CHAPTER 37
I left them to their chat, for there was nothing I could meaningfully add. I was still undecided about Joe Evans but after all I had been given sight of his witness statement. I had seen Steve in a very different light after that, and I knew that I was never going to dig any deeper. Leave that particular case deep frozen, Lainey.

Siân was off at the weekend, which chimed with my own self-planned working roster, and she was insistent.

CHAPTER 35
I was in work the next day, but in my own HQ instead of Cardiff. It felt strange, after so long in civvies, but the uniform was the thing that had helped me hold things together when life had thrown shit at me. That dreadful funeral, the confrontation with Mam and Dad, the ritual had helped me cope. Siân was on a stupidly early start, so I had to eat breakfast alone. I hated early turns, so as I was now effectively supernumerary, I had treated myself to a nine o’clock start.

CHAPTER 22
“Come in, do! George, is there a problem?”

“Sort of, sir. Chap here, Gerald, he’s come all the way down to ask a favour of you”

“Beattie, may we please have some tea. Gentlemen, tea?”

CHAPTER 33
“Can you get the plate?”

“Not yet, Ma’am. Parked up too close behind the van. Two men, looks like. Another car joining them now”

Hansen. “What are they doing?”

CHAPTER 19
I gave my hair a last quick comb, and buffed up the toe caps of my shoes on the backs of my trousers. Why had I bought flowers? They weren’t good ones, but they weren’t roses. Mam had said that flowers all said things, all had different messages and places and times they were each right for, and roses were making a very clear statement best not said right at the start. It wasn’t really the start, of course, for we had been dancing the blushing two-step for months. Mithering, her mam had called it. Sod it, couldn’t I just be back outside that bloody airfield again?

CHAPTER 31
The drive over to the Channel coast was getting familiar now, but this time we had our parents with us. Our parents, not Siân’s, as that would have been a step so excessive I’d have lost control. I would never forgive her for what she had said and done, but I had agreed with my wife that we had to come to some sort of understanding. Our Mam and Dad, though, needed no such adjustment. Somewhere near Swindon, Dad turned round to face me.

CHAPTER 18
The Ouse was low and slow, murmuring past the moorings as I laid out my tools. Somewhere overhead a lark was singing away, and there was a splash near the far bank as a vole dropped into the water. Dragonflies droned past, and when I looked down past the rail I saw a pair of dead eyes fixed on mine as a pike hung almost motionless, drifting slowly downstream as it waited for something to kill.

CHAPTER 17
We were winding down a little bit as the little band Ernie’s dad had hired played some slower tunes, including a very slow waltz that got a lot of couples onto their feet and each other. I was sitting at one of the tables with Bill and the new groom as his lady wife went to powder her nose.

CHAPTER 28
Siân was insistent that night.

“Just because one of them is called Evans it means nothing! How common is that name, especially round here?”

I pushed my empty plate away. “And how many pies has that bastard family got fingers in? No. I know you’re right, but it would be so, so nice to get another of the bastards nailed. That family should never have been allowed to breathe never mind breed”

CHAPTER 27
Sar was on the phone that evening, almost the moment I got in, bubbling away.

“Lainey, you will NOT believe this!”

“Sister, sweet girl, can I at least get a cuppa before you get into full flow!”

“Get Siân to get you one. There’s a lot to tell”

CHAPTER 26
“Right, then boys and girls, we need to have a bit of a brainstorm here. We’ve got a bit of a lead from that camera footage, but unless Alun can pull off a match it gives us nothing more than evidence we can use after we catch the gentleman in question.

CHAPTER 13
I did some reading after that, after they dragged him screaming into their private little world, and years later I found out more.

CHAPTER 12
Life settled down after that. It was strange to find ourselves with a proper billet; stranger still to find that we had a servant, in the form of an unsmiling local woman.

CHAPTER 11
Bob was away for a few hours the next morning, and when he came back he was dragging a kitbag.

“Right, lads. There’s a lot been going on, so this is going to be a busy few days. Happen Ivan didn’t like the Jerries surrendering to us, and Jerry didn’t like to stop fighting Uncle Joe’s boys. They’ve sorted it now, but what we’ve got is a German government just outside Denmark. Being run by the bloke who was chief of the U-boats”

Bill spat, yet again. “Lovely company they keep, lads!”

CHAPTER 9
Fighting doesn’t stop while you stand round and grieve. It keeps on and on, for any particular human being is just another piece of kit to be used and discarded. We waited those six hours in the snow by a mortar section, one of whom tended to the burn on Harry’s neck. Wilf…

CHAPTER 8
We were on two hours on-two hours off that first night. The paint had been spread all over Stan, and Ernie had liberated some net curtains that broke up our shape, but I still felt isolated even though the rest of the troop were lying up either side of us in their own little patches of cover.

CHAPTER 22
Sergeant, eh? He must have earned more respect from his bosses that I would have guessed from his breakdown. I had been told he’d had some bad ones, and to see him there with a set of stripes raised my own opinion of him considerably. We took the rest of the introductions, I gave out the prepared domestics speech about fire exits and toilets, which was a bit strange as I was actually in their building, and began.

CHAPTER 6
We kept rolling. They kept shooting, but we weren’t losing mates quite as often now. The days were getting shorter, but the weather was usually fine, which made the waste of July and August so dreadfully clear.

CHAPTER 4
I sat in the warmth of that Summer’s sun and wept. We had finally been pulled out of contact, for you can’t replenish under fire, and in the sudden break from what I had been watching my strength had finally broken loose and fled, and I was crying like some stupid little girl. That airfield.

CHAPTER 2
“Turret left! Range five hundred! Got him, Ginge?”

“Aye…”

The Cromwell rocked as the breech flew back.

“Nice one, lad. You’ve got the eye for this, all right. Driver, sharp left here”

We rolled forward, rising slightly as we went over the dead horse, and I tried not to listen as the port track slipped just a little in the mess. Something struck the front of the hull; rifle round, probably. I was tired beyond anything I had ever felt.