IV 1943: Bombing run
Chief Inspector Nigel Cockett saw himself as a happy and cheerful man, mostly. He liked to think that he had every reason to be so. For starters, the Great War had come just too late to maul him the way it had mauled most men of his generation. Born at the start of the century, he had been called up at the age of eighteen, gone through military training, and just when the fourteen weeks of training were done and he was ready to be sent over to be slaughtered in France or in Flanders, the Boche had surrendered with impeccable timing, and the armistice had been signed.
Then, when it had all started again the second time around, he was a policeman. So, luckily, he had been in a “reserved occupation”. Very soon the younger colleagues were enlisted in their turn, but he himself had kept just ahead of the age for conscription for senior police officers.
And there you had the third thing the Chief Inspector could gloat over every morning, while he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and shaved. He had made a stellar career in the police force, not because he was well educated, nor was he especially clever. Nigel Cockett would be the first one to admit with a derogatory chuckle that he was neither. No, again it had simply been a matter of impeccable timing. Starting on the beat just after the Great War, when police recruits had been scarce and hard to find, then climbing up the ladder steadily and fast, owing mostly to the fact that Great Dunmow, Essex, was the ideal place to achieve this. A small town, few candidates for promotion, but still enough senior posts to be filled. And of course, once the younger colleagues had been called up, this climb up the ladder had led straight to the post of Chief Inspector.
The salary was good; the post came with a car. What more could you ask? Oh yes: and as Chief Inspector, you command authority. Nigel Cockett could afford to be cheeky, stubborn and obnoxious, even towards quite posh people. Him, with his humble origins; nowadays no one dared to tell him off for his total disregard for manners or breeding, that’s for sure. Just the other day, there had been this girl, lovely little piece of fluff, though totally blind, banging on with her posh little accent about her dead RAF husband, whining about poor hubby being murdered. What utter rot! He had given her short thrift, that one. He had almost gone too far, he had to admit it. But she had slammed the door on him. What a lark!
Then she had sent on a letter, from a London pharmacist no less, claiming that arsenic had been found in hubby’s Thermos. Well-well-well! But still, a Chief Inspector didn’t have to act on the whims of a bloody pharmacist… And now, not even a fortnight later, real orders had come down the chain of command to the effect that he, Nigel Cockett, had to pick up the case and get results. It was not only the local coroner’s office, it went all the way up to Scotland Yard in bloody London! A post-mortem by one Doctor Westmore had “brought to light” the presence of arsenic in the RAF chappy’s corpse. Fancy that! It was one of the few things the Inspector really hated about his otherwise charmed life: you sometimes got orders from above; impossible demands were made by people you could not afford to be rude to… “I’ve never had to solve a murder case in my whole career,” the man grumbled, throwing down on his desk the message that had just arrived. “Wouldn’t even know where to begin. Not happy at all about this!”
Nigel Cockett sighed deeply, then he took his keys and retrieved his briefcase from under his desk. He put on his coat and hat and went down to the front office. “I’m going for a drive,” he told old Constable Kidley. Starting the engine of his police-issue Morris, he mumbled “Let’s go down to the RAF station. I’m pretty sure the CO will feel just as miserable to see me, as I will be to see him!”
And indeed, the dead man’s Commanding Officer found it “a damn unsettling business.” The Chief Inspector did not inspire much sympathy by demanding an office space from the outset, “Otherwise I will have to take people to the police station in town. Your choice, Major…” Reluctantly, the CO took him to a small cubicle that happened to be unoccupied, reflecting that this obnoxious policeman apparently intended to hang around for a while. So, looking sharply at the unkempt civilian who was emptying his briefcase at his new desk, the station commander intoned, “I hope you understand, Chief Inspector, how awkward all this is for me. We have a vital bombing operation against Berlin going on at the moment. It would simply not do to go around the station accusing people of murder…”
“Oh, don’t worry, Major. I’m famous for being a real diplomat, if I may say so myself. I just need to talk to the crew that flew with that gentleman on the night he died, and to his batman of course… Maybe a few other people… You know, to get an idea of what exactly happened… But I can assure you that I will go about my inquiries with the utmost tact and discretion…”
“Very well, Chief Inspector, I would be very grateful for that… As for Ralph’s crew, as it happens, they are gathered in the officer’s mess right now, commissioned and non-commissioned men together. They have a visitor. Let me take you to them at once.”
And that is how the inspector came upon a charming, but infuriating, domestic scene, in a quiet and sunlit corner of the station mess. Seven men were sitting in rattan armchairs, chatting agreeably with the blind girl—she immediately recognisable by those horrid dark glasses. Her eyes seemed to be covered with bandages of some sort, but they were well hidden behind the glasses. She was sitting in their midst, with her white cane at her side, holding a tiny model of a bomber between her slender fingers, and the men sitting around her were apparently giving her explanations about it. “There you have them,” the CO muttered. “I’ll leave you to it…” And he disappeared at once.
“Good God,” the inspector thought. “What on earth is she doing here? This is really starting to feel like a nightmare!” Then he stepped forward and started hesitantly, “Gentlemen… Madam.”
“Chief Inspector!” Daisy cried. “Fancy meeting you at the crime scene just a fortnight after the crime was committed!”
The men around her burst out laughing.
“Good Lord!” the inspector sputtered. “How do you know it’s me? I hardly said a word!”
“Oh, I’d recognise that voice everywhere: ‘This is a case for the Berlin police, har-har-har’.”
“Well, I already apologised for that… Anyway, gentlemen… I’m Chief Inspector Nigel Cockett from the Great Dunmow police, and I’m here to investigate the murder of Flying Officer Ralph Prendergast… So let’s stop fooling around, this is no laughing matter.”
While saying these words the inspector looked down harshly on the group seated around him. He now held the attention of the airmen, who looked up at him earnestly. Only the blind girl kept fidgeting with the model aircraft, apparently engrossed, like a small child at play.
“What is it you have there, Madam?”
“It’s a model of a Lancaster that Flight Engineer Derek Wakefield has cut out of balsa wood. Look, Chief Inspector, it has Dinky Toys wheels that can actually turn round… Isn’t it the prettiest thing in the world?”
Despite himself, Nigel Cockett did find it rather fascinating indeed. He wondered for a very short moment if he might confiscate this pretty object, but then he thought better of it.
“Harrumph! To order, gentlemen. As I see it, one thing is clear: you were all present at the murder scene. You had opportunity, and, I would say, by definition no alibi…”
“Excuse me, Chief Inspector,” Daisy piped up, “but that is rubbish. Ralph was poisoned, so no one on earth has an alibi.”
“Did I ask you anything, Madam? At any rate, be that as it may, it doesn’t change the fact that you gentlemen are first in line as witnesses… and as suspects. As I see it, who on the crew has motive? The chap who took the victim’s place, that’s who. The new skipper! The man who got a promotion out of it… So, what I would like to know now, is who of you gentlemen has taken over after the victim’s death. Which one of you is it, eh?”
“It’s me,” said a man sitting in a rattan armchair right next to Daisy. “I understand the logic of your reasoning, but I’m afraid your idea doesn’t fly, Chief Inspector. I was not with the others on the night Ralph died. You see, when a skipper is incapacitated or dies, the replacement is always someone from outside the original crew. No one within the crew is qualified to become the new pilot, and I myself could have been posted anywhere else within Bomber Command.”
“What’s your name, Sir?” the inspector demanded while he took a notebook and a pencil from his breast pocket.
“Flight Sergeant Richard Clayton, Sir”
“Thank you.” The inspector scribbled down the name and rank. “And which one of you gentlemen actually took over the controls of the aircraft on that fateful night?”
“I did. Flight Engineer Derek Wakefield. But what has that got to do with anything?”
“That is for me to decide. You are the first one I will ask to make a deposition. Please follow me to my office…”
“Chief Inspector,” Daisy interjected, “you do realise that Derek had no need to murder Ralph in order to take over the controls of the aircraft? In fact, he does that all the time. It’s normal for the flight engineer to take over from the skipper during a long flight, when the skipper needs to take a rest or go to the ‘rest room’, for example…”
“Well, Daisy,” Derek reflected, “the inspector’s reasoning is still valid up to a point, as I am normally not allowed to take off or land the craft. I could still have murdered Ralph, if I absolutely wanted to do a landing on my own at least once in my life…”
“Excuse me!” the inspector shouted. “I’m getting a bit fed up with the meddling and the lack of respect, here. You, Lady, I have a mind to get you expelled from the base. What are you doing here anyway? Trying to solve the case on your own?”
“Not at all, Chief Inspector. I’m only here to have a friendly chat with my late husband’s comrades in arms… And another thing: think twice before you lash out at a blind person, and a war widow at that. It might not look so good…”
The inspector sighed deeply. “Mister, er… Wakefield? In my office!”
As soon as the two men had left the mess, the new skipper, Rik, exclaimed, “What a nasty man! My dear Daisy, now I see what you’ve had to put up with…”
“But tell us honestly, princess,” the bomb aimer, Ken, asked. “When you found out about Ralph’s death, on that first day, did you really never suspect us?”
“Well, I did consider the possibility, of course… but it’s hard to believe that any of you could have done it. I mean to say, really… you are the crew!”
Ralph had always spoken with a deep sense of awe of the magic of the crew, and Daisy had come to believe in it. It all started with the way a bomber crew was formed.
In a big military organisation like the RAF, you were bound to have a lot of heavy-handed bluster and blundering in the way the hierarchy organised its internal structure and daily functioning. But one unnamed planner within that hierarchy had come up with a brilliant idea, and more remarkably still, he had been allowed to put it into practice. And this stroke of genius, this brilliant idea, concerned the method by which the bomber crews were formed. At the end of the training period, all the specialist trades needed on a bomber were brought together in an Operational Training Unit, an OTU, as a last step before they were sent on to a squadron to fly their first mission. During this period, one day, all the participants in an OTU were assembled in a large hall, the requisite number of each aircrew category being present. But in contrast to the many other briefings and instruction gatherings these men had attended, on this occasion there were no chairs in the room. That was the stroke of genius: people were left to mingle freely, just like at a party or a ball. The officer in charge of the OTU simply instructed the men “to team up”. Of course, complete chaos ensued.
“I’ll never forget that day, when we crewed up in the ‘dance-hall’ of our OTU,” Sandy Brooks, the navigator, said to Daisy. “That was the very first time I set eyes on Ralph. He looked like Jesus Christ coming straight from the hairdresser’s.”
“Is that an expression? I’ve never heard it before.”
“No, not an expression. That’s how Ralph actually looked! Seeing him, you just felt that he would know his business, and that he would take good care of you. So I stepped up to him and said: ‘Are you looking for a navigator?’ And he simply answered: ‘Do you know a good bomb-aimer?’”
“Yes, and that’s when the two of you came over to me,” said Kenneth Rawnsley, the bomb aimer.
“Yes, I knew Ken from the Initial Training Wings, where we had been Air Crew Cadets together, before we were sifted into different trades and went on to our own specialist training.”
“And I had Cray in tow” Ken said, “Rear-Gunner Cray Collier, because we’re both from Yorkshire…”
“And as the group was forming,” Sandy continued, “we were spontaneously joined by Jerry Milton, our wireless operator, and Derek, our flight engineer. The first one from Australia, the other from Canada.”
“Then I sneezed spectacularly” Mid-Upper Gunner Timothy Buckley added. “Ralph automatically answered ‘Bless you’, and I said: ‘Do you already have a mid-gunner? ‘No’, Ralph answered, ‘why don’t you join us?’ And I felt exactly like a fisherman from the Sea of Galilee must have felt on being asked by Christ to join his band of disciples!”
“How well you chaps tell this story,” Daisy sighed. “I’ve heard it before, but you tell it even better than Ralph himself!”
Still, Daisy had come to realize that she could not afford to dismiss the crew as possible suspects out of hand. There were just too few other possibilities; someone at the airbase must have poisoned Ralph’s coffee on the night he died… She went on fidgeting with Derek’s model of the Lancaster because she felt so nervous, and because it allowed her to concentrate on each and every word the crew-members were saying, without appearing to be weighing and analysing their banter for the slightest clue. Daisy sighed discretely and told herself, “I positively hate it that I should be the one who has to go looking for Ralph’s murderer!”
Presently Derek came back from his interview with the inspector. “Good God, what a nasty little man, even though he is tall enough!”
“And who’s the next victim that fellow wants to put on the rack?”
“Right now he’s talking to the batman. I have the impression that I managed to convince him that my reasons for killing Ralph were rather slim. Now he has put all his hopes on the batman…”
“Of course!” they all sniggered. “It’s always the butler that did it!”
“Doesn’t that chump realise,” the mid gunner reflected, “that in fact the butler never did it?”
“What do you say, Daisy?” Ken asked. “Do you suspect Ralph’s batman?”
“Well, I just don’t know. At least he is a key witness. We’ve already spoken at length, even though he had little time. He’s a busy man…”
“But who do you suspect? You must have an idea. Do you care to tell us?”
“No one, really. I mean, I have no idea. That’s the infuriating thing. Someone must have done it. Most probably someone at the base!”
“At any rate,” the new skipper grumbled. “We have to put a stop to this inspector’s charade. It’s almost teatime, and tonight we have an op on, for goodness’ sake!”
“An op tonight!” Daisy cried. “Are you chaps going to Berlin?”
“Yes, we’re not supposed to tell, but yes. We’ve already had our main briefing, and some of us still have specialist briefings to attend after tea, so I think I’ll go and have a word with the CO about this inspector chappy…”
“I wish I could go along with you men,” Daisy sighed, and she tenderly stroked the model Lancaster in her hands. “At least we would be able to talk for hours without any interference from that policeman!”
“Are you serious, Daisy?” Rick asked. “Would you be willing to risk your life to come along with us?”
“But of course! Do you think I don’t know of the dangers involved? So, what do you say, skipper: may I join you tonight?”
The rest of the crew reacted enthusiastically. “Of course she can!”
“What say you, skipper?”
“It’s your call. Let her join us!”
The new skipper had taken Daisy under his wing. At the outset he’d said, “You know, when we fly at night, I believe we’re feeling a bit like a blind person, just groping our way through the dark.” Daisy was delighted: exactly what Ralph also used to say! She told this new skipper what she’d said to her husband: “The only difference is that we blind people are used to it, and you’re not. Being blind is not the same thing as closing your eyes or groping around in pitch darkness.”
“I see,” Richard Clayton had replied, “but precisely for that reason you could give us night bombers some useful pointers on how to go about this business…”
Now, as Daisy volunteered to join them, and as the crew seemed enthusiastic, he exclaimed, “All right, all right, the majority wins! Good heavens, now I’m starting to understand why D for Daisy is such a lucky kite! I guess it would only bring bad luck if we don’t take the original Daisy along… I’ll go and have a word with the CO.”
In the course of the next hours, Daisy’s intention to join the planned bombing run to Berlin led to many discussions.
The base Commanding Officer said to D-Daisy’s new skipper, “My dear Flight Sergeant, does the blind girl realise what she’s in for?”
“I think so, yes, Major. As I understand it, my predecessor, Pilot Officer Prendergast, had a very open and honest relationship with his wife. He did not believe in sparing the sensitivities of the womenfolk. I heard he was rather candid about the dangers involved in his work…”
“All right. I know for a fact that she is a very spirited girl. What I don’t quite understand, however, is why you are so keen to take her along, if I may inquire?”
“Well, my concern is for the morale of my crew. They’re a rather funny lot: very superstitious about the girl, you understand, what with the bomber named after her and all that… And for them I’m still ‘the new skipper’… I’m hoping that this little caper will create a better bond between us.”
“Very well, I respect that; I will even put it down as a commendable initiative.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“But of course you are taking the entire responsibility for all of this…”
“Oh, I certainly am, Major, I certainly am.”
Then there was a discussion between Chief Inspector Nigel Cockett and the CO. “I find this highly irregular, Major. What is this girl doing at the base, by the way? Interfering with my investigation? I have the disturbing feeling that she is trying to pull one over on me…”
“Well, Chief Inspector, it’s really quite simple. If you want me to put you on that bomber tonight, you only need to say the word… Your request would automatically have precedence over Mrs Prendergast’s. I mean to say, a police officer will trump a civilian any time…”
“No, no, don’t bother, my dear Major. I think I’ll call it a day now. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Hmm, I’m looking forward to that very much, I’m sure, Chief Inspector.”
Finally, the crews that were going to fly that night streamed out of their living quarters to be “suited up” at the Parachute Section. The last thing that had been heard from the inspector’s investigation, was that the poor batman had been taken into custody. A quartermaster who had his office right next to the Chief Inspector’s had heard a loud argument through the thin partition. Allegations and protestations had been flying back and forth.
“You’re a bookmaker, you have a criminal record!”
“What has that got to do with anything? I did not kill the skipper!”
The humble pen-pusher was delighted to report the end-result of this éclat to D-Daisy’s glamorous bomber boys: the batman had been taken away.
All the crews for that night’s op were driven out in canvas-topped lorries to the dispersal area, where the bombers were waiting for them, ready for action. The bubbly WAAF driver who “manned” Daisy’s shuttle was quite astonished to see another young woman like herself among her passengers. Daisy had removed her glasses, and her eyes were covered with white gauze pads kept in place with sticking-plaster, following her GP’s instructions. These big X’s pasted over her eyes looked quite dramatic. Now the crew-members and the other airmen had made a point of not commenting on this, but the WAAF girl spontaneously exclaimed “Ooh, poor thing! That looks awful! And I guess you’re tired of living, because of this?”
“No, not at all! What on earth makes you say that?”
“Well, if you’re going to get on board of one of those bombers, poor pet, you’re in for it!”
“Yes, I know. I’m willing to take the risk, and I intend to enjoy myself. Thank you for your concern…”
“Ooh, no concern at all, darling. You just do as you like, bless you!”
After a short walk they finally reached D-Daisy, parked on her appointed spot on the dispersal area. She loomed large, one of the biggest aircraft of the age, but Daisy could not perceive her size, of course. The men took her over to one of the huge wheels and put her hand on top of the tire to feel its heft. The wheel came almost up to her shoulders. So she could extrapolate the aircraft’s size and bulk, somewhat, by thinking back to the Dinky Toys wheels of Derek’s wooden model.
The skipper and Derek went on an inspection tour around their machine, going through the checklist they carried with them on a clipboard. In the meantime, the others started hoisting Daisy on board. She was wearing the standard-issue flying suit, electrically heated, with heated boots and gloves, a Mae West life jacket and a parachute. She could hardly move, and giggled nervously as the others literally hoisted her on board, pushing and tugging her along the gangway until they could strap her onto the collapsible seat provided for passengers. Then she was shown how to adopt the “brace position” in case it should be necessary.
“And how will I know that it is necessary?” Daisy asked.
“Well, the skipper will be yelling orde