“A remarkable achievement,” Cullen said.
I turned. “But you don’t understand. Here was a man who was questioning everything. Turning his whole field upside down. And then the Second World War broke out and the rest is silence. Until now, that is.”
“Silence?”
“Oh, he left Oxford, we know that. Worked for the Ministry of Defence and then the Ministry of Economic Warfare, as I told you. Many academics did that. But the tragedy was that he seems to have stopped working altogether in his chosen field. No more papers and the book he’d been writing for years was left unfinished. We’ve got the manuscript at Harvard. Not a line written after September nineteen thirty-nine.”
“How very strange.”
I went back and sat down. “We have all his papers in the Harvard Library. What really intrigued me on going through them was a personal thing.”
“And what was that?”
“When I finished high school at eighteen, instead of going straight to Harvard I joined the Marines. Did a year in Vietnam until a bullet in the left kneecap sent me home for good. Martineau did the same sort of thing. Joined the American Expeditionary Force in the last few months of the First World War, underage, I might say, and served as an infantry private in the trenches in Flanders. I was fascinated by the fact that in turning from what we’d gone through, we’d both sought another answer in the same way.”
“From the hell of war to the cool recesses of the mind.” Canon Cullen knocked out his pipe in the hearth. “I can’t remember who said that. Some war poet or other.”
“God save me from those,” I said. “Nam cost me a permanently stiff left leg, three years in the hands of psychiatrists and a failed marriage.”
The clock on the mantelpiece struck twelve. Cullen got up, moved to the sideboard and poured whisky from a cut glass decanter into two glasses. He brought them back and handed me one. “I was in Burma during the war myself, which was bad enough.” He sipped a little whisky and put down his glass on the hearth. “And so, Professor, what about the rest?”
“The rest?”
“Priests are supposed to be ingenuous souls who know nothing of the reality of life,” he said in that dry, precise voice. “Rubbish, of course. Our business is confession, human pain, misery. I know people, Professor, after fifty-two years as an ordained priest, and one leams to know when they are not telling you everything.” He put a match to his pipe and puffed away. “Which applies to you, my friend, unless I’m very much mistaken.”
I took a deep breath. “He was in uniform when they found him.”
He frowned. “But you said he was working for the Ministry of Economic Warfare.”
“German Luftwaffe uniform,” I said. “Both he and the pilot.”
“Are you certain?”
“I have a friend from the Vietnam days in the Marines called Tony Bianco. He’s with the CIA at our embassy in London. They get to know things, these people. I had problems with the Ministry of Defence the other day. They were giving very little away about Martineau and that plane.”
“Your friend checked up for you?”
“And found out something else. The newspaper report about that Arado being from the Enemy Aircraft Flight. That’s suspect, too.”
“Why?”
“Because they always carried RAF rondels. And according to Bianco’s informant, this one still had Luftwaffe markings.”
“And you say you couldn’t get any more information from official sources?”
“None at all. Ridiculous though it may seem, Martineau and that flight are still covered by some wartime security classification.”
The old man frowned. “After forty years?”
“There’s more,” I said. “I had this kind of problem last year when I was researching. Ran into roadblocks, if you know what I mean. I discovered that Martineau was awarded the Distinguished Service Order in January 1944. One of those awards that appears in the list without explanation. No information about what he’d done to earn it.”
“But that’s a military award and a very high one at that Martineau was a civilian.”
“Apparently civilians have qualified on rare occasions, but it all begins to fit with a story I heard when researching at Oxford three years ago. Max Kubel, the nuclear physicist, was a professor at Oxford for many years and a friend of Martineau’s.”