The Last Wolf (23 page)

I'm sorry I haven't been able to get up to Craigmore to see you for so long . . . Things have been pretty hectic, as you can imagine. I haven't seen Stroma for months. She's done her WRNS training – I expect she told you all about that – and she's got roped into some very hush-hush work in Liverpool which she can't talk about. I'm sure she'll come to Craigmore as soon as she can.

He recognized the writing on the next envelope at once; the letter was dated a week later in February.

Dearest Grandfather,

Guess what! I'm a proper Wren at last. And I've been posted to Liverpool – so I'm much nearer to you and Craigmore.

The German bombers made a terrible mess of this poor city and hundreds of people were killed. Apparently, the Luftwaffe came over for eight nights in a row and dropped more than a thousand firebombs as well as tons of high explosives and parachute mines. Everything went up in flames.

I can't tell you anything about my work here, but it's pretty tiring. We're on watch for hours on end and almost fall asleep sometimes, but we have to carry on somehow.

I had a letter from Hamish the other day – the first for ages. He still wishes he was in destroyers, not corvettes – especially a corvette called
Buttercup
! I must say it's rather a funny name for a warship.

I promise I'll come up to Craigmore as soon as I get some leave.

I know you'll be missing Grandmother very much. We all are.

With love from,

Stroma.

He put the letters back in the drawer. He had learned something. The grandmother must have died – probably during last year – and in April, the grandfather had followed her. Stroma and her brother were both serving in the British Royal Navy. He knew of the British WRNS – there was a women's branch in the German Navy, too. Secret naval work in Liverpool could only mean the Atlantic convoys and tracking down U-boats. By another ironic coincidence, Hamish's HMS
Buttercup
was the very corvette that he had so magnanimously spared.

On his way back to the drawing room, he passed a row of coats hanging on hooks in the hallway, among them a raincoat with a scarf trailing from a pocket. A woman's silk scarf of red and blue with a pattern of curled feathers. When he buried his face in its soft folds, it smelled of lily of the valley. He knotted it carefully round his neck.

Engelhardt had made himself at home. An oil lamp had been lit and he was sitting at the grand piano, dust cover tweaked back, testing out the keys.

‘Needs a bit of tuning but it's not too bad, sir – considering the damp. Bechstein know what they're doing. Oh, and I found some malt whisky in the decanter over there, sir. Glasses, too.'

Reinhard poured two shots and handed one over to his First Officer.

‘
Zum wohl
!'

‘
Zum wohl
! I like the scarf, sir.'

‘Spoils of war.'

‘Of course, sir.'

‘I didn't know you were a pianist, Number One.'

‘Nothing to boast about.' Engelhardt had unearthed some sheet music from the piano stool and was turning pages. ‘They seem to have rather gone for Chopin.'

He began to play; the piece was the same one that Stroma had played so reluctantly. As Reinhard listened, he admired the family photographs arranged on the piano lid. Bewhiskered gentlemen in kilts, bustled ladies, shooting parties, outings in traps and carriages, the Italian grandmother veiled as a beautiful young bride, the brother and sister, Hamish and Stroma, posed side-by-side on a stool, at about seven and five years old. Stroma was all dressed up in a frilly white party frock with a big satin bow in her hair and he could tell from her expression that it had been done under protest. Exploring further beneath the dust sheet, he discovered a silver-framed studio portrait of Hamish in his Royal Navy uniform. Very serious and not dissimilar to his own Naval Academy version. Next to it was a portrait of Stroma in her WRNS uniform, but she was smiling – straight at him. He picked it up and studied it for a long moment before removing the photograph from its frame.

‘More spoils, sir?'

‘More spoils, Number One. And we haven't finished yet.'

They stole a sheep before they left Glas Uig, just as his father had done. Killed it, skinned it, dismembered it. The edible parts were carried triumphantly aboard the U-boat, the rest buried in the woods.

He put the photograph of Stroma away in his cabin, slotting it between two books on the shelf.

She looked as he had always imagined she would look when she was grown-up: the same bird wing eyebrows, smoky eyes, wide mouth, pointed chin . . . Only the hair was different. No more ragged clumps. Instead, it was neatly combed and curled under the demure HMS cap which she wore at a slight angle. He wondered how tall she was – whether she still only reached below his shoulder and whether she would be as easy to carry as she had been before.

One thing was certain: her smile would fade in an instant if she knew that she was being taken unwittingly to war with him – on the wrong side, in a U-boat.

There was a letter from the Hamburg police waiting for Reinhard on his return to Lorient. His father's body had been found buried in the ruins of the apartment block and a formal identification had been made. Instructions for his burial were awaited.

It was a small consolation for himself and Bruno that at least they were able to bury their father beside their mother at the cemetery, instead of in one of the city's mass graves.

The Commanding Officers' Tactical Course, an intensive course for escort ships' captains, was held at Western Approaches. Lectures took place in the morning, followed by a practice session in the afternoon when a pretend convoy game was played on the chalk-marked wooden floor of a large room.

Stroma had been promoted to Leading Wren and was sent to stand with a circle of other Wrens round the chalk marks, ready to move the model ships across the boards with long rakes. The weather was invented, urgent signals made-up, ships menaced day and night by imaginary U-boats. The point of the game was to work out how best to protect the convoy against all possible difficulties and dangers that might face a commander, and how to sink the U-boats.

There were new weapons, new tactics, new strategies to learn and new perils to think about. Some of the commanding officers sat confidently in their chairs and pointed with their sticks, giving the correct directives without hesitation, but others – usually the older men – found it harder.

The Wrens learned a lot themselves by listening and watching – and quite often they'd worked out the next move quicker than the senior officers on the course, though, naturally, they kept quiet about it. One commander had three U-boats threatening his convoy of seventy ships and his mind seemed to have frozen. Minutes went by and still he said nothing, while everybody waited. Stroma was standing beside him, near enough to whisper quietly in his ear.

‘There's a gap on the port side where the U-boats are located, sir. You need to close up the escorts.'

He gave her a grateful look.

Incredibly, the U-boats were starting to lose the battle in the Atlantic. In the beginning, they'd been the easy winners, sinking ship after ship – sometimes nearly a whole convoy – but the tide had been slowly and inexorably turning against them. Now, they were the ones being sent to the bottom by the escorts and the aircraft, and many more convoy ships – including the fast-constructed American Liberty ships – were being built and getting through. The atmosphere in the Ops Room at Western Approaches was no longer so grim, though nobody was counting any chickens.

Stroma met an officer from a Royal Navy submarine at a party. He'd just come back from a patrol and his boat had called in at Merseyside. They'd claimed a U-boat but, unlike Hamish, he didn't seem particularly jubilant about it – rather sombre, in fact.

‘We caught them on the surface and sunk them with gunfire. They went straight down. None of them got out. Jolly bad luck.'

No, not a bit like Hamish.

‘Bad luck?'

‘Well, you can't help sympathizing . . . when you're in the same boat, so to speak. You see, we know exactly what it's like for them, serving in a sub, and it's no picnic, believe me. Not that any of us would swop places with the chaps on the surface. We're in subs because we want to be, and, of course, everyone thinks we're marvellous and terribly, terribly brave. Rather a joke. We're the valiant heroes and the German U-boat crews are the dastardly villains. But actually, we're both just the same. And we sink their ships, too. I think they've got a terrific lot of guts. They took on the whole Royal Navy and now they've got the Yanks to cope with as well. Their odds on surviving are pretty bad already and they're getting worse. I rather admire them, to tell the truth.'

‘It's not very admirable to be fighting for Hitler.'

‘From what we've heard, U-boat crews don't have a lot of time for the Nazis, and Dönitz won't let Party activists serve on his boats if he can help it. He keeps the political thugs away. He's no fool. In a submarine you've got to have crews that can trust each other completely. They can't have some Nazi spying on them and telling tales as soon as they get into port if they forgot their Heil Hitlers.' He smiled at her. ‘Submariners are quite a tough breed, you know, whichever side they're on. Nobody pushes us around.'

Towards the end of January, the Allies landed in Italy at Anzio and it seemed, at first, that the war might be coming to an end. Except that now there were rumours of new German secret weapons – weapons so deadly that there was no defence against them.

There had always been rumours, ever since the war had begun – some frighteningly believable, others plain absurd. Rumours that Mr Churchill was close to death, that spies in England were passing on titbits direct to Lord Haw Haw for use in his broadcasts, that enemy bombers never hit the same house twice, that one of their bombs could go round corners, that German troops were being parachuted into Wales disguised as miners, that hundreds of drowned German soldiers had been washed up on the south-east coast of England in another invasion attempt. Rumour upon rumour upon rumour.

Stroma went home on a forty-eight-hour leave, which meant that she spent most of the precious hours waiting on platforms or standing in train corridors. London was full of American servicemen, prowling the streets, crowding the bars and restaurants, commandeering the taxis. She shared one from King's Cross with some Eighth Air Force airmen who had only just arrived in England. They had seen the bomb damage in Liverpool when their ship had docked and now they were seeing London for the first time. They were shocked. One of them, a gunner from Kansas, said to her kindly, ‘Don't you worry. Now we're over here, we'll see they don't do it to you no more.'

She smiled at him because he meant well and decided not to mention that it would have been nice if they'd come sooner.

She spent a lot of her leave sleeping. Her father was working until very late at the hospital and her mother was busy with the WVS. Delilah kept her company, curled up on the end of her bed.

She went for a walk in the park but it was bitterly cold. The trees were dark and stark, the grass dull and muddy. The barrage balloon was tethered at ground level, docile, the allotments displayed row after regimented row of winter cabbages, turnips, swedes, onions and Brussels sprouts.

She walked over to the lake and sat down on a bench, pulling from her pocket the stale crust of bread that she had brought for the ducks. They gathered at once, paddling furiously towards her, quacking and quarrelling. She distributed the pieces as fairly as she could.

‘You shouldn't be doing that. You could be prosecuted and fined.'

A woman had stopped on the path behind the bench – an elderly busybody who was glaring at her.

She said politely, ‘I'm sorry . . . is there something wrong?'

‘I ought to report you. It's against the law to waste bread by feeding it to birds and animals. It's meant for human consumption only.'

She looked down at the remaining piece of coarse, dark Government wartime bread, already speckled with green mould.

‘Then perhaps you'd like to eat it yourself.'

She stood up and placed it firmly in the woman's hands. As she walked away, the ducks were emerging boldly from the lake and quacking round the woman's feet, pecking at her shoes.

There were no vacant seats on the return journey to Liverpool, and she had to sit on her kitbag in the train corridor. A Canadian pilot parked his luggage next to her and started a friendly conversation. He was from Vancouver, he told her, and this was his first time over in the Old Country. He thought England was a great place, even in winter. He was hoping he'd still be around when the spring and summer came because he'd heard that was really something to see. He produced photographs of his family to show her and she struggled to make them out in the blue electric light – the mother, the father, the elder sister, the two kid brothers. As he was in the middle of telling her a whole lot more about Vancouver, she fell sound asleep.

There were to be no more packs of wolves roaming the North Atlantic, by order of the Grossadmiral. The Allies had become too good at the game, the losses too great. In the first three months of the year more than fifty U-boats had been sunk. As well as destroyers and corvettes, the enemy now used frigates, built and designed for one purpose only – to sink U-boats.

From time to time, news of Reinhard's former Academy classmates percolated. Werner, Max, Gunther, Paul, Hans and Klaus were all dead. Only Harald and Rolf had so far survived. And, one after the other, commanders serving at Lorient failed to return with their crews. More empty pens in the bunker, more vacant places at mess tables, fewer high spirits and drunken celebrations. There wasn't a lot to celebrate. The wolf packs were no longer the hunters but the hunted.