The Truth in Our Lies

by Eliza Graham

  ‘I thought I might take that rather wonderful motorcycle of yours,’ Becker told Atkins. ‘It’ll put some miles between me and you.’

  ‘We have police watching every ferry. Let her go.’

  I heard the safety catch click off.

  22

  ‘Don’t make a sound,’ I whispered to Mrs Waites, grabbing her arm. Atkins must have seen Micki standing behind Becker by now. Micki sprang up onto the top of a milk churn, silent as a panther, and from there climbed onto a stack of straw bales.

  ‘All right,’ Atkins said. ‘Release the girl and we’ll let you go.’ Atkins moved a few steps forward and to her right, forcing Becker to reposition himself, Mary still in his grip. I saw that Atkins was manoeuvring him so the bales were at his back, close enough that Micki must be able to see every knitted stitch in Mary’s violet cardigan. I couldn’t see Mary’s face clearly in the gloom but could make out the rigid outline of her body as Becker held on to her.

  ‘She’s staying with me for a bit longer.’ Becker’s arm tensed around Mary.

  Micki’s rake swiped down at the hand holding the revolver. The gun fired and crashed to the ground. After a second’s silence the chickens squawked. As Becker’s grip on her relaxed, Mary pulled herself free. Micki hit Becker again with the rake, this time on his arm, preventing him from retrieving the revolver. Atkins jumped forward and stuffed the gun into her belt before grabbing Becker. As he struggled to release himself, showing far more coordination than he’d ever exhibited in Mulberry House, Becker swore at her in German. Micki jumped down, muttering equally fierce German curses, brandishing the rake. ‘I’ll blind you if you move,’ she hissed. ‘Not so brave now without a gun against a kid’s head, are you?’

  He stood still. ‘I would not have hurt the girl.’ Perhaps Micki believed him. She lowered the rake, but the set of her shoulders threatened further violence if required.

  I heard a car bumping up the farm track. Mrs Waites was pulling away from me. I let her go and we both ran downstairs.

  The men in the truck that pulled up looked like regular soldiers. Atkins stepped towards the officer accompanying them, saying something I couldn’t hear. Becker was hauled into the truck. I swerved past Atkins to the rear door before it could be closed. One of the soldiers made an attempt to hold me back but I elbowed him aside. ‘We trusted you,’ I said to the prisoner.

  For a moment Becker looked at me as he had when I’d admitted feeling responsible for my sister’s death: as though my words were touching him somewhere. As though he’d liked me. I’d certainly liked him – admired him, even.

  Then his face hardened. ‘Trust? Those people in Germany who listened to your broadcasts trusted you, Anna,’ he said. ‘You made them into your friends over the wireless, but you manipulated them for your own ends, encouraging them to surrender or put themselves into danger or making them fearful of things that weren’t going to happen. Women. Children. Old people. Doesn’t that bother you?’

  ‘Not as much as the fact you betrayed us.’ The other aspects did bother me at times, but I wasn’t going to admit it to him.

  ‘I didn’t betray you. I don’t care about you. People like Schulte and Miss Rosenbaum here are the ones who have betrayed their own country.’

  Micki’s chin jutted forward. She looked as though she might spit at him. For a moment I wanted to cover him with spittle, too.

  ‘That’s enough.’ One of the guards was pulling me away.

  ‘You killed Beattie,’ I shouted at Becker.

  He started to say something but stopped.

  ‘I know he didn’t fall into that pond,’ I said, watching him. No sign of guilt appeared on his face. We could have used him as an actor after all – he’d done a good enough job of pretending to be someone else all this time.

  The guard tugged at my arm.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ I asked. Nobody answered. Becker was perhaps bound for a place I’d heard of just outside Richmond Park in south-west London, where agents were interrogated prior to execution, sometimes in the Tower of London. I hoped that was where this murderer was heading.

  Atkins plucked at my sleeve. ‘Come away now, Hall.’ I stepped back.

  ‘We thought he was one of us,’ I said. We’d drunk coffee with him, joked with him, gone to the cinema with him. He’d even commented on Micki’s gymnastics in the office with what had seemed like genuine friendliness.

  ‘He was never one of you.’ She said it with the neutral coldness of the professional. Atkins must regard me as a fool, incapable of spotting that I was working with a spy.

  ‘How long have you known?’ I watched the truck pull out of the yard. Mrs Waites had come into the farmyard and clung to her daughter. Atkins was quiet. ‘I can’t see that would be telling us very much,’ I said.

  ‘Beattie thought something was up fairly soon after William Nathanson arrived.’ She spoke the words guardedly.

  ‘Why?’

  She shook her head and went to talk to Mary.

  William had been planted by Atkins’s team to keep an eye on us? On me? On Micki? I revisited the comment he’d made earlier this evening about looking out for me. I remembered Schulte’s accounts of a black-coated man spying on him. An active-sounding man. That hadn’t been William, but Becker, an apparently blunt knife who was really something far sharper than he pretended. Only Mrs Haddon’s terrier had been worried by the gap between appearance and reality. Did spies emit some kind of electric signal that dogs could pick up?

  Atkins was asking Mary questions in an authoritative but kindly tone. I heard Mary reply that Becker had come across her after she’d returned the cows to their pasture and was inspecting a crop in a neighbouring field.

  ‘Your Father what’s-his-name came looking for Franz— Lieutenant Schulte. He’d returned to camp. The prisoners were all collected early because the officer in charge there needs them to dig out a new drain for the shower block.’

  I thought of the proud Lieutenant Schulte digging drains.

  ‘Franz – the lieutenant – didn’t have to dig, but he had to get a lift back to the camp with the others. I was alone when that priest appeared out of the trees.’ She shivered.

  I remembered the times I’d thought I was being watched.

  ‘He grabbed me,’ Mary continued. ‘Said he’d bargain me for a motorcycle or car.’

  ‘He didn’t . . . ?’ For the first time Atkins seemed to lose a little of her composure.

  ‘No,’ Mary said emphatically. ‘He didn’t do anything to me.’

  Atkins let out a breath. ‘There’ll be more questions at some point. But for tonight, I suggest you all get some rest. You’re safe now.’ With a nod to us all, she moved away in the direction of her motorcycle.

  ‘Will I see you again?’ I asked, following her to the house, feeling like a girl whose favourite prefect was about to leave the school.

  Atkins paused and turned back, some warmth in those pale-blue eyes of hers. ‘I can’t really say.’

  ‘It’s strange not having you drive us in the Austin.’

  She smiled. ‘I won’t miss that clunky gearbox.’ Her expression became more serious again. ‘Alexander could never say much about your work, Sergeant Hall, but it was clear he had great faith in you.’

  At the mention of his name emotion swept me again. I folded my arms as though to contain myself. ‘I feel . . .’

  ‘Lost without him? Uncertain? Of course.’ Her voice was sympathetic now. ‘I will miss him, too. But you’re not alone. Lieutenant Nathanson and Miss Rosenbaum would obviously do anything for you.’

  Despite this, some man would eventually be placed in charge of me.

  Perhaps Atkins knew what I was thinking. ‘For now, it’s your show, Anna Hall. Throw your heart into it.’ She placed a hand on my arm briefly before she walked off. I heard her jump onto her motorcycle. The engine gave its throaty purr. 500cc . . .

  As she drove down the track to the lane, her hair was a pale punctuation mark agai
nst the black of her cap and jacket. I could hear the motorcycle for a few seconds after it passed out of view.

  Micki came to stand beside me. ‘You can see why some men would pant over that girl, can’t you?’ she said. ‘And some women, too. It’s the black breeches and boots. There’s this bar in Hamburg where girls—’

  I put up a hand to prevent her saying anything more. ‘Let’s go to The Blue Anchor.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘I thought—’

  ‘The pub was out of bounds? Officially, yes. But tonight you and I are going to sit in a corner quietly and have a drink.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘You were wonderful this evening,’ I told her. ‘Thank God for your circus training.’

  She was silent.

  ‘The way you leapt up onto that hay bale without a sound.’

  ‘I have to tell you something.’ She sounded younger, quieter.

  I looked at her.

  ‘I never actually performed in a circus. Well, not as an acrobat. I cleaned the tents and caravans. Counted the takings.’

  ‘I thought . . .’ What had I thought?

  ‘The family remembered me – my father took me to see the show every time it was in town. Until, well, until Jews weren’t allowed to go to performances.’

  ‘So how did you . . . ?’ I shook my head. ‘You don’t have to tell me. It’s not my business.’

  ‘I want to. It feels right.’

  We stood by ourselves in the dark.

  ‘When the police came for my family, Maxi and I were out of the apartment, playing hide and seek in the garden.’ Words were falling out of Micki now. ‘We lived in this modernist block, quite famous architecturally, with landscaped grounds. We weren’t allowed to play outside. No Jews in public spaces. But we used to sneak out if nobody else was there. I saw the four of them leaving with a few suitcases.’ She put a hand to her mouth. ‘I just knew not to . . .’

  I waited.

  ‘There was a hollow that dipped towards a pond, out of sight of the apartment entrance. We hid there when we were playing. Maxi and I crawled down and lay on our stomachs among the reeds, very still. When the police brought them out of the block we could hear my mother – she was hysterical. My father told the police he had no idea where we were. We heard them slap him round the face. But they drove off without us.’ Micki shivered.

  In the background I could hear Mary talking to her mother, her voice as low as Micki’s.

  ‘The circus was set up three or four miles away. When it was dark we walked there. I had to carry Maxi for some of it. I begged them to take us in. No way would they have let me perform in public: a new girl with no training and Jewish. But they sheltered us for as long as they could, until it became dangerous for them.’ She gulped. ‘I should have told you the truth before.’

  ‘Nobody else does.’ I squeezed her arm. ‘Not all the time. Perhaps you needed a story that made the past a little more bearable?’

  She blinked hard and made a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘Beattie would say you needed that psychoanalyst’s couch again, Anna.’

  I wanted to say more to her about Beattie, about how awful I felt about not noticing her feelings for him. I could tell by the way she stuck her jaw out that this wasn’t the moment.

  ‘How do we get to the pub?’ she asked. ‘Before closing time, on foot?’

  I heard a motor engine. A car, a small one, was bumping up the drive. I recognised the Liverpudlian driver. ‘Atkins must have arranged transport for us,’ I said.

  ‘Come on.’ Micki moved towards the car. ‘I’ll stick the bicycle in the boot, even if we can’t close it. One of the bikes is still missing, by the way.’

  ‘We need to find it. We won’t have cars driving us everywhere from now on,’ I said. ‘Beattie was given the Austin so he could talk to Atkins in private.’

  ‘The weather’s getting warmer by the day,’ Micki said. ‘Good for us to get the exercise. Let’s say goodbye to the Waiteses now, make sure they’re all right.’

  The women looked steadier when we walked across to them. Mary was no longer clinging to her mother. It was too dark to be certain, but I thought the rosiness had returned to her cheeks.

  Again, a suspicion crossed my mind, but it wasn’t anything that needed acting on tonight. The prospect of a quiet corner in The Blue Anchor and a glass of whatever alcohol it might provide was now overwhelmingly inviting.

  23

  ‘Tell me about you and Lieutenant Schulte or I’m going inside to talk to your mother about what I suspect.’

  It was just before eight the following morning. I had cycled out to the farm on Micki’s bicycle while she was still sleeping. I found Mary by herself behind the farmhouse, moving chicken runs so the hens could peck at fresh grass.

  She tried to slip past me, but I caught her sleeve.

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ She shook herself free. ‘You’ve been listening to gossip.’

  ‘I haven’t listened to anything at all.’

  She opened her mouth to resume her denials but sighed. ‘My mother trusted me and I’ve let her down.’

  ‘I thought you hated him.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You meet him in the fields before the truck comes for him in the evenings, don’t you? Out of sight.’

  Mary nodded. ‘Not last night, though, as he was taken back to the camp early.’

  The change in plan had probably saved him from Becker’s gun. ‘Has it gone far?’ I felt some responsibility for the girl. We’d insisted on the prisoner coming to the farm, after all.

  ‘Not yet.’ Her eyes met mine.

  ‘Don’t let it, Mary. It could result in . . . complications.’

  It would be impossible for Mary and Schulte to pull away from one another once a certain point had been reached, though. I remembered how it had been with Patrick and me: balancing on a high bar, knowing you’d topple off, that the fall was unavoidable, but unable to climb down. Nobody could have stopped me sleeping with Patrick. Daughter of the vicar I might have been; it had made no difference. The fear that I might lose him had added to the passion.

  ‘Be careful,’ I said. ‘You know what people are like. And it won’t be good for Lieutenant Schulte if people think he’s taking advantage of you.’

  ‘He’s not.’ But her voice was less strident now.

  ‘Look after yourself.’ I hoped I sounded concerned rather than judgemental. ‘You’ve done good work for us by having him here on the farm and enabling us to see him discreetly. Mr Beattie . . . was so pleased.’

  ‘You hear all kinds of stories,’ Mary said. ‘About what they’re like, the Germans. You see those Pathé news programmes at the pictures. But Franz, he’s just a boy like my brother.’ She shook her head. ‘I think they tell us lies about the enemy. I know a lot of them are cruel to civilians and persecute Jews, but they’re not all evil.’ She kicked at a stray boulder in the field. ‘It’s all bad enough, what’s going on in the world. Why do we need more false stories?’

  ‘You have a point,’ I said softly. I looked at the hens with their chicks, at the green on the hedgerows starting to ripple white with blossom. Something flipped inside me, as though someone had turned on a switch. My feelings of paranoia, guilt and anger seemed to ebb away. This girl, this young woman I’d regarded as a nuisance who had to be bribed with cosmetics into helping us, whom I’d suspected of all kinds of things – she was just worried about upsetting her mother because she’d fallen in love with a prisoner of war. Mary and Schulte ought by nature’s laws to be left in peace. But in wartime it was fraternisation.

  ‘Don’t let it go too far.’ I knew my warning was futile. I’d make arrangements for Schulte to be moved. Much as I felt for him and Mary, it really was time he went to Canada with the rest of the German prisoners.

  Mary raised a hand in farewell as I stepped through the gate. I knew she was watching me as I ran across the farmyard to jump onto the bicycle before Mrs Waites spotted me or the truck
bringing Schulte here for work pulled up.

  At the junction with the lane I stopped, remembering how before someone had seemed to watch me from the copse. If it had been Becker cycling out here, we’d missed his absence. He’d always seemed to be present in the office. No doubt someone was currently extracting the practical details of his espionage from him now. I shivered and cycled on.

  Passing the turning to Mulberry House I continued to the square so I could quickly shop in the village store before work. I didn’t have a cabinet of delights like Beattie but perhaps I could find biscuits or even chocolate to cheer up the depleted team. My ration card held enough vouchers for some small treat.

  As I walked across the road, I felt a strong urge to turn around; the same feeling I’d had before that someone was just behind me, watching me. I told myself there was no need to be neurotic now.

  I propped the bicycle up against the shop front, glimpsing my reflection in the window. I blinked, halted.

  There, behind me, was the blurred image of a man. The events of the last weeks rushed through my mind: the fear and guilt, the doubting of my own mind. And there he was, my pursuer, features indeterminable in the smeared reflection, but so close.

  I pivoted round to look at him.

  24

  ‘William.’ I let my breath out, feeling like an idiot. ‘You made me jump. I thought you were someone else.’ I couldn’t tell him what I’d feared, and grinned at him inanely.

  ‘Sorry, Anna.’ He gave me his quick grin. ‘Didn’t mean to startle you. Are you going inside?’

  I told him about the plan to buy biscuits.

  ‘I was after another packet of peppermints myself.’

  ‘You must almost be through your sweet ration. How are you this morning?’ I remembered his drained face last night.

  ‘I’m fine.’ He met my gaze and held it.