The Interrogator (19 page)

And with a short prayer for forgiveness, she stepped briskly from the room, across the next and into the corridor.

Later, at her desk in the Tracking Room, Mary began to regret her sharp words to Lindsay. It was a terrible waste, maddening. He was fumbling for the truth, breaking the rules, and now his reputation was clouded by failure and distrust. And she had let him stumble into this mess. He was paying the price for her silence.

25

T

he silence was broken only once. Lindsay snatched up the telephone, hoping to hear Mary’s voice but it was his mother.

‘Are you all right, Douglas?’

She spoke to him in English for the first time. They had always spoken German in the family. His father was working too hard, his brother had joined the Royal Air Force – ‘Why don’t you ever ring? I’ve heard nothing from the rest of the family but the papers say they’ve bombed Bremen.’ And then there were tears. He was relieved when the call ended.

Rising from the couch, he drifted to the window of his little sitting room. It was half past eleven and St James’s Square was deserted but for a couple kissing in the shadows, entirely caught up in each other. Everything seemed to be falling apart. He shook his head, disgusted with himself for being so full of self-pity. The spooning couple separated and Lindsay watched them amble along the pavement. A black Morris was parked against the kerb opposite and as they passed it he was surprised to see the glowing orange pinprick of a cigarette behind the wheel. He stepped away from the window and drew the heavy blackout curtains. After a moment’s fumbling, he switched on the desk lamp and, reaching for a sheet of paper, wrote a brief note to Mary. If he delivered it now she would be able to read it in the morning, if not before.

The front door swung heavily to behind him and he stood on the pavement outside, catching his breath in the warm, still air. The city was humming restlessly even in the blackout and he could hear drunken voices outside the gentleman’s club on the opposite side of the square. Close by, a car engine grunted. It was the Morris and peering closely at it, he could distinguish the silhouettes of two men. It pulled away quickly from the kerb as he approached. The driver seemed to glance furtively across at him before swinging the car
into Charles II Street. Were they spivs conducting a little night-time business? If you knew the right person you could still buy anything in London.

The house in Lord North Street was close-shuttered. Slipping the envelope through the letterbox, Lindsay turned to wander slowly back, glancing over his shoulder in the hope that Mary would find it at once and call after him. He considered returning to ring the bell but it was after midnight and her uncle was probably at home. He spent a long hour brooding, walking he knew not where before turning almost reluctantly for home. On the doorstep, his keys slipped through his fingers. As he bent to pick them up, he glanced through the iron railings to his left. The black Morris was now parked between two other cars in the north-east corner of the square. The driver and his passenger were lost in shadow but Lindsay knew they were there and that they were watching him. The door clunked firmly shut and he turned to lean against the wall in the dark hall, his chest tight with anxiety. They were not black-market wide boys, they were Special Branch policemen, he was sure of it, perhaps the Security Service. He had been identified as a risk. Perhaps they had searched his apartment. He raced up the stairs, his head pounding, giddy with breathlessness. He would ring Fleming, and he picked up the phone, only to slam it back a few seconds later. Collapsing into a chair, he closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on breathing deeply. Two, three, four minutes passed and his pulse began to slow. He must keep calm. They were probably ordinary policemen carrying out some sort of surveillance operation that was nothing to do with him. Lighting a cigarette, he sat in the darkness and smoked it slowly down to a small stub. This had happened before. Something in him snapped and he lost control. Foolish. Without bothering to look out of the window again, he walked through to the bedroom and flopped on to his lumpy old mattress.

That night, he had a dream. He was standing on the pavement below his apartment and the Morris was close by. The driver’s window was open and an arm with a black tattoo of a fouled anchor was resting against the door. ‘Who are you?’ Lindsay shouted. There was no reply. He bent to look inside. A head lunged towards him and he recoiled in disgust. The man’s face was no longer there, as if a giant hand had dashed it without mercy against a jagged rock. Tails of skin
were clinging to the top of the skull and from one of these hung a tangled strand of auburn hair. And he knew the auburn hair belonged to a sailor from the
Culloden
. When he woke in the morning both his hands were hooked tightly around the frame of his bed. The Morris had gone.

26

T

he news came with the rations. The guard hammered on the door at half past seven and half an hour later he was back with the breakfast tray. Helmut Lange was dressed but lying on his camp bed, trying to ignore the tortured grunts of his room-mate who was busy jumping and stretching in nothing but a vest and pants. Obersteuermann Eduard Bruns considered it his duty as a good National Socialist to be fit and ready. ‘Ready for what?’ Lange had asked him on their first day together. Bruns had shrugged his muscular shoulders and then, after giving the question a little thought, replied: ‘Victory.’ He did not explain how he hoped to contribute to this behind the wire in a British prisoner-of-war camp and Lange knew better than to ask.

‘Trent Park Hotel bed and breakfast,’ the British corporal said cheerily as he placed the tray on the table. Some porridge, some toast and a tin mug of evil brown tea. ‘Your last day, Fritz, your-last-day-here,’ the corporal enunciated the words carefully, as if speaking to small children. ‘New-hotel-tonight.’

Lange was glad to be moving at last. The formal interrogations had not troubled him because he had no secrets to betray, but Lieutenant Lindsay had taken him from the confines of his prison cell into the park and asked him very different questions, questions he was free but unable to answer. And at the club, the lieutenant’s girlfriend had pressed him in a gentle way, too, about the concentration camps, the duty of the Church, and the Jews. Eyes fixed on the white ceiling of his room, Lange had prayed for guidance. In the still hours of the night, Bruns breathing heavily close by, his prayers had been answered and although he was afraid, he took comfort from the thought that he could shrink behind the wire.

At eleven o’clock the guards ordered them from the room, with keys jangling and doors opening the length of the corridor like a scene from the Last Judgement. A military lorry was parked just beyond the
double fence at the front of the house and a group of twenty prisoners was standing in a line close by. Lange stepped forward to join them but the young British army officer in charge shouted something at the guards and one of them grabbed his sleeve: ‘Not yet, Fritz.’

Bruns was at his side: ‘They’re our men from the
112
. They’re separating the officers.’

The two of them stood in silence together on the forecourt and watched as the line of men was escorted through the wire and into the back of the lorry. As soon as the last man had scrambled inside it began to pull away and was replaced by a green military bus. All the officers of the
112
were assembled now, chatting and smoking in the sunshine. Lange recognised his first room-mate, the young engineer, August Heine. Then he heard voices in the outer hall and a thick-set British naval officer stepped through the door and held it open for Kapitän zur See Jürgen Mohr. The prisoners came smartly to attention. Mohr acknowledged their salute with a weak smile.

The British officer was speaking loudly in English. Lange watched them drift through the gate to the bus until a guard yelled something he took to be an order to follow. On an impulse, he began rooting about in his little bag for a pencil and, tearing the back off a cigarette packet, he wrote a short note.

Mohr was still talking to the British officer a little way from the bus. He half turned as Lange approached and looked him up and down: ‘Yes?’

‘Herr Kapitän, I was hoping to leave this note.’

He took the scrap of cardboard from his pocket and handed it to the officer who read it carefully, frowned, then placed it in his jacket pocket: ‘All right. I’ll make sure Lieutenant Lindsay sees it.’

Lange was on the bottom step of the bus when he felt a firm hand against his chest. It was Mohr and he was looking at him intently, his face set hard in a silent promise: Lange would be called to account for his note.

From the window of the interrogators’ office Lindsay watched the military bus pull away. There were a few things he needed to rescue from his desk but no ‘goodbyes’ he wished to say. Well perhaps one,
he thought, a fond farewell to Sassoon’s ghost. It was difficult to take seriously because a small voice kept whispering, ‘This is all a mistake.’ Old notes, German newspapers, military handbooks – he swept them all into the large canvas bag he had once used for his rugby boots. It took just five minutes. He was trying to force the zip together when Charlie Samuels walked into the office.

‘I’ve done that already,’ he said, pointing to Lindsay’s empty desk.

‘I know. Sorry, Charlie.’

‘Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe, Douglas. At least they had the good sense not to try and make a sailor of me.’ Samuels lifted the plain cardboard file he was carrying with the satisfied air of someone preparing to hand over a fine present: ‘I’ve something to show you.’

‘What is it?’

‘Not here,’ he whispered conspiratorially. ‘Come with me.’

He led Lindsay out into the servants’ corridor and to the foot of the back stairs. Then, after checking that no one was about, he began to climb down quickly to the basement.

‘This is very cloak-and-dagger, Charlie,’ said Lindsay, behind him. ‘I feel like Guy Fawkes.’

Samuels did not answer but turned right into a long low badly lit passage way, its walls lined with large cream tiles. Doors to left and right opened on to empty wine racks, boot and dairy rooms, a silver store and an archive, neglected and dusty. It was Lindsay’s first time below stairs.

‘In here,’ said Samuels.

‘Here’ was a dingy barrel-vaulted cellar with whitewashed walls and terracotta floor tiles, lit by a single naked bulb. It was empty but for a rickety trestle table.

‘All right,’ Lindsay’s voice bounced about the room, ‘tell me.’

Samuels took a deep breath: ‘My friend at Oxford sent me this. It will tell you all you need to know.’ And he thrust a file at Lindsay in which there were four or five typed pages. The title in bold at the top of the first page was ‘
Administrative and Auxiliary Codes
’.

The Administrative Code was brought into force in 1934 and used unrecoded for routine signals . . .

Lindsay glanced down the page. There was a section entitled ‘
Naval Code
’, and on the next page, ‘
Long Subtractor System
’ and ‘
Merchant Navy Code
’. Lindsay looked at Samuels and down again at the file.

‘How on earth did you get this?’

‘I’ve told you, a friend. It’s a basic guide to the book codes we use. Be careful. My friend would be in very hot water for giving it to me.’

‘A good friend,’ said Lindsay.

‘Yes,’ said Samuels, ‘someone else who likes to break rules.’

There was something in Samuels’ voice that suggested his friend was a woman, perhaps an academic colleague and an old flame. Lindsay knew that the naval codes people had taken over one of the Oxford colleges and recruited some of the university’s dons.

‘You can read it later,’ said Samuels, ‘but for God’s sake look after it. The most interesting stuff is on page four.’ He leant forward to find the page and pointed to a paragraph near the bottom:

The enemy seems to have been able to keep track of British naval mobilisation at the beginning of the war and of our patrols in the North Atlantic and Home Waters. A copy of the Administrative Code may also have been captured when Norway fell in May 1940 . . .

‘Charlie.’ Lindsay’s voice shook a little with excitement: ‘The Germans broke one of our codes at the beginning of the war . . .’

‘Perhaps two,’ said Samuels.

‘And the Admiralty knows. Then why . . .’

Samuels laughed and grabbed Lindsay’s arm as if restraining a difficult patient: ‘Steady, you need to read it. Our codes
may
have been broken. It seems the Germans salvaged some secret material from one of our submarines and captured more in Norway too. Anyway, they were changed as a precaution. We scrapped the Administrative and Auxiliary Codes last summer and brought in a new one, the Naval Code . . .’

‘The Germans could have broken that too, Charlie.’

‘It’s history,’ said Samuels, ‘Read it. They changed the codes.’

‘Do you think someone’s deliberately trying to stop us? Trying to hide the truth?’

Samuels pulled a face: ‘Honestly, Douglas, you’re turning this into the plot of a penny dreadful.’ He paused, then said with quiet deliberation: ‘You know, there’s a much simpler explanation.’

Lindsay turned sharply to look at him: ‘All right, what do you . . .’

But someone in heavy military boots was approaching along the passage. Samuels raised his hand in warning.

‘We should go,’ he whispered, and he slipped through the half-open door. He must have surprised the owner of the boots because a frightened voice squealed: ‘For Christ’s sake,’ and a second later, ‘Oh sorry, sir’.

It was one of the guards, a red-headed corporal with a guilty expression on his face. They could rest easy. He was seeking a secret corner of his own for ‘a crafty fag’.