by John Harris
In his hands he held a summary of allied plans for the invasion, so vast they were terrifying. The whole of England was packed with men – among them Poles, Czechs, Dutch, French, Danes, Norwegians – all of them hating the Germans, all of them waiting to go home. It had been Hitler’s biggest mistake to antagonise so many nations at once because it was obvious Germany couldn’t hold the whole coast of Europe in strength; and in Normandy, it seemed, the allies had probed a soft spot.
The man on the bed frowned. He’d already learned that the famous Atlantic Wall, on which the Germans were relying for the defence of Fortress Europe, was largely a fraud. The Atlantic Wall, they were saying in Berlin, was so tight not even a louse could creep through; but the reports he’d heard were that any amateur swimming club on a day out could penetrate it without trouble. In places it was so thin it resembled a fragile length of cord with a few small knots at isolated places, most of them in the Pas de Calais area. To his certain knowledge, Normandy was poorly defended, and only an earlier warning he’d sent, springing from an intelligent guess at possibilities, had set Rommel frenziedly improving on them.
Now, in his hands, he held the confirmation that his guess had been correct. At first he’d imagined that Normandy was to be the site of a diversionary attack to draw troops from the Pas de Calais. Now he was certain that the diversionary attacks, if there were any, would not be in Normandy. Normandy was to be the site of the main assault.
His face, intelligent and intense to the point of nervousness, changed. He was a lonely man who didn’t mix much. A few of his brother officers assumed his silence was because he had taken the tragedy of Poland to heart. They believed he had a family there but they never heard him talk of them. Though it was safer that way, it was also lonelier. He seemed to have been alone for so long now, never able to talk to other men on level terms because his fears weren’t their fears, his loyalties not their loyalties, so that he sought only the company of undemanding women and the shared comfort of a warm bed. Women allowed him to relax and satisfied the desperate sexual need he felt for his wife.
He looked at the photographs in his hand again, suddenly feeling lighter-hearted. What he held could virtually end the war and take him home. By using the knowledge that the allies had broken their cipher system, German intelligence could load the information contained in their radio messages to lead the allies to disaster. And if the invasion failed, they would never be able to mount another for years – if ever. They would have no choice but to seek terms, and then – if anyone in Germany had any sense – the Reich would demand peace and see they got it.
He thrust the thought aside as he realised that the first and most important thing he must do was send a warning to OKW headquarters in France. His role had changed. His original task as leader of a team of saboteurs had swung long since to collecting and collating information. Now it had changed again. For Germany he had probably become the most important man in Britain. Krafft in Essex, the sole survivor of his sabotage team, was doing a good job and could be left to carry on with the information he’d fed him, but he knew he wouldn’t last long because he was far too reckless. As for himself it had been pure chance that the Poles had been called out to help look for the Bigot officers; as soon as they’d been told to search particularly for field officers he’d known it was important, and the enormous secrecy the Americans had shown had convinced him he was right.
He glanced once more at the photographs in his hand. Then he thrust them into his pocket and, pulling a sidepack from among the pile of equipment, he hurriedly began to throw things into it.
It seemed to be time for him to move on.
Three
‘Those papers,’ Pargeter said. ‘When you found them, were they wet or dry?’
Iremonger frowned. ‘Damp,’ he said. ‘But that could have been the goddam mist that was everywhere at the time. They certainly weren’t saturated and they sure ought to have been, oughtn’t they? As a matter of fact, I thought about it afterwards, but decided the guy must have got them out of the packet after he reached the beach, and then died of exhaustion or exposure – somethin’ like that.’
As the jeep headed back to Portsmouth, Iremonger sat frowning at the road unfolding ahead and the constant pro-cession of American army lorries.
‘Did you read the papers?’ Pargeter asked.
‘No.’ Iremonger’s frown grew deeper. ‘I just saw the top of the first sheet. It said “Bigot”. In pretty big letters. Then “Top secret”. Also in pretty big letters. Then “Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force. Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff”. Then underneath in ordinary typing it said “G-2 estimate of the enemy build-up against Operation Overlord”. Something like that. I also noticed the second sheet. Same heading, but this one said “G-3 directions for manoeuvring, D1–D2, with instructions to be followed on breakout from beachhead”.’
‘See any names?’
‘Cherbourg, Lorient, St Nazaire, Brest, St Malo and Rennes. There were more, I guess, but I’d been instructed not to read the papers, so I didn’t. I just couldn’t help seeing some of the goddam stuff.’
It was Pargeter’s turn to frown. ‘If this bloody Polish officer wasn’t a Polish officer at all, but our friend the Fox,’ he said, ‘then it means that the Germans will be getting information of where the landing’s going to take place and where we’ll be heading after we break out from the beachhead.’
Iremonger remained sunk in gloom. ‘We’d better have a check made on all ports and all airfields,’ he growled. ‘Even small ones. In case the bastard tries to get out of the country.’
‘We’d better also set up a round-the-clock check with radio detectors and arrange for all service operators not involved in transmitting or receiving to listen out in case the Fox tries to transmit.’
‘Yeah.’ Subtly, Iremonger noted, the man they were seeking had become not ‘Fox’ but ‘The Fox’. It was a title that suited him because he had the same shadowy cunning as a fox, remarkably slippery, and vicious if trapped. ‘I’ll go see Hardee,’ he went on. ‘He’ll fix it. Any operator not actually working a channel could be looking for him and arrange to jam anything suspicious. In the meantime we’ll contact all Polish units attached to the British XXX Corps.’
Within two days they had discovered the name of the Polish officer who had found the body of Colonel Greeno.
‘Kechinski,’ Pargeter said. ‘Captain Taddeus Kechinski, 20th Polish Recce Regiment, follow-up troops attached to the 50th Division. Stationed in the New Forest, and called in to help find the bodies of American soldiers lost on the night of April 27 to 28. The police saw his identity card.’
‘And the guy himself?’
‘Arrived in England early 1940 via the Middle East, together with other Polish officers. Background: Reserve officer. Married with one child; present whereabouts of wife and child not known. Has since not been out of England. Interested in photography.’
‘How interested?’
‘If he was interested enough to possess a good German camera he could have photographed those papers in the quarter of an hour it took that Polish soldier to fetch help.’
‘He sure could. Let’s go see this guy Kechinski. He might be a contact of the Fox.’
Pargeter’s pale eyes gleamed. ‘He might well be the Fox,’ he said.
Kechinski’s unit was stationed near Ringwood and it took them two hours to reach it because of the volume of traffic on the road. In every field there seemed to be scattered lines of men assaulting some imaginary object, and in every wood and copse hutted and tented camps sprawled. It was becoming difficult to believe that anything else existed but the need to land troops on the coast of France.
The Polish reconnaissance regiment was billeted in a village, some of the men in tents, some in huts, some in private houses. The colonel’s office was in what had once been the church hall, a battered tin hut whose floor still showed traces of the French chalk that had been scattered there for weekly dances.
The colonel was unable to identify Kechinski from the photograph Hardee had provided. ‘This is a mere boy,’ he said. ‘Probably in his early twenties. Kechinski was around forty.’
‘Forty-two, in fact,’ Pargeter said as the Pole shrugged. ‘This was taken some years ago. Could it be him?’
‘It could. On the other hand, equally it could not. I don’t know.’
‘Where is he now?’
The colonel shrugged again. ‘Not here. He has just left us. He was suffering from neuralgia. I think it is to do with not knowing what has happened to his wife and child in Warsaw. He reported sick a week ago and was admitted to hospital at Winchester. I had him driven there in my own car.’
Iremonger scowled. ‘Then he must have gotten out again,’ he growled. ‘Because on April 30th, he was on the beach at Abbotsbury near Lyme Regis in Dorset.’
For a moment they were silent then Pargeter spoke. ‘Would there be a photograph?’
The colonel shook his head. ‘I think not. He was a keen photographer himself and had an excellent camera which he said he’d taken off a dead German in Poland, but he wasn’t very interested in portraits. There is a group photograph, of course.’
The photograph was a long one of two or three hundred men in lines, piled in tiers one above another like stacked cards. The colonel smiled. ‘A prize for anybody who manages to identify himself,’ he said. He jabbed a finger. ‘That is Kechinski.’
The face he indicated was no larger than a little fingernail and was none too clear. Even the face of the colonel didn’t look like that of the man in front of them.
They compared the two photographs they now possessed and there seemed to be no relationship between them. The new one showed a man who had become thickset with the years, strong-looking and stern-faced.
‘Could be two different guys,’ Iremonger said.
The colonel shrugged. ‘In a unit photograph,’ he said, ‘one doesn’t have to be handsome. Just present.’
Pargeter cleared his throat. ‘Colonel,’ he said. ‘What else do you know about Kechinski?’
Holding his cigarette between finger and thumb in the arse-about-face fashion that so intrigued English girls, the colonel raised his shoulders in another shrug. ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘He joined us from a unit in Scotland. A good officer. Very useful. He spoke French, English and German, in addition to Polish. Sometimes even, I thought he spoke them better than he spoke Polish. He had been on the staff of General Sosnowski for a period.’
‘And General Sosnowski?’
‘Attached to the staff of General Bucknall, XXX Corps.’ The Pole smiled. ‘I believe they will be spearheading the British half of the landing.’
‘This guy Kechinski knows more than is damned well good for him,’ Iremonger said angrily as they hurtled back towards Portsmouth. ‘Probably the direction, the date, and any contacts we might have with the French Resistance.’
‘If he studied those papers Greeno was carrying,’ Pargeter said, ‘he even knows what happens after we’re established on French soil.’
As they breasted the hills behind Portsmouth, they could see the Solent so packed with warships, transports and landing craft, it seemed in parts almost possible to walk across to the Isle of Wight without getting the feet wet.
‘Jee-sus,’ Iremonger said in an awed voice. ‘How can those guys on the other side not know what’s coming? Do you know, there are fifty-four thousand guys just establishing and maintaining the installations for the assault forces and another four thousand five hundred just cooking for those guys, to say nothing of another four thousand doing nothing but watch security.’
‘Let’s hope one of ’em’s turned up Kechinski,’ Pargeter said.
A subtle change had come over their relationship. Iremonger was not so hostile and Pargeter not so painfully prepared to be patient. In the few days they’d been together, they had discovered an odd phenomenon: they worked well in company, sparking ideas from each other in the way an ideal police investigation team did. Neither was prepared yet to admit more than that, but they were prepared to accept each other’s intelligence.
As it happened, however, they drew another blank at the hospital at Winchester. It was full of men who’d been injured during training, but Kechinski had discharged himself the night he’d arrived.
‘He just disappeared,’ the sister in charge of the ward told them stiffly. ‘He left a note, with an address in Wales, where he said he was going to join his unit.’
‘In Wales?’
‘That’s what he said. He said he’d heard the invasion was finally coming off and, because of that, had found that his neuralgia had disappeared. You’d be surprised what this invasion’s done for people like the Poles, Dutch, Czechs and Free French. For four years they’ve been hanging around in England, suffering from the mopes. The worst danger they laid themselves open to in some cases was venereal disease.’ The sister had obviously made a great study of wartime psychology and was full of enthusiasm. ‘The hospitals for nervous cases and cases of depression were packed with them because they were homesick, deprived of action, and parted from their families. Since it became known that there’ll be an invasion this year the wards have emptied. Kechinski was just another.’
Iremonger looked at Pargeter. ‘That’s what you think, Sister,’ he said grimly. ‘This guy’s illness was just a goddam ruse to be away from his unit without anyone being suspicious. And he hasn’t returned to his unit in Wales because his unit isn’t in Wales. It’s in the New Forest.’
Four
‘The guy could be anywhere,’ Iremonger snarled.
‘More than likely in London,’ Pargeter said. ‘You can hide better in London than in the New Forest.’
‘Well, we’ve got to goddam find him! And, first off, since he seems at one time to have masqueraded as a Yank called Fox, and he’s probably doing it again now, I guess we’d better look up the list of American deserters. Let’s go see the Provost boys.’
The Provost boys had a formidable list of soldiers, from major down to private, who had decided they didn’t like the war enough to be part of it, and had quietly opted out, vanishing into the back streets and living on stolen ration cards and rations.
‘You have to accept, of course,’ they were told, ‘that some of ’em might no longer be alive, because some guy might have swapped identities with ’em a touch forcibly.’
The list was extensive and, since nothing was known of what had happened to the owners of the names, it left them still in the dark as to the identity Kechinski had adopted.
‘We’d better get in touch with the police,’ Pargeter suggested. ‘And ask them to keep a lookout, too. Then we can check on canteens, servicemen’s clubs and officers’ clubs.’
‘Rainbow Club? American Red Cross?’
‘And the French Club in St James’s, the Polish Club, the Czech Club and all the other foreign clubs, because we don’t really know what nationality or rank he is at the moment, and he seems to speak all the necessary languages. We could also search bomb sites and air raid shelters and try the women’s voluntary services and detention centres, and request the navy and the merchant navy to search ships – especially those heading for neutral ports.’
Pargeter frowned in a self-dependent absorbed manner, indifferent to the grin spreading on Iremonger’s face. There was an infuriating complacency about him but Iremonger had a feeling that he knew exactly what he was doing. ‘The police’ll co-operate,’ he said, ‘because they’re at it all the time and, without a ration card and an identity card, nobody can live any other way but rough.’
‘This guy won’t be living rough,’ Iremonger said.
‘No, he probably won’t,’ Pargeter agreed. ‘But we can’t take a chance. And, just in case he tries to make a dash for it, we’d better warn bobbies in coastal villages to put the request round that all small boats be immobilised by the removal of oars, rowlocks or whatever starts their engines.’
Iremonger stu
died Pargeter. ‘You ever a cop, Cuthbert?’ he asked.
Pargeter sniffed, suspecting sarcasm. ‘I was on the officer reserve and I was called up in 1939.’
‘How come you ended up in Intelligence?’
‘They didn’t know what to do with me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Got shot.’
‘Where?’
‘Backside.’
‘I mean, what country?’
‘Oh!’ Pargeter permitted himself a small grave smile. ‘North Africa. Why?’
‘Just wondered. You seem goddam efficient.’
‘I’ve done it all before.’ Pargeter blinked and got back to the subject. ‘We also make snap raids on the clubs and pubs and canteens, and get troops confined to camp for snap kit inspections.’
‘What the hell for?’
Pargeter smiled. ‘To check on ’em. No one’ll worry. They’re having them all the time with the invasion just round the corner. De Rezonville can handle the foreigners. In the meantime, we get Liz Wint to contact Kechinski’s last unit before the one in Ringwood and see what they know about him.’
As they were talking, the telephone rang. It was the detective inspector Pargeter had questioned in Colchester about the murdered Jacobson.
‘That chap you were investigating,’ he said.
‘Go on, Inspector,’ Pargeter encouraged. ‘I’m all ears.’
‘Seems he was asking a few questions about a chap out Chiteley way. Chap called Isaac Hatcher.’
‘Was he now?’
‘Yes. So I did a bit of asking around for you, and it seems this chap Hatcher was seen in the pub at Chiteley talking to an officer.’
‘What sort of officer?’
‘The landlord thought he was a Pole. He was in British battledress and beret but he had that funny metal badge on it they wear. Is it what you’re after?’