by Alan Hardy
She desperately, so desperately wanted power over him. She wanted to fill his every waking moment, torment him incessantly, and twist and turn him like putty in her hands.
He swallowed, and assumed a defensive, even annoyed demeanour and expression. He hooded his eyes, and sat up.
“Freddie was a certain type of man, it’s true,” he commented drily, “but I doubt that he was really an evil man, or anything like that. He was the type of man many men of his class are like. It’s always fifty-fifty, isn’t it? He was difficult, I’m sure, but perhaps half the problem was in your reaction to him. Maybe he wasn’t as incorrect as you thought, maybe the fault was in you both…”
“How do you mean?” she asked abruptly, feeling angry, and almost abused.
“Perhaps your reaction to him was somewhat intemperate, and over-emotional..?” he suggested gently.
Fiona was speechless.
What did he mean?
What was he implying about her?
Should she just smile, or get up and slap him across his cheeky, beautiful face?
She couldn’t decide, and just sat there rubbing her wrist.
She felt both humiliated, and triumphant.
The way he was speaking about her wasn’t right. He’d reached into her emotional innards, had a good look around, and then, to put it bluntly, felt he had the right to disparage her.
It was like a smack in her own face.
On the other hand, the way he spoke about her, with allusions to matters not really up for discussion between people totally unrelated, proved that he was the letter-writer.
How else would he have the temerity to refer to her relationship with her husband if he didn’t already know everything there was to know? In her present conversation with him, no great information had been imparted.
So, he’d had the gall to pretend to be her husband, use that cover to discover what he could about her intimate life with that husband, and then had the cheek to comment on it in a manner she found offensive, and downright derogatory.
How dare he?
“Flight Lieutenant Manfred,” she began, pointedly forgetting his Christian name, “do you remember my queries in the letter I sent you?”
“Of course,” he replied, looking chastened, and somewhat wary.
She instantly felt sorry for him, and regretted her frostiness. After all, he was so young he hardly knew how to conduct himself in such delicate cases. A young chap would never know when to keep his mouth shut or not, and when to say a lot, or little.
She would love to be able to teach him, but then she herself knew little about such affairs.
“Do you know anything about Freddie’s letters to me?” she asked quite savagely, causing Matthew to flinch.
He hesitated for a moment.
“No, I don’t,” he replied. “What you wrote in your recent letter was very strange, I must admit, but then I was never close to Freddie, and nor was I a member of his group of mates. So, I’m afraid I can’t…”
He was unable to meet her stare, glancing haphazardly about the tea-room.
“Did you, either solely or with others, write those letters?”
She felt avenged.
He looked nonplussed, his lips quivering as he searched for valid words.
She was an interrogator, she felt, forensic, unremitting, callous even.
Serve the beautiful man right for being so disrespectful and cheeky.
“Of course not.”
He was lying through his teeth. She knew that. His furtive, guilty, adorable eyes betrayed him. She kept her stare relentlessly fixed upon him, as she wallowed in her rather vicious dominance over him.
That was it, really.
There were a few more pleasantries, and also the interesting news that he was being posted back to the base near her home, rejoining 287 Squadron in Scotland.
That thrilled her.
She invited him to her birthday do next month, at which half the people who mattered in the county would be present.
“Are you happy about the posting?” she asked.
“It’s a cushy number,” he answered honestly. “Covering the occasional convoy, or scrambling to investigate radar reports of intruders, which turn out to be flocks of seagulls, is more my idea of warfare than the endless round of combat we had last year down here in the south.”
“Hardly heroic, patriotic sentiments, Matthew?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Mrs MacIntosh,” he countered. “I want Britain to win this war as much as the next man, but I also want to get through it unscathed. Anything wrong with that?”
“Nothing at all, Matthew.”
She asked him a few questions about his background and his experience of the war, which he seemed to very guarded about.
There was one bit of verbal sparring which amused them both towards the end of their meeting.
“How does the Spitfire compare with the Messerschmitt 109 in manoeuvrability, speed, diving, climbing and speed of turning?” she asked. “Freddie would never discuss such things. He said they were of no interest and concern to women. But I’ve always been intrigued about anything to do with aeroplanes. I’ve lived all my life next to an airfield, and, as you know, my family has had close ties with 287 Squadron, long before I married Freddie. I’ve maintained the tradition of holding the fetes and parties which daddy set up after the last war in support of the squadron.”
“Well,” he replied with a chuckle, “we’re not really supposed to talk about operational issues. You’ve seen the poster, haven’t you? CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES. I might get arrested if I’m not careful.”
“What? Talking to the wife of a hero?”
“A hero? Was Freddie a hero?” he asked, looking doubtful.
“What would you call someone who lost his life for his country?”
“Very dead?”
They both laughed, rather naughtily, and instinctively glanced round to make sure nobody had heard them.
She enjoyed that. Sharing something with Matthew. Something intimate, even naughty. He and she together, separate from the rest.
So, that was the situation as of now, as she sat on the sofa in her hotel-room.
Three tasks awaited her.
Firstly, who had been writing the letters to her?
Well, she was convinced that was Flight Lieutenant Matthew Manfred.
Secondly, who had killed Freddie?
She knew for a good many reasons that his death had not been an accident of war, but had been a deliberate, cold-blooded murder.
Thirdly, who, amongst the people whose lives touched hers, whether directly or coincidentally, was the spy?
For, if there was one incontrovertible fact in this whole business, it was that there was a spy in their midst.
And one other thing. She knew that her life depended on her solving that particular puzzle.
She stayed in London for a few more days.
She even got caught up in a couple of air raids, and spent a whole night in a bomb-shelter, lapping up the atmosphere, listening to the people having a sing-song, not really caring that she couldn’t fall asleep.
It was scary, but exhilarating.
She visited a few friends she hadn’t seen for a while, but also found time to wander round bombed-out London, checking out its famous streets and zones. It was certainly curious tip-toeing over the rubble, and walking by destroyed buildings, but it wasn’t as bad as she had imagined it would be. It was true what they said. London could take it.
She would have loved to meet up with Matthew again, but such a proposition would have sounded indelicate. Anyway, she had arranged to see him next month at her birthday party. She would have to wait, however frustrating that was.
She wondered if, as well as being the letter-writer, he might also be the murderer, and even the spy, and how she would react if he was.
Or it could be she was looking for three different people, linked in some way perhaps, or maybe not at all. But that was unlikely.
> When she got home to her beautiful mansion in Scotland, her head buzzing with all the possible scenarios she had puzzled over on the train journey up, she was exhausted.
James, her butler, drew her attention to a pile of letters in the lobby.
She took them with her to the drawing-room, and leafed disinterestedly through them prior to going to bed. They were nearly all of a business nature, either dealing with her various charitable fetes and duties, or financial matters. She had people like solicitors and chairmen of boards to deal with all that, and she would pass them on tomorrow.
One letter, postmarked London, caught her eye.
She tore it open.
With a gasp, she saw it was from Flight Lieutenant Turnbill.
It was a brief answer to her own letter. It was also type-written.
He apologized for what he had done. He admitted that Freddie had persuaded him and others to answer her letters, in order to save him, Freddie, the trouble, and that he, Turnbill, had carried on doing it longer than the others. He again apologized profusely, and said that it was wicked of him, and he hoped she would find it in her to forgive him.
She leant against the mantelpiece in the drawing-room, the letter falling from her grasp as her arm fell by her side.
She could hardly breathe.
What on earth was going on?
6
“As I wrote in my letter, Mrs MacIntosh, I’m deeply ashamed of my actions. What started out as a bit of a jape, or, at best, a helping hand extended to an old friend…well, in the end…it became something which went too far…”
“Why did you do it, Flight Lieutenant?” asked Fiona coldly, this time sitting within the genteel clinks and restrained chatter of the Baker Street Lyons tea-room in London.
“God knows… When something like that starts, then it’s difficult to stop… I know it must have caused you a great deal of pain…”
“What made you take the deception so much further? Why you, and not the others?”
“You mean the P.O. Box number?”
“Yes,” answered Fiona, staring him full in the face. “Was it just you from then on?”
“Yes,” he replied. “The others got bored with the whole rigmarole one by one, and I just…well…got hooked by the deception… I carried it on far too long. I can’t really explain why.”
He looked uncomfortable, and was obviously eager to be on his way.
Fiona took a sip or two from her tea-cup, and studied him intently.
Despite the situation’s awkwardness, Flight Lieutenant Turnbill’s fleshy, ruddy-skinned face still exuded a brash self-confidence which grated upon her.
It wasn’t that he was embarrassed by his past actions. More that he just couldn’t wait to buzz off.
His statuesque form, oversized in juxtaposition with the small chair he was plonked on, seemed fidgety. He kept stretching out his legs under the table, occasionally scraping against her boots, while he glanced at the clock on the far wall.
When he stood up to go, Fiona couldn’t deny the impressiveness of his muscular body, and the unflinching rigidity of his expansive features.
This was a man who thought he was God’s gift to women, and Fiona hated him.
For all his servile apologizing, there was a cocky look in his big, brown eyes which revealed the truth: he considered her a woman like any other, someone ripe for the picking if he should choose.
“Flight Lieutenant Turnbill, could I just ask you a further question?”
“Of course, Mrs MacIntosh,” he answered, looking somewhat wary.
“As you were pretending to be my husband for a good many months, and over a good many letters, what impression did you form of our relationship?”
“Our relationship?”
“I mean, our marriage.”
“Our marriage?”
The man was a buffoon, thought Fiona.
“I mean, my marriage with Freddie. What impression did you get?”
“Well,” said Turnbill, mouthing the words slowly, and fiddling nervously with his cap held in his hands, “like most marriages, it was fifty-fifty, you know.”
“Fifty-fifty?” Fiona echoed, not far from bursting into laughter.
“Well…Freddie was Freddie…you know, he—he could be difficult, I suppose… He was typical of his…his…”
“Class?”
“Yes, his class… Yes, that’s it.”
“Anything else?”
“Well… Probably you and he weren’t…well… How shall I say?”
“Freddie and I were probably not particularly suited? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, exactly, Mrs MacIntosh.”
Fiona paused, staring unrelentingly at the poor man.
“Well, I am obliged to you for agreeing to meet me here,” she said, extending a hand to him. “I wish you all the best for the future.”
“Thank you very much,” he said, shaking her hand, surprisingly gently, and giving the slightest of bows. “We’ll probably see each other soon anyway. I’m being posted back to 287 Squadron.”
“Really?”
How very strange, thought Fiona. Both Matthew and Turnbill posted back to Scotland. Was that just coincidence, or did it mean something? Was it to decide which one would be taking over as Squadron Leader once the present incumbent, Squadron Leader Jackson, had moved on to greater things? Were they being put in direct competition, and their performance marked to see which one would end up top of the class? Or was there something going on which should worry her?
Anyway, Flight Lieutenant Turnbill was lying through his teeth.
He no doubt had been responsible for some input in the first few letters, but would have got bored soon after, and quickly packed up. There was also no way that such a dolt could possibly have written as the letter-writer had done. The sentiments, feelings, thoughts and affection expressed would have been beyond him.
After he had left, Fiona went to the Ladies.
While there, she stared at herself in the mirror.
She unbuttoned her black coat—it was a particularly cold March morning—and scrutinized her figure in its black-polka-dotted white dress. The style of the dress accentuated her slim waist, and even her bosom. Her curves were still just about satisfactory, she supposed. As was the firmness of her face. To make sure, she plopped on a tiny bit more powder, and smeared some lipstick on her drying lips. Just a light covering. Like a slight snowfall you barely noticed on the ground. She had never believed in overdoing make-up. She wasn’t that sort.
As she exited on to Baker Street, she was taken aback to see Flight Lieutenant Turnbill over the other side of the street, chatting animatedly to a blonde-haired sergeant in the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force). She was well-shaped (much more than Fiona herself) and a bit more than medium height. Her blonde hair was collected at the back in a bun. Her hand rested on Turnbill’s arm as she spoke, and she occasionally laughed.
Although Fiona didn’t see her features clearly, she reminded her of someone. The hair, and the body-shape in its greyish-blue WAAF uniform.
Straining to keep the couple in focus, she was forced to move to the right.
She bumped into a man and, with the shifting of their bodies and echoing polite “Sorry!”, by the time she looked up and over the street, she had lost them.
She rushed over, turning this way and that, but couldn’t get a glimpse of either of them.
There he was! Striding off in the direction of Regent’s Park.
She looked around.
She decided to follow him.
There was no sign of the blonde-haired, rough-faced woman.
Yes, that was it. Her face was a bit roughened, whether through excessive application of make-up, or just naturally scabby skin, or a bit of both, she didn’t know, but it was that which reminded her of somebody in her recent past.
She was young enough too, younger than Fiona herself. Under thirty, she would guess.
She kept well behind Turnbill. What
with all the people between them, there was no chance of being spotted.
He turned into Regent’s Park, and walked along a number of paths until he got to the small artificial lake.
He made for a bench by the side of the lake.
A greyish-blue figure sitting on the bench stood up, and moved towards Turnbill.
They shook hands, and had a quick chat.
It was Matthew.
Fiona instinctively held back, moving towards a kiosk selling sweets and tobacco.
She positioned herself behind it, so that she could peep out and keep the two under observation.
After a short time, Matthew tapped Turnbill on the right arm, as if thanking him, and they parted.
Both moved away in directions which took them away from her.
‘Well, well,’ she thought. ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’
She turned around to retrace her steps back to Baker Street and its Underground station, and, as she did so, the blonde-haired WAAF sergeant walked by her in the direction Turnbill had taken, without giving her a glance.
Fiona now recognized her immediately. She was a member of the WAAF who had been based at the airfield back home in Scotland early last year. Fiona had seen her at one or two events and dances. She seemed to remember she was married to one of the pilots, but she didn’t think it was Flight Lieutenant Turnbill.
The final piece in the jigsaw came to her as she was about to board the train at Baker Street Underground Station.
Her name was Paula. Paula Wentworth. The wife of Flying Officer Wentworth, who had been lost in action over Northern France during a recent sortie. It was the same sortie at the end of which Freddie’s plane had been hit, and Freddie had been cast down to live with the fishes in the deep, deep blue sea.
Curiouser and curiouser.
7
As she was on the train, she realized she had made a calamitous mistake.
She got off at the next stop, waited anxiously for a train to take her back, and, once at Baker Street, ran like the clappers to Regent’s Park.
She didn’t know what was going on exactly, but obviously Flight Lieutenant Manfred was in cahoots with Flight Lieutenant Turnbill, and the latter was in cahoots with Paula Wentworth. So, logically, all three formed a trio who were in cahoots with each other, against her, Fiona, she imagined.
