The Truth in Our Lies

by Eliza Graham

  Three seconds, two seconds, one second. William finished his final benediction as Father Friedrich and took a gulp from the glass of water. He waited until the next item, a pre-recorded Rhineland folk song, had commenced, before pushing back his chair and standing. He and the announcer quietly slapped one another’s shoulders. If Beattie’d been here he’d have known where to track down a filing cabinet with something strong filed under ‘Emergency’. Even now, I could smile at the thought.

  William slipped out of the studio door. I wanted to embrace him but that was out of the question in such a public place. I contented myself with clasping his hand, only releasing it when he winced.

  Atkins appeared and looked from one of us to the other.

  William frowned. ‘I know that last page was in place at Mulberry House before we left. At least, I thought I did.’

  Atkins and I exchanged glances. William’s hand went to his back. ‘Bad again?’ I asked.

  ‘Just a spasm. My tablets will sort me out.’ He patted his pocket.

  ‘You’re one of a kind.’ Beattie would have been so proud. Not that he would have expressed this pride. A particularly good bottle of something would have been opened. Beattie would then have been particularly rude to William for a few days afterwards, in case he got above himself.

  ‘I’m just part of a good crew,’ William said. ‘You looked after me in there, Anna.’ There was something solemn in his words that made me look at him more closely. ‘And I hope I do the same thing in return.’

  I wanted to say more, but there wasn’t time to talk right now. Half an hour to go before our schedule finished. After the folk songs there’d be a final news programme. I was assuming that any details of air raids on German cities I needed to add to my news items would have been given to me by now.

  Assumptions are the kiss of death, Hall, I heard Beattie tell me.

  I knocked on the door of Sefton Delmer’s office, feeling perspiration on my forehead. A woman’s voice told me to come in. Without my needing to ask her she checked the out-tray and a message pad. I waited for an explosion, for Delmer himself to ask why the hell there’d been such a slip-up with the script.

  ‘Nothing for you, sergeant.’

  ‘I can close down as normal?’

  She nodded. I shut the door. They must know about Father Becker; Grey-suit Man must have telephoned the studio. Not that they would tell me. We were each confined to our own little squares on some complicated grid. Probably only a few people in the whole country knew how all the squares connected.

  ‘Go home and rest,’ I told William. ‘Have an early night.’

  ‘I . . .’ He blinked, looking dazed. ‘Yes, an early night. Good idea.’

  I returned to the control room, watching as the announcer switched to the music studio, where the live dance band waited. Our music was irresistible enough to make my leg jig up and down as we listened and I forgot that our leader was dead and that one of our team was a traitor, on the run. The technician smiled as he noticed. ‘It’s going well,’ he said. ‘Mr Beattie would be pleased.’

  The announcer took over. In front of him sat my news script. He flicked through the pages, double-checking. My own copy was now dog-eared from being read. He looked up and gave me a thumbs-up.

  I sat perspiring as the music came to an end and we switched back to the studio. The announcer read the news items. There was a nice little lie about the end of a shortage of anaesthetic drugs for civilians. Soon even non-combatants undergoing minor operations might benefit from pain relief again. I hoped that some Nazi official was sweating as he feared he’d be on the operating table fully conscious while his bunions were cut off. The anaesthetics idea had been Beattie’s last story. I remembered him agonising as to whether piles would work better.

  The news was over. A final blast of Beethoven. The light switched off. We were off-air. The announcer slumped in his chair, wiping a handkerchief over his face. ‘What a night.’

  Atkins was waiting for me outside in the corridor. ‘Can you come now?’

  ‘I have to get final sign-off.’ I went back to Sefton Delmer’s office. The woman inside told me I was free to leave. ‘We’ll be in touch shortly, but for now, carry on as normal,’ she said.

  ‘Does he know what happened earlier?’ I meant Delmer himself.

  She nodded. ‘We were a second away from intervening.’ Her face softened. ‘Alexander Beattie said you had a cool head, sergeant.’

  To my horror I felt my eyes pricking and left the room quickly. ‘I need to see the telephonists,’ I told Atkins, but to my relief the girls told me that no calls had come in. I’d been half-expecting an irate senior military officer or minister to have rung in to complain that I’d missed off an essential item or used something that hadn’t been properly approved. I handed the girls the bars of Fry’s chocolate I’d found in the cabinet of delights.

  ‘Nothing going on outside?’ Atkins asked the guard as we left the building.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Keep it that way,’ she said. ‘High alert, all night.’

  William was getting into the car that would take him back to his lodgings. His face was drained of colour. I slowed down.

  ‘I need to make sure he’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘No time.’ She pointed towards the motorcycle. I’d imagined we’d go wherever it was she was taking me by car. I’d never sat on a motorcycle before and eyed it with a mixture of excitement and distrust.

  ‘It’s quicker than a car,’ she said. ‘I’ll get on first, then you jump on behind me. See the pegs?’ She pointed to the one on our side. ‘Put your feet up on them. Arms around my waist, but don’t crush me. Or put one hand behind yourself on the rack, if you prefer. Alexander used to do that.’

  Alexander? Beattie on a motorbike? Even now my eyes widened at the thought.

  ‘He had better balance than you might imagine.’ She sprang onto the motorcycle.

  ‘Are we going to Waites Farm?’

  She nodded.

  ‘We’ll be there in less than ten minutes. This has a 500cc engine, more powerful than the other couriers’ bikes.’ I detected a note of pride. ‘Hold on tight.’ The engine ignited and the motorcycle roared into life. Atkins nodded at the guards and they let us through the gate. We turned left into the lane, accelerating rapidly.

  ‘Schulte won’t be there this late,’ I said, above the engine. I thought of something else. ‘Won’t Becker go to the camp? He could say he was there to minister to Schulte’s soul or something.’ I raised my voice as our speed increased.

  ‘I rang the camp. If Becker turns up, they’ll throw him in a cell. Franz Schulte is safely locked up in his hut there.’

  ‘Who do you work for?’ I said, raising my voice as Atkins accelerated.

  ‘Lean with the bike,’ she said. We took a corner at a speed that made my muscles clench.

  Ahead of us a boy was herding cows into a field after milking. Atkins would surely slow and wait . . . She shot to the opposite side of the road. The boy’s mouth widened into an O. Atkins was heading for a gap between the cows and the hedge. Too small. I closed my eyes. When I opened them it was to concentrate fixedly on the back of her dark jacket.

  Atkins turned into the track leading up to the farm. As we bumped along, I scanned the fields, could see nobody outside. We pulled up outside the farmhouse. ‘You get off first,’ she said.

  ‘What am I going to do here?’ I hadn’t even thought to ask before, had just blindly followed instructions.

  ‘It’s your German,’ she said. ‘We might need to speak to Becker in haste and without ambiguity. When we find him.’ Father Becker spoke some English but had never been entirely fluent. ‘My German’s not good enough.’

  I felt a brief, unworthy relief that there was something I was better at than Atkins. But I was still only a substitute, a stand-in for Beattie who’d been born and raised in Berlin. I couldn’t be regarded as that vital in tonight’s pursuit of Becker, or they wouldn’t
have let me stay at the studio until the end of the broadcast. Or perhaps it was the other way round; they thought the broadcast mattered too much to disrupt. That thought made me feel better.

  Atkins ushered me into the farmhouse. Mrs Waites stood inside the kitchen, her face blank, wrists clenched together.

  ‘Where’s Mary?’ I asked. The woman seemed to slump down into herself. I wasn’t surprised at the response.

  I steered her to a chair.

  ‘Did the milking and never came in for her tea.’

  I looked at Atkins but her perfectly symmetrical features showed no sign of consternation.

  ‘May I use your telephone, Mrs Waites?’ Atkins asked, poised as a debutante at a tea party. Mrs Waites nodded.

  ‘That German you sent us has taken my girl as a hostage, hasn’t he?’

  ‘The lieutenant’s safely locked up in camp.’ I stopped before I could mention Father Becker. From the hallway I half-heard Atkins murmur down the line.

  ‘We should never have had him here,’ Mrs Waites continued. ‘You said it was our duty, but it was too risky. Look at your Mr Beattie, drowned by German spies.’

  Despite all the efforts to keep it quiet, the nature of Beattie’s death had obviously spread through the neighbourhood.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I asked Atkins when she returned.

  ‘We wait,’ she said, picking up the kettle from the range and filling it with water. ‘The police are watching railway stations and buses.’ From her inside jacket pocket she produced a hip flask. ‘Whisky,’ she said. The smell reminded me of Becker. Mrs Waites demurred at first but agreed after Atkins looked at her more pointedly. The edge of my anxiety seemed to soften as I drank the fortified tea. Mrs Waites retired upstairs to wait for her daughter.

  Atkins and I sat in the kitchen. The cat came in and lay by the range.

  I opened my satchel. Tomorrow’s Clara script was inside. I’d hoped to have time to check it over one last time. ‘Would you mind turning away from what I’m reading?’ I asked. ‘I’m not supposed to let anyone else catch sight of it. I just need a few minutes to read it through.’

  I thought Atkins might be annoyed by the request but approval flashed briefly over her face. She sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the stove, flexible as a schoolgirl, back to me, stroking the cat.

  At first glimpse it appeared to be the script I had typed. A reference to Aesop’s Fables made me sit up. In my version Clara had referred to the story of the frogs and the king. The frogs requested Jove give them a king. At first he dropped a large log into their pond. When they asked a second time he sent a heron, who ate them up – a useful metaphor. I’d discussed the use of the fable with Beattie. ‘Deftly inserted if not a strikingly original parallel with the election of Hitler,’ he’d told me. ‘Beta plus. Alpha minus, if I’m being generous.’

  In the version of the script I had in front of me now the frogs had been replaced with the fable of the dog and the shadow. The dog drops the meat he carries securely in his mouth to snatch at the piece of meat in his shadow’s mouth.

  I must have gasped out loud. Atkins looked at me. ‘More tinkering by the unholy priest,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll sort it out, Sergeant Hall.’

  Becker’s substitution was the same length as the text it replaced – making the change hard to spot at a glance. But surely he’d know the script would be reviewed before I handed it to the actors? I reminded myself that William’s script had been checked, yet Becker had somehow managed to exchange the original last page with the blank sheet just before we’d left for the studio this evening.

  Atkins was still observing me. ‘I think the good father intended carrying out several low-level acts of sabotage. Cumulatively it might mean your unit’s broadcasts being discredited by those in charge,’ she said, reading my mind. ‘Even if the altered scripts never got as far as causing havoc on air.’

  ‘One of them nearly did.’

  Our eyes locked.

  ‘Who is Becker really?’ I asked, replacing Clara in my satchel and fastening it.

  Someone moved outside in the darkness. Atkins was at the window in a single bound, her hand reaching inside her jacket. She’d carry a handgun, I realised. Of course. Her elegant shoulders stiffened and then relaxed. An object bumped against the farmhouse wall. ‘Just a bicycle,’ Atkins said from the window. ‘I do believe it’s your colleague, Miss Rosenbaum.’

  It always took me a moment to recall that Miss Rosenbaum was Micki. I went to let her in. Her cheeks were pink from exertion.

  ‘I saw William after the broadcast. He wouldn’t say much but I gather there was trouble at the studio?’ she whispered.

  I beckoned her inside. ‘You shouldn’t be here. How did you know I’d come here?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Two women on a dispatch bike flying out of Milton Bryan at diabolical speed? They’ll be talking about it for weeks.’ She followed me into the kitchen, which seemed to fill with oxygen as she entered.

  Atkins frowned but didn’t reprimand Micki. The three of us sat at the table, the blackouts pulled down again. Atkins sat very upright, but seemingly without tension. I could imagine her on her hunter outside some copse, waiting for the hounds to flush out a fox. Micki looked as though she might burst into acrobatics at any moment. As for me, I probably looked like a woman who hadn’t slept well for days and needed fresh clothes and a square meal. The make-up would be sliding off my damaged cheek. In my satchel I carried my powder compact, but I didn’t want to move away from the others to touch up my face.

  Atkins stood up, a finger to her lips. I hadn’t heard anything but as I strained, I made out voices. Mary, I thought. And a male voice.

  German accent. Becker.

  ‘Go upstairs to Mrs Waites and tell her to stay in her room,’ Atkins told me.

  I moved towards the staircase. I hadn’t been upstairs before. The ground floor of the farmhouse was almost a working premises. Upstairs there were paintings on walls, rugs on floors, photographs on shelves and dressing tables. The oak furniture looked old and polished. I’d regarded the Waites family as a means to an end: they’d provided cover work for Schulte. Seeing their possessions on display reminded me that they were people in their own right, not just cogs in our wheel of operation.

  I didn’t know which was Mrs Waites’s room and walked along the landing, past a room with a dressing table in it on which I spotted the lipstick we’d sent Mary. On the top of the mirror she’d hung rosettes from pre-war gymkhanas. A row of dolls sat on the bottom shelf of her bookcase.

  Another open door revealed shelves with small model soldiers and sports trophies arranged on it. Her brother’s bedroom.

  The door at the end of the landing was closed. I knocked on it. ‘It’s only me – Anna.’ I hoped that using my Christian name would reassure her.

  ‘Come in,’ Mrs Waites said. She was sitting in darkness, the curtains not drawn over the window. As I came closer I saw she clutched something woollen in her lap – a piece of darning? ‘I’m trying to distract myself,’ she went on. ‘Thought I’d finish mending this sock, but I haven’t made a single stitch.’ She was the kind of woman who’d been brought up not to flap, to take her mind off things by doing something useful, but it wouldn’t work tonight.

  I drew the curtains – thick, black velvet lengths – and turned on the oil lamp beside her bed. This was a feminine bedroom belonging to a wife and mother who’d cooked, looked after the hens and tended the vegetable garden rather than carrying out heavy, dirty farm work as she did now. Yet Mrs Waites seemed to have accepted her change in role and that of her daughter – the pretty girl who might have made something of her life as a secretary instead of ruining her skin outdoors in the mud and cold.

  ‘That’s my Mary outside, isn’t it?’ Mrs Waites asked.

  The one child she still had at home. The one who ought to have been safe here.

  ‘There are people down there taking care of everything.’ I tried for a
soothing tone. It had gone quiet again outside.

  ‘I thought Lieutenant Schulte was a decent type. For a German. But there are other Germans round here, in the village, and who knows what they’re capable of?’

  I was tempted to tell her that one of these Germans, Micki, was now sitting downstairs, having cycled out here to help. Something else occurred to me, not relevant to tonight’s events, but which would need managing later on.

  Mrs Waites put down her darning.

  ‘Who’s got Mary? Is he dangerous?’

  I put a finger to my lips, listening. The back door leading to the yard creaked. Atkins was on the move. I heard her boots tread across the farmyard.

  ‘Why did it take you so long to come out here?’ Mrs Waites asked. I couldn’t tell her that I’d delayed Atkins at the studio because the programme was the priority, more important than her seventeen-year-old daughter’s safety. I strained my ears to hear what was happening down below. Footsteps came towards the farmhouse – two or three sets of them, I estimated. Mrs Waites lunged for the window, pulling open the curtains before I could prevent her. We were looking down at the farmyard.

  ‘What’s the plan? Make for one of the ports to Ireland?’ Atkins addressed one of the figures in front of her.

  ‘Why not, sweetheart?’ Becker spoke in English, sounding more fluent and less the kindly, considerate priest. He was a fugitive now, but even in the dark I could see how he stood taller.

  ‘Without ID or money for train tickets or a vehicle?’ Atkins asked.

  Mary was shaking in Becker’s grip. Her chest rose and fell in short jerks.

  ‘He’s got a gun pointed at her.’

  Where’d Becker got the weapon? Perhaps he’d smuggled it into the country from Switzerland. Maybe Swiss priests weren’t subjected to body searches on entry to the UK.

  I saw something else. Micki had emerged along the side of the house, having, I guessed, crept out of the front door, treading silently on those gymnast’s feet of hers. She now stood behind Becker, her eyes on him, assessing the situation. In her right hand she carried what looked like a rake. She could hit him with it, but that gun held on Mary’s temple might fire a bullet as the rake struck. Mary now looked as though it was only Becker’s grip on her that stopped her from collapsing; her legs shook.