Inspector Yarrow - Giles Ekins

A Crime Novel Series

Inspector Yarrow by Giles Ekins

Series Excerpt

Pilot Officer Christopher Yarrow spent many months in hospital recovering from his injuries. Both legs were so severely broken below the knee that surgeons considered amputation, but as a final resort before that drastic step, both legs were placed in a Thomas splint, elevated and then put in traction before the plaster casts could be applied.

He had also broken several ribs, which fortunately did not puncture his lungs, but made breathing extremely painful for several weeks.

Additionally he broke three fingers and his left wrist

The wound to his left leg proved not to be as serious as first feared, the bullet had passed through his calf but did not hit either the tibia or fibula. The wound therefore healed without complication, leaving only a bullet sized scar. The wound to his left hand also healed but there was damage to some of the nerves and he never recovered full feeling in the hand.

The most serious injury proved to be that to his left eye. The sliver of glass from his broken googles, probably smashed by a piece of metal from the shattered canopy, had entered his eye in the lower quadrant and sliced deep across his retina at the rear of his eyeball. shredding it virtually in two.

The eyeball had filled with blood, making it impossible to remove the sliver until the blood had been re-absorbed into his optical bloodstream, a process that took several months. Until the blood was absorbed and the eyeball had cleared, surgeons could not properly examine the eye and remove any glass fragments. Once the initial bandages had been removed from his face, all that Yarrow could see through the damaged eye was a brilliant orange and black kaleidoscope, like a fluorescent tiger, shimmering with the change in light, brilliant in bright daylight, a dull receding grey at night.

When the blood did eventually clear, and an eye surgeon could at last see into the eyeball and remove the glass sliver, it was apparent that nothing could be done to save the sight. From the day of the crash in his Hurricane, PO Yarrow had been permanently blind in his left eye.

When his broken legs had sufficiently healed, albeit still in plaster, Yarrow was transferred to Bellington Hall, some 4 miles from West Garside, there to continue his extensive recuperation.

The hall was the former residence of the Bellington family, who had made their fortune from the manufacture of sweets and chocolate. Sir Howard Bellington had turned the property over to the Government for the duration of the war for use as they thought fit and moved into his apartment in Belgrave Square in London and took an advisory position with the Ministry of Food. (After the war, to avoid crippling Death Duties, Sir Howard donated Bellington Hall to the National Trust)

Initially used as a training base for local regiments, Bellington Hall was now a hospital for recuperating wounded airmen. Most of the wounded men would return to active service, although there were those so severely injured that they could never return to active duties. It was here, whilst waiting for the blood to clear from his punctured eyeball and for his legs to regain their full strength that Christopher Yarrow met Marie-Hélène Fayolle, an orthopaedic nurse at the hospital.

Marie-Hélène had fled from France just days before the invading German army entered Paris where her family had lived for generations. With German forces drawing ever closer, her family decided that apart from Madame Fayolle, Marie Hélène’s mother who elected to remain in Paris to care for elderly and infirm parents, they would try to escape to England,

Even though non-participating and only partly Jewish, they had few illusions as to Nazi attitudes towards those with Jewish blood, seeing all too clearly the foul wind of anti-Semitism blowing ever stronger across Hitler’s Germany.

However, in their worst nightmares they could never have imagined that those family members who remained behind; parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins would all perish in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Treblinka. Or that their arrest and deportation to the death camps would be assisted by their former neighbours, war-time France being almost as anti-Semitic as Germany.

Marie-Hélène, with her lawyer father and two brothers had driven their Citroën Traction Avant, firstly to Rouen and then onwards to the Channel Coast, the entire route filled with laden refugees fleeing the German onslaught. Cars, lorries, horse drawn carts, bicycles, wheelbarrows, prams; an endless procession of fleeing fearful humanity which together with scattered units of the British BEF straggled along the road, all fleeing the Nazi terror.

The fearful columns were frequently strafed by Me 109’s and Stuka dive bombers, leaving a harrowing trail of dead and dying. Just beyond Rouen, they came across two young children, a boy of about 5 or 6 and a girl of 3, crying and wailing beside the bodies of their parents and an older sibling killed in one of the strafing raids. Fleeing families and troops had passed them by, too concerned with reaching their own safety to give any thought to rescue two orphaned children standing by the roadside.

‘Oh, Papa, those poor, poor, children, we cannot leave them here, leave them to the mercies of the Nazis,’ Marie-Hélène, said angrily, sweeping an arm around to take in the death and destruction all about them; bodies, smoking cars and lorries, dead horses and an overturned pram with a child’s doll alongside it. Wanton destruction and death for no other reason than that the marauding Germans could do so.

‘Papa, we must take them with us, in England they will be safe, who knows what would happen to them if left here.’

‘We have very little room, Marie-Hélène. We are already four, and our luggage,’ her father protested mildly, torn by the obvious need to care for the children but concerned with practicalities.

‘They can have my seat, I shall walk.’ Marie-Hélène said stubbornly, comforting the youngest child in her arms. ‘Papa, we must, must take them.’ Her brothers joined in, further reinforcing her pleas to rescue the sobbing children, afraid, uncomprehending and so very vulnerable.

‘Very well, we shall take them. We’ll manage somehow.’

‘They are only small, will not take up much room or they can sit on our knees,’

And so it was settled. The children, still dazed and in deep shock, meekly allowed Marie-Hélène to lead them to the Citroën and with barely a backward glance, they climbed into the rear seat.

‘Will Maman and Papa meet us later?’ the boy, called Henri, asked, whilst the girl, Josette curled up on Marie-Hélène’s lap and sucking her thumb, slept in the blissful ignorance and innocence of childish dreams

After enduring another strafing raid, they eventually reached Le Havre. There they abandoned the car and purchased their passage from a grizzled fisherman who made more money in a week ferrying refugees across the Channel than he had made in a lifetime of fishing. He landed them at Newhaven on June l4 1940, with the great mass of Beachy Head their first sighting of England and freedom, leaving Le Havre in smoking ruins behind them; the day that German troops marched into Paris.

After initial internment, interrogation and screening to ensure that they were not planted German spies, the Fayolle family were allowed into the community whilst Henri and Josette, were taken into care. Josette clung in tears to Marie-Hélène skirts, sobbing and sobbing as Marie-Hélène, also in tears, handed them over to the authorities.

‘At least now, they are safe,’ her father comforted her.

‘I know Papa, but what is to become of them? Poor Josette is heartbroken.’

‘I wish I could say, but they will be well taken care off, you can be sure of that.’

(Henri and Josette spent several weeks in an orphanage for refugee Jewish children before he was able to convince authorities that they were not Jews, but Catholics. They were later adopted by a childless French couple and in 1947, the family emigrated to Montreal in Canada. Beyond that, no further information is available)

Marie-Hélène Fayolle had trained in orthopaedic nursing at the famous Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris and as soon as she was able, contacted the Ministry of Health and offered her services. She was given a trial in St Bartholomew’s hospital in London, where her expertise in treating patients with severely broken bones was recognised and she was transferred to Bellington Hall to assist in the recovery of injured airman, and where she met and nursed Pilot Officer Christopher Yarrow.

As well as supervising the recovery of strength to his legs, she encouraged and helped him to come to terms with his partial blindness. Their developing closeness grew into love and in April 1942 they were married, their marriage held in the private chapel of the Bellington estate.

Books In This Series

Gallows Walk (Inspector Yarrow Book 1)