Read No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries) Online
Authors: John Gardner
No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries)
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Contents
For Trish,
again and always.
‘The blind impersonal nature of the missile made the individual on the ground feel helpless. There was little that he could do, no human enemy that he could see shot down.’
Winston Churchill on the V-Weapons
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is the fifth volume of a projected six books set during the Second World War, starring the young policewoman Suzie Mountford.
It is also my 52
nd
book, and written in my 80
th
year – though I don’t know what that’s got to do with the price of eggs.
I should say that the Royal Marine NCOs, Colour-Sergeant ‘Tubby’ Shaw and Sergeant Harvey, who appear in the closing chapters of this tale, should not be confused with the late Colour-Sergeant ‘Tubby’ Shaw and the excellent, if taciturn, Sergeant Harvey, who whipped Y9 Squad through basic drill at the Royal Marine Depot, Deal, in the early spring of 1945. I should know; I was in Y9 Squad. At the time, the war was still being fought, yet at Deal we were even taught the ceremonial
Feu de joie,
which Tubby Shaw called the
Foo Dee Joy,
as all surviving members of Y9 will recall.
John Gardner,
Hampshire, 2006.
CHAPTER ONE
Suzie’s brother James flinched as the explosion shuddered through the walls of his sister’s sitting room high above Upper St Martin’s Lane. The curtains puffed – windows open to stop bomb blast from shattering glass.
‘Damn!’ said the convent-educated WDI Suzie Mountford. Then to her brother, ‘It’s OK, Jim … Fine, don’t worry.’ Looking up from her teacup, concerned, glancing at the military style watch she wore on her left wrist.
Three minutes past twelve noon exactly.
‘Bloody doodlebugger,’ Tommy Livermore growled. ‘Third today. That wasn’t as close as it sounded. On a calm day…’
‘Shut up, Tommy, we know. On a calm day the sound is carried over long distances causing the aural illusion of the explosion being closer than it really is.’ Suzie spoke as though quoting from a manual.
Up to that point the conversation, when it wasn’t about the fighting in Normandy, was about the V-1 doodlebugs, flying bombs. Failing that, in recent days the talk had been of the attempt to assassinate Hitler in his headquarters at Rastenburg in Prussia, a few weeks previously, on 20
th
July.
All of them, at that moment, felt the disturbing ripple under their feet. Suzie, sitting near the door, felt it through her thighs and bottom as though someone had repeatedly pummelled her. It was not an unpleasant sensation.
For a moment, Lieutenant James Mountford, Royal Marines, thought he was back on Sword beach over a month before, going in with the second wave of 41 Commando on D-Day. He heard the explosions as he reached the surf line, the Sherman tanks with their flails slashing, clearing the mines from the sand: the heavy inhuman whoosh of the flame-throwers ahead. Then he saw the bullets kick up the sand and felt the terrible gouging drill into his right foot, suffered as the bones were snagged apart and again as a further bullet ripped like an electric shock into his left shoulder, spinning him down into the surf, rolling him as though he was a piece of driftwood, blacking him out and disorienting him until Marines Page and McDermott lifted him bodily from the foam and dragged him up to the dressing station already set up among the dunes.
This he relived in a fraction of a second, standing back from the window, right foot encased in plaster, left arm in a sling. He was in battledress, with the Royal Marines Commando flashes on his shoulders, the triangled dagger below, parachute wings and the Combined Ops flash on his right sleeve. He leant on a walking stick and looked sickly white, his eyes sad as those of a frightened puppy.
It was Sunday – second week of August – and they had discharged him from hospital that morning, so he rang Suzie to find she was back in London: she’d been away on cases, twice with Tommy, in recent weeks: before D-Day up to Manchester, following and interrogating a soldier suspected of throttling a prostitute in London, in a flat above Beak Street, Soho. Then there was the case in Sheffield where a young housewife, Doris Butler, had been bludgeoned to death in her kitchen on the night of 5
th
/6
th
June. The husband had been on leave but had long gone back to his unit and by 9
th
June was dead in Normandy. Tommy told Shirley Cox and Laura Cotter to root around and look for a boyfriend; there had been some footprints and a lot of cigarette ends behind bushes at the far end of the woman’s little garden, someone watching the house. ‘Boyfriend,’ Tommy reckoned. ‘Boyfriend driven mad by the husband being home and sleeping with his wife. Came down most nights to watch them move around the house, put the blackouts up, go to bed. Hubby goes back to his unit and the bloke nips in. They have a fight – “You said he never touched you!” Bang! Over and out,’ there, in Sheffield, the United Kingdom’s steel capital. Tommy raised his eyebrows and corrected himself in a mutter, ‘No, look for boyfriends, plural. I think our Doris rang the changes: had round heels.’
Later that day, James Mountford was going on to Larksbrook. Their mother, Helen Gordon-Lowe, was coming to collect him, together with the dreaded stepfather, the Galloping Major, who got petrol from God knows where. All the time.
Suzie found it odd that when the war had started her brother was still at school; now here he was in her flat, an officer wounded on the beaches of Normandy.
A Maren, as they called Wrens attached to the Royal Marines, proudly wearing a blue beret with the red flash and the RM Globe and Laurel cap badge, had picked up Jim in a jeep and driven him up from the military hospital on the outskirts of Oxford.
‘Thought all the jeeps were in France now,’ Jim said.
‘Not this one, sir. Wouldn’t float so they left it with me.’ She glanced at him cheekily and liked what she saw. Marens often twisted young RM officers round their little fingers and other parts of their anatomies. By the time they got to Upper St Martin’s Lane and Suzie’s flat, Jim had discovered her name was Emily Styles. She came from New Malden, in Surrey, and he’d also got the telephone number of the Wrenery from her, plus her home number in case she was on leave. ‘If the excuse is good enough I can always charm a jeep out of the chiefy,’ she told him. ‘No problem. I’ll just give your name – it’ll be in the register for a month. I can easily tootle down to Newbury.’ She would have taken him today, but he’d told her his mum was coming for him, so she had to make do with helping him up to his sister’s flat, letting the back of his hand brush hard against her left breast as she did so.
Now, up in Suzie’s living room, he felt dejected, could’ve been with the Maren instead of his fun-defying stepfather, Ross Gordon-Lowe, hero of World War One, firewatcher extraordinary, dull as a tarnished cap badge.
‘Cheer up, Jim. You’re a hero now,’ Tommy grinned at him.
‘Hero my arse. Commissioned for less than four months, commando course, parachute course then off to 41 Commando. Two minutes on the beach and I’m shot to buggery.’
‘At least you won’t get a medal for it like the Yanks.’ American troops received the Purple Heart medal for getting wounded, and this was looked upon with derision by members of HM Forces.
‘In the last lot they called it getting a Blighty.’ Tommy winked at him. In the first war getting a Blighty meant getting a wound that sent you home, got you out of the trenches. ‘Your sister got a sort of Blighty last year.’
Suzie didn’t see the wink; she had turned away, squinting at the little mirror in her handbag held at arm’s length, checking out the new lipstick she’d acquired:
Cyclax
Velvet Grape. Also, she’d had her hair done in Sheffield and was persuaded to have her eyebrows plucked. Still couldn’t get used to it: wondered if it was too much.
Tommy saw her back stiffen. ‘Joke, heart,’ he chuckled. Then, to Jim, ‘Got herself promoted without taking any exams. Jammy girl, eh?’
‘Not funny, Tom,’ she snapped.
‘Not sitting where I am, heart.’
Suzie didn’t bite, wanted to claw his eyes out but knew it wasn’t worth it. She was starting to learn about damping down her temper and this was a particularly irritable wound, Tommy nibbling away at last year’s still-festering sore.
Last year, ’43, there had been a ginormous split when Suzie was moved from the Reserve Squad to an intelligence unit, the War Office Intelligence Liaison Department, on special duties. Tommy had no say in the matter that was seen to be temporary, but Tommy, being the Honourable Tommy Livermore, threw a sort of childish paddy, saw shadows where there were none, and devious moves where none existed. The result was a real divide, an incomprehensible falling-out with Suzie learning more about Tommy than was good for her.
In the end, of course, Tommy had crawled back, pleading for a return to the status quo, but every now and then he gave her a sharp dig just to remind himself of how bad it had been.
Suzie’s promotion had come with the move to WOIL and she had been allowed to keep the rank of Woman Detective Inspector after she returned to the Reserve. This still appeared to rankle with old Dandy Tom and she didn’t really know why: thought he’d have been proud of her.
They had a scratch lunch. There was always a supply of ham, bacon and eggs, from the home farm at Tommy’s parents’ estate, Kingscote Grange: ‘Where Tommy cut his molars on the old silver spoon,’ Suzie told people.
So today they had poached eggs on toast because Suzie hadn’t had the patience to do a proper Sunday lunch and her mother had told her not to worry as they planned to take everybody to the Savoy that night for dinner before they drove back to Newbury. If you had money you could still eat in places like the Savoy at almost pre-war standards; and the Galloping Major always seemed to have money. Another thing that puzzled Suzie.
Not that it mattered because as soon as they arrived Ross Gordon-Lowe, full of self-importance, announced that they couldn’t stay after all. ‘I have a parade tonight.’
‘What’s he going to parade?’ Suzie muttered to her mother. ‘Going to march through Newbury with that little moustache – bayonets fixed and drums beating? His moustache got the freedom of Newbury, has it? That what it’s about?’
‘ARP evening church parade, Suzie. Don’t tease him, you know how important it is to him,’ and Helen entered the drawing room setting eyes on James in his cast, sling and some sticking plaster on his face. ‘Oh, my poor darling, what have they done to you?’
‘Slipped in the bath, Mummy.’ He gave his most winning smile, the one that seemed almost to slip off his face, wondering why his mum and the major hadn’t driven over to Oxford to see him. He’d been there long enough.
