Hitchens smiled. ‘Because, according to Tarrant’s colleagues at the haulage company, Naomi is his girlfriend.’

Chapter Thirty-four

THAT EVENING, DAVID Headon needed to take only one glance at the badge found during the search at Eden View.

‘The ROC,’ he said. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘The Royal Observer Corps, right?’ said Cooper.

‘That’s it. Did you know I was a member?’

‘No, I didn’t. You’re just the sort of person I’d expect to know about these things.’

Headon was an old friend of his father’s, a man of about the same age as Joe Cooper. He’d visited Bridge End Farm a few times when Ben was a teenager, and he could remember Headon talking endlessly about annual camps at RAF stations around the country.

‘All the ROC posts were closed in 1991, and we were stood down completely a few years later,’ said Headon. ‘There were quite a few of us, you know. Eighteen thousand observers, until the cutbacks started in the sixties. The Corps did a brilliant job during the Second World War, tracking German air raids. Then, when the Cold War started, the observers were needed again. We had posts all over the country. There was even one at Windsor Castle, in the coal cellar.’

‘What did the ROC do, exactly?’ asked Cooper.

‘What do you think?’

‘Observe, I suppose.’

‘That’s right. Observe and report.’

‘I thought I recognized the logo. I was at the National Arboretum the other day.’

‘Ah, you saw the ROC grove. So how were the trees doing? Still waterlogged?’

‘No. They’re small, but alive.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘The trees had labels with this logo. They said “7 Group Bedford, 8 Group Coventry”. For some reason, the labels stuck in my mind. It’s the emblem, I think. It’s quite distinctive, and not immediately obvious what it’s supposed to be.’

Headon stroked the emblem on the ROC badge. ‘He’s an Elizabethan beacon lighter, who used to warn of Spanish ships approaching the coast.’

‘Yes, I found that on Google.’

‘Well, that’s pretty much the role the observers carried on, though during the Second World War it was German planes they were tracking. A series of observer posts could follow an aircraft’s flight path right across Britain, the way they did when Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in 1941.’

‘Aircraft recognition, then,’ said Cooper.

‘That was it, for a long time. It was what a lot of the blokes that I knew came into the Corps for. But that job went out when aircraft got too fast for us. By the 1960s, it was becoming a bit impractical. A low-flying enemy aircraft could have entered UK airspace, flown to London, dropped its bombs and been on the way home again, all while the observers were still trying to make their minds up whether it was friend or foe. The ROC would have been wound up right then, if it hadn’t been for the Bomb.’