James Benn - The Rest Is Silence

“This is the army,” I said. “Nothing makes sense. It’s a long shot, but you said yourself that you never envisioned someone sneaking themselves onto the list. Off would have been more likely, right?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I get it. If I didn’t expect it, that’s an advantage for Wiley.”

We left Siebert glumly checking his lists and found Harding finishing a cup of coffee.

“You are about to be further initiated into the brotherhood of BIGOTs,” Harding said, unlocking a desk drawer and grabbing a key chain. “Are you ready?”

“We know how to keep our mouths shut, Colonel,” I said.

“Let’s get this over with so you can get to Dartmouth and see what Montgomery’s officer is up to. Maybe he’s even learned something useful.”

“If he did, I’d be shocked if he shared it. But as he’s a fellow Yank, you never know,” I said as we trailed Harding to Wiley’s office. The guard stood aside as Harding unlocked the door, ushered us in, and quickly shut and locked it behind us.

A tilted artist’s table sat beneath high windows. Paints and brushes stood ready on a side table; a rag hung off the back of a chair where Peter might have tossed it after cleaning up. Against the wall sat a long trestle table covered with reconnaissance photographs taped together to create a mosaic. Fields, villages, beaches, and gun emplacements.

“Colleville-sur-Mer,” Kaz said behind me. “I know this place. I drove through Normandy on holiday before the war.”

“Omaha Beach,” I said, reading the caption on the map. TOP SECRET-BIGOT was printed in large green letters at the bottom. Another map hung next to it. “Utah Beach.”

“Sainte-Mère-Église,” Kaz said, pointing to an inland town on the Utah Beach map. “I recall a pleasant meal in the town square. Coq au vin, I believe.”

“Normandy,” I said, taking in what had been revealed to us. “That’s a long way across the Channel.”

“Exactly,” Harding said. “The Germans probably think the same thing. Notice anything familiar about the Utah Beach map?”

I studied it, noting the broad expanse of beach and a flooded area beyond it. Causeways linked the beach to Sainte-Mère-Église and other towns and villages along a north-south roadway.

“Slapton Sands,” I said. “Slapton Ley is the spitting image of the water behind the beach.”

“The Germans flooded it, to isolate the beach. That’s why we needed to practice getting off the beach quickly and moving inland. Slapton Sands was the perfect stand-in for Utah Beach.”

“Which is why the German attack on the convoy was doubly disastrous,” Kaz said. “If the Nazis knew the destination of Operation Tiger, it would be a simple matter to deduce Normandy as the target, and these specific locations.”

“Exactly. Which is why we had to identify all the BIGOTs and make sure no one had been picked up by the Germans. The death toll is staggering, over nine hundred dead so far and some still missing. But it would have been far worse if any of this had been revealed.”

I looked at the maps and the photos on the table. It was easy to see what Peter had been doing-creating the maps from the recon photos laid out so precisely. The map was accurate down to the smallest building or path. At the bottom of each map, there was a watercolor painting, a dead-on view of the beach from the water. The watercolor was laid out to correspond to physical features on the map directly above it.

“Perspective,” I said, taking in the painstaking detail and beauty of Peter’s artwork. “He wanted to see the beach from the perspective of a landing craft.”

“He was insistent about that,” Harding said. “But as you can see, he did a great job from the photographs alone. He worked in church steeples, towers, bunkers, and even trees. I couldn’t take a chance on losing him, and besides, he needed some leave. He’d been holed up in here for weeks, working ten or twelve hours a day. He was exhausted.”

On the back side of the maps there were detailed charts showing information about the sun, moon, tide, and currents. Harding showed us an idea Peter had come up with to help navigators get as close as possible to the landing beaches. Using a system of transparent overlays, profiles of landing craft of all sizes were displayed. When you adjusted the sheet over a graph showing the slope of the beach, navigators could see the water’s depth and where their specific craft would run aground.

“Very clever,” Kaz said. “Peter’s death is a loss in many ways.”

“The only good news is that he’d finished all the maps before he went on leave,” Harding said. “It’s a damn shame he died. We were going to start a new project soon. Southern France.” He leaned against the door as Kaz and I searched the room, checking drawers and rummaging through stacks of recon photos, old road maps of France, and even a pile of postcards from prewar vacations.

Half an hour later, we gave up. This had been Peter’s studio, but he hadn’t kept anything personal here. I sat in his chair, looking out the window. His artist’s table set at the perfect angle to catch the light. I could imagine him hunched over a sheet, using colored inks to create the map itself and the more delicate watercolors to paint the view of the shoreline below, the brush clutched in his thin fingers.

His fingers. I thought back to when I found his body. Besides his khakis, he’d been wearing nothing but his dog tags. His fingers were bare.

“Where’s his ring?” I said, jumping up out of the seat.

“What?” Harding said.

“The ring he was wearing when he first came to Ashcroft House,” I said. “It wasn’t on his finger when I found the body. He had a watch as well, but that was gone too.”

“The Pemberton family coat of arms,” Kaz explained. “It had been given to his mother, and she passed it on to him. A remembrance, I would assume, from Sir Rupert.”

“Sir Rupert nearly keeled over when he saw it,” I said. “He’d suspected his daughter Meredith had stolen it years ago. We should search his room again.”

Harding locked up Peter’s office and took us back to his quarters. Nothing much had changed. This time we tossed the place, throwing the mattress on the floor, pulling out all the drawers, turning pockets inside out. Nothing.

“I hate to say it, but it could have been stolen, along with his watch,” Harding said. “He always wore one. Nothing fancy, a standard issue A-11 wristwatch.”

“You can sell a watch on the black market,” Kaz said. “But the ring was unique.”

“I remember seeing it while he showed me the drafts, now you mention it. It looked like solid gold,” Harding said. “Tempting for anyone with an inclination to thievery. Especially after hauling bodies out of the Channel all day. Dozens of sailors and soldiers would have had a chance to help themselves.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or it could have been a civilian, if the body washed up on shore.”

All we had were more questions. Possibilities that added up to maybes. Harding and Kaz went to grab a cup of joe, but I begged off. Sitting in a chair amidst the chaos of Peter’s belongings, I tried to focus my mind on what we knew for certain and what we were guessing at. Or assuming. There was more guesswork than certainty, which I tried to tell myself was good, since I could boil things down to their essence and move on from there.

Peter Wiley had a ring, a ring that connected him to Ashcroft House. The ring was gone.

Peter Wiley was not approved to go on Operation Tiger.

Peter Wiley showed up among the dead of Operation Tiger.

Peter Wiley was alive the night Sir Rupert died. I never saw him again.

Sometime after that, he took a blow to the head, probably not severe enough to kill him.