The Rest is Silence (Billy Boyle World War II Mystery) (44 page)

“Smart,” I said, moving toward Diana once we were alone. Even in her brown wool FANY uniform, she looked like a million bucks.

“We are trained to be devious in the SOE,” she said, grinning from ear to ear. “Are you concerned about disobeying Colonel Harding?”

“Rules,” I said, then kissed her. I never got to
were made to be broken
.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A
LONE BODY
washed up on the beach at Slapton Sands, much as described in Chapter One, and was examined by the real Doctor Verniquet. The identity or nationality of the corpse was never discovered.

The friendly fire incident and the subsequent training disaster in Lyme Bay did happen as described. The dates and sequence were slightly altered to fit the demands of the narrative.

Charles Sabini was an actual racetrack criminal, the leader of a large gang specializing in extortion and gambling. He was interred as an enemy alien, but released in 1941. His son, serving in the Royal Air Force, was killed while his father was in prison for three years for receiving stolen goods. Sabini harbored a grudge against the British government for his perceived ill treatment and the death of his son. Charles Sabini died in 1950, in a far more peaceable manner than is depicted in this novel.

Agatha Christie’s country home, Greenway House, was taken over by the military early in the war. It was used as a naval headquarters for the 10th Flotilla, transports manned by the US Coast Guard for the Normandy D-Day invasion. Not that far from Greenway House, a young sailor named Yogi Berra served on a Landing Craft Support, Small (LCSS) Rocket Launcher. He and his crew took their thirty-six-foot craft to within three hundred yards of Omaha Beach, unleashing their twenty-four rockets at the enemy emplacements in the early hours of D-Day.

The disaster at Slapton Sands was the most deadly training incident in American military history. A total of 946 servicemen were killed, a total far worse than the approximately two hundred casualties incurred at Utah Beach on D-Day itself. Ten BIGOTs were on the ships sunk or damaged, necessitating a hunt for bodies and survivors, lest plans for the invasion fall into German hands. All ten bodies were recovered; the eleventh body is my fictional creation.

It was not only the potential capture of personnel with the BIGOT classification that worried Allied planners. Slapton Sands shares many of its terrain features with Utah Beach; if the Germans had determined that it was the destination of the transport ships, they may have inferred the location of the invasion. However, the attack occurred too far offshore for them to draw any conclusions about the purpose or destination of the convoy.

The map-making activities of Peter Wiley are based on the real-life contributions of Navy Lieutenant William Bostick, who created maps for both Utah and Omaha Beaches. He also developed a system of transparent overlays showing profiles of large and small landing craft. By adjusting the overlay on a graph of the beach slope, navigators could determine water depth and see where their craft would run aground. This is the “perspective” that Peter Wiley was seeking. William Bostick went on to a career in art and lived into his nineties.