The Interrogator (35 page)

‘Childs? No,’ and he waved a dismissive hand, showering ash from the cigarette he was holding on to the desk of his secretary.

‘So no one’s told you? We’ve found something important.’

‘All right, you tell me,’ and he stood aside to let her into his office.

Lieutenant Childs slipped back into the Tracking Room as she was beginning her brief. He had enjoyed what only he could describe as a ‘satisfactory’ canteen supper. Unlocking his desk drawer, he took out the decrypts and presented them to Winn with the hushed reverence of a wise man before the manger. Winn dragged his anglepoise over and switched it on with a purposeful click, then began reading and shuffling the little pieces of paper in its light.

‘B-Reports,’ he muttered after a minute and glanced up at Mary, then across at Childs.

‘There isn’t much doubt, is there?’

He looked at the flimsies again then with an exasperated grunt tossed one back towards them: ‘My favourite: “Admiralty issued warning of a U-boat”. That’s us, here, the Tracking Room. What a mess.’

Reaching for his cigarettes, he lit one, then said:

‘And I have news too. I’ve been at Bletchley and the Naval Section there has done some analysis of the
Bismarck
operation. There are some indications that the enemy was able to follow the British hunt for the battleship.’

Winn picked up a file from his desk and removed a report stamped ‘Most Secret’: ‘There’s a long list of German signals here that seem to draw on our own. Here, for instance, sent on the twenty-fifth of May:

ENEMY AIRCRAFT OF SQUADRON ZB6 REPORTED TO PLYMOUTH AT 1405: AM IN CONTACT WITH ENEMY BATTLESHIP.

‘I’m going to ring the Director tonight. He knows about Bletchley’s work but he’ll want to know about yours too. The maddening thing is our Code Security people at Section 10 were given some of this stuff a fortnight ago. Sheer bloody incompetence.’

Winn sighed and eased himself back in his chair: ‘It isn’t clear how far this goes. The enemy will be working on all our codes and ciphers, the question is, which ones has he broken – one, perhaps two or more? And how can we be sure?’

Mary looked at her hands, neatly folded in her lap, and the angry mark on her wrist, still smarting from the candle burn. And she wondered for a fanciful moment if it was a sort of punishment, a stinging reminder: Lindsay, the codes, the
Imperial Star
and all those ships setting out in ignorance across the Atlantic.

‘Marvellous. They’re reading ours and we’re reading theirs,’ said Childs with a small dispassionate smile.

Winn gave him a disapproving look: ‘We don’t know how many of our signals they’re reading yet but one is too many. One signal sank the
Imperial Star
.’

Childs wriggled uncomfortably.

‘All right, I’ve a call to make to the Director,’ and Winn picked up the green phone on his desk. ‘Go to bed. And thank you.’

They both got up and Childs moved towards the door but Mary hovered at the edge of his desk: ‘There’s Jürgen Mohr, of course.’

Winn did not bat an eyelid but kept dialling. Only when he had finished did he look up at her, his face impassive, the receiver to his ear: ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’

It was nearly midnight when Mary left the Citadel. As the Admiralty’s doors swung open into Spring Gardens she touched the tightly folded square of paper in her pocket. Fine summer rain was beading her brown wool jacket. Her wrist was throbbing lightly. A strange comfort. She set off across the Mall and did not stop walking until her finger was on the bell of Lindsay’s apartment. She felt purposeful but calm, as she had done when they had met in Trafalgar Square all those weeks before. Why? Was it her need or his? Did she need him more or less than he needed her? Did it matter? She could hear him thumping wearily down the carpeted staircase to the door. What was he thinking? Then it opened and without speaking he reached out to brush her cheek with his fingers.

Later she lay small and naked beside him in bed, the sweet smell of his sex on her body, the sheets and blankets hanging in shameless folds on the floor. And she tried to concentrate and hold those moments when past pain and fear and the future were lost in the strange stillness she felt in his arms. And she reached over to touch his hard shoulder and run her fingers lightly across his chest to his stomach. Then she rolled quickly on to her side and stretched down to the floor and felt in the darkness for where her jacket must have fallen. And when at last she found it she lifted it, crumpled, by the sleeve and reached into the pocket with two fingers.

‘Here.’

‘What is it?’

‘What you want.’

He unfolded it carefully, then leant across to switch on the bedside light:
Admiralty issued warning of a U-boat . . .

43

T

he bell rang in the grey half-world that was always his just before dawn, at the edge of consciousness when memories and images form and shift and dissipate like clouds at a front. An uncomfortable but familiar place, a rattling place, a place Jürgen Mohr could smell and taste in his sleep, and the faces always the same. Sometimes they were smiling, more often wide-eyed with fear and screaming, and then that tight grey world shuddered until it was lost in an impenetrable blackness. But at such times he was calm, he was careless, he knew that darkness so well, knew its deep, deep emptiness. Perhaps one day he would be caught and it would hold him for ever. Twice now he had been drawn from it by a small red light. Groping towards it, clutching at nothing, he had found himself between the smoking engines of his boat. And Heine’s slight frame was bent over the starboard diesel with an oil can. He had reached out to touch his shoulder. The engineer had turned with a smile of recognition and pleasure. But his face was the beaten face of Lindsay’s photograph, one eye closed, his cheeks purple and the weal about his neck scarlet and black. And then the roll-call bell had rung in the hall below, as it was ringing now, and there was the comfort of boots on the boards outside the room and the sharp knock of his batman at the door.

The men were gathering on the broad terrace at the back of Stapley Hall, chatting, yawning, lighting the first cigarette of the day, some in civvies, some in air-force or navy blue, most in a mixture of the two. It was cool in the shade of the house, even on a bright August morning, with a hint of vapour when they spoke. The prisoners were falling through habit into ragged lines, watched by the sentries at the wire and in the towers at the corners of the terrace.

‘There seem to be more guards than usual, Herr Kap’tän.’

A tousled-looking Fischer was standing on the steps behind him.

‘Perhaps the camp commander is going to pay us a visit.’

There were forty soldiers at least, twice the regular complement, and a good number of unfamiliar faces.

As they watched, a party of ten men under the command of Sergeant Harrison began marching along the wire to the gate. It opened and Harrison gave a sharp blast on his whistle, the signal for the parade to come to order. Mohr dropped his cigarette and walked round the prisoners – their lines orderly now – to stand at their head, Brand, the Luftwaffe major, to his right and Fischer to his left. The guards took up positions in front of him, bayonets fixed, backs to the wire, then on a command from Harrison the headcount began, a corporal and two men walking through the lines. Mohr glanced at his watch. It would be over in five minutes; everyone would be present and correct enough for the British and then he would breakfast in his room.

But Sergeant Harrison did not blow his whistle or bellow a shrill parade-ground ‘Dismissed’. He put the piece of paper he had used to tot up the prisoners in his pocket and marched back to the gate. There was a rumble of surprise in the ranks and a Luftwaffe clown shouted something about breakfast that Mohr did not catch. He reached into his jacket for his cigarettes, to find there were only two left; he would buy more from the NAAFI at lunch-time. He took one and stroked it; half the cigarette, then he would dismiss the men himself. But as Fischer bent to light it for him, he saw out of the corner of his eye some British officers approaching the gate at the east end of the terrace.

‘Thank you, Fischer.’

Four officers in khaki led by Benson with his – what was it they called it in the movies? – his ‘posse’ of guards. They took up positions at the gate, rifles at the ready. Benson and the other officers marched on towards him.

‘Good morning, Captain.’ There was a chilliness in the Major’s voice Mohr had not heard before. ‘This is Lieutenant Cox from the Military Police. He will be leading your escort. You and a number of your men are being taken to another camp.’

No, Benson could not say where, there were no further details and there would be no time to pack.

‘I have the list here. Read it out, Harrison, would you.’

The sergeant took out his notepad, cleared his throat nervously, then began to read the names.

‘May I?’ Mohr asked with a dry smile and he took the pad. His name was at the top of the list, then Fischer, the officers of the
112
and the
500
and of course the propaganda reporter, Lange. No, they were not going to let it go.

‘I’m sure it will only be a temporary arrangement,’ said Benson uncomfortably.

Fischer read out the ten names to the parade. There was a murmur of concern as they stepped forward to be escorted to the gate.

‘Dismissed.’

The other men stood at the wire to watch as their officers were led under close escort round the east wing and under the great monkey puzzle tree to the carriageway. A green military bus was waiting in front of the Hall, its engine grumbling, the windows painted black. As they approached the bus door, Mohr caught a glimpse of navy-blue uniform through the windscreen and his pulse beat faster.

‘Wait here.’ Cox left them there and crunched round the front of the bus but he was back a minute later with Lindsay at his side. They were together only a moment but there was something in his movements, in his face, his smile, that Mohr had not seen before, a stillness, a quiet assurance, and it was unnerving: ‘You’ve come to escort us.’

Lindsay looked at him curiously for a few seconds and Mohr wondered if the composure in his voice had sounded a little studied.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked in German this time.

Still no reply. Then a guard prodded him sharply in the back with his rifle, forcing him to stumble on to the steps of the bus.

Mohr was woken by the cursing of the driver as the old military bus kangarooed to a halt. He yawned and glanced at his watch – they had been travelling for at least eight hours, with one brief stop for the lavatory and no food and now it was late evening. The military policeman opposite was sleeping, his rifle resting carelessly against the seat in front. Beyond the security partition he could hear someone climbing the steps and issuing orders to the driver. Fischer was snoring heartily across the aisle. Then the engine roared again and the bus began to roll forwards. He pressed his eye to a crack in the blackout paint
on the window and hazy summer green seemed to flash by in the fading light, as if they were in a wood or a park. After a few minutes they began to slow down and then to crawl and there were more muffled orders before the driver lifted the heavy clutch and the bus shot forward, to stop seconds later. This time the engine coughed and died. The military policeman jerked upright and his gun clattered to the floor.

‘I won’t tell,’ and Mohr gave him his sweetest smile.

The soldier blushed the colour of his cap badge and got stiffly to his feet. Boots clattered on the bus steps and the screen door slid back with a screech.

‘All right, at the double.’

Another British sergeant stood squarely in the frame. The bus was close to the wire and it was a few seconds before Mohr realised with a start that it was parked in front of another great house, a finer house, its old bricks warm pink in the evening sunshine. It was elegant, handsome in an understated way, familiar – but it gave him no pleasure.

44

I

t was the same second-floor room at Trent Park he had shared with Heine three months before. That was deliberate, of course, and crude, but strangely affecting. And Helmut Lange had taken the same bed, the one on the right-hand side as you looked from door to barred window. There was a neat pile of brown blankets at the bottom of the other bed and the bucket with the broken handle they had been obliged to share. On the dirty white wall beyond it the tangled shadow of the cedar, just as he remembered it, twisting and turning interminably in even a light breeze. And his thoughts drifted with it to home, as they had before, but opaque, brittle memories and when he closed his eyes it was the kitchen at the camp that swam into focus and the swollen face of the little engineer. More than once he had tried to say his prayers but he could not shape the words, the old words of home, ‘forgiveness’, ‘hope’, ‘salvation’, empty and hollow in this place. And in the silent early hours he tried to bury the thought, no, the feeling, that they would never have meaning, never, unless he found the courage to do what he knew in the fibre of his being to be right.

They left him alone on the first day and he tried to prepare. He had lost control last time. This time he would say he had seen nothing, he knew nothing, he could say nothing more, nothing. Fischer had been sent to talk to him again at Stapley, a gentle reminder to keep his mouth shut. Bruns and Schmidt had visited too: no blows, only the thinly veiled threat of their broad shoulders and rolled-up sleeves. But he had known the matter would not rest. Lieutenant Lindsay was not going to let it rest.

It was after breakfast on the second day at the Park and he was taking a piss in the bucket. Footsteps in the corridor and he knew at once it was Lindsay.

‘Helmut. How are you?’

The door closed on the guards and he pulled the chair from the table and sat down: ‘You know why you’re here, of course.’