SS-GB (33 page)

‘Lost someone?’

Douglas rested on a railing, pleased with a chance to catch his breath. ‘Big man, in his middle fifties, greying hair, dark complexion, dark business suit and white shirt – arrested in Liverpool Road about three
A.M.’
He’d said it all so many times that it had become the sort of hasty prayer that is mumbled by those without faith.

‘Proper bloody muddle, isn’t it?’ He was a thin, twitchy little fellow with expensive clothes, a Royal Artillery necktie and heavy rimmed spectacles. ‘I live in Highbury Crescent,’ he said. Douglas realized that
the man had hardly heard Harry’s description, and didn’t care. ‘A lot of these people are riffraff,’ he confided, having approved of Douglas’s middle-class appearance. ‘You look whacked. Have you eaten?’

‘No,’ said Douglas.

‘Well you’ve probably got a bob or two in your pocket. If you go along the railing there, the sentries can be bribed to slip across the road and bring fried fish and chips. They must be making a fortune at the prices they’re charging.’ He smiled to show that he bore them no ill will.

‘Fish and chips?’ said Douglas. It sounded delicious.

‘These people think the Germans will bring them food.’

‘But you don’t think so?’

‘Ask yourself,’ said the man scornfully. ‘I’ve seen army field kitchens in action during the last lot…during the last war,’ he added in case Douglas hadn’t understood him. ‘Can you imagine how they are going to cope with this chaos? What are they going to get? Slice off the roast beef and two veg…huh. They’ll be lucky to get a mouthful of potato soup. You get along there and get a feed. Some of these kids, and the old ones, will be in a terrible state by morning unless these bloody Huns get themselves moving…Where did you say…Liverpool Road?’

‘About three
A.M.’

The little man nodded. It was the chaos that was so distasteful to him; he had no quarrel with men who knew what they were doing. ‘Arrest Team Number 187. They knew what they were doing. Polite young officer. He must have given your friend’s wife a yellow docket, with a counterfoil number on one side above his signature. What was the last letter?’

‘T.’

‘Then you should find him near that large T over there.’

‘I went there first,’ said Douglas wearily. ‘I know the system.’

‘Yes, well it will have been Arrest Team 187. Jerry officer couldn’t speak more than half-a-dozen words of English. They’d come from Liverpool Road…and some stupid kid of a copper; he couldn’t have been more than nineteen.’ He tapped Douglas’s chest. ‘They’re the ones I blame – the bloody coppers – what are they doing, helping the Jerries arrest innocent people in the middle of the night? I’d put the whole lot of them up against the wall and shoot the buggers. I never have liked coppers.’

‘My friend must have been in the same bus with you.’

‘Big fellow you say? Grey hair. Did he have a Guards tie?’

‘Very likely.’

‘The big guardsman. Yes, I remember him. He took it badly, sat up at the front of the bus with his hands in his pockets. Big man, broad shoulders. I remember thinking he must be a hotel doorman or a boxer or something.’ The man stood on tiptoe to see across the crowd. Failing to do so, he put a foot on one of the cattle pen rails and hoisted himself up. ‘Go over to the S sign. I seem to remember seeing him there, when I got the sentry to buy me some fish and chips.’

‘Thanks,’ said Douglas as he moved on.

‘You’ll get yourself something to eat, if you take my advice,’ the man called after him.

Douglas saw Sylvia before he saw Harry. She was sitting on the cattle railing, chewing a piece of bread. There was no reason to be surprised at the sight of Sylvia. She was a gambler, and just as an obsessional gambler wins, and returns again and again, to gamble
until all the winnings are gone, so would Sylvia keep risking her freedom until she lost it forever.

‘We don’t need you,’ she said when she caught sight of Douglas.

‘How did you find me, chief?’ said Harry.

‘Routine inquiries,’ said Douglas.

‘Thanks very much, chief. I mean it.’

‘No more than you’d do for me, Harry,’ said Douglas.

‘Why don’t you two get married?’ said Sylvia. She sniffed, popped the last of the piece of bread into her mouth and got down from where she was perched on the railing.

‘I think it’s going to be all right,’ said Harry.

‘How?’ said Douglas.

‘Sylvia’s people are going to fix one of the officers.’

To a Metropolitan policeman fix could mean nothing other than a bribe. Sylvia pulled a face, as if angry that Harry was talking about it. ‘It’s the best way,’ said Harry.

‘Yes, it might be,’ said Douglas cautiously. If Harry went through the interrogation centre, it must result in an entry on his personal file at Scotland Yard. If Douglas arranged for him to be released, it must result in an entry on Douglas’s file. A bribed guard was the only way to secure Harry’s freedom without any compromising paperwork.

‘We don’t need you,’ said Sylvia again. It was tempting for Douglas to believe that her contempt was a sign of unrequited love; that hellish fury that scorned women are reputed to conjure up. But he could see that it was deeper than that; it was irrational and unbalanced hysteria, and it frightened him. Perhaps she saw that fear on his face. ‘Go back to your office, Douglas,’ she jeered. ‘We’ll do this our way.’ She used his first name in an attempt to deprive
him of any dignity that his family name or his rank could have provided.

‘I hope you both know what you are doing,’ said Douglas looking at Harry.

Harry rubbed his jaw. ‘No, we’ll be all right, chief, honestly.’

‘One of your friends can contact me if you want anything,’ said Douglas. He was tired from his search and depressed by everything he’d seen. Now he retreated before Sylvia’s hatred.

‘Tell Joan,’ said Harry.

‘Tell Joan what?’ said Douglas.

‘Tell her I’ll be home soon.’

‘I’ll tell her,’ said Douglas. He was glad of an excuse to get away from there but once outside he reproached himself for being so quick to accept Harry’s reassurances.

The smell of fried fish was on the air and Douglas walked along the road to the fried fish shop that the little man had talked about. There were four people bending over the fryers. All of them worked furiously to supply the endless stream of German soldiers, who carried the paper-wrapped fish across the empty road to where lines of hungry prisoners waited behind the barbed wire of the cattle market boundary. Huge white five-pound notes were being tossed across the counter, handled with the same careless haste given to the newspaper wrappings.

Douglas sat down at one of the marble-topped tables in the empty dining area. ‘No service there,’ shouted one of the men at the fryer.

‘Where is there service?’ asked Douglas, going to the counter.

‘You’ll have to find another fish shop, mate,’ said the man at the fryer. He mopped his brow with his hand. ‘No time for casuals today.’

‘You bring me fried plaice and chips,’ demanded Douglas.

‘Or what?’ said the man, leaning across the counter top to put his face close to Douglas.

‘Or I’ll come round the counter there and dip you, and your three pals in the fryer,’ said Douglas quietly.

‘You…’ The man aimed a blow at Douglas but he found his wrist gripped and twisted hard enough for his face to be pressed on to the pile of newspapers. ‘All right, all right, don’t get nasty!’ he shouted. The other three men pretended not to notice what was happening.

A German soldier – with a vested interest in the continued functioning of the fried fish shop – grabbed at Douglas’s free arm but was greeted with such a roar of parade-ground German that he let go immediately, and even came to a position of attention. ‘Now you give me a nice piece of plaice, and four pennyworth of chips,’ Douglas continued, still holding the man, ‘or I’ll put you over the other side of the street, inside the wire. You understand?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry, sir.’ Douglas let him go. Sullenly the man slammed a piece of fish on to a thick chipped white plate, following with a portion of chips aimed carelessly enough to scatter half-a-dozen of them across the wooden counter top.

Douglas put a half-crown on the counter and got his change and a surly grunt. The man nodded to the German soldier and another portion of fish landed in newspaper. As his practised hands wrapped it, Douglas glimpsed the
Daily Telegraph
front page. The ancient headline said, ‘Germans in retreat near Ashford. Canterbury declared open city as German tanks enter.’ What have they done to us, thought Douglas? What has it done to me?

He looked out through the fish shop window, the
glaze of condensation was streaked with tears in which herds of prisoners could be glimpsed. Even above the sizzle of the fryer, and the clink of money, he could hear them.

Douglas sprinkled vinegar and salt upon his fish and chips. All of his working life had been spent in this sort of squalor. But until now he’d been fortified by the belief that he was upholding law and order. Now as he looked across the road that belief faltered.

Douglas thought of the father he’d never known and of the happy marriage so cruelly ended. Now he had only his son. There was no place in his life for the sort of complexities that Barbara Barga would bring. And yet, after all the reasoning was done, he’d fallen in love with her. There was no denying it; he wanted her in every way. But as a policeman, he distrusted love; too often had he seen the other side of it, the violence, the suffering and despair it could bring. He told himself that she represented no more than a chance to escape from the madhouse of deceit and suffering. He told himself it was the idea of America that he was in love with, and Barbara no more than a go-between. But whatever the truth of it, he needed her and had to see her.

‘You look like hell,’ she said with an amused smile. ‘And you smell of fried fish. Douglas Archer, where have you been? I’ve been eating my heart out.’ It was just her way of joking, of course, but it was what he wanted to hear.

They embraced tightly and then she put a hand against his cheek while she looked at him. ‘Can I have a drink?’ he asked.

‘My darling, of course.’ His wife had never called him darling, and he found it a strange form of address, one confined, or so he’d thought, to movie stars. And the idea of Douglas asking for a drink as soon as he stepped through the door was one that would have surprised most people who knew him.

She went into the kitchen, prised ice cubes from the tray and dropped them into two tumblers. Douglas told her about Harry Woods at the cattle market but he gave no speaking role to Sylvia.

‘Only the Nazi press handouts are going out on the wire service,’ said Barbara as she passed him his whisky. ‘I’ve got a great story, and lots of photos, but there is a blackout. Hundreds of people have been arrested, you just have to take a cab uptown to see what’s happening. Back home a dozen papers would have broken this story by now.’

‘You’re not back home,’ Douglas reminded her. ‘And the arrests number thousands, not hundreds.’ A sudden ray of sunlight lit up the white walls of the kitchen but it didn’t last long.

‘Colonel Mayhew phoned. He wants to see you. He’s coming here about eight.’

‘I have an arrest warrant for him. Huth wants to frighten him into doing a deal.’

‘What kind of deal?’

‘Mayhew gets the King and takes him to America. Huth gets a lot of atomic physics research. The Germans are trying to make an atomic explosion.’

She showed no surprise. ‘So I’d heard. Can I freshen that drink?’

Douglas put his hand over the glass. ‘They’re both crazy,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Because once the King gets to the USA, Mayhew will be left aside and forgotten. And as soon as Huth gets the research material, he will become superfluous. He is a lawyer; he has no scientific training. He had a lot of stuff extracted from German scientific papers and encyclopaedias as background, and two special reports by Professor Springer. I read it all; now I know nearly as much as Huth does.’

‘Perhaps Mayhew and Huth are motivated by something other than ambition?’

‘You can’t be serious, Barbara.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’ve never met two men so alike in their ruthless ambition.’ She saw then the great strength within him, not the athletic superiority that men so often used to intimidate others, but a strength that was kind and unassuming.

They went into the lounge and sat down on the ugly little sofa. Its loose cover, decorated with large green leaves, made it look like some carnivorous plant.

‘Do you miss your wife?’ she said. She touched the ice in her drink with her fingertip, and watched herself doing it.

‘Sometimes. We were children together.’

‘That’s really tough.’

‘I have the boy.’ She sat down with him and he put an arm round her.

Barbara drank a little of her drink. ‘And you have me too,’ she said.

‘Do I?’ He looked at her but she had turned away from him. He touched her back. She shivered. ‘Do I?’ he said again.

‘You know you do,’ she whispered to the ice cubes.

‘I love you, Barbara.’

‘I love you too, Doug. I didn’t want to, God knows.’ The cloud moved across the sun, and the golden light dwindled and died until the room was almost dark. She leaned over and switched on the table lamp. ‘I hate this damned sofa,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘It’s the ugliest thing I ever saw,’ said Douglas. ‘Will you marry me?’

‘I was going to have it dyed, but the people who rent me the place probably think it’s valuable.’ She fingered the chintz cover thoughtfully.

Douglas said, ‘My year’s salary is no more than you earn for a good story.’

‘Let’s marry soon, very soon.’

‘There’s my son, remember.’

‘I remember.’

‘Don’t cry, Barbara.’

With mock severity she said, ‘Without your son, no deal,’ but the words caught in her throat, and she cried as he put both arms round her and kissed her.

Colonel Mayhew arrived at eight o’clock. Douglas and Barbara felt a childish satisfaction in the way that they received him in the lounge, pretending they hadn’t watched him arrive from the window of the bedroom upstairs.