Despite the busyness, he couldn’t escape. With each recording, he had to ring Fletcher with his notes, like an errantschoolboy—which, in fact, he was. To report to Fletcher, Hugh had to keep his notes organized.
He could still hear Aleida’s sweet, lightly accented voice.“Open to a fresh page.Date it at the top. Don’t change pages untilyou fill the first one.”
Hugh’s gut wrenched, and he rolled up cord and brought it back to Rob. Escape? How could one escape memories? The past month’s activity could only blur the memories, not erase them. Couldn’t erase the regret.
He’d lost her, and loneliness gnawed at his insides.
Although he’d spoken without care, was it wrong to lay the suggestion before her? Her appropriate determination to find her son had become an obsession so dangerous she considered abducting the boy. What could abduction accomplish? She’d be found, imprisoned, and separated from Theo again—but in worse straits. Without proof, she had no recourse.
Hugh sat on a bunk and reviewed his notes. He planned to record three four-minute discs on this flight, and he wanted to use the time well.
If he could learn to take orderly notes, perhaps he could learn the orderly ways of a solicitor or a government minister. A safe job to protect the Collingwood heir. Far safer than patrolling the North Sea.
A job that might earn his first sliver of respect from his parents.
Hugh groaned. If he took such a job, he could end up like his father. Nigel Collingwood would have been a brilliant professor of some esoteric subject. But he’d obeyed his father and taken a commission in the Army. During the First World War, the Army had given him mundane posts in London where he could do no harm, where he’d performed in a thoroughly lackluster manner. After too many years, the Army had retired him with more pomp than he deserved. He was a failure, and he knew it.
That would be Hugh’s fate if he chose the law or the government. In his head, Uncle Elliott’s voice roared.“Stuffing a vibrant young man likeHugh in a stodgy desk job would kill him.”
Uncle Elliott. Pain crushed Hugh’s chest, and he folded his notebook shut. The newspapers insinuated that Philippe Larue would be charged for writing the threatening letter but not charged with murder. The police simply hadn’t enough evidence.
Why couldn’t they see the murderer had to be a man like Bert Ridley who prized security over freedom, a man who’d almost come to blows with Uncle Elliott and who despised Jouveau? Hugh frowned. But a man with an alibi.
Or someone with a temper, a career at stake, and no alibi, like Norman Fletcher. Or someone with the initials of G.B. or J.I., like Jerome Irwin, another man who disliked both victims.
“Is that a periscope?” one of the gunners called from high on his perch.
Hugh sprang to standing and caught Rob’s eye.
“I’m ready when you are.” Rob fiddled with dials.
Hugh climbed the ladder to the gunners’ platform, not an easy task in a bumping aircraft with a microphone in hand.
The two gunners sat back-to-back, wearing padded jackets and hoods with implanted headphones.
On the left, an affable gunner called Blackie grinned at Hugh. “I can’t believe I’m going to be on the BBC.”
Hugh gave Rob the thumbs-up. “Here we are, not even an hour into our mission, and one of our alert gunners has observed something.” Hugh gave Blackie raised eyebrows to proceed.
“Down there.” Blackie pointed his machine gun to the waters. “I saw a periscope.”
“Or a whale,” his mate said with a laugh.
“Or a whale,” Blackie said with a resigned sigh. “But we can’t be too careful.”
Hugh nodded. “The pilots are circling lower. What comes next?”
“We keep watching.” Blackie’s dark gaze fixed on Hugh, his voice low and portentous. “If we think it’s something, we drop bombs.”
His mate let out a scoffing noise. “So keep watching, Blackie.”
“I’ll leave you to your duties. Now I’d like our listeners to hear what this crew’s engineer has in store for any U-boat lurking beneath these waves.”
After he gave Rob the signal to stop recording, Hugh descended the ladder, made sure his headphones were in place so he could hear Rob, and headed forward, his knees bent, his feet wide, and his free hand gripping anything stationary.
Toward the front, the plane had two decks, the lower deck with the comforts Hugh had described earlier and the upper deck for pilots and navigator and engineer and bomb-aimer and radio operator.
Trailing cord behind him, Hugh climbed a ladder to the upper deck. In the first compartment, the engineer checked bombs on a rack overhead.
