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RHCP Digital is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Part I of this edition first appeared as The Disappearance of Tom Pile, published 2015
This edition, including The Miraculous Return of Annick Garel, first published 2017
This ebook published 2017

All correspondence to:
RHCP Digital
Penguin Random House Children’s
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL

PROLOGUE

‘Tell us your story,’ the voices said. ‘We want to hear your story – all of it …’

That was when I started speaking out loud to the night stars all around me, and to the music, the voices in my head. They said, ‘That’s it. Go on … go on … tell us, tell us all …’

My mother died when I was seven. I remember so clearly the simple coffin box in our little cottage parlour. It lay there closed and screwed down, resting on trestles, and even then I knew that she was inside it. My father sat beside it with his head bowed, his mug of tea resting on the lid. The parlour was almost dark, with just a single lit tallow candle on the mantel, and still he sat there quietly all night.

She was buried in February – on St Valentine’s Day, to be exact. The dark earth was tamped down hard and wet. The grave was dressed with greenery and one or two hothouse blooms from the Rectory. Mr Woolard had cut the grave and Mr Woolard’s son had made the coffin. There was no stone or marker as yet, only the few pale flowers under the sleet and the ivy.

I stood at the grave while the Woolards lowered the coffin down on wide hessian straps. My father was standing at the graveside in his black Sunday best, one hand on my shoulder. He was the first to throw in some of the wet earth and flowers from the heap by the open grave. I looked around at the expectant faces: the Reverend Stone, Miss Gladwyn, my uncle and aunt, and then my father, who was hatless in the cold. His beard and side whiskers were grey, and his teeth were clamped together, making his cheeks look hollow. His hair was whipped by the wind that blew across Gallows Hill, where we would see the lights together for the first time, years from that night …

Cover Note

I don’t want to waste too much of your valuable time by telling you all about myself. I am not very important. You don’t need to know much about me personally. I will simply say that I did something very secret during the Second World War. All that was, of course, some twenty-four years ago now, although the results of our work are still very much with us.

What I did was rightly categorized as secret, for I was dealing with the mysterious and the unexplained – it would perhaps be better described as the inexplicable. I was always viewed with suspicion. Some thought I was wasting valuable war resources by looking, as I did almost daily, into reports of odd and unexpected things: sightings and events that were, in the majority of cases, the ravings of the deluded, the drunk and the insane. I was there to thoroughly investigate the five per cent or so of those reports which were not so easily explained away; those strange and deeply troubling events that happen all the time, whether there is a war on or not.

The idea of investigating such things made some of the high-up folk in the War Office very nervous indeed. Some of them found it almost laughable, and said so endlessly in circulated memos. In the end, of course, we were proved right, but our stories have remained secret and classified. The secrecy embargo has finally been lifted; I would suggest this is because the astonishing events of last July have finally made it unnecessary, hence this volume – the first, I hope, of a good few.

I am all too aware, however, that the licence to publish could be revoked at any point, so my concluding dateline below could, in fact, be out of date by the time these words reach the public.

I had actually been conducting these investigations since I graduated from university many years before the war. But when the conflict began, and the threat to our democratic freedom and our very way of life became ever more real, I gained the strong support of the highest authority, in the form of Winston Churchill himself. He was only too aware that in the 1930s the Germans had founded a secret department: the Office of the Unerklärliche & Übernatürliche, which roughly translated as the ‘Unexplained and the Supernatural’. It was a subject the Nazis and Hitler took very seriously indeed, and Churchill knew that; he was of course unwilling to take the risk that the Axis powers might stumble on an advantage of any kind, however bizarre and remote, that might be denied to us, the Allies.

I was thus allowed to recruit my own small unit, with a very similar aim to our German counterparts. We were known as Department 116 – which was simply the number on our annexe door. We comprised a handful of technicians and research scientists, and one very bright young man from the East End of London. As a child he had shown a kind of genius for recognizing the mathematical patterns behind the seemingly random and disordered. He also had a strong – indeed, an almost uncanny – sense of intuition, which proved very helpful in certain circumstances. His name was Jack Carmody, and he was to become my man in the field, my special investigator; my ‘go to’ man, if you like. We were given offices close to Churchill in his Citadel and the Admiralty buildings, and more or less left to get on with it.

This, the first of our cases to be published, will be told partly in Jack Carmody’s words, because he kept a detailed journal of our adventures, and partly in my own, because I did too – although of course it was not encouraged by the authorities. Now, in retrospect, I am glad that we did keep such detailed journals. With the help of these, and the other evidence, the whole story of Tom Pile can be told.

I have added in certain previously classified documents: direct transcripts of wire recordings, various intercepted messages and more, which all add their own layers of truth to the narrative. Some of the documents date back to long before the war; before the twentieth century, in fact. Each entry adds another little piece to the strange jigsaw puzzle of past, present and future which makes up Tom Pile’s story. These events were so mysterious, and revealed something so huge and potentially dangerous, that they had an effect which went way beyond what might have been expected at the time.

So the roots of this story were laid down long before the war – and not just in these islands, but on the mainland of Europe too, as you will discover. I have tried not to interfere with the original testimonies, some of which I intend to present here in facsimile form. It will be up to the reader to read them carefully in order to see the big picture, which I hope will be revealed as each piece finally falls into place.

M. D. Holloway

(Captain, retired)

Glynde, Sussex

CHAPTER ONE

‘Down to darkest Dorset today, then,’ Captain Holloway said to me with a friendly wink. I was about to set off and was, you can bet, excited enough about what I might finally find there. Still, a tiny part of me wished I wasn’t going away and leaving poor old London. There were too many things I had to leave behind – and who knew for how long? And it was not just that. I would miss the terror and drama of the Blitz. I was worried that, what with the bombs falling, and the destruction of dear old London, which seemed certain in those early days, I might never see the place the same way again. I couldn’t let that stop me, though. Fear was a curse, and I wasn’t about to give in to it. I could trust my aunt Dolly to look after herself, and she would look out for my own place too. Anyway, there I was, all ready to go. I was kitted out in my very stiff and uncomfortable new uniform, and I felt not only self-conscious, but a bit of a twerp too, to be honest.

‘That’s right, sir,’ I said, looking down the length of my new and very itchy khaki strides (that, by the way, is slang for trousers in these parts).

‘You might remember to return a salute to an officer, by the way, Carmody. You may be a pretend soldier and I might be one too, but we must at least play the part for our lords and masters.’

‘Yes, sir, sorry, sir,’ I said, and brought my hand up beside my forehead in what I hoped was a correct salute, as fast and as smartly as I could without laughing.

‘Better,’ he said, and he smiled his smile, and I could see that he wasn’t taking it all that seriously after all. The bluster and noise was for the sake of the others who might be listening in the outer office of the Citadel annexe.

‘Then good luck. Remember, anything you can get of these lights – the more the better. Of course, you know what else to look out for?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, grinning again. ‘An actual live person, if I can manage it.’ Another smart raising of the hand.

‘That’s right, Jack. The real thing, and remember to get into the saluting habit and stay in it. You’re supposed to know how to salute. You’re meant to have gone through all that in basic training.’

Viktor Prejm, a tame Polish airman who is said to be ‘walking out’ with our general office assistant and copy typist, Miss Greville, was perched, as casually as ever, on the edge of her desk while she tried to work. She was giggling when I reached the office.

‘Nothing funny about you, Jack,’ she said. ‘Mr Prejm here just said he wanted to whisk me away to a romantic hideaway like one of these.’ She gestured to the frosted glass panel to one side of her work area, over which she had taped dozens of picture postcards. There were sunny seaside and cottage scenes and the like, making it her own personal blackout area, shielding her from the worst of the bustle in the big office. ‘Fat chance, I told him,’ she added. ‘I was laughing at his ruddy cheek, that was all.’

‘Dear Viktor,’ Ruth said. ‘Look, it’s already done. I do know how to file – and I don’t mean my nails. I used to be an archivist, don’t forget. I know my way around all kinds of files.’ She smiled.

Viktor raised his hands in mock surrender and shrugged, as if to say, English girls, and then gave me an ironically appraising look as I turned to struggle up the stairs and out of our inner sanctum, all crouched over (we have a low ceiling) and weighed down with the army kit bag over my shoulder and an overstuffed army-issue suitcase in each hand.

‘Take care now, young man,’ he said, helping me up the steps and along the corridor. ‘Where are you off to? Somewhere more exotic than I was proposing to take your Miss Greville, I trust?’

‘No, of course not, er, Corporal,’ he said, his eyes widening a little as he took in my smart uniform. ‘Well, now, look at you. Whatever else you do, just mind out for the girls, looking like that, eh? What would your girlfriend say if she were to find out?’ And then he laughed.

I laughed too, but the joke was on me. Unlike Viktor, I didn’t have a girlfriend.

It wasn’t until I had struggled off the dingy train at Dorchester South and had been standing for a while in the poorly lit, bone-damp, cold station forecourt, waiting for the army truck from Burton Bradstock to come and collect me, that it properly hit home.

I was in the army, and I was in ‘darkest Dorset’ all right, just as Captain Holloway had said.

Standing there shivering on that late afternoon made me feel homesick for life in the good old smoke. I had no idea how long I was likely to be stuck down here on what might be just another wild-goose chase. We’d had plenty of those to contend with in our time.

There was one tiny saving grace, though, at that moment. The station was near a brewery, and that telltale warm, malty smell drifted over occasionally on the wind. It was almost as good as standing near Truman’s in Brick Lane.

CHAPTER TWO

I have to admit something. There’s no getting away from it. I’m a London boy through and through. There were times during those first few quiet days down in the country when the thought of a nice warm picture house – like the Sphere on Tottenham Court Road, or the Rialto on Coventry Street – showing a good old horror picture or a Marx Brothers comedy, and sharing it with a crowd of jumpy, laughing Londoners, was like a vision of heaven itself. After all, the deep dark countryside wasn’t meant for everyone, but in the end that wasn’t the point. I should at least have brought my travelling telescope with me for those rare clear nights. My army-issue binoculars had to stand in for my stargazing (and by that I don’t, of course, mean looking at Miss Greta Garbo), but they just weren’t as good.

It’s hard to say exactly when everything started for me; hard to date when my path in life was suddenly clear. It was long before I first met up with Captain Holloway, in any case.

I was born in August, so I was always the youngest in my class at the local school. School didn’t last long. Not that being the youngest held me back at all, as it is meant to – far from it, in fact. I was always a bit of a whizz. I could read almost anything before I ever went to school. I surprised the teachers with my abilities right away, especially for my age, and with my background. I was part of the dirt-poor but very respectable London working class, and I still am in a way. I’m not saying I was especially proud of it, but I certainly ‘wasn’t ashamed neither’, as my aunt Dolly would have said, and did say, over and over, to anyone who would listen.

She brought me up on her own, Dolly did. She was my father’s sister. Salt of the earth, and a bit more besides. She was fierce in her determination to look after me. I was, after all, her brother’s only son. She was fierce too in her ambition to get me properly educated. Dolly had enough drive, pride and loyalty for about ten people. She was a force to be reckoned with.

I never knew my parents. To me, growing up in the streets of Hackney, Aunt Dolly had to be both mother and father. She saw my promise early. She moved heaven and earth and worked the system sideways, backwards and upside down for me. She applied for scholarships. When my abilities really started to show, I was tested and probed and questioned so often it felt normal to me. I suppose it must have been some of the strange things I did when I was very young that alerted her. First there was the thunder, and then there was the lady in grey.

She never tired of talking about the incident with the thunder. Aunt Dolly didn’t like thunder. I noticed it once in a storm. There was one of those particularly loud claps of thunder overhead, the kind that almost shake the room, and she went all to pieces. I suppose I was about four years old, and her fear must have made a big impression on me. A year or so later, I was sitting in the back garden with her on a warm afternoon when I suddenly went and stood right in front of her and pressed my hands very tightly over her ears.

A moment or two later there was a huge and terrifying clap of thunder overhead. I saved her from hearing it: I just knew it was coming. Even at that age I could read the seemingly random patterns in the sky and the atmosphere. Aunt Dolly couldn’t get over it. She told the neighbours, she told Lew the barber, she told everybody. They mostly looked at her like she was a bit touched. It just served to further convince her that her late brother’s son, her only nephew, her Jack, was ‘special’. It was quite something to live up to. Every time I got my hair cut – and in those days it was pretty often – Lew would tell all the customers, ‘This little boy ’ere knows when the thunder’s going to bang off before it happens. How about that, then? ’E ought to go on the halls.’ I blushed with embarrassment as I looked at myself in Lew’s mirror while he laughed and rinsed out his comb in a cup of white liquid.

I would have liked to go on the ‘halls’, as he put it, but not in variety. I wanted to be up on the silver screen. I wanted to be a Hollywood actor, like Ramon Navarro or Douglas Fairbanks. I suppose what I have done since has involved acting at various times; playing a part to deceive.

My childhood bedroom was at the back of the house overlooking the garden patch. Dolly slept in the middle room. She had the big front bedroom with the two windows all kitted out as a study for me. I would sit up there working even on bright summer’s evenings. The other kids would all be out playing street cricket or generally roughhousing about while I sat there and read my books and solved things. I didn’t mind. I didn’t feel deprived. Sometimes I roughed it up with the best of them. I wasn’t weak or scared; I had my share of fun and games. I played knock-down ginger and the like, and generally annoyed the neighbours from time to time like all the local kids.

‘It’s only natural, after all. Boys will be boys, you know,’ Dolly would say, arms folded across her wide shelf of a bosom, head nodding in apparent sympathy with whoever had banged on the door to complain.

Every year I enjoyed our little backyard blaze on Bonfire Night. Aunt Dolly let me set off bangers and jumping jacks and sky rockets out of our Brock’s selection box, just like everybody else. However, I didn’t much care for the stuffed homemade Guy Fawkes that kids used to wheel around in old prams, collecting ‘pennies for the Guy’ long before November the fifth. When I was very little, my overactive imagination gave those poorly stuffed straw men life. I felt them watching me from behind their papier-mâché masks, which I saw hung in rows on string in the local paper shop. I knew they weren’t real, but once they were put on the dummies, I believed in them.

I wasn’t like everybody else. I don’t say that to show off. It is the simple truth.

I also saw the patterns in large groups of numbers. I could pick out the connections and links between seemingly random events. I could see the core shapes in apparently formless things – like cloudscapes, for instance, or crashing waves and rushing water torrents. I could decode almost everything, or at least it seemed that way. I saw these patterns and connections fast, and I saw them clearly and simply; I didn’t have to think or try or struggle. I solved things.

And I suppose you might say I even had visions of a kind; the sort of thing people referred to as ‘being psychic’ or having ‘second sight’. I couldn’t predict the Derby winner or anything like that, but I had something else. It was a kind of sixth sense, if you like, for odd and unexplained things. If predicting the thunder wasn’t enough, there was the other incident; the one Aunt Dolly didn’t tell everybody about. The woman in grey.

My aunt Dolly supplemented her income by doing bits and pieces of fine needlework, dressmaking and knitting for people. She was very skilled at it, and often made things for the locals who were that bit better off, too busy or too idle to make their own. Sometimes she took me to their houses to show me off. One of her ‘ladies’, Mrs Burtenshaw, lived a bus ride away, up in Hampstead. She had a large house with railings around it and a big gate. I had to be on my best behaviour. After we were given tea, with tiny triangle-cut sandwiches and fruit cake (‘Only one slice now, Jack, and don’t ask for another!’), I needed to go to the lavatory. I put my hand up and asked as if I were still at school.

‘Please may I use the lavatory?’ I said, and I saw Aunt Dolly beam at my polite approach.

‘Of course,’ Mrs Burtenshaw said. ‘Just go out of here and turn left, keep on down the passageway, and there is a door on your left, and that is the cloakroom. Inside there is another door, and that leads to the lavatory.’

The hallway had a shiny marble floor with black-and-white squares like a chessboard. I could easily imagine big scaled-up pawns lined up along one side protecting the knights and bishops. I dawdled along, counting the squares to see if there was an even number between the front parlour and the cloakroom. Then I smelled something very sweet. I looked up, and saw a woman in the hallway looking at me. She was dressed in a long grey dress and a straw hat with a wide brim. Over her arm was one of those trug gardening baskets, full of cut roses.

‘I was just going to put these in water,’ she said, opening the cloakroom door and letting me pass by. It was the roses that smelled so sweet. ‘There ought to be a suitable vase in here somewhere. You carry on, young man, don’t mind me.’ She looked down at me and smiled, then turned her back and began rummaging on a shelf. I went through the door to the lavatory.

After I had finished I went back out into the cloakroom. The roses had been arranged in a china vase. The lady’s straw hat was hanging from a peg behind the door. I was careful to wash my hands because I knew Aunt Dolly would make very sure that I had.

When I got back to the parlour, Aunt Dolly said straight away, ‘I hope you washed your hands, Jack.’

There was a silence after I spoke, and I knew I’d done or said something wrong; I had somehow upset this woman.

‘In one of those flat-bottomed trug baskets. She was looking for a vase to put them in.’

The colour drained out of the woman’s face. She looked like a sheet of paper. ‘You saw her?’

The woman was staring at me in shock, her hand to her throat. ‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘He says he’s seen her.’

‘It really was her … My God. Did you put him up to this, Miss Carmody? Have I ever spoken about her to you?’

‘Of course I didn’t, Mrs B., and I swear you have never mentioned your sister to me, not once. Have you fallen out with her or something? Is she not meant to be here?’

‘My sister used to wear a straw hat and an old grey day dress. She wore them for gardening. Tell me again what she said to you.’ She seemed even more intense now, and she leaned forward and held my wrist hard, as if to stop me getting away, or daring me to be wrong.

‘She said, “I was just going to put these in water,” and then, “There ought to be a suitable vase in here somewhere,” and after that, “You carry on, don’t mind me.”’

‘Has he done something wrong?’ Aunt Dolly said, putting her hand on my shoulder.

‘Not as far as I know. He is the first to see her. I hoped I might; I felt something once in that hallway, not long after she died, but I never saw her.’

‘I never saw her,’ Mrs Burtenshaw continued, almost to herself. ‘And we had such a strong connection too. Surely she would have shown herself to me …’ She shook her head then and let go of my arm.

‘I can show you the flowers,’ I said – even then, young as I was, aware that none of this was normal. It was almost as if there were a charge of electricity in the air, as if a thunderclap were imminent.

Mrs Burtenshaw took my hand in hers and held it slightly too hard. ‘You are not teasing me, are you?’

‘He wouldn’t do that, Mrs B. Jack’s a good boy, bright as a button. Gets up to larks like any other boy, but he’s not cruel.’

‘Show me the flowers.’ Mrs Burtenshaw led me back out into the tiled corridor. We all three stood just inside the door frame looking down the empty space. The polished floor, the rugs, the wood-panelled walls. I sniffed the air, and there was still the sweet rose smell.

‘I smell the roses,’ Mrs Burtenshaw said, and her voice, I remember, was quavery and suddenly nervous. She led the way down the passage. Aunt Dolly had her hand on my shoulder. The silence in the hall was deafening. It was quiet and calm, but it seemed to me that everything around us was screaming, there was so much tension, such a strange force of veiled energy in that house. I didn’t experience that kind of pent-up and hidden force again until one night many years later, on a hilltop in West Dorset.

Mrs Burtenshaw closed her eyes and quickly opened the cloakroom door. The roses were there, neatly arranged in a white vase on an old sideboard below a row of shelves. White and sweet-smelling, they were, at least a dozen of them. We stood huddled together in the doorway, just looking at them.

‘Perhaps you put them there and forgot,’ Aunt Dolly said, doing her best to be helpful.

‘Oh, no,’ said Mrs Burtenshaw quietly. ‘That bush has long gone over. Madame Hardy, a damask rose – the old kind. They only flower once or twice a season.’ She leaned forward, picked one of the roses out of the bunch and brought it up to her face. ‘It ought to be a comfort,’ she murmured, ‘but I can’t help feeling cheated.’

She turned to Aunt Dolly. ‘I think you arranged this to trick me. I don’t know why, but you hid those flowers somehow, and then the boy put them in there and made up that story. I think you had better leave.’

Aunt Dolly frowned. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs B., but you’re quite wrong. I told you before that this boy is special. You remember, I said he could tell when it was going to thunder, and he covered my ears to protect me from it? Well, now he’s gone and properly seen a ghost, by the sound of it.’

‘I shall pay you for your work and that will be that. Just be thankful I haven’t called the police.’

‘How ridiculous!’ Aunt Dolly protested. ‘Call the police! He’s not a liar and nor am I. We are respectable, honest folk.’

On the way home we stopped off at a café. Aunt Dolly bought me an ice cream. ‘I could do with a brandy after that. Always said you were special, Jack. You weren’t scared, were you?’

‘No,’ I told her honestly. ‘She seemed a nice lady. I didn’t know she was a ghost before.’

It was one thing to see the patterns in things, to see through them. That was all connected to links and fast thinking. I suppose I was a bit like one of those adding machines most of the time. Seeing that lady in grey, though, was very different. Part of me sensed something about that hallway before I saw her. I knew there was something up: some part of my inner antennae told me. It was as if I had opened another undiscovered part of myself that afternoon. I realized, almost with a shock, that there were unexplained things, deep mysteries just at the edge of my understanding. I had somehow lifted a curtain on a new world.

Aunt Dolly drank her tea, but I could tell she was troubled. What had just happened had scared her, and she wasn’t someone who scared easily. It hadn’t scared me, though – quite the opposite. I was excited by what else might be behind the curtain. Aunt Dolly never mentioned what I saw in that house in Hampstead. She didn’t tell Lew the barber or anyone else – it worried her too much. I think she thought that I had somehow conjured up the lady in grey.

As I got older, I developed a keen interest in astronomy, and in the worlds beyond our own – which is how I came to be taken up by Captain Holloway.

When they discovered what I could do, I was soon whisked away from my local infant school. I was tutored at home instead, and that’s when all the testing started. Aunt Dolly would regularly take me in to appointments in the West End. We went to impressive but fusty offices in places like Russell Square, where I was set difficult theorems and mathematical problems. We would visit various institutes where my intelligence was tested. It was all very friendly, but it involved us both getting dressed up and me having my hair strictly parted and smarmed down with horrible brilliantine, which Dolly bought at Lew’s.

I had to be polite, and hang my gabardine raincoat up on the hook, and sit at a desk in a plain brown varnished room all on my own. Then I would have to answer the questions.

‘Just do your best, Jack,’ Dolly said. ‘You can’t be expected to do more than that.’

I was asked by a friendly examiner after one of the tests if I ‘had an ambition at all’.

‘I would like to look at the craters on the moon through a proper big telescope, sir,’ I said. I was just fourteen at the time.

Dear Miss Dorothy Carmody and Master Jack Carmody,

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Michael Holloway and I have been told by an examiner friend of mine, Mr Anthony Paine from the College of Preceptors in Russell Square, that following a very successful recent mathematical examination Jack expressed an ambition to observe the moon through a proper telescope. I have a private observatory in my garden near Lewes on the Sussex Downs. I would be delighted to welcome you both here for just such an observation. I would suggest a date in mid March when the moon will be at the half phase, which allows for better viewing of the craters, etc.: March 19th would seem to be the best date. We must pray for a clear sky. If you are agreeable, a car will be sent to collect you from your home and will also take you back again. There will of course be no charge for this. I look forward to hearing from you both and very much look forward to welcoming you here.

Yours faithfully,

M. D. Holloway

(Captain – ret’d)

We were collected by a uniformed driver. He was behind the wheel of a Humber 12. I had never ridden in such a car before, and nor had Aunt Dolly.

‘My word,’ she said, ‘this is a very nice car. I hope her at number fourteen saw us getting in, Jack, toffee-nosed old cow – pardon my French.’

We were driven to Mr Holloway’s house high on the South Downs. Luckily it was a rare clear night. The sky was cloudy over south London as we drove out. The ground was still white after the late snowfall. Even though the car had a heater, Aunt Dolly sat with a heavy picnic blanket over her lap all the way down. The weather had been overcast and cold for most of the year. That night, though, away from the city, the moon was clear. I could see it as the car climbed the hill up to the house, which was hidden in a copse of trees.

Mr Holloway was a tall man. He came out to meet us with his pipe clenched between his teeth; he waved, a broad smile on his face. His hair was thin at the front and swept back over his ears. He had a high forehead and looked like the kind of professor you might see in a film. He stooped forward a little to shake my hand. ‘Welcome, Jack,’ he said. ‘And you, dear lady, must be Jack’s aunt Dolly. Well done, both of you, for getting here.’

‘We ain’t done much,’ Dolly said. ‘Your driver fetched us here; we just sat.’

‘I meant partly in regard to Jack’s education. It’s you we all have to thank for encouraging his great talents, I gather?’

I liked Mr Holloway right away. He was friendly and engaging; a bit like some of the examiners I had met, but more jokey. I felt comfortable with him. Later, when I came to know him better, I realized that whenever he said something, it was with a special kind of authority, a certainty; it seemed that he knew everything about whatever the particular subject was. It was as if somehow he carried with him, all hidden away, the contents of a huge electric brain, which, like the nine-tenths of an iceberg, was floating under the water. In his case the waters of the everyday.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the moon is our business this evening. Come on – we’ve no time to waste.’

Mr Holloway had a big wooden shed on a circular set of rails in the garden behind the house. The roof had a sort of dome, which could open in half, allowing for a view of the night sky.

‘You see, Jack, I use this place as a summer house in daytime and good weather. I can move it around along the rails to follow the sun. At night it becomes my home observatory like it is now.’

Mr Holloway pointed to a chair set up under the eyepiece of the telescope. ‘Park yourself there, Jack,’ he said.

‘Now, on the side there you will see the small sighting scope – got it? Good. Now line up the visible edge of the light and shadowed area on the moon with the cross hairs. When you move that small scope into place, it moves the big scope as well – that’s it. Now look through the eyepiece of the big scope.’

There it was. My first view of an alien world. I could see details of the craters on the defined edge between the light and the dark area. They were thrown into sharply detailed relief. I probably said something stupid like, ‘Cor,’ or ‘Blimey.’ Something uncouth anyway.

‘Never fails to impress, does it?’ Mr Holloway said. ‘Think how far away it is. It’s about 238,900 miles from Earth on average. At its closest approach, which is called the lunar perigee … I bet you know that word too.’

‘The moon is 221,460 miles from us here on Earth. At its farthest approach—’

I spent a happy hour examining the edge areas. I checked the details of crater names against the moon map – the Plato crater, and the Mare Imbrium.

‘I am certain that one day we will settle a colony on the moon,’ Mr Holloway said.

He settled himself on an old sofa which was pushed up against the back wall under the moon map. He lit his pipe. ‘So you have two more years of study – although looking through some of your results, I can’t imagine what they are finding to teach you any more.’

‘I see everything, I’m afraid. I’m a very nosy person, and because of my job I’m allowed to do and see all sorts of things that most people can’t. What would you like to do after your studies are over, Jack?’ he said.

This was where I always came unstuck. The jobs I wanted to do either didn’t exist, or were impossible for someone like me. First off I had always wanted to be an actor in the pictures. Aunt Dolly took me twice a week to the Dalston Odeon. I loved films. Secondly, but most of all, I wanted to be a detective who could solve mysteries through making all the odd connections that only I could see. A kind of clairvoyant secret sleuth operating on the edges of instinct and science. How could I, a fourteen-year-old boy with brilliantined and badly cut hair, explain that to anyone older, anyone in charge? How could such a job exist? It was mad.

‘It’s hard to explain to anyone,’ I said, my confidence rising just a little as I looked over at Mr Holloway, who seemed to be willing me on. I felt I could confide in him and it would be all right. ‘I think, sir, that most of all I would like to be a kind of detective,’ I said awkwardly, both expecting and fearing that I would be laughed at.

‘That’s very interesting,’ he said, not laughing at all. ‘What kind of detecting? Do you mean criminal stuff – fingerprints and all that?’

‘No, not really that. Like I said, it’s hard to explain. It’s more to do with the mysteries of science; more to do with unexplained things – finding out about them and investigating.’

‘What you mean is: are there little green men on Mars, and what really happened to the Mary Celeste, and is there a spirit world – and all the time pretending that you are not doing it and keeping it all secret; that sort of caper?’

‘Well, then, it looks like you have come to the right place.’ Mr Holloway cheerfully banged the arm of the sofa so that a cloud of dust rose up in the lamplight. He reached out his hand. ‘Shake that, young man,’ he said. ‘I think you and I are going to work well together in the not-too-distant future, because, you see, the job I just described to you – that is exactly what I do.’

CHAPTER THREE

As far as I could see, as I sat there hugging my knees under the dripping wet tarp in the back of the lorry, looking out at all that gloom on the way over to my billet, Dorset was just a lot of bare wet trees and cold-looking hills. There were some buildings, I grant you – farms, barns, cottages, and I don’t know what, all clinging to the round hillsides for dear life. It was all very Thomas Hardy and bleak and doomed-looking in the November dusk; and romantic, I’m sure. There wasn’t much in the way of actual pavement, though. There weren’t too many shops, either, and no picture houses – at least where I ended up. Just a lot of cows and sheep, and noisy cockerels, and all of them started making their big racket well before dawn.

The village where I was billeted, Litton Cheney, was in the Bride Valley in West Dorset. Not much of a centre to it, not many houses; a tiny place really. You could walk the length of it and hardly notice you had come out the other side. There were two ways into the village proper. It was as if one half was attempting to make its way up Gallows Hill, and the rest was content to stay in the flat valley. One road snaked its way down gradually from the main top road that eventually led to Honiton via Bridport. The other way in was from the same main road but was much steeper. There was a fine view of the valley and the sea from the top. This route ran directly into the village all the way down Gallows Hill. Litton Cheney had a church, and there was a pub, the White Horse, off to the south – where I had my rooms. There was one general grocer’s and tobacconist’s shop.

The church was north of the main route through the village. You could reach it in two ways. One was along a narrow track called Church Path. There were half a dozen labourers’ cottages on one side looking out over the valley, with the Rectory at the far end behind its iron gates. Then there was another path that led up from the lower edge of the village past the steep border of the Rectory garden, where there was a spring which bubbled out and ran back down the side of the path. A corrugated-iron ‘tin tabernacle’ club house with a pitched roof, which looked like a cricket pavilion, was set at the very top of this path, and this was my main office. I shared it with the officer of the local centre for Air Raid Precautions – or ARP, for short – Mr Feaver.

Almost every day there was some new fear or alarm in the village. As soon as I started on my regular patrol, villagers either came running up to me with some story or other, or went and reported to Mr Feaver in the tin hut. They were all full to bursting with panicky rumours and stories.

For instance, a Mrs Hinde-Smith claimed that the German invasion had started already: her maid had spotted some Hitler youth spies near the village. Turned out to be just some Boy Scouts out camping in what was called Rocks Field, looking after a few evacuees.

There were constant rumours of Nazi landings too. One morning Mr Fry, a particular nuisance, and a bugbear of mine, swore he had seen dozens of parachutes dropping down onto Gallows Hill in clear daylight. When the ARP warden went up there to investigate, the parachutes turned out to be nothing more than an innocent flock of sheep.

With more than one aerodrome based around Dorchester, just a few miles from us, the whole village, and even those further west, had witnessed the recent Battle of Britain. This had lasted from July until October. I think this had set the mood of panic up nicely, because the villagers went on about it all the time.

When I was first stationed there, I just about saw the tail end of it all. At least, I saw a skirmish – a bit of action in the sky. I noticed some Spitfires and Hurricanes just after takeoff from the hills above Dorchester, and soon after that I heard the air-raid sirens. None of it seemed to be real at first. The planes were all so high, they were just little silvery dots; they looked like toys. Though toys would never have left the distinctive white vapour trails that everyone in London had got used to seeing. There was the distinctive droning sound of the engines too. Then I heard distant ack-ack guns. I saw the shells explode with those soft-looking puffs of dark or light smoke. They drifted in a fixed velocity pattern which I could read clearly against the background colour of the sky. The vapour trails crisscrossed each other, and I heard the machine-gun fire, both from our planes and from the Germans’. Once shot down, the planes fell quickly, spinning and turning, the vapour trails echoing the seemingly chaotic patterns of the falling craft – which of course were not chaotic to my eye. I noted a number of parachutes. More than one surely meant that the crew had baled out of a German bomber. The distant siren sounded the all clear. I was lucky that day: one of our fighters flew low over the village and went into a victory roll as he barrelled out over the top of Gallows Hill, which was exciting to watch. I heard no more about any arrests or the survival of the parachutists. Life at Litton Cheney was mostly aggravation, routine and tedium.

As my cover was to be the local support service to the ARP office, I heard all the rumours of invasion and tales of hidden spies – and worse.

There was a group of London evacuees who played in and around the village. They upset some of the villagers one Sunday morning by jumping out of the bushes at them, holding wooden rifles and shouting out in what they thought was German. All of this was reported to our office with a straight face.

The fear and panic was everywhere, and it was mostly irrational. If one of the locals saw a piece of broken glass or mirror, or even a bit of shiny tin, by the roadside, it was seen as a possible signalling device put there to alert enemy aircraft. If someone hung out their washing on a Tuesday, when on the Monday morning the weather had been good for drying, some of the villagers found it deeply suspicious, and would report the possible signal to us very seriously.

All sorts of strange advice and rumours circulated about what to do if anyone actually found a possible invader or spy. In the White Horse pub one evening, I heard the theory that you should go up to a suspicious person and ask, ‘Excuse me, sir, but how tall are you, if you don’t mind my asking?’ If the suspect answered in metres, then they were plainly the invading enemy.

The other option offered up in the bar was that you should suddenly stamp on a suspect person’s foot and see what language they swore back at you in.

Mrs Gladwyn’s unmarried sister Ada told me once that she carried a brown paper bag full of pepper in her handbag at all times to ‘throw into the invader’s eyes should they get near enough’.

I will admit it was hard to picture poor little Miss Ada throwing her bag of pepper over a hulking great storm trooper.

The night things kicked off properly, it was not only freezing cold, it was raining too. Well, actually, no … sorry … start again – let’s be more accurate here. It wasn’t exactly rain. You see, back in London, rain was rain, and fog was fog. We had plenty of both, but we kept them apart. We wouldn’t allow them to muddle themselves up and get mistaken one for the other. It was not the same, though, down in the country. For a start, it was so close to the sea; within hearing distance on a windy night. The rain down there was sometimes really more of a heavy sea mist – a ‘precipitation’, I suppose it would be termed officially (I might be a cockney lad, but I am, as you can tell, well educated). It was more of a ‘soak you right through’ sort of a fog. You could smell the salt water and the acrid engine oil and that rank whiff of seaweed; they were all mixed up in it as it rolled in off the sea – that is, if you could bring yourself to breathe it in at all.

That night I was on my ‘reassuring presence’ rounds, walking my preferred circuit of the village not far from my billet. There were no stars to be seen, nothing much to look up at, just low cloud and the general cold wetness. I stopped in the most sheltered corner I could find on my regular beat.

I stamped my army boots (have you ever tried on a pair of army boots? They don’t bend at all), just to try and get the blood flowing again. Anything to warm up my poor cold feet.

I had been doing my level best to look and behave like a regular soldier; of course, I wasn’t one at all, just acting the part. I saw myself as a plucky young soldier in a propaganda film. The others weren’t meant to know about me, which is why I had to work extra hard on my act.

I pushed myself further in under the high overhanging bushes to get out of the wet stuff, and tried my hand once more at rolling a blessed cigarette.

It seemed to me that the British army ran on Naafi tea and hand-rolled cigarettes. Nearly all the other soldiers in the barracks over at Burton Bradstock ‘rolled their own’, and whenever I went over there, I felt like the odd one out for being unable to do it properly. I never even had any cheap Woodbines to offer round like everyone else.

I was under Captain Holloway’s strict orders to do my best to fit in. I had to try and be like all the other regular soldiers. So I practised rolling rotten filthy fags. I did it again, and for the last time, on that fateful evening.

I held up the thin paper tube, already stuffed with Gold Flake tobacco, and sealed it, as I had seen the other soldiers do, by running my tongue along one edge. I turned so I was facing out of the wet as much as I could, and tried to light it – and then that was it.

I threw the horrible soggy thing away among the tree roots. Who was I trying to kid? Smoking wasn’t for me, Jack Carmody.

‘That’s it. Enough is enough. It’s finished, Jack,’ I said out loud in my very best Leslie Howard voice to the wet leaves pressing in all round me. Even though no one but the leaves was listening, it somehow had to be said, and out loud too. I was giving up smoking, and the idea of smoking, and anything to do with smoking, for ever and ever amen. And that was before I’d even got properly started on it.

Everybody in the regular army smoked like chimneys. Captain Holloway had his pipe. But I didn’t like it, and I couldn’t get the hang of it anyway, even though I knew it would make me look older and more like a proper soldier if I could. Part of me enjoyed that aspect – the pretending. As I said before, it was like being an actor in a big film. I played my part. The only problem was, it went on all day. I wasn’t like the rest of the soldiers: I was undercover, and when I was with them, I think they sensed something about me; something a bit off kilter. Anyway, since I was posted to the village, away from the main barracks, the smoking didn’t seem so important. There was no one around here to impress or notice in any case.

‘No more fags ever, ever, ever,’ I said out loud to the dripping leaves. ‘Decision made. Good boy,’ I added.

Part 1

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF TOM PILE

PROLOGUE

Cover Note

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE