Eye of the Survivor
Snowdonia National Park, North Wales.
Hi, it's me again. I would tell you where we are but I don’t have enough spit in my mouth to get it all out. Somewhere unpronounceable in North Wales. Between us, Conrad and I speak at least ten languages and neither of us can pronounce the village names around here. They all sound like somebody being strangled. Anyway, we're on a 20-mile cross-country hike from one part of the mountains here to a town on the coast. I've been on a business trip, discussing future business plans with our houses in France, the Netherlands and Britain. Nothing much to tell anybody about, the houses keep to our business plan and maintain a low profile. Therefore, they are prospering and that's all we need to know. I do have a plan to do something in Germany but you really don’t need to know about that. Conrad has been discussing churchie stuff concerned with aiding refugees from Venezuela. Once all that was done, Conrad and I took a week off for the hike.
Before you ask, I'm pretty much all right now. Where I took that bullet has healed over and the scarring has nearly all gone. Or as much of it that is going to has. I did have an adhesion which required a bit of surgery but we caught it early and it's all fixed. I'm back to being reasonably fit at last and these mountain hikes are the last stage in getting back to normal.
Conrad's surprisingly capable of looking after us in these conditions. After all, he grew up when this was the standard way of travelling from one place to the next and he knows how to handle being in the woods where there aren't any fast-food joints. I'm a city girl, being out here in the wild is strange to me. There's a lot of things I don’t really know. For example, first night out, I shot a rabbit for our dinner. I'd have eaten it without a thought but Conrad explained that it could be diseased and we needed to check it very carefully. As it happened, it was clear but it might not have been. Cleaning it was a pain as well and then it turned out we're not supposed to eat the wildlife anyway. So now we stick to ready-made meals in retort packages. Just pour water into a flameless heater, stick the pouch in and twenty minutes later we have a hot meal. Tonight I have cassoulet while Conrad has sausages in spicy sauce with rice. What I want to know is how did Conrad find out that the French military ration packs are the best ones on the market?
I rooted around in my daily bag and found the starter pouch and a package of salted crackers. Conrad was doing the same and he pulled out his starter with a tangible air of achievement. "Venison pate, Angel. What have you got?"
"Fish and vegetable salad. I've got to call into the Mountain Rescue center, then I'll eat. You get ahead." Conrad loves pate in general and venison pate in particular. If you're wondering about the rescue center, this is a pretty wild area. It always beats me how a place as small and as crowded as Britain can still have parts that are deserted and almost untouched wilderness. This is one of them and the rules for visitors are strict. Take nothing out and leave nothing behind. I was breaking the rules by shooting that rabbit and I've got a fine waiting for me as a result. Cutting down trees or damaging plants is also a strict no-no and have serious penalties attached. Above all, trekkers have to call in to the rescue center each morning and evening to confirm they are in good condition and know where they are. In exchange they get a detailed local weather forecast and that can be a life-saver.
"Mountain Rescue Center, Meiriona here. Is this an emergency?"
"Hi, Meiriona. No, this is just a routine call-in. Conrad and Angel, we're in good health, warm, dry and well-fed. Our GLI location is . . " I read the numbers off the display on our Global Location Index tracker. Surprisingly, we were more than 1,300 feet up, a lot more than I had thought. We must have been climbing steadily since we set out. "We're camping overnight here and will be heading west again tomorrow. Ultimate destination, Canaerfon."
"All right, I have that. Be advised that your route takes you across a wild part of the national park. Nobody has been there for a long time. No surfaced roads you see. Take care, rock outcrops are slate and you can break an ankle easily. Have a good night. I'm transferring you to the weather forecast now."
The weather forecast was mostly harmless. It is summer so it's warm. No strong winds or storms but there was fog forecast for early morning followed by drizzle clearing by mid-morning. Typical North Wales. The Mountain Rescue monitoring center is mostly run by volunteers funded by fees from hikers and trekkers. It's pretty expensive to come here which is policy to keep the number of people in the park down. If visitors do get into trouble and require emergency extraction, there are rotodynes based at RAF Valley a bit north of here. That can get really expensive. There used to be a lot of airfields in this part of the world, reminders of when the Luftwaffe was based here trying to intercept US Navy raids. Mostly, they are gone now, either derelict or built-over.
I opened the pouch containing my starter and started spreading what looked like coleslaw mixed with fish on the crackers. Conrad had already finished his pate and was alternately licking his fingers and searching for any crumbs he might have missed. "Good pate. Conrad?"
He smiled a bit sheepishly at me. "Very good. It's hard to remember the French government give this to their military personnel. Most ration packs are very institutional. How's your fish?'
"I thought it was coleslaw but it isn’t. Not quite, anyway. It’s a mix of veggies and some lumps of seasoned white fish in a sauce of some sort. Not mayo. Goes well with the crackers." I reached into my bag and felt the pouch of venison pate that had been included with my lunch. I'd put it to one side and kept it for Conrad. "Now what have I got here? Why it's an extra package of the venison pate. I wonder what its worth?"
I held it up by one and waved it temptingly. Conrad couldn’t resist licking his lips at the sight. "Trade you my isotonic drink for it?"
He knows I drink a lot of that isotonic stuff. So does 'Lea by the way. She claims it helps prevent her getting cramps, something her over-muscled body is prone to. I pursed my lips, "throw in your Vinogel and you have a deal."
Vinogel is a jellied wine concentrate issued by the French Army. It's supposed to be dissolved in water to give something similar to red wine but I, like most people who get it, eat it like jello. Conrad hates it, Vanna is disgusted by it but I like it. Go figure. Anyway, we traded packages and Conrad tucked into his second helping of venison. Meanwhile I ate my cassoulet. It's a duck stew with beans and bacon and its good. By the time I had finished with coffee well-laced with Bacardi 151 from my hip flask, we were happy.
"Should we put the tent up?" Conrad was happy as well. Two 100-gram packages of venison pate, his sausages and a desert of fruit jelly and an energy bar had filled him up. I shook my head. You know how to kill people sleeping in a tent? Sneak up, throw gasoline on it and apply a match. Or toss a road flare. People inside are trapped, can’t get out and get burned alive. I'm not afraid of dying, I sort of accept that I'm already dead, but I don’t see any reason why dying should take longer than it has to.
"You can use it if you want to but I'll sleep in the open. That way, I'll wake up if anybody is prowling around."
Conrad looked around and frowned slightly. "The weather forecast said nothing about a storm coming in?"
I shook my head. "Warm night, fog tomorrow morning, drizzle. That's it. Something wrong?"
"I'm not sure. Something's not the way it should be." Conrad sounded cautious. He comes from a time before weather forecasts and is damned good at reading local conditions. When we're out in the woods like this, he's almost infallible at predicting changes. He says he can smell the rain coming which sounds as reasonable as anything else.
Well, it turned out he was right. Again. A little bit after dawn the wind picked up and big drops of rain started to come down. I had just enough time to run to the tent and dive inside before the skies opened and the rain really came hammering down. A constant roar supplemented by the sound of the downpour beating on the fabric of the tent. It was coming down so hard we could feel a fine spray inside the tent where the drops had been broken up by the canvas but still managed to force their way through despite the anti-water treatment.
A minute or two after it started, my portable telephone started giving the emergency alert warning. I opened up the screen and there it was. "Conrad, we'd better be careful. MRC says there are severe localized mountain storms forming and we might see some heavy rain. Thunderstorms are possible."
The tent was lit up by a brilliant flash with a loud clap of thunder directly on top of it. That meant the storm was directly overhead and that the warning was a bit late. My telephone was flashing again and I picked up the call.
"Mountain Rescue Center here. Are you two safe?"
"Yes, so far. Our tent is up and we have taken shelter. This is Meiriona?"
"It is, look you, this storm is very bad. The weather officer is not sure how it came out of nowhere but the leading edge is bright purple on the weather radar. There is some rotation in the storm; it is not a tornado situation yet but it could become one. We're getting reports of trees down and extensive power outages already. If you need help, call, but we're not sure when we will be able to get to you."
"Thanks’ Meiriona. We'll ride this out. We seem to be sheltered where we are."
"All right then. Signing off."
That coincided with another thunder clap and lightning flash. This one was even worse than the preceding one so I took a small chance and looked outside through the crack where the tent opened. I got thoroughly wet for my pains, the rain wasn't coming down in drops but in a solid sheet and it was being blown almost horizontal by the wind. That was impressive but what was more so was that the visibility outside was down to a few feet. A sort of strange misty gray seemed to infiltrate everything. There were dark shadows moving in the gray; when I realized they were bits of trees and other heavy debris, I knew we were in real trouble.
Conrad had pitched our tent so that it was shielded by a dip in the ground and surrounding boulders. I had assumed that was in case there were ill-intentioned people around but now I knew that it was to protect us from storms. Whether it would be enough to protect us against tempests like this was another matter. Even so, I could see the roof and walls of our tent bulging where wind-blown debris was hitting them. Why they didn’t split open under the impact I don’t know. "Angel, get your head back inside the tent now!"
Conrad rarely yells orders at me and when he does I tend to obey them. I assume that if he is stirred enough to yell, he knows what he is talking about. Or possibly he just had a warning from his boss. I have no patience with people who don’t listen to advice because they want to show off. I was caught in a drive-by shooting once, nothing to do with me, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. A man had seen what was about to happen and dragged his wife down to cover. He told her to stay down . . . and the silly bitch made a point of doing the opposite and standing up. Unbelievable. Took a stray bullet right in the smug expression on her face. Good example of evolution in my opinion.
What happened next was something I’d never experienced before. The rain and sound suddenly doubled and there was a sort of 'whoom' noise. Our tent came within a hair of collapsing completely, certainly the metal support rods bent and the roof was pushed down so far we were trapped between it and the ground. The wind scream was deafening and seemed to go on forever. Then, it slowly started to ebb. Twenty minutes later whatever had hit us was over and there was just normal heavy rain outside. We weren't out of danger yet. Remember I said our tent was in a dip? Well it was flooding and we had to get out of there. We got our stuff and climbed up so we were in the lee of a rock outcrop. We had proper weatherproof outerwear of course but we were still soaked. Once we were on top of the rocks, we could see that the strange gray mist was fading and we were getting some visibility back.
The area around us was shocking. The bushes and trees hadn't just been uprooted, they'd been splintered by the storm. Wreckage was scattered over the ground, mostly windblown branches, stray leaves and twigs, you name it. There was something else as well. Remember I said the weather as warm? Well, it wasn't now, it was cold. Not bitterly, but enough to be uncomfortable. I had a bad feeling we were looking at a disaster. Just to confirm it, my telephone went off again.
"Are you two all right?" Meiriona's voice was shaking.
"We are, I think by the skin of our teeth. What happened? A tornado?"
"It was a macroburst. The wind went off the scale at 135 miles per hour. We're getting tornado reports as well. We've got at least six dead out here, dozens wounded and there's no power for miles. No roads either, blocked by trees or landslips. We’re completely overloaded so if you two are safe, I have to move on to the next group. Good luck."
The rain was continuing to ease off. Even so, it took us a couple of hours to get everything sorted out. We rescued our tent and re-erected it on a patch of what was laughingly called dry ground. Our backpacks had survived as advertised and kept our clothes dry so when the rain finally stopped we could change into dry things. Conrad got our computer out and looked up "macroburst." When he read the entry, he whistled.
"What's up?"
"This macroburst thing. It's rare but apparently it happens in mountains sometimes. What happens is a layer of warm, dry air gets trapped low down with cold, wet air above it. If it's raining, the upper layer gets wetter and heavier and the whole thing becomes unstable. Then, it flips and the cold wet air drops down to hit the ground underneath. Just like suddenly dropping a bucket of water into a bath. Apparently, the damage is worse than tornadoes."
I looked around. It certainly seemed that way. "Conrad, you're the expert at this sort of thing. Do we move on or stay here."
He thought about that for a moment. "We get some hot food inside us, then we might as well move on. We'll not gain anything by staying here. As soon as the visibility has improved enough to make trekking safe, we’ll try and get as high as possible. The ground will be drier. After last night, the ground low down is probably a swamp."
I agreed. "What's your breakfast package?"
Conrad opened his 24-hour pouch. These things are a marvel. Weigh two kilograms and feed one person well for a day. We had brought five and have three left each and once they run out I'll shoot rabbits and to hell with the rules. "Chicken sausage with potatoes and peppers, crackers and fruit jam. Coffee of course and a pouch of fruit cordial."
"Same here. One thing, all the ground water is likely to be contaminated. What we have is what we've got."
"Well, we do have purification tablets but I wouldn't bet on their effectiveness. If we're going to walk out of here, we'd better be careful. I suspect the search and rescue people are way more than overloaded right now."
Where we had camped overnight had been fairly open country, odd patches of trees here and there but mostly open. As we trekked west, I could see that decision to stay in open ground had probably saved our lives. The patches of forest had grown more frequent and the tracks that led through them narrower and more overgrown. Notice I said 'had'. The storm had knocked down more trees than it had left standing and the trunks were in rows touching each other. It was obvious that the damage was radiating out from a center point and equally apparent that if we'd camped in one of those patches of pine forest, we'd have been squashed flat when the trees came down.
About mid-morning, a Royal Air Force Rotodyne came over and hovered above us. Almost immediately, my phone rang.
"Mountain Rescue Center here. Is there a rotodyne above you?"
"Conrad and Angel de Llorente. Yes, there is. Meiriona?"
"Meiriona is off-duty now. This is Cerys. Do you need a pick-up?"
"We're doing fine. We have food and shelter. Put us way down on the rescue priority list; we can walk out of here."
There was a delightfully-accented laugh on the other end. "That makes a change; most people are sure they are about to die and need immediate rescue. All right, I'll tell the 'dyne and it can move on. Thank you for your consideration on this, we're facing a full-scale disaster here."
"If we can help, let us know. Otherwise, we'll check in at dusk."
"Thank you. Good luck." Above us, the rotodyne waggled its wings and flew off, obviously to check on the next party in the area.
I looked at Conrad who was smiling slightly. "Keep heading west?"
He obviously agreed. "Ground is heading down and the forests are getting thicker. There's an odd patch not far west from here. It's marked as Druid's Forest and is supposed to be very old. And haunted by the spirits of ancient Druids massacred by the Romans. There's a note here that local people avoid the place due to supernatural occurrences. Also that it's registered as an ancient monument."
"Interesting. Let's have a look." I'm always interested in places people avoid. They can be really useful sometimes.
If Druid's Forest was ancient, it wasn't any more. It had been flattened. The trees hadn’t just been torn out of the ground, they’d been ground into splinters. Reading the ground it looked to me like a freak of the terrain had channeled the energy of the macroburst on to the patch. Conrad looked at the scene, frowning the way he always did when something puzzled him. "Angel, if this is an ancient forest, why are the trees modern? I'd say they are sixty years old if that."
"Forest got cut down and replanted?"
"But it is supposed to be haunted and so on. Ancient beliefs like that are surprisingly strong. I'd have expected this to be untouched forest, it looks almost farmed to me. Yet it's an ancient monument?"
We went in and wandered around. I could see what Conrad meant, the place somehow didn’t feel old. Then I looked at one of the trees that seemed to have been lifted out of the ground by the macroburst. Its roots were largely intact and tangled within them was a piece of dark-blue painted but very rusty metal.
2009 - Eye of the Survivor
Re: 2009 - Eye of the Survivor
Chapter Two
The Saloon Bar, Pontwyn-Pairys Inn Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
Take my word for it, it tends to cause unwelcome interest when a man and a woman start comparing bullet wound scars in the bar of a very staid Welsh inn. In the early days of my association with the Thames Valley Police, Peter Atkinson and Isolda Rowley walked into an ambush and got shot to shit. For my own reasons, of course, I had to go in there and get them out before they died on us. They were evacuated in time and made it. The dipshits who did the shooting both got killed, something that really helped me get accepted by the police there. Isolda is crippled but remained a police officer and made a good career for herself. Peter was invalided out, I suspect because his wife was traumatized by him getting shot and insisted. He got a good pension from the police and landed himself a job as an aviation historian at one of the Oxford colleges. Anyway, he's standing in front of me, his shirt lifted to show the two bullet scars on his stomach. I'm doing the same, showing him the wound from the bullet I took in Rome and several others I've accumulated over the years. Behind me Conrad is grinning broadly, he's seen this ceremony before. The other drinkers in the bar, not so much.
Anyway, we got to this place about two days after the great storm. We stayed put, partly because the area was still badly disrupted by the storm and that made travel difficult, partly because rescue and repairs were everywhere and we didn’t want to throw any extra burden on them (that was Conrad's idea, as you probably guess it wouldn’t have occurred to me) and partly because we needed to call the find in. We knew we were dealing with a US Navy aircraft from the color the metal was painted. That midnight blue is unmistakable, not least because the Navy still use it.
So, I called the Home Office, they put me through to Peter and, after some catching-up talk, I told him what we had found. To wit, wreckage of one US Navy aircraft, probably from WW2 buried in the wilds of Wales. That means the wreck has to be excavated, any human remains removed, identified if possible, and returned home. Then the wreck has to be checked for unexploded munitions and the rest either handed to a museum or scrapped. Peter's job, or part of it, is to identify the aircraft, determine if it has any historical value and then make a decision over its disposal. Every year, lost aircraft turn up in Britain or the waters around it. Mostly German and American with a handful of others. Sometimes, they get found when the munitions explode which makes this work both vital and dangerous.
Just how dangerous was shown by the fourth member of our little party, Lieutenant Brian Ashe of the Royal Engineers who is very keen to make sure everybody knows he is not related to the central character of a TV series on bomb disposal. He doesn’t have a belly scar but he does have fragment scars on his left leg and limps a little because of them. He dropped his pants to show them and almost caused a local lady to faint.
In case you are wondering, one of the rules of this little ritual is that anybody who won’t show his scars or hasn't got any has to buy the next round of drinks. It's Conrad's turn and he showed everybody the scars from the shotgun wound in his back. They’re old now, but they still count, especially since he got them deliberately taking a bullet aimed at me. With all of us suitably established as serious people, I caused another outbreak of appalled disbelief by buying the next round of drinks. A woman sitting in a bar with three men, and buying the drinks made everybody watching feel that the ultimate in sin and depravity had befallen their community. I'm not sure which part they considered the most dreadful. Probably the depravity.
"Most likely it was coming back from a raid on Liverpool. The carrier aircraft were operating right on the edge of their range when they hit there. If they took a hit in their fuel tanks or engines, they wouldn’t make it back." Peter sounded saddened despite the fact that those losses kept him in work.
"Hope so." Brian was calculating odds. "If that bird was on its way back, it would have dropped its load. That will make my job a bit easier."
"They'll probably still have live ammunition on board. We're probably looking at a Corsair or Skyraider. The worst of the losses were in 1947 and were climbing, right up to The Big One. By then everything older had gone. You know, I was speaking with a colleague over in America who believes if the war had gone on a bit longer, the carrier aircraft losses might have reached prohibitive levels." Peter took a gulp out of his beer. "He said America was pretty war-weary by 1947."
Brian took a look at his mug, realized it was empty and signaled for another round. The barmaid looked worried by that. Not at the beers Brian and Peter were drinking but at the spirits Conrad and I were knocking back. Me in particular; I'd had four Bacardi 151s by then and she was obviously concerned that I was going to keel over. I knew it would take at least another four before I reached that point. Until then, I can control the symptoms of being hammered. Mostly.
"What's the situation at Druid's Forest, Brian?" Conrad was nursing his second brandy. It's on my bucket list to trap him into a shot-for-shot and get him completely hammered but he's really good at ducking it.
"We've got RAF Regiment people up there to guard the wreck until it's excavated. In addition, Druid's Forest is our forward gathering point for people who were trapped by the storm and had trouble getting out. So, there's a field medical detachment out there and a search-and-rescue team. Few people are still coming in, but their condition is getting progressively worse. They're the ones who stayed put until it was almost too late. Very soon now, we will be terminating the hunt for survivors and starting the one for victims."
"People don’t realize how easy it is to die of exposure." Conrad shook his head. "Even on a warm day, being soaking wet and exposed to constant wind will do it. Add in hunger and dehydration and they're done."
"Trouble is city people don’t understand how quickly nature can kill them. I know, I'm one of them." I swallowed about half my shot of rum. "The difference is that I just take it for granted that nature isn’t kind and generous. She's absolutely neutral and doesn’t care whether people live or die."
"You're a bit of a force of nature yourself, Angel." Peter was laughing but looked slightly nervous. Most people do when they poke fun at me. Scared I'll take offense and do them. Alright let's clear that one up. I don't usually understand why I should take offense and I assume that people I know are joking when they make fun of me. I don’t understand jokes about people either, so I watch everybody else, and then laugh when they do. I'll let you into a secret, psychopaths like me are really bored and very lonely most of the time. We can see the world, we can watch it but we can't be part of it. So, we do things to amuse ourselves or out of frustration that things are going on around us and we can't participate in them. Conrad's taught me ways I can be a part of the things surrounding me and for that I'll forgive him anything.
"So I have been told." I answered gravely. "The people who don’t tell me that, usually ask where I keep my scythe and pale horse."
That caused a round of relieved laughter that was interrupted by the bell ringing. "Excuse me ladies and gentlemen, the kitchen is opening. We have sausages, eggs and chips tonight. If you will come to the bar and let me know if you would like a meal, the kitchen staff will get to work."
The Pontwyn-Pairys Inn normally has a reputation for good food but it's restricted to basic meals on a set menu for residents only right now. The roads are still being cleared and power is unreliable so everybody is rationing what they have. Here, the kitchen uses bottled gas so they open for as limited a period as they can manage. The owner is really apologetic but he's doing the best he can under the circumstances and his guests know that. It's worth noting that the eggs were very fresh and the sausages locally made. All in all, we're doing all right.
"Are there any problems up at Druid's Forest?" Peter asked the question through a mouthful of yolk-soaked chips. I know what he meant; every time a wreck was reported, somebody would go out there with a spade and try and find themselves a few 'souvenirs'. Sometimes they get more than they expect. There was a case of a couple of dipshits in Dartmoor who tried that with the wreck of a Skyraider. What they didn’t know was the aircraft was shot down while coming in, not going out and they hit the tail fuse of an unexploded thousand pound bomb with a spade. Didn't know that bombs often have nose and tail fuses. The bomb didn't stay unexploded any longer which really complicated the autopsy.
"Not really." Brian sounded a little hesitant. "Our main worry is likely to be unexploded .50 caliber or 20mm ammunition. One of them can kill somebody just as surely as a thousand pounder if the odds break wrong for the recipient. It could happen too; one of the rock-heads is convinced he saw a couple of locals hanging around the wreck site. Tried to run them in but they slipped off. Or so he says."
"Rock-heads?" I glanced at Conrad.
"The RAF Regiment is known to the service as the Rock-Heads Regiment. There are rumors that back in 1942, one of them knocked a Mark IV tank out by head-butting it." Conrad addressed himself to his chips. "Now why can’t we get proper chips like this in Bangkok?"
Crash Site, Druids Forest, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
Give the British credit, they are damned good at handling disasters. They try and keep everything on a local level with the district councils making the decisions and asking for resources while the county and national executive assign priorities and manage resources and information. That means the people who need to work, work and the administrators administrate. The higher people are, the more likely their job is to collect and allocate resources and fight the press rather than wield spades. The area was hit by what the newspapers claimed was the worst storm in British history (nowhere close but that's another story) including the macroburst and three tornadoes and they had normal services restored in five days. Mostly, there were a few outlying areas that were still isolated but even they had the supplies they needed and power. The main lines were still down in a lot of places but the Air Force rotodynes had lifted in portable generators to fill the gap.
So, here we are, at the crash site we found, watching patiently while the crash site is excavated. The Royal Engineers were doing the digging, starting where we had found the metal and preparing a trench. Sure enough, they'd found more debris. They'd also found more in the roots of the blown-down trees. To me it was just a pile of tangled metal in a hole but I could see that Conrad and Peter were getting puzzled.
"Something up, Conrad?"
"Remember we learned about stratification at the dig up in Lincolnshire last year? Well, the stratification here is wrong. We're supposed to be in old forest but the trees are on top of the wreckage. That means they are later than the wreck. The site itself looks odd to me as well. It's as if . . . . "
"Somebody had dug a hole and buried the wreckage?" Peter had come over and joined us. "This isn’t how aircraft crash. If the plane had been crippled and forced down, it would have hit the ground at a shallow angle and bounced along the ground. There would have been a wreckage trail, not this buried pile. If the aircraft had fallen out of the sky; say the pilot was killed, it would have been in a steep dive and the wreckage would have been dispersed by the impact. If it had exploded in mid-air, the debris would be all over the place."
"So somebody found the wreck, dug a hole and buried everything." Conrad was thoughtful. "More than one person, it would need to be a big hole. Then they planted trees on top to cover it?"
"They'd have to. If the aircraft came down in the forest, it would level the trees at the impact point and the scars on the rest would still be visible. They last a long, long time. I can't see any old scars on any of these trees. I think they were all planted after the aircraft crashed and the wreckage buried. Their roots have grown down and forced the wreckage apart. That is one reason why the aircraft is in such bad condition."
I found myself visualizing the amount of work required to bury the wreckage of a reasonable-sized aircraft. Now, I've got quite a bit of experience in burying things I don’t want the police to find, mostly things that require pits about six feet long and three feet wide. It's a lot of hard work. I can't imagine digging out a pit that's big enough to hold something thirty feet long by the same wide. All right, the objects I buried had to go down at least six feet to avoid being found, but an aircraft? This was a serious engineering project. Which raised another question. Why? I guessed the answer to that one, again from my own experience. Because they didn’t want the authorities to find it. And, when this aircraft was likely to have crashed, that meant the German occupation forces.
"Boys, is it likely we've stumbled across something tied in with the Resistance?"
Peter was saved from answering by an imperious blast on a whistle. Brian was looking around at us. "All right, will everybody stop digging. We have live ammunition down here. Looks like .30 Browning. We need to clear it. Also, I can smell fuel residue. Everybody, collect hazmat suits until we find out what we are dealing with."
I looked at Peter. "Fuel residue? After sixty years?"
"Buried like this, certainly. The light fractions will have gone but the heavy ones will still be around. Hazmat suits seems a bit excessive though."
Brian must have heard because he turned around with a big grin on his face. "Not since the Army got sued by somebody who claimed they got skin cancer from fuel residues. The Army always has, and always will, take every possible measure to protect our soldiers from harm. So, plastic hazmat suits, gloves and breathing masks."
He'd raised his voice a bit while reciting the last lines, I assume because Army lawyers mandated the exact words used. He got a laugh from his men who had obviously heard the line before, probably many times. One voice came out from the pit. "Sir, if this is another B-36, request permission to buy myself out!"
"Wilkens, if this is another B-36, it must have shrunk in the wash." That caused another roar of laughter and a smattering of applause. It occurred to me that Lieutenant Ashe was popular with his men. Usually that's a good thing, not always. He joined us, politely herding us back from the site as he did so. "All right, there'll be a delay while we get this sorted out. The book says all soldiers and leaders must maintain a proactive posture towards safety in day-to-day operations. The need for total commitment to safety should be made evident to commanders, senior soldiers, and their subordinates. The importance of safety is intensified for units and personnel engaged in munitions-related activities. One of my erstwhile colleagues forgot that and four men died. He would have been court-martialed only he was one of them."
I couldn't resist it. Bad of me I know but as you've probably realized by now, I'm a bad, bad girl. "Training plus Equipment plus Motivation plus Execution with Caution equals Safety."
He looked at me curiously. "Straight out of the munitions disposal manual, the classified one. How do you know that, Angel?"
"When running guns, some of the stuff that gets transported is really old. There's no profit in blowing up one's customers so care is needed and we got the best advice available."
"Brian, are you certain those are .30 Browning? Not .50s?" Peter was trying to change the subject away from things he didn’t want to know.
"I'll look at them more closely, they're all mixed up with mud, rust and debris but I'm fairly certain. If it's any help, it looks to me like they are in an ammunition tank which suggests they were feeding a wing gun."
"That aircraft must be old then. The Americans stopped using .30 wing guns early on. Corsairs had .50s, Skyraiders 20mm. That must be an early model Avenger which means we're looking for a three-man crew. This aircraft probably came down in '43. 1944 at the latest."
"That helps a little." Brian looked thoughtful. "We'll see if we can find the identity plate when all this is cleared up. I want you well back while we do that. Once I give the all-clear, if you're going to come down, leave your matches, lighters and anything else inflammable at a safe distance, clear? That includes those pistols of yours, Angel. Under no circumstances will any of you approach, touch, or pick up anything that even looks like an unexploded munition."
After all that, one might expect what happened to be exciting. Good luck. We all just went the prescribed safety distance away and waited patiently while the ammunition scattered in the excavation was collected and taken, very carefully I might add, away. As Brian had thought, it was all .30 Browning and a lot of it was in really bad condition. Once all that was gone, the soldiers went over the pit with a detector and dug out some areas of soil that showed as being contaminated. Once all that was done, we were allowed back into the area.
The good news was that pieces of the tail section were next to be found and the brass manufacturer's plate was attached. Bright green but the serial number and type were still readable. The aircraft was identified as a Grumman TBF-1 Avenger which made it a seriously early aircraft. The fragments of surviving paint confirmed that. Instead of being midnight blue overall, it had top surfaces midnight blue, sides intermediate blue and a light blue underside. Peter says that dates the aircraft as either late 1943 or early 1944. The bad news was that axe-marks showed that the wreck had been chopped up by hand before being buried. That pretty much destroys any historical value it might have had, and deterioration was doing the rest. Peter was really disappointed in the condition of the wreck but took down the number from the plate down so he could have it checked out. With a little luck, we would get the date the aircraft was lost and the names of its crew.
Hard work fascinates me; I can sit and watch it for hours. While I was doing so, one thing was puzzling me. "Peter, what was all that about a B-36?"
"Long time ago, back in '49 I think, a B-36 had technical problems and crashed in Ireland. Catch was, it had three atomic bombs on board. The problem was everybody looked in the wrong places and it was almost twenty years before the wreck was found. Turned out it was in a peat bog and had sunk. Anyway, the wreck was recovered but only two of the bombs got found. The third is still out there somewhere. Every so often, somebody reports finding it and the bomb disposal people have to go and look. The bomb is still missing."
Over at the wreck site, there was a triumphant shout. Peter took a quick look. "Come along, they've found the cockpit."
We hurried over; when I got close I caught Brian's eye and pointed to my boys in their holsters. He nodded and waved me in. The cockpit of the Avenger was almost intact; the engine had gone and the tail we had found earlier was detached but the crew section seemed relatively undamaged. It was empty. Wherever the crew had gone to, they weren't still in their aircraft. Everybody was being really cautious; the aircraft was really rusted out and parts were crumbling whenever somebody looked at them too hard. The salvageable parts were few and far between.
That's what made it surprising when Brian straightened up and very carefully gave something to Conrad. "I think this is your area, Conrad. An old picture, stuck to the instrument panel. We're lucky it survived. The soil and groundwater are really acid here."
It was a young man, his arm wrapped around a young woman, both smiling shyly at the camera. Conrad shook his head sadly. "It's just possible she may still be alive. If we can find her, knowing what happened to her young man may bring her some closure."
The Saloon Bar, Pontwyn-Pairys Inn Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
Take my word for it, it tends to cause unwelcome interest when a man and a woman start comparing bullet wound scars in the bar of a very staid Welsh inn. In the early days of my association with the Thames Valley Police, Peter Atkinson and Isolda Rowley walked into an ambush and got shot to shit. For my own reasons, of course, I had to go in there and get them out before they died on us. They were evacuated in time and made it. The dipshits who did the shooting both got killed, something that really helped me get accepted by the police there. Isolda is crippled but remained a police officer and made a good career for herself. Peter was invalided out, I suspect because his wife was traumatized by him getting shot and insisted. He got a good pension from the police and landed himself a job as an aviation historian at one of the Oxford colleges. Anyway, he's standing in front of me, his shirt lifted to show the two bullet scars on his stomach. I'm doing the same, showing him the wound from the bullet I took in Rome and several others I've accumulated over the years. Behind me Conrad is grinning broadly, he's seen this ceremony before. The other drinkers in the bar, not so much.
Anyway, we got to this place about two days after the great storm. We stayed put, partly because the area was still badly disrupted by the storm and that made travel difficult, partly because rescue and repairs were everywhere and we didn’t want to throw any extra burden on them (that was Conrad's idea, as you probably guess it wouldn’t have occurred to me) and partly because we needed to call the find in. We knew we were dealing with a US Navy aircraft from the color the metal was painted. That midnight blue is unmistakable, not least because the Navy still use it.
So, I called the Home Office, they put me through to Peter and, after some catching-up talk, I told him what we had found. To wit, wreckage of one US Navy aircraft, probably from WW2 buried in the wilds of Wales. That means the wreck has to be excavated, any human remains removed, identified if possible, and returned home. Then the wreck has to be checked for unexploded munitions and the rest either handed to a museum or scrapped. Peter's job, or part of it, is to identify the aircraft, determine if it has any historical value and then make a decision over its disposal. Every year, lost aircraft turn up in Britain or the waters around it. Mostly German and American with a handful of others. Sometimes, they get found when the munitions explode which makes this work both vital and dangerous.
Just how dangerous was shown by the fourth member of our little party, Lieutenant Brian Ashe of the Royal Engineers who is very keen to make sure everybody knows he is not related to the central character of a TV series on bomb disposal. He doesn’t have a belly scar but he does have fragment scars on his left leg and limps a little because of them. He dropped his pants to show them and almost caused a local lady to faint.
In case you are wondering, one of the rules of this little ritual is that anybody who won’t show his scars or hasn't got any has to buy the next round of drinks. It's Conrad's turn and he showed everybody the scars from the shotgun wound in his back. They’re old now, but they still count, especially since he got them deliberately taking a bullet aimed at me. With all of us suitably established as serious people, I caused another outbreak of appalled disbelief by buying the next round of drinks. A woman sitting in a bar with three men, and buying the drinks made everybody watching feel that the ultimate in sin and depravity had befallen their community. I'm not sure which part they considered the most dreadful. Probably the depravity.
"Most likely it was coming back from a raid on Liverpool. The carrier aircraft were operating right on the edge of their range when they hit there. If they took a hit in their fuel tanks or engines, they wouldn’t make it back." Peter sounded saddened despite the fact that those losses kept him in work.
"Hope so." Brian was calculating odds. "If that bird was on its way back, it would have dropped its load. That will make my job a bit easier."
"They'll probably still have live ammunition on board. We're probably looking at a Corsair or Skyraider. The worst of the losses were in 1947 and were climbing, right up to The Big One. By then everything older had gone. You know, I was speaking with a colleague over in America who believes if the war had gone on a bit longer, the carrier aircraft losses might have reached prohibitive levels." Peter took a gulp out of his beer. "He said America was pretty war-weary by 1947."
Brian took a look at his mug, realized it was empty and signaled for another round. The barmaid looked worried by that. Not at the beers Brian and Peter were drinking but at the spirits Conrad and I were knocking back. Me in particular; I'd had four Bacardi 151s by then and she was obviously concerned that I was going to keel over. I knew it would take at least another four before I reached that point. Until then, I can control the symptoms of being hammered. Mostly.
"What's the situation at Druid's Forest, Brian?" Conrad was nursing his second brandy. It's on my bucket list to trap him into a shot-for-shot and get him completely hammered but he's really good at ducking it.
"We've got RAF Regiment people up there to guard the wreck until it's excavated. In addition, Druid's Forest is our forward gathering point for people who were trapped by the storm and had trouble getting out. So, there's a field medical detachment out there and a search-and-rescue team. Few people are still coming in, but their condition is getting progressively worse. They're the ones who stayed put until it was almost too late. Very soon now, we will be terminating the hunt for survivors and starting the one for victims."
"People don’t realize how easy it is to die of exposure." Conrad shook his head. "Even on a warm day, being soaking wet and exposed to constant wind will do it. Add in hunger and dehydration and they're done."
"Trouble is city people don’t understand how quickly nature can kill them. I know, I'm one of them." I swallowed about half my shot of rum. "The difference is that I just take it for granted that nature isn’t kind and generous. She's absolutely neutral and doesn’t care whether people live or die."
"You're a bit of a force of nature yourself, Angel." Peter was laughing but looked slightly nervous. Most people do when they poke fun at me. Scared I'll take offense and do them. Alright let's clear that one up. I don't usually understand why I should take offense and I assume that people I know are joking when they make fun of me. I don’t understand jokes about people either, so I watch everybody else, and then laugh when they do. I'll let you into a secret, psychopaths like me are really bored and very lonely most of the time. We can see the world, we can watch it but we can't be part of it. So, we do things to amuse ourselves or out of frustration that things are going on around us and we can't participate in them. Conrad's taught me ways I can be a part of the things surrounding me and for that I'll forgive him anything.
"So I have been told." I answered gravely. "The people who don’t tell me that, usually ask where I keep my scythe and pale horse."
That caused a round of relieved laughter that was interrupted by the bell ringing. "Excuse me ladies and gentlemen, the kitchen is opening. We have sausages, eggs and chips tonight. If you will come to the bar and let me know if you would like a meal, the kitchen staff will get to work."
The Pontwyn-Pairys Inn normally has a reputation for good food but it's restricted to basic meals on a set menu for residents only right now. The roads are still being cleared and power is unreliable so everybody is rationing what they have. Here, the kitchen uses bottled gas so they open for as limited a period as they can manage. The owner is really apologetic but he's doing the best he can under the circumstances and his guests know that. It's worth noting that the eggs were very fresh and the sausages locally made. All in all, we're doing all right.
"Are there any problems up at Druid's Forest?" Peter asked the question through a mouthful of yolk-soaked chips. I know what he meant; every time a wreck was reported, somebody would go out there with a spade and try and find themselves a few 'souvenirs'. Sometimes they get more than they expect. There was a case of a couple of dipshits in Dartmoor who tried that with the wreck of a Skyraider. What they didn’t know was the aircraft was shot down while coming in, not going out and they hit the tail fuse of an unexploded thousand pound bomb with a spade. Didn't know that bombs often have nose and tail fuses. The bomb didn't stay unexploded any longer which really complicated the autopsy.
"Not really." Brian sounded a little hesitant. "Our main worry is likely to be unexploded .50 caliber or 20mm ammunition. One of them can kill somebody just as surely as a thousand pounder if the odds break wrong for the recipient. It could happen too; one of the rock-heads is convinced he saw a couple of locals hanging around the wreck site. Tried to run them in but they slipped off. Or so he says."
"Rock-heads?" I glanced at Conrad.
"The RAF Regiment is known to the service as the Rock-Heads Regiment. There are rumors that back in 1942, one of them knocked a Mark IV tank out by head-butting it." Conrad addressed himself to his chips. "Now why can’t we get proper chips like this in Bangkok?"
Crash Site, Druids Forest, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
Give the British credit, they are damned good at handling disasters. They try and keep everything on a local level with the district councils making the decisions and asking for resources while the county and national executive assign priorities and manage resources and information. That means the people who need to work, work and the administrators administrate. The higher people are, the more likely their job is to collect and allocate resources and fight the press rather than wield spades. The area was hit by what the newspapers claimed was the worst storm in British history (nowhere close but that's another story) including the macroburst and three tornadoes and they had normal services restored in five days. Mostly, there were a few outlying areas that were still isolated but even they had the supplies they needed and power. The main lines were still down in a lot of places but the Air Force rotodynes had lifted in portable generators to fill the gap.
So, here we are, at the crash site we found, watching patiently while the crash site is excavated. The Royal Engineers were doing the digging, starting where we had found the metal and preparing a trench. Sure enough, they'd found more debris. They'd also found more in the roots of the blown-down trees. To me it was just a pile of tangled metal in a hole but I could see that Conrad and Peter were getting puzzled.
"Something up, Conrad?"
"Remember we learned about stratification at the dig up in Lincolnshire last year? Well, the stratification here is wrong. We're supposed to be in old forest but the trees are on top of the wreckage. That means they are later than the wreck. The site itself looks odd to me as well. It's as if . . . . "
"Somebody had dug a hole and buried the wreckage?" Peter had come over and joined us. "This isn’t how aircraft crash. If the plane had been crippled and forced down, it would have hit the ground at a shallow angle and bounced along the ground. There would have been a wreckage trail, not this buried pile. If the aircraft had fallen out of the sky; say the pilot was killed, it would have been in a steep dive and the wreckage would have been dispersed by the impact. If it had exploded in mid-air, the debris would be all over the place."
"So somebody found the wreck, dug a hole and buried everything." Conrad was thoughtful. "More than one person, it would need to be a big hole. Then they planted trees on top to cover it?"
"They'd have to. If the aircraft came down in the forest, it would level the trees at the impact point and the scars on the rest would still be visible. They last a long, long time. I can't see any old scars on any of these trees. I think they were all planted after the aircraft crashed and the wreckage buried. Their roots have grown down and forced the wreckage apart. That is one reason why the aircraft is in such bad condition."
I found myself visualizing the amount of work required to bury the wreckage of a reasonable-sized aircraft. Now, I've got quite a bit of experience in burying things I don’t want the police to find, mostly things that require pits about six feet long and three feet wide. It's a lot of hard work. I can't imagine digging out a pit that's big enough to hold something thirty feet long by the same wide. All right, the objects I buried had to go down at least six feet to avoid being found, but an aircraft? This was a serious engineering project. Which raised another question. Why? I guessed the answer to that one, again from my own experience. Because they didn’t want the authorities to find it. And, when this aircraft was likely to have crashed, that meant the German occupation forces.
"Boys, is it likely we've stumbled across something tied in with the Resistance?"
Peter was saved from answering by an imperious blast on a whistle. Brian was looking around at us. "All right, will everybody stop digging. We have live ammunition down here. Looks like .30 Browning. We need to clear it. Also, I can smell fuel residue. Everybody, collect hazmat suits until we find out what we are dealing with."
I looked at Peter. "Fuel residue? After sixty years?"
"Buried like this, certainly. The light fractions will have gone but the heavy ones will still be around. Hazmat suits seems a bit excessive though."
Brian must have heard because he turned around with a big grin on his face. "Not since the Army got sued by somebody who claimed they got skin cancer from fuel residues. The Army always has, and always will, take every possible measure to protect our soldiers from harm. So, plastic hazmat suits, gloves and breathing masks."
He'd raised his voice a bit while reciting the last lines, I assume because Army lawyers mandated the exact words used. He got a laugh from his men who had obviously heard the line before, probably many times. One voice came out from the pit. "Sir, if this is another B-36, request permission to buy myself out!"
"Wilkens, if this is another B-36, it must have shrunk in the wash." That caused another roar of laughter and a smattering of applause. It occurred to me that Lieutenant Ashe was popular with his men. Usually that's a good thing, not always. He joined us, politely herding us back from the site as he did so. "All right, there'll be a delay while we get this sorted out. The book says all soldiers and leaders must maintain a proactive posture towards safety in day-to-day operations. The need for total commitment to safety should be made evident to commanders, senior soldiers, and their subordinates. The importance of safety is intensified for units and personnel engaged in munitions-related activities. One of my erstwhile colleagues forgot that and four men died. He would have been court-martialed only he was one of them."
I couldn't resist it. Bad of me I know but as you've probably realized by now, I'm a bad, bad girl. "Training plus Equipment plus Motivation plus Execution with Caution equals Safety."
He looked at me curiously. "Straight out of the munitions disposal manual, the classified one. How do you know that, Angel?"
"When running guns, some of the stuff that gets transported is really old. There's no profit in blowing up one's customers so care is needed and we got the best advice available."
"Brian, are you certain those are .30 Browning? Not .50s?" Peter was trying to change the subject away from things he didn’t want to know.
"I'll look at them more closely, they're all mixed up with mud, rust and debris but I'm fairly certain. If it's any help, it looks to me like they are in an ammunition tank which suggests they were feeding a wing gun."
"That aircraft must be old then. The Americans stopped using .30 wing guns early on. Corsairs had .50s, Skyraiders 20mm. That must be an early model Avenger which means we're looking for a three-man crew. This aircraft probably came down in '43. 1944 at the latest."
"That helps a little." Brian looked thoughtful. "We'll see if we can find the identity plate when all this is cleared up. I want you well back while we do that. Once I give the all-clear, if you're going to come down, leave your matches, lighters and anything else inflammable at a safe distance, clear? That includes those pistols of yours, Angel. Under no circumstances will any of you approach, touch, or pick up anything that even looks like an unexploded munition."
After all that, one might expect what happened to be exciting. Good luck. We all just went the prescribed safety distance away and waited patiently while the ammunition scattered in the excavation was collected and taken, very carefully I might add, away. As Brian had thought, it was all .30 Browning and a lot of it was in really bad condition. Once all that was gone, the soldiers went over the pit with a detector and dug out some areas of soil that showed as being contaminated. Once all that was done, we were allowed back into the area.
The good news was that pieces of the tail section were next to be found and the brass manufacturer's plate was attached. Bright green but the serial number and type were still readable. The aircraft was identified as a Grumman TBF-1 Avenger which made it a seriously early aircraft. The fragments of surviving paint confirmed that. Instead of being midnight blue overall, it had top surfaces midnight blue, sides intermediate blue and a light blue underside. Peter says that dates the aircraft as either late 1943 or early 1944. The bad news was that axe-marks showed that the wreck had been chopped up by hand before being buried. That pretty much destroys any historical value it might have had, and deterioration was doing the rest. Peter was really disappointed in the condition of the wreck but took down the number from the plate down so he could have it checked out. With a little luck, we would get the date the aircraft was lost and the names of its crew.
Hard work fascinates me; I can sit and watch it for hours. While I was doing so, one thing was puzzling me. "Peter, what was all that about a B-36?"
"Long time ago, back in '49 I think, a B-36 had technical problems and crashed in Ireland. Catch was, it had three atomic bombs on board. The problem was everybody looked in the wrong places and it was almost twenty years before the wreck was found. Turned out it was in a peat bog and had sunk. Anyway, the wreck was recovered but only two of the bombs got found. The third is still out there somewhere. Every so often, somebody reports finding it and the bomb disposal people have to go and look. The bomb is still missing."
Over at the wreck site, there was a triumphant shout. Peter took a quick look. "Come along, they've found the cockpit."
We hurried over; when I got close I caught Brian's eye and pointed to my boys in their holsters. He nodded and waved me in. The cockpit of the Avenger was almost intact; the engine had gone and the tail we had found earlier was detached but the crew section seemed relatively undamaged. It was empty. Wherever the crew had gone to, they weren't still in their aircraft. Everybody was being really cautious; the aircraft was really rusted out and parts were crumbling whenever somebody looked at them too hard. The salvageable parts were few and far between.
That's what made it surprising when Brian straightened up and very carefully gave something to Conrad. "I think this is your area, Conrad. An old picture, stuck to the instrument panel. We're lucky it survived. The soil and groundwater are really acid here."
It was a young man, his arm wrapped around a young woman, both smiling shyly at the camera. Conrad shook his head sadly. "It's just possible she may still be alive. If we can find her, knowing what happened to her young man may bring her some closure."
Re: 2009 - Eye of the Survivor
Chapter Three
Cabinet Office, Whitehall, London
Bernard always puts me in mind of a young and over-enthusiastic puppy. That's hard to explain since he's at least four times older than I am and I don’t really like dogs. Fair enough, because dogs hate me on sight. Cats, I get along with; neither of us cares whether the other one lives or dies and we both pretend to be friends with the other so we can get what we want. I've been told that the first thing cats do when their human dies is to eat the corpse. Sounds sensible to me.
Anyway, Bernard is helping me out by sending details of the aircraft we found back to Washington to see if records exist on what happened. An official Cabinet office request gets processed a lot faster than one from an academic institution and a request from the Piccadilly Circus gets through the system more quickly still. That depends, of course, on how easy the answer is to find. There’s a price for this help of course and I’m trying to find out what it is.
I flew back to London last night specifically to find the information on the Avenger we dug up. After a week in North Wales, it’s a relief to get back to a city. This is where I belong. I spent the first hour after I got back here just standing on the sidewalk and listening to the traffic. "Sir Humphrey sends his apologies, Angel. He's got an interdepartmental committee meeting and he'll be tied up for hours."
"Trying to make sure it doesn’t actually do anything?"
"Angel, you have a worrying understanding of how the Civil Service operates. We call it masterly inactivity by the way. This one is a bit more than the usual though."
Bernard folded his fingers and looked over them at me. Now, of all the people in the Cabinet Office, Bernard is probably the most underestimated. He has a talent for spotting the right course of action that prevents situations becoming critical. In his own words, he is responsible for ensuring the chips stay up. There is a very good reason why he is Humpty's right-hand man yet because he solves problems before they become critical, what he achieves is rarely noticed. That makes me wonder why we are really in his office. I got an answer without asking the question. Say again, Bernard is really good at his job. "Have you ever heard of Gareth Kendrick, Angel?"
"He's an industrialist isn’t he?"
"A Welsh industrialist, yes. His father, Owen Kendrick was a mining and steel foundry magnate and his grandfather, Thomas Kendrick was also a big presence in the Welsh coal mining industry. You can see the progression. We could say Thomas founded the family business digging coal, Owen expanded it and turned a business into a kingdom by using the coal to make steel. Now, Gareth is taking it further and trying to expand it into a worldwide empire by adding modern businesses." Bernard was looking at me keenly and I got the strong feeling he was waiting for me to put the pieces together. It suddenly dawned on me that the key word was 'trying'.
"Something is going wrong, isn't it? He's blown it and the business is collapsing."
"You can't blow something up and then have it collapse immediately. If it blows up, it goes poof! It all goes upwards and the bits are scattered everywhere." Bernard waved his hands in the air to simulate an explosion. "This is more like everything turning pear-shaped and sort of going flump. He's expanded too far, too fast. He was playing a risky game where everything had to go just right and it hasn’t. Commodity prices have moved the wrong way and a little too fast, some of his new ventures have taken a bit longer and cost a little more than he expected. None of the problems great in themselves but their cumulative result is that his business empire is hitting a serious cash-flow crisis. He's got a lot of short-term notes coming due and he hasn’t got the money to pay them."
"So he borrows money from the bank or you bail him out. Or you let his company fold. What am I missing, Bernard?"
"We got Lillith to analyze his corporate accounts for us." I know what that means all right; if there was anything even slightly hinky about the Kendrick business dealings, Lillith will have spotted it. Whatever she has found is enough to have Humpty running scared. And that's enough to have Bernard getting to work on damage limitation. I began to wonder if his definition of damage limitation might involve my boys. That made me think of something else. The government has its own financial people, why didn’t Humpty go to them? They do this kind of investigation for a living. The only plausible answer was he was afraid of a leak if this went through official channels. That would fit him bringing me in. At the end of the day, I am the government’s preferred contractor for wet work.
"What did Lillith have to say?"
"What we expected; that Kendrick Industries is on the verge of collapse and needs a major cash injection to save the group. The problem is that their position isn't just short-term debt, there are questions over their medium and long-term liabilities as well. That will be enough to ensure that the banks won’t touch them. There are only three possibilities. One is that the government bails them out with loans. The second is that the government nationalizes the group and the third is that Kendrick sells the business to another company, one that has deep enough pockets to fix the problems. The first solution is precluded by government policy. We do not extend government loans to troubled companies without a good, solid recovery plan. Gareth Kendrick has proposed a plan which is the subject of the meeting going on now."
"Not a good plan?"
"Lillith took one look at it and burst out laughing. She described it as jam at some undefined point in the future and jam sometime unspecified time after that but no jam at any specific time. The present government's policy is to denationalize industry, not nationalize it so that rules out the second. Even if there is a potential buyer for the Kendrick Empire in the wings, Gareth Kendrick won't hear of it. His attitude is that his company belongs to his family and is a Welsh company. Not for sale, boyo."
“I smell politics. What is it that you want me to do, Bernard?” I looked pointedly down at my boys.
“Politics is the major reason this thing is so complex. The Welsh Nationalists are doing well in the polls; not much in the Commons of course but they’re getting good representation at district and county level. If we let Kendrick Industries go down, there will be significant unemployment problems all across Wales. In that situation, the Nationalists may, probably will, turn that local strength into a Commons presence. That kind of decentralization is not Civil Service policy. If we bail them out, we have our own back-benchers up in arms. The Unionist Party will stir things up by asking why we bailed out Kendrick after refusing to do the same for English companies. Angel, you have a reputation for producing out-of-the-box solutions to intractable problems. Sir Humphrey was hoping that you might come up with something.”
I was afraid he was going to say that. This is the kind of situation where the removal of one person can resolve a very complex situation. In case it isn’t quite clear to you, that’s the kind of job I have spent most of my life doing. Only since I met Conrad has it taken a different direction. Mostly. “Bernard, if you’re asking me to do what I think you’re asking me to do, you will be making a bad mistake. In fact, you’ll be doing the same thing that Kendrick is doing.”
“I’m sorry?” Bernard sounded puzzled.
“Kendrick has got himself into a mess by applying long-term solutions to short-term problems. If I understand what you are saying correctly, he’s been making short-term borrowings to maintain the payments on the long-term debt he’s incurred. That’s doing the equivalent of making the payments on a high interest-rate mortgage by putting them on his credit card.
“Well, yes.”
“In other words, he’s applying long-term solutions to temporary problems. It’s not smart, Bernard, not smart at all. Do not try and solve transient problems with permanent solutions. Me doing my thing is about as permanent as it gets.”
Bernard burst out laughing. “Sir Humphrey said you’d say that. So, have you any ideas on how to solve a transient problem?”
“First thing to do is to identify the cause of the problem and that's simple. What’s causing the problems are those short-term notes. We need to buy some time and take off the pressure they represent. Can you put some pressure on the banks to extend the payment period? If Kendrick paid tribute to us, its one of the things we would fix for him.”
“Sir Humphrey has done that already. He spoke with Sir Dennis Glazewater over lunch yesterday and got them to agree to a 90-day extension of the short-term notes. He asked for 120 days but 90 was the best he could get. Kendrick doesn’t know that of course. Sir Humphrey is using it as a lever to try and make him see sense.”
I know you have all been discussing how organized crime evolves into organized government. I would describe it more like a wheel with organized government at the top in the sunlight and organized crime at the bottom in the shadows with a fairly smooth transition between the two. This is a pretty good example of just that. The British Civil Service is arguably a descendent of a European equivalent of the Triad movement. The Triads are themselves descendants of the Chinese civil service. You’ll notice that Bernard hasn’t actually denied that the possibility of me removing Kendrick had been considered. Instead he let me explain why it’s not a good idea. Not yet at any rate.
“By ‘see sense’, I assume you mean to change his mind and allow his business to be taken over by a White Knight. So, what you are really telling me is that there is a two-pronged process going on here. Sir Humphrey is trying to negotiate a solution. You want me to find a lever that will force Kendrick to accept his terms. If necessary, over his dead body.” Bernard looked a bit panic-stricken at that. Most people do when a nebulous possibility is suddenly real. “Bernard, I’ll need to see his security file and compare it with ours.”
“Angel, I don’t know if . . . .”
“Bernard, if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
Bernard relaxed a little. “I haven’t heard that since I was eleven years old. I don’t know if the file will help much though. One of our problems is that Gareth Kendrick is an upstanding example of true Welsh Methodism. Maintains a meekness and lowliness of heart and abstains from all appearance of evil. Goes to Chapel every Sunday without fail, sings in the choir, and supports local charities. You name it, if it’s good, he does it. Even his enemies say what a good man he is personally.”
“That’s useful to know. Anybody who is that virtuous is hiding something. I’ll have to find out what.”
There was a sad sigh from Bernard’s side of the desk. Although he keeps it well-hidden, there’s an idealistic streak running through him, and I horrify it. “All right, I’ll call archives, and have it brought over. Why don’t we have lunch at my club? It should have arrived, along with your other stuff, by the time we get back.”
He was quite right, all the documents we needed had come in by the time we got back, after a very good lunch I have to say. I’ve often thought we should start similar clubs. We have our houses of course but they are primarily business offices. There's a possible market for really nice, quiet, discrete places where people can stay without going through the noise and nuisance of a hotel, where they can eat well and meet privately. Problem is as far as I know, only the British run such places properly. Indians as well I think. I'll have to think it over.
Anyway, the U.S. Navy had checked the data on the Avenger we had found and identified it. As Peter had said, it was an early-production TBF that had been assigned to VT-5 flying off the USS Yorktown. It had been written off charge when it had failed to return from a mission launched against a power station at Deeside in November 1943. The after-action report indicated that three Avengers and two Hellcat fighters had been shot down but that the power station had been severely damaged and four German fighters had also been shot down. There was a note at the end of the document that the Avenger and its crew of three men were still listed as missing in action. The other four Navy aircraft and their crews had all been accounted for.
“Eleven men. One Hellcat and one Avenger got far enough out to sea before crashing for the Navy to pick up the crews. They had submarines out there for just that. One Avenger and a Hellcat shot down over the target. Nobody got out of that Avenger but the Hellcat pilot bailed out. It's assumed he was taken prisoner but if he was, he didn’t survive the war. I think you just found the remaining Avenger.” Bernard sounded incredibly sad which confused me a little. This was a tiny, unimportant incident in a war that killed tens of millions. Why get particularly sad over three men? I couldn’t understand it then and I can’t now.
“Is there a pre-war map of the area we found the aircraft in?” I was curious about why somebody had buried the wreck and planted trees on top of it.
“I got you an ‘Orange Cover’ 1:25000 1938 Ordnance Survey map. Well, a copy of it. The originals are very rare. As many as possible were destroyed when the occupation was started. This is one that was kept in a secure documents depositary by the Ministry of Food. It’s a bit unusual; it shows farms and their boundaries. The other package is the security file you wanted. It is extremely sensitive, not for anything that is in it but because it exists at all.”
“I understand, Bernard, and thank you. For lunch as well, which was really great.” I ran quickly over the checklist that Conrad has taught me and mentally signed off at the bottom. All social goodness completed.
The Saloon Bar, Pontwyn-Pairys Inn, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
"Megan, while the bar is quiet, could you help us a little? We're looking for some local history, the sort of things that don’t get written down." Conrad smiled beatifically. When I do that, people get frightened, with good reason.
"Oh, there's plenty of that around here. What do you need to know?" Megan was the barmaid and, like most barmaids, she knows almost everything that goes on locally.
"Druid's Forest and the legends about it. We've heard that there are beliefs about the place but nobody will elaborate on them."
"Bad place that is. No good will ever come of going there. You historian people, chancing your arms you are digging up there."
"What happened up there Megan?"
"The Emperor Agricola invaded here in 60CE, starting with the lands of the Ordovicii. This was the last area to hold out. We had strong defenses, you've seen how rough the countryside is. Also, we had all the surviving Druids here after they fled from Anglesey. In 65CE, the Second Legion attacked and wanted to wipe out the last center of resistance. Well, they did that all right. Worked on the basis that if nobody is left alive, there isn't any resistance. They'd recruited auxiliaries from other tribes by promising them land, loot and women as usual. They'd also brought in auxiliary troops conscripted from Germany, Holland and Belgium. Once they'd defeated the army in this area, their cavalry spread through the hills and valleys, slaughtering everybody. It's said that in the bloodbath that followed 10,000 men were slaughtered.
"The last survivors, along with their families and their priests, made their last stand at Druid's Forest. There, they fought valiantly to the bitter end, burning their houses and killing their own wives and children in fear of Roman reprisals. Others fled into the surrounding forests and mountains but the Roman cavalry hunted them down, brought them back to the forest. There, they impaled them all, men, women and children on stakes, tarred them and burned them alive. The last Druids put a curse on the land, one that said any foreign invader who put his foot on the ground at Druid's Forest would die by fire. After the battle was over, Tacitus wrote that the hills were deserted, all that could be seen were houses smoking in the distance, and our scouts could ride for days without meeting a living soul.”
I couldn’t help thinking that it was fortunate 'Lea wasn't with us. If the locals had found out she was a real, honest-to-God Roman, they'd probably lynch her. Or try to. I'd be obliged to stand with her of course and then we'd have to explain to Humpty why we had wiped the entire village out. That gave me a thought about how to handle Kendrick.
"It all sounds too familiar. The Germans did much the same thing after all. Ireland has still not recovered from the German occupation and if it hadn’t been for American aid, western Russia wouldn't be any better." Conrad's words made me think of something else.
"Conrad, Peter, does that wreck we found show any signs of being burned?"
It was Brian who answered. "No, if it had, ammunition would have exploded in the fire and all the rounds we've found so far have been intact. By the way, that's a final verdict. We've finished up there and I'm declaring the site safe from explosive hazards. That still means you'll have to watch for contaminants but nothing up there that'll go bang."
"And no remains." Conrad was saddened by that. I couldn't help feeling this was not proving to be a cheerful vacation for him.
Cabinet Office, Whitehall, London
Bernard always puts me in mind of a young and over-enthusiastic puppy. That's hard to explain since he's at least four times older than I am and I don’t really like dogs. Fair enough, because dogs hate me on sight. Cats, I get along with; neither of us cares whether the other one lives or dies and we both pretend to be friends with the other so we can get what we want. I've been told that the first thing cats do when their human dies is to eat the corpse. Sounds sensible to me.
Anyway, Bernard is helping me out by sending details of the aircraft we found back to Washington to see if records exist on what happened. An official Cabinet office request gets processed a lot faster than one from an academic institution and a request from the Piccadilly Circus gets through the system more quickly still. That depends, of course, on how easy the answer is to find. There’s a price for this help of course and I’m trying to find out what it is.
I flew back to London last night specifically to find the information on the Avenger we dug up. After a week in North Wales, it’s a relief to get back to a city. This is where I belong. I spent the first hour after I got back here just standing on the sidewalk and listening to the traffic. "Sir Humphrey sends his apologies, Angel. He's got an interdepartmental committee meeting and he'll be tied up for hours."
"Trying to make sure it doesn’t actually do anything?"
"Angel, you have a worrying understanding of how the Civil Service operates. We call it masterly inactivity by the way. This one is a bit more than the usual though."
Bernard folded his fingers and looked over them at me. Now, of all the people in the Cabinet Office, Bernard is probably the most underestimated. He has a talent for spotting the right course of action that prevents situations becoming critical. In his own words, he is responsible for ensuring the chips stay up. There is a very good reason why he is Humpty's right-hand man yet because he solves problems before they become critical, what he achieves is rarely noticed. That makes me wonder why we are really in his office. I got an answer without asking the question. Say again, Bernard is really good at his job. "Have you ever heard of Gareth Kendrick, Angel?"
"He's an industrialist isn’t he?"
"A Welsh industrialist, yes. His father, Owen Kendrick was a mining and steel foundry magnate and his grandfather, Thomas Kendrick was also a big presence in the Welsh coal mining industry. You can see the progression. We could say Thomas founded the family business digging coal, Owen expanded it and turned a business into a kingdom by using the coal to make steel. Now, Gareth is taking it further and trying to expand it into a worldwide empire by adding modern businesses." Bernard was looking at me keenly and I got the strong feeling he was waiting for me to put the pieces together. It suddenly dawned on me that the key word was 'trying'.
"Something is going wrong, isn't it? He's blown it and the business is collapsing."
"You can't blow something up and then have it collapse immediately. If it blows up, it goes poof! It all goes upwards and the bits are scattered everywhere." Bernard waved his hands in the air to simulate an explosion. "This is more like everything turning pear-shaped and sort of going flump. He's expanded too far, too fast. He was playing a risky game where everything had to go just right and it hasn’t. Commodity prices have moved the wrong way and a little too fast, some of his new ventures have taken a bit longer and cost a little more than he expected. None of the problems great in themselves but their cumulative result is that his business empire is hitting a serious cash-flow crisis. He's got a lot of short-term notes coming due and he hasn’t got the money to pay them."
"So he borrows money from the bank or you bail him out. Or you let his company fold. What am I missing, Bernard?"
"We got Lillith to analyze his corporate accounts for us." I know what that means all right; if there was anything even slightly hinky about the Kendrick business dealings, Lillith will have spotted it. Whatever she has found is enough to have Humpty running scared. And that's enough to have Bernard getting to work on damage limitation. I began to wonder if his definition of damage limitation might involve my boys. That made me think of something else. The government has its own financial people, why didn’t Humpty go to them? They do this kind of investigation for a living. The only plausible answer was he was afraid of a leak if this went through official channels. That would fit him bringing me in. At the end of the day, I am the government’s preferred contractor for wet work.
"What did Lillith have to say?"
"What we expected; that Kendrick Industries is on the verge of collapse and needs a major cash injection to save the group. The problem is that their position isn't just short-term debt, there are questions over their medium and long-term liabilities as well. That will be enough to ensure that the banks won’t touch them. There are only three possibilities. One is that the government bails them out with loans. The second is that the government nationalizes the group and the third is that Kendrick sells the business to another company, one that has deep enough pockets to fix the problems. The first solution is precluded by government policy. We do not extend government loans to troubled companies without a good, solid recovery plan. Gareth Kendrick has proposed a plan which is the subject of the meeting going on now."
"Not a good plan?"
"Lillith took one look at it and burst out laughing. She described it as jam at some undefined point in the future and jam sometime unspecified time after that but no jam at any specific time. The present government's policy is to denationalize industry, not nationalize it so that rules out the second. Even if there is a potential buyer for the Kendrick Empire in the wings, Gareth Kendrick won't hear of it. His attitude is that his company belongs to his family and is a Welsh company. Not for sale, boyo."
“I smell politics. What is it that you want me to do, Bernard?” I looked pointedly down at my boys.
“Politics is the major reason this thing is so complex. The Welsh Nationalists are doing well in the polls; not much in the Commons of course but they’re getting good representation at district and county level. If we let Kendrick Industries go down, there will be significant unemployment problems all across Wales. In that situation, the Nationalists may, probably will, turn that local strength into a Commons presence. That kind of decentralization is not Civil Service policy. If we bail them out, we have our own back-benchers up in arms. The Unionist Party will stir things up by asking why we bailed out Kendrick after refusing to do the same for English companies. Angel, you have a reputation for producing out-of-the-box solutions to intractable problems. Sir Humphrey was hoping that you might come up with something.”
I was afraid he was going to say that. This is the kind of situation where the removal of one person can resolve a very complex situation. In case it isn’t quite clear to you, that’s the kind of job I have spent most of my life doing. Only since I met Conrad has it taken a different direction. Mostly. “Bernard, if you’re asking me to do what I think you’re asking me to do, you will be making a bad mistake. In fact, you’ll be doing the same thing that Kendrick is doing.”
“I’m sorry?” Bernard sounded puzzled.
“Kendrick has got himself into a mess by applying long-term solutions to short-term problems. If I understand what you are saying correctly, he’s been making short-term borrowings to maintain the payments on the long-term debt he’s incurred. That’s doing the equivalent of making the payments on a high interest-rate mortgage by putting them on his credit card.
“Well, yes.”
“In other words, he’s applying long-term solutions to temporary problems. It’s not smart, Bernard, not smart at all. Do not try and solve transient problems with permanent solutions. Me doing my thing is about as permanent as it gets.”
Bernard burst out laughing. “Sir Humphrey said you’d say that. So, have you any ideas on how to solve a transient problem?”
“First thing to do is to identify the cause of the problem and that's simple. What’s causing the problems are those short-term notes. We need to buy some time and take off the pressure they represent. Can you put some pressure on the banks to extend the payment period? If Kendrick paid tribute to us, its one of the things we would fix for him.”
“Sir Humphrey has done that already. He spoke with Sir Dennis Glazewater over lunch yesterday and got them to agree to a 90-day extension of the short-term notes. He asked for 120 days but 90 was the best he could get. Kendrick doesn’t know that of course. Sir Humphrey is using it as a lever to try and make him see sense.”
I know you have all been discussing how organized crime evolves into organized government. I would describe it more like a wheel with organized government at the top in the sunlight and organized crime at the bottom in the shadows with a fairly smooth transition between the two. This is a pretty good example of just that. The British Civil Service is arguably a descendent of a European equivalent of the Triad movement. The Triads are themselves descendants of the Chinese civil service. You’ll notice that Bernard hasn’t actually denied that the possibility of me removing Kendrick had been considered. Instead he let me explain why it’s not a good idea. Not yet at any rate.
“By ‘see sense’, I assume you mean to change his mind and allow his business to be taken over by a White Knight. So, what you are really telling me is that there is a two-pronged process going on here. Sir Humphrey is trying to negotiate a solution. You want me to find a lever that will force Kendrick to accept his terms. If necessary, over his dead body.” Bernard looked a bit panic-stricken at that. Most people do when a nebulous possibility is suddenly real. “Bernard, I’ll need to see his security file and compare it with ours.”
“Angel, I don’t know if . . . .”
“Bernard, if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
Bernard relaxed a little. “I haven’t heard that since I was eleven years old. I don’t know if the file will help much though. One of our problems is that Gareth Kendrick is an upstanding example of true Welsh Methodism. Maintains a meekness and lowliness of heart and abstains from all appearance of evil. Goes to Chapel every Sunday without fail, sings in the choir, and supports local charities. You name it, if it’s good, he does it. Even his enemies say what a good man he is personally.”
“That’s useful to know. Anybody who is that virtuous is hiding something. I’ll have to find out what.”
There was a sad sigh from Bernard’s side of the desk. Although he keeps it well-hidden, there’s an idealistic streak running through him, and I horrify it. “All right, I’ll call archives, and have it brought over. Why don’t we have lunch at my club? It should have arrived, along with your other stuff, by the time we get back.”
He was quite right, all the documents we needed had come in by the time we got back, after a very good lunch I have to say. I’ve often thought we should start similar clubs. We have our houses of course but they are primarily business offices. There's a possible market for really nice, quiet, discrete places where people can stay without going through the noise and nuisance of a hotel, where they can eat well and meet privately. Problem is as far as I know, only the British run such places properly. Indians as well I think. I'll have to think it over.
Anyway, the U.S. Navy had checked the data on the Avenger we had found and identified it. As Peter had said, it was an early-production TBF that had been assigned to VT-5 flying off the USS Yorktown. It had been written off charge when it had failed to return from a mission launched against a power station at Deeside in November 1943. The after-action report indicated that three Avengers and two Hellcat fighters had been shot down but that the power station had been severely damaged and four German fighters had also been shot down. There was a note at the end of the document that the Avenger and its crew of three men were still listed as missing in action. The other four Navy aircraft and their crews had all been accounted for.
“Eleven men. One Hellcat and one Avenger got far enough out to sea before crashing for the Navy to pick up the crews. They had submarines out there for just that. One Avenger and a Hellcat shot down over the target. Nobody got out of that Avenger but the Hellcat pilot bailed out. It's assumed he was taken prisoner but if he was, he didn’t survive the war. I think you just found the remaining Avenger.” Bernard sounded incredibly sad which confused me a little. This was a tiny, unimportant incident in a war that killed tens of millions. Why get particularly sad over three men? I couldn’t understand it then and I can’t now.
“Is there a pre-war map of the area we found the aircraft in?” I was curious about why somebody had buried the wreck and planted trees on top of it.
“I got you an ‘Orange Cover’ 1:25000 1938 Ordnance Survey map. Well, a copy of it. The originals are very rare. As many as possible were destroyed when the occupation was started. This is one that was kept in a secure documents depositary by the Ministry of Food. It’s a bit unusual; it shows farms and their boundaries. The other package is the security file you wanted. It is extremely sensitive, not for anything that is in it but because it exists at all.”
“I understand, Bernard, and thank you. For lunch as well, which was really great.” I ran quickly over the checklist that Conrad has taught me and mentally signed off at the bottom. All social goodness completed.
The Saloon Bar, Pontwyn-Pairys Inn, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
"Megan, while the bar is quiet, could you help us a little? We're looking for some local history, the sort of things that don’t get written down." Conrad smiled beatifically. When I do that, people get frightened, with good reason.
"Oh, there's plenty of that around here. What do you need to know?" Megan was the barmaid and, like most barmaids, she knows almost everything that goes on locally.
"Druid's Forest and the legends about it. We've heard that there are beliefs about the place but nobody will elaborate on them."
"Bad place that is. No good will ever come of going there. You historian people, chancing your arms you are digging up there."
"What happened up there Megan?"
"The Emperor Agricola invaded here in 60CE, starting with the lands of the Ordovicii. This was the last area to hold out. We had strong defenses, you've seen how rough the countryside is. Also, we had all the surviving Druids here after they fled from Anglesey. In 65CE, the Second Legion attacked and wanted to wipe out the last center of resistance. Well, they did that all right. Worked on the basis that if nobody is left alive, there isn't any resistance. They'd recruited auxiliaries from other tribes by promising them land, loot and women as usual. They'd also brought in auxiliary troops conscripted from Germany, Holland and Belgium. Once they'd defeated the army in this area, their cavalry spread through the hills and valleys, slaughtering everybody. It's said that in the bloodbath that followed 10,000 men were slaughtered.
"The last survivors, along with their families and their priests, made their last stand at Druid's Forest. There, they fought valiantly to the bitter end, burning their houses and killing their own wives and children in fear of Roman reprisals. Others fled into the surrounding forests and mountains but the Roman cavalry hunted them down, brought them back to the forest. There, they impaled them all, men, women and children on stakes, tarred them and burned them alive. The last Druids put a curse on the land, one that said any foreign invader who put his foot on the ground at Druid's Forest would die by fire. After the battle was over, Tacitus wrote that the hills were deserted, all that could be seen were houses smoking in the distance, and our scouts could ride for days without meeting a living soul.”
I couldn’t help thinking that it was fortunate 'Lea wasn't with us. If the locals had found out she was a real, honest-to-God Roman, they'd probably lynch her. Or try to. I'd be obliged to stand with her of course and then we'd have to explain to Humpty why we had wiped the entire village out. That gave me a thought about how to handle Kendrick.
"It all sounds too familiar. The Germans did much the same thing after all. Ireland has still not recovered from the German occupation and if it hadn’t been for American aid, western Russia wouldn't be any better." Conrad's words made me think of something else.
"Conrad, Peter, does that wreck we found show any signs of being burned?"
It was Brian who answered. "No, if it had, ammunition would have exploded in the fire and all the rounds we've found so far have been intact. By the way, that's a final verdict. We've finished up there and I'm declaring the site safe from explosive hazards. That still means you'll have to watch for contaminants but nothing up there that'll go bang."
"And no remains." Conrad was saddened by that. I couldn't help feeling this was not proving to be a cheerful vacation for him.
Re: 2009 - Eye of the Survivor
Chapter Four
Crash Site, Druids Forest, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales.
So, you've crashed an aircraft in the territory occupied by somebody who devoutly wants to kill you. What do you do? The answer, assuming you are smart, is to get the hell out of there with the first priority being to get as far from the crash site as possible and do it as fast as possible. There is a debate about whether the crew should burn the aircraft or not. Personally, I wouldn’t. The cloud of smoke is a pointer to where you are and, say again, you do not hang around the wreck for anything. Even if it is possible said people who want to kill you aren’t closing in, you can’t be sure of that. So run fast and run far and let the Navy worry about security. All that raises lots of questions. There are no human remains near here that we have found so the crew of the Avenger probably didn’t die in the crash. In fact, I suspect the aircraft must have been badly damaged enough to make getting home unlikely but not enough to stop it flying a hundred miles or so before bellying-in. It's quite plausible the Germans weren't certain where it had come down but I wouldn’t bet my life on that.
That leaves us with three American airmen, cut off in an isolated part of the world and forced to assume that a homicidal enemy is closing in. It's a bit hard to put myself in their place because usually the homicidal enemy is me. But, Conrad wants to try and find their remains so I'll have to do my best. The first step is to compare the local ground with our map and work out what they were likely to do. That's when the first real problem came to light.
"Conrad, Druid's Forest isn't on the map. According to the Ordnance Survey, this was all open ground. Farmland."
I handed the map to Conrad who studied it carefully. "You're right. Also, follow the lines of the field divisions. They don't allow for a forested area here at all."
"When we first came to Britain, I remember you telling me that the terrain we see today reflect the field divisions established centuries ago. Mad Tom said much the same thing. In fact, he has made his career tracing the connections."
"You can see it on this map. Here's the path we came in on and you can see how it's aligned with the field division over there. The country road over there is an upgrade of this footpath on the map here and also follows the field divisions. Yet there's nothing to suggest that there is a wood here. If there had been one, the field divisions would have gone around it. That tells us that if there ever has been a forest here, it predates the farms we can trace and was gone by the time these divisions were established."
You can see the significance of this. We got told about a battle followed by a massacre in the woods here. That led to the whole area being cursed and shunned. Only, there were no woods here until they were planted over the wrecked Avenger. Before that, this area has been treeless for a very long time. So where did that legend come from? And there's another question nagging away at me. Who buried that Avenger? And why?
"Who would bury a wrecked aircraft, Conrad?"
Conrad and I have a game. One asks a question, the other gives the most blindingly obvious answer they can think of. Surprising how often it gives us an insight into a problem. For example, 'who killed him?" Answer, 'somebody who wanted him dead.' Conrad answered my question in that style. "Somebody who didn’t want it found."
Then he thought about it. "That has to be the local people. The Germans would want the wreck. Quite apart from any intelligence material within it, it’s a pile of scrap metal that can be smelted down and reused. If I remember properly, shortage of aluminum was a perennial German problem. But, if they found a wrecked aircraft and the crew vanished, they'd assume the local people were helping the crew escape. Then, they'd go to the nearest village and kill everybody in it. They'd lock the women and children in the church and burn it down. Then they'd shoot all the men. Everybody knew that. So, if a wrecked Navy aircraft turns up, the local people would try and hide it. They buried it, then they made up the myth about Druid's Forest to keep people away from the scene. Sixty years later, the forest is mature, the myth is established and the reason for it is forgotten."
"Sounds good." If that was a bit like my mind was elsewhere, you're right. I was studying the map, trying to work out where those airmen went. East is obviously out, it took them back into the populated and occupied areas. South, likewise. That left north and west. There was little to choose on terrain grounds, both were rough and obstructed, but west led to the Irish Sea and there were submarines stationed there to pick up air crew and bring them home. A bit later in the war, the American Navy founded the SEALs who would go into hostile territory to find stranded airmen and bring them out. That was later than this crash, I think, but, in 1943, there were still the submarines. There’s a problem, ‘going west’ is a 90-degree arc and that is a lot of countryside.
So, let’s try and thin it down a bit. You’ve decided you’re going west but you have a choice. You can either go along a nice, smooth, clear route or a rough one covered with rocks and debris. Which do you choose? Answer, the rough one. Think about it. If you are on smooth, open ground and the bad people turn up, where do you hide? There will probably be a few places but not many and they'll be fairly obvious. Go into the hills, there are lots of subtle places to hide and there's even a chance of ambushing any pursuers and blowing them away. So there is a complex balance between the need to travel in terrain that provides cover and protection and the need to put distance between oneself and the point of origin. Staring at our map and visualizing the ground, I did that balancing act and the likely route began to form in my mind.
"What are you two up to now?" Peter had come over and was looking over my shoulder at the map.
"We thought we would try and track the people who came down here. I think they walked west to try and get to the coast. They didn’t make it but with a lot of luck, we may find some trace of them."
"A lot of luck sums it up. Look, the truth is they probably went somewhere for help and got handed over to the Germans. Who would then have shot them or strung them up from the nearest tree. Most people these days sneer at the collaborators and blow hard about how they'd have fought back but the truth was, faced with choosing between collaborating or having your entire community wiped out, they collaborated. Even burying this aircraft was a fairly gutsy thing to do; the people here had followed the rules they should have reported it to the authorities."
"Peter, you don’t happen to know if there are any records of allied aircrew being detained around here do you. November 1943?" This was one of those times when negative information is much more useful than positive. We know those three men did not return to the US. They disappeared without trace the day their aircraft went missing. If there are no records of them being taken into German custody, then something strange must have happened.
"No, but then there wouldn't be, Angel. At this point in the war, the Germans were killing shot-down air crew and not bothering to keep any records of doing so. That started on the Russian Front and then spread here. A year or so later, Goering found out about it and created hell. Reputedly he actually had one of their ace fighter pilots transferred to the infantry after he had found the man was habitually shooting pilots on their parachutes. From then on, allied pilots were 'shot while trying to escape' or 'died of wounds' rather than being summarily executed."
"I thought Goering was a bad guy?" I don’t know that much about the war but I do have an approximate idea who was on the side of the angels and who was not.
"He was a very bad man indeed." Peter sounded reflective. "But, he had flashes of virtue and was apparently a very amiable man in social settings. An extremely good host by all accounts. He had enough redeeming aspects to his character to convince the Americans to accept him as President post-war. For a couple of years anyway, he was dying of cancer even as the Big One went down. Anyway, you two staying with us here?"
I shook my head. "We're off on our cross-country walk. We'll see you back at the inn."
As soon as we were out of sight of the recovery site, Conrad and I made like brats playing at "resistance and collaborators". We pretended we were the Avenger crew evading capture, claiming that aircraft flying overhead were 'German spotters' and the tiny handful of people we saw were 'German patrols'. Conrad cautioned me not to get carried away and shoot them. He was having endless fun as we played our game, I think he was remembering when he was a child although I suppose the two sides must have been different back then. Heretics and Inquisitors perhaps? I wasn't of course; I never had a childhood. Alone, living on the streets, the 'games' I played were deadly serious with an accent on the word "deadly". I'll give you an example. Conrad pretended to ambush a "collaborator" (actually a rock that looked a bit like a person) and "shot him" with a finger-gun. When I was 14, I did much the same thing to a snitch. Not for the first or last time. Only, of course, I used a real pistol and real bullets.
There was something we noted right away. All the farms that were shown on our 1938 map were gone. We came across some ruined cottages in the hills that were supposed to have been surrounded by fields. The field divisions were still visible, mostly marked by largely-collapsed stone walls, but the general air was one of dereliction and abandonment. The cottages were more of the same; doors and windows gone, roofs fallen in, internal floors collapsed. When I'd been a street brat, I'd found a house just like these ones. It has gone now torn down when the whole block was purchased for development but then it was derelict and isolated from the main streets. Between Mott Street and Canal Street if you're interested. At that time, the land it was on was isolated without any right of access and thus worthless. The thing was that the basement was in comparatively good condition and was very hard to get into. Somebody could only get to the basement by going up a floor and then down. That simple trick was enough to give me a refuge I could live in. I thought of that place while we checked out the ruined cottages. They were small and simple with no room for the oddities that had protected me when I was a brat. "These places have been deserted for decades."
Conrad nodded in agreement. "They were probably abandoned in the 1950s. That was when marginal farmland like this was abandoned in favor of the productive and efficient large farms elsewhere. Before then, the British were desperate to grow all the food they could and before that, even the less productive farms in places like this were viable. Once industrialized farming was established though, places like this were done and the occupants went to join the workforces in the factories. I think sheep are the only agriculture up here now."
"Ah, walking lamb chops." I am quite certain that most people don't associate the pretty lambs playing in a field with the Sunday roast. People who have had to scavenge for food and ate out of dumpsters don't have that luxury. It's odd, I don’t usually get sucked into thinking about my past like this. Perhaps I am getting old after all. "Have you noticed that none of these places are burned out? I'd have expected at least some of them to have been torched."
"I think this area is too remote for serious vandalism. Arsonists want an audience for their work, the bigger and more active the better. Up here, the only witnesses are likely to be the sheep. I suspect that there was little left to burn in these crofts anyway. The original occupants would have cleared everything of value out and left nothing but stone walls."
That was pretty convincing and I went along with it. Only, have you noticed how when somebody remarks on the absence of something, they trip over it five minutes later? Well, it wasn't five minutes later but it happened to us. We'll get back to that in due course. We continued our cross-country trek, noting just how deserted the area was. We discovered something else. The sound from aircraft, mostly rotodynes still hunting for casualties from the great storm of course but in our play-world they were German spotting aircraft, could be heard from quite a distance. The Americans would have had plenty of time to take cover. I was beginning to question whether there had been a search going on though. The Avenger was a big aircraft and a dark blue wreck would have been easy to spot from the air. It would have taken time to bury an aircraft like that. As I thought about it, concealing the wreck from the Germans was becoming unlikely. So why had it been buried?
By the time evening started to close in, we had covered about five miles which struck me as being reasonable going. Quite apart from anything else, it gave us a handle on how much distance the American navy airmen could have covered. It was a convenient place to stop, we had to cross the road I mentioned earlier, the one that was a footpath on the map we had. Even better, there was a bus stop where we had come out and a quick call confirmed the busses were running again. Ten minutes later, we were sitting on the bus for Waunfawr. Don’t ask me to pronounce that. Fortunately, one of the other passengers on the bus helped us out. Even if she was staring at my boys while she did so.
The Dining Room, Pontwyn-Pairys Inn, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
The Inn was back to a normal food service although the menu was obviously made up from what was available. Nevertheless, it was really good. Not least because Conrad and I were really hungry. I had a pint of shell-on giant shrimp, they called them prawns, with fresh-baked malted bread and citrus mayo followed by a steak and ale pie. Conrad, possibly feeling guilty that he had 'killed somebody' even in play had a chicken and bacon pie named after a local saint called Dwynwen. We both finished off with toffee pudding and ice cream.
"How did your hike go?" Peter had come in and joined us about half way through. "Find anything?"
Conrad shook his head. "Nothing. We see what you meant earlier. If they were buried up there, nobody would even find them except by pure chance. How about you?"
Peter sighed. "It could have been really something, an early-production aircraft like that but it's gone too far. Mostly it is just crumbled rust. A few parts were recognizable but they just fell apart. The soil must be really acid up there. We'll bring in backhoes to clear what's left of the wreck and Public Health UK will decontaminate and make the pit safe. Then the pit will be filled in and the trees replanted. We have the names of the crew by the way; because Yorktown survived the war, her records are good. Pilot was Lieutenant Joe Murphy from Dallas, Texas, turret gunner/bombardier was Petty Officer Walter Benton from Los Angeles, California and the belly gunner was Petty Officer Lee Holtzer from Capital Heights, Maryland. The Navy are notifying any surviving next-of-kin. If you two do find the bodies, they'll be sent home of course."
"Will that earn us brownie points with your boss, Conrad?"
"I would think so. We'll get some with the US Navy as well if we can pull it off." Conrad took a last mouth-full of his toffee pudding and wiped his lips. "I wonder if there's anywhere that has a list of who owned the farms up there and what happened to them?"
"It’s the local library you'll need for that." Megan had brought us some post-dinner drinks. Brandy for Conrad and rum for me of course. "Angharad is mad about local history she is. You tell her all about that aircraft and she'll answer anything she can for you. Spends all her time collecting documents she does."
"Then, she'll like this." Peter reached into his briefcase, took out a file and removed a blown-up copy of the picture he'd found. I'd had them made in London. "That's Murphy with his wife. We got sent another picture of the crew when the identification was made. Murphy in the middle, Benton on the left and Holtzer on the right.
Megan put her hand to her mouth and when she spoke, her voice was shaking. "They're so young. They were no more than boys."
"Seventeen or eighteen." Peter also sounded incredibly sad. "A million American boys just like them went to war and never came back. Some died in Russia or here or over France. Others on the Arctic convoys. If we can send just three more home, I think you'll get your brownie points, Angel."
Local Library, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
Hearing about a librarian who was interested in old documents, I'd been expecting a shabby old woman with her hair pulled back in a strict, iron-gray bun. Instead, we got a bouncing, enthusiastic teenager who was only just wearing clothes at all and whose hair was dyed blonde and cut short in the latest style. She'd dyed her eyebrows as well and I made a calculated guess, one or two other patches of hair.
"I'm Angharad Trahern. How can I help you?"
Conrad moved smoothly in. "We have something for you. We heard you collect old documents and we have a copy of a picture of the crew from the wrecked aircraft that was found. For your collection."
"That's so kind. I heard the wreck is so badly deteriorated there's nothing can be saved. This is great though." She looked at the picture and teared up. "They were so young. Just boys."
"We're trying to find their bodies. We're certain they are up in the hills somewhere but the chances of finding where are slender. We wondered if you had a list of who owned the farms up in the hills?"
"There's not as many as you think. Most of the people on those farms were tenants. The whole area was owned by a single family who lived in a big house in the center of the area. Problem is, the Germans burned all the property registration files so nobody quite knows now who owned what. Every librarian in the country is trying to rebuild those files. Ownership is one thing, tenancy is quite another."
'We have a 1938 ordnance survey map if that helps. With the farms marked on it."
"That's rare. I don’t suppose I can have a copy?"
That was my cue. "I'll find out. Hold on a moment."
I went outside and called Bernard. We exchanged pleasantries and he authorized Angharad to get our copy of the map when we'd finished with it. She bounced around some more when I gave her the news. Then we settled down and studied the map and where we had walked the day before.
"All these crofts were tenancies. One room houses, with the wealthier having an outbuilding or two. A few years earlier, in the 1890s say, the whole family and their animals would have lived in that room. The landlord lived here." She stabbed her finger on the map about a mile beyond where we had stopped. "I know this place, it's in ruins now. Nobody quite knows what happened up there. The general assumption is the Germans destroyed it for some reason."
"Because the American airmen were found there?" Conrad had an odd note in his voice.
"Could be." Angharad went to a filing cabinet, pulled out a thin folder and opened it. "We got this file in an exchange with Cardiff. The family who owned this particular farm were the Pennoyers. The last registered owners were Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer. I don’t know why this file was down there although I would guess the family moved there when they gave up the farm. 1943 that was. Leave this with me, I'll ask around."
It suddenly dawned on me that despite her age and appearance, Angharad was very good at her job. If only she was Chinese, I'd probably try and recruit her.
Crash Site, Druids Forest, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales.
So, you've crashed an aircraft in the territory occupied by somebody who devoutly wants to kill you. What do you do? The answer, assuming you are smart, is to get the hell out of there with the first priority being to get as far from the crash site as possible and do it as fast as possible. There is a debate about whether the crew should burn the aircraft or not. Personally, I wouldn’t. The cloud of smoke is a pointer to where you are and, say again, you do not hang around the wreck for anything. Even if it is possible said people who want to kill you aren’t closing in, you can’t be sure of that. So run fast and run far and let the Navy worry about security. All that raises lots of questions. There are no human remains near here that we have found so the crew of the Avenger probably didn’t die in the crash. In fact, I suspect the aircraft must have been badly damaged enough to make getting home unlikely but not enough to stop it flying a hundred miles or so before bellying-in. It's quite plausible the Germans weren't certain where it had come down but I wouldn’t bet my life on that.
That leaves us with three American airmen, cut off in an isolated part of the world and forced to assume that a homicidal enemy is closing in. It's a bit hard to put myself in their place because usually the homicidal enemy is me. But, Conrad wants to try and find their remains so I'll have to do my best. The first step is to compare the local ground with our map and work out what they were likely to do. That's when the first real problem came to light.
"Conrad, Druid's Forest isn't on the map. According to the Ordnance Survey, this was all open ground. Farmland."
I handed the map to Conrad who studied it carefully. "You're right. Also, follow the lines of the field divisions. They don't allow for a forested area here at all."
"When we first came to Britain, I remember you telling me that the terrain we see today reflect the field divisions established centuries ago. Mad Tom said much the same thing. In fact, he has made his career tracing the connections."
"You can see it on this map. Here's the path we came in on and you can see how it's aligned with the field division over there. The country road over there is an upgrade of this footpath on the map here and also follows the field divisions. Yet there's nothing to suggest that there is a wood here. If there had been one, the field divisions would have gone around it. That tells us that if there ever has been a forest here, it predates the farms we can trace and was gone by the time these divisions were established."
You can see the significance of this. We got told about a battle followed by a massacre in the woods here. That led to the whole area being cursed and shunned. Only, there were no woods here until they were planted over the wrecked Avenger. Before that, this area has been treeless for a very long time. So where did that legend come from? And there's another question nagging away at me. Who buried that Avenger? And why?
"Who would bury a wrecked aircraft, Conrad?"
Conrad and I have a game. One asks a question, the other gives the most blindingly obvious answer they can think of. Surprising how often it gives us an insight into a problem. For example, 'who killed him?" Answer, 'somebody who wanted him dead.' Conrad answered my question in that style. "Somebody who didn’t want it found."
Then he thought about it. "That has to be the local people. The Germans would want the wreck. Quite apart from any intelligence material within it, it’s a pile of scrap metal that can be smelted down and reused. If I remember properly, shortage of aluminum was a perennial German problem. But, if they found a wrecked aircraft and the crew vanished, they'd assume the local people were helping the crew escape. Then, they'd go to the nearest village and kill everybody in it. They'd lock the women and children in the church and burn it down. Then they'd shoot all the men. Everybody knew that. So, if a wrecked Navy aircraft turns up, the local people would try and hide it. They buried it, then they made up the myth about Druid's Forest to keep people away from the scene. Sixty years later, the forest is mature, the myth is established and the reason for it is forgotten."
"Sounds good." If that was a bit like my mind was elsewhere, you're right. I was studying the map, trying to work out where those airmen went. East is obviously out, it took them back into the populated and occupied areas. South, likewise. That left north and west. There was little to choose on terrain grounds, both were rough and obstructed, but west led to the Irish Sea and there were submarines stationed there to pick up air crew and bring them home. A bit later in the war, the American Navy founded the SEALs who would go into hostile territory to find stranded airmen and bring them out. That was later than this crash, I think, but, in 1943, there were still the submarines. There’s a problem, ‘going west’ is a 90-degree arc and that is a lot of countryside.
So, let’s try and thin it down a bit. You’ve decided you’re going west but you have a choice. You can either go along a nice, smooth, clear route or a rough one covered with rocks and debris. Which do you choose? Answer, the rough one. Think about it. If you are on smooth, open ground and the bad people turn up, where do you hide? There will probably be a few places but not many and they'll be fairly obvious. Go into the hills, there are lots of subtle places to hide and there's even a chance of ambushing any pursuers and blowing them away. So there is a complex balance between the need to travel in terrain that provides cover and protection and the need to put distance between oneself and the point of origin. Staring at our map and visualizing the ground, I did that balancing act and the likely route began to form in my mind.
"What are you two up to now?" Peter had come over and was looking over my shoulder at the map.
"We thought we would try and track the people who came down here. I think they walked west to try and get to the coast. They didn’t make it but with a lot of luck, we may find some trace of them."
"A lot of luck sums it up. Look, the truth is they probably went somewhere for help and got handed over to the Germans. Who would then have shot them or strung them up from the nearest tree. Most people these days sneer at the collaborators and blow hard about how they'd have fought back but the truth was, faced with choosing between collaborating or having your entire community wiped out, they collaborated. Even burying this aircraft was a fairly gutsy thing to do; the people here had followed the rules they should have reported it to the authorities."
"Peter, you don’t happen to know if there are any records of allied aircrew being detained around here do you. November 1943?" This was one of those times when negative information is much more useful than positive. We know those three men did not return to the US. They disappeared without trace the day their aircraft went missing. If there are no records of them being taken into German custody, then something strange must have happened.
"No, but then there wouldn't be, Angel. At this point in the war, the Germans were killing shot-down air crew and not bothering to keep any records of doing so. That started on the Russian Front and then spread here. A year or so later, Goering found out about it and created hell. Reputedly he actually had one of their ace fighter pilots transferred to the infantry after he had found the man was habitually shooting pilots on their parachutes. From then on, allied pilots were 'shot while trying to escape' or 'died of wounds' rather than being summarily executed."
"I thought Goering was a bad guy?" I don’t know that much about the war but I do have an approximate idea who was on the side of the angels and who was not.
"He was a very bad man indeed." Peter sounded reflective. "But, he had flashes of virtue and was apparently a very amiable man in social settings. An extremely good host by all accounts. He had enough redeeming aspects to his character to convince the Americans to accept him as President post-war. For a couple of years anyway, he was dying of cancer even as the Big One went down. Anyway, you two staying with us here?"
I shook my head. "We're off on our cross-country walk. We'll see you back at the inn."
As soon as we were out of sight of the recovery site, Conrad and I made like brats playing at "resistance and collaborators". We pretended we were the Avenger crew evading capture, claiming that aircraft flying overhead were 'German spotters' and the tiny handful of people we saw were 'German patrols'. Conrad cautioned me not to get carried away and shoot them. He was having endless fun as we played our game, I think he was remembering when he was a child although I suppose the two sides must have been different back then. Heretics and Inquisitors perhaps? I wasn't of course; I never had a childhood. Alone, living on the streets, the 'games' I played were deadly serious with an accent on the word "deadly". I'll give you an example. Conrad pretended to ambush a "collaborator" (actually a rock that looked a bit like a person) and "shot him" with a finger-gun. When I was 14, I did much the same thing to a snitch. Not for the first or last time. Only, of course, I used a real pistol and real bullets.
There was something we noted right away. All the farms that were shown on our 1938 map were gone. We came across some ruined cottages in the hills that were supposed to have been surrounded by fields. The field divisions were still visible, mostly marked by largely-collapsed stone walls, but the general air was one of dereliction and abandonment. The cottages were more of the same; doors and windows gone, roofs fallen in, internal floors collapsed. When I'd been a street brat, I'd found a house just like these ones. It has gone now torn down when the whole block was purchased for development but then it was derelict and isolated from the main streets. Between Mott Street and Canal Street if you're interested. At that time, the land it was on was isolated without any right of access and thus worthless. The thing was that the basement was in comparatively good condition and was very hard to get into. Somebody could only get to the basement by going up a floor and then down. That simple trick was enough to give me a refuge I could live in. I thought of that place while we checked out the ruined cottages. They were small and simple with no room for the oddities that had protected me when I was a brat. "These places have been deserted for decades."
Conrad nodded in agreement. "They were probably abandoned in the 1950s. That was when marginal farmland like this was abandoned in favor of the productive and efficient large farms elsewhere. Before then, the British were desperate to grow all the food they could and before that, even the less productive farms in places like this were viable. Once industrialized farming was established though, places like this were done and the occupants went to join the workforces in the factories. I think sheep are the only agriculture up here now."
"Ah, walking lamb chops." I am quite certain that most people don't associate the pretty lambs playing in a field with the Sunday roast. People who have had to scavenge for food and ate out of dumpsters don't have that luxury. It's odd, I don’t usually get sucked into thinking about my past like this. Perhaps I am getting old after all. "Have you noticed that none of these places are burned out? I'd have expected at least some of them to have been torched."
"I think this area is too remote for serious vandalism. Arsonists want an audience for their work, the bigger and more active the better. Up here, the only witnesses are likely to be the sheep. I suspect that there was little left to burn in these crofts anyway. The original occupants would have cleared everything of value out and left nothing but stone walls."
That was pretty convincing and I went along with it. Only, have you noticed how when somebody remarks on the absence of something, they trip over it five minutes later? Well, it wasn't five minutes later but it happened to us. We'll get back to that in due course. We continued our cross-country trek, noting just how deserted the area was. We discovered something else. The sound from aircraft, mostly rotodynes still hunting for casualties from the great storm of course but in our play-world they were German spotting aircraft, could be heard from quite a distance. The Americans would have had plenty of time to take cover. I was beginning to question whether there had been a search going on though. The Avenger was a big aircraft and a dark blue wreck would have been easy to spot from the air. It would have taken time to bury an aircraft like that. As I thought about it, concealing the wreck from the Germans was becoming unlikely. So why had it been buried?
By the time evening started to close in, we had covered about five miles which struck me as being reasonable going. Quite apart from anything else, it gave us a handle on how much distance the American navy airmen could have covered. It was a convenient place to stop, we had to cross the road I mentioned earlier, the one that was a footpath on the map we had. Even better, there was a bus stop where we had come out and a quick call confirmed the busses were running again. Ten minutes later, we were sitting on the bus for Waunfawr. Don’t ask me to pronounce that. Fortunately, one of the other passengers on the bus helped us out. Even if she was staring at my boys while she did so.
The Dining Room, Pontwyn-Pairys Inn, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
The Inn was back to a normal food service although the menu was obviously made up from what was available. Nevertheless, it was really good. Not least because Conrad and I were really hungry. I had a pint of shell-on giant shrimp, they called them prawns, with fresh-baked malted bread and citrus mayo followed by a steak and ale pie. Conrad, possibly feeling guilty that he had 'killed somebody' even in play had a chicken and bacon pie named after a local saint called Dwynwen. We both finished off with toffee pudding and ice cream.
"How did your hike go?" Peter had come in and joined us about half way through. "Find anything?"
Conrad shook his head. "Nothing. We see what you meant earlier. If they were buried up there, nobody would even find them except by pure chance. How about you?"
Peter sighed. "It could have been really something, an early-production aircraft like that but it's gone too far. Mostly it is just crumbled rust. A few parts were recognizable but they just fell apart. The soil must be really acid up there. We'll bring in backhoes to clear what's left of the wreck and Public Health UK will decontaminate and make the pit safe. Then the pit will be filled in and the trees replanted. We have the names of the crew by the way; because Yorktown survived the war, her records are good. Pilot was Lieutenant Joe Murphy from Dallas, Texas, turret gunner/bombardier was Petty Officer Walter Benton from Los Angeles, California and the belly gunner was Petty Officer Lee Holtzer from Capital Heights, Maryland. The Navy are notifying any surviving next-of-kin. If you two do find the bodies, they'll be sent home of course."
"Will that earn us brownie points with your boss, Conrad?"
"I would think so. We'll get some with the US Navy as well if we can pull it off." Conrad took a last mouth-full of his toffee pudding and wiped his lips. "I wonder if there's anywhere that has a list of who owned the farms up there and what happened to them?"
"It’s the local library you'll need for that." Megan had brought us some post-dinner drinks. Brandy for Conrad and rum for me of course. "Angharad is mad about local history she is. You tell her all about that aircraft and she'll answer anything she can for you. Spends all her time collecting documents she does."
"Then, she'll like this." Peter reached into his briefcase, took out a file and removed a blown-up copy of the picture he'd found. I'd had them made in London. "That's Murphy with his wife. We got sent another picture of the crew when the identification was made. Murphy in the middle, Benton on the left and Holtzer on the right.
Megan put her hand to her mouth and when she spoke, her voice was shaking. "They're so young. They were no more than boys."
"Seventeen or eighteen." Peter also sounded incredibly sad. "A million American boys just like them went to war and never came back. Some died in Russia or here or over France. Others on the Arctic convoys. If we can send just three more home, I think you'll get your brownie points, Angel."
Local Library, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
Hearing about a librarian who was interested in old documents, I'd been expecting a shabby old woman with her hair pulled back in a strict, iron-gray bun. Instead, we got a bouncing, enthusiastic teenager who was only just wearing clothes at all and whose hair was dyed blonde and cut short in the latest style. She'd dyed her eyebrows as well and I made a calculated guess, one or two other patches of hair.
"I'm Angharad Trahern. How can I help you?"
Conrad moved smoothly in. "We have something for you. We heard you collect old documents and we have a copy of a picture of the crew from the wrecked aircraft that was found. For your collection."
"That's so kind. I heard the wreck is so badly deteriorated there's nothing can be saved. This is great though." She looked at the picture and teared up. "They were so young. Just boys."
"We're trying to find their bodies. We're certain they are up in the hills somewhere but the chances of finding where are slender. We wondered if you had a list of who owned the farms up in the hills?"
"There's not as many as you think. Most of the people on those farms were tenants. The whole area was owned by a single family who lived in a big house in the center of the area. Problem is, the Germans burned all the property registration files so nobody quite knows now who owned what. Every librarian in the country is trying to rebuild those files. Ownership is one thing, tenancy is quite another."
'We have a 1938 ordnance survey map if that helps. With the farms marked on it."
"That's rare. I don’t suppose I can have a copy?"
That was my cue. "I'll find out. Hold on a moment."
I went outside and called Bernard. We exchanged pleasantries and he authorized Angharad to get our copy of the map when we'd finished with it. She bounced around some more when I gave her the news. Then we settled down and studied the map and where we had walked the day before.
"All these crofts were tenancies. One room houses, with the wealthier having an outbuilding or two. A few years earlier, in the 1890s say, the whole family and their animals would have lived in that room. The landlord lived here." She stabbed her finger on the map about a mile beyond where we had stopped. "I know this place, it's in ruins now. Nobody quite knows what happened up there. The general assumption is the Germans destroyed it for some reason."
"Because the American airmen were found there?" Conrad had an odd note in his voice.
"Could be." Angharad went to a filing cabinet, pulled out a thin folder and opened it. "We got this file in an exchange with Cardiff. The family who owned this particular farm were the Pennoyers. The last registered owners were Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer. I don’t know why this file was down there although I would guess the family moved there when they gave up the farm. 1943 that was. Leave this with me, I'll ask around."
It suddenly dawned on me that despite her age and appearance, Angharad was very good at her job. If only she was Chinese, I'd probably try and recruit her.
Re: 2009 - Eye of the Survivor
Chapter Five
Ruin of Pennoyer Farm, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
Conrad is getting fat. It's hardly surprising given the diet up here. Everything seems to be pies and puddings. Except breakfast of course, that's usually a vast plate piled high with fried food washed down by too many cups of tea loaded with milk and sugar. The English definition of tea is not quite as vile as their rice pudding but it's very close. I just had toast and marmalade washed down with rum from my hip-flask. Once we had finished, we caught the bus back to where we finished off last night. It was easy enough to pick up our trail even if Conrad was puffing slightly as we climbed the hill. I think I'll make him run back to the inn tonight.
Anyway, the ruin of the farmhouse was where Angharad had said it would be. What she hadn’t picked up was that it sat in a terrain bottleneck where anybody walking west would have to pass through. I'd say that there had been something defensible here for a very long time and what was left of the farmhouse had just been the latest iteration.
'What was left' wasn't very much. The walls were waist-high at best but at some points they dropped below ground and could only be seen by the change in the color of the grass. There was a tall chimney structure at one end, pointing to where the living room had been. It was an interesting structure consisting of two intertwined flues, both ornately decorated with moldings and supported by the surviving brickwork. I looked harder and saw that the moldings formed a series of triangles with some sort of flower inside the shape. Given the remnants of the house at the lower end and the decorations in the upper half, I realized the structure was climbable.
"I'll race you to the top Conrad." I didn't want him to have a heart attack from eating too much unhealthy food and he needed the exercise. On the other hand, if I fell off, I'd need something soft to land on.
"What? Where?" Conrad looked around, confused by a challenge he wasn't expecting and saw the chimney. I almost said ruins of the chimney but it wasn't ruined yet. "No, you can’t climb that. The bricks are crumbling and there's no secure hand-holds. You'll break your neck falling."
"Not if you stand underneath me. Now, hold my boys and watch this." Why did I take my boys off? Because if I do fall, they'll break my ribs. The state of the brickwork was working for me; the erosion of the soft brickwork had left lots of hand- and foot-holds.
The trick when climbing something is to make sure your position at one level is secure before taking the next step up. If one hand or foothold is shaky, adjust until it isn’t before detaching a hand or foot from a secure spot. Get used to doing that and it should be possible to go up the wall like a cat. I did, sure a foot slipped a couple of times that looked a bit scary from the ground but the fact I had a good hold with everything else meant I wasn't in any danger. My back and stomach were aching a bit by the time I reached the end of the square brickwork but otherwise, no great sweat. The circular decorated chimneys were about my height but they were in a lot better condition than the bricks. I think they were made of some kind of heat-resistant pottery. I was sorely tempted to climb on them but I decided I had pushed my luck about as far as I should. Anyway, I could already see all I needed to.
"Conrad, see the place where the above-surface outer wall ruins go underground, could you walk there please?"
I watched him look around and go to the place indicated. "Great. Now, head about thirty paces straight ahead of you and then turn 90 degrees left and another thirty. That's it. Your standing on the grass-shadow of a wall, I think it's a barn or something."
Grass-shadow is where the grass is a different color because of ruins buried just under the surface. From my chimney I could see at least three grass-shadows around the main building. The one I had steered Conrad to was the furthest away. What interested me in it was that the other two were simple rectangles. This one had a shadow in one corner that looked about the size that I find rather familiar.
The next step was to peg out the grass shadow area. We didn't have proper archeological pegs but Conrad improvised with strips of newspaper and rocks. I steered him from my chimney-top viewpoint and he marked the spots. By the time we had finished, we had a clear, very professional-looking, marked out area. It was time for me to come down.
Strangely, getting off the top of the square brickwork was the hardest part of climbing down. I nearly slipped and fell doing it but managed to hold on. Fortunately Conrad was standing with his back to me and missed all the excitement. Once I joined him at the barn site, he had dug a shallow hole on one of the wall lines to confirm there was brickwork under there. What made a big difference was there were clear signs of burning along the top edge of the buried brickwork. Seventy years of exposure to the weather had eroded it away from the exposed bricks but not from the buried ones. Then, he'd dug a small but deeper hole in the suspect area, one that went substantially further down than the ground level outside the walls. The earth he had exposed bore distinct signs of soot and ash. It looked reasonably certain that whatever building was here had been burned down.
"Time to call Peter?" Conrad nodded in response. Whatever was here was worth following up.
I dialed the number. Peter answered immediately. "What's up, Angel?"
"Hi Peter. How are you people doing at the crash site?"
"All done. We're just clearing it up. There's almost nothing left here, just deposits of rust and unidentifiable scrap. We found a couple of instruments in the cockpit that are salvageable, I'll ask the Navy if we can give one to Angharad for her museum. How's your search going?"
"I think we may have found some bodies."
Peter sounded reproachful. "Oh Angel, what did they do to offend you this time?"
This is hard to understand but British police know who and what I am. They are very well-aware that I'm the sort of person they would normally spend a lot of resources chasing down and arresting. What makes the difference is that I'm helping them get their firearms doctrine and training under control after they made a disastrous false start. Since that arrangement is working well and benefitting everybody involved, there is an understanding that as long as I don't commit any crimes on British soil, they won’t arrest me. I interpret that as long as they don’t find out about any crimes I've committed on British soil, I'll be all right. Also, I've worked hard for them and saved several of their people on the way. They respond in a peculiarly British manner, they make jokes about my alleged profession. Go figure.
"I think they may be the aircrew. If not, I'm pretty sure there's somebody down there. I'll send you my GLI numbers, if you can bring some of your people over? This could be significant."
I could hear Peter talking with his crew. "All right, we're on our way. Is Conrad there?"
"He is. Don’t worry, you're all safe."
Peter laughed, I assumed because he knew I won’t commit a cold-blooded murder if Conrad is watching. "Actually, I was thinking that if the American crew members are there, we could ask him to say a mass for them when we expose the bodies."
"I'll be pleased to do that Peter." Conrad had been listening to the conversation with an odd smile on his face. "Put it under the heading of professional courtesy."
We sat back for an hour or so while Peter brought some of his team over. We would have eaten some more of our 24-hour ration packs but Conrad was too full from breakfast to even face eating more. Me, I had my rum so that was all I wanted.
The first thing they confirmed was that this had been the site of a serious fire. One that had taken down the whole of the building. The soot layer was spread evenly across the test holes and there were even charred chips of wood. The second sign was a number of animal skeletons piled up by the site of the doors. That didn’t need much explanation, they'd been trapped in the fire, tried to escape and been burned as they made the effort. Then the team went to the square area that I'd noticed. They concluded fairly quickly that this area had been dug up after the fire and then filled in. That was why it appeared darker than the ground that had been baked. When they got two feet down, they found something else. A human skeleton. That brought digging to an immediate halt. What had once been a mildly interesting bit of recent history was now, potentially at least, a crime scene.
Forensic Pathologist's Office, Caenarfon, North Wales
"Back in the Glyndŵr Rising, the castle was held by 30 men-at-arms who defeated a combined Welsh and French Army of some 15,000. How they did it, I just don’t know." I was standing beside the window, looking out at the great castle that dominated the town, while listening to Peter was reading from the book on the castle released by the preservation society. The previous day, while the post-mortems had been carried out on the three human skeletons, we'd explored the castle in detail and bought copies of all the books we could find in the gift shop.
"That's why people built castles, Peter." Conrad was reading a history of the Glyndŵr Rising. "The whole purpose was to provide a near-impregnable defense with the minimum manpower. That economy allowed the deployment of more men into the field army and also provided them with secure bases. The trick is, the besieging army has to keep back to avoid losing people from arrow-shot and so on. That gave defenders the ability to see where they were massing for an attack and use the tunnels through the walls to mass their defenses in time to meet them. The attackers can’t even see where the defensive fire is coming from."
Conrad doesn't need to read books to know how castles were defended; he's seen the real thing. I've defended places as well and the same principles apply to beating off bandits. Economize on force so we can mass against the attackers at each point of attack in turn. I was thinking that over when the Pathologist came in.
"I am sorry to keep you waiting. We have a preliminary autopsy result for you but I am afraid it doesn't tell us much. Not yet anyway, we're running tests now and we've sent samples over to Belfast to see if we can get DNA readings back. We can show all three skeletons were men in their late teens or early twenties. Main thing is, you noticed the contorted positions of the bodies, bent over and with the fists clenched? We call that the pugilistic pose and it's indicative of people who were burned alive in a fire. The heat causes ligaments and tendons to contract you see. Given the surrounding conditions and the animal remains, we are reasonably certain the three men were caught in the barn fire and burned along with the animals. One of the skeletons had a broken leg. Very sharp, lateral cuts and clean breaks. The wounds are familiar to us up here. We see them a lot with hikers who slip and fall on slate fields. The slate layers act like axes and break bones easily.
"As a preliminary guess, I would say that the three men were hiking when one of them fell and broke his leg. His friends took themselves to the nearest habitation for help and were given refuge in the barn. What happened then, we don't know. Perhaps they were smoking and the hay caught fire but that's purely conjecture. One thing we can tell from the way the breaks are remodeling, they were in that barn for a week, perhaps two, before the fire killed them."
"No signs of bullet wounds or anything?" Conrad asked the question; it had occurred to me but I leave the questioning to him.
"None. In fact, no discernable injuries at all, other than the leg-breaks we mentioned, although remember these are skeletons. There may have been soft-tissue injuries that have been lost. We were lucky to get bone marrow samples for DNA testing. As I said, we have some tests in progress that will give us a little more information but unless a miracle happens, we can't add that much to what I've just told you."
Lounge Bar, The Menai Inn, Caenarfon, North Wales
"We haven't got a positive identification, yet, but I think we can be reasonably sure we found the Avenger crew. Three men lost seventy years ago and you two walk straight to their bodies. How do you do it?" Peter shook his head.
"Virtuous living?" I offered the explanation, aware that if the bodies had been buried recently, I could have a problem. But, they'd been buried long before I was born.
"I think there was a measure of divine guidance here." Conrad was being serious and I kept quiet. "Angel just followed the terrain but I can't help feeling we were doing God's work."
"I want to know how that barn caught fire." There was something off about the way the remains had been distributed in the barn. The animals had mostly been found by the barn doors and I've never known trapped farm animals to run towards a fire. Come to think of it, I've never known a farmer not to try and rescue his livestock, not infrequently getting burned up themselves in the process. That would imply that the fire start at the back end of the barn, close to wear the airmen were found. Consistent with them smoking of course, but would they have been that dumb? Possibly, I was a heavy smoker once but I gave it up after much persuasion and no little outright bullying from 'Lea and Nammie. The thing is, lighting up becomes a habit and one does it without thinking. So yes, smoking in dangerous places is quite plausible.
"The Germans?" Peter obviously agreed something was off. "How about the airmen were going cross-country and one of them tripped. Fell down and broke his leg. His friends brought him here, the owners sheltered them but somebody informed on them. So the Germans came and burned the place down. If that looks plausible, we'd have to search for the bodies of the owners as well."
"Wait a minute." An anvil had just dropped on my head. "According to the locals we spoke with, the last owners of that farm left about a year after this all happened. August 1944. Perhaps they turned the Americans in?"
"And got their farm burned out." Peter shook his head. "The Germans rewarded collaborators. They'd have had something nice for treachery like that. Extra food rations perhaps."
Conrad suddenly looked thoughtful. "Aircraft went down in November 1943, the family left the farm in August 1944. If the fire was linked to the air crew, that's several months after the place burned down. In fact, anybody notice that is nine months? Coincidence, probably, but odd."
It seemed to me that we had run into a dead end. That being the case, I had other things to do that didn’t involve Conrad or Peter. So, I left them discussing Edward IIs castles and planning a trip to Conway while I went to the room I share with Conrad and settled down to read Gareth Kendrick's security file. Despite my comments to Bernard, we didn’t have a Triad file on him. He quite simply had never come up on our radar. For him, that was a good thing in the sense that we had no reason to be interested in him.
Most people think that security files are filled with dark impenetrable secrets exposing the darkest recesses of a person's life. Sometimes they are, that's why I was up here alone to read Kendrick’s. Mostly, they aren't. The average security file is compiled by somebody very like a cheap private detective, reads like cheap detective fiction and contains information that anybody can find out if they know where to look. Some security services actually contract the preparation of such files out to private investigators. If they want a really in-depth investigation of somebody, they can do it themselves but it is rarely standard procedure. Even then, it's less than likely the file will contain anything useful.
Gareth Kendricks security file was so boring it actually sent me to sleep. He was 65 years old, only son of Owen Kendrick and his wife Tegan. His father had died in 1979. Owen Kendrick's death certificate had been issued in Cardiff and listed 'heart failure' as cause of death. That's completely meaningless of course; when I pump a dozen bullets into somebody, the actual cause of death is heart failure. There was a list of societies Gareth had belonged to, all of them about as worthy as they came. He'd married Nerys Beynon in 1966 and they had three sons and two daughters. She had her own notes all of which suggested a blameless life. In fact, they seemed to be a studiously respectable couple who had brought up a group of studiously respectable children. Dear God, they were boring people.
There's an old Chinese saying. One generation makes a fortune, the second builds on it, the third loses it. The Kendricks seemed to be following that pattern. The only thing was that the meaning of the Chinese saying is the third generation lose the fortune on wine, women, gambling and general debauchery. If it's any consolation, they enrich the local Triad in the process. Gareth Kendrick hadn't done any of that, he was simply a very mediocre businessman who had been unlucky. At that point I went to sleep.
I woke up when Conrad entered our room. I've said before that I sleep very lightly and I woke as soon as the door started to open despite his efforts to be quiet. We had a room with twin beds and he had the one nearest the window, mine the one nearest the door.
"Sorry, Angel, I tried not to wake you."
"No problem. I'd be worried if you hadn't. Are we off to Conway?"
"Day after tomorrow. As soon as Peter has finished off with his crash site."
"Oh good. We need to do some routine checks tomorrow. Do you fancy a flight down to Cardiff? There's something I have to do for Bernard and Humpty."
I heard Conrad chuckle in the darkened room. "Will I have to pray for your soul afterwards?"
"Nah. I've just got to check some old records. Good night, Conrad."
Ruin of Pennoyer Farm, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
Conrad is getting fat. It's hardly surprising given the diet up here. Everything seems to be pies and puddings. Except breakfast of course, that's usually a vast plate piled high with fried food washed down by too many cups of tea loaded with milk and sugar. The English definition of tea is not quite as vile as their rice pudding but it's very close. I just had toast and marmalade washed down with rum from my hip-flask. Once we had finished, we caught the bus back to where we finished off last night. It was easy enough to pick up our trail even if Conrad was puffing slightly as we climbed the hill. I think I'll make him run back to the inn tonight.
Anyway, the ruin of the farmhouse was where Angharad had said it would be. What she hadn’t picked up was that it sat in a terrain bottleneck where anybody walking west would have to pass through. I'd say that there had been something defensible here for a very long time and what was left of the farmhouse had just been the latest iteration.
'What was left' wasn't very much. The walls were waist-high at best but at some points they dropped below ground and could only be seen by the change in the color of the grass. There was a tall chimney structure at one end, pointing to where the living room had been. It was an interesting structure consisting of two intertwined flues, both ornately decorated with moldings and supported by the surviving brickwork. I looked harder and saw that the moldings formed a series of triangles with some sort of flower inside the shape. Given the remnants of the house at the lower end and the decorations in the upper half, I realized the structure was climbable.
"I'll race you to the top Conrad." I didn't want him to have a heart attack from eating too much unhealthy food and he needed the exercise. On the other hand, if I fell off, I'd need something soft to land on.
"What? Where?" Conrad looked around, confused by a challenge he wasn't expecting and saw the chimney. I almost said ruins of the chimney but it wasn't ruined yet. "No, you can’t climb that. The bricks are crumbling and there's no secure hand-holds. You'll break your neck falling."
"Not if you stand underneath me. Now, hold my boys and watch this." Why did I take my boys off? Because if I do fall, they'll break my ribs. The state of the brickwork was working for me; the erosion of the soft brickwork had left lots of hand- and foot-holds.
The trick when climbing something is to make sure your position at one level is secure before taking the next step up. If one hand or foothold is shaky, adjust until it isn’t before detaching a hand or foot from a secure spot. Get used to doing that and it should be possible to go up the wall like a cat. I did, sure a foot slipped a couple of times that looked a bit scary from the ground but the fact I had a good hold with everything else meant I wasn't in any danger. My back and stomach were aching a bit by the time I reached the end of the square brickwork but otherwise, no great sweat. The circular decorated chimneys were about my height but they were in a lot better condition than the bricks. I think they were made of some kind of heat-resistant pottery. I was sorely tempted to climb on them but I decided I had pushed my luck about as far as I should. Anyway, I could already see all I needed to.
"Conrad, see the place where the above-surface outer wall ruins go underground, could you walk there please?"
I watched him look around and go to the place indicated. "Great. Now, head about thirty paces straight ahead of you and then turn 90 degrees left and another thirty. That's it. Your standing on the grass-shadow of a wall, I think it's a barn or something."
Grass-shadow is where the grass is a different color because of ruins buried just under the surface. From my chimney I could see at least three grass-shadows around the main building. The one I had steered Conrad to was the furthest away. What interested me in it was that the other two were simple rectangles. This one had a shadow in one corner that looked about the size that I find rather familiar.
The next step was to peg out the grass shadow area. We didn't have proper archeological pegs but Conrad improvised with strips of newspaper and rocks. I steered him from my chimney-top viewpoint and he marked the spots. By the time we had finished, we had a clear, very professional-looking, marked out area. It was time for me to come down.
Strangely, getting off the top of the square brickwork was the hardest part of climbing down. I nearly slipped and fell doing it but managed to hold on. Fortunately Conrad was standing with his back to me and missed all the excitement. Once I joined him at the barn site, he had dug a shallow hole on one of the wall lines to confirm there was brickwork under there. What made a big difference was there were clear signs of burning along the top edge of the buried brickwork. Seventy years of exposure to the weather had eroded it away from the exposed bricks but not from the buried ones. Then, he'd dug a small but deeper hole in the suspect area, one that went substantially further down than the ground level outside the walls. The earth he had exposed bore distinct signs of soot and ash. It looked reasonably certain that whatever building was here had been burned down.
"Time to call Peter?" Conrad nodded in response. Whatever was here was worth following up.
I dialed the number. Peter answered immediately. "What's up, Angel?"
"Hi Peter. How are you people doing at the crash site?"
"All done. We're just clearing it up. There's almost nothing left here, just deposits of rust and unidentifiable scrap. We found a couple of instruments in the cockpit that are salvageable, I'll ask the Navy if we can give one to Angharad for her museum. How's your search going?"
"I think we may have found some bodies."
Peter sounded reproachful. "Oh Angel, what did they do to offend you this time?"
This is hard to understand but British police know who and what I am. They are very well-aware that I'm the sort of person they would normally spend a lot of resources chasing down and arresting. What makes the difference is that I'm helping them get their firearms doctrine and training under control after they made a disastrous false start. Since that arrangement is working well and benefitting everybody involved, there is an understanding that as long as I don't commit any crimes on British soil, they won’t arrest me. I interpret that as long as they don’t find out about any crimes I've committed on British soil, I'll be all right. Also, I've worked hard for them and saved several of their people on the way. They respond in a peculiarly British manner, they make jokes about my alleged profession. Go figure.
"I think they may be the aircrew. If not, I'm pretty sure there's somebody down there. I'll send you my GLI numbers, if you can bring some of your people over? This could be significant."
I could hear Peter talking with his crew. "All right, we're on our way. Is Conrad there?"
"He is. Don’t worry, you're all safe."
Peter laughed, I assumed because he knew I won’t commit a cold-blooded murder if Conrad is watching. "Actually, I was thinking that if the American crew members are there, we could ask him to say a mass for them when we expose the bodies."
"I'll be pleased to do that Peter." Conrad had been listening to the conversation with an odd smile on his face. "Put it under the heading of professional courtesy."
We sat back for an hour or so while Peter brought some of his team over. We would have eaten some more of our 24-hour ration packs but Conrad was too full from breakfast to even face eating more. Me, I had my rum so that was all I wanted.
The first thing they confirmed was that this had been the site of a serious fire. One that had taken down the whole of the building. The soot layer was spread evenly across the test holes and there were even charred chips of wood. The second sign was a number of animal skeletons piled up by the site of the doors. That didn’t need much explanation, they'd been trapped in the fire, tried to escape and been burned as they made the effort. Then the team went to the square area that I'd noticed. They concluded fairly quickly that this area had been dug up after the fire and then filled in. That was why it appeared darker than the ground that had been baked. When they got two feet down, they found something else. A human skeleton. That brought digging to an immediate halt. What had once been a mildly interesting bit of recent history was now, potentially at least, a crime scene.
Forensic Pathologist's Office, Caenarfon, North Wales
"Back in the Glyndŵr Rising, the castle was held by 30 men-at-arms who defeated a combined Welsh and French Army of some 15,000. How they did it, I just don’t know." I was standing beside the window, looking out at the great castle that dominated the town, while listening to Peter was reading from the book on the castle released by the preservation society. The previous day, while the post-mortems had been carried out on the three human skeletons, we'd explored the castle in detail and bought copies of all the books we could find in the gift shop.
"That's why people built castles, Peter." Conrad was reading a history of the Glyndŵr Rising. "The whole purpose was to provide a near-impregnable defense with the minimum manpower. That economy allowed the deployment of more men into the field army and also provided them with secure bases. The trick is, the besieging army has to keep back to avoid losing people from arrow-shot and so on. That gave defenders the ability to see where they were massing for an attack and use the tunnels through the walls to mass their defenses in time to meet them. The attackers can’t even see where the defensive fire is coming from."
Conrad doesn't need to read books to know how castles were defended; he's seen the real thing. I've defended places as well and the same principles apply to beating off bandits. Economize on force so we can mass against the attackers at each point of attack in turn. I was thinking that over when the Pathologist came in.
"I am sorry to keep you waiting. We have a preliminary autopsy result for you but I am afraid it doesn't tell us much. Not yet anyway, we're running tests now and we've sent samples over to Belfast to see if we can get DNA readings back. We can show all three skeletons were men in their late teens or early twenties. Main thing is, you noticed the contorted positions of the bodies, bent over and with the fists clenched? We call that the pugilistic pose and it's indicative of people who were burned alive in a fire. The heat causes ligaments and tendons to contract you see. Given the surrounding conditions and the animal remains, we are reasonably certain the three men were caught in the barn fire and burned along with the animals. One of the skeletons had a broken leg. Very sharp, lateral cuts and clean breaks. The wounds are familiar to us up here. We see them a lot with hikers who slip and fall on slate fields. The slate layers act like axes and break bones easily.
"As a preliminary guess, I would say that the three men were hiking when one of them fell and broke his leg. His friends took themselves to the nearest habitation for help and were given refuge in the barn. What happened then, we don't know. Perhaps they were smoking and the hay caught fire but that's purely conjecture. One thing we can tell from the way the breaks are remodeling, they were in that barn for a week, perhaps two, before the fire killed them."
"No signs of bullet wounds or anything?" Conrad asked the question; it had occurred to me but I leave the questioning to him.
"None. In fact, no discernable injuries at all, other than the leg-breaks we mentioned, although remember these are skeletons. There may have been soft-tissue injuries that have been lost. We were lucky to get bone marrow samples for DNA testing. As I said, we have some tests in progress that will give us a little more information but unless a miracle happens, we can't add that much to what I've just told you."
Lounge Bar, The Menai Inn, Caenarfon, North Wales
"We haven't got a positive identification, yet, but I think we can be reasonably sure we found the Avenger crew. Three men lost seventy years ago and you two walk straight to their bodies. How do you do it?" Peter shook his head.
"Virtuous living?" I offered the explanation, aware that if the bodies had been buried recently, I could have a problem. But, they'd been buried long before I was born.
"I think there was a measure of divine guidance here." Conrad was being serious and I kept quiet. "Angel just followed the terrain but I can't help feeling we were doing God's work."
"I want to know how that barn caught fire." There was something off about the way the remains had been distributed in the barn. The animals had mostly been found by the barn doors and I've never known trapped farm animals to run towards a fire. Come to think of it, I've never known a farmer not to try and rescue his livestock, not infrequently getting burned up themselves in the process. That would imply that the fire start at the back end of the barn, close to wear the airmen were found. Consistent with them smoking of course, but would they have been that dumb? Possibly, I was a heavy smoker once but I gave it up after much persuasion and no little outright bullying from 'Lea and Nammie. The thing is, lighting up becomes a habit and one does it without thinking. So yes, smoking in dangerous places is quite plausible.
"The Germans?" Peter obviously agreed something was off. "How about the airmen were going cross-country and one of them tripped. Fell down and broke his leg. His friends brought him here, the owners sheltered them but somebody informed on them. So the Germans came and burned the place down. If that looks plausible, we'd have to search for the bodies of the owners as well."
"Wait a minute." An anvil had just dropped on my head. "According to the locals we spoke with, the last owners of that farm left about a year after this all happened. August 1944. Perhaps they turned the Americans in?"
"And got their farm burned out." Peter shook his head. "The Germans rewarded collaborators. They'd have had something nice for treachery like that. Extra food rations perhaps."
Conrad suddenly looked thoughtful. "Aircraft went down in November 1943, the family left the farm in August 1944. If the fire was linked to the air crew, that's several months after the place burned down. In fact, anybody notice that is nine months? Coincidence, probably, but odd."
It seemed to me that we had run into a dead end. That being the case, I had other things to do that didn’t involve Conrad or Peter. So, I left them discussing Edward IIs castles and planning a trip to Conway while I went to the room I share with Conrad and settled down to read Gareth Kendrick's security file. Despite my comments to Bernard, we didn’t have a Triad file on him. He quite simply had never come up on our radar. For him, that was a good thing in the sense that we had no reason to be interested in him.
Most people think that security files are filled with dark impenetrable secrets exposing the darkest recesses of a person's life. Sometimes they are, that's why I was up here alone to read Kendrick’s. Mostly, they aren't. The average security file is compiled by somebody very like a cheap private detective, reads like cheap detective fiction and contains information that anybody can find out if they know where to look. Some security services actually contract the preparation of such files out to private investigators. If they want a really in-depth investigation of somebody, they can do it themselves but it is rarely standard procedure. Even then, it's less than likely the file will contain anything useful.
Gareth Kendricks security file was so boring it actually sent me to sleep. He was 65 years old, only son of Owen Kendrick and his wife Tegan. His father had died in 1979. Owen Kendrick's death certificate had been issued in Cardiff and listed 'heart failure' as cause of death. That's completely meaningless of course; when I pump a dozen bullets into somebody, the actual cause of death is heart failure. There was a list of societies Gareth had belonged to, all of them about as worthy as they came. He'd married Nerys Beynon in 1966 and they had three sons and two daughters. She had her own notes all of which suggested a blameless life. In fact, they seemed to be a studiously respectable couple who had brought up a group of studiously respectable children. Dear God, they were boring people.
There's an old Chinese saying. One generation makes a fortune, the second builds on it, the third loses it. The Kendricks seemed to be following that pattern. The only thing was that the meaning of the Chinese saying is the third generation lose the fortune on wine, women, gambling and general debauchery. If it's any consolation, they enrich the local Triad in the process. Gareth Kendrick hadn't done any of that, he was simply a very mediocre businessman who had been unlucky. At that point I went to sleep.
I woke up when Conrad entered our room. I've said before that I sleep very lightly and I woke as soon as the door started to open despite his efforts to be quiet. We had a room with twin beds and he had the one nearest the window, mine the one nearest the door.
"Sorry, Angel, I tried not to wake you."
"No problem. I'd be worried if you hadn't. Are we off to Conway?"
"Day after tomorrow. As soon as Peter has finished off with his crash site."
"Oh good. We need to do some routine checks tomorrow. Do you fancy a flight down to Cardiff? There's something I have to do for Bernard and Humpty."
I heard Conrad chuckle in the darkened room. "Will I have to pray for your soul afterwards?"
"Nah. I've just got to check some old records. Good night, Conrad."
Re: 2009 - Eye of the Survivor
Chapter Six
Central Records Department, Cardiff, Wales.
It takes nearly four hours to drive the 171 miles from Caernarfon to Cardiff. It takes five hours to go by train. Flying from the Rotodyne pad in central Caenarfon to its equivalent in Cardiff takes 25 minutes. That's why Rotodynes dominate medium-haul travel. The Cymraeg Aer flight goes on to London Docklands City Airport and takes another 25 minutes to cover the 150 miles. That's how I got there when I went to see Bernard a few days ago. Less than an hour to get from the wilds of North Wales to the bustling flesh-pots of London. I honestly cannot imagine living without Rotodynes. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a Medevac Rotodyne, I wouldn’t be living at all.
Conrad and I caught a bus from our hotel to the Rotodyne pad, bought our tickets at the ground floor office and were waiting on the roof when the aircraft landed. It dropped its tail ramp, the handful of passengers for Canaerfon collected their luggage from the bag area and got off, we got on and that was that. We didn’t have luggage so we went straight to our seats. Everybody else brought their bag on, stowed it and sat down. Then we were off and heading south. We landed in the city center at Cardiff and got a taxi to the Central Records Department. By the time we left the airport, our Rotodyne had already taken off on the next leg of its commuter trip. Does that work well or what?
Our task was going to be a lot more difficult than it could have been because, during the Occupation, the Germans destroyed as much of the historical record archives as they could. They burned birth, marriage and death certificates, and property deeds. Anything that could suggest that their version of who was who and who owned what was not the correct one. The British had been forewarned by the Germans doing the same thing in other countries they had occupied and secured as much of their archives as they could. Inevitably what survived and what didn’t was a crap-shoot and rebuilding records to fill in the gaps is a big industry. The Central Records Department is the Civil Service version of that industry and works in parallel with private company versions of the same thing. Civil Service and Private Enterprise work closely together on this one, share their results and have a sense of mission.
In case you are wondering, yes, Cardiff House has friendly relations with Central Records and we help them out where we can. Chinese families keep good records. Of course, we use that relationship for our own ends as well and they know it. Hence the old saying, 'one hand washes the other'. One result of that relationship is that the Central Records staff have arranged for us to have computer access to their files, a workstation is waiting and one of their researchers has been assigned to assist us.
"You are Mr. and Mrs. de Llorente? I'm Afanen Broderick and I'll be helping you with your search."
"Please, it's Conrad and Angel. Thank you for taking the time out to help us Afanen." Conrad gave a grateful and very genuine smile. "Angel, any ideas on where we should start?"
I gave Afanen a grateful and very fake smile. Not that she realized it was faked of course. "Perhaps we could see the birth certificate for Gareth Kendrick? Born in August 1943?"
"All right, that will be interesting. It's fortunate we digitized all our records. Now, back in 1943, the records will have been compiled under German supervision and will comply with their standards. So be warned, what we will see is what they wanted us to think. Here, it shouldn't make much difference but you never know. Sometimes the differences can fill in a bit of history. For example, the registration clerks sometimes would create bogus records to cover for Resistance or OSS operatives. Or CheKa of course. It's rumored that one CheKa agent stayed here after the war and is now known as "Thomas the Spy" to all his neighbors."
That caused a round of laughter making it obviously a joke so I joined in the laughter. In this case, the German-issued birth certificate simply confirmed what I'd already read. Gareth Kendrick, born August 3rd 1944, son of Owen Kendrick and his wife Tegan Kendrick. I guessed whoever had compiled the security file had consulted the same record. "Do we have a death certificate for the Kendricks?"
"Owen and Tegan? We should do." Afanen typed some search criteria in and ran down a list of names. "Here we are, Owen Kendrick, died in 1979 from heart failure brought on by obesity and smoking. Fairly normal, a lot of the deaths here are attributed to unhealthy diet and excessive tobacco use. Now that's strange, there's no record for Tegan Kendrick. She must be in her 90s now, late 80s at best. She must still be alive though otherwise we'd have a modern death certificate."
"How about her maiden name?" Conrad was looking at the list of names on the screen. "Would she have been listed under that?"
"Unlikely, women in those years took their husband's name on marriage and never went back. Even if widowed or divorced. There were a couple of cases where women murdered their husbands and were hanged under their name." I didn't like that; it struck me as being the final insult to those women.
"How about we take a step back? Could we find their marriage certificate?" Conrad was in his element now, digging out the facts he needed. I just sat back and let him get on with it.
"We can try. It's problematic though. She'd have to be married between November 1942 when the Occupation started and November 1943 when the baby was conceived." Conrad looked confused at that so Afanen explained. "Before November 1942, the marriage certificate would have been the old Welsh style, where the bride's personal name is entered but not her family name. Her family didn't matter you see. One of the first things the Germans did after the occupation was to change all the paperwork so that the bride's family name was included. Simple reason of course, they were looking for Jews. If she was married after November 1943, she would have been pregnant when she married and that was a serious scandal. I mean seriously scandalous. She would have run a real risk of being sent to an asylum as a moral defective. Anyway, we'll give it a try."
We beat the odds. We found a microfilmed copy of the parent's marriage certificate from April 1938, listing Owen Kendrick, aged 24 as the groom and Tegan, aged 18, as the bride. Afanen gave us a quick background of the time, telling us that men tended to marry late and women early on purely economic grounds. It was very interesting but it didn’t tell us Tegan's family name.
Conrad broke the log-jam. He noted that Tegan had been 18 when she was married in 1938. That meant she must have been born in 1920. Although the Germans had destroyed the official birth records, the Center had reconstructed them from church yearbooks. Across the country, ministers had hidden them rather than see their Parish records lost and more than one had lost his life rather than expose the secret hiding place. The microfiche record made by the center from Gwynedd church books showed that in 1920, a daughter had been christened Tegan. The parents were listed as Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer.
Tegan Kendrick had been born Tegan Pennoyer. That didn't help us as much as we had hoped. There was no trace of a death certificate for Tegan Pennoyer either. Nor was she listed on the voting lists either under that name or her married name. She had disappeared as thoroughly as if she had dissolved in the mist. That interested me; you can take this comment to the bank. If somebody disappears like that, there is always a reason for them doing so. They may be in hiding, they may be buried somewhere, they may have become the business part of a meat pie but there is always a reason why and that reason is very rarely innocent.
Our trip to Cardiff had told us that the Kendrick family were hiding something and that could give Humpty and Bernard the leverage they needed.
Conrad was packaging our stuff and thanking the Central Records Department for their help. We had to head back up north; that morning we had received an email from a Mrs. Susan Mitchell that asked if we would be available for a video conference that evening. We had confirmed it with a certain amount of curiosity; it wasn't often we got calls like that. Finding us both is a lot harder than it seems. A quick investigation showed that contact had been made via Peter Atkinson. He had told us that the caller was connected with the wrecked Avenger so we had given him account and session numbers and a password valid for that session only.
Business Center, The Menai Inn, Caenarfon, North Wales
Even small hotels have a business center these days. It was a bit grandly named in the Menai Inn; it was just a small office with a large-screen computer for video-conferencing but they were trying. At the appointed hour, we were sitting opposite the screen waiting for the connection to appear in our 'conference room'. The computer blinked, the screen flashed and a message came in stating that there was a caller wanting to make contact. Conrad entered the session password and we were in.
The woman on the screen was obviously elderly but had made a major effort to look her best. She had a good start; some women age very badly and can look in their nineties when thirty years younger. Susan Mitchell was the other way; her age was obvious but the years had been very kind to her. When she spoke, her voice was steady and well-pitched. Just before introducing herself she glanced at the man sitting beside her. He gave her a comforting smile, a slight nod and then took her arm protectively. Conrad wrote one word on a pad that we kept out of sight. 'Son.'
"I'm Susan Mitchell, everybody calls me Sue and this is my eldest son Joseph. Everybody calls him Joe Junior. Thank you for taking our call, I hope it's not an inconvenience?"
"No, absolutely not." From the way Conrad was speaking, I guessed that he had already guessed what this was about. "I am Conrad de Llorente, this my friend and working partner Angel. Everybody just calls us Conrad and Angel."
"Hello Sue, Joe." I love video-conferences; they mean that nobody feels they have to touch me. I watched Sue Mitchell smiling shyly and suddenly the years fell away from her and I knew who she was as well. She was the women in the photograph we had found in the Avenger. Conrad had recognized her instantly. I said the years had been kind to her? The young woman she had been in 1943 was still there, waiting to come out.
"We wanted to thank you for finding Joe's body and sending it back home. We got the DNA identification a few hours ago and wanted to call you right away. Mr. Atkinson said you'd called off your vacation to help in the search. That was so kind of you both. Joe was my husband you see, and Joe Jnr here is our son."
"It was my DNA sample that confirmed the remains were those of my father." Joe Jnr had inherited his smile from his mother. "He never saw me of course."
I glanced at Conrad; it wouldn’t have been obvious to a stranger but he'd seen something and it was puzzling him. He was also keeping his voice very mild and gentle. "You must have been married just before the Yorktown set sail?"
"Oh yes, although the Navy were very good to us. They even got the paperwork through in time for us to have a brief honeymoon. RFP you see." The slightly shy, self-conscious smile was back.
"Russian Front Priority." Conrad was laughing in a semi-conspiratorial way.
Sue joined him in the laugh. "That's a piece of history not many people remember. Angel, the armed forces back then would stamp marriage paperwork that needed to be processed very quickly 'RFP'. If anybody asked, it stood for 'Russian Front Priority'. Actually, it meant 'Reports Fiancé Pregnant' and the forces made certain we could be married before the husband went overseas. And before it began to show. I was six weeks gone when we were married. I've brought something to show you. This was taken the day we were married."
Joe Jnr reached forward and fiddled with some switches, putting a color picture up on the screen. We'd seen it before but only as a semi-rotten, badly deteriorated black-and-white print from the cockpit of a wrecked aircraft. This was in perfect condition, the colors still bright and sharp. It was obviously a treasured family heirloom. I saw Conrad tear up slightly at the sight of a young man who had died long before his time. He said, very quietly, "Did you know there was a copy of that picture stuck to the instrument panel of his aircraft. He must have loved you very much."
"Mr. Atkinson told me, yes. He says the print will need stabilizing before it can be sent to me but he will send it as soon as it's ready. We'll be burying Joe on Sunday, in the family plot next to my second husband. The Navy are sending a color party and doing a 'missing man' fly-past. That makes everything very final somehow." Her composure was beginning to fail and Conrad realized it was obviously time to end the call. We had a few more brief civilities and the conference session ended.
When we went to our room, Conrad was very quiet and thoughtful. I assumed he was reflecting on the loss of young men like Joe Murphy that war represented. It's not something I really understand, people die. Once I said that everybody dies only now I know that's not quite true. "Angel, could I see the picture from Gareth Kendrick's file please?"
I opened the file and gave it to him. He looked at it and nodded as if some pieces had fallen into place. I kept quiet while he thought them over.
Eventually he came out with it. "Did you notice something when we were talking? There's a marked family resemblance between Joseph Murphy Junior and Gareth Kendrick. It kept nagging at me during our conference with the Mitchells. Joseph Junior reminded me of somebody but I didn’t place it until I saw that wedding picture. I am reasonably sure that Joseph Murphy Junior and Gareth Kendrick are half-brothers."
And that, boys and girls, is where I saw a way out of the mess Humpty and Bernard had dumped in my lap. The only question in my mind was whether Owen Kendrick had murdered his wife Tegan or whether he had done something worse to her. That led to another problem that ran through my mind while I was in bed that night. What had happened to my mother?
Local Library, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
"Are there many people left from that time, Angharad?" Conrad needed to find somebody, anybody, who could help find out what had happened in November 1943. Both he and I, for different reasons, were beginning to believe that the real story was entirely different from our original perceptions.
She shook her head. "People then didn’t live that long. They married young and died young. Look you, I'm 17 right? Back then I'd already be married and probably pregnant. Families of seven or eight kids were normal and that doesn’t count the ones that die at birth or the ones that took their mother with them. This was farming country and children are free labor. Go back another generation and 14 year old mothers aren't rare. Men did all the hard work by hand and that killed them almost as quickly as constant childbearing."
She caught her breath and the hard, brilliant look faded from her eyes. "I'm sorry, but we get so many people come in and think that the old days were some sort of rural paradise. It wasn't like that back then. Thomas Hobbes got it right, 'life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’"
Conrad nodded very sadly. "People who think they are idealistic, or would like us to think that, keep telling me that living in a state of nature is wonderful. It’s really what Hobbes called the bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. The strong will take what they want, and the weak will suffer what they must. Or at least the ones who want to carry on living will. During the Great Storm, because of Angel’s foresight, we had all we needed to survive. In a world without laws, people struggling to find food and water to survive would have found it rational to kill us and take our supplies. I believe in a just and merciful God who lays down rules and principles by which we can avoid the nightmare of bellum omnium contra omnes but I've also come to realize that God appreciates a little help now and then.”
Conrad stopped himself, caught his breath and smiles sheepishly. "I'm sorry Angharad. I didn’t mean to let fly like that. I'm really depressed right now because I think a terrible crime has been committed, one that might still be going on today and the thought of it weighs on my soul. Can you help me, please? Is there one person left alive who can tell us what happened back then?"
"Sixty-six years ago. No, I don't know of anybody who can remember those days. Honestly I don’t." Angharad stopped. "Hold on a minute, there is one person who might be able to help you. Deiniol Cornog. He's the youngest son of one of the Pennoyer tenants. He's a bit adrift if you get my meaning but he might remember something that helps."
"Thank you Angharad, we'll give it a try."
"Conrad, let me sign a book out to you for a couple of days. It's a collection of poetry by Thomas Love Peacock. There's one poem called 'The War-song of Dinas Vawr' that describes what you have been saying. There's one part that always makes me weep. It goes 'On Dyfed's richest valley, where herds of kine were browsing, we made a mighty sally, to furnish our carousing.' At first, nobody understands what those words mean. Those who do understand never read the whole poem the same way again. It's a nightmarish indictment of the war of all against all." She obviously thought for a second, making her mind up about something. “Do you two have any plans for tonight?”
We both shook our heads. Angharad reached into a drawer and got out a pad of tickets. “I sing in a band, part-time of course but we write all our own stuff and the plan is we’ll sing our way through University. Why don’t you come along? Pub in the next village. Good food, they’ve got your rum, Angel and live music?”
Conrad grinned brightly and handed over the price of two tickets. "Thank you, Angharad, we’ll be there. I'll read your book tonight. Now, we'll let you get along with your work."
Outside, Conrad sighed despondently. “It’s all too true, I fear. There was a very cynical article once that compared human society to a flock of sheep. The vast majority of people are sheep. As long as they can chew their grass and think beautiful thoughts, they don’t care what horrors the woods hold. They let the shepherd worry about that. The shepherds do the thinking for the flock and make the rules that keep them safe. Only all the rules the shepherd makes can’t keep the wolves away by themselves. Fortunately, he has allies to help him enforce them, the sheep-dogs. Sheep dogs are violent and vicious, they look and behave very much like the wolves and the sheep are afraid of them. The sheep don't understand the very important difference is that the sheepdogs are supremely devoted to protecting the shepherd and the flock, if necessary at the expense of their own lives.”
I couldn’t resist it. I looked at Conrad and said "woof, woof." Giving a wolf-howl would have attracted too much attention. What surprised me was that he nodded in agreement.
Central Records Department, Cardiff, Wales.
It takes nearly four hours to drive the 171 miles from Caernarfon to Cardiff. It takes five hours to go by train. Flying from the Rotodyne pad in central Caenarfon to its equivalent in Cardiff takes 25 minutes. That's why Rotodynes dominate medium-haul travel. The Cymraeg Aer flight goes on to London Docklands City Airport and takes another 25 minutes to cover the 150 miles. That's how I got there when I went to see Bernard a few days ago. Less than an hour to get from the wilds of North Wales to the bustling flesh-pots of London. I honestly cannot imagine living without Rotodynes. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a Medevac Rotodyne, I wouldn’t be living at all.
Conrad and I caught a bus from our hotel to the Rotodyne pad, bought our tickets at the ground floor office and were waiting on the roof when the aircraft landed. It dropped its tail ramp, the handful of passengers for Canaerfon collected their luggage from the bag area and got off, we got on and that was that. We didn’t have luggage so we went straight to our seats. Everybody else brought their bag on, stowed it and sat down. Then we were off and heading south. We landed in the city center at Cardiff and got a taxi to the Central Records Department. By the time we left the airport, our Rotodyne had already taken off on the next leg of its commuter trip. Does that work well or what?
Our task was going to be a lot more difficult than it could have been because, during the Occupation, the Germans destroyed as much of the historical record archives as they could. They burned birth, marriage and death certificates, and property deeds. Anything that could suggest that their version of who was who and who owned what was not the correct one. The British had been forewarned by the Germans doing the same thing in other countries they had occupied and secured as much of their archives as they could. Inevitably what survived and what didn’t was a crap-shoot and rebuilding records to fill in the gaps is a big industry. The Central Records Department is the Civil Service version of that industry and works in parallel with private company versions of the same thing. Civil Service and Private Enterprise work closely together on this one, share their results and have a sense of mission.
In case you are wondering, yes, Cardiff House has friendly relations with Central Records and we help them out where we can. Chinese families keep good records. Of course, we use that relationship for our own ends as well and they know it. Hence the old saying, 'one hand washes the other'. One result of that relationship is that the Central Records staff have arranged for us to have computer access to their files, a workstation is waiting and one of their researchers has been assigned to assist us.
"You are Mr. and Mrs. de Llorente? I'm Afanen Broderick and I'll be helping you with your search."
"Please, it's Conrad and Angel. Thank you for taking the time out to help us Afanen." Conrad gave a grateful and very genuine smile. "Angel, any ideas on where we should start?"
I gave Afanen a grateful and very fake smile. Not that she realized it was faked of course. "Perhaps we could see the birth certificate for Gareth Kendrick? Born in August 1943?"
"All right, that will be interesting. It's fortunate we digitized all our records. Now, back in 1943, the records will have been compiled under German supervision and will comply with their standards. So be warned, what we will see is what they wanted us to think. Here, it shouldn't make much difference but you never know. Sometimes the differences can fill in a bit of history. For example, the registration clerks sometimes would create bogus records to cover for Resistance or OSS operatives. Or CheKa of course. It's rumored that one CheKa agent stayed here after the war and is now known as "Thomas the Spy" to all his neighbors."
That caused a round of laughter making it obviously a joke so I joined in the laughter. In this case, the German-issued birth certificate simply confirmed what I'd already read. Gareth Kendrick, born August 3rd 1944, son of Owen Kendrick and his wife Tegan Kendrick. I guessed whoever had compiled the security file had consulted the same record. "Do we have a death certificate for the Kendricks?"
"Owen and Tegan? We should do." Afanen typed some search criteria in and ran down a list of names. "Here we are, Owen Kendrick, died in 1979 from heart failure brought on by obesity and smoking. Fairly normal, a lot of the deaths here are attributed to unhealthy diet and excessive tobacco use. Now that's strange, there's no record for Tegan Kendrick. She must be in her 90s now, late 80s at best. She must still be alive though otherwise we'd have a modern death certificate."
"How about her maiden name?" Conrad was looking at the list of names on the screen. "Would she have been listed under that?"
"Unlikely, women in those years took their husband's name on marriage and never went back. Even if widowed or divorced. There were a couple of cases where women murdered their husbands and were hanged under their name." I didn't like that; it struck me as being the final insult to those women.
"How about we take a step back? Could we find their marriage certificate?" Conrad was in his element now, digging out the facts he needed. I just sat back and let him get on with it.
"We can try. It's problematic though. She'd have to be married between November 1942 when the Occupation started and November 1943 when the baby was conceived." Conrad looked confused at that so Afanen explained. "Before November 1942, the marriage certificate would have been the old Welsh style, where the bride's personal name is entered but not her family name. Her family didn't matter you see. One of the first things the Germans did after the occupation was to change all the paperwork so that the bride's family name was included. Simple reason of course, they were looking for Jews. If she was married after November 1943, she would have been pregnant when she married and that was a serious scandal. I mean seriously scandalous. She would have run a real risk of being sent to an asylum as a moral defective. Anyway, we'll give it a try."
We beat the odds. We found a microfilmed copy of the parent's marriage certificate from April 1938, listing Owen Kendrick, aged 24 as the groom and Tegan, aged 18, as the bride. Afanen gave us a quick background of the time, telling us that men tended to marry late and women early on purely economic grounds. It was very interesting but it didn’t tell us Tegan's family name.
Conrad broke the log-jam. He noted that Tegan had been 18 when she was married in 1938. That meant she must have been born in 1920. Although the Germans had destroyed the official birth records, the Center had reconstructed them from church yearbooks. Across the country, ministers had hidden them rather than see their Parish records lost and more than one had lost his life rather than expose the secret hiding place. The microfiche record made by the center from Gwynedd church books showed that in 1920, a daughter had been christened Tegan. The parents were listed as Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer.
Tegan Kendrick had been born Tegan Pennoyer. That didn't help us as much as we had hoped. There was no trace of a death certificate for Tegan Pennoyer either. Nor was she listed on the voting lists either under that name or her married name. She had disappeared as thoroughly as if she had dissolved in the mist. That interested me; you can take this comment to the bank. If somebody disappears like that, there is always a reason for them doing so. They may be in hiding, they may be buried somewhere, they may have become the business part of a meat pie but there is always a reason why and that reason is very rarely innocent.
Our trip to Cardiff had told us that the Kendrick family were hiding something and that could give Humpty and Bernard the leverage they needed.
Conrad was packaging our stuff and thanking the Central Records Department for their help. We had to head back up north; that morning we had received an email from a Mrs. Susan Mitchell that asked if we would be available for a video conference that evening. We had confirmed it with a certain amount of curiosity; it wasn't often we got calls like that. Finding us both is a lot harder than it seems. A quick investigation showed that contact had been made via Peter Atkinson. He had told us that the caller was connected with the wrecked Avenger so we had given him account and session numbers and a password valid for that session only.
Business Center, The Menai Inn, Caenarfon, North Wales
Even small hotels have a business center these days. It was a bit grandly named in the Menai Inn; it was just a small office with a large-screen computer for video-conferencing but they were trying. At the appointed hour, we were sitting opposite the screen waiting for the connection to appear in our 'conference room'. The computer blinked, the screen flashed and a message came in stating that there was a caller wanting to make contact. Conrad entered the session password and we were in.
The woman on the screen was obviously elderly but had made a major effort to look her best. She had a good start; some women age very badly and can look in their nineties when thirty years younger. Susan Mitchell was the other way; her age was obvious but the years had been very kind to her. When she spoke, her voice was steady and well-pitched. Just before introducing herself she glanced at the man sitting beside her. He gave her a comforting smile, a slight nod and then took her arm protectively. Conrad wrote one word on a pad that we kept out of sight. 'Son.'
"I'm Susan Mitchell, everybody calls me Sue and this is my eldest son Joseph. Everybody calls him Joe Junior. Thank you for taking our call, I hope it's not an inconvenience?"
"No, absolutely not." From the way Conrad was speaking, I guessed that he had already guessed what this was about. "I am Conrad de Llorente, this my friend and working partner Angel. Everybody just calls us Conrad and Angel."
"Hello Sue, Joe." I love video-conferences; they mean that nobody feels they have to touch me. I watched Sue Mitchell smiling shyly and suddenly the years fell away from her and I knew who she was as well. She was the women in the photograph we had found in the Avenger. Conrad had recognized her instantly. I said the years had been kind to her? The young woman she had been in 1943 was still there, waiting to come out.
"We wanted to thank you for finding Joe's body and sending it back home. We got the DNA identification a few hours ago and wanted to call you right away. Mr. Atkinson said you'd called off your vacation to help in the search. That was so kind of you both. Joe was my husband you see, and Joe Jnr here is our son."
"It was my DNA sample that confirmed the remains were those of my father." Joe Jnr had inherited his smile from his mother. "He never saw me of course."
I glanced at Conrad; it wouldn’t have been obvious to a stranger but he'd seen something and it was puzzling him. He was also keeping his voice very mild and gentle. "You must have been married just before the Yorktown set sail?"
"Oh yes, although the Navy were very good to us. They even got the paperwork through in time for us to have a brief honeymoon. RFP you see." The slightly shy, self-conscious smile was back.
"Russian Front Priority." Conrad was laughing in a semi-conspiratorial way.
Sue joined him in the laugh. "That's a piece of history not many people remember. Angel, the armed forces back then would stamp marriage paperwork that needed to be processed very quickly 'RFP'. If anybody asked, it stood for 'Russian Front Priority'. Actually, it meant 'Reports Fiancé Pregnant' and the forces made certain we could be married before the husband went overseas. And before it began to show. I was six weeks gone when we were married. I've brought something to show you. This was taken the day we were married."
Joe Jnr reached forward and fiddled with some switches, putting a color picture up on the screen. We'd seen it before but only as a semi-rotten, badly deteriorated black-and-white print from the cockpit of a wrecked aircraft. This was in perfect condition, the colors still bright and sharp. It was obviously a treasured family heirloom. I saw Conrad tear up slightly at the sight of a young man who had died long before his time. He said, very quietly, "Did you know there was a copy of that picture stuck to the instrument panel of his aircraft. He must have loved you very much."
"Mr. Atkinson told me, yes. He says the print will need stabilizing before it can be sent to me but he will send it as soon as it's ready. We'll be burying Joe on Sunday, in the family plot next to my second husband. The Navy are sending a color party and doing a 'missing man' fly-past. That makes everything very final somehow." Her composure was beginning to fail and Conrad realized it was obviously time to end the call. We had a few more brief civilities and the conference session ended.
When we went to our room, Conrad was very quiet and thoughtful. I assumed he was reflecting on the loss of young men like Joe Murphy that war represented. It's not something I really understand, people die. Once I said that everybody dies only now I know that's not quite true. "Angel, could I see the picture from Gareth Kendrick's file please?"
I opened the file and gave it to him. He looked at it and nodded as if some pieces had fallen into place. I kept quiet while he thought them over.
Eventually he came out with it. "Did you notice something when we were talking? There's a marked family resemblance between Joseph Murphy Junior and Gareth Kendrick. It kept nagging at me during our conference with the Mitchells. Joseph Junior reminded me of somebody but I didn’t place it until I saw that wedding picture. I am reasonably sure that Joseph Murphy Junior and Gareth Kendrick are half-brothers."
And that, boys and girls, is where I saw a way out of the mess Humpty and Bernard had dumped in my lap. The only question in my mind was whether Owen Kendrick had murdered his wife Tegan or whether he had done something worse to her. That led to another problem that ran through my mind while I was in bed that night. What had happened to my mother?
Local Library, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
"Are there many people left from that time, Angharad?" Conrad needed to find somebody, anybody, who could help find out what had happened in November 1943. Both he and I, for different reasons, were beginning to believe that the real story was entirely different from our original perceptions.
She shook her head. "People then didn’t live that long. They married young and died young. Look you, I'm 17 right? Back then I'd already be married and probably pregnant. Families of seven or eight kids were normal and that doesn’t count the ones that die at birth or the ones that took their mother with them. This was farming country and children are free labor. Go back another generation and 14 year old mothers aren't rare. Men did all the hard work by hand and that killed them almost as quickly as constant childbearing."
She caught her breath and the hard, brilliant look faded from her eyes. "I'm sorry, but we get so many people come in and think that the old days were some sort of rural paradise. It wasn't like that back then. Thomas Hobbes got it right, 'life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’"
Conrad nodded very sadly. "People who think they are idealistic, or would like us to think that, keep telling me that living in a state of nature is wonderful. It’s really what Hobbes called the bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. The strong will take what they want, and the weak will suffer what they must. Or at least the ones who want to carry on living will. During the Great Storm, because of Angel’s foresight, we had all we needed to survive. In a world without laws, people struggling to find food and water to survive would have found it rational to kill us and take our supplies. I believe in a just and merciful God who lays down rules and principles by which we can avoid the nightmare of bellum omnium contra omnes but I've also come to realize that God appreciates a little help now and then.”
Conrad stopped himself, caught his breath and smiles sheepishly. "I'm sorry Angharad. I didn’t mean to let fly like that. I'm really depressed right now because I think a terrible crime has been committed, one that might still be going on today and the thought of it weighs on my soul. Can you help me, please? Is there one person left alive who can tell us what happened back then?"
"Sixty-six years ago. No, I don't know of anybody who can remember those days. Honestly I don’t." Angharad stopped. "Hold on a minute, there is one person who might be able to help you. Deiniol Cornog. He's the youngest son of one of the Pennoyer tenants. He's a bit adrift if you get my meaning but he might remember something that helps."
"Thank you Angharad, we'll give it a try."
"Conrad, let me sign a book out to you for a couple of days. It's a collection of poetry by Thomas Love Peacock. There's one poem called 'The War-song of Dinas Vawr' that describes what you have been saying. There's one part that always makes me weep. It goes 'On Dyfed's richest valley, where herds of kine were browsing, we made a mighty sally, to furnish our carousing.' At first, nobody understands what those words mean. Those who do understand never read the whole poem the same way again. It's a nightmarish indictment of the war of all against all." She obviously thought for a second, making her mind up about something. “Do you two have any plans for tonight?”
We both shook our heads. Angharad reached into a drawer and got out a pad of tickets. “I sing in a band, part-time of course but we write all our own stuff and the plan is we’ll sing our way through University. Why don’t you come along? Pub in the next village. Good food, they’ve got your rum, Angel and live music?”
Conrad grinned brightly and handed over the price of two tickets. "Thank you, Angharad, we’ll be there. I'll read your book tonight. Now, we'll let you get along with your work."
Outside, Conrad sighed despondently. “It’s all too true, I fear. There was a very cynical article once that compared human society to a flock of sheep. The vast majority of people are sheep. As long as they can chew their grass and think beautiful thoughts, they don’t care what horrors the woods hold. They let the shepherd worry about that. The shepherds do the thinking for the flock and make the rules that keep them safe. Only all the rules the shepherd makes can’t keep the wolves away by themselves. Fortunately, he has allies to help him enforce them, the sheep-dogs. Sheep dogs are violent and vicious, they look and behave very much like the wolves and the sheep are afraid of them. The sheep don't understand the very important difference is that the sheepdogs are supremely devoted to protecting the shepherd and the flock, if necessary at the expense of their own lives.”
I couldn’t resist it. I looked at Conrad and said "woof, woof." Giving a wolf-howl would have attracted too much attention. What surprised me was that he nodded in agreement.
Re: 2009 - Eye of the Survivor
Chapter Six
Central Records Department, Cardiff, Wales.
It takes nearly four hours to drive the 171 miles from Caernarfon to Cardiff. It takes five hours to go by train. Flying from the Rotodyne pad in central Caenarfon to its equivalent in Cardiff takes 25 minutes. That's why Rotodynes dominate medium-haul travel. The Cymraeg Aer flight goes on to London Docklands City Airport and takes another 25 minutes to cover the 150 miles. That's how I got there when I went to see Bernard a few days ago. Less than an hour to get from the wilds of North Wales to the bustling flesh-pots of London. I honestly cannot imagine living without Rotodynes. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a Medevac Rotodyne, I wouldn’t be living at all.
Conrad and I caught a bus from our hotel to the Rotodyne pad, bought our tickets at the ground floor office and were waiting on the roof when the aircraft landed. It dropped its tail ramp, the handful of passengers for Canaerfon collected their luggage from the bag area and got off, we got on and that was that. We didn’t have luggage so we went straight to our seats. Everybody else brought their bag on, stowed it and sat down. Then we were off and heading south. We landed in the city center at Cardiff and got a taxi to the Central Records Department. By the time we left the airport, our Rotodyne had already taken off on the next leg of its commuter trip. Does that work well or what?
Our task was going to be a lot more difficult than it could have been because, during the Occupation, the Germans destroyed as much of the historical record archives as they could. They burned birth, marriage and death certificates, and property deeds. Anything that could suggest that their version of who was who and who owned what was not the correct one. The British had been forewarned by the Germans doing the same thing in other countries they had occupied and secured as much of their archives as they could. Inevitably what survived and what didn’t was a crap-shoot and rebuilding records to fill in the gaps is a big industry. The Central Records Department is the Civil Service version of that industry and works in parallel with private company versions of the same thing. Civil Service and Private Enterprise work closely together on this one, share their results and have a sense of mission.
In case you are wondering, yes, Cardiff House has friendly relations with Central Records and we help them out where we can. Chinese families keep good records. Of course, we use that relationship for our own ends as well and they know it. Hence the old saying, 'one hand washes the other'. One result of that relationship is that the Central Records staff have arranged for us to have computer access to their files, a workstation is waiting and one of their researchers has been assigned to assist us.
"You are Mr. and Mrs. de Llorente? I'm Afanen Broderick and I'll be helping you with your search."
"Please, it's Conrad and Angel. Thank you for taking the time out to help us Afanen." Conrad gave a grateful and very genuine smile. "Angel, any ideas on where we should start?"
I gave Afanen a grateful and very fake smile. Not that she realized it was faked of course. "Perhaps we could see the birth certificate for Gareth Kendrick? Born in August 1943?"
"All right, that will be interesting. It's fortunate we digitized all our records. Now, back in 1943, the records will have been compiled under German supervision and will comply with their standards. So be warned, what we will see is what they wanted us to think. Here, it shouldn't make much difference but you never know. Sometimes the differences can fill in a bit of history. For example, the registration clerks sometimes would create bogus records to cover for Resistance or OSS operatives. Or CheKa of course. It's rumored that one CheKa agent stayed here after the war and is now known as "Thomas the Spy" to all his neighbors."
That caused a round of laughter making it obviously a joke so I joined in the laughter. In this case, the German-issued birth certificate simply confirmed what I'd already read. Gareth Kendrick, born August 3rd 1944, son of Owen Kendrick and his wife Tegan Kendrick. I guessed whoever had compiled the security file had consulted the same record. "Do we have a death certificate for the Kendricks?"
"Owen and Tegan? We should do." Afanen typed some search criteria in and ran down a list of names. "Here we are, Owen Kendrick, died in 1979 from heart failure brought on by obesity and smoking. Fairly normal, a lot of the deaths here are attributed to unhealthy diet and excessive tobacco use. Now that's strange, there's no record for Tegan Kendrick. She must be in her 90s now, late 80s at best. She must still be alive though otherwise we'd have a modern death certificate."
"How about her maiden name?" Conrad was looking at the list of names on the screen. "Would she have been listed under that?"
"Unlikely, women in those years took their husband's name on marriage and never went back. Even if widowed or divorced. There were a couple of cases where women murdered their husbands and were hanged under their name." I didn't like that; it struck me as being the final insult to those women.
"How about we take a step back? Could we find their marriage certificate?" Conrad was in his element now, digging out the facts he needed. I just sat back and let him get on with it.
"We can try. It's problematic though. She'd have to be married between November 1942 when the Occupation started and November 1943 when the baby was conceived." Conrad looked confused at that so Afanen explained. "Before November 1942, the marriage certificate would have been the old Welsh style, where the bride's personal name is entered but not her family name. Her family didn't matter you see. One of the first things the Germans did after the occupation was to change all the paperwork so that the bride's family name was included. Simple reason of course, they were looking for Jews. If she was married after November 1943, she would have been pregnant when she married and that was a serious scandal. I mean seriously scandalous. She would have run a real risk of being sent to an asylum as a moral defective. Anyway, we'll give it a try."
We beat the odds. We found a microfilmed copy of the parent's marriage certificate from April 1938, listing Owen Kendrick, aged 24 as the groom and Tegan, aged 18, as the bride. Afanen gave us a quick background of the time, telling us that men tended to marry late and women early on purely economic grounds. It was very interesting but it didn’t tell us Tegan's family name.
Conrad broke the log-jam. He noted that Tegan had been 18 when she was married in 1938. That meant she must have been born in 1920. Although the Germans had destroyed the official birth records, the Center had reconstructed them from church yearbooks. Across the country, ministers had hidden them rather than see their Parish records lost and more than one had lost his life rather than expose the secret hiding place. The microfiche record made by the center from Gwynedd church books showed that in 1920, a daughter had been christened Tegan. The parents were listed as Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer.
Tegan Kendrick had been born Tegan Pennoyer. That didn't help us as much as we had hoped. There was no trace of a death certificate for Tegan Pennoyer either. Nor was she listed on the voting lists either under that name or her married name. She had disappeared as thoroughly as if she had dissolved in the mist. That interested me; you can take this comment to the bank. If somebody disappears like that, there is always a reason for them doing so. They may be in hiding, they may be buried somewhere, they may have become the business part of a meat pie but there is always a reason why and that reason is very rarely innocent.
Our trip to Cardiff had told us that the Kendrick family were hiding something and that could give Humpty and Bernard the leverage they needed.
Conrad was packaging our stuff and thanking the Central Records Department for their help. We had to head back up north; that morning we had received an email from a Mrs. Susan Mitchell that asked if we would be available for a video conference that evening. We had confirmed it with a certain amount of curiosity; it wasn't often we got calls like that. Finding us both is a lot harder than it seems. A quick investigation showed that contact had been made via Peter Atkinson. He had told us that the caller was connected with the wrecked Avenger so we had given him account and session numbers and a password valid for that session only.
Business Center, The Menai Inn, Caenarfon, North Wales
Even small hotels have a business center these days. It was a bit grandly named in the Menai Inn; it was just a small office with a large-screen computer for video-conferencing but they were trying. At the appointed hour, we were sitting opposite the screen waiting for the connection to appear in our 'conference room'. The computer blinked, the screen flashed and a message came in stating that there was a caller wanting to make contact. Conrad entered the session password and we were in.
The woman on the screen was obviously elderly but had made a major effort to look her best. She had a good start; some women age very badly and can look in their nineties when thirty years younger. Susan Mitchell was the other way; her age was obvious but the years had been very kind to her. When she spoke, her voice was steady and well-pitched. Just before introducing herself she glanced at the man sitting beside her. He gave her a comforting smile, a slight nod and then took her arm protectively. Conrad wrote one word on a pad that we kept out of sight. 'Son.'
"I'm Susan Mitchell, everybody calls me Sue and this is my eldest son Joseph. Everybody calls him Joe Junior. Thank you for taking our call, I hope it's not an inconvenience?"
"No, absolutely not." From the way Conrad was speaking, I guessed that he had already guessed what this was about. "I am Conrad de Llorente, this my friend and working partner Angel. Everybody just calls us Conrad and Angel."
"Hello Sue, Joe." I love video-conferences; they mean that nobody feels they have to touch me. I watched Sue Mitchell smiling shyly and suddenly the years fell away from her and I knew who she was as well. She was the women in the photograph we had found in the Avenger. Conrad had recognized her instantly. I said the years had been kind to her? The young woman she had been in 1943 was still there, waiting to come out.
"We wanted to thank you for finding Joe's body and sending it back home. We got the DNA identification a few hours ago and wanted to call you right away. Mr. Atkinson said you'd called off your vacation to help in the search. That was so kind of you both. Joe was my husband you see, and Joe Jnr here is our son."
"It was my DNA sample that confirmed the remains were those of my father." Joe Jnr had inherited his smile from his mother. "He never saw me of course."
I glanced at Conrad; it wouldn’t have been obvious to a stranger but he'd seen something and it was puzzling him. He was also keeping his voice very mild and gentle. "You must have been married just before the Yorktown set sail?"
"Oh yes, although the Navy were very good to us. They even got the paperwork through in time for us to have a brief honeymoon. RFP you see." The slightly shy, self-conscious smile was back.
"Russian Front Priority." Conrad was laughing in a semi-conspiratorial way.
Sue joined him in the laugh. "That's a piece of history not many people remember. Angel, the armed forces back then would stamp marriage paperwork that needed to be processed very quickly 'RFP'. If anybody asked, it stood for 'Russian Front Priority'. Actually, it meant 'Reports Fiancé Pregnant' and the forces made certain we could be married before the husband went overseas. And before it began to show. I was six weeks gone when we were married. I've brought something to show you. This was taken the day we were married."
Joe Jnr reached forward and fiddled with some switches, putting a color picture up on the screen. We'd seen it before but only as a semi-rotten, badly deteriorated black-and-white print from the cockpit of a wrecked aircraft. This was in perfect condition, the colors still bright and sharp. It was obviously a treasured family heirloom. I saw Conrad tear up slightly at the sight of a young man who had died long before his time. He said, very quietly, "Did you know there was a copy of that picture stuck to the instrument panel of his aircraft. He must have loved you very much."
"Mr. Atkinson told me, yes. He says the print will need stabilizing before it can be sent to me but he will send it as soon as it's ready. We'll be burying Joe on Sunday, in the family plot next to my second husband. The Navy are sending a color party and doing a 'missing man' fly-past. That makes everything very final somehow." Her composure was beginning to fail and Conrad realized it was obviously time to end the call. We had a few more brief civilities and the conference session ended.
When we went to our room, Conrad was very quiet and thoughtful. I assumed he was reflecting on the loss of young men like Joe Murphy that war represented. It's not something I really understand, people die. Once I said that everybody dies only now I know that's not quite true. "Angel, could I see the picture from Gareth Kendrick's file please?"
I opened the file and gave it to him. He looked at it and nodded as if some pieces had fallen into place. I kept quiet while he thought them over.
Eventually he came out with it. "Did you notice something when we were talking? There's a marked family resemblance between Joseph Murphy Junior and Gareth Kendrick. It kept nagging at me during our conference with the Mitchells. Joseph Junior reminded me of somebody but I didn’t place it until I saw that wedding picture. I am reasonably sure that Joseph Murphy Junior and Gareth Kendrick are half-brothers."
And that, boys and girls, is where I saw a way out of the mess Humpty and Bernard had dumped in my lap. The only question in my mind was whether Owen Kendrick had murdered his wife Tegan or whether he had done something worse to her. That led to another problem that ran through my mind while I was in bed that night. What had happened to my mother?
Local Library, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
"Are there many people left from that time, Angharad?" Conrad needed to find somebody, anybody, who could help find out what had happened in November 1943. Both he and I, for different reasons, were beginning to believe that the real story was entirely different from our original perceptions.
She shook her head. "People then didn’t live that long. They married young and died young. Look you, I'm 17 right? Back then I'd already be married and probably pregnant. Families of seven or eight kids were normal and that doesn’t count the ones that die at birth or the ones that took their mother with them. This was farming country and children are free labor. Go back another generation and 14 year old mothers aren't rare. Men did all the hard work by hand and that killed them almost as quickly as constant childbearing."
She caught her breath and the hard, brilliant look faded from her eyes. "I'm sorry, but we get so many people come in and think that the old days were some sort of rural paradise. It wasn't like that back then. Thomas Hobbes got it right, 'life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’"
Conrad nodded very sadly. "People who think they are idealistic, or would like us to think that, keep telling me that living in a state of nature is wonderful. It’s really what Hobbes called the bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. The strong will take what they want, and the weak will suffer what they must. Or at least the ones who want to carry on living will. During the Great Storm, because of Angel’s foresight, we had all we needed to survive. In a world without laws, people struggling to find food and water to survive would have found it rational to kill us and take our supplies. I believe in a just and merciful God who lays down rules and principles by which we can avoid the nightmare of bellum omnium contra omnes but I've also come to realize that God appreciates a little help now and then.”
Conrad stopped himself, caught his breath and smiles sheepishly. "I'm sorry Angharad. I didn’t mean to let fly like that. I'm really depressed right now because I think a terrible crime has been committed, one that might still be going on today and the thought of it weighs on my soul. Can you help me, please? Is there one person left alive who can tell us what happened back then?"
"Sixty-six years ago. No, I don't know of anybody who can remember those days. Honestly I don’t." Angharad stopped. "Hold on a minute, there is one person who might be able to help you. Deiniol Cornog. He's the youngest son of one of the Pennoyer tenants. He's a bit adrift if you get my meaning but he might remember something that helps."
"Thank you Angharad, we'll give it a try."
"Conrad, let me sign a book out to you for a couple of days. It's a collection of poetry by Thomas Love Peacock. There's one poem called 'The War-song of Dinas Vawr' that describes what you have been saying. There's one part that always makes me weep. It goes 'On Dyfed's richest valley, where herds of kine were browsing, we made a mighty sally, to furnish our carousing.' At first, nobody understands what those words mean. Those who do understand never read the whole poem the same way again. It's a nightmarish indictment of the war of all against all." She obviously thought for a second, making her mind up about something. “Do you two have any plans for tonight?”
We both shook our heads. Angharad reached into a drawer and got out a pad of tickets. “I sing in a band, part-time of course but we write all our own stuff and the plan is we’ll sing our way through University. Why don’t you come along? Pub in the next village. Good food, they’ve got your rum, Angel and live music?”
Conrad grinned brightly and handed over the price of two tickets. "Thank you, Angharad, we’ll be there. I'll read your book tonight. Now, we'll let you get along with your work."
Outside, Conrad sighed despondently. “It’s all too true, I fear. There was a very cynical article once that compared human society to a flock of sheep. The vast majority of people are sheep. As long as they can chew their grass and think beautiful thoughts, they don’t care what horrors the woods hold. They let the shepherd worry about that. The shepherds do the thinking for the flock and make the rules that keep them safe. Only all the rules the shepherd makes can’t keep the wolves away by themselves. Fortunately, he has allies to help him enforce them, the sheep-dogs. Sheep dogs are violent and vicious, they look and behave very much like the wolves and the sheep are afraid of them. The sheep don't understand the very important difference is that the sheepdogs are supremely devoted to protecting the shepherd and the flock, if necessary at the expense of their own lives.”
I couldn’t resist it. I looked at Conrad and said "woof, woof." Giving a wolf-howl would have attracted too much attention. What surprised me was that he nodded in agreement.
Central Records Department, Cardiff, Wales.
It takes nearly four hours to drive the 171 miles from Caernarfon to Cardiff. It takes five hours to go by train. Flying from the Rotodyne pad in central Caenarfon to its equivalent in Cardiff takes 25 minutes. That's why Rotodynes dominate medium-haul travel. The Cymraeg Aer flight goes on to London Docklands City Airport and takes another 25 minutes to cover the 150 miles. That's how I got there when I went to see Bernard a few days ago. Less than an hour to get from the wilds of North Wales to the bustling flesh-pots of London. I honestly cannot imagine living without Rotodynes. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a Medevac Rotodyne, I wouldn’t be living at all.
Conrad and I caught a bus from our hotel to the Rotodyne pad, bought our tickets at the ground floor office and were waiting on the roof when the aircraft landed. It dropped its tail ramp, the handful of passengers for Canaerfon collected their luggage from the bag area and got off, we got on and that was that. We didn’t have luggage so we went straight to our seats. Everybody else brought their bag on, stowed it and sat down. Then we were off and heading south. We landed in the city center at Cardiff and got a taxi to the Central Records Department. By the time we left the airport, our Rotodyne had already taken off on the next leg of its commuter trip. Does that work well or what?
Our task was going to be a lot more difficult than it could have been because, during the Occupation, the Germans destroyed as much of the historical record archives as they could. They burned birth, marriage and death certificates, and property deeds. Anything that could suggest that their version of who was who and who owned what was not the correct one. The British had been forewarned by the Germans doing the same thing in other countries they had occupied and secured as much of their archives as they could. Inevitably what survived and what didn’t was a crap-shoot and rebuilding records to fill in the gaps is a big industry. The Central Records Department is the Civil Service version of that industry and works in parallel with private company versions of the same thing. Civil Service and Private Enterprise work closely together on this one, share their results and have a sense of mission.
In case you are wondering, yes, Cardiff House has friendly relations with Central Records and we help them out where we can. Chinese families keep good records. Of course, we use that relationship for our own ends as well and they know it. Hence the old saying, 'one hand washes the other'. One result of that relationship is that the Central Records staff have arranged for us to have computer access to their files, a workstation is waiting and one of their researchers has been assigned to assist us.
"You are Mr. and Mrs. de Llorente? I'm Afanen Broderick and I'll be helping you with your search."
"Please, it's Conrad and Angel. Thank you for taking the time out to help us Afanen." Conrad gave a grateful and very genuine smile. "Angel, any ideas on where we should start?"
I gave Afanen a grateful and very fake smile. Not that she realized it was faked of course. "Perhaps we could see the birth certificate for Gareth Kendrick? Born in August 1943?"
"All right, that will be interesting. It's fortunate we digitized all our records. Now, back in 1943, the records will have been compiled under German supervision and will comply with their standards. So be warned, what we will see is what they wanted us to think. Here, it shouldn't make much difference but you never know. Sometimes the differences can fill in a bit of history. For example, the registration clerks sometimes would create bogus records to cover for Resistance or OSS operatives. Or CheKa of course. It's rumored that one CheKa agent stayed here after the war and is now known as "Thomas the Spy" to all his neighbors."
That caused a round of laughter making it obviously a joke so I joined in the laughter. In this case, the German-issued birth certificate simply confirmed what I'd already read. Gareth Kendrick, born August 3rd 1944, son of Owen Kendrick and his wife Tegan Kendrick. I guessed whoever had compiled the security file had consulted the same record. "Do we have a death certificate for the Kendricks?"
"Owen and Tegan? We should do." Afanen typed some search criteria in and ran down a list of names. "Here we are, Owen Kendrick, died in 1979 from heart failure brought on by obesity and smoking. Fairly normal, a lot of the deaths here are attributed to unhealthy diet and excessive tobacco use. Now that's strange, there's no record for Tegan Kendrick. She must be in her 90s now, late 80s at best. She must still be alive though otherwise we'd have a modern death certificate."
"How about her maiden name?" Conrad was looking at the list of names on the screen. "Would she have been listed under that?"
"Unlikely, women in those years took their husband's name on marriage and never went back. Even if widowed or divorced. There were a couple of cases where women murdered their husbands and were hanged under their name." I didn't like that; it struck me as being the final insult to those women.
"How about we take a step back? Could we find their marriage certificate?" Conrad was in his element now, digging out the facts he needed. I just sat back and let him get on with it.
"We can try. It's problematic though. She'd have to be married between November 1942 when the Occupation started and November 1943 when the baby was conceived." Conrad looked confused at that so Afanen explained. "Before November 1942, the marriage certificate would have been the old Welsh style, where the bride's personal name is entered but not her family name. Her family didn't matter you see. One of the first things the Germans did after the occupation was to change all the paperwork so that the bride's family name was included. Simple reason of course, they were looking for Jews. If she was married after November 1943, she would have been pregnant when she married and that was a serious scandal. I mean seriously scandalous. She would have run a real risk of being sent to an asylum as a moral defective. Anyway, we'll give it a try."
We beat the odds. We found a microfilmed copy of the parent's marriage certificate from April 1938, listing Owen Kendrick, aged 24 as the groom and Tegan, aged 18, as the bride. Afanen gave us a quick background of the time, telling us that men tended to marry late and women early on purely economic grounds. It was very interesting but it didn’t tell us Tegan's family name.
Conrad broke the log-jam. He noted that Tegan had been 18 when she was married in 1938. That meant she must have been born in 1920. Although the Germans had destroyed the official birth records, the Center had reconstructed them from church yearbooks. Across the country, ministers had hidden them rather than see their Parish records lost and more than one had lost his life rather than expose the secret hiding place. The microfiche record made by the center from Gwynedd church books showed that in 1920, a daughter had been christened Tegan. The parents were listed as Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer.
Tegan Kendrick had been born Tegan Pennoyer. That didn't help us as much as we had hoped. There was no trace of a death certificate for Tegan Pennoyer either. Nor was she listed on the voting lists either under that name or her married name. She had disappeared as thoroughly as if she had dissolved in the mist. That interested me; you can take this comment to the bank. If somebody disappears like that, there is always a reason for them doing so. They may be in hiding, they may be buried somewhere, they may have become the business part of a meat pie but there is always a reason why and that reason is very rarely innocent.
Our trip to Cardiff had told us that the Kendrick family were hiding something and that could give Humpty and Bernard the leverage they needed.
Conrad was packaging our stuff and thanking the Central Records Department for their help. We had to head back up north; that morning we had received an email from a Mrs. Susan Mitchell that asked if we would be available for a video conference that evening. We had confirmed it with a certain amount of curiosity; it wasn't often we got calls like that. Finding us both is a lot harder than it seems. A quick investigation showed that contact had been made via Peter Atkinson. He had told us that the caller was connected with the wrecked Avenger so we had given him account and session numbers and a password valid for that session only.
Business Center, The Menai Inn, Caenarfon, North Wales
Even small hotels have a business center these days. It was a bit grandly named in the Menai Inn; it was just a small office with a large-screen computer for video-conferencing but they were trying. At the appointed hour, we were sitting opposite the screen waiting for the connection to appear in our 'conference room'. The computer blinked, the screen flashed and a message came in stating that there was a caller wanting to make contact. Conrad entered the session password and we were in.
The woman on the screen was obviously elderly but had made a major effort to look her best. She had a good start; some women age very badly and can look in their nineties when thirty years younger. Susan Mitchell was the other way; her age was obvious but the years had been very kind to her. When she spoke, her voice was steady and well-pitched. Just before introducing herself she glanced at the man sitting beside her. He gave her a comforting smile, a slight nod and then took her arm protectively. Conrad wrote one word on a pad that we kept out of sight. 'Son.'
"I'm Susan Mitchell, everybody calls me Sue and this is my eldest son Joseph. Everybody calls him Joe Junior. Thank you for taking our call, I hope it's not an inconvenience?"
"No, absolutely not." From the way Conrad was speaking, I guessed that he had already guessed what this was about. "I am Conrad de Llorente, this my friend and working partner Angel. Everybody just calls us Conrad and Angel."
"Hello Sue, Joe." I love video-conferences; they mean that nobody feels they have to touch me. I watched Sue Mitchell smiling shyly and suddenly the years fell away from her and I knew who she was as well. She was the women in the photograph we had found in the Avenger. Conrad had recognized her instantly. I said the years had been kind to her? The young woman she had been in 1943 was still there, waiting to come out.
"We wanted to thank you for finding Joe's body and sending it back home. We got the DNA identification a few hours ago and wanted to call you right away. Mr. Atkinson said you'd called off your vacation to help in the search. That was so kind of you both. Joe was my husband you see, and Joe Jnr here is our son."
"It was my DNA sample that confirmed the remains were those of my father." Joe Jnr had inherited his smile from his mother. "He never saw me of course."
I glanced at Conrad; it wouldn’t have been obvious to a stranger but he'd seen something and it was puzzling him. He was also keeping his voice very mild and gentle. "You must have been married just before the Yorktown set sail?"
"Oh yes, although the Navy were very good to us. They even got the paperwork through in time for us to have a brief honeymoon. RFP you see." The slightly shy, self-conscious smile was back.
"Russian Front Priority." Conrad was laughing in a semi-conspiratorial way.
Sue joined him in the laugh. "That's a piece of history not many people remember. Angel, the armed forces back then would stamp marriage paperwork that needed to be processed very quickly 'RFP'. If anybody asked, it stood for 'Russian Front Priority'. Actually, it meant 'Reports Fiancé Pregnant' and the forces made certain we could be married before the husband went overseas. And before it began to show. I was six weeks gone when we were married. I've brought something to show you. This was taken the day we were married."
Joe Jnr reached forward and fiddled with some switches, putting a color picture up on the screen. We'd seen it before but only as a semi-rotten, badly deteriorated black-and-white print from the cockpit of a wrecked aircraft. This was in perfect condition, the colors still bright and sharp. It was obviously a treasured family heirloom. I saw Conrad tear up slightly at the sight of a young man who had died long before his time. He said, very quietly, "Did you know there was a copy of that picture stuck to the instrument panel of his aircraft. He must have loved you very much."
"Mr. Atkinson told me, yes. He says the print will need stabilizing before it can be sent to me but he will send it as soon as it's ready. We'll be burying Joe on Sunday, in the family plot next to my second husband. The Navy are sending a color party and doing a 'missing man' fly-past. That makes everything very final somehow." Her composure was beginning to fail and Conrad realized it was obviously time to end the call. We had a few more brief civilities and the conference session ended.
When we went to our room, Conrad was very quiet and thoughtful. I assumed he was reflecting on the loss of young men like Joe Murphy that war represented. It's not something I really understand, people die. Once I said that everybody dies only now I know that's not quite true. "Angel, could I see the picture from Gareth Kendrick's file please?"
I opened the file and gave it to him. He looked at it and nodded as if some pieces had fallen into place. I kept quiet while he thought them over.
Eventually he came out with it. "Did you notice something when we were talking? There's a marked family resemblance between Joseph Murphy Junior and Gareth Kendrick. It kept nagging at me during our conference with the Mitchells. Joseph Junior reminded me of somebody but I didn’t place it until I saw that wedding picture. I am reasonably sure that Joseph Murphy Junior and Gareth Kendrick are half-brothers."
And that, boys and girls, is where I saw a way out of the mess Humpty and Bernard had dumped in my lap. The only question in my mind was whether Owen Kendrick had murdered his wife Tegan or whether he had done something worse to her. That led to another problem that ran through my mind while I was in bed that night. What had happened to my mother?
Local Library, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
"Are there many people left from that time, Angharad?" Conrad needed to find somebody, anybody, who could help find out what had happened in November 1943. Both he and I, for different reasons, were beginning to believe that the real story was entirely different from our original perceptions.
She shook her head. "People then didn’t live that long. They married young and died young. Look you, I'm 17 right? Back then I'd already be married and probably pregnant. Families of seven or eight kids were normal and that doesn’t count the ones that die at birth or the ones that took their mother with them. This was farming country and children are free labor. Go back another generation and 14 year old mothers aren't rare. Men did all the hard work by hand and that killed them almost as quickly as constant childbearing."
She caught her breath and the hard, brilliant look faded from her eyes. "I'm sorry, but we get so many people come in and think that the old days were some sort of rural paradise. It wasn't like that back then. Thomas Hobbes got it right, 'life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’"
Conrad nodded very sadly. "People who think they are idealistic, or would like us to think that, keep telling me that living in a state of nature is wonderful. It’s really what Hobbes called the bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. The strong will take what they want, and the weak will suffer what they must. Or at least the ones who want to carry on living will. During the Great Storm, because of Angel’s foresight, we had all we needed to survive. In a world without laws, people struggling to find food and water to survive would have found it rational to kill us and take our supplies. I believe in a just and merciful God who lays down rules and principles by which we can avoid the nightmare of bellum omnium contra omnes but I've also come to realize that God appreciates a little help now and then.”
Conrad stopped himself, caught his breath and smiles sheepishly. "I'm sorry Angharad. I didn’t mean to let fly like that. I'm really depressed right now because I think a terrible crime has been committed, one that might still be going on today and the thought of it weighs on my soul. Can you help me, please? Is there one person left alive who can tell us what happened back then?"
"Sixty-six years ago. No, I don't know of anybody who can remember those days. Honestly I don’t." Angharad stopped. "Hold on a minute, there is one person who might be able to help you. Deiniol Cornog. He's the youngest son of one of the Pennoyer tenants. He's a bit adrift if you get my meaning but he might remember something that helps."
"Thank you Angharad, we'll give it a try."
"Conrad, let me sign a book out to you for a couple of days. It's a collection of poetry by Thomas Love Peacock. There's one poem called 'The War-song of Dinas Vawr' that describes what you have been saying. There's one part that always makes me weep. It goes 'On Dyfed's richest valley, where herds of kine were browsing, we made a mighty sally, to furnish our carousing.' At first, nobody understands what those words mean. Those who do understand never read the whole poem the same way again. It's a nightmarish indictment of the war of all against all." She obviously thought for a second, making her mind up about something. “Do you two have any plans for tonight?”
We both shook our heads. Angharad reached into a drawer and got out a pad of tickets. “I sing in a band, part-time of course but we write all our own stuff and the plan is we’ll sing our way through University. Why don’t you come along? Pub in the next village. Good food, they’ve got your rum, Angel and live music?”
Conrad grinned brightly and handed over the price of two tickets. "Thank you, Angharad, we’ll be there. I'll read your book tonight. Now, we'll let you get along with your work."
Outside, Conrad sighed despondently. “It’s all too true, I fear. There was a very cynical article once that compared human society to a flock of sheep. The vast majority of people are sheep. As long as they can chew their grass and think beautiful thoughts, they don’t care what horrors the woods hold. They let the shepherd worry about that. The shepherds do the thinking for the flock and make the rules that keep them safe. Only all the rules the shepherd makes can’t keep the wolves away by themselves. Fortunately, he has allies to help him enforce them, the sheep-dogs. Sheep dogs are violent and vicious, they look and behave very much like the wolves and the sheep are afraid of them. The sheep don't understand the very important difference is that the sheepdogs are supremely devoted to protecting the shepherd and the flock, if necessary at the expense of their own lives.”
I couldn’t resist it. I looked at Conrad and said "woof, woof." Giving a wolf-howl would have attracted too much attention. What surprised me was that he nodded in agreement.
Re: 2009 - Eye of the Survivor
Chapter Seven
Canaerfon Assisted Living Home, Canaerfon, Wales
"Conrad, why have I got a bad feeling that Tegan Kendrick is somewhere in a place like this?"
I watched while Conrad looked around at the facility. To me it didn't seem much different from a maximum-security prison but I'm cynical about such things. You spend three years in a cell waiting to be executed while being beaten half to death at regular intervals and you'll be cynical as well.
"If she's lucky Angel. This place is pretty good by the standards of its kind. It's clean, well-equipped, the staff care about their clients. It's institutionalized certainly, but I've seen much, much worse. Yes, I'd say the people here are lucky. Their families are probably paying the difference between the rates charged here and the care funded by the State. There are some that don’t."
"And some that take the money and short-change the people in their care. Yeah, I know, Conrad, and if Tegan is still alive, I bet she's been stuffed in one of those and forgotten. If she is, I want her out of there."
Conrad couldn’t help lifting his eyebrows in surprise. He's used to the fact that I don't have a conscience and quite literally couldn’t care less about other people's problems unless they affect my interests. Sympathy is not an Angelic characteristic even though Conrad tried to explain it to me once. "All right, we'll do our best. She's going to be really old though and after being institutionalized for sixty years, she'll need a lot of care. We can sort that problem out later."
"Excuse me? Are you the couple who wanted to see Deiniol Cornog?" A middle-aged woman was standing by the door of the waiting room. She was wearing a uniform that was almost but not quite that of a nurse. Conrad nodded in acknowledgment. "Well, he's willing to speak with you and is waiting for you in our guest's lounge. One of our doctors will be observing the interview. He won’t interfere unless Mr. Cornog is distressed or exhibits problematic symptoms. By the way, young lady, you can't take those guns in there. They will frighten some of our guests. We have a secure and lockable box you can put them in."
Don’t argue with nurses. They have too many ways of getting back at you. I picked up the keys to a lock-box and put my boys and their holsters away for a while. My shoulders don't feel quite right without their weight. Then we went into the lounge. I could see immediately why the staff were concerned about Deiniol Cornog. He was obviously old and fragile and there was something about him that suggested his grip on reality was slowly sliding away. We introduced ourselves and then paused while an attendant arrived with plates of tea-cakes and cookies, sorry, biscuits, accompanied by a pot of tea. Actually, it was hot water and there were tea-bags. I noted one thing right away; the staff had provided Chinese tea for me. Suddenly, I began to feel a bit more kindly-disposed towards them.
"Shall I be mother?" This would be Conrad's interview; I was just support staff. I did notice one thing though. Deiniol didn’t grab for the cakes or cookies as if they had been rare treats and he seemed well-fed. This was going well. A nurse arrived with another plate of biscuits, chocolate ones. She leaned forward confidentially. "They're his favorites. Chocolate Bourbons."
The talk went very well. I don’t relate to people which meant I didn’t get frustrated when Deiniol drifted away following a line of discussion that was apparent only to him. Conrad was, as usual, a master of interviews and would gently bring him back on course. The big problem was that Deiniol's sense of time was fading and he would jump years, forwards or backwards, without any warning so it was hard to string his memories into a coherent tale. We were talking for at least three hours before the doctor observing us said that Deiniol was getting too tired to continue. By then we had what we needed.
I don't think anybody else could have pieced the story together from the wandering mixture of memories and reminiscences that we had listened to. Yet, when Conrad wrote his notes up, we had a coherent story albeit one seen through the eyes of a five-year old. It turned out that about two weeks after the Avenger had crashed, Owen Kendrick had collected his tenants, as was his right, and put them to work chopping up and burying the aircraft wreck. Some tenants had objected because hiding the wreck would bring down German reprisals on the whole area but Kendrick had told them they would either obey his orders or they would lose their crofts. The sight of their landlord in his gray suit shouting and bullying people had made a deep impression on the young boy watching. After the hole had been dug and the pieces of wreckage thrown in, the ground had been filled in and trees planted over the top. Another thing Deiniol had remembered, the cockpit section had proved hard to break because of the armor around it so it had been buried whole. Conrad had also asked about Tegan Kendrick but the only thing Deiniol had said about her was 'Poor girl. Never happy.'
There are several interesting things in that story. One is that the landlord was Owen Kendrick. He'd obviously taken over the farm when Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer had left. So why had a couple in their late forties left a farm and a respected position in the community? And, come to think of it, what had happened to them? Another is that the wrecked aircraft had been sitting on the surface for two weeks before being buried. That was, coincidentally, just about the time between one of the aircrew breaking his legs and the time they all died. I don't believe in coincidences. The fact the aircraft wasn't found by the Germans suggests to me they weren't looking for it. The Avenger is a big aircraft. A dark blue 'plane that size sitting in a light green field isn't precisely hard to find. To me, ignorant gun-chick that I am, it smells that the Germans didn’t care about it one way or the other. Then the anvil dropped. Two damaged aircraft had crashed out to sea with the crews rescued by submarines. The Germans had assumed all three had done that and never realized there was a wreck out there to find.
Remember that question, why was the wreck buried at all? Suddenly, it takes on a new dimension. The wreck wasn't buried to hide it from the Germans. It was hidden to conceal the fact the crew had survived and then died in a local barn fire. A very suspicious barn fire. It had come down in an area that was overflown by American aircraft regularly and they would have seen it. It wasn't buried to hide it from the Germans, it was being hidden from the Americans and that makes the death of the crew really suspicious.
Dolafon Inn, Llanberis, North Wales
“For the sheep are in the fields and they don’t care
When they hear the wolves in the night
But the shepherd cares and he keeps them tight
While his sheepdogs go out to fight
Yeah, it’s the sheepdogs that make things right.”
I’d been expecting Angharad’s group to be a small number of amateur kids who were capable of playing instruments and singing but never came close to reaching professional standards with either. I’d thought their hopes of singing their way through University had been optimistic at best. Now, don’t get me wrong, their style isn’t my taste which runs mostly to very heavy metal rock but I do recognize genuine talent when I hear it and these kids had it. Angharad was a much better singer than I'd given her credit for; unlike most amateurs, her voice didn’t waver while she held notes. In fact, I got a feel that if a professional agent got hold of them, managed them properly and did a bit of grooming, they might not need the university bit. I made a mental note to have one of the agents and managers we have available to come down and see them.
Their last song “The Sheepdogs” had actually been the 'The War-song of Dinas Vawr' but rewritten from the point of view of the sheep and the dogs that had tried to protect them. It was billed as being in honor of the Resistance fighters but everybody in the audience had linked it to the crew of the Avenger whose picture and identities had been on the front page of the local newspaper. After Angharad had finished the last chorus there had been a profound silence for a few seconds as the message of the song sank in, then a long and deafening burst of applause. Suddenly, it occurred to me that her group would do very well on a cruise liner.
Once their set was finished, the band broke off for a break before their second set. Angharad came over to see us, still in her stage costume. A sequined halter top and jeans to match, both being so tight they looked sprayed on. Actually, it was only a more elaborate version of her day clothes. She saw me looking and grinned. "I'll have to change before I go back on; the boys can wear more or less the same outfits but us girls have to change. When my mam saw this outfit, she thought I'd gone on the game. Wait until she sees the next one."
"Have you got an agent and manager, Angharad?" I was tempted to call her Angie but Conrad had cautioned me against abbreviating names without an indication it was acceptable.
She shook her head. "We're not important enough for that yet. Say, that's nice ink you've got there. I've thought of having some done but Mam would go ballistic. She doesn’t like me being on stage as it is."
"The tattoos are my Triad markings. They tell people in the know who I am, and you shouldn’t use them as a model. Could cause you problems with both sides of the law. If you want decorative ink, butterflies look good. I know several good tattoo artists if you want to go that way. Anyway, we have a few theatrical agents in our organization who can come up here and watch your act. They'll give you an honest opinion if your band has what it takes to make it. If you have, they'll make your group an offer."
Angharad looked suspicious so I carried on. "No funny business, I promise you. I can call a professional agent on your behalf and you'll get an honest opinion and honest representation. Have you got a stage name?"
She shook her head. "Not really. Traherne is a bit too local for show business."
"You could stick with just your first name. Angharad works nicely. I've only got one name. Just Angel."
Conrad had left us to it up to this point but now he leaned forward. "Angharad, if you did create a stage name, now would you do it?"
"Just something that sounded good. Use my Mam's maiden name perhaps or her mother's. She was an Arianne though, so it doesn’t fit. I like Angel's idea better."
We chattered on until she had to change for the next set. By the time the show was finished, I'd been on my telephone to one of the London theatrical agents who look to the 14K. He agreed to come over to Wales and evaluate Angharad and her group. I referred to Angharad as a cousin, meaning that she was a friend of our society without being a sworn member. That made sure she and her group would be treated with respect.
After the show as over, we stopped at a table by the door and bought several sets of the band's disks. The label designs were painfully amateurish, but I'd send one to the agent I'd called. Conrad was looking at them very thoughtfully. Eventually he said, carefully, "Angel, I think I know how to find Tegan Kendrick. Assuming she is still alive."
Central Records Department, Cardiff, Wales
I'd called Bernard while we were flying down to Cardiff and asked him for a list of retirement homes for senior citizens in South Wales. I'd also asked about complaints made about them and he'd told me that every single one made against a retirement home was filed. I asked him to send me one list of the homes that had a lot of complaints made against them and one of those that had none. I suspected that the really bad ones would have their residents so cowed and intimidated that they wouldn’t make complaints. Oh boy, was I right on that one. By the time we landed at Cardiff and got to the Records Department, the lists were arriving for us. Told you, Bernard is really good at what he does,
Now, the first job was to find Tegan Pennoyer's current identity. We checked the current voting list again, but that name didn't appear anywhere. So, the next step was to find Cerys Pennoyer's family name and see if that came up with anything. Conrad was in his element now. Based on the society of the times, its lack of movement and the youth of women when they married, he assumed that Cerys Pennoyer had married when she was between 14 and 20 years old. That meant she would probably have been born between 1900 and 1906. That meant going through the birth certificates in Gwynedd for those years to find all the girl children christened Cerys. We were lucky; the records for South Wales had been destroyed but those for Gwynedd had been saved. We found six candidates.
Conrad then got to work winnowing out the improbable candidates. One of those girls had died in infancy, others could be discounted for other reasons. Eventually, after hours of hard work, he had reduced the probables to two. Cerys Griffith and Cerys Cloyd.
What had I been doing? First of all, I’d tried to find the death certificates for Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer. Nothing. They had vanished into the night and fog. If they had moved to the Cardiff area, the records had been destroyed. I put that to one side and started working through the lists of state pension payments made to retirement homes, trying to find names that offered a probability of being Tegan Pennoyer. The problem was that those lists were alphabetical by surname. Hard work and boring. The moment we had Griffith and Cloyd though, it made things easier. Assuming, of course, that when Tegan had been sent to one of those homes, her husband had registered her under her grandmother's family name. It seemed from what Angharad had said, that using a grandparent's family name as a false ID was a common practice. Why, I don’t know, but it was the only hope we had right then.
Late in the afternoon, we found a Tegan Cloyd listed as a resident at the Quiet Hours Residential Care Home. It was one that had no complaints listed against it.
Now, of course, we had no proof that Tegan Cloyd was Tegan Kendrick. All we could do was hope. And that meant going to the Quiet Hours Residential Care Home and making sure it suddenly got a lot less quiet.
Quiet Hours Residential Care Home, Cardiff, South Wales
"I believe you have a guest here registered under the name of Tegan Cloyd?" Conrad was being his usual polite self but it was clear his suspicions about this place were being raised. Mine weren't. I knew this place was rotten. Look, anybody, guilty or not, can go to prison but having been on Death Row is a real distinction. Gets one props from other villains. I've been there, and I know the smell of places where people have been left to die. This was one of them.
"I can't discuss . . . . . . . "
"Yes, you can." I cut in and I had no intention of being polite. I had my warrant card out and on display. "My name is Inspector Angelique de Llorente and I am working directly for the Cabinet Office. We can do this now, or I can bring in several busloads of police and we can do it the very public way. Now, which would you prefer. A quiet discussion or a week of bad headlines on every news service in Britain? And all your dirty laundry washed in public? Instant response is mandatory."
"Well, I . . ."
"Fine." I opened up my portable telephone and dialed Bernard's number. I had my telephone on speaker so the words "cabinet office" echoed around the room. "I'd like to speak to Mr. Wooleigh please. It's Inspector Angelique de Llorente.
"Inspector?"
"Bernard, its Angelique here. I need the riot squad, literally, at the Quiet Hours Residential Care Home in Cardiff immediately if not sooner. Also, some forensic accountants and an unlimited search and seizure warrant covering every shred of paper in the place. It looks like we have a major scandal that links to the Kendrick business we spoke about."
"Got you. I'll call the Chief Constable of the Heddlu de Cymru. Do you want the Armed Response Team as well?" Bernard was enjoying himself far too much. This must be coming on a very dull day.
"You got an ART down here?"
"You should know, your people trained it, Angelique." Yup, Bernard was enjoying himself.
"In that case, we'll have them in as well. Oh, Bernard, tip the newspapers and television off, will you?"
"All right, all right." The head of the place, obviously an Admin Wonk was having a fit. He'd left it too late of course. Here's a tip for when you are dealing with us. Negotiate and make a deal. We are reasonable people and we'd rather have a deal people can live with than one that breaks them. But, once we start to take action, it's too late for that. "We have a Tegan Cloyd here. I warn you though, she is very elderly and has been institutionalized for a long time. She doesn’t make much sense."
"Why is she here?" Conrad had taken over again, to the Admin Wonk's great relief.
There was a delay while he found the file. "We inherited her when this place was repurposed as a senior citizen's residential unit. Before that she was assigned to our care as a moral defective."
"When did she arrive here?" Conrad had an edge on his voice and I thought the smell of a grave injustice was beginning to get to him.
"She was brought here in 1944. She's lucky to be alive; that was during the occupation and the Germans executed most mental patients. She's the only survivor from that time I know of. You're the first people who have wanted to see her in decades." Institutionalized and in what amounted to solitary confinement for 64 years and she'd been 24 when she'd been brought here. I gazed at the Admin Wonk and thought carefully about where I should put the first bullet. Through the hip joint seemed about right as a start with more coming later. I don't torture people, you all know that, but this time I was really tempted. Just this once. I heard the whisper in the back of the mind and understood what Conrad had meant by saying the temptation to slide down was always there.
Tegan's room was almost exactly like my cell on Death Row. Small, dirty, stinking of stale urine and other body waste. The bed was an iron-frame cot with a dilapidated mattress and a moth-eaten blanket. The woman laying on it had a cheap threadbare dress of some sort that hadn't been washed for a long time. It looked like something that had once been donated to a charity store and had gone downhill ever since.
Conrad was very carefully hiding his anger but his voice was still gentle. "Are you Tegan Kendrick?"
The woman's voice was very weak and trembling. "Nobody has called me that for such a long time. Is Owen coming to take me out of here?"
Outside the building I could hear the sound of sirens as the Police came to take possession of this hell-hole. It was about time.
Chapter Eight
Home of Gareth Kendrick, Swansea, South Wales.
"We have found your mother, Mr. Kendrick." I admire a lot about Conrad, but his self-control is one of the leaders on the list. Personally, after seeing the pitiful state Tegan was in, I'd have had the truth beaten out of Kendrick without a moment's hesitation. In contrast, Conrad was his usual polite and gentle self. You’re about to see who got it right. Spoiler coming, it wasn’t me.
"You have made a mistake there boyo. My Mam died when I was born. My Fa never remarried. He brought me up."
"I think your mother's husband didn’t tell you the whole story." Always listen carefully to what Conrad says. He very rarely lies but he can tell the truth more deceptively than anybody I know. How he says something is critically important. Note how he phrased that, for example. If Kendrick had been paying attention, he'd have had a warning about what was coming. I mean, Conrad wasn’t being precisely subtle, was he?
There is an impassive solidity about the way Welsh men sit. It's as if they have taken lesson of the rocks they grew up around, place themselves and do not contemplate moving no matter what happens. Kendrick was displaying that now. Impressive, because we knew he was only half-Welsh.
In the gap between us finding Tegan and her being rushed to hospital, Conrad had got the start of the story out of her. She'd become pregnant from her affair with Joe Murphy. After the delivery, her husband had taken her to the 'nursing home' where she was admitted as a 'moral defective'. He'd told her that her baby had died then he'd left and never gone back. He'd paid the bare minimum fees for her 'care' and a few years later, when the government had made basic care available on the National Health Service, he'd stopped paying even that. In a very real sense, he had simply left her to rot. I'm a professional killer, you all know that, but it's not something I would do to anybody. She was registered under a false name and nobody had ever even come to visit her. Her lonely, solitary existence had been hidden for more than sixty years.
Remember I said, I'd have had the truth beaten out of him? When Conrad finished telling him that, I didn’t need to. His words had done everything that would have achieved and more. You see, Conrad was present in his capacity as a priest and Gareth Kendrick was a Roman Catholic. He knew what he was hearing was the truth and nothing but the truth. It wasn't the whole truth, that would come later when we found out what it was. One part of it sort of confirmed everything. Owen Kendrick had never remarried because he knew that his first wife was still alive, and remarrying would risk exposing everything. That was just one example of why what we had learned to that point was enough for now. Tears were rolling down Kendrick's face and he was making choking noises. Bernard and the file had been right, Gareth Kendrick was a good man and the knowledge that he had been living his life and doing good works while his mother was imprisoned in a disgusting apology for a 'home' tore him apart.
“Gareth, did your father ever mention your maternal grandparents? Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer?” I’d briefed Conrad on their disappearance and he’d come to the same conclusions I had. Now he was just confirming it.
Gareth shook his head. “Never heard of them. First time I have even heard their names it is.”
“I’m afraid you must consider the possibility that Owen Kendrick was responsible for their deaths as well.” Conrad sounded intensely sympathetic. Our operating theory was that Owen Kendrick had married Tegan to get a claim on the farm and then, when he wanted to move away from the cities, informed on them as resistance supporters. Or something like that, we don’t know the details and probably never will. But, he killed them and took their property, one way or another. We know that when Tegan was committed to the asylum, she made frantic efforts to get in touch with them but there was no response. She thought it was because they had turned their backs on her as well. I think it was because they were already dead.”
It was going to get much worse for Gareth. I'd called Lillith, explained what had happened and listened to her explode on the other end of the telephone. Lillith is normally a gentle and motherly person but when she loses her temper, it's time to watch out. She was on her way over the Atlantic right now and her first objective was to go through the books of the nursing home and dig out everything she could. 'Lea calls it 'vengeful harpy mode' and treats it with great caution. When Lillith goes into vengeful harpy mode, 'Lea tries to be anywhere else.
"How could my Fa' have done it?" Kendrick had recovered enough to gasp the words out.
Conrad looked at him with deep sympathy. "Owen Kendrick was not your father, Gareth. That's what caused this whole awful business. We need to confirm it but we believe your father was a man called Joe Murphy. He was the pilot of the Avenger that was found up near Canaerfon. We can confirm that with a simple DNA test."
"If that is the case, then you are not part of the Kendrick family. They died out with Owen Kendrick and good riddance. You do have a different family in America though and you might consider making contact with them." As you might realize, I'm at work on Bernard's behalf right now. Gareth wants to keep the business in his family? Fine, he now has a new family to keep it in. Even better, his step-father had founded his own company that makes advanced electronics, an odd sort-of-fit with Kendrick Industries. Is step-father, right? I'm not sure, I don’t think the standard names cover this situation.
Kendrick sat, staring at the wall opposite his desk. I was about to say something else, but Conrad stopped me. It was time to wait while Kendrick thought through the situation and absorbed its meaning. Eventually, he gave a little sigh. "Where is my Mam now?"
"She's at the Cardiff General hospital, intensive care ward. Suffering from severe osteoporosis, criminal neglect, malnutrition, dehydration and general malaise. Gareth, she's been institutionalized for more than sixty years. It's amazing she has survived at all. You need to take this very carefully. Her bones are so weak they could break from somebody looking hard at them. Sixty years of neglect have left her so fragile sudden shocks could kill her."
"And what of the people who did this to her?" Gareth's voice now had anger crackling through it.
That was my cue. "Gareth, I'm a gun-crazed psychopath, not a social worker. But, if you really want my advice, leave things like payback to people who are qualified to deal with them. Your mother hasn’t much time left, use it to do what you can for her and make her as happy as you can. Don’t worry about vengeance. People who deserve to be on the receiving end of a good, healthy dose of it always get what they have coming."
The Saloon Bar, Pontwyn-Pairys Inn, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
Peter had ordered the drinks and listened quietly while Conrad told him the story. "Some of this is us filling in the gaps of course but I think we have the story pretty close. Murphy's Avenger was hit on the Deeside raid and for whatever reason the crew decided to go home over North Wales rather than get out to where the rescue submarines were waiting. It didn’t help them, they crashed fairly shortly afterwards. I would guess his engine failed since there was still fuel on board. Anyway, he put the aircraft down and the crew started to walk out.
"It went quite well at first but then one of the crewmembers slipped and fell, breaking his leg on a slate outcrop. It’s a common injury in that part of the world so I'm told. His two crewmates carried him, but they needed shelter. They came to the Kendrick farm and asked for help. Tegan Kendrick hid them in the barn and brought food out for them. They stayed for two weeks and during that time, she had an affair with Joe Murphy. Owen Kendrick got suspicious, watched her and realized that she was being unfaithful to him with the American pilot. He beat her, very badly, then torched the barn with the Americans inside it. The fire went out of control and it spread to all the buildings. Owen Kendrick blamed Tegan for that of course.
"When he came to his senses, he realized what he had done. The crashed Avenger was still there, and it was only a question of time before somebody spotted it. It didn't really matter who; he was in deep trouble with both the Germans and Americans no matter which side found it and both would want to know where the crew was. So, he assembled his tenants and buried the wreck. I don’t know how the Druid's Forest legend started; it may have already existed and been adapted to circumstances. That may have been why the trees were planted. He waited a few months for memories to ebb and then moved away.
"That doesn’t work." Peter shook his head. "The resources needed to bury an aircraft, even after it had been chopped up, are too great. Planting trees over the area is a German thing and how would hill-farmers get the saplings? There's something more to this. What interests me is the old man's memories. Especially how Owen Kendrick was wearing a gray suit and shouting orders at everybody. Clothing in Britain back then was strictly rationed. Can you imagine anybody doing rough work like that wearing his business suit?"
I hid my smile. Conrad was kicking himself for missing that. I'd file it away and tease him with it later. In the meantime, I'd rub a little pepper in the wound. "Who would wear a gray suit in a situation like that, Peter?"
"The German Army, Angel. They'd also have the resources and the expertise to break the aircraft up." Peter thought carefully. "I'd modify the story this way. The Avenger went in like you say but the Germans didn't bother with finding it because they thought the crew had got it out to sea where they had a chance to be picked up. The crew started to walk out. We've identified the man who broke his leg as Petty Officer Walter Benton, so by default identity for the third is Petty Officer Lee Holtzer. Anyway, Benton had his accident and was taken to the farm. That's where their luck ran out. Tegan Kendrick hid them, not least because she knew her husband was a collaborator. When he found out, he burned the barn, the fire spread as you suggested, and that was that. Then he informed the Germans, probably saying that he’d only found out when the barn had caught fire, and blamed Tegan for everything. She pleaded her belly and thus avoided immediate execution. When the baby was delivered, Owen Kendrick took it and dumped Tegan in the ghastliest environment he could find. That explains why Tegan wasn't executed along with other mental patients by the way. She wasn't insane, she was being punished and the Germans knew it."
"But the aircraft?" Conrad was confused.
Atkinson smiled grimly. "The local German occupation commander has just discovered that an abandoned American aircraft had been lying, undetected, in his patch for two weeks. To the German Army and the Gestapo that's negligence and incompetence at best and outright treason out at worst. Best to mop the whole affair up quietly. So, he gets his collaborator friend to assemble a workforce from his tenants and they bury the aircraft before anybody hears of it. No official report was ever made and that was that. What your aged friend saw was a German officer directing work, not Owen Kendrick. Kendrick was probably there, and with the passage of time he confused the two."
I watched Conrad nodding. It all made sense. He wished it didn’t, but it did.
Cabinet Office, Whitehall, London
"So what happened?" Bernard, along with the whole Cabinet Office was shocked by what had been exposed by our investigation. They weren’t alone, the shock-waves from the scandal would probably cost the present party in government the next election.
"We got the story out of Tegan, step by step." Conrad rubbed his eyes. This whole mess had upset him deeply; what had been intended as a quick holiday had been a disaster for everybody. Not least for Humpty who was trying to defuse the explosion over the scandals exposed in residential care facilities for the elderly. He repeated the story of Murphy's last mission with the added insight Peter had provided.
"By then, Tegan realized she was pregnant and used her condition to escape execution. She had already told Owen Kendrick and got another beating for her pains. When the child was born, he had her condemned as a 'moral defective', dumped her in an asylum and forgot all about her. He told her that the child was dead; he told the boy that his mother was dead. The asylum became a care facility and the reason Tegan was there became lost. And so it stayed until the Great Storm exposed the wrecked Avenger and everything unraveled."
Remember I told you Bernard has an idealistic streak? Well, if you think I appall him, guess what that story did. He'd gone white although I'm not sure if it was with rage or shock. He cleared his throat a couple of times. "She was 24 when he had her committed? And she was in that place for sixty years? He destroyed her whole life."
"No, Bernard, he took it, just as certainly as if he had murdered her." I looked at him and he flinched. I have that effect on people sometimes. Well, often. "He's dead now. There's nothing more we can do to him, unfortunately. I suppose Conrad might be able to call in a few favors and arrange something in the afterlife. Gareth Kendrick has moved her to the Canaerfon home we visited. They're good people and they're looking after her properly. He's introduced her to his family, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so she knows that she has a future through them. And that Owen Kendrick never had one."
I was quoting Conrad there of course. As usual, it's not the sort of thing that I'd think of. Conrad wanted to know what would be happening with those homes. He'd already been in touch with Rome about the problem and Popie was getting a message to all Parish priests telling them to keep an eye on any such facilities in their area and make regular visits to the patients, regardless of their nominal religion. Bearing in mind that they were quite likely to end up in such places, I thought that was simply self-interest.
Bernard had the information at hand, as usual. "The good news is that most of the residential care homes are passing the inspections we are making. In fact, some of them go above and beyond where caring for their residents is concerned. Our people are finding some that are marginal and a few that are downright dreadful. In the former cases, we're sending people in to put them right, the latter cases we've moved the residents out and closed the places down. The staff at the Quiet Hours Residential Care Home are all under arrest. With the exception of the Director of course. He made a run for it and is hiding abroad somewhere.
"On a longer-term basis, we're setting up an inspectorate who will make random unannounced visits to Senior Citizen Residential Care Facilities. This will include a full audit of their books to ensure the government money they receive is being spent properly. An old friend of yours is being appointed to it, Angel. Heather Watson? Angel, for all her faults, she's really good at organization so this is her chance at redemption. Please don't shoot her."
"Oh, all right, Bernard. Just for you. This won't solve the basic problem though. As I understand it, the health service here pays for a basic standard of care and people who want more for their wrinkles pay additional fees for it. You are always going to get people who won’t pay anything above the basic and always get places that cut corners to increase profits from the basic allowance. Your inspectorate will not change that. In fact, it may add to it. Corrupt homes will pay off the inspectors and take the money out of the fees that are supposed to support the wrinkles. That'll make the situation worse, not better."
"I never thought I would say this, but would the Triads be interested in taking part in this business?"
"Absolutely not." Bernard looked shocked at the instant response. "I've already run the numbers on this and there's no hope of making serious money at the bottom end of the scale without becoming the people you're trying to ease out. Top end, sure. That works, and we probably will get in there. We can do things like bring in nurses and other staff who are well-trained but willing to work for lower-than-average wages. That's something you might look at for your health service by the way. Hire staff from, say, the Philippines, and tell them they can have a residence permit at the end of five years working for a reduced salary. I'll talk to my staff about running the basic end of care but don’t hold out hope."
Conrad was smirking when I mentioned my staff. It was a sign of how much I have changed since we met. So much so that even I can see it. I won’t tell Conrad this but when I think of how I was back then, it makes me shake. Bernard obviously wasn't pleased that we couldn't help with the care problem but recognized it was a side-issue. That took him to the main point. "Anyway, what about Kendrick and his company? That's our prime responsibility right now."
'All solved. Joe Murphy Junior came over to meet his half-brother and they hit it off right away. Gareth took and his mother Joe to visit the crashed Avenger site and Joe noticed something. The soil is very acid and that's one indicator there are rare earth minerals there. There are other indicators as well and the place has all of them. Apparently, they are critical materials these days and Joe's company is a big consumer of them. So, establishing a position in their extraction and sales makes sense. Vertical integration it’s called. Since Kendrick Industries is already established in the area, Joe's buying them up with Gareth using some of the money to pay off the troublesome short-term notes. Joe and Gareth's kids will run the Kendrick industries as the Welsh branch of Joe's company.
"It's a neat little package. Joe's happy because it’s a major boost for his company and he's bringing his new family into the fold. Gareth is happy because the business is staying in his family. The banks are happy because some potentially troublesome debts have been paid off. Humpty is getting a financial crisis quietly wrapped up and will be bringing residential care under centralized control. Everybody gets what they want. Crisis there is over." I didn’t tell him we were happy because the Gold and Metal Processing Company, based in Saigon, had obtained three percent of the new business for arranging the deal. And so we get our nose into another tent. Why were we so interested? The richest source for rare earth minerals is China but they can't export much of their production for a variety of reasons. With this new connection, we can illegally export their production by labelling it as the product of the Welsh mines. "By the way, what was the name of the Quiet Hours Admin Wonk?"
"The Admin Wonk?" Bernard hadn’t heard the term before.
"The Director of the Quiet Hours Residential Care Home."
"Ah yes, we mean to speak with you about that. You are referring to Nigel Cranston. He made it to somewhere that has no extradition treaty with us. Precisely where, we're still trying to find out." Bernard glanced at Conrad. This was my business, a part of my life that Conrad doesn't need to know about. I nodded in understanding, an example needed to be made of where the line was drawn and a demonstration provided that the hand of HMG had a long reach if that line was crossed. I didn't need to say that he should leave it to me. I also didn’t need any great insight to know Conrad had realized what had just been offered and agreed but our entire relationship is based on "don't ask and don’t tell." In this case, I suspect he thought I was doing God's Work. The truth is, I identified with Tegan. I could very, very easily have been her, still rotting away after decades locked in a New York prison cell.
Outside the Dragon Moon Chinese Restaurant, Marbella, Spain.
There are at least 1.2 billion Chinese in the world, which means there are 2.4 billion eyes watching. Most of them are owned by people who are not in the Triad movement but know that the Triads pay their debts and being owed a favor by them is something worth having. It also has no expiry date. Not long ago, a non-Triad family called in a favor they'd been owed for four generations. The debt was paid in full to their complete satisfaction. I'll tell you the story one day if you are interested.
In the case of the staff at the Dragon Moon, the owner had recognized a regular customer, Nigel Cranston, from a picture that had been circulated. He had called the local Triad family and told them of Cranston's presence. That message went up the organization with commendable speed and, once the sighting had been confirmed, the next time he picked up a meal, a gun-chick was waiting.
When he came out, the gun-chick stepped out of the shadows behind him while he was unlocking the door of his car and fired three shots into the back of his head. She fired two more into his heart as he slumped to the pavement, slipped away into the shadows and was gone. By the time the police were on the scene, she was already on the way out of the country.
Or so it is rumored. I'm in Bangkok, how could I possibly know for sure?
Canaerfon Assisted Living Home, Canaerfon, Wales
"Conrad, why have I got a bad feeling that Tegan Kendrick is somewhere in a place like this?"
I watched while Conrad looked around at the facility. To me it didn't seem much different from a maximum-security prison but I'm cynical about such things. You spend three years in a cell waiting to be executed while being beaten half to death at regular intervals and you'll be cynical as well.
"If she's lucky Angel. This place is pretty good by the standards of its kind. It's clean, well-equipped, the staff care about their clients. It's institutionalized certainly, but I've seen much, much worse. Yes, I'd say the people here are lucky. Their families are probably paying the difference between the rates charged here and the care funded by the State. There are some that don’t."
"And some that take the money and short-change the people in their care. Yeah, I know, Conrad, and if Tegan is still alive, I bet she's been stuffed in one of those and forgotten. If she is, I want her out of there."
Conrad couldn’t help lifting his eyebrows in surprise. He's used to the fact that I don't have a conscience and quite literally couldn’t care less about other people's problems unless they affect my interests. Sympathy is not an Angelic characteristic even though Conrad tried to explain it to me once. "All right, we'll do our best. She's going to be really old though and after being institutionalized for sixty years, she'll need a lot of care. We can sort that problem out later."
"Excuse me? Are you the couple who wanted to see Deiniol Cornog?" A middle-aged woman was standing by the door of the waiting room. She was wearing a uniform that was almost but not quite that of a nurse. Conrad nodded in acknowledgment. "Well, he's willing to speak with you and is waiting for you in our guest's lounge. One of our doctors will be observing the interview. He won’t interfere unless Mr. Cornog is distressed or exhibits problematic symptoms. By the way, young lady, you can't take those guns in there. They will frighten some of our guests. We have a secure and lockable box you can put them in."
Don’t argue with nurses. They have too many ways of getting back at you. I picked up the keys to a lock-box and put my boys and their holsters away for a while. My shoulders don't feel quite right without their weight. Then we went into the lounge. I could see immediately why the staff were concerned about Deiniol Cornog. He was obviously old and fragile and there was something about him that suggested his grip on reality was slowly sliding away. We introduced ourselves and then paused while an attendant arrived with plates of tea-cakes and cookies, sorry, biscuits, accompanied by a pot of tea. Actually, it was hot water and there were tea-bags. I noted one thing right away; the staff had provided Chinese tea for me. Suddenly, I began to feel a bit more kindly-disposed towards them.
"Shall I be mother?" This would be Conrad's interview; I was just support staff. I did notice one thing though. Deiniol didn’t grab for the cakes or cookies as if they had been rare treats and he seemed well-fed. This was going well. A nurse arrived with another plate of biscuits, chocolate ones. She leaned forward confidentially. "They're his favorites. Chocolate Bourbons."
The talk went very well. I don’t relate to people which meant I didn’t get frustrated when Deiniol drifted away following a line of discussion that was apparent only to him. Conrad was, as usual, a master of interviews and would gently bring him back on course. The big problem was that Deiniol's sense of time was fading and he would jump years, forwards or backwards, without any warning so it was hard to string his memories into a coherent tale. We were talking for at least three hours before the doctor observing us said that Deiniol was getting too tired to continue. By then we had what we needed.
I don't think anybody else could have pieced the story together from the wandering mixture of memories and reminiscences that we had listened to. Yet, when Conrad wrote his notes up, we had a coherent story albeit one seen through the eyes of a five-year old. It turned out that about two weeks after the Avenger had crashed, Owen Kendrick had collected his tenants, as was his right, and put them to work chopping up and burying the aircraft wreck. Some tenants had objected because hiding the wreck would bring down German reprisals on the whole area but Kendrick had told them they would either obey his orders or they would lose their crofts. The sight of their landlord in his gray suit shouting and bullying people had made a deep impression on the young boy watching. After the hole had been dug and the pieces of wreckage thrown in, the ground had been filled in and trees planted over the top. Another thing Deiniol had remembered, the cockpit section had proved hard to break because of the armor around it so it had been buried whole. Conrad had also asked about Tegan Kendrick but the only thing Deiniol had said about her was 'Poor girl. Never happy.'
There are several interesting things in that story. One is that the landlord was Owen Kendrick. He'd obviously taken over the farm when Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer had left. So why had a couple in their late forties left a farm and a respected position in the community? And, come to think of it, what had happened to them? Another is that the wrecked aircraft had been sitting on the surface for two weeks before being buried. That was, coincidentally, just about the time between one of the aircrew breaking his legs and the time they all died. I don't believe in coincidences. The fact the aircraft wasn't found by the Germans suggests to me they weren't looking for it. The Avenger is a big aircraft. A dark blue 'plane that size sitting in a light green field isn't precisely hard to find. To me, ignorant gun-chick that I am, it smells that the Germans didn’t care about it one way or the other. Then the anvil dropped. Two damaged aircraft had crashed out to sea with the crews rescued by submarines. The Germans had assumed all three had done that and never realized there was a wreck out there to find.
Remember that question, why was the wreck buried at all? Suddenly, it takes on a new dimension. The wreck wasn't buried to hide it from the Germans. It was hidden to conceal the fact the crew had survived and then died in a local barn fire. A very suspicious barn fire. It had come down in an area that was overflown by American aircraft regularly and they would have seen it. It wasn't buried to hide it from the Germans, it was being hidden from the Americans and that makes the death of the crew really suspicious.
Dolafon Inn, Llanberis, North Wales
“For the sheep are in the fields and they don’t care
When they hear the wolves in the night
But the shepherd cares and he keeps them tight
While his sheepdogs go out to fight
Yeah, it’s the sheepdogs that make things right.”
I’d been expecting Angharad’s group to be a small number of amateur kids who were capable of playing instruments and singing but never came close to reaching professional standards with either. I’d thought their hopes of singing their way through University had been optimistic at best. Now, don’t get me wrong, their style isn’t my taste which runs mostly to very heavy metal rock but I do recognize genuine talent when I hear it and these kids had it. Angharad was a much better singer than I'd given her credit for; unlike most amateurs, her voice didn’t waver while she held notes. In fact, I got a feel that if a professional agent got hold of them, managed them properly and did a bit of grooming, they might not need the university bit. I made a mental note to have one of the agents and managers we have available to come down and see them.
Their last song “The Sheepdogs” had actually been the 'The War-song of Dinas Vawr' but rewritten from the point of view of the sheep and the dogs that had tried to protect them. It was billed as being in honor of the Resistance fighters but everybody in the audience had linked it to the crew of the Avenger whose picture and identities had been on the front page of the local newspaper. After Angharad had finished the last chorus there had been a profound silence for a few seconds as the message of the song sank in, then a long and deafening burst of applause. Suddenly, it occurred to me that her group would do very well on a cruise liner.
Once their set was finished, the band broke off for a break before their second set. Angharad came over to see us, still in her stage costume. A sequined halter top and jeans to match, both being so tight they looked sprayed on. Actually, it was only a more elaborate version of her day clothes. She saw me looking and grinned. "I'll have to change before I go back on; the boys can wear more or less the same outfits but us girls have to change. When my mam saw this outfit, she thought I'd gone on the game. Wait until she sees the next one."
"Have you got an agent and manager, Angharad?" I was tempted to call her Angie but Conrad had cautioned me against abbreviating names without an indication it was acceptable.
She shook her head. "We're not important enough for that yet. Say, that's nice ink you've got there. I've thought of having some done but Mam would go ballistic. She doesn’t like me being on stage as it is."
"The tattoos are my Triad markings. They tell people in the know who I am, and you shouldn’t use them as a model. Could cause you problems with both sides of the law. If you want decorative ink, butterflies look good. I know several good tattoo artists if you want to go that way. Anyway, we have a few theatrical agents in our organization who can come up here and watch your act. They'll give you an honest opinion if your band has what it takes to make it. If you have, they'll make your group an offer."
Angharad looked suspicious so I carried on. "No funny business, I promise you. I can call a professional agent on your behalf and you'll get an honest opinion and honest representation. Have you got a stage name?"
She shook her head. "Not really. Traherne is a bit too local for show business."
"You could stick with just your first name. Angharad works nicely. I've only got one name. Just Angel."
Conrad had left us to it up to this point but now he leaned forward. "Angharad, if you did create a stage name, now would you do it?"
"Just something that sounded good. Use my Mam's maiden name perhaps or her mother's. She was an Arianne though, so it doesn’t fit. I like Angel's idea better."
We chattered on until she had to change for the next set. By the time the show was finished, I'd been on my telephone to one of the London theatrical agents who look to the 14K. He agreed to come over to Wales and evaluate Angharad and her group. I referred to Angharad as a cousin, meaning that she was a friend of our society without being a sworn member. That made sure she and her group would be treated with respect.
After the show as over, we stopped at a table by the door and bought several sets of the band's disks. The label designs were painfully amateurish, but I'd send one to the agent I'd called. Conrad was looking at them very thoughtfully. Eventually he said, carefully, "Angel, I think I know how to find Tegan Kendrick. Assuming she is still alive."
Central Records Department, Cardiff, Wales
I'd called Bernard while we were flying down to Cardiff and asked him for a list of retirement homes for senior citizens in South Wales. I'd also asked about complaints made about them and he'd told me that every single one made against a retirement home was filed. I asked him to send me one list of the homes that had a lot of complaints made against them and one of those that had none. I suspected that the really bad ones would have their residents so cowed and intimidated that they wouldn’t make complaints. Oh boy, was I right on that one. By the time we landed at Cardiff and got to the Records Department, the lists were arriving for us. Told you, Bernard is really good at what he does,
Now, the first job was to find Tegan Pennoyer's current identity. We checked the current voting list again, but that name didn't appear anywhere. So, the next step was to find Cerys Pennoyer's family name and see if that came up with anything. Conrad was in his element now. Based on the society of the times, its lack of movement and the youth of women when they married, he assumed that Cerys Pennoyer had married when she was between 14 and 20 years old. That meant she would probably have been born between 1900 and 1906. That meant going through the birth certificates in Gwynedd for those years to find all the girl children christened Cerys. We were lucky; the records for South Wales had been destroyed but those for Gwynedd had been saved. We found six candidates.
Conrad then got to work winnowing out the improbable candidates. One of those girls had died in infancy, others could be discounted for other reasons. Eventually, after hours of hard work, he had reduced the probables to two. Cerys Griffith and Cerys Cloyd.
What had I been doing? First of all, I’d tried to find the death certificates for Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer. Nothing. They had vanished into the night and fog. If they had moved to the Cardiff area, the records had been destroyed. I put that to one side and started working through the lists of state pension payments made to retirement homes, trying to find names that offered a probability of being Tegan Pennoyer. The problem was that those lists were alphabetical by surname. Hard work and boring. The moment we had Griffith and Cloyd though, it made things easier. Assuming, of course, that when Tegan had been sent to one of those homes, her husband had registered her under her grandmother's family name. It seemed from what Angharad had said, that using a grandparent's family name as a false ID was a common practice. Why, I don’t know, but it was the only hope we had right then.
Late in the afternoon, we found a Tegan Cloyd listed as a resident at the Quiet Hours Residential Care Home. It was one that had no complaints listed against it.
Now, of course, we had no proof that Tegan Cloyd was Tegan Kendrick. All we could do was hope. And that meant going to the Quiet Hours Residential Care Home and making sure it suddenly got a lot less quiet.
Quiet Hours Residential Care Home, Cardiff, South Wales
"I believe you have a guest here registered under the name of Tegan Cloyd?" Conrad was being his usual polite self but it was clear his suspicions about this place were being raised. Mine weren't. I knew this place was rotten. Look, anybody, guilty or not, can go to prison but having been on Death Row is a real distinction. Gets one props from other villains. I've been there, and I know the smell of places where people have been left to die. This was one of them.
"I can't discuss . . . . . . . "
"Yes, you can." I cut in and I had no intention of being polite. I had my warrant card out and on display. "My name is Inspector Angelique de Llorente and I am working directly for the Cabinet Office. We can do this now, or I can bring in several busloads of police and we can do it the very public way. Now, which would you prefer. A quiet discussion or a week of bad headlines on every news service in Britain? And all your dirty laundry washed in public? Instant response is mandatory."
"Well, I . . ."
"Fine." I opened up my portable telephone and dialed Bernard's number. I had my telephone on speaker so the words "cabinet office" echoed around the room. "I'd like to speak to Mr. Wooleigh please. It's Inspector Angelique de Llorente.
"Inspector?"
"Bernard, its Angelique here. I need the riot squad, literally, at the Quiet Hours Residential Care Home in Cardiff immediately if not sooner. Also, some forensic accountants and an unlimited search and seizure warrant covering every shred of paper in the place. It looks like we have a major scandal that links to the Kendrick business we spoke about."
"Got you. I'll call the Chief Constable of the Heddlu de Cymru. Do you want the Armed Response Team as well?" Bernard was enjoying himself far too much. This must be coming on a very dull day.
"You got an ART down here?"
"You should know, your people trained it, Angelique." Yup, Bernard was enjoying himself.
"In that case, we'll have them in as well. Oh, Bernard, tip the newspapers and television off, will you?"
"All right, all right." The head of the place, obviously an Admin Wonk was having a fit. He'd left it too late of course. Here's a tip for when you are dealing with us. Negotiate and make a deal. We are reasonable people and we'd rather have a deal people can live with than one that breaks them. But, once we start to take action, it's too late for that. "We have a Tegan Cloyd here. I warn you though, she is very elderly and has been institutionalized for a long time. She doesn’t make much sense."
"Why is she here?" Conrad had taken over again, to the Admin Wonk's great relief.
There was a delay while he found the file. "We inherited her when this place was repurposed as a senior citizen's residential unit. Before that she was assigned to our care as a moral defective."
"When did she arrive here?" Conrad had an edge on his voice and I thought the smell of a grave injustice was beginning to get to him.
"She was brought here in 1944. She's lucky to be alive; that was during the occupation and the Germans executed most mental patients. She's the only survivor from that time I know of. You're the first people who have wanted to see her in decades." Institutionalized and in what amounted to solitary confinement for 64 years and she'd been 24 when she'd been brought here. I gazed at the Admin Wonk and thought carefully about where I should put the first bullet. Through the hip joint seemed about right as a start with more coming later. I don't torture people, you all know that, but this time I was really tempted. Just this once. I heard the whisper in the back of the mind and understood what Conrad had meant by saying the temptation to slide down was always there.
Tegan's room was almost exactly like my cell on Death Row. Small, dirty, stinking of stale urine and other body waste. The bed was an iron-frame cot with a dilapidated mattress and a moth-eaten blanket. The woman laying on it had a cheap threadbare dress of some sort that hadn't been washed for a long time. It looked like something that had once been donated to a charity store and had gone downhill ever since.
Conrad was very carefully hiding his anger but his voice was still gentle. "Are you Tegan Kendrick?"
The woman's voice was very weak and trembling. "Nobody has called me that for such a long time. Is Owen coming to take me out of here?"
Outside the building I could hear the sound of sirens as the Police came to take possession of this hell-hole. It was about time.
Chapter Eight
Home of Gareth Kendrick, Swansea, South Wales.
"We have found your mother, Mr. Kendrick." I admire a lot about Conrad, but his self-control is one of the leaders on the list. Personally, after seeing the pitiful state Tegan was in, I'd have had the truth beaten out of Kendrick without a moment's hesitation. In contrast, Conrad was his usual polite and gentle self. You’re about to see who got it right. Spoiler coming, it wasn’t me.
"You have made a mistake there boyo. My Mam died when I was born. My Fa never remarried. He brought me up."
"I think your mother's husband didn’t tell you the whole story." Always listen carefully to what Conrad says. He very rarely lies but he can tell the truth more deceptively than anybody I know. How he says something is critically important. Note how he phrased that, for example. If Kendrick had been paying attention, he'd have had a warning about what was coming. I mean, Conrad wasn’t being precisely subtle, was he?
There is an impassive solidity about the way Welsh men sit. It's as if they have taken lesson of the rocks they grew up around, place themselves and do not contemplate moving no matter what happens. Kendrick was displaying that now. Impressive, because we knew he was only half-Welsh.
In the gap between us finding Tegan and her being rushed to hospital, Conrad had got the start of the story out of her. She'd become pregnant from her affair with Joe Murphy. After the delivery, her husband had taken her to the 'nursing home' where she was admitted as a 'moral defective'. He'd told her that her baby had died then he'd left and never gone back. He'd paid the bare minimum fees for her 'care' and a few years later, when the government had made basic care available on the National Health Service, he'd stopped paying even that. In a very real sense, he had simply left her to rot. I'm a professional killer, you all know that, but it's not something I would do to anybody. She was registered under a false name and nobody had ever even come to visit her. Her lonely, solitary existence had been hidden for more than sixty years.
Remember I said, I'd have had the truth beaten out of him? When Conrad finished telling him that, I didn’t need to. His words had done everything that would have achieved and more. You see, Conrad was present in his capacity as a priest and Gareth Kendrick was a Roman Catholic. He knew what he was hearing was the truth and nothing but the truth. It wasn't the whole truth, that would come later when we found out what it was. One part of it sort of confirmed everything. Owen Kendrick had never remarried because he knew that his first wife was still alive, and remarrying would risk exposing everything. That was just one example of why what we had learned to that point was enough for now. Tears were rolling down Kendrick's face and he was making choking noises. Bernard and the file had been right, Gareth Kendrick was a good man and the knowledge that he had been living his life and doing good works while his mother was imprisoned in a disgusting apology for a 'home' tore him apart.
“Gareth, did your father ever mention your maternal grandparents? Maldwyn and Cerys Pennoyer?” I’d briefed Conrad on their disappearance and he’d come to the same conclusions I had. Now he was just confirming it.
Gareth shook his head. “Never heard of them. First time I have even heard their names it is.”
“I’m afraid you must consider the possibility that Owen Kendrick was responsible for their deaths as well.” Conrad sounded intensely sympathetic. Our operating theory was that Owen Kendrick had married Tegan to get a claim on the farm and then, when he wanted to move away from the cities, informed on them as resistance supporters. Or something like that, we don’t know the details and probably never will. But, he killed them and took their property, one way or another. We know that when Tegan was committed to the asylum, she made frantic efforts to get in touch with them but there was no response. She thought it was because they had turned their backs on her as well. I think it was because they were already dead.”
It was going to get much worse for Gareth. I'd called Lillith, explained what had happened and listened to her explode on the other end of the telephone. Lillith is normally a gentle and motherly person but when she loses her temper, it's time to watch out. She was on her way over the Atlantic right now and her first objective was to go through the books of the nursing home and dig out everything she could. 'Lea calls it 'vengeful harpy mode' and treats it with great caution. When Lillith goes into vengeful harpy mode, 'Lea tries to be anywhere else.
"How could my Fa' have done it?" Kendrick had recovered enough to gasp the words out.
Conrad looked at him with deep sympathy. "Owen Kendrick was not your father, Gareth. That's what caused this whole awful business. We need to confirm it but we believe your father was a man called Joe Murphy. He was the pilot of the Avenger that was found up near Canaerfon. We can confirm that with a simple DNA test."
"If that is the case, then you are not part of the Kendrick family. They died out with Owen Kendrick and good riddance. You do have a different family in America though and you might consider making contact with them." As you might realize, I'm at work on Bernard's behalf right now. Gareth wants to keep the business in his family? Fine, he now has a new family to keep it in. Even better, his step-father had founded his own company that makes advanced electronics, an odd sort-of-fit with Kendrick Industries. Is step-father, right? I'm not sure, I don’t think the standard names cover this situation.
Kendrick sat, staring at the wall opposite his desk. I was about to say something else, but Conrad stopped me. It was time to wait while Kendrick thought through the situation and absorbed its meaning. Eventually, he gave a little sigh. "Where is my Mam now?"
"She's at the Cardiff General hospital, intensive care ward. Suffering from severe osteoporosis, criminal neglect, malnutrition, dehydration and general malaise. Gareth, she's been institutionalized for more than sixty years. It's amazing she has survived at all. You need to take this very carefully. Her bones are so weak they could break from somebody looking hard at them. Sixty years of neglect have left her so fragile sudden shocks could kill her."
"And what of the people who did this to her?" Gareth's voice now had anger crackling through it.
That was my cue. "Gareth, I'm a gun-crazed psychopath, not a social worker. But, if you really want my advice, leave things like payback to people who are qualified to deal with them. Your mother hasn’t much time left, use it to do what you can for her and make her as happy as you can. Don’t worry about vengeance. People who deserve to be on the receiving end of a good, healthy dose of it always get what they have coming."
The Saloon Bar, Pontwyn-Pairys Inn, Somewhere Unpronounceable in North Wales
Peter had ordered the drinks and listened quietly while Conrad told him the story. "Some of this is us filling in the gaps of course but I think we have the story pretty close. Murphy's Avenger was hit on the Deeside raid and for whatever reason the crew decided to go home over North Wales rather than get out to where the rescue submarines were waiting. It didn’t help them, they crashed fairly shortly afterwards. I would guess his engine failed since there was still fuel on board. Anyway, he put the aircraft down and the crew started to walk out.
"It went quite well at first but then one of the crewmembers slipped and fell, breaking his leg on a slate outcrop. It’s a common injury in that part of the world so I'm told. His two crewmates carried him, but they needed shelter. They came to the Kendrick farm and asked for help. Tegan Kendrick hid them in the barn and brought food out for them. They stayed for two weeks and during that time, she had an affair with Joe Murphy. Owen Kendrick got suspicious, watched her and realized that she was being unfaithful to him with the American pilot. He beat her, very badly, then torched the barn with the Americans inside it. The fire went out of control and it spread to all the buildings. Owen Kendrick blamed Tegan for that of course.
"When he came to his senses, he realized what he had done. The crashed Avenger was still there, and it was only a question of time before somebody spotted it. It didn't really matter who; he was in deep trouble with both the Germans and Americans no matter which side found it and both would want to know where the crew was. So, he assembled his tenants and buried the wreck. I don’t know how the Druid's Forest legend started; it may have already existed and been adapted to circumstances. That may have been why the trees were planted. He waited a few months for memories to ebb and then moved away.
"That doesn’t work." Peter shook his head. "The resources needed to bury an aircraft, even after it had been chopped up, are too great. Planting trees over the area is a German thing and how would hill-farmers get the saplings? There's something more to this. What interests me is the old man's memories. Especially how Owen Kendrick was wearing a gray suit and shouting orders at everybody. Clothing in Britain back then was strictly rationed. Can you imagine anybody doing rough work like that wearing his business suit?"
I hid my smile. Conrad was kicking himself for missing that. I'd file it away and tease him with it later. In the meantime, I'd rub a little pepper in the wound. "Who would wear a gray suit in a situation like that, Peter?"
"The German Army, Angel. They'd also have the resources and the expertise to break the aircraft up." Peter thought carefully. "I'd modify the story this way. The Avenger went in like you say but the Germans didn't bother with finding it because they thought the crew had got it out to sea where they had a chance to be picked up. The crew started to walk out. We've identified the man who broke his leg as Petty Officer Walter Benton, so by default identity for the third is Petty Officer Lee Holtzer. Anyway, Benton had his accident and was taken to the farm. That's where their luck ran out. Tegan Kendrick hid them, not least because she knew her husband was a collaborator. When he found out, he burned the barn, the fire spread as you suggested, and that was that. Then he informed the Germans, probably saying that he’d only found out when the barn had caught fire, and blamed Tegan for everything. She pleaded her belly and thus avoided immediate execution. When the baby was delivered, Owen Kendrick took it and dumped Tegan in the ghastliest environment he could find. That explains why Tegan wasn't executed along with other mental patients by the way. She wasn't insane, she was being punished and the Germans knew it."
"But the aircraft?" Conrad was confused.
Atkinson smiled grimly. "The local German occupation commander has just discovered that an abandoned American aircraft had been lying, undetected, in his patch for two weeks. To the German Army and the Gestapo that's negligence and incompetence at best and outright treason out at worst. Best to mop the whole affair up quietly. So, he gets his collaborator friend to assemble a workforce from his tenants and they bury the aircraft before anybody hears of it. No official report was ever made and that was that. What your aged friend saw was a German officer directing work, not Owen Kendrick. Kendrick was probably there, and with the passage of time he confused the two."
I watched Conrad nodding. It all made sense. He wished it didn’t, but it did.
Cabinet Office, Whitehall, London
"So what happened?" Bernard, along with the whole Cabinet Office was shocked by what had been exposed by our investigation. They weren’t alone, the shock-waves from the scandal would probably cost the present party in government the next election.
"We got the story out of Tegan, step by step." Conrad rubbed his eyes. This whole mess had upset him deeply; what had been intended as a quick holiday had been a disaster for everybody. Not least for Humpty who was trying to defuse the explosion over the scandals exposed in residential care facilities for the elderly. He repeated the story of Murphy's last mission with the added insight Peter had provided.
"By then, Tegan realized she was pregnant and used her condition to escape execution. She had already told Owen Kendrick and got another beating for her pains. When the child was born, he had her condemned as a 'moral defective', dumped her in an asylum and forgot all about her. He told her that the child was dead; he told the boy that his mother was dead. The asylum became a care facility and the reason Tegan was there became lost. And so it stayed until the Great Storm exposed the wrecked Avenger and everything unraveled."
Remember I told you Bernard has an idealistic streak? Well, if you think I appall him, guess what that story did. He'd gone white although I'm not sure if it was with rage or shock. He cleared his throat a couple of times. "She was 24 when he had her committed? And she was in that place for sixty years? He destroyed her whole life."
"No, Bernard, he took it, just as certainly as if he had murdered her." I looked at him and he flinched. I have that effect on people sometimes. Well, often. "He's dead now. There's nothing more we can do to him, unfortunately. I suppose Conrad might be able to call in a few favors and arrange something in the afterlife. Gareth Kendrick has moved her to the Canaerfon home we visited. They're good people and they're looking after her properly. He's introduced her to his family, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so she knows that she has a future through them. And that Owen Kendrick never had one."
I was quoting Conrad there of course. As usual, it's not the sort of thing that I'd think of. Conrad wanted to know what would be happening with those homes. He'd already been in touch with Rome about the problem and Popie was getting a message to all Parish priests telling them to keep an eye on any such facilities in their area and make regular visits to the patients, regardless of their nominal religion. Bearing in mind that they were quite likely to end up in such places, I thought that was simply self-interest.
Bernard had the information at hand, as usual. "The good news is that most of the residential care homes are passing the inspections we are making. In fact, some of them go above and beyond where caring for their residents is concerned. Our people are finding some that are marginal and a few that are downright dreadful. In the former cases, we're sending people in to put them right, the latter cases we've moved the residents out and closed the places down. The staff at the Quiet Hours Residential Care Home are all under arrest. With the exception of the Director of course. He made a run for it and is hiding abroad somewhere.
"On a longer-term basis, we're setting up an inspectorate who will make random unannounced visits to Senior Citizen Residential Care Facilities. This will include a full audit of their books to ensure the government money they receive is being spent properly. An old friend of yours is being appointed to it, Angel. Heather Watson? Angel, for all her faults, she's really good at organization so this is her chance at redemption. Please don't shoot her."
"Oh, all right, Bernard. Just for you. This won't solve the basic problem though. As I understand it, the health service here pays for a basic standard of care and people who want more for their wrinkles pay additional fees for it. You are always going to get people who won’t pay anything above the basic and always get places that cut corners to increase profits from the basic allowance. Your inspectorate will not change that. In fact, it may add to it. Corrupt homes will pay off the inspectors and take the money out of the fees that are supposed to support the wrinkles. That'll make the situation worse, not better."
"I never thought I would say this, but would the Triads be interested in taking part in this business?"
"Absolutely not." Bernard looked shocked at the instant response. "I've already run the numbers on this and there's no hope of making serious money at the bottom end of the scale without becoming the people you're trying to ease out. Top end, sure. That works, and we probably will get in there. We can do things like bring in nurses and other staff who are well-trained but willing to work for lower-than-average wages. That's something you might look at for your health service by the way. Hire staff from, say, the Philippines, and tell them they can have a residence permit at the end of five years working for a reduced salary. I'll talk to my staff about running the basic end of care but don’t hold out hope."
Conrad was smirking when I mentioned my staff. It was a sign of how much I have changed since we met. So much so that even I can see it. I won’t tell Conrad this but when I think of how I was back then, it makes me shake. Bernard obviously wasn't pleased that we couldn't help with the care problem but recognized it was a side-issue. That took him to the main point. "Anyway, what about Kendrick and his company? That's our prime responsibility right now."
'All solved. Joe Murphy Junior came over to meet his half-brother and they hit it off right away. Gareth took and his mother Joe to visit the crashed Avenger site and Joe noticed something. The soil is very acid and that's one indicator there are rare earth minerals there. There are other indicators as well and the place has all of them. Apparently, they are critical materials these days and Joe's company is a big consumer of them. So, establishing a position in their extraction and sales makes sense. Vertical integration it’s called. Since Kendrick Industries is already established in the area, Joe's buying them up with Gareth using some of the money to pay off the troublesome short-term notes. Joe and Gareth's kids will run the Kendrick industries as the Welsh branch of Joe's company.
"It's a neat little package. Joe's happy because it’s a major boost for his company and he's bringing his new family into the fold. Gareth is happy because the business is staying in his family. The banks are happy because some potentially troublesome debts have been paid off. Humpty is getting a financial crisis quietly wrapped up and will be bringing residential care under centralized control. Everybody gets what they want. Crisis there is over." I didn’t tell him we were happy because the Gold and Metal Processing Company, based in Saigon, had obtained three percent of the new business for arranging the deal. And so we get our nose into another tent. Why were we so interested? The richest source for rare earth minerals is China but they can't export much of their production for a variety of reasons. With this new connection, we can illegally export their production by labelling it as the product of the Welsh mines. "By the way, what was the name of the Quiet Hours Admin Wonk?"
"The Admin Wonk?" Bernard hadn’t heard the term before.
"The Director of the Quiet Hours Residential Care Home."
"Ah yes, we mean to speak with you about that. You are referring to Nigel Cranston. He made it to somewhere that has no extradition treaty with us. Precisely where, we're still trying to find out." Bernard glanced at Conrad. This was my business, a part of my life that Conrad doesn't need to know about. I nodded in understanding, an example needed to be made of where the line was drawn and a demonstration provided that the hand of HMG had a long reach if that line was crossed. I didn't need to say that he should leave it to me. I also didn’t need any great insight to know Conrad had realized what had just been offered and agreed but our entire relationship is based on "don't ask and don’t tell." In this case, I suspect he thought I was doing God's Work. The truth is, I identified with Tegan. I could very, very easily have been her, still rotting away after decades locked in a New York prison cell.
Outside the Dragon Moon Chinese Restaurant, Marbella, Spain.
There are at least 1.2 billion Chinese in the world, which means there are 2.4 billion eyes watching. Most of them are owned by people who are not in the Triad movement but know that the Triads pay their debts and being owed a favor by them is something worth having. It also has no expiry date. Not long ago, a non-Triad family called in a favor they'd been owed for four generations. The debt was paid in full to their complete satisfaction. I'll tell you the story one day if you are interested.
In the case of the staff at the Dragon Moon, the owner had recognized a regular customer, Nigel Cranston, from a picture that had been circulated. He had called the local Triad family and told them of Cranston's presence. That message went up the organization with commendable speed and, once the sighting had been confirmed, the next time he picked up a meal, a gun-chick was waiting.
When he came out, the gun-chick stepped out of the shadows behind him while he was unlocking the door of his car and fired three shots into the back of his head. She fired two more into his heart as he slumped to the pavement, slipped away into the shadows and was gone. By the time the police were on the scene, she was already on the way out of the country.
Or so it is rumored. I'm in Bangkok, how could I possibly know for sure?