Troubled Midnight Read Free

to accompany him to the quayside where a U-Boat from La Rochelle was tied up, a skeleton crew on board: tired men with dead eyes who had just completed two months out in the Atlantic, men from the Grey Wolves.
    Sadler said goodbye to the sergeant who remained stiff and formal, surprised that his special package was relaxed and friendly.
    The U-Boat captain shook hands but did not speak and Sadler went below where he changed back into his uniform, then stretched out on a bunk and waited – twelve hours, then more time with the U-Boat submerged, waiting for nightfall again. A petty officer rowed him ashore in a rubber dingy. An hour later he was on a London train, crowded, dirty, filled with smoke and uniforms. In the corridor a woman crouched down saying she was searching for cleaner air, and a drunken soldier fell over as the train swayed on a bend.
    He had been away for four days. Nobody missed him. That was the kind of man he was. The kind who was never missed and had difficulty summoning a waiter.
    On the August Sunday when Sadler was briefed by the Abwehr in France, so Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Livermore and Woman Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford spent the day in the market town of Wantage which lay under the Berkshire Downs, where the Roman Ridgeway once echoed to the tramp of marching legions.

Chapter Two
    “YOU EVER WANT to be me?” Tommy asked.
    “Be you?” the question puzzled Suzie, lifting her voice just short of a screech.
    “Yes. Ever feel you’d like to be me?”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Read it in a book.”
    “In a book?”
    “Yes – lovers often want to be the other person. Love’s known for it, heart.”
    “I’d never want to be you. God, no. I wouldn’t want to have to shave every day, and I wouldn’t want your body either, not with…”
    “Not with what?”
    “Never mind.”
    “You’ve never complained about my body before.”
    “No, but I wouldn’t want to wear your body.”
    “Oh.” Tommy sounded disgruntled, turning down the corners of his mouth.
    “Poor darling.” Suzie reached over and kissed him on the cheek, realising that she hadn’t done that – shown that kind of spontaneous affection – for quite a long time.
    They had been in the Coffee Room of the Bear Hotel having tea because it was almost four o’clock, beautiful view, looking down on the cobbled courtyard at the back of the hotel shimmering in flat sunlight as they drank their tea and ate the little triangular cucumber sandwiches.
    “Let’s go have a nose round, eh?” Tommy said and she smiled at him, took his hand and let him lead her down the narrow stairs and onto the cobble stones that went right to the gates at the back and out in front of the building, all the way to the pavement, what the American GIs called the sidewalk, along the east side of the Market Place.
    “Oh, a bear,” she said, still a shade high-pitched, looking up at the black bear, chained and with a bunch of grapes in its mouth, high on a plinth on top of a pole that made up the extraordinary inn sign.
    “Name of the hotel, heart. Bear Hotel.”
    Suzie Mountford felt extraordinarily happy because they were on what Tommy called ‘a frivol’.
    When they had first become lovers, on her posting, in 1940, to the Reserve Squad – Tommy’s elite unit inside the Metropolitan Police Force – he was forever surprising her with trips here and there at a moment’s notice. Recently all that seemed to have come to an end: after she’d refused to agree a date for their planned marriage.
    Until now.
    They had been working hard – the pier murder last month, 26 th July. Pier Murder was what the papers called it, at one of East Anglia’s best-known watering places: a girl, Angela Williams, who sometimes looked after two roundabouts for small children, the little merry-go-rounds squeezed in between the full-sized carousel and the Pier Theatre where a scratch company was playing to good business, Rookery Nook one week