The Last Mission Read online

  “Brombeck saved her,” I lied, “and then Finkle and I flew her home.” Finkle, the flight engineer, had climbed down next to me.

  The colonel nodded. He walked to the jeep and put his hand on the stretcher. “You’re going to make it,” he said to Brombeck, whose eyes kept staring straight into the sky, then he walked away, staggering under the weight of his grief.

  I dropped to my knees and gagged and vomited.

  Finkle’s hand came across my shoulder. “You did great, Lieutenant. I’ll fly with you anywhere.”

  I started to pound my fist on the runway, and I cried until I began screaming.

  Now

  Norwich still looks medieval, with its perfect Norman church tower that rises above small buildings and narrow streets. The tower was our turning point whenever we were coming in from the north—225 degrees magnetic to the tower, and then a southerly turn to 080. That would line us up into the wind that blew in from the North Sea. It also put Whittingbridge and the surrounding farms and pastures right in our landing path, which explains why the cows stopped milking and the chickens stopped laying.

  As I drive into the city, fifty years of changes are immediately apparent. Cars are lined bumper to bumper on one side of the street. Bland commercial buildings have replaced intricate buildings with tiny shops. Central police headquarters is a low stone building with aluminum-edged windows and underground parking. Intimacy seems to have been banished as a barrier to progress.

  Several polite young men listen to my inquiry, each in turn deciding that I need to speak with someone else. Finally, I stand in a hallway, while two police officers debate whether I’m even in the right county. “It’s all been centralized,” one officer explains. “No telling where records from Whittingbridge might be.”

  “I’d suppose London,” the other officer allows.

  They give me a London address for district records and I thank them politely, even though it’s obvious that the address is a brush-off. No one remembers a Detective Sergeant Browning, and no one has the slightest interest in any case he might have worked on. Today’s police have no hope of rescuing society from violence, drugs, theft, and murder. For every case put in the out-box, three more appear in the in-box. Why would anyone look for another case in the archives?

  I cross the street to a pub, only to learn that I need a debit card to use the telephone. I find the British Telecom office, which issues the debit card and has public telephones that take it. I make three calls before an authoritative woman’s voice tells me that the records I’m looking for are in the police station that I just left. “Talk to Andrew Barnes,” she says. “He’ll be able to help you.”

  Barnes is a civilian clerk who lives in the bowels of the police station. You can enter and leave his office without ever seeing either an officer or a felon. It’s possible to work your whole life behind his desk without ever hearing a police-car siren.

  “Whittingbridge,” he says. “I don’t believe that was ever put on the computer.” He pecks at his keyboard and talks aloud to the data that appears on his monitor. “No…that wouldn’t be it…maybe under Norfolk…no…no listings at all.”

  Then he’s up to a file drawer, his fingers dancing over the tabs as if he were playing a harp. “So much of this was just dumped here. It will take forever to get it in proper order.”

  He leads me deeper into the building, down into a subbasement where rows of black filing cabinets sit on a polished tile floor. There’s a fluorescent tube over every aisle. “Whittingbridge is right here,” he tells me, indicating a group of about a dozen cabinets, each with four drawers. “Fortunately, it seems to have been one of our smaller stations.” He sighs. “Of course it should be organized according to years, but I’m afraid that it’s scarcely alphabetical. I assume the letters indicate the name of the case. If I can help you in any way…”

  I pull one folder out of the top drawer in each cabinet and glance through to get the lay of the land. Each folder seems to have a case document that contains the initial report, and then dated entries for all the follow-up activities. Other papers are randomly piled behind the case document. They are alphabetized according to the name of the complainant, which in a criminal matter is the name of the victim. The murdered woman was named Mary Brock, and all the B’s are in two drawers at the beginning of the aisle. I laugh out loud at my good luck.

  The folder is in the back of the first drawer, its ragged edges indicating that it had a good bit of use, but its faded color showing its age. Sergeant Browning’s name is in the upper corner, indicating the officer in charge. I take the folder back to Andrew Barnes’s office. He’s stunned that I found it so quickly, and I think a little bit hurt that I have made his job look easy, but he lets me take over a chair and table in his office so I can spread the papers out.

  First the case document with its dated entries:

  March 2, 1943—The body of Mary Brock, female, age twenty-eight, was discovered by children playing in the rubble of a bombed-out building in Norwich. She was fully clothed in office attire and identified by the wallet in her handbag. First impression by officers from Norwich station was that she was killed when a German plane dumping its bomb load, unexpectedly hit the building.

  The Norwich station report, on two hand-printed pages, is in the folder. It adds that she was a resident of Whittingbridge, employed as a secretary by an English construction company.

  Another entry on the same day notes that Miss Brock had no known family in the area, and that a coworker identified the body.

  March 8, 1943—The Norwich medical examiner’s report finds the cause of death to be a broken neck, along with a massive trauma at the base of the skull, entirely consistent with the view that she was killed when the building came down on top of her, but it puts the time of death approximately twenty days earlier, or nearly a month after the building was flattened by the bomb blast.

  March 10, 1943—The case was delivered to Whittingbridge station, which was closest to the victim’s home, for further investigation. Sergeant Browning, the station commander, assigned himself.

  March 12, 1943—Browning began talking with Mary Brock’s acquaintances. From the twelfth to the twentieth there are a dozen interviews, starting with her landlord, moving on to her office companions, then widening out in a circle that included various pub owners, storekeepers, and neighbors.

  There are pages from a yellow legal pad on which Browning scribbled the comments of his witnesses as they spoke. Much of this is illegible, and I can picture him writing with the pad balanced on his knee. He also wrote summaries of his impressions of each interview, and these are in a more careful hand. I’m amazed at the detailed picture of the dead woman that he was able to assemble.

  She had arrived in Whittingbridge in mid-1942, a secretary in a company that was building the airfields, not only at the Bridge, but in two other Norfolk locations. She took a floor in a private house owned by the widow who lived on the ground floor. Apparently she was a perfect tenant who was quiet, paid on time, and even thought to bring little gifts: flowers, when specific varieties bloomed, or cakes from the local bakery. And she was a fine employee.

  Browning’s summaries showed him to be puzzled that a young woman would travel to a strange, unexciting town just to pursue a rather commonplace secretarial job. He was also disturbed that her hours didn’t dovetail. Her landlady said she had worked late nearly every night, whereas her employer claimed that she rarely put in any overtime. He was also distressed that friends and neighbors knew little about her, except that she was frequently on the arm of American flyers from the Whittingbridge air base.

  March 28, 1943—Browning had concluded from his review of the coroner’s report that Mary Brock had been murdered. The healthy balance in her bank account, which indicated that she had another source of income well beyond her salary, particularly impressed him. He felt that her involvement with the American flyers might explain her source of funds and be linked to her death.

 
; April 2, 1943—The date Browning showed up in our duty room. He summarized our meeting, including my promise to get back to him on the possibility of his witnesses viewing our officers’ photographs. I find the handwritten notes he took while we talked. In them, he described me as “a pleasant young man, who appears genuinely cooperative.”

  April 6, 1942—His case record entry acknowledged receipt of my letter, denying him access to base records. He speculated that this was “undoubtedly the decision of a superior officer,” which was exactly what it was. Colonel Mast had been stunned by the suggestion. “All the officers?” he asked. “Even the ones who had their heads shot off protecting his fat ass? When would he like to talk to them? While a flock of 190s is shooting at them? Or when they’re shivering in their beds, trying to quiet the screams of their friends that keep ringing through their heads?”

  Back in the folder, there’s the original of my letter. “Because of our high rate of turnover, photos are quickly out of date. Base commanders feel the chance of an identity would not warrant the disruption of operations and the added burden to our aircrews.”

  On the bottom of the letter, in Browning’s handwriting, is the word “Poppycock!”

  April 10, 1942—Another visit to the Bridge is noted, and I remember this one just as clearly.

  The sergeant brought in three photographs, each containing a clear image of the dead woman. She was very attractive, blond hair pulled back professionally, thin face with large, light eyes, and a small mouth. In the first picture she was smiling, obviously sharing a happy moment with her coworkers. In the second, she was at a restaurant table with another young woman and two men in military uniforms. I couldn’t recognize any of the other three, and had a hard time matching the image to the woman in the original picture. The last was in some sort of dance hall. It showed Mary Brock dancing with an RAF pilot.

  Browning had reconsidered and decided to circulate her photo. “Maybe someone knows who she was seeing, if it was someone here at Whittingbridge,” he reasoned. He would certainly appreciate the names of the two Americans who were in one of the photos.

  His notes recall that I was cooperative, but unenthusiastic. I remember that Colonel Mast had made me acting first lieutenant and had named me the pilot of a new plane with a new crew. I had met the men that morning, and realized that their lives were in my hands. Then I had gone to the hospital in London, where Jimmy Brombeck was recovering from the surgery that had saved one of his legs and cost him the other. So in all honesty, I didn’t give a damn about Detective Sergeant Browning’s investigation into the death of a woman I assumed was a high-class officers’ whore. All I had done was put the photos on the officers’ club bulletin board, with a note that asked anyone recognizing anyone in the photos to contact me.

  The answer came quickly. People recognized both of the American officers. I felt a sick sense of bitter triumph when I told Browning that they had both been killed in the same mission when I had been Mast’s copilot. Now, in reading Browning’s notes, I realize that he had been more distressed by the deaths of two young Americans than he was by the loss of evidence in his case. His sorrow had been genuine.

  May 3, 1943—I had forgotten that he called first, but there is an entry for a call to the base, asking me if he might bring in a witness to look just at photographs of officers named Roger. The witness, a young woman who worked with Mary Brock, recalled her referring to an American officer named Rog, who called for her around the time she disappeared.

  He noted my comment that it would take a few days to sort through the back rosters, find all the Rogers, and pull their files. He was enthusiastic over my suggestion that perhaps the young woman could provide a description, which would certainly ease my search.

  May 8, 1943—I have to smile at his reaction on the day he introduced me to Angela Priest. Browning had offered to bring her in, but our group had just suffered frightening losses on a raid deep in the German heartland. Mast had told me to finish up training my new crew because I would be filling a hole in the squadron on our next mission. I had been anxious to get away from the tension, and had suggested to Browning that we might meet in town. I didn’t care in the least about any information the witness might provide. All I wanted to do was sit in a pub with civilians and drink myself into oblivion.

  “The lieutenant was extremely attentive to Miss Priest,” Browning wrote in the log, “and promised full cooperation.” I flipped through the file for his handwritten notes and read, “Lt. Marron and Miss Priest nearly swooned over one another. Doubt if he’ll remember a word of her description.”

  I had been dropped by a jeep at the door of the police station and ushered into a small lounge, with two soft chairs, a table, and a console radio. Browning greeted me and introduced me to the young woman who was hidden behind the wings of a chair until she stood. Swoon was probably an exaggeration, but he couldn’t have missed the thoroughness with which I examined every curve of her figure. Angela didn’t miss it either, because she was already blushing when I focused on her face.

  Young, fresh, attractive are thoughts that come to mind now when I recall our first meeting. All true, but all inadequate to the moment. She was so much more.

  I was living in horror. Not just the slaughter, but more the easy acceptance of slaughter. Men died, their mattresses were changed, and a new man took over the bed. You were glad that you weren’t too close to the man who had disappeared, and you knew you didn’t want to know too much about the newcomer who would shortly disappear. You formed phantom relationships. You could sing with your comrades at the club, grouped around a piano. You could drink with them until you fell down. You could swap jokes with them, and if you shared a pass, even go whoring with them. But you couldn’t get too close to them, because one day a fighter would dive past you, or the flak would explode under you, and someone would be bled to death like a chicken. And you knew, when that moment came, that you wanted it to be him and not you.

  I had just been told that I was going to take a new crew into combat. As I looked at them in our briefing, I felt responsible for their lives. I was in the pilot’s seat. I was making the decisions. I was giving the orders. I found myself praying that someone else’s plane would take the hit. Maybe the pilot in the next bunk. Or the navigator who had just moved in across the hall. His crew, not mine. His life, not mine.

  Then suddenly I was face-to-face with life. Life danced in her eyes and rushed from her smile. Angela could dream of living forever, and in her dream, no one else had to die.

  It wasn’t that she was young. We were all young. Nor that she was glamorous. There were many lovely young women who came out to the base to our parties and dances. Instead, she seemed whole at a time when I was breaking to pieces. Confident at a time when I was afraid. But at that moment, when she stood and smiled at me, none of these things came to mind. All I remember was the feeling that I had to protect her to keep her alive, and that if I held onto her, I might come back to life myself.

  Browning said I swooned, and I guess that’s what it was in his idiom. I think I reached out to her. She was the life I had left behind and was, in the entire war, my only chance of reclaiming it. If I couldn’t protect her, then the war was senseless. If I couldn’t be with her, then I was lost.

  The notes in the file were absolutely correct. I didn’t “remember a word of her description.” I sat across from her, staring, while Browning asked the questions I should have been asking and wrote down the answers that I should have been writing down.

  “I can’t think of anything else,” she finally said. “I just saw him holding the door of the car she was getting into. I saw his face only for an instant. He looked around, as though he was afraid someone might be watching him.”

  I was still staring at her when she finished, and she began to blush again, waiting for a signal that our interview was over. Browning tried to rescue us.

  “Well, this is very good of you, Miss Priest. Very good indeed. I’m sure Lieutenant Marron wil
l be able to put your information to…”

  “Are you hungry?” I blurted out, as if the detective wasn’t talking.

  “Am I hungry?” She repeated my question in amazement, and then smiled at my embarrassment when I realized what a dumb thing it was to say to a witness.

  Browning cleared his throat, then tried to make himself invisible by cleaning his glasses and folding his papers.

  “I had lunch,” Angela answered, “and I will be having dinner.”

  “Have dinner with me. Please.”

  “Oh, that isn’t necessary…” she started, about to tell me that she was only too glad to cooperate and didn’t expect any reward.

  “It is necessary,” I argued. “I mean, it isn’t, but…” And then I was lost. How could I tell her that it was absolutely essential if I had any chance of drawing my next breath?

  “It could be useful,” the detective suggested. “The lieutenant might think of a few more questions, or you might remember something more.”

  His explanation rang hollow, but his encouragement was genuine. Judging from his notes, he was delighted at the spark of interest in Angela’s eyes, as well as in mine.

  “I’d join you,” Browning said, “but I have work here at the station.”

  If she saw through his ruse, she never let on. “If you really think it would be helpful,” she offered. I was up out of my chair with my hand out. She stood and turned so I could take her arm. I began leading her to the door.

  “Lieutenant!” When I looked back, the sergeant was still wearing his official expression. “Perhaps you’d care to take a copy of your notes?”