‘Billiards? At this time of night?’
‘Couldn’t sleep, sir. Thought it might relax me, a bit of practice. I’ve got a bet on, with one of the other lads.’
‘And my door was open?’
‘Probably the wind, sir. Could have blown it open when I came in the front door. It’s a real bluster out there. But when I saw it open, I thought I’d better look in to check all was well. But it’s all right, there’s nobody else here, as you can see, just the wind. The blind and curtains were open too, so I’ve closed them to keep out the draught.’
‘Thank you, Brevik. I could have sworn I locked it. I couldn’t sleep either. Something woke me up; I kept imagining I was hearing an engine and that the Germans were invading. Ridiculous, eh? The things you think of when you’re half-asleep.’
‘Sorry if I disturbed you. I’ll let you get back to bed.’
‘Well, as we’re both awake now, d’you fancy a game?’
Karl blinked. He didn’t. But he smiled in a relaxed way. ‘Sure. I didn’t know you played.’
‘I was the one who got the table installed. Used to be a bit of an expert in my youth.’
‘You can put me through my paces then, sir.’ Karl led the way out of the office and strolled to the billiard table. Under his jersey, his armpits were damp, his heart too loud, but it would soon settle. The dangerous part was over. Police work had taught him the sooner you moved on from the flashpoint, back to ordinary life, the better. People forget so easily.
Within half an hour, Harcourt was lecturing him on the importance of angles and slide-shots, and had even got out the brandy for a nightcap.
As June turned to July, and July turned to August, Jørgen continued to watch Karl. He simply couldn’t help himself, and yet it was impossible to do this without becoming his friend. They’d spent so much time together in the last few months he began to feel like there was something missing if he couldn’t see him out of the corner of his eye. Karl, on the other hand, seemed to be doing everything possible to get away from him.
The nights were light now, like a permanent dusk, and Jørgen was a light sleeper. They’d been moved from the refugee camp and had use of an old crofter’s cottage, close to Scalloway harbour. A room each, thinly partitioned by a stud wall, over the one room below that served as kitchen-cum-living room. On several nights he’d heard Karl go out at night. Lying awake now, unable to sleep, he heard Karl moving about in the room next door, and a light, creeping tread on the wooden stairs as he went down.
Jørgen got up and went to the landing. ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’ he asked, leaning over the bannister in his pyjamas.
Karl turned, boots in hand, a flash of annoyance on his face. ‘It’s this time of year. It always makes me restless, even at home. Like I should be up and doing something.’ He continued to go downstairs.
‘Where are you going?’ Jørgen followed him down into the gloom. The blackout blinds were still down in there.
‘Just out. For a walk round.’
‘Mind if I come? If you just give me a few minutes to get —’
‘No. What is it with you? Can’t a man get any peace?’
‘Okay, okay, sorry I even asked.’ Jørgen couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his voice.
Karl’s face hardened. In this light it was all sharp angles. ‘Look, I know you’re watching me. It’s bloody obvious. I can’t move an inch without you being at my elbow. I’m not sure what you think I’m up to, but I’m sick of having you trailing me like a dog everywhere I go.’
‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Even to his ears it sounded thin.
‘Who put you up to it?’ Karl said. ‘Harcourt?’
‘Nobody. Calm down. You’re imagining it.’
Karl stared at him pityingly a moment longer, and then swung on his kitbag and barged out of the door, leaving it swinging behind him.
Jørgen didn’t follow. Damn, damn, damn. He thought he’d been subtle, but of course he couldn’t be. Shetland was a tiny place, everyone knew everyone else; you couldn’t move an inch without somebody seeing. And he felt bad. Like he’d hurt a friend. The fact they’d been on that journey together across the vidda had given him a respect for Karl. For his sheer physical prowess, for his quick-thinking when they’d been in danger, and for the fact he’d inspired him to keep going when his own legs would barely move. Without Karl he probably would still be out there in a drift, one more soul lost to the wind and snow.
Jørgen was summoned to Harcourt’s office the next day. Morag came for him in the car. Karl had apparently been in earlier to ask Harcourt why he’d been put under surveillance.
‘It won’t do, Nystrøm,’ Harcourt said. ‘We work here as a team. What has Brevik done that means you must be on his back like that? Poor chap was quite upset by the whole thing.’
‘It was just a silly argument. We’re both a bit stir crazy, wanting to do something to help Norway. It gets a bit intense when we share a billet.’
‘You need to find a way to let off steam. You’re a good man, Nystrøm, but you need to calm down.’
Calm down? He was already calm, or at least he was before he was in Harcourt’s office.
‘I’ll make sure you and Brevik are billeted separately now,’ Harcourt said. ‘Take the pressure off him a bit. How’s that sound?’
Jørgen gritted his teeth. He had to nod and agree, even though the conversation with Harcourt made him uncomfortable. It made him feel he was letting the side down.
Harcourt got out a folder and began to talk about the next few missions on the Shetland Bus, but Jørgen hardly heard him, just kept agreeing. It seemed important to look to be on his side rather than someone who was always throwing a spanner in the works.
He was glad to see Morag waiting for him in the lobby when he came out. She seemed to read his mood. ‘How about we go the long way back, whilst we’ve got a few minutes breathing space. Give you an idea of the coast.’
Anything to take his mind off the fact that Harcourt thought he was some sort of headcase. ‘Sounds good,’ he said.
She set off through the intermittent rain, the wiper making a rhythmic squeak. ‘Keep it quiet though, won’t you? Petrol’s rationed, so we’ll have to freewheel down the hills.’
He was amazed to see that she knew exactly how to do this and had obviously done it many times before. It was an odd feeling to be bowling downhill with no engine — like floating. It eased his agitation and his anger.
She let him gaze out of the windows, as he trawled back through his conversation with Harcourt. Against his better judgement, he’d finally agreed to crew on the Shetland Bus. He wanted to make amends and prove willing, now he’d been accused of spying on Karl.
He was pondering this, and so it was a moment or two before he realised they’d stopped. They were overlooking a bay, and the horizon was peppered with small islands. The sun streaked through the clouds, lighting up the folds of the hills and the green of the sea. It was breath-taking.
‘Whiteness,’ she said. ‘My favourite place. It’s where I always come if I need space from life at base.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘The grass is so green here.’
‘It’s limestone underneath — hence the name. Here,’ she reached to the seat behind and dragged over a bag. ‘I’ve got coffee. Not the real thing, obviously, but it’s hot and wet.’
They opened the doors and climbed out, and he followed her to a rocky ledge of limestone that acted as a seat.
As Morag poured the coffee from the thermos he took in a great deep breath, staring out at the sea and the layers of islands fading into the distance, savouring the sharp sunlight on his face, and the wind ruffling his hair. This was it, he thought. Forget Karl and Harcourt. This view was a taste of freedom. The first time he’d felt free since joining Milorg in the winter of 1940.
And yet he’d just given all this up again for possible arrest and execution by the Nazis, crossing the sea back to Norway again. What
an idiot.
Morag handed him a tin mug. The coffee was hot and bitter and reviving.
‘I think I just volunteered for the Shetland Bus,’ he said.
‘I thought you might,’ she said. ‘You struck me as the type to give something back.’ She twisted her head towards him and smiled.
Her eyes were brown, the colour of chestnuts. Her gaze made something tug in his heart.
From then on, whenever Morag had to drive him somewhere, they would go the long way round. She always had the thermos, and they would stop somewhere different and spend a few moments talking and admiring the view, and slapping away the midges that always seemed to form a cloud around their heads.
It never went any further than that. She was aware he would be going out with the next run of boats to Norway, and that he might not return, and that he was still in some way attached to a woman in Norway. He told her about Astrid, and about his parents, about how he was the youngest of three brothers and always had to use cunning to avoid being blamed for everything. In turn she told him about her childhood in Shetland, the only daughter of older parents who doted on her.
‘I was stifled by them, even though I loved them,’ she said. ‘The wild coast was my escape.’
She knew every inch of the island, and all the best views. She was modest about how much organisation it took to funnel the refugees from the boats. ‘No. To tell you the truth, I’m more comfortable with puffins and otters than people.’
‘Just treat me like a puffin or an otter then,’ he said.
‘OK. Next time, forget the coffee, I’ll just throw you a fish!’
In the weeks after that, Jørgen found himself thinking of Morag often, looking out for her at lunchtimes, hoping to see her windswept figure with the wild brown hair, hurrying towards the boatyard from the car park. She was always ready to share a joke and had a sense of humour that was both sharp and dry.
He spent the rest of the summer fitting out the boat he was to sail in — a fifty-foot open clinker-built fishing vessel called the Vidar. She had a diesel engine, and was in every way indistinguishable from the other fishing vessels you might see, hugging the Norwegian coastline with their creels and pots and nets piled on deck. The only difference was, this one was going right across the North Sea and back, and needed to be armed, carry vast amounts of fuel and water, and enough food to sustain the crew for several weeks at sea.
Larsen, who ran the whole Shetland Bus operation, told them to take the Vidar out fishing to dirty her up a bit more, and make sure she smelled of fish, in case the Nazis should come nosing around when they got back to Norwegian Waters. Another ‘Bus’ crew, headed by an ex-military man, Clausen, was to do the same.
To Jørgen’s surprise, Karl managed to get himself taken on as part of the crew of the Vidar for this ‘dirtying’ trip, and it was the first time Jørgen’d had any close contact with him for more than a month. After their argument, Harcourt had moved Jørgen in with the rest of the Norwegians, into a former net loft jokingly nick-named ‘Norway House’.
Another Norwegian, a stout fisherman called Anders, had been billeted with Karl. How did Anders get along with Karl? Best not to ask. Karl seemed to be Harcourt’s golden boy.
A little of the discomfort in Jørgen’s chest ebbed away when Karl greeted him in a friendly-enough manner, and offered him a smoke. He accepted, just to ease the awkwardness, and they puffed away together until Jacobsen the skipper gave them the orders to cast off. The seas were light today, with a fresh easterly breeze that meant they had to have full throttle to get out to sea. Once out from the shore, Shetland lost its beauty; it looked a forbidding place — wind-scoured and uninteresting, no dramatic, soaring peaks like Norway. They cruised around the coast, navigating well away from the shore to avoid mines, and past steep-angled cliffs full of raucous kittiwakes who’d painted the cliffs white with droppings. A few of the inlets had rocks where seals basked in the thin sunlight.
As they passed out towards the open sea, they caught sight of Clausen’s boat further out, and another genuine fishing boat coming in after their catch, thronged by a blizzard of gulls.
When the mainland was a blur on the horizon, they likewise cast out their nets and trawled in their haul of silver shimmering fish.
‘Like home,’ Karl said, as they hauled together.
‘Did you know Shetland was once part of Norway, five hundred years ago?’ Jørgen said. ‘Morag told me.’
‘Is that so? Now it seems to belong to the English. Better if we could take it back.’
‘Scottish,’ Jørgen said. ‘It’s Scottish.’
They didn’t speak again as they helped the rest of the crew slice the heads of the fish, drawing another crowd of marauding screeching gulls. The ship certainly stank now, of blood and fish. He was mesmerised by Karl’s hands as he sliced through the fish, twice as fast as he could manage.
‘I saw you were out with Morag last week,’ Karl said. ‘Saw you drive past in that old car.’
‘Had to go and see Harcourt. Report on how this old girl’s doing.’ Jørgen slapped a hand affectionately on the side of the boat. Though the boat was called Vidar which meant ‘warrior’, from long habit he still thought of all boats as ‘she’.
‘You were a long time.’
He shrugged, but he knew what Karl was getting at.
‘You said you’d got a girl back home in Norway?’
‘Astrid? Yes, but obviously I haven’t seen her for a long time. I don’t know what she’s doing any more.’ The niggle of guilt made him defensive. ‘Anyway, she could have found someone else, for all I know.’
‘You’ve asked Morag out then?’
‘No. We just…’ What? There was something there, but it was too new to talk of. ‘She just takes me round the island, to see a bit more of it.’
‘Would you mind if I asked her?’ Karl heaved up the crate of fish-heads and tossed them into the sea. The resultant screeching and dive-bombing of gulls prevented further conversation, but not the stab of feeling in Jørgen’s heart.
‘No,’ he said, ‘’Course not.’ Though he did mind, terribly.
When they got back, there was a truck waiting to take the fish to the gutting sheds to be salted. From there it would go to the rest of Scotland. ‘Before the war it used to go as far as Italy,’ Jacobsen told them. ‘The war’s decimated our —’ He paused as a group of men were making their way to the harbour.
‘What’s up?’ Jørgen asked.
A big-wig welcoming committee was heading down the slope, holding their hats to their chests to stop them blowing away; Harcourt and a few other officers, along with Larsen.
‘Sorry men, you need to come to the marine supply shop,’ Harcourt said. ‘We’ve urgent instructions.’ His expression was grim.
They trudged there in their boots and oilskins, like children about to be told off by the headmaster.
‘What d’you think we’ve done?’ Karl whispered.
‘Dunno,’ Jørgen said. ‘They told us to go fishing, so it can’t be that.’
Harcourt waited until they had all filed in and were silent before speaking. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, but we lost the Fiskegutt last night, and five of the crew have been taken by the Nazis. One managed to swim ashore and radio back to us, but the others tried to get away in one of our motorboats. Sad to say, the engine-housing for the motorboat was faulty, the thing wouldn’t start, and none of our men, including the agent we’d taken months to train, could get away.’
Jørgen glanced around at the other men. They looked as horrified as he felt.
‘The housings were watertight,’ Jacobsen said. ‘I made sure of it.’
Harcourt sighed. ‘I know, Jacobsen. It isn’t your fault; we don’t know what went wrong between here and Norway. And it was foolish to send them at this time of year. But we needed that updated intelligence, and observations are easier in good weather. Now we’ve learnt our lesson the hard way. We’ve lost a good boat, but worse, five of our men.
We realize now we sent them too early and we can’t risk it again.’ He raked his gaze around the assembled crew. ‘But you must do your part too; we must be certain every single one of those engine housings are checked and double-checked. Men’s lives depend on it. I don’t need to tell you that you will all be in their position in a months’ time.’
It was a sobering thought. Jørgen thought back to the housings he’d made. He’d double checked every single one.
‘So no reconnaissance about the German defences has come back?’ Karl asked. As well as dropping in a trained W/T op, the Fiskegutt had been sent try to update the SOE’s information about Nazi positions on the coast — where watch posts and patrol vessels might be operating, what the new Nazi shipping regulations might be since last winter.
‘Unfortunately not much,’ Harcourt replied. ‘Anders had to swim for his life. They didn’t have time to complete their mission, which means our first few trips to Norway in the season will be running blind.’
It was a blow. Jørgen looked over to Karl, but his face was impassive, blank. He remembered Anders had been billeted with Karl. Karl didn’t ask where he was now, or how he’d get home. Jørgen frowned. A memory had just surfaced — of the day he went over to Karl’s bench to tell him he hadn’t quite plugged the hole for the starter handle properly. Karl had thanked him, and Jørgen just assumed Karl would have done it again until it was watertight.
But it made him wonder. Had it been just a beginner’s mistake, or had Karl been sabotaging the housings? He shook his head to free himself of these thoughts. He’d washed his hands of Karl; there was no way he could go and report this to Harcourt. Harcourt would just tell him he was being neurotic.
‘Our first forays will begin on the first of September,’ Harcourt continued. ‘Briefings will take place next week. We’ve a lot of advance preparation to do for the first few missions, and we need to adapt and re-arm the boats. The first boat out will be crewed by Haraldsen, Barlie and Nystrøm. The rest of the crew is yet to be assigned.’
The Lifeline Page 16