Jack Higgins – Night of the Fox

“I see.” He opened the door and we went out into the porch.

“Do you know much about him?” I asked.

“Very little, besides the extraordinary way he met his end.”

“And the even more extraordinary circumstance of his last rites,” I said. “After all, Canon, it isn’t often you get to bury a man forty years after his death.”

The bungalow was at the other end of St. Brelade’s Bay, close to L’Horizon Hotel where I was staying. It was small and unpretentious, but the living room was surprisingly large, comfortable and cluttered, two walls lined with books. Sliding windows opened to a terrace and a small garden, the bay beyond. The tide was rushing in, the wind lifting the sea into whitecaps, and rain rattled against the window.

My host came in from the kitchen and put a tray on a small table by the flre. “I hope you don’t mind tea.”

“Tea will be fine.”

“My wife was the coffee drinker in the family, but she died three years ago. I could never abide the stuff myself.”

He filled my cup and pushed it toward me as I sat down on the other side of the table from him. The silence hung between us. He raised his cup and drank very precisely, waiting.

“You’re very comfortable here,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I do very well. Lonely, of course. The great weakness of all human beings, Professor Stacey, is that we all need somebody.” He refilled his cup. “I spent three years in Jersey as a boy and grew to love the place very much.”

“That would be easy enough.” I looked out at the bay. “It’s very beautiful.”

“I returned on holiday on many occasions. When I retired, I was a canon of Winchester Cathedral. Our only son moved to Australia many years ago, so…” He shrugged.

“Jersey seemed an obvious choice as my wife had owned this bungalow for many years. A legacy from an uncle.”

“That must have been convenient.”

“Yes, especially with the housing laws the way they are here.” He put down his cup, took out a pipe and started to fill it from a worn leather pouch. “So,” he said briskly. “Now you know all about me. What about you and friend Martineau?”

“Do you know much about him?”

“I’d never heard of the man until a few days ago when my good friend, Dr. Drayton, came to see me, explained the circumstances in which the body had been recovered and told me it was being shipped from London for burial here.”

“You’re aware of the manner of his death?”

“In a plane crash in 1945.”

“January 1945, to be precise. The RAF had a unit called the Enemy Aircraft Flight during the Second World War. They operated captured German planes to evaluate performance and so on.”

“I see.”

“Harry Martineau worked for the Ministry of Economic Warfare. In January 1945, he went missing when traveling as an observer in an Arado 96, a German two-seater training plane being operated by the Enemy Aircraft Flight. It was always believed to have gone down in the sea.”

“And?”

“Two weeks ago it was found during excavations in an Essex marsh. Work on the building site was halted while an RAF unit recovered what was left.”

“And Martineau and the pilot were still inside?”

“What was left of them. For some reason the authorities kept a low profile on the affair. News didn’t filter through to me until last weekend. 1 caught the first plane out. Arrived in London on Monday morning.”

He nodded. “You say you’ve been working on a biography of him. What makes him so special? As I told you, I’d never even heard his name before.”

“Nor had the general public,” I said. “But in the thirties, in academic circles…” I shrugged. “Bertrand Russell considered him one of the most brilliant and innovative minds in his field.”

“Which was?”

“Moral philosophy.”

“An interesting study,” the canon said.

“For a fascinating man. He was born in Boston. His father was in shipping. Wealthy, but not outrageously so. His mother, although born in New York, was of German parentage. Her father taught for some years at Columbia then returned to Germany in 1925 as professor of surgery at Dresden University.” I got up and walked to the window, thinking about it as I peered out. “Martineau went to Harvard, did a doctorate at Heidelberg, was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, a Fellow of Trinity College and Croxley Professor of Moral Philosophy by the age of thirty-eight.”

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