brief glimpse of the submarine as they approached: a black whaleback with a tall sail outlined by flecks of white foam lost in the middle of a sunlit ocean empty to the horizon. Amos took over control for the final run which he made at a thousand feet while Rickards used the entire range of the aircraft’s jamming devices and deployed various types of chaff. On this run, after the submarine’s radar had briefly picked up both Vulcans at forty-eight nautical miles’ distance, no lock-on had been achieved and it was left baffled and trying to reacquire the big deltas even as they overflew and, banking steeply, climbed away for the last time towards the north-east.

  As they were nearing the Bristol Channel Amos suddenly remembered something and clicked his switch. ‘Captain to AEO.’

  ‘Yes, Boss.’

  ‘What about those running rabbits of yours. Did you see any?’

  ‘Nothing to speak of. A bit on that last run when Yogi 2 was so close, but that’s normal. I don’t think Oilcan makes the interference any worse. It’s too focused.’

  ‘I got the odd bunny on mine,’ came Vic’s voice. ‘But like Gavin says, no big deal.’

  While Keith Coswood flew them back to Wearsby Amos thought again of the rabbit that had just hopped out of his own life. Since Jo had left him he was aware that his crew, normally so relaxed and informal, were now fractionally less so when he was present. He would intercept anxious glances as though he were being examined for signs of emotional fragility after a tragic bereavement. The truth was that he missed the rabbit more than he did Jo. He had grown fond of old Vulcan who, to be honest, had never done much other than hop and chew and crap. But Amos had liked the unfathomable look in his dark and bulgy eyes. Sometimes he had caught the animal gazing at him, unwinking, in an oddly companionable and intimate fashion, which was more than his recent wife had done.

  The real conundrum was, did any of those anxious gazes conceal a suspicion of the true state of affairs? In that respect the service was quite as bad as school had been. It was in the nature of hermetic institutions that everybody’s private radar was sensitively attuned to detecting special friendships as well as hidden enmities. One never knew when they might cause a subtle shift in the balance of power. In any hierarchy the whole hidden drama of who–whom was never far from people’s calculations . . . Might Amos induce Gavin to leave the service if he were to do so? Absurd. The boy had his own career to think of. It was hopeless to think anything could ever come of it, whatever ‘it’ was.

  But Wearsby’s Air Traffic Control was talking to Keith Coswood, and Amos broke off his sad musing to busy himself with the usual disciplines of approach and landing. In a separate part of his brain, though, he briefly revisited one of his earliest reactions to Jo’s departure, which was the glum realisation that any moment now he would be booted out of Brabazon Close and back into a caravan.

  20

  Jo and Avril were sitting in the kitchen of Avril’s rented house. Outside it was a frosty Fenland Sunday with an enormous blue sky in which the sun, like a great cold bell, hung low. The children were at their grandparents’. Earlier, Avril and Jo had done the washing in the scullery, a quarry-tiled room a step down from the kitchen containing a gas stove, a large earthenware sink and a mangle. At the back of the scullery was also a recently added door leading into the outside lavatory so that one no longer had to go out of the house in all weathers.

  The kitchen, with its lino floor beneath which the ends of floorboards showed here and there as rectangular prominences, was an altogether warmer place. The stove in its alcove beneath the mantelpiece gave an occasional sigh as its coals shifted behind the double doors with their little mica windows. It was a companionable sound, as was that of the women sipping mugs of Ovaltine at the table. The mantelpiece itself was decorated with a row of little paper golliwogs from pots of Robertson’s jam. The washing was drying on the airer hauled up to the ceiling: the children’s clothes, chiefly, which had simply frozen stiff on the line in the garden earlier. A ginger cat was dozing on the ironing board, its wrists tucked in. Anyone coming through the side passage from the street and glancing through the kitchen window would have thought it a tranquil domestic scene; and so it was, outwardly at least.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Avril said for perhaps the twentieth time. She was referring to a visit they’d had earlier that day from two plainclothes policemen wearing Homburg hats and raincoats and looking just as they did in the cinema. They were asking questions about Avril’s friend Ted who had the mobile shop: questions she had been quite unable to answer, such as ‘Did you ever have any reason at all to suspect that some of the items Mr Timperley had for sale might have been stolen?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Avril had answered. ‘How could you tell? I mean, if you went into Griffiths the petrol station to buy paraffin, how would you know if it was genuine Aladdin Pink or something they’d got on the black market? Come to that, how would you know if the brandy on sale in the wine shop hasn’t been smuggled in from France by night in little black kegs?’

  Detective Inspector Hammersley and Detective Sergeant Dibley had smiled those tight, bleak smiles by which policemen convey that they don’t mind those they question scoring the odd debating point because they are privy to a larger picture which will shortly become horribly clear. On this occasion, however, they left the picture opaque.

  ‘So what’s Ted done? Or supposed to have done?’ Avril demanded.

  ‘Oh, no charges have been laid yet, Mrs O’Shea. We’re just making some preliminary inquiries, asking people in this area who are known to have been among his customers. For instance, can you tell us if you ever saw any meat aboard his vehicle?’

  ‘Meat? Well, he’s got a fridge in the back and often has chops and sausages and sometimes chickens. I’m just another customer. Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘Oh, we will when we find him.’

  ‘What do you mean, find?’

  ‘He’s not been home for days, madam. I suppose you don’t know where he is, do you?’

  ‘Why should she know?’ Jo, having been listening in the kitchen, had been unable to stop herself coming into the hall and breaking in. ‘You heard her: she’s just a customer of his.’

  ‘And you are?’ The inspector’s pale eyes had switched to her beneath lifted eyebr
ows. Jo noticed the skin on his forehead was slightly rough and peeling as though he’d caught a touch of the sun, although it was probably chapping from the winter wind. She mentally prescribed Nivea cream or Snowfire.

  ‘I’m Mrs McKenna and I’m an old friend of Mrs O’Shea’s.’

  ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘It’s none of your business where I live.’ One thing about being – or having been – a service wife, you did feel confident and even slightly immune when dealing with civilian police. They were nothing like as serious a prospect as the RAF police. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve been staying here a few days. I was living at Wearsby until then.’

  Both women caught the glances which Hammersley and Dibley exchanged. ‘You were living at RAF Wearsby, were you?’ the senior man asked.

  ‘I was. I’m . . . I’m married to Squadron Leader McKenna.’

  ‘I see. And I suppose you don’t know where Mr Timperley is, either.’

  ‘Not only do I not know where he is, I’ve never even met the man.’ The DS burrowed in his raincoat and came out with a photograph which he handed her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve never seen him. I don’t recognise him at all.’

  After a few more exchanges the two detectives had left, saying it was likely they would return in due course. Since then Avril had been repeating ‘I don’t get it’ and compulsively making Ovaltine.

  Suddenly Jo said, ‘I wonder if I’m being stupid, Rilly. I’ve only just remembered something. At about the time of that incredible Christmas Party I told you about there was a rumour going around Wearsby that people had been arrested for being involved in a plot to do with food in the sergeants’ mess. Amos might have mentioned it and my neighbour Kay Hendry did – you know, she was the one who helped me get the vet job in Mossop? I remember she did say there was a scandal about black-market food supplies or something but I’m afraid I didn’t pay it much attention since I had rather more urgent things to worry about. Now I come to think about it, could there be a connection with your Ted? Those two coppers did seem to perk up when I mentioned I’d been living at Wearsby. You don’t think he’s involved in anything fishy, do you?’

  Avril gave a little sigh and lifted a crinkled scab off the top of her Ovaltine with a teaspoon. ‘I know, I know. You did warn me.’

  ‘I warned you he might have other women, not that he might be a crook.’ The two friends looked at each other and both simultaneously shook their heads slightly. ‘You and me – we’re not doing too well, are we?’

  ‘You’ve still got a husband,’ Avril reminded her. ‘And no children.’

  ‘Technically true: Amos and I are still married. But not in any other sense we aren’t. I don’t see how we could be after that.’

  ‘That’ referred to the night of the Christmas party, which had been a constant topic of conversation between the two friends.

  ‘I just knew, Rilly. Seeing them together on the sofa, even if they were asleep and couldn’t avoid embracing if they didn’t want to fall off . . . I mean, one of them could have slept on the floor, couldn’t he? In fact it looked as though one of them had started out there. There were cushions and stuff. They looked intimate, somehow, as if they’d been doing it for ages even though I’m fairly sure they hadn’t. No, the moment I saw them everything fell into place. Amos’s iffiness about, you know, lovemaking, and suddenly remembering how often he would talk about Gavin – much more than he did about the others. You were right all along.’

  ‘Poor Jo.’

  ‘I suppose . . . Not really. It would be hypocritical of me to make a great song and dance about it. I already knew I couldn’t stick life with the RAF for ever. No, all this does is give me a solid reason that anybody would recognise. Not that I can use it. I’ve had enough of Amos and his world but I wouldn’t want him sent to jail. Or ruin young Gavin’s life, either. He’s actually rather a sweet boy, innocent in a way. I’ve no idea if he knows what he’s got himself into but that’s his funeral. If he’s old enough to die for his country, and all that.’

  Now Avril got up and made some more Ovaltine. It seemed very comforting in the circumstances. The afternoon outside the windows was turning to dusk. ‘Frost tonight,’ she said as she stirred in the hot milk. Placing a mug in front of her friend, Avril said, ‘I’m afraid I have a confession to make,’ and she told Jo about a night long ago when she thought she might have seen Amos kissing someone in an alley near the Serpent’s Tooth. ‘I feel bad about it,’ she ended. ‘I really ought to have told you at the time. But I wasn’t sure and I couldn’t risk telling you something like that if it wasn’t true, could I?’

  ‘I don’t know, Rilly. I’m not sure I’d have believed it anyway, not then. Anyway, it’s water under the bridge now. I know it sounds funny but that’s not really what bothers me about Amos. It’s that whole way of life he’s involved with. Maybe with Marty you saw something different because he flew helicopters and spent a lot of his time doing rescue work. Airlifting badly burned stokers off ships or winching up birdsnesting boys stuck on cliffs – that’s decent, worthwhile work. But what those Wearsby crews are doing is different, somehow, or else it makes them different. That Christmas party . . . You know, in a way it was actually mad. Even that might have been overlooked, I suppose. But deliberately getting that poor animal drunk and terrified out of his mind before driving him to his death – I’m sorry, that’s just not forgivable, Rilly. I know Amos didn’t do it personally because he was asleep on the settee with his boyfriend, but he was part of it; some of his friends were involved.’

  ‘Mm. It was a shitty thing to do, all right, but maybe you’re being a bit harsh about the other stuff, Jo? Plenty of people round here would say the job Amos and others like him are doing is very worthwhile. They’d probably say that helping prevent nuclear war is rather more important than rescuing people who get stuck on cliffs. Marty used to say he was thankful he wasn’t doing Amos’s job. He said the strain did something to you, day after day spent studying targets, towns in the Ukraine whose inhabitants had done nothing to you but who you might at any minute have to drop a bomb on. The whole spirit of it has to be cold and scientific but also aggressive, and all at the same time. I think that sort of life must take its toll.’

  ‘Oh, you can see it doing that,’ agreed Jo. ‘It’s one thing to get these guys highly motivated for something but it’s another if you’re going to keep them at that sort of pitch indefinitely. It changes them. I could see it in Amos. It made him cruder, something like that. Rougher. If you’re a hundred per cent professional bomber there isn’t any per cent left over for you to be an ordinary husband about the house, is there?’

  Avril glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘I think we’ve probably had enough Ovaltine. We could have some tea before I go and fetch the kids,’ she said, ‘though we needn’t worry about them. Nan and Grampa love having them. When we come home I’ll put them pretty much straight to bed.’ She took the kettle from the top of the stove and into the scullery where she lit a gas ring to bring the water all the way up to boiling.

  ‘Do you think those policemen know about you and Ted?’

  ‘That’s just it: you can never tell how much coppers know. Perhaps they went to his house and found a list of his customers including my name and they were just working through the list? I know he kept a notebook because sometimes he gave credit if you were too skint one day. It was very neat and businesslike with names and addresses and dates. That’s one of the things I like about him – he’s punctual and professional. There again people round here are that nosy, one of them might have seen him parked outside one night and they’d have probably told those detectives. That’s people round here: all smiles and good neighbours if you meet them out shopping; but they’d shop you too behind your back, given half the chance.’

  That morning Jo had made a sponge cake in Avril’s Wonder Oven: a metal affair with a thermometer set in its circular lid in which one could bake things by standing it on an ordinary gas ring. It was su
pposed to be more economical than having to heat an entire oven. This particular cake had raspberry jam in the middle and Jo now cut them both a slice each.

  ‘You weren’t really banking on him, though, were you?’ she asked Avril.

  ‘I suppose not. It was just nice to feel, you know, wanted again after a whole year of being a widow and a mother. Someone warm next to you. I really miss that part of it. Also, I do believe children need two parents. Petey definitely needs a man in his life. So at the back of my mind I admit there was always the thought: by a miracle someone decent might come your way. But the decent ones don’t always want to take on someone else’s children, do they? Ted’s very nice in the bedroom department but if it turns out he’s not all I hoped he might be in the other departments I don’t know that I’ve lost anything very much. I’m not pinning too many hopes on him. Fewer still after this morning.’

  ‘Bloody men.’ Jo gazed at her tea and smiled wanly. ‘I’m beginning to think a nice reliable nine-to-five orang-utan might be a safer bet after all. Perhaps I should get on to that lady scientist and get a few names and addresses . . . I’m so grateful to you, Rilly, taking me in like this. But short of going back to my parents I couldn’t think who to go to.’