The Warning Bell Read online

  The Warning

  Bell

  T. D. Griggs

  The Warning Bell © Tim Griggs 2009

  First published 2009 by Orion Books

  The right of T.D. Griggs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under the UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Tim Griggs tragically died, very suddenly, in October 2013.

  This book was originally published under the pen-name of Tom Macaulay.

  His wife, Jenny, would like to dedicate this edition, published under his own name, to Tim, who always hoped it would be possible.

  Tim’s original dedication is as follows:

  For all rescuers everywhere, in particular for the crew of High Speed Launch 2548. But most of all for my dad, Percy George Griggs (1907-1967), who was proud to have been one of that crew.

  Read it, my father, prune it of its faults, And strengthen with thy praise what pleases thee. And may God give thee in thy hands the green Unwithering palm of everlasting life.

  Walafrid Strabo

  Original Acknowledgements

  My father served from 1942 to 1945 on the original Air-Sea Rescue launch 2548. Called up at 35, he was a junior, though elderly, member of the crew. This book came forty years too late for me to ask him for guidance, but during my research it was my pleasure and privilege to make contact with two other wartime members of the crew, Bill Shepherdson and Laurie di Placito. Their help and encouragement were invaluable as were their remarkable memories of those years. Both knew, or knew of, my father. Which was a particular joy to me.

  Posthumous thanks too to the late Dave Fellick, much-loved Cox’n of 2548 during those years, and my gratitude to his son and daughter, Bryan and Elaine. They shared many of their father’s stories with me, and showed me the exquisite model of 2548, which has found its place in the following tale.

  Bryan and Elaine also alerted me to the survival of the real 2548, or what is left of her. She then lay derelict in a northern junkyard, far from her native element. Despite our father’s stories about her, my brother Andy and I had never laid eyes on 2548, and in 2006 we were able to make a pilgrimage to see her for the first and last time. We both felt she had been waiting for us. Her fabric may be decaying now, but she has thrust herself – full ahead all three – into my novel. I hope that is some kind of a memorial to her.

  Members of the RAF’s Air-Sea Rescue and Marine Branch veteran’s association, and other enthusiasts, were enormously helpful with photographs, anecdotes and research material. My thanks to all of them.

  My indefatigable agent Mark Lucas and editor Peta Nightingale went far beyond the call of duty to keep this frail barque off the rocks (and me with it, occasionally). Nicki Kennedy and Sam Edenborough of ILA also laboured at the pumps to keep her afloat during both storms and doldrums. I can’t thank any of them enough. Writing isn’t the easiest row to hoe, but it must be one of the last professions where relationships don’t stop at the commercial.

  Thanks too to my original publisher Bill Massey of Orion for his generous enthusiasm and many valuable comments, all of which have refined and improved the story.

  The situation in Occupied France during the war years was a moral minefield of agonising complexity. Those times presented everyone with impossible choices, and sometimes the most upright and courageous people faced the most impossible choices of all. I should like to thank all the fates that we in Britain never had to confront such challenges, and I hope I have treated the French circumstances with the reverence they deserve.

  My lovely wife Jenny never faltered in her belief in this story, nor – incredibly – in me. How am I supposed to thank her for that? However, I shall try.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: 1944

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  Long ago, and in another age, my father worked on the fishing boats out of Falmouth harbour.

  I discovered later that he was thirteen when he first went to sea as a deckhand on his Great Uncle Jack’s wooden trawler, a vessel which had been built so far back in the days of sail that it had to be adapted to take an engine. My father never talked to me about those times. He never really talked to me at all. But even now I imagine him at night on a pitching deck, a thin boy in oilskins too big for him, scrubbing fish blood off the planking, shovelling the quicksilver catch into the hold.

  Fishermen of his generation knew the sea floor between St Anthony Head and the Breton coast better than they knew the road to Exeter. But after the Second World War, my father never went back to the great waters, as he called them. I should have realised that at some moment in the past he had broken faith with the sea, and that this haunted him. I should have realised that, down all the years that followed, he was trying to protect me in the only way he knew how. But as a child I was frightened when I heard him shouting at night, wild shouting and things knocked over – a lamp broken, a chair overturned – and under it all my mother’s calm voice, soothing him until he was quiet again. To my shame, I felt only the injustice of his withdrawal, and never asked myself the reason for it

  When at last he did tell me about the night in 1944 which had thrown so deep a shadow over him, it was very nearly too late. Perhaps it actually was too late.

  This is how it happened.

  PROLOGUE: 1944

  A running sea muttered along the hull. The launch rolled a little. On the foredeck, Pilot Officer George Madoc braced his knee against the wheelhouse bulkhead and checked his watch. The luminous hands momentarily hurt his eyes with their brightness. It was 1.14 in the morning. That made it the 20th of March already. His twenty-second birthday.

  He sensed
the tide falling away beneath the boat, and could feel her tugging at her tether like a restive horse. Inshore, white water flickered as the St Cyriac Shoals rose above the surface. A tocsin bell tolled unseen in the darkness, as if from a drowned cathedral.

  Great Uncle Jack would have called this a smugglers’ night - the dark of the moon, ragged clouds drifting like gunsmoke, and the threat of dirty weather. George remembered a hundred nights like it on this very coast, the trawler thudding steadily homeward, fish flashing like ingots on the deck. A real smugglers’ night. Uncle Jack would lean on the wheel and peer into the murk, chew on his pipe and spit over the side for luck.

  George wondered what the old man would have made of High Speed Launch 2548, if he had been alive to see her – sixty-three feet of mahogany hull with a cutwater curved like a sabre and a top speed of forty knots. There were those who said the RAF should leave the sea to the Navy, but to George it was altogether fitting that the launch should be piloted by airmen: she was more of the air than of the sea, more gull than fish, with the thunder of her Napier Sealion aero engines and the jolt of grey seas spuming away behind her.

  Beyond the Shoals he could just make out the dark mass of the Breton coast. Once he saw a wandering pin-prick of light – a bicycle, perhaps, with a poorly masked front lamp. He imagined a German soldier wobbling back to his billet, full of wine, dreaming of a blonde wife in Hamburg. But there would be other Germans on those cliffs tonight, men who were more alert, sentries leaning on the parapets of pillboxes, scanning the waters with their Zeiss binoculars. Everyone knew the invasion was coming soon, and the whole North Atlantic coast bristled with tension. George shrugged himself deeper into his duffel coat. It wasn’t especially cold, but he could not seem to get warm.

  ‘You wish to be flying back to England, Captain,’ Lucien whispered, almost in his ear. ‘Flying home over the waves in your fast boat.’

  Lucien’s eyes were startlingly white in the darkness, and were fixed on him like a cat’s. The man’s dark camouflage clothing and his blackened face and hands made the rest of him all but invisible.

  ‘Your friends are late,’ George said shortly. He didn’t like to be surprised. He lifted his binoculars again to peer into the rising wind. ‘I won’t wait much longer.’

  The seconds dragged by. George kept his binoculars to his eyes while rain speckled the lenses, hoping to shut out the other man, hoping he would take the hint and leave. But he did not, and George could sense him hovering at his shoulder.

  He didn’t know why he felt the way he did tonight. He had reason enough to be on edge, with the launch wallowing off the St Cyriac Shoals and its huge engines cold and silent, but it was more than that. It was something to do with this quiet Frenchman with his classroom English and his face as black as a demon from the pit. Lucien wasn’t the first agent George had ferried across – the fast wooden Air Sea Rescue launches were ideal for the task – but he was the first to unnerve him in this way.

  The cold wind slung a handful of rain over them both, and then curled back and slung another. Great blocks of water thudded into the sand ahead of them, and spray exploded over the Shoals. The launch swung and a cable groaned and the sea slapped against her stern. No matter what he had said, George knew he would wait a little longer yet. Someone was out there even now, a local fisherman perhaps, who could thread through the wire and the mines and the white shoal water where no one else would venture, who knew the suck and rush of every channel and could find his way with no moon and all the shore lights blacked out.

  ‘They’ve sent me to kill someone,’ Lucien said, conversationally. ‘I suppose you know that?’

  ‘I just drive the boat. Thank God, that’s all I do.’

  ‘Ah, Captain, how you would like to stay pure.’

  ‘I’m not a captain.’

  ‘You don’t like to risk your crew for an assassin. Your job is saving lives, not for ferrying killers. Am I right? But it is too late. We are all part of this madness.’

  The Frenchman stood up, and for the first time George could see something of him in the light reflected from the water. He realised how young Lucien was, younger even than he was himself.

  ‘He lives in St Malo, this man I must kill,’ Lucien said. ‘Runs a firm making precision instruments. He’s a jolly type who likes a glass of wine with his friends and never hurt anyone in his life. An ordinary man, doing the best he can for his family and his people. There was a time when working with the Germans was the only option for men like him. But people think differently now.’ Lucien paused. ‘I’ll use a knife, probably. That’s what London will expect. It sends such an emphatic message.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me this.’

  ‘I’ve lost count of them, Captain, to tell you the truth. Though there is one I will never forget. A man in Nantes. I waited in the lobby of his apartment building for over two hours. It was very dark, and when he came up the stairs, it was all over in a moment. I wasn’t to know his daughter had come down from Paris for the weekend. She was only eighteen or so, and looked remarkably like him. At least she did from behind, as she tried to find the lock. Looked quite different when she was dead, of course, but by then –’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘But no one could blame me for that. If they did, they’d have to blame everyone else who played a part. The officer who gave the order, the people who trained me, the experts who forged my documents… Even the pilot of the plane who flew me across the Channel.’

  George stared out to sea.

  ‘How will we all be judged, Captain? I used to believe that Good would triumph, and that our blackened souls would be washed clean at the end, no matter what we had done, but now I’m no longer sure. Now I tell myself I am just the ferryman. That comforts me. Charon, that’s who I am. I ferry the souls of the dead across the Styx.’ He looked at George. ‘Just as you ferry me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You cannot stand away from the shore forever, Captain. None of us can.’

  George swung to face him, angry now. But as his eyes met Lucien’s he saw such emptiness there, such despair, that he could not give voice to the sharp words that were on his lips. He turned away again.

  ‘Perhaps it will be different this time,’ Lucien said, his tone gentler now. ‘Perhaps I will not do what they tell me to do. Perhaps this time there is a chance for me to find my way back. I shall take it if I can.’

  The launch swooped into a trough and up again and both men gripped the cabin roof.

  George ducked into the wheelhouse. MacDonald, the Australian Flight Sergeant and First Cox’n, was huddled against the bulkhead, his binoculars resting on the edge of the window and trained out into the night. Spray shone on his coat. George stepped past him and took the wheel, though this was properly MacDonald’s role. Glancing towards the stern George could see Darby Allen crouched between his engines, his pale brow a question mark in the dark, waiting for the command. MacDonald moved his binoculars left to right, and then quickly back again.

  ‘Red light, Skip,’ he said. ‘On the port quarter. Again.’

  George felt the wheel twist in his hands as the sea nudged at the rudder. 2548 was restless, anxious to carry him away. She would respond at a touch. No one would blame him. The crew would thank him. Full ahead all three. The order that meant home, escape, freedom. Utter those words and they would be gone. They would be safe.

  He left the wheel and climbed back out on deck.

  In less than a minute the little boat nudged alongside, a cockleshell of a skiff with two figures in it. George caught a glimpse of a man reaching for the nets and behind him at the tiller a boy of perhaps thirteen, who – astonishingly – smiled up at him with guileless pleasure. One of his crewmen took the thrown rope and made it fast, and there were hissed exchanges of French and English in the darkness. Lucien dropped a clinking bag over the side.

  ‘It seems there is no escape for us, Captain,’ he said.

  Lucien swung himself over and found his f
ooting on the nets. He gripped George’s wrist, twisted his hand and pressed something hard and cold into his palm. A strange expression crossed his face, and then the boat fell away into the darkness.

  1

  Pablo handed his Mont Blanc pen to me across the leather-clad acreage of his desk. ‘Two mill and change, you’ll come out with. Plus the share option, and pension rights, healthcare and so on. It’s not a fortune, but if you’re careful, you won’t have to work again. Which I suppose was the idea.’

  ‘Isn’t that everyone’s idea?’

  Pablo grunted in a noncommittal fashion, and peered at the label of the champagne bottle over the top of his half-moon glasses. I rolled the fat pen between my fingers.

  ‘Well don’t sit there staring at it!’ Pablo bellowed. ‘Sign the bloody thing!’

  I scrawled my name and he snatched the document from me, as if he feared I might have changed my mind at the last moment. He reached for his pen and tucked it away inside his immaculate jacket.

  ‘Congratulations, Iain. You’re a free man.’ He leaned back in his oak captain’s chair until it groaned. ‘So it’s to be bliss in Burgundy, is it? Passion in Provence?’

  ‘Not sure where yet. Somewhere in France. A little place I can keep a pig.’

  His chair came forward with a bump. ‘A pig?’

  ‘I always wanted a pig.’

  He stared at me.

  I grinned. ‘Don’t worry about us, Pablo.’

  ‘I don’t worry about you, you weird bastard. But you’re even madder than I thought you were if you seriously imagine that the lovely Chantal is going to be happy digging in a dunghill and slaving over a hot Aga - even if she is French. That woman of yours is an adrenalin junkie.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d be flattered, Pablo.’

  ‘Where is she now, for example?’

  ‘On her last assignment. Lebanon.’