Ring of Spies

by Alex Gerlis

  It was a while before Prince answered, and when eventually he did, there was a hint of excitement in his voice.

  ‘It could be him, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This Edward Palmer at the War Office – he could be Milton.’

  ‘Hang on, Prince, hang on…’ Harper looked surprised. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh? All we know is that a chap who had a perfectly valid reason for using these maps happened to ask about the Rhine map and then decided not to put in a written request for it. Let me have a word with Johnny: most likely there’ll be an innocent explanation – the chap’s a major after all.’

  ‘I realise that, sir, but there’s something else. You may remember that a month ago I went to see MI9 about Hanne, the agent I’d worked with in Denmark. Before I left, Mr Bennet told me a story about how he’d recently carried out the debrief of an RAF pilot who’d escaped from his PoW camp. According to this pilot, he was captured in Brussels and taken to be interrogated at the Luftwaffe headquarters, but the Gestapo turned up and took him to their headquarters, where he was roughed up a bit and questioned. Funny thing was, they wanted to know less about his mission and more about his identity and age. The next day a Herr Rauter from Berlin turned up to question him, but it soon became clear he wasn’t terribly interested and—’

  ‘I hope you’re coming to the point, Prince.’

  ‘I am, sir. To cut a long story short, the pilot was examined by a doctor, who told Rauter that he was no more than twenty-five years old, at which point Rauter ordered them to let him go. The pilot is convinced they thought he was someone else.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘That’s the point, sir, the pilot’s name is Ted Palmer – Edward Palmer.’

  No one spoke for a full minute.

  ‘Same name as our chap at the War Office.’

  ‘Exactly, sir.’

  ‘And how old is he?’

  ‘He’d have been twenty when he was caught. How old is the Edward Palmer at the War Office, Lance?’

  King looked through a file in front of him. ‘Late thirties.’

  ‘So it could be a case of mistaken identity, couldn’t it? They thought the RAF Ted Palmer was the other Edward Palmer and only realised he wasn’t because he was clearly too young.’

  ‘But if Edward Palmer is one of their spies, why did the Gestapo pull in an RAF pilot with the same name?’

  ‘Looks like we’ll need to find this Herr Rauter and ask him.’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ said Hugh Harper, standing up, ‘we’ll need to have a chat with this Major Palmer, though let me give Johnny a call first.’

  * * *

  Edward Palmer had been very calm and organised that Thursday night. When he reached his apartment, he’d looked out over Abbey Road for a while and realised Jim was no longer there. For months now he’d reckoned he’d know the right moment to disappear, and the meeting with Jim had made it clear that it was now.

  He typed a letter for the landlord giving up his tenancy because he’d unexpectedly been posted elsewhere and enclosing two months’ rent. He checked the folder with the false identity papers along with five hundred pounds, money he’d saved over the years plus various sums passed on to him by Agent Byron. It would keep him going long enough; it amounted to almost half a year’s salary. He didn’t have much in the way of ration cards, but he had enough cash to be able to rely on the black market for a while.

  It was harder to work out what to take with him. He reckoned one suitcase and a rucksack was as much as he should risk. For years now he’d planned the journey he was about to take. He’d first head north by train and then keep moving, never more than two nights in one place, using buses where possible and all the time looking for somewhere to stay, somewhere it would be apparent he’d fit in. Once the war ended – it shouldn’t be long now – life would be much easier.

  He woke with a start at four o’clock, convinced that Jim was going to go to the police and tell them everything. Jim would have seen how shocked he’d been at the news of the murder. He didn’t sleep after that, constantly watching Abbey Road in case anyone else was observing his block. He took a few bags down to the bins and then had a bath followed by breakfast. He made one telephone call, one that he hoped would buy him a few days, at least until Monday, then he checked everything again. Once he was satisfied that all was in order, he put aside a pile of anything that could identify him as Edward Palmer. He watched the papers burn to blackened embers in the small grate before leaving the apartment.

  He walked to the estate agency and put the keys and letter through the door, then waited five minutes before a black cab came along. He told the driver he wanted to go to Euston station and told him he was on his way to Manchester. At Euston he waited until the taxi disappeared and then walked to King’s Cross.

  By the time he entered the busy concourse, he still wasn’t sure where he was going. He’d study the departure board before making up his mind.

  That was how his life would be now.

  He felt something approaching a sense of relief, and that took him by surprise.

  Chapter 24

  Ravensbrück, April 1945

  Although it was difficult to gauge the passage of time these days, Hanne reckoned it had been at least two months since she’d been summoned to the Gestapo office in the camp. Exactly how long it was didn’t seem to terribly matter.

  She was sure it was towards the end of January when she’d been brought before the Gestapo officer called Mohr. Her abiding memory of him was of how ill he looked and sounded, not unlike a prisoner in the camp. He’d asked her about her Englishman, the man they only knew as Peter Rasmussen. She’d been surprised at the naïvety of his questions: had she heard from him? Had anyone tried to pass her a message from him? Did she have any clue where he might be?

  She was stunned that even if she had heard from Peter or had any idea where he might be, they thought she’d tell them – not least because it was clear that it was in the interests of the Gestapo to keep her alive in case they caught him. Mohr had warned her that the next time she was visited by someone from the Gestapo they wouldn’t be as easy-going as him, and she suspected that was true. And as if to show how easy-going he was, he told her she was being transferred to the Texled workshops.

  There was no question that making uniforms was preferable to the brickworks. The work there had been hard, with the constant risk of injury, and she doubted she’d have survived it much longer, which was probably why Mohr had organised her transfer. It wasn’t exactly pleasant in the workshops: the guards were just as cruel, the work monotonous, and it was still a concentration camp, with the ever-present threat of punishment and even death.

  But the place had its advantages: it was warm, and for long periods of the day she was able to sit down. Another advantage was that she had met Paulette there.

  Paulette Dubois was a French resistance fighter, and although Hanne wasn’t to know her for long, their friendship quickly reached the point where they were able to confide in each other.

  Paulette told Hanne she actually ran a resistance cell in Orléans but had been arrested when they discovered copies of the clandestine newspaper Combat on her at a checkpoint. ‘They thought I was just a paper girl!’ She was in her mid twenties – quite a few years younger than Hanne – but they seemed to view life in the same way, with as much of a sense of humour as it was possible to summon in the camp. They both had a kind of optimism about them, buoyed by a certainty that they’d somehow survive the hell they were in, and they were able to confide the reason for this. Both women were deeply in love, Hanne with Peter Rasmussen and Paulette with Olivier, who’d been her boyfriend since school.

  The two women shared a work bench, and although conversation between prisoners was forbidden, the noise of the machinery meant it was difficult for the guards to enforce the silence. They’d speak quietly while looking at their machines, concentrating on the job in hand and keeping an eye out for the guards. Ra
rely did they look at each other, and this gave their conversations a strange kind of intimacy, the type that came from the detachment involved in avoiding eye contact, like lovers whispering to each other in the dark.

  Paulette told Hanne how Olivier had been on the run from the Gestapo and was hiding in a village in the Sologne. Hanne confided in Paulette about Peter and how the two of them worked for the British, even hinting that Peter himself was British. She wondered if she’d gone too far, but somehow talking about him to someone else brought him alive, and at times she felt he was alongside her, assuring her that all would be well and they’d be together soon.

  She was as sure as she could be that Paulette was no Gestapo stooge. She never asked Hanne to divulge any details about Peter or where he might be. And they soon agreed a pact: if one survived the camp and the other didn’t – or even in the unlikely event that one managed to escape to freedom – the other would get a message to either Peter or Olivier.

  Their short-lived friendship came to an abrupt end one February morning when Paulette was one of a small group taken on a work detachment. That happened all the time and Hanne thought little of it until that evening, when a Belgian woman told her what had happed: they’d been taken to Rheinsberg to paint a hall, and Paulette had escaped.

  For the next twenty-four hours, Hanne was worried sick. Perhaps Paulette really had been a Gestapo stooge: it was not unusual for them to be removed from the camp before their target was arrested. But if she wasn’t a stooge, there was still danger: escapees were invariably caught within the first twenty-four hours, and the camp commandant would make sure all prisoners were aware of her fate.

  But for two days there was no sign of her and no officer so much as looked in Hanne’s direction. The next worry was the reprisals that would inevitably follow. The problem for the Germans was that the prisoners remaining in Ravensbrück were only there because they were fit enough to work, and their labour was now more essential than ever.

  It didn’t prove to be an insurmountable problem: on a morning roll-call a French woman whose name Hanne didn’t know was hauled out of line. She was clearly sick – it looked as if she had typhus – and therefore now dispensable. She seemed resigned to her fate as the commandant read out a warning to the other prisoners in case they were minded to escape. The moment they tied the noose round her neck, it began to snow: a light flurry at first, but by the time her body eventually stopped twisting, it had turned into a blizzard.

  Hanne was beginning to feel unwell herself, but the fact that two days on Paulette had clearly not been caught gave her enormous hope, which sustained her over the weeks to come. If Paulette had successfully escaped, then she had a chance of reaching freedom, and Hanne knew she would keep her promise.

  Peter would know she was alive.

  Her Englishman would come and rescue her, she had no doubt about that.

  * * *

  Friday 20 April was Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, but there was little celebration in Berlin. The sound of Red Army artillery to the east dampened any party mood there might have been.

  The same day, north of Berlin, in Ravensbrück concentration camp, the mood among the prisoners veered between despair and optimism. The despair came not just from the fact that they were still in a concentration camp but because they were terrified of how the Nazis would behave now the war was clearly about to end. The workshops and factories in the camp had ground to a halt, which meant the prisoners had now outlived any economic value they might have had. A few weeks earlier, more than twenty thousand prisoners had been sent on a death march in the direction of Mecklenburg and nothing had been heard of them since. Thousands of prisoners remained in the camp and they were dying in their hundreds.

  Something strange had happened earlier in the month. The Swedish Red Cross had turned up at the camp and taken a hundred prisoners away with them. They were mostly Scandinavian and they were told they were being taken to Denmark. Hanne had only heard about this after they’d departed, but then came rumours that the Red Cross was about to return and this time take many more prisoners with them. It seemed that the Swedes had done some kind of deal with the Nazis.

  Hanne Jakobsen had every reason to be optimistic that Friday morning. After all, she was Danish so was bound to be among those rescued. And it couldn’t come a day too soon. She was feeling quite ill now and was beginning to have trouble walking.

  After roll-call that morning she was summoned to the commandant’s office, where she was shocked to find Mohr, the sickly Gestapo officer, waiting for her. She was surprised he was still alive. He still looked dreadful, but now his manner was far more menacing.

  ‘I imagine you think you’re going to be taken back to Denmark by those Swedes, don’t you?’

  She shrugged, unsure of how to respond. She placed a hand on the back of a chair to stop herself from falling.

  ‘Have you heard from Peter Rasmussen?’

  She shook her head, perhaps too eagerly. It made her feel dizzy and faint.

  ‘Is there anything you want to tell me about Peter Rasmussen?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, sir, I—’

  ‘Any information you can give me about him?’

  ‘There’s nothing I can tell you.’

  ‘Well let me make it clear, Hanne Jakobsen, unless you do tell me something, you’ll be the last person left in this wretched place.’

  Chapter 25

  London, April 1945

  It was a week since they’d identified Major Edward Palmer as a probable German agent: a traitor. What they’d found out in the past seven days had turned what had been a probability into a near certainty. The meeting had now reconvened.

  ‘Johnny Oakley’s absolutely furious: incandescent – couldn’t believe it.’ Hugh Harper shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it either. ‘He recruited Palmer, said he was doing a decent job: quite liked him too. As you know, I called Johnny as soon as we’d finished our meeting last Friday and asked him where his Major Edward Palmer was and he said he’d rung the duty officer early that morning to say he was unwell and wouldn’t be in that day. I went over to see him. He insisted he was a first-class chap – Cambridge and all that, well thought of in military intelligence – and wouldn’t believe what I was telling him, but by then you’d called in from Palmer’s place, hadn’t you, Prince?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I went straight there and had to break in: the place was abandoned. From what we can gather, he’d left early that morning. A neighbour in the opposite flat saw him make three or four trips to the rubbish bins at the back of the block, and then noticed him leaving with a suitcase. I called the local police in to secure the flat and search the bins, but there was nothing of interest in them. We tracked down the estate agency he rented the place from. He’d dropped a letter off there to say he had to give up his tenancy at short notice and enclosing two months’ rent and his keys. We have no idea where he went after that, but he’s not been seen since then.’

  ‘Why would you pay two months’ rent if you’re going to disappear?’

  ‘I have no idea, sir; maybe he wanted to minimise suspicion – who knows?’

  ‘Means he’s thorough: leaves nothing to chance.’

  ‘And what do we know about his background, Prince?’

  Prince thumbed through a small black notebook. ‘Born in Kidderminster in 1907, making him… what, thirty-eight? His father was a bank clerk and his mother worked in a shop: both died some years ago. He’s an only child and there seems to be no other close family. He went to the local grammar school, then Cambridge – double first – followed by a couple of years teaching before returning to Cambridge to study for a doctorate in medieval literature. Gave it up in 1938 when he took a short service commission. Joined the York and Lancasters, fought in Norway and after that was based at Brigade Headquarters and transferred to Brigade Intelligence. Divisional HQ next, then Normandy – injured at Caen – promoted to major and joined the War Office in September last year.’

>   ‘So he was having a good war then.’ Lance King looked impressed.

  ‘A decent enough one. Any politics that we know of, Prince?’

  ‘Nothing, sir, no files on him anywhere – Special Branch, police in Cambridge, Metropolitan Police, MI5.’

  ‘Friends, lovers?’

  ‘Again, nothing we can find. A few people in Cambridge remember him, though not terribly well. Quiet and reserved were the words that cropped up, not a very sociable type, something of a loner; very bright apparently and spoke with a stammer when he was nervous. The only bit of information that may help is that he went to the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in the summer of 1935: seems he got the funding from Munich.’

  ‘Could have been recruited there.’

  ‘Who knows, sir?’

  ‘So the trail’s run dry…’

  ‘It has, Lance, yes – we’ve put his name, photograph and details on the police and ports watch lists and flagged him with the highest level of urgency, but let’s remember, this is a man who’s been operating successfully as a German spy for at least six years if not more and managed to remain above suspicion until very recently.’

  ‘True, and he’s bound to have changed his identity: most probably his appearance too. Let’s not forget we’ve still got to find agents Byron and Donne too. Has anything cropped up to help us with that?’

  ‘No, Lance, nothing. I’m convinced the key to uncovering this spy ring is in Berlin.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Remember how I told you last week about the young RAF pilot who was obviously mistaken for Edward Palmer in Brussels? Well, you’ll recall he said that this chap Rauter came from Berlin to interrogate him. He’s almost certainly Abwehr or RSHA. If I can go to Berlin and track him down, he could be the key to finding them all.’

  ‘But Berlin’s still in Nazi hands.’

  ‘Surely not for long now.’