Troubled Midnight

by John Gardner

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraphs

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Historical Note

  Also by this author

  Copyright

  For Trish

  Who lent me her name

  And twice gave me her love.

  Author’s Note

  THIS IS THE fourth book in a series concerning a young Woman Detective Sergeant – Suzie Mountford – middle class, bright but inexperienced and, in the first instance, naive and vulnerable. The previous books are, at the time of writing, available through Amazon.co.uk and the titles are Bottled Spider, The Streets of Town and Angels Dining at The Ritz. Each is self-contained and all the reader has to know is that young Suzie Mountford has been attached to Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Livermore’s Reserve Squad, at New Scotland Yard since 1940. She has also been Tommy’s lover, but has become somewhat disenchanted with him as the relationship develops.

  I make no apology for the fact that the premise of this book has already been used by at least four – possibly many more – novelists. It is a good premise and it’s a starting point for the ingredients, the characters.

  Also there never was a CO of the Glider Pilot Regiment stationed at RAF Brize Norton called Tim Weaving. Indeed I doubt if any of the Glider Pilot Regiment staff at Brize Norton in the final months of 1943 were named after the characters I have placed there.

  I lived in the beautiful market town of Wantage from 1936 until I was married in 1952; I was more or less educated there; went off to serve my country from there in 1944 and spent vacations there during the three years I was up at Cambridge between 1947-1950. I still regard myself as Wantage born and bred, even though I wasn’t born there. In those days it was in Berkshire and I cannot think why Oxfordshire has now embraced it.

  Most of my descriptions of Wantage at that time are accurate, but I have built an extra house. There never was a Portway House standing in Portway looking out across King Alfred’s School playing fields. Because there was no such house, there was, of course, never a murder there. There was never a Captain Bunny Bascombe VC, so there was never an Emily Bascombe.

  If some old Wantage folk imagine they can see themselves in the odd character woven into this book they must be wrong because it is a work of fiction. The same applies to some of the names. There may well have been some people with names like Wilson Sharp, Christopher Long, Pete Alexander, Peter Mulford etc. etc. but they are not the people who appear in this book. How could they be?

  John Gardner

  Hampshire 2004

  The difficulty of controlling the operation once launched, lack of elasticity in the handling of reserves, danger of leakage of information with consequent loss of that essential secrecy.

  Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke: Diary reflections on Operation Overlord. June 1944

  Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

  La Figlia che Piange

  T.S.Eliot

  Chapter One

  RITTER CAME ALL the way from Hamburg, what was left of it, to see him: Nicholaus Ritter of the Abwehr whom he’d last seen in 1938 when he’d stayed in Hamburg and offered his services to the Nazis in the belief that Hitler was the strong man of Europe. It had been difficult in ’38 because you had to be a loyal Nazi to work for the Abwehr; you also had to be a German and the Abwehr were twitchy about an Englishman making such an offer. His first meeting with Ritter had been a preposterously clandestine affair at the railway station in the first class dining room. Of course they didn’t think they’d even be enemies of the English then. Nick Ritter worked in the Military District X Headquarters where he was really in charge of Air Espionage, but he had employed Sadler who now felt pleased that Ritter himself had come all this way, to central France, to see him.

  “We have new offices,” Ritter told him. “Very smart and still standing. They used to be a Jewish Old People’s Home. No need for Jewish old people any more.” And he laughed.

  On the Sunday morning Ritter was gone and he spent the day with the other two men. The sunshine was warm and he sat close to a stand of pine trees on the edge of a great lawn with a water garden in the distance. So Sadler, as he was now known, smiled his secret smile: the one that hinted of evil known only to him. Who would believe it: him, Sadler, sitting here, miles out in the occupied French countryside in the fourth year of the war?

  “Sattler,” the one with the buckteeth said. “In German, Sattler.”

  “Ah. Yes,” he nodded. “Sattler. Sadler.”

  He didn’t know exactly where he was: couldn’t pinpoint it or give a map reference because they had brought him by night. But he reasoned that he had to be between twenty-five and fifty miles south of Amiens because the train had stopped at Amiens on the way from the coast. The blinds of his carriage were down and he was locked in but he’d cheated and pulled back one side of the blind, squinted out and saw they were in Amiens station. After that they travelled for around fifty minutes, at steady speed, so he reckoned between twenty-five and fifty miles before they pulled into the siding and the one-platform halt. He thought in miles because England was his home; he couldn’t think in kilometres, and when they got to the house Ritter was already there and they had dinner.

  “I wanted you to know how specially pleased we are with your work,” Ritter told him. “The Führer doesn’t know your name but he is impressed and has asked that you be presented with this.” This was the Iron Cross First Class with Oak Leaf Cluster. After he had pinned it on Sadler’s breast, Ritter unpinned it and said he’d hang on to it, for safekeeping. “Rommel says we will destroy them on the beaches,” still holding the medal cupped in his hands, the box on the table. “That will be the end, when they are finished. Or, if not the end then the beginning of the end, or perhaps the end of the beginning as someone has already said.” He laughed. “I could never work out what Churchill meant by that.” He lifted an eyebrow and laughed again.

  Later he told Sadler that he might not be in charge of things for much longer. “Our friends in the RSHA are making inroads. By the time it comes for you to do your duty for the Fatherland I think they will be in command and you’ll answer to them alone: to Schellenberg and his like.”

  The RSHA was the Reich Security Administration, the Party intelligence service, the SD and its domestic partner the Gestapo. The thought did not make for easy sleeping.

  In the morning Sadler had woken in a comfortable bed with a uniformed servant pulling back the curtains, letting sunlight into the room, bringing coffee and fresh rolls – real coffee and newly baked rolls with apricot preserve. These people did themselves well, which gave the lie to the stories doing the rounds in England. As far as England was conc
erned Germans fought for a loaf of black bread: rations in the Third Reich were meagre, but, Sadler told himself, not everyone would be as well fed as the officers here. Nothing in his world was ever really what it seemed.

  They had changed his name to Sadler just after he arrived on the previous night; told him, in English, that they had to ring the changes. For operational purposes he would now be known as Sadler. One of them muttered a colloquial expression, ‘Wir brauchen ein Tapetenwechsel.’ Literally, ‘We need a change of wallpaper,’ and for a moment he didn’t understand. Then they laughed, the two majors from the Abwehr: German Military Intelligence, really funny men.

  The jolly pair asking their questions: one calling himself Clauswitz and the other, a slight short man with protruding teeth reminding Sadler of a rabbit, called himself Hindenburg. Much laughter at that. Hindenburg indeed. That well-known double-act Clauswitz and Hindenburg, for one week only here at the Adolph Hitler Palace of Varieties.

  He already knew their real names: Major Klampt and Major Osterlind, knew them well from when they were lieutenants back in the thirties when he had first made himself available to the Abwehr. Dietrich Klampt and Fredericht Osterlind: Dieter and Freddie, old amusing friends who had trained him in the house on the outskirts of Hamburg.

  In the space of two weeks they had taught him rudimentary coding, using simple ciphers; they also set him on the way to learning the Morse Code; taught him the rules of surveillance, aircraft recognition, calculating the layout of military camps and airfields and from that deduce how many people were stationed there. He learned how to sift through local newspapers and find nuggets of information; ask leading questions from strangers. They played Kim’s Game to hone his memory and taught him how to throw someone who was shadowing him in a built-up area. From a tough nut-brown gnome of a Fallschirmjäger sergeant he learned the art of silent killing, a skill he was later to put to good use.

  Now, on this summer Sunday afternoon they told Sadler of their appreciation for what he had done, and said they understood about him not being able to give them the facts concerning Siegfried, Jack and Josefine – where they were, how they were operating. Well they knew about Josefine they told him, but did he hear anything?

  All three were reporting in regularly, they said, and the product was not complete rubbish. Some of their information was good. All the same, Sadler told them what he’d heard about Camp 20, just in case. One couldn’t be too careful. Sometimes it was just called The Twenty Committee.

  In Roman numerals though Camp 20 was Camp XX.

  Camp Double-Cross: where they turned captured spies, playing them back against their former masters.

  He was trying to get more information, he told them, but it was difficult. If people were being held in Camp XX nobody was talking.

  As for Sadler, originally known as Sparrowhawk, it was easier for him to evade the security services because he was a ghost, invisible, a born and bred Englishman. During that morning he started to wonder if he was the only agent they had in England: the only one sending them substantial information.

  They got to the point quite quickly: there was real work for him now, and they spent most of the time going through what was necessary, suggesting ways he could go about the job, telling him what he knew already, that it wouldn’t be an easy job to get the minutiae of the Allied plans to invade occupied Europe. They talked inside the house, oppressive he thought, with old furniture, the kind of thing you expected in a house like this, heavy and unrelenting, highly polished with the scent of wax everywhere. The tables were particularly weighty with thick barley sugar twisted legs, sideboards that were so sturdy they would never groan under the weight of food. In the bedrooms there were headboards a mile high and wonderfully carved, making you think that possibly there would be grips on the footboards, shaped like male feet, just to give you purchase during the serious business of making babies for the Fatherland. There were solid dressing tables in the bedrooms as well, so functional you’d have second thoughts about letting the triple looking glasses glimpse a naked thigh, a breast or a man’s exposed genitals.

  In the morning the air raid warnings warbled and they actually heard some American Flying Fortresses very high and droning south. In the early evening the warnings sounded again.

  “It’s how it goes these days,” said Clauswitz. “The Yanks in the mornings and the Tommies at night.”

  “No rest for the wicked,” Hindenburg chuckled. “We never get even a stray bomb here. Not nowadays.”

  They had lunch in the cool house and it reminded Sadler of being at home for the holidays, coming in from the garden after being in his tree house eating plums and watching people go by on the main road that skirted the copse at the bottom of the neatly striped lawn. He had begun early in his life, watching people without their knowledge, spying on friends, following people.

  “They’re coming, you know,” he said, and the two men nodded gravely. Clauswitz told him they knew that well enough, “But with your help we’ll possibly be ahead of the game.”

  Hindenburg smiled knowingly and said that General Rommel – “I beg his pardon, Field Marshal Rommel” – was confident that the beaches would be denied to the attacking armies. “I personally heard him say that the beaches will be slaughter yards for the Tommies and Yanks. Heard him say that in Berlin. He will be put in charge here very soon I think.”

  Sadler said he was glad to hear it and Clauswitz repeated, “We know they are coming, and we know it will be a substantial attack. All we need now are your reports.” A bleak smile with a coldness behind the eyes. Uncertainty? Sadler wondered.

  “When d’you think?” he asked.

  “Not this year for sure.” Osterlind shook his head. “They’ve yet to appoint the Supreme Allied Commander. That’s why you’re to do the job. They’ll probably come in the spring. Maybe early summer. It’s far from easy. There are limited times. They can’t pick and chose.” The smile again, then, “It’s up to you, Sadler,” which made him feel terrific, worry pouring in on him.

  Then there was the other, almost suicidal, instruction.

  “Before it happens, should the opportunity present itself, you should dispose of the Supreme Allied Commander.”

  “Kill him,” Osterlind added as though they hadn’t made themselves clear.

  Sadler said he hadn’t been appointed yet, and they chorused that it was only a matter of time.

  “Before the New Year,” Klampt said.

  “Around Christmas.”

  The enormity of what they were asking ballooned in Sadler’s mind like some terrible explosion.

  “Most of our intelligence comes from Lisbon these days,” Klampt said, almost casually, sealing his deduction that most of their agents had already been swallowed up.

  “Who is likely…?” He began and Osterlind jumped in.

  “If the British have their way it will be their Chief of General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, failing him, then Montgomery of course.”

  “But this is not certain,” Klampt grinning as though he had a special source. “My informer thinks they will have to let the Americans take the lead and in that case it will, of course, be Marshall. General Marshall.”

  His job, after supplying them with details of the invasion, would be to remove the Supreme Allied Commander, but only if he had a straightforward chance. “A clean shot, you might say,” Osterlind told him. Sadler’s hands were sweating and he could have sworn that he smelled cordite in his nostrils. The very nature of this command consumed him, making his hands tremble. Not that the killing worried him, he had killed before, it was the terrible clarity, the visibility, of the target that concerned him. Would he ever have a clean shot at the SAC?

  That evening, about eight o’clock, they put him in a car after giving him a cold meal, salad, tomatoes, cucumber and a wonderful potato salad, with thick slices of ham and crisp crusty bread. Before he went they drank a toast, “To the Russian riders.” Laughed because it was such a good code word, though Sadler
frowned because it wouldn’t take a mathematician to work it out. An obvious code word, he considered. Too obvious.

  A sergeant accompanied him to the little wayside halt that had no name; and the express stopped specially for him, the sergeant boarding with him, showing him to an empty compartment which had Reserviert stickers on the windows and a lock on the corridor side, the blinds pulled down like the one on the previous evening.

  The sergeant brought him coffee and checked if there was anything he needed and he remained in the compartment for just over two-and-a-half hours. It was dark when they arrived and the sergeant waited until everyone else had left the station, most of them army stationed at the defences. Then a pair of sailors came up, sent to accompany him to the quayside where a U-Boat from La Rochelle was tied up, a skeleton crew on board: tired men with dead eyes who had just completed two months out in the Atlantic, men from the Grey Wolves.

  Sadler said goodbye to the sergeant who remained stiff and formal, surprised that his special package was relaxed and friendly.

  The U-Boat captain shook hands but did not speak and Sadler went below where he changed back into his uniform, then stretched out on a bunk and waited – twelve hours, then more time with the U-Boat submerged, waiting for nightfall again. A petty officer rowed him ashore in a rubber dingy. An hour later he was on a London train, crowded, dirty, filled with smoke and uniforms. In the corridor a woman crouched down saying she was searching for cleaner air, and a drunken soldier fell over as the train swayed on a bend.

  He had been away for four days. Nobody missed him. That was the kind of man he was. The kind who was never missed and had difficulty summoning a waiter.

  On the August Sunday when Sadler was briefed by the Abwehr in France, so Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Livermore and Woman Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford spent the day in the market town of Wantage which lay under the Berkshire Downs, where the Roman Ridgeway once echoed to the tramp of marching legions.