Disclaimer: Despite the passage of four months since my last post, nothing has changed. I still own nothing related to "Foyle's War," most especially the episode "Plan of Attack," which will be the focus of both this and the next chapter.
Author's Notes: It's absolutely terrific to be settled in our new home and community and back to writing this story. Hopefully there won't be any four month gaps between chapters from now on, though I can't make any promises...
And, as always, many thanks to my tireless Beta, GiulliettaC.
Enjoy!
April, 1944
Sam's head veered round as soon as she heard the front door open.
"Hello, Paul!" she sang out, then returned her attention to laying the table for dinner.
"Hello," he called back as he hung up his coat and hat. Paul entered the kitchen, then sauntered up behind Sam and wrapped his arms around her waist, burying his face in the crook of her neck.
"I've missed you too," she purred, arching her back into his embrace, then wriggling around so that they faced each other, and planted a resounding kiss on his mouth. "But you're distracting me from my wifely duties," she added with mock severity.
"Isn't this one of them?" he asked, dipping his head to claim another kiss.
"Now, now," Sam smiled, "Food first. I'm famished and I'm sure you are too."
"What's for dinner?"
"Shepherd's pie. Could you get it on the table?" She handed him a towel while she retrieved two drinking glasses from a cupboard. The dish made a satisfying thunk when Paul set it on the table. In another few minutes they were both seated and ready to eat.
"How was work?" Sam asked breezily as she spooned a steaming serving onto her husband's plate. Paul answered with a long, drawn-out groan of dejection that seemed to emanate from the innermost recesses of his soul. Sometimes Sam wondered why she even bothered asking about his job any more. The only thing that seemed to depress Paul more than working under DCS Meredith was talking about it. "I'll start with my day then." Sam launched into an account of driving the ambulance out to the American base; one of their men had come down with an acute case of appendicitis and had to be rushed to St. Mary's for immediate surgery. By the time Sam's narrative was winding down and a second helping of shepherd's pie was occupying his plate, Paul was ready to begin talking about his day at the station.
"It was actually quite a good day, really. We finally arrested Bill Burton."
"The man with all the lorries who's been getting commissions for trips that never happened?" Sam inquired eagerly.
"That's the one."
"Lovely," she beamed proudly, "And is he co-operating?"
"Not one jot," Paul snorted, "But I think that he'll do business with us eventually. Right now, he just needs to sit tight and sweat a bit. For that matter," Paul added after a pause, "I believe it's working already. Towards the end of the day Burton took it upon himself to warn me that he had a great many friends, some of whom would be quite unhappy over his arrest, and who might come calling."
"Do you think there's anything behind what he said?" Sam asked as she poured more water into Paul's empty drinking glass, trying to keep the worry out of her voice, "Or is he just trying to rattle you?
"Well, if it's the latter, he's failing quite badly. Brooke was present for our conversation and I simply told him to add obstruction and threatening a police officer to Burton's charge sheet. I'm not worried."
"How was Mr. Meredith today?"
"About the same." Distracted. Distant. Uncommunicative. Paul had been serving under DCS Meredith for close to a year, but the man was as much of an enigma now as he had been in his first few weeks on the job. He came in every day and went through the stacks of papers in his in-tray with a sort of ponderous conscientiousness, but he seemed to drift through most of his days in a kind of waking dream. When anyone informed him of new developments in a case, he usually presented a blank, confused countenance to the speaker. He was perpetually several steps behind whatever events had been unfolding and required constant reminders of what all of his subordinates were doing.
Despite his faithful presence at that station, Mr. Meredith seemed disconnected from everything that went on, issuing few orders and giving almost no direction to any of the men. The result was that Paul was obliged to assume considerably more responsibility in all of his investigations. In and of itself, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing; Paul knew that he was capable of more and had always been pleased when Mr. Foyle had given him the chance to test and prove himself. But on those occasions, Mr. Foyle had actually been paying attention to unfolding events, whereas Mr. Meredith simply left everything in Paul's hands.
The result was not only increased responsibility, but increased power over goings on at the station, and this was where everything became really worrisome. Because Paul was acutely aware that any de-facto power that he might be obliged to wield came without any formal authority. All of that belonged legitimately to DCS Meredith, who still needed to approve steps taken and could countermand any decision that Paul made. There were some men, Paul was wont to reflect, who would have taken to working under Mr. Meredith like ducks to water, reveling in the beguiling possibilities that might come with being the power behind the throne. But as much as Paul wanted to grow in his profession and eventually gain promotion, this was not the way that he wanted to go about doing it.
Paul and Sam had speculated endlessly in trying to solve the riddle that the DCS presented. Paul's first thought had been dipsomania, but after months of watching his boss quite narrowly, he had concluded that that wasn't it. Over the course of his career with the police, Paul had seen men in all states and degrees of inebriation and their subsequent hangovers; he never saw or smelled anything to indicate that Mr. Meredith was drinking on the job.
Sam was partial to the theory that Mr. Meredith was going senile. When Paul pointed out that he wasn't all that old – essentially the same age as both Mr. Foyle and her father – she had countered that she had known of cases where such conditions manifested before people had reached true old age. Paul gave the idea some consideration, though he ultimately dismissed it as well. Mr. Meredith often seemed out of his depth at work, but he never lost track of the month or year; he never forgot Paul's name.
Paul had recently concluded that Mr. Meredith simply didn't care about his job. Perhaps he'd simply been promoted because of the dearth of men senior enough who were qualified for the position of DCS. Frankly, Paul had ceased to care about guessing at what might be wrong, turning his attention to possible ways of extricating himself from the quagmire of frustration, confusion, and low-morale that the Hastings police station had become.
"You're going out to see Mr. Foyle tonight, aren't you?" Sam's voice cut across Paul's thoughts.
"Yes," he replied, checking his watch, "But not until eight, so I still have plenty of time." Paul had finally decided, with Sam's encouragement, to talk to Mr. Foyle about what working at the station under Meredith was really like and the advisability of trying to put in for a transfer.
Something of Paul's earlier mood seemed to have transferred itself to Sam; she picked at the remaining food on her plate discontentedly. "I understand why Mr. Foyle had to resign," she said at last, "Really, I do. But I can't help wishing sometimes that he could have stuck it out after all, or that he could come back. Everything's been going to pot without him. He could still do so much, and instead he's writing this bally awful book."
"Is he such a terrible writer?"
"It's not his words, exactly. But the whole thing is just dry as dust. I could think of a half dozen really interesting cases that we all worked on in the past few years, but he hasn't included any of them."
"Well, it wouldn't do to put names to a lot of these culprits; most of them still have families," Paul reasoned.
"It would be easy enough to change a few details to disguise everybody," Sam countered huffily. "I'm complete rubbish as a secretary," she grumbled, thinking of the number of times that the typewriter had jammed over the course of her Saturday sessions with the former DCS and the list of words that she had either mistyped or couldn't spell in the first place. "The last time I was there, you know, I asked Mr. Foyle right out if he misses police work."
"What did he say?"
"He claims that he doesn't. I said that I didn't either, which was a complete lie. I'm sure he must miss it as well; why else would he be spending all his time writing about when he used to be in the thick of things? At least I have you to make me feel like I'm still connected to it all."
...
They did the washing up together and then Paul left. Sam put on the wireless, then roamed around the house for about a half an hour, straightening things up here and there and feeling rather at a loose end. She wondered how Mr. Foyle would advise Paul and whether they would end up moving to Brighton, which was where Paul thought a transfer would be most likely. It sounded like a nice enough place; a little closer to her parents, but not too close. And not too far from Hastings either.
Sam sighed. She imagined that she and Paul would carry on quite well if they moved, but she sometimes found herself fretting about how Mr. Foyle would cope. Sam supposed that he must know people apart from herself and Paul (he'd lived in Hastings all his life, hadn't he?), but it really worried her sometimes, thinking how lonely and frankly boring his life would be if all he did was potter around with his book, go fishing, and worry about Andrew.
At last she settled herself with a novel, which mercifully absorbed her attention until a couple of hours later, when she heard the front door open. She was still in the midst of setting her book aside and stretching when Paul entered the sitting room. His coat was badly splashed with mud and his limp more pronounced than usual.
"What happened?" Sam exclaimed in consternation as he sat down heavily in the first available chair.
"I fell," Paul replied succinctly, quickly rolling up his trouser leg and detaching his prosthetic. "Something got jarred when I did; fortunately I didn't have very far to go." As he spoke, he briefly massaged the stump of his leg and fiddled with the prosthesis itself before reattaching it and readjusting his trouser leg.
"Because of the blackout?" Sam inquired skeptically, too concerned about Paul's current state to take notice or pleasure from the nonchalance with which he had handled his leg in her presence, something that always gave her a secret thrill in thinking how very far they had come from the anguished prelude to Paul's marriage proposal.
"No." Paul sighed heavily, leaned back in his chair, and ran a hand through his hair. "A lorry ran me off the road."
"One of Mr. Burton's friends?" Sam asked quietly, pinching her lips together to hold back the gush of invective sitting on the tip of her tongue. She understood well enough that the thrill of detection was counterbalanced by real risks and that Paul had to see his cases through even if they involved some danger. But the idea of someone hunting him down through the dark streets made her simultaneously mad enough to spit and weepy with sheer horror at what might have happened. Paul read Sam's struggle in her face and reached out for one of her hands, drawing her gently down onto his lap. She promptly threw her arms around his neck and held on tightly, feeling Paul's arms circle her shoulders, returning the embrace.
"I'm fine," he reassured her, "And once the coat dries, I'm sure the mud will brush off."
"You could have been killed," Sam sniffed despite herself, the image of herself widowed after only a year (and by-and-large a positively glorious year) of marriage sprang unbidden to her mind. She knew of so many women whose marriages had ended with abrupt prematurity on far-off fields of battle. The fact that Paul was right here in Hastings meant that Sam had almost never contemplated the prospect of losing him suddenly, though the air-raids that still took place were an occasional reminder that neither of them could take each other's safety for granted.
"I'm perfectly fine," Paul repeated, "And I'm fairly certain that Mr. Burton's associates meant tonight to be a warning, nothing more." Gradually, Sam calmed down and relaxed her hold on Paul, simply leaning cosily against his chest. His arms hung loosely around her waist. He was glad that he'd been able to reassure Sam; he had anticipated that the evening's misadventure would upset her and he could hardly blame her for it. Diving out of the path of an on-coming lorry on narrow, blacked out streets had been the stuff of nightmares and he hoped most fervently that his instincts were accurate about the sort of men Burton and his associates were. Paul fancied he knew the type. Burton liked to talk, liked to make veiled threats. He probably followed through on his threats sometimes, but when he did, he would always stop well short of murder, because murder was another level of law-breaking altogether, and Burton's type had far too healthy a regard for their own necks to risk them by breaking anyone else's.
"Tell me about Mr. Foyle," Sam said after a while, "What did he say about Mr. Meredith and about you putting in for a transfer?"
"Not much," Paul sighed, "Mr. Foyle only knows Mr. Meredith by reputation. He has quite a good reputation according to Mr. Foyle." In the end, Paul hadn't been able to bring himself to be very explicit about what it was like to work under DCS Meredith, but he was nevertheless fairly sure that his former boss could draw a few shrewd conclusions based on what little he had been able to say.
"And the transfer?"
"He wouldn't advise me in one direction or the other. But I think I've got to try it, Sam. I don't want to leave Hastings and I know you don't either, but I simply can't carry on under Mr. Meredith indefinitely."
"I understand," Sam sighed, resigning herself to the inevitable. She hoped that whoever Paul's next superior officer might be wouldn't be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. "I nearly forgot," she exclaimed a moment later as they stood up and prepared to head up stairs, "I was going to tell you over dinner; Uncle Aubrey telephoned; he's coming to town for some sort of church conference tomorrow. It seems his hotel has let him down, so he's asked to stay here and I told him we'd be delighted. I hope you don't mind?"
"Not at all," Paul replied with equanimity, "It will be nice to see him again."
...
Sam met Uncle Aubrey's bus; fortunately it got in around the same time as her lunch break, and she had gotten one of the other ambulance drivers for St. Mary's to agree to cover for her in case she was a little late in returning. Miraculously, however, Uncle Aubrey's bus pulled into Hastings at its scheduled time. He kissed her cheek affectionately once he had disembarked, observing that she was clearly in excellent health. She brought him back to the house and gave him some tea and sandwiches.
"I've brought something for you from the country," he announced once they were both seated. Fleeting visions of eggs, jam, or honey danced through Sam's mind, only to be dashed the next moment as Uncle Aubrey reached into his valise and extracted a bottle of his greengage wine. Despite her chagrin, Sam managed to manufacture what she hoped was a creditable smile as she accepted the gift with decently good grace. Then she excused herself and hurried back to work for the rest of the afternoon.
...
Over dinner that evening, Uncle Aubrey was full of a sort of spiritual enthusiasm over the opening sessions of the conference; he rather monopolized the greater part of the dinner conversation with his account of it.
"It was a fascinating afternoon," he burbled while Sam did her best to feign polite interest. "I know Francis Wood, Bishop of Cirencester."
Paul's interest rallied despite himself at the mention of Bishop Wood. Although it was one of the last things that Paul had expected to intrude on his working hours, the ecumenical conference that had brought Aubrey Stewart to Hastings had become a part of his morning with Mr. Meredith. Showing more energy and focus than Paul had ever witnessed DCS Meredith bring to any other conversation in the past year, Paul had been astonished to witness his superior threaten a Bishop of the Church of England – the very embodiment of a mild mannered, unworldly old man – with charges of sedition if he continued to speak out against the bombing raids currently being made over Germany. It was, Paul reflected ruefully, a toss-up over who had been more astonished by Mr. Meredith's outburst: Bishop Wood or Paul himself.
"And were you aware that you have a German priest here in Hastings?" Aubrey Stewart continued, bringing Paul's attention back to the dinner table.
"A Jerry?" Sam commented laconically, "He's probably spying on us."
"No, not at all," Aubrey assured his niece with genial good humour, "He's a friend of Bonhoeffer." Sam's face remained blankly uncomprehending at the German surname, as did Paul's, prompting Aubrey to give a potted history of the Lutheran priest's brave and vocal opposition to the Nazi regime. "The Gestapo's put him in prison, poor man." Uncomfortable silence reigned for several long moments as both Sam and Paul contemplated this depressing fact. It seemed to dawn on Aubrey that he had cast something of a pall over the dinner table, because he veered around to a different subject, announcing, "I rang up your friend Mr. Foyle and invited him to come out with me tomorrow. There are public forums; everyone is welcome. Perhaps you would care to join us, Samantha?"
"I can't think of anything more dreary," Sam replied matter-of-factly. Not that she had the time to skive off of work for such an occasion either, and Thank God in Heaven for that!
"That's because you're a wicked girl, and a severe disappointment to your parents and all your uncles," Uncle Aubrey replied with a fire and brimstone solemnity entirely belied by the twinkling in his eyes. Sam grinned back, entirely unrepentant.
"But I'll make it up to you tomorrow when I feed you a really grand dinner. I've already invited Mr. Foyle, and he's providing the main course. The ingredients anyway; I'm making fish stew! It'll be lovely – I've watched Mr. Foyle make it several times and he wrote down the directions for me as well; it's terribly easy," Sam gushed, her cheeks going pinker than usual with her enthusiasm.
"I look forward to sampling your culinary arts," Uncle Aubrey assured her a few minutes later when they all said goodnight for the evening. "And it's plain to see," he added, giving her a peck on the cheek, "that marriage agrees with you very well, my dear."
...
It wasn't until they had climbed into bed that Paul was able to share the details of his day with Sam; it had been the sort of afternoon that Paul knew his wife would have considered a red letter day back when she worked for the police.
"Mr. Meredith and I got called out to a very interesting crime scene this afternoon."
"Murder or spy ring?" Sam immediately queried, her enthusiasm audible in her voice.
"Well, two landgirls were walking through Garton woods and came upon a young man hanging from a tree."
"Oh. Poor chap," Sam murmured, feeling rather chastened.
"The reason the DCS and I were called out, though," Paul continued, "was that they found a photograph in his pocket; an aerial view of a city. And the back was labeled with the name 'Hochfeldhausen.'"
"Well that's a German name if ever I heard one," Sam replied, her interest piqued once more, "Is it a spy ring after all? Did you identify the young man?"
Paul continued relating the scene to Sam, reliving it in his own mind as he did so. The victim's identity card gave his name as Henry Scott. Mr. Meredith had been in his usual daze; all that he seemed to have taken note of was the youth of the deceased. But Paul had observed very distinct bruising on the back of the dead man's head. And the rope Henry Scott had used to supposedly hang himself was stained green along nearly its whole length from the tree's bark, as though something heavy had been attached to the rope and then hauled into the air. And it was impossible that anyone could hang themselves in that way; it defied both common sense and the laws of physics.
To confirm his burgeoning theory of foul play, Paul had asked Sergeant Brooke to climb up to look at the branch from which Henry Scott had been found hanging. Upon being directed to report on the state of the branch, Brooke confirmed that the rope had made a deep, discernible groove – deeper than might normally be expected. The obvious conclusion – to Paul at any rate – was that someone had murdered Henry Scott, intending for the young man's death to be taken as a suicide.
"And what did Mr. Meredith think?" Sam asked when Paul's narrative had reached its conclusion.
"Well, you know him. Not terribly enthused, but willing to let me see if I can back it up with further investigation."
"I should jolly well hope so!" Sam exclaimed, snuggling closer to her husband. "I wish I could have been there this afternoon, to watch you being brilliant."
"Well, we'll see what comes of it," Paul replied, turning his thoughts from the afternoon's crime scene to the warm curves of his wife's body and her eager lips.
...
Paul was occupied with interviews the whole of the following day. Henry Scott's landlady reported that his work fell under the purview of the Air Ministry, although the exact nature of his work was extremely hush-hush. She also described Scott as both suicidal and deeply religious. He had attempted suicide on two separate occasions, though those times he had used sleeping pills. In Paul's view, this information did nothing to either strengthen or weaken his theory of murder. One could argue (as Paul was inclined to do) that it wasn't usual for a suicide to change their modus operandi so drastically from one attempt to another. A skeptic, of course, would simply argue that method was irrelevant and that this strengthened the idea that Henry Scott was the sort of person who would hang himself after all.
The landlady had suggested that Paul talk to Scott's priest, Father Keppler. This turned out to be the German priest that Aubrey Stewart had mentioned the previous evening, and Paul eventually tracked him down at the same ecumenical conference. The man had appeared quite distressed on learning that Henry Scott was dead, and apparently by his own hand. Father Keppler had not, however, been terribly helpful either. He wouldn't shed any light on what sort of work Scott did, claiming the sanctity of the confessional. Nor could he give any information about the location or significance of Hochfeldhausen; before arriving in England, Father Keppler had been ministering to a parish near Munich.
The afternoon brought an RAF officer to the station. He introduced himself as Wing Commander Stephen Foster, Henry Scott's superior at his work.
"I really don't think any police investigation is needed," Foster declared.
"With respect, Sir, that's not for you to decide," Paul replied as firmly as he dared. It was times like this that Paul felt as though, bizarrely, he was really the one in charge rather than Mr. Meredith. It did no one any good to be perpetually drawing comparisons between Mr. Foyle and his successor, but Paul knew by now that DCS Meredith habitually followed the path of least resistance and any hope of holding on to the essentials of the case rested of necessity with himself rather than his superior.
"I just don't want you wasting your time," Foster replied with a touch of impatience, "Or mine. Henry Scott was a mess. He hated his job, he hated the war… He tried to do away with himself at least twice before."
"Was this ever reported, Wing Commander?" DCS Meredith enquired.
"No. Of course it should have been. But Scott was superb at his work and we decided to look after him ourselves.
"Did he have any enemies?" was Mr. Meredith's next question.
"No," came the immediate reply. "None that I know of," Foster added after a moment, as though hedging his bets.
"Well I must say, Milner," the DCS remarked, "this does look a bit like a blind alley."
"You still haven't told us what his work was, Sir," Paul addressed Commander Foster, more for form's sake than anything else; he didn't expect Scott's superior to divulge any information.
"I can't," Foster replied immediately, meeting Paul's expectations. "Not without clearance from the Air Ministry. And frankly, I don't think they'll give it. Our work is highly classified."
"And we still have a man who is dead, Sir," Paul declared, trying his best to sound simply matter-of-fact. There was a very fine line between being doggedly conscientious and being stubbornly insubordinate, and Paul felt anxiously that he was skating alongside it.
"Who killed himself," interposed Foster.
"Look, this isn't getting us very far," Mr. Meredith announced with more authority than he usually bothered to project. "We'll apply to the Air Ministry and see what they have to say." Foster took this with rather poor grace, but accepted it nonetheless. He also confirmed Mr. Meredith's next question that he was on the telephone and could be reached without difficulty.
On his way out, Foster paused at the door of Mr. Meredith's office, "By the way, did Scott have a photograph with him?"
"Yes," DCS Meredith replied immediately, "What was the name on it, Milner?"
"Hochfeldhausen, Sir." Paul spoke through clenched teeth, feeling more than ever that he was in danger of losing his tenuous grip on both his patience and his professional deference. Mr. Foyle would never have simply given out information pertaining to a case, especially when the individual asking the question was as uncooperative as Commander Foster.
"That's right," Mr. Meredith echoed, oblivious to his sergeant's internal struggle.
"I need it back," Commander Foster stated matter-of-factly.
"I'm sorry, Sir. I can't do that," Paul rushed to answer, desperate now to keep DCS Meredith from meekly handing over the photograph. "It's police evidence." Paul felt a hot rush of blood flood his face; feeling distinctly that he had finally put his foot in it, making fools of both himself and the DCS. To say nothing of the fact that any other superior officer would have every right to rake him over the coals for this kind of overt insubordination, though Paul suspected that Mr. Meredith wouldn't bother and wasn't even entirely sure that he had noticed.
Commander Foster, however, certainly had. "It's actually very important to us right now," he said, looking from one man to the other as though trying to gauge who was really in charge. Paul sometimes wondered that himself. Thankfully, Mr. Meredith backed Paul up and Commander Foster was forced to leave the station without his photograph. Nor did the DCS offer Paul any words of reprimand when they were alone once more. The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully.