Chapter 260
“Ian....IAN!”
“What?”
“Jesus Christ Ian... could I bother you to focus on our work?” Felix said with a smirk, knowing full well that Ian's mind was with his family. Not that he minded, because the finely honed instinct that they both had told them that they wouldn't see them again for quite some time.
“Where were we....Ah yes..the list.” Ian said. He rummaged through the papers on his desk and picked it up. “There we go.”
It was a list with names and addresses of of all the spectators at the perimeter who had been present at the site of the explosion, but the plod had already talked to them so there was nothing much to be found there, even more because neither Ian nor Felix looked forward to knocking onto twenty-six doors all over Coventry.
Still, Ian rattled off the names and occupations of everyone, and by the end of it they had no more of an angle on this than yesterday when they had started, and Ian had the sickening feeling that barring anything unforseen they wouldn't find anything. And yet he hated the thought of the King and Queen dying in something as mundane as an accident following a cockup in communications.
“So what do you think?” Felix asked.
“Something's off on all of this.” Ian replied and Felix nodded in agreement, but Instinct didn't automatically mean truth and id didn't generate proof either.
“But what would that be, Ian?” Felix did have a point. So far nothing in the police reports and in the few questions they themselves had managed to ask since taking over gave even the slightest indication of the matter being nothing but a tragic accident and yet both of them couldn't help but feel that they were missing something.
“Dunno.” Ian glanced at his wristwatch and then said: “I do know though that something else is off too. Pub?”
“Pub.”
The formula was the same, even though since the war had begun they were mostly going to whatever cantine was in reach, and today was no different. At least Mountbatten made sure that the SOE employees were well fed, so unlike the workers at, say, Vickers, the SOE ate well.
“What bugs me the most is that this is so obvious an accident...” Ian began once they entered the cafeteria, “....that there is definitely something wrong.” Felix added. The SOE cafeteria was, just like it's equivalents at MI5 and MI6 parcelled up into cubicles just large enough to house a table and four seats to eliminate accidental eavesdropping and everyone entering had to sign in. Once they were seated, Ian and Felix continued to talk, completely ignoring the meat they were eating and that was actual Beef for a change.
“Rule Number Eight.” Felix said, and both then recited at exactly the same time: “Nothing is ever as clean as it looks like.”
“Right, so what are we going to do about it then?” Ian asked, but by the look on his face Felix could tell that his friend was asking himself. “We'll need to go through the entire list, door by door.”
Felix thought about protesting, but Ian was right. If they talked to them again they might find out some things that the Plod had missed or just by accident they might find something, or, if they really were unlucky they might waste their time and all they would accomplish then was to have no one to present the vengeful British Public. Hell, even HRH The Princess Royal, Mary, Countess of Harewood and under the Regency Law of 1937 currently the regent for the Queen until she came of age in 1944 had communicated the Palace' desire to see the perpetrators punished if they could be found, but Felix had the sickening feeling that they might come up empty.
“Well?” he asked Ian when he hadn't heard anything more for a couple of minutes.
“Ask around. What else is there to do?” Ian answered, “however, we should start first by talking to the relatives of that UXB crew. It says here that they were sent there after the original crew got held up by another Bomb on the other side of the city.”
“Gotcha.”
The UXB team had consisted of the usual six people, all Army NCOs led by an Officer who usually did the actual defusing. Their service records had revealed nothing except that two of them were expats, something that didn't indicate anything as Felix didn't have to point out after all their time together. Still, Felix felt apprehension when he realized that he would probably have to dive into the Expat Community again, and he had carefully avoided that wherever possible. The rest of the Leiter clan might not be able or willing to see it, but the self pity some of the wallowed in was in Felix' opinion the wrong thing to feel when quite obviously nothing could be done to 'send the reds packing' as the Observer, the principal American Newspaper liked to say.
Three hours later they were sitting in the living room of the Carter household opposite the parents of one of the Non-Coms that had been killed. Both Ian and Felix were wearing civilian suits to disguise the fact that agencies other than Special Branch, and while Felix exchanged pleasantries with the grieving parents to 'soften them up' for the actual questioning later, Ian discreetly surveyed his surroundings. According to the background brief, Mr Carter had been a mid-level buissenessman in Detroit and had by the looks of it managed to evacuate some of his assets, because the house, the location and the trimmings inside were definitely upper-class if still below the lower half of the landed Gentry and the big Industrialists. Therefore the furniture wasn't of much interest, but rather more the place of remembrance in the corner of the room. The usual picture of the dead with the black band draped over a corner, surrounded by little British and US Flags. It was placed on a corner shelf that held memorabilia of days gone by, the prize and centrepiece was black-and-white picture of the Washington Monument as taken by someone standing on the far side of the pool.
...and anyway, that's what the paper says.” Felix concluded a sentence Ian had mostly missed. Sensing that Felix thought they were ready, Ian concentrated his attention on the people sitting on the other side of the coffee table.
“But why are you asking us all these questions again?” asked the Father. “We have talked to the Police already..”
“Well Sir, the questioning then wasn't very exhaustive, the Officer were understandably pressed for time and the Chaos everything was in hasn't helped either, you understand.”
Using a little white lie Ian had implied that he did not think that the plods had done a good job even though when they had done what they could and even more, for it had been their King and Queen that died.
“The thing is though that we would have gone all over the testimony of everyone involved anyway and it would have been more than likely that we would have called on you again in that case too.”
“That is true.” Carter said. What can I tell you?”
Ian leaned back in his chair and asked: “Well, firstly I would like to know how he came to be in the Royal Engineers, much less a UXB team?”
Mr. Carter smiled ruefully while his wife quite obviously tried to keep her tears under control. “That's a long story...I can tell you if you want, but suffice it to say when he saw when we fled Detroit mad him want to do something more constructive when he joined yo..the Army in '38.”
So Max Carter was...had been part of the wave of Expat volunteers that had flocked to the British colours when the Army had virtually exploded in size in 1938-39. Ian had faint memories of some rumblings in the scene back then and made a mental note to ask Felix later on, since he had been involved much more back in the day.
“I see.”
Felix asked the next question.
“When did he join this line of work, I mean has he ever talked about what he did with the RE?”
His mother excusing herself for a few seconds. She came back with a stack of letters and said with a voice that showed that she was barely holding back the tears: “He...he..he always wrote at least once a week, and he was so happy now that his group had been assigned to the task last week when the other team was....”
That was new to both Ian and Felix. None of the records they had been given had indicated that the Team had replaced another one at the last moment, but then again they had never bothered to ask and in the total Chaos that was still gripping the law enforcement community of Coventry and the surrounding counties this must have slipped through the grid.
When they stepped out of the house wand walked down the road to where they had parked the car, Felix suddenly asked: “You do realize that this proves nothing?”
Ian nodded. “I do. But remember, we aren't part of MI5, so technically we have no authority at all, and what we have now is enough to try and make everything we do official.”
“You know, if there really is a conspiracy, and I am not saying there is, I almost pity the poor fools who did it.” Felix said when he saw the predatory grin on Ian's face.
[Notes: And the case goes on...]