Chapter 4
Jack entered his office at Baker Street keen to get started on his growing pile of work on his desk.
He’d been pulled from his daily routine of helping Val prepare Lizzie for Berlin.
It was a miserable task, but he’d rather be involved and make sure they didn’t miss anything, than leave it to someone else.
Lizzie and Hannah’s cover stories were watertight, and most of the arrangements had been made. Documents were forged, and they only had to finalise their travel routes to Berlin, and they would set the date for her to leave.
A heaviness weighed in his chest, which he recognised only too well.
Lizzie hadn’t even left yet, and he was already struggling with her absence.
For the past few nights, she’d slept at home so she could prepare the family for her having to leave suddenly.
Of course, she couldn’t tell them where she was really going, but each time she left on a mission, she had to give them a plausible reason for being called away urgently.
Her father was an important figure at the War Office, and he knew she was with the SOE, but the rest of the family were completely in the dark.
Jack sighed as he flicked through the pages of the new report he’d requested. There were more leaks in the SOE French networks than in a sieve, and he had been tasked with tracking down intelligence that could point to traitors in their midst who might be helping the enemy.
It was a top-secret document. No one relished the prospect of uncovering compromised agents within the ranks, but as the war rumbled on, the more necessary it became. There was no point excelling in espionage in France if their people were feeding their secrets straight to Berlin.
A shiver ran through him at the thought. Berlin. The report took on a much more personal meaning now Lizzie was about to be sent into the Reich. If there were British traitors within the SOE, he would make it his mission to root them out.
The phone rang, interrupting Jack’s chain of thought.
‘Jack?’
‘Maman, qu'est-ce que c'est?’ Jack asked, recognising his mother’s voice.
She never phoned him at work, and she sounded strange.
‘It’s your brother,’ she gasped.
‘What’s happened to Henry?’ He leapt out of his seat and his strangled voice sounded like he was speaking underwater.
‘They delivered a telegram,’ his mother continued, now sobbing.
His body turned ice cold, and he felt like he was living in the nightmare he had dreaded since the day his brother joined the RAF and became a fighter pilot.
His mother read the telegram to him in a shaky voice:
‘Regret to inform you that Flight Lieutenant Henry King is reported missing in action following an operation over Germany.’
Jack heard the phone hit the floor and his mother wailing in the background before Elise, her live-in companion spoke. ‘I’m so sorry, Jack,’ she said. ‘Your Maman is inconsolable.’
‘She’s in shock. Please pour her a drop of brandy to soothe her nerves and stay with her until I arrive. I will be there as soon as I can.’
Jack grabbed his coat and left the building, telling no one where he was going. If he didn’t speak the words out loud, perhaps he could pretend they weren’t true, and his baby brother wasn’t missing in action somewhere in Germany.
At his childhood home, on the prestigious Grosvenor Place, Jack sat with an arm around his mother, and she clung to him with one hand and clutched the tear-stained telegram in the other.
‘Pass it to me, Maman,’ Jack said, his tone gentle but firm. ‘I will see what more I can find out.’
She shook her head and kept reading it again and again as if she couldn’t quite believe what it said.
Jack called the family doctor, and when he arrived, he asked him to sedate her so she could get some sleep.
When Jack finally let himself out of the house where he and Henry had lived throughout their youth, darkness was falling, and the blackout was in force, with people drawing their curtains and pulling blinds or boards into place.
He walked back to his flat with long strides, the cold air rushing into his face as his mind filled with horrific possibilities of what had become of Henry.
Did the Gestapo have him right now, or had he crashed and was lying in a field, broken and twisted, with no one to help him?
Jack reasoned; it depended where in Germany they had seen him go down.
If it were directly over a city, his chances of survival were slim.
And even if he survived the crash somehow, Nazi sympathisers would give him up either out of allegiance or fear.
Germany was not France. The Gestapo’s iron fist made organised Resistance virtually impossible.
When he was nearly home, he stopped and made a sharp U-turn.
He wouldn’t sleep a wink tonight anyway, so he went straight to RAF Headquarters to see what he could find out.
It was late, but the RAF didn’t keep normal working hours.
How could they when their boys fell like flies out of the sky at all times of the day and night?
In the back of his mind, Jack clung to the hope that there had been a misidentification, and it wasn’t Henry who had gone missing in Germany, after all.
Mix-ups did happen. He knew that well enough from his work in the SOE.
There had been one operation just a few months earlier where they had believed a recruit, who had been parachuted into occupied France, had been captured soon after landing.
She’d not reached the safe house, and they received an intelligence report that a young woman had been shot in the town square as an example.
But a week later, the woman, who was about the same age as Lizzie, messaged to confirm her arrival. It turned out the Gestapo must have executed a different agent, but the SOE still didn’t know who she was.
The work was tragic, and who died and who got to live was like a game of Russian roulette.
Jack wasn’t in the habit of praying to a God he didn’t really believe in, despite his mother’s and his school’s best efforts, but now he prayed with every sinew of his being that Henry would be one of the lucky ones who would get out of Germany alive.
Jack had contacts at Kingsway RAF HQ, and it didn’t take long for one of his old chums to come and greet him and usher him inside.
‘I’m so sorry, Jack. I meant to reach out to you, but I only heard the news this afternoon and it’s been manic here all day,’ he said.
The officer whom Jack knew from his Oxford years pointed to a chair. ‘You look exhausted. Take the weight off, and I’ll tell you all I know, which isn’t much, I’m afraid.’
He told Jack in muted tones what he had heard about Henry’s aircraft going down.
‘The Lancaster bombers were flying in formation, like they do. They were returning from a night raid on Stuttgart when Henry’s was shot down.’
‘Did they see it crash?’ Jack asked. His voice was low as he held himself together.
‘No, one of the men said they were being shot at and he saw smoke. More than that, I can’t tell you.
’ The officer patted Jack’s shoulder and asked if he could get him something to drink.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said again. ‘I wish I had more concrete information, but all I can confirm at this time is that Henry and the crew are officially missing in action.’
Jack accepted the glass his friend offered him and knocked back the whisky shot in one gulp.
The fiery liquid coursed through him as he took his leave and exited back onto Kingsway in Holborn on that gloomy night.
Rain fell softly on his face, but he barely felt it as he walked in a daze towards Covent Garden.
Dim streetlights, partially covered for the blackout, cast eerie shadows around the bombed-out streets, and he walked for hours, his mind replaying scenes of his childhood with Henry on a loop.
Tears mingled with the rain, and his chest felt as if it had been crushed.
The meeting had confirmed the details of the telegram and given him the name of the city where Henry had gone down.
It made it more real. Stuttgart was a major industrial city and home to factories such as Daimler-Benz and Bosch.
He knew from recent conversations with Henry when he was on leave that he had transferred to Bomber Command earlier that year and no longer flew a Spitfire.
There were heavy bombing campaigns against factories, and Jack wondered what Henry’s last moments as the plane went down were like.
He hoped he didn’t suffer. Dear Henry, who had survived so many near-fatal dogfights in the sky during the Battle of Britain.
It seemed unfair that they had got him now when he was in a much bigger plane and the odds were weighted in his favour.
He wandered on through the night, unable to face going home. If he kept moving, somehow, he could pretend it was an awful dream he might awaken from at any moment.
As dawn broke, he found himself outside Regent’s Park, its gates still locked.
The tall trees, silhouetted by silver shadows, swayed in the wind.
The rain had subsided; he hadn’t even noticed when, and the washed-out sun hung on the horizon, its soft light glinting on the huge barrage balloon floating over the park.
His feet moved without thinking, and he walked around the perimeter of the park.
Before Lizzie began staying at his flat regularly, he would meet her in the park in the mornings, and they would spend stolen moments together alone before the bustle of Baker Street consumed them for the day.
But the park was closed, and he couldn’t see Lizzie.
He thought of her still asleep in her room upstairs in the buttermilk-hued terraced house and wished he could knock on the door and climb the stairs to seek comfort in her arms. She was the only person who would understand what he was going through.
He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did.
Knocking on her door at this hour was out of the question, no matter how he yearned for her. It would arouse suspicion, and even in his befuddled mental state, he held himself back.
Jack lingered outside Lizzie’s house as the weak sun rose in the gunmetal sky, before he turned and trudged back to his empty flat to the familiar sounds of London stirring for another day.
A London without Henry.