Convoy (20 page)

There was an average of three neutral ships in every convoy; a total of thirty-two had sailed in the eleven convoys and mercifully only four had been hit. He ran his eyes down the list again and realized some were not in fact neutrals now: thanks to some of Hitler’s more recent activities, they were Allies: Denmark and Norway, for example. Only two neutrals had been hit, in fact. For a moment he thought of Sunday evenings before the nine o’clock news on the BBC – it had become the custom to play the national anthems of the Allies – France, Belgium, Holland…then more had been added as Hitler overran Europe and the Japs had finally brought the Americans in. Now it took nearly a quarter of an hour to play all the anthems…

The telephone on his desk rang. He made sure the switch was not on ‘Scramble’ and lifted the receiver. ‘Yorke here.’

‘Exton here,’ Clare said with a giggle. ‘Is this a bad time to talk?’

‘No, of course not – but is something wrong?’ Pleasure struggled with alarm in his voice.

‘Don’t sound so frightened, darling; I just wanted to hear your voice.’

‘You didn’t phone last night.’

‘I told you I wouldn’t. It’s a long walk to the kiosk in the village, and it was raining.’

‘I know, you’re forgiven.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘Hmmm, you should be sleeping. Or is night duty less arduous?’

‘I’m on day duty now.’

‘Thank heavens for that. Listen; the pips will go in a few moments – have you plenty of change?’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Clare said airily. ‘Now, how is the arm? Any pain?’

‘No, just a dull ache. But I told you – I hardly notice it, except on a cold, damp day.’

‘And you’re doing the exercises?’

‘You know I am. Hell, you were watching me the day before yesterday. I say, we’re getting a long three minutes, aren’t we? And it’s a very clear line.’

‘Yes,’ Clare said, ‘very clear. Your mother says dinner is at eight-thirty, so don’t be late. Two plump partridges for three.’

‘Three? Partridges? What–’

‘You’ll never make a detective, darling! I’m phoning from Palace Street. Old Walter poached the partridges from somewhere – in fact they’re probably your own – and gave them to me when he heard that I was going up to London again.’

‘And why, Nurse Exton, are you in London?’

‘Because, Lieutenant Yorke, for reasons I don’t understand but certainly don’t question, I’ve been ordered back to St Stephen’s. Apparently Willesborough can function without me but St Stephen’s can’t.’

Ned suddenly recalled a comment of Uncle’s made yesterday morning; a remark which Ned had not taken very seriously. Uncle knew which strings to pull, although Ned would have thought it easier for an RN captain to get a destroyer moved halfway round the world than have a nurse transferred. Still, Uncle was also a regular visitor at Downing Street and had obviously picked up a few tricks.

He was bending over his desk holding the receiver, his elbows resting on the big form on the back of the old chart, and as they talked – quite freely because Ned was thankful the rest of the ASIU team were still out at lunch – he found his eyes resting on the entries under the ‘Neutrals’ column. Only one neutral country had a ship sailing in every one of those convoys.

Eleven times the word ‘Swedish’ appeared, making not just a pattern but almost a spinal column.

‘Ned! Ned! Are you still there?’

Clare’s voice came from a long way off and it took a conscious effort to pull himself back to his desk at ASIU in the Citadel: in his imagination he had been watching the pale ice-blue and yellow flag of Sweden streaming out in an Atlantic breeze.

‘Sorry darling, yes I’m here again. When do you have to report for duty?’

‘Tomorrow, for duty the next day. They are giving me a day or two of leave.’

‘Does that mean…?’

‘Your mother has been kind enough to invite me to stay tonight.’

‘Me too,’ Ned said. ‘I must go now. I’ll be back by six.’ He put the receiver back too quickly to hear her say: ‘I love you,’ and he ran his finger down the column once again, in case his eye had jumped and there was in fact a convoy without a Swedish ship in it which had been attacked. There was none.

Jemmy and the Croupier were still having lunch so it was probably too soon to take the diagram in to Uncle. He pushed the chart away and pulled the pile of dockets towards him. Who owned the Swedish ships? Were they sailing for their owners or were they on charter? He flipped open a notebook, picked up a pencil, and leafed through the first docket until he found the three pages of typing, held together by a rusting paperclip, giving the owners and managers or charterers of the ships in the convoy. Most British ships were under charter to the Ministry of War Transport; the Americans were owned or chartered by the US Maritime Commission. He found the Swedish ship was registered in Stockholm and under charter to another Stockholm company. Six thousand nine hundred tons and twin screw – unusual for a ship that size. Sultzer diesels, as one would expect. He added the details to his big diagram, drawing in extra columns.

The next docket was thicker but he soon found the list of ships and owners. Eight thousand seven hundred tons, twin screw, different owners but same charterers. The Swede in the third convoy was roughly the same size, owned by the same company as the first – and was under charter to the same Stockholm firm. But single screw – did that show the fact that the first two were twin screw was just a coincidence? But the same charterer for the Swedish ships in the first three convoys – was that a pattern?

Quickly he worked his way through the remaining dockets, noting down all the details, until finally his notebook and diagram showed that the eleven Swedish ships were owned by four different shipping companies, most were twin screw (although three were single), all were motor ships, none was smaller than 6,500 tons and none bigger than 9,500. All were chartered by the same company. All had been in the third, fourth or fifth columns and were usually fourth or fifth in a seven-ship column. In other words the convoy commodore and escort commander had always given them the safest positions. And, of course, not one had been lost.

That set off another train of thought, and Yorke referred back to his other lists. Yes, not one of the neutral ships lost was Swedish.

He went through his convoy diagrams, where the positions of torpedoed ships had been marked. He picked up a red pencil and on each convoy diagram he put a red ring round the Swedish ship and then checked the position in relation to it of the ships that had been torpedoed. There was no particular pattern; a few were ahead or astern, though most were to port or starboard. None was far off, but most of the insider victims were close to the centre of the convoy anyway.

The time had come for a quick walk in St James’s Park to ease the anger mounting in him and clear his head so he would be ready for all the questions that first Jemmy and the Croupier would raise, and then Uncle. He would need to think hard during the walk; it was possible that he had found a pattern – there was no doubt about it in fact. What mattered was whether the pattern had a damned thing to do with U-boat insider attacks. Was it significant or just a coincidence?

As he locked up his papers before leaving the room he found the exhilaration and anger which had been sweeping him along for the past fifteen minutes were vanishing; like a sailing dinghy slowing down as the gust of wind died and the wave crest passed on ahead, he realized he had done nothing concrete towards beating the insiders; he had merely found a possible pattern. A possibly significant pattern rather. He had been struggling so hard to find a damned pattern that he had made the mistake of thinking that finding one would reveal the answer.

A pattern…a pattern…a pattern…he kept repeating to himself as he climbed the stairs up to the ground-floor level in the old building next to the Citadel and, showing his pass, went through the main door and up the few wide steps past the Captain Cook statue, turning left along the Mall and leaving Admiralty Arch behind him, buried under its layers of soot and bird lime.

Swedish owners, all motor ships, mostly twin screw, and all chartered by the same firm. The patterns were thus – first, Swedish; second, same charterers; third, all motor ships (but these days most modern ships were); most were twin screw – which was unusual in these smaller sizes. They were definite threads in the pattern – even individual patterns in a whole design. Less definite (the thing that Uncle might well decide was mere coincidence) was that no Swedish ship had ever been torpedoed in one of the convoys.

There were a couple of dozen other men in uniform striding about St James’s Park, and a few civilians. Half a dozen of them seemed to Ned to be men with unsolved problems waiting on their desks. Another half-dozen were clearly keep-fit fiends who made it a rule to walk twice daily around the Park. A red-tabbed and red-capped brigadier with two rows of medal ribbons, including most of the tough ones from the First World War, was clearly hoping a brisk walk would help him sober up. He looked shocked and sad rather than harassed and puzzled, and Ned wondered if he had been using his club bar to drown some private sorrow; a son killed on some distant battlefield, perhaps, because the man looked like a link in what was often called a ‘military family’. He might have a son of thirty who could have spent the last year fighting in the Western Desert, and whose luck had at last run out…

There were half a dozen whores, middle-aged, but perky and bright-eyed even though the night bombing obviously affected trade and cost them their beauty sleep. Their dresses were clean, but frequent ironing was leaving a shine not intended by the makers of the fabric. So far, Ned reflected bitterly, he had speculated about a possibly bereaved Army brigadier and a few game old whores, one of whom winked as he went by and another who smiled wryly and said: ‘You ain’t on leave are you, Jack?’ He had walked nearly half a mile and not thought once about the Swedes and the convoys.

What was there to think? Sitting in an underground room in the Citadel was not going to find any more answers. The eleven dockets had been drained, squeezed and stripped of every fact, pattern or gobbet of information that stood any chance of answering the question of how the insider got into the convoy in the first place and managed to stay there until it had used up all its torpedoes and left, transmitting to Doenitz its number of kills and then making for Lorient or Brest, where leave, French wine and pliant women waited…

Piles of large leaves, gold and brown, swirled round the trees along the Mall; two Guardsmen saluted smartly; Buckingham Palace and its trees formed the western horizon behind the Queen Victoria statue. Farther to the west, hundreds and thousands of miles beyond, there was probably a convoy plodding its way across the grey wastes of the North Atlantic winter, bound for Liverpool or the Clyde, with a U-boat like a rapid cancer in its midst and every man in every ship knowing that as soon as it was dark the insider’s torpedoes would start to run… Equally, a U-boat captain was perhaps glancing at the convoy every hour or so, confirming its course, perhaps choosing his victims for the night.

Supposing that somehow the Swedish ship in every convoy was in fact the key to the insiders – what then? Would the Government refuse to allow Swedish ships to sail in British convoys? They would need plenty of hard evidence before making such a decision: they were treading very lightly with the Swedes as it was, trying to ensure they could buy the vitally needed Swedish ball-bearings, and knowing the Swedes allowed troop trains to pass back and forth through their country carrying Germans to Norway. The Germans and Prussians were traditional friends of Sweden and the cynic might say that with Britain apparently on her knees and Denmark and Norway occupied, this was no time to expect the Swedes to turn on her old friends.

How to prove it? And, having proved it, what to do about it? He found himself walking along Birdcage Walk knowing that, for all the good he was doing, he might as well walk the extra few hundred yards to Palace Street and see Clare. Army dispatch riders, Air Ministry cars, the wide tyres noisy on the road… He turned left to cross Horseguards Parade and fifteen minutes later was back in the ASIU room two floors below ground level in the Citadel.

Jemmy and the Croupier were busy at their desks and Ned unlocked his papers and spread the old chart face downwards on his desk, so that the enormous form could be read. He opened his notebook, and then called to the two other men. When they came over he gestured at the form.

‘That shows the guts of the material in the dockets.’

Jemmy sniffed like a pointer testing the wind and ran a finger across the headings. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘who
cares
who owns the bloody ships, and what does it matter what they’re carrying? They all get sunk!’

‘Read out the entries to him,’ Ned told the Croupier crossly, irritated by Jemmy’s manner. ‘He gets tripped up by words of more than one syllable.’

The Croupier was already scanning the columns and he remained silent for two or three minutes reading the entries, while Jemmy huffily lit a cigarette. Finally the Croupier sighed. ‘The bloody Swedes… All this time they’ve been shitting on us from the sanctity of a neutral flag. Has Uncle seen this?’

Jemmy, startled, bent over the form. ‘I was looking at the zigzag numbers. Nothing of interest there.’

Ned shook his head in answer to the Croupier. ‘No. I only spotted it when you were both out at lunch, and I took a turn round the Park just to sort out my thoughts.’

‘You’ve checked all this?’ Jemmy asked. ‘I mean, you’ve gone through the dockets again just in case there was one convoy without a Swede in it?’

‘Yes. I did that straight away. I was hoping there was one,’ he admitted. ‘Their Lordships are likely to shoot the bearer of bad news.’

The Croupier gave a short and bitter laugh. ‘No, TL will be delighted. But don’t accept a drink from anyone at the Foreign Office because it’ll be poisoned. It was the Foreign Office (in its infinite wisdom, of course) that insisted we allow neutrals into our convoys. I once saw an FO minute on the subject. Said letting in neutrals like the Swedes – yes, they damned well mentioned the Swedes as an example, come to think of it – would “create a good impression”. Well–’ he ran his fingers along to the total under the ‘losses’ column, ‘it looks as though they were right: an “impression” on eighty-eight ships.’