The Interrogator (11 page)

‘I see.’

‘So you will be careful what you say won’t you?’ said Winn.

‘Of course,’ she said crossly.

‘Sorry,’ said Winn – there was nothing in his voice to suggest that he meant it – ’but we need to be clear about these things.’

‘And you are now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then perhaps you’ll excuse me.’

Winn shuffled awkwardly in his chair. Mary was struck again by the tired lines on his face, the tobacco-yellow tinge to his complexion, and in spite of herself she felt sorry for him. He was doing no more than his duty.

‘It’s fine, Rodger. I know how important security is.’

He blinked at her and smiled: ‘I know you do.’

She was at the door of his office when, almost as an afterthought, he said: ‘Funny, but he seems to have upset a few people, doesn’t he?’

Mary turned to look at him sharply. ‘Douglas? Who has he upset?’

‘Well, what about your brother?’

It troubled Mary for the rest of the day. People were talking about her, asking, ‘Can Mary be trusted?’ It had never crossed her mind that she should speak of her work but Winn had gone out of his way to warn her against it and in a strange way that made a difference. She felt as if she was being drawn into a conspiracy to keep Lindsay at a distance. She was conscious that she was doing only half her job and she kept glancing furtively over at Winn’s office to see if he was
watching her. Winn was far too busy. He had probably forgotten their conversation already. But she felt an enormous sense of release when, at a little after seven, she stepped out of the Citadel into evening sunshine.

She had arranged to meet Lindsay beneath the lions in Trafalgar Square. He had booked a table at La Coquille just two minutes walk away in St Martin’s Lane. It was only a few days after one of the heaviest raids Mary could remember and yet the square was bustling with West End theatre-goers. A group of young women in air-force blue was feeding the pigeons, joking, laughing, and a pavement artist was hanging his pictures on the railings outside St Martin-in-the-Fields.

‘Hello you.’

Mary felt his lips upon her neck and she reached up to touch his hair. Lindsay turned her shoulders towards him, held both her hands and looked at her intently.

‘I don’t know if I’ve said it already, but you have the most beautiful eyes.’

‘I think you’ve mentioned it, yes.’

‘It’s worth mentioning again. Shall we go?’

‘Do we have to, Douglas? I don’t feel very hungry.’ She knew she did not want to spend the evening in a smoky restaurant.

‘No, not if you don’t want to.’ He sounded rather disappointed. ‘What would you prefer to do? It’s too late for a show.’

‘Then take me home.’ The words seemed to slip from her. A thrilling impulse, not a thought, and she felt a little frightened.

Lindsay said nothing, but offered her his arm and they crossed the square.

‘Have you missed me?’ she asked.

‘Yes. I’ve thought about you all the time.’

‘Tell me about Liverpool?’

They walked slowly along Whitehall, past the Admiralty, Downing Street and the Treasury and Lindsay spoke of HMS
White
and the prisoners. The commander of the
112
had been at Trent Park for a week: ‘Mohr’s men call him “the Buddha”. They respect him but they don’t love him. He looks like every British boy’s idea of an evil U-boat commander, black leather jacket, swarthy complexion – by no means the perfect Aryan man.’

She laughed. ‘You mean like you.’

By the time they turned into Lord North Street the sky behind the broken silhouette of St John’s was a rich blue. Mary took the key from her pocket. Her hand was shaking a little.

‘Where’s your . . .’ Lindsay cleared his throat. ‘Where’s your uncle?’ He was nervous too.

‘In his constituency.’

The door clicked behind them. Before she could switch on the light he turned her towards him, held her face between his hands and kissed her, slowly at first and then quicker, harder, with trembling urgency. She was clinging to him but he pushed her gently away and his fingers were on her face then on her breasts, loosening her blouse.

‘Where?’ She took his hand and kissed it.

‘This way.’

And fear was gone, and reason; there was only love and a wild excitement that just for a moment made her laugh out loud.

Later they lay together in silence, naked beneath a cotton sheet, her head resting on his chest. The steady beat of his heart made her smile. She was lying next to a man and that man had been inside her. Why had she let him make love to her? She was in love with him, she was sure of that. She had never been orthodox in her views about sex before marriage but it had happened tonight because, there in Trafalgar Square, she had wanted to draw him closer than any man had ever been to her, to give him a part of herself.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

‘Oh about you, about us.’

Her head slipped from his chest as he shuffled down the bed and on to his side to look into her eyes: ‘I love you.’

‘Thank goodness for that,’ she said brusquely.

He laughed.

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to give myself to a man who didn’t.’ Lindsay smiled and stroked her face with his fingertips: ‘I was under the impression you’d taken rather than given.’

Mary pushed at him playfully: ‘Are you accusing me of being forward?’

‘No, I’m grateful to you, and in love with you.’ He reached beneath the sheet to caress her.

‘Grateful?’ She expected him to say something flippant but his face stiffened a little and he rolled on to his back.

‘Grateful? Oh for bringing a little hope into my life, some love, yes some hope.’

‘Was it so bleak?’

He gave a long sigh then swung his legs off the bed and stood up. She watched as he reached over to the bedside lamp and then he was lost in the darkness. A moment later she heard the clang of the shutter guard and thin white light poured into the room.

‘Yes, it was bleak.’ He padded back to the bed, sat on the end of it and reached under the sheet for one of her feet. ‘I don’t know. These things affect people differently but I’ve felt, well, angry, depressed, mostly guilty.’

Mary interrupted: ‘Your ship? But you did more than your duty.’

He gave her foot a gentle squeeze. ‘I didn’t really, you know.’

‘Of course you did. They don’t give medals out for nothing.’

He snorted and shook his head vigorously. ‘Yes they do. That was nothing. Nothing.’

Mary sat up and the sheet slipped from her as she moved down the bed towards him. She put her arms around him, pressing herself tightly against his back. They sat there in silence for a while, then she said: ‘Will you tell me what happened?’

‘No,’ he said abruptly.

She felt a pang of disappointment and almost let go of him.

‘Why won’t you talk about it?’

He must have heard the disappointment in her voice because he turned to face her, leant forward and kissed her gently.

‘I can’t, Mary. Not yet. Not tonight.’

14

F

or three days Helmut Lange had watched the cedar’s shadow creep around the walls of his room at Trent Park like a giant clock marking the hours between dawn and dusk. He had followed its shifting, twisted patterns as if they were a crazy reflection of his own thoughts: memories of his home in Munich, his father the teacher, his mother on her knees in church and his friends at the St Anna Gymnasium. Darker memories too, of his time at the front in Poland and those last desperate minutes aboard the
U-500
. There were no magazines or books, no distractions. The room was a blank canvas for memories, empty but for two roughly sprung camp beds with army-issue blankets and a bucket.

The other bed groaned as Leutnant August Heine rolled over to face him.

‘Why are you smiling, Helmut?’

‘Was I smiling?’ asked Lange.

‘You were smiling.’

Lange had silently cursed the British for holding him with a man called Heine who possessed not an ounce of poetry in his soul.

‘If they don’t want to interrogate us, why are they holding us?’ Heine asked.

Lange shrugged. Heine was a typical northerner, reserved, perhaps a little shy, nineteen, slight, greasy brown as if the engine oil of the
U-112
was engrained in his skin. He seemed to have no interest in politics or religion, beer or women. He was an engineer – a small but essential cog – and U-boats were his chief, almost his only concern. At first his conversation had been limited even more by his commander’s order to say nothing of the war and the
U-112
. Lange had formed the firm impression that Mohr was capable of inspiring a dread which the old Jewish prophets would have envied. But slowly, patiently, he had drawn Heine from his shell. The engineer had begun to talk freely of the
112
, of ships
sunk and his commander’s fame, and of the feature film that had been shot aboard. It was to the U-boat that Heine’s thoughts turned again:

‘Admiral Dönitz came to see us sail.’

‘Yes,’ said Lange as he hoisted himself up on to the edge of his bed. ‘Cigarette?’

Heine reached across and took one from the packet. There were just three left.

‘I was there too,’ said Lange casually, ‘there when you sailed.’

‘You saw us leave Lorient?’ Heine asked with boyish excitement. ‘What a turnout.’

‘Yes.’

The quay had been crowded with naval uniforms, the black greatcoats of the senior officers at the head of the gangway. Lange remembered the
112
’s screws turning slowly in reverse, the shouts of ‘Happy hunting’, and the thump of the military band as it struck up the old favourite, ‘Wir fahren gegen Engeland’, the ‘Sailing Against England’ song. The music, the occasion, the spirit of the men on the narrow deck, flowers fastened to their olive-green fatigues – Lange had been full of pride and admiration.

‘Have you met the Admiral?’ Heine asked.

‘Three or four times. The last time a few months ago. I took some photographs for a feature. He shook my hand and he remembered my name.’

Heine leant forward, eyes bright with excitement: ‘Three or four times?’

‘Four times, yes.’

‘He visited our boat once and spoke to me. He’s a personal friend of the commander.’

‘Is he?’ said Lange flatly. Almost everyone in the U-boat arm claimed Admiral Dönitz as a personal friend.

‘The commander knows him very well.’

‘Yes?’ Lange struggled to suppress a yawn. His stomach was rumbling; it would be supper soon and perhaps the guards would bring news of his transfer to a proper camp. Heine was still speaking: ‘. . . at headquarters and before.’

Lange looked across at him: ‘Herr Kapitän Mohr was at U-boat Headquarters?’

‘Yes, for some time. He was . . .’

Lange stiffened and raised his hand with a jerk. The boredom and indifference that had fogged his mind for most of the last three days had been swept away in an instant. He knew little of U-boats, and no one had ever trusted him with a secret, but he was enough of a journalist to know that their conversation was dangerously close to one. Chit-chat was one thing but Heine was forgetting himself.

‘I think we’d better talk of something else,’ he said quietly.

Heine was pulling nervously at the cuff of his leather jacket, his face blotchy red, and when he spoke again it was in barely more than a whisper: ‘I’ve been talking too much, haven’t I? I’ll say nothing more.’

‘I think we should change the subject, yes. Tell me, have you ever visited Munich?’

‘You won’t say anything to Kapitän Mohr?’ Heine’s voice trembled a little: ‘Please don’t say anything.’

‘No, no, don’t worry,’ said Lange. ‘No one heard you except me and I can keep a secret.’

‘I heard you,’ the operator in the Map Room whispered under his breath as he lifted the heavy cutting head from the disc.

The Map Room occupied most of the first floor at Trent Park. It was not a room at all but a dozen rooms, each equipped with a recording table and a microphone amplifier. Room Three was at the dark end of the corridor. Lindsay opened the door and stepped quietly inside. The shutters were closed, the room harshly lit by a single naked ceiling bulb. It was little more than a cubicle, smoky and very close. Karl Jacob was sitting with his back to the door.

‘You wanted to speak to me?’

Very deliberately, Jacob placed his headphones on the table in front of him then swung his heavy swivel chair about until he was facing Lindsay. He was an elderly man with a thin, thoughtful face, a neat grey beard and lamp-like glasses that made his light brown eyes appear enormous. He was dressed a little like a street musician in a shabby checked jacket and green flannel trousers. Once, he had been a doctor with a smart practice in Berlin – before his patients cared that he was Jewish.

‘Yes, I have something for you, Lieutenant,’ he said in heavily accented English.

A twelve-inch zinc disc was revolving slowly on the unit in front of him. Lindsay could see from the concentric rings of purple filings on its surface that almost five minutes of conversation had been recorded.

‘Well?’

‘It’s your propaganda man. There’s something he doesn’t want you to hear.’

Jacob pushed back the steel cutting arm and lifted the disc gently from the turntable: ‘Mohr was something at U-boat Headquarters.’

He handed the disc to Lindsay who placed it in a protective can that was lying open on the recording table. They had been listening to the crew of the
112
for nearly a week, until now, none of them had let anything slip.

‘Thank you, Karl. Thank you very much.’

In the duty intelligence officer’s room, Lindsay slipped the fragile disc on to a playback machine, settled behind the desk and picked up a broken set of headphones. He smiled as Lange’s strong bass voice crackled in the single earpiece. Yes, Mohr had done a good job with his crew. Heine was very frightened. But he could use that fear.

15

T

he murmur of conversation and laughter stopped as Lindsay reached the half-open door of the old library. Colonel Philip Checkland was clearing his throat purposefully. Lindsay slipped sheepishly into the room.