It was wonderful to feel the warmth of the Indian sun as they stumbled out of the fuselage. They had been shockingly cramped for the hour and a half flight, so many of them packed inside the fuselage they could barely move. An airman, counting them as they appeared, looked at Hatto.
‘My God, sir,’ he said, ‘where did you put ’em all?’
Hatto shrugged. ‘You might well ask.’
As Dicken appeared, his grin died and he slapped him on the back.
‘Nice to have you home, old lad,’ he said quietly. ‘I expect they’ll be sending me back to Iraq now that the job’s done. Perhaps they’ll even give us leave and send us home.’ He paused. ‘What’ll you do?’
Dicken looked up, unable to thrust from his mind the incredible conversations he’d had with Marie-Gabrielle. ‘Go and find Zoë, I suppose,’ he said.
Hatto frowned and was silent for a moment. ‘Dick, old lad,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you get my message?’
‘What message was that?’
Hatto looked uncomfortable. ‘Someone should have told you. A message was sent, I know. I expect it was overlooked in the panic. She went missing between Singapore and Java.’
Dicken was silent, uncertain what to say. ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said slowly. ‘She’s always all right. She’s got the luck of the devil.’
Hatto sighed. ‘Not this time, old lad. They fished the wreckage out of the sea two days ago. They were still inside.’
For a long time, watched by curious airmen, Dicken walked slowly about the airfield. Babington approached him, then, seeing the expression on his face, turned away and Dicken guessed that someone had told him the news.
What happened, he wondered? Had Angus Packer, the navigator, been another of Zoë’s bad choices, like Charley Wright and Harmer and George Peasegood? He tried to avoid the thought of her struggling in the water, her hair plastered across her face, blood on her cheek, her eyes wild and afraid, gasping as she fought for breath. It was too painful and as it kept returning he brushed it away with a movement of his hand. He’d never see her grin again, or hear that blunt forthrightness that had captivated him as a boy and hurt him so often as a man. Drowning was a wretched way to die and the thought of her struggling in the water came back again, stark and nauseating, so that he had to put aside the image of her terror as the water filled her throat and nose and eyes and nostrils.
When he returned to the headquarters building, he found a message waiting for him from Diplock, insisting that he write a report on what had happened. It was marked ‘Urgent’ and stressed the importance of immediacy. He recognised it as another of Diplock’s ploys to irritate him and simply tore it across and threw it into the orderly room waste paper basket.
Curiously, though, it seemed to start him from his mood and he decided to look up Father O’Buhilly. He found him in a hotel in a poor part of the city. His room seemed as bare as all his rooms. The moment he entered them, it seemed as if the furniture flew out of the window, leaving nothing but an iron bedstead, a chair and a table.
‘I heard what happened, me boy,’ the priest said. ‘I’ve said a prayer for her soul.’
‘Thank you, Father. What shall I do now?’
‘In what way, my son?’
‘For ten years I’ve been chasing her round the world. I even started a divorce. Now she’s gone. For ten years Marie-Gabrielle was chasing me. Ought I to try to find her?’
‘What do you intend?’
‘I don’t know. Just talk, I think. I could do with someone to talk to.’
‘Will not I do, me boy?’
Dicken smiled. ‘She’d perhaps be better, Father.’
Father O’Buhilly smiled back. ‘Then why not? God’s grace is about us and He’s more understanding than people realise. I think you should.’
‘So soon after–?’
‘Now, me boy. Do you wish any help?’
‘No, Father. I’ll be all right.’
Returning to RAF headquarters he found, as he expected, that the sergeant clerk in the orderly room had a typed list of everybody who’d been brought from Ambul. The air force was at its efficient best with lists. You could always rely on a list being made and you couldn’t carry anything from anywhere to anywhere else without someone insisting on setting it down on paper. It was one of the exercises Diplock was good at.
He wondered what Annys would have to say in the inevitable note she would send about Zoë. The usual platitudes, he supposed. But what else could you offer for a death except platitudes?
He found the name, ‘Marie-Gabrielle Aubrey, spinster, 20, governess to Major Basil Forsythe’, and placed his finger against it.
‘This one, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Where’s she staying?’
He didn’t know what he wanted, except sympathy, and he felt that Marie-Gabrielle, young as she was, could give it to him, saying little, just reassuring him with her silences.
The sergeant was looking at him, a worried frown on his face. ‘She wouldn’t tell us, sir,’ he said. ‘She just said she wanted to go away.’
‘Where to?’
‘She didn’t say, sir.’
‘What about the Forsythes? Where are they?’
‘They’re staying with Major and Mrs Harvey, Army Medical Corps, sir. Some relation, I believe. Everybody’s offering help until they can be found somewhere to go.’
‘Do you have the telephone number?’
The sergeant did and Major Harvey brought Forsythe to the telephone.
‘Hello, old man,’ he said briskly. ‘We have you flying chaps to thank for our lives.’
Dicken was brusque. ‘Have you got Miss Aubrey there?’
‘No, old man.’ Forsythe sounded worried. ‘We met her when she landed, of course. Expecting her to join us. But she said she didn’t want to and that we’d better get an ayah for the children. It was damned odd.’
‘Does your wife know where she is?’
‘I’ll ask. Hang on.’
Forsythe’s wife didn’t know. Several hours later, having checked everywhere in the cantonment and the hotels, Dicken had found out only that she’d stayed long enough to sleep one night in the city and had then caught a train south to Delhi.
Putting the telephone down for the last time, he was suddenly aware how tired he was. It would be impossible to find her in the teeming millions in Delhi, especially since he didn’t for a moment imagine she intended staying there. By this time, she could even be somewhere on the high seas heading for England, Australia or China.
He lit a cigarette and nodded his thanks to the sergeant.
‘No luck, sir?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
As he walked outside, almost the first person he saw was Babington heading for the wireless section. He grinned and slammed up a tremendous salute.
‘I don’t think we let anybody down, sir,’ he said. Dicken returned the salute. ‘No, Babington,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we did.’
Only me, he thought, as he headed for the sunshine. Only me. Only me and Zoë and, above all, Marie-Gabrielle.