The Light Over London(44)

Cara stepped back to let the young woman out and then slipped inside the warm, comfortable office. There were already little personal touches: a photograph of him with three other men on top of a snow-covered mountain, a black baseball cap with an orange bill and a stylized “SF” embroidered in the same shocking color, a stack of Moleskine notebooks teetering on the edge of the desk. Every inch of wall space was taken up by already-filled bookcases, and his desk was a study in controlled clutter. Liam looked happy here, she decided. At home.

“Close the door, would you?” he asked as he flicked on the plug for an electric teakettle set up on a bookshelf. “If it’s open, students tend to come crashing in. Tea?”

“Yes, please. I’m surprised you’re already seeing students. I thought lectures only just started.”

“They did,” he said, dropping a tea bag into a blue stoneware pot with a chipped spout. “My predecessor left me some notes on some of his stars, and Miss Okafor was among them. She has ambitions to get her doctorate one day.

“Now . . .” He let his hands hover over the stacks of paper before snatching up a manila folder. “Here we are. I still haven’t identified who our mystery diarist was, but we’re closer. How far are you in your reading?”

She laughed. “When you ask it like that, I feel like I’m back in school.”

The tips of his ears turned pink. “Sorry, force of habit.”

“It’s okay. I liked it,” she said, before blushing herself, because the way she said it made it sound as though she liked him as well. Quickly she added, “When I fell asleep reading yesterday, her section had just arrived in London.”

He nodded. “Then you’ll already know that the white shoulder lanyard in our girl’s photo means that she was attached to the Royal Artillery as part of the Ack-Ack Command. Those mixed batteries were sent all over Britain and the Continent at various stages in the war, and the ones sent to London would’ve been in place to try to defend key depots, artilleries, and factories, as well as the East London docks.”

“She said she was stationed at the Woolwich Depot,” said Cara.

He nodded. “South of the Thames. It was one of the key distribution points for munitions to and from the factories operating in that area of London, not to mention for ferrying troops to and from the capital. It sustained serious damage during the first stages of the Blitz in September 1940 and was hit several times afterward. As you can imagine, it was a valuable asset for the British, so the Luftwaffe did its best to blow it up.”

“She names some of the other women in her unit. If we can find them in the ATS or RA records, we should be able to find her through process of elimination, right?”

“You read my mind,” said Liam, spinning in his chair to pour boiling water into the teapot as soon as the kettle clicked off. “If there’s one thing the military is good at, it’s keeping personnel records. My colleague Felix is on sabbatical doing some research for a book at the Imperial War Museums’ archives. He drove a hard bargain, but he said he’ll look for us.”

“What did you offer in return?” she asked.

“I’m picking up one of his Western Civ rotations next year,” said Liam cheerfully. “Now, about Paul, our flier. Finding him may prove a little more straightforward. Coastal Command had four Pauls on base at Trebelzue in February 1941. Sergeant Paul Stephen Jackson. Flight Lieutenant Paul Edward Bolton. Flight Lieutenant Paul Charles Letchley, and Flight Captain Paul Harrow Yarlow.”

Cara frowned. “She said he was an officer, so the sergeant is out.”

“So either Bolton, Letchley, or Yarlow is our mysterious romantic pilot. I’ll see about pulling their service records. Do you take milk?” Liam asked.

She nodded. “Enough to make the tea the color of a ginger biscuit.”

She watched him fix her a cup of tea. When he handed it to her, his fingers brushed hers, and a little frisson of interest fluttered in her stomach. Their eyes locked for a second, but then Liam looked away, leaving her to wonder if there’d been anything there at all.

“There’s something else,” he said, pulling a laptop across the desk and typing in a password. “I wasn’t able to find any online record of a shop called Bakeford’s in Cornwall, so I reached out to a local historian.” He clicked the trackpad a few times. “No email back yet, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.”

She looked down at her perfect cup of tea with just the right amount of milk, suddenly a little overwhelmed at his enthusiasm and all he’d done. “This is so much more than I’d have been able to do on my own.”

“You would’ve figured out how to go about it. I’m just used to mucking about in archives and shamelessly calling in favors.” He paused to take a sip of tea and then set his cup down carefully. “Can I ask why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to figure out who wrote the diary?” he asked.

“I want to return it to its owner or her family if she’s no longer alive.”

He raised his brows. “If that’s all you want, you could hand it over to an archive and let them do the work.”

“No,” she said quickly. “No, I couldn’t do that.”

“Then what?”

“It’s not enough that it’s a mystery?” she asked.