by Jan Needle
‘Frank,’ said Edward, a little later. ‘These rooms at the Reform Club. Are they in the cellar? What’s going to happen to him? What’s intended?’
There was a long pause. The Humber, old and driven hard, squeaked and rattled. Foley’s voice took on its quiet form. Carrington had to strain to hear him.
‘I wish to God I knew,’ he said.
BOOK THREE - Mr Churchill's private war
One
August 17, 1987
The Americans were in charge the day he died. That was the key to it. Silversmith had contacts in the CIA, and Peter-Joe had been their guest. The CIA set up the business in the prison, provided the right men, took care of the paperwork, as it were. They provided the British team with fatigues, they got them into Spandau and made sure that no one noticed them. They showed them the lie of the land, organized the rotas of the warders and nurses who might be troublesome, arranged to call the one guarding the old man to the telephone. The rest was very easy.
The old man, not to put too fine a point on it, was a wreck. He was almost blind, and could not even walk in a straight line unaided. He could not lift his arms above his shoulders, he could not tie his boots, he could not hold a mug properly, he had to sit to shave, and he could scarcely drag a big-toothed comb through his meagre hair. His will, however, was still powerful. Almost incontinent, he forced himself to wake at 3 a.m. so that he could empty his bladder into a lavatory and not his bed, and he still scrawled sharp notes when necessary – most recently to demand the dismissal of an American warder who he said deliberately upset him and was a danger to his health. It was this warder who was called away that afternoon to answer the mysterious phone call. When he returned, the old man’s health had deteriorated indeed.
The morning had passed like all the others did these days, in a routine of minimal movement, minimal human intercourse, minimal thought. The Americans were the most easy-going of the watchers, but still he was watched, continuously. Overnight it had been British and US nurses, at 7.45 a.m. a Frenchman, then a Briton and again an American. At twenty past ten Hess painstakingly wrote out a list of his requirements – paper handkerchiefs, toilet rolls, a ruler – and twenty minutes after that the Tunisian, Abdallah Melaouhi, brought him in his early lunch, of shrimp cocktail, fish, mashed potato, beans. Although a suicide note was found in his pocket two days after his death – sitting, strangely, with his list of requirements but discovered, fortuitously, in front of witnesses – the old man was at no time seen to write one.
The morning, then the afternoon, dragged on. The American governor popped in for ten minutes before midday, and finally Melaouhi went off for lunch. The old man had a sleep, then, at about ten past two, hobbled into the warm Berlin air with his American keeper, to drag himself painfully round the garden for a while. He did not walk far – he could not walk far – but headed for the garden hut a few hundred metres away from the doorway of the prison. He would sit there, as he often did, and let his mind wander quietly, his old body out of draughts and sunlight. As he approached the door, the keeper was called back to Spandau Jail. The telephone.
Inside the hut, the two Britons waited. It was very warm, and they were sweating in their US Army overalls. The hut was cramped, untidy, with a pair of chairs and a small table with a reading lamp on it. One of the men had a length of cable with him, which had come into the jail in the pocket of his overalls. The plan was to make the death look like a suicide; the old man was to hang himself with the flex that fed the table lamp. Safer to bring the gear, however. One never knew.
‘A pound to a pinch of shit,’ Peter-Joe had said, ‘if we don’t take a bit of flex to do the job, some bloody cleaner will have nicked the lamp for his kid’s bedside table. Then we’d have to break the old bastard’s neck and make that look like suicide. Difficult.’
It was not difficult to kill a ninety-three-year-old man in itself. That was easy. The difficulty, in fact, might be in doing it without causing visible injury if he struggled. The secret was not to give him the chance. They heard the warder being called away, they heard the shuffling of feet outside, they heard the stick bang against the side of the planked hut, and watched the door swing slowly open. They kept their breathing easy, slow and quiet.
Being almost blind, and coming from bright sunshine, the old man could not comprehend them for a moment. They should not be there, that much he did know, but the Americans were very lax. He stood in the doorway for too long, they needed him inside. He stood there, framed in sunlight, straining to see them clearly, to work it out. They willed him to move forward, to get in. So that they could kill him.
The old man was a stubborn character, they had been warned of that. He’d been the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich, and he had been in prison since 1941. He had hardly complained about such big facts, only about minor things, illnesses, discomforts, illogicalities. He had been guarded night and day, since 1966 he had been alone, he had been treated harshly by everyone and like dogshit by the Russians, and he had eaten, slept and brooded without asking for quarter. That was no help to them. They needed him inside.
That was how he received the head bruising that was noted at the autopsy, but not thought significant by Dr Cameron. One of them rushed at him, and the old man was jerked into the hut. He fell against a chair, crashed sideways, and banged his head against the table. Instead of expiring on the spot, or begging for mercy, he was galvanized. He seized the other chair, and tried with all his strength to get on to his feet. It was pathetic. He got halfway up, on to one knee, then the chair leg slipped away and he fell forward, this time striking the table with his chest. Both chairs were over now, and the old man tried to slither in among the seats and legs. The killers, cursing, had to kick the furniture aside. Peter-Joe, dexterous as ever, caught the table lamp as it fell, saving the bulb from shattering. The wire flex slipped from his right hand – the flex that he had brought – and the old man tried to grab it.
The noise was great and the situation grimly humorous. Peter-Joe responded like a fisherman trying to land a conger eel, using a loop of flex in place of a gaffe. As the old man boosted himself forward like a toddler going for the crawling championship, he swung the loop and caught it underneath his chin. He stood back, an end wrapped round each hand, his legs straddling the narrow back.
‘Whoa, Dobbin! Hey up, you silly old bugger! Keep still, for Christ’s sake!’
The old man ducked his head beneath the table, trying to butt his way into its shelter. Peter-Joe hauled backwards, trying to drag him out. He dropped to one knee, tried to get his left hand round the old man’s head, to take him by the ear and twist him round, get him to face facts. His right hand had both ends of the ligature, he was trying to get some purchase on, some strangling pressure. There was a sharp smell of sweat suddenly in the hut. The old man was wriggling, more like a teenager than a nonagenarian. His black boots were flying about wildly, grey socks and off-white longjohns peeping momentarily. His face appeared, congested, his eyes bulging, rolling. His mouth was open and flecked with foam, his tongue thick and slimy. Peter-Joe spoke no more. He was panting.
He threw his leg across the old man’s back, straddled him once more, then sat heavily on the skinny buttocks and thighs, transferring the flex to both hands which he brought together at the side and back of the neck. The pale lips drew back suddenly from the teeth, the old man grinned like a horse, he even snickered, whinnied almost. Peter-Joe dipped his head, the two heads almost touched, as he increased the pressure. His shoulders heaved, his face was wet with perspiration, as the old man kicked and lashed and battered with his boots.
‘You … stubborn … old … sod!’
Suddenly, the cable slipped, the closed throat opened, air rasped into the tortured lungs. Suddenly, too, the other man moved in and took the strain, convulsively, his fingers overlapping Peter-Joe’s, his face set like a gleaming mask. Still it seemed interminable, the flapping and the twitching, the trembling of the legs, but then the movement ceased. Pet
er-Joe rolled sideways, got both knees on the floor, studied the blue face. He glanced over his shoulder at his companion, who had moved back. He grinned.
‘You took your fucking time, you’re not on your holidays, you know. You look like fucking death.’
There was no reply. Peter-Joe turned back cheerfully, to the corpse.
‘A real old Nazi, eh?’ he said, half admiringly. ‘What a tough old bastard! Listen, get the acetone out, rub things down. Better than the smell of sweat, anyway. And he might shit himself. Look, we’re running late. Let’s get gone, pronto. What a tough old bird.’
They were still there when the warder returned, but that did not matter much, he would be squared. The nurse, Melaouhi, saw them briefly, two unknown men in Yankee clothing, but he was too upset by the death of the old man to realize the significance for a while. By the time the alarm was raised they were gone. In any case, the armed guards – true military thinking, this – were there to secure the prison from imagined dangers from the Berlin streets, and could not quickly get from the watchtowers into the prison gardens, however great the urgency. Because of the old man’s stubbornness in clinging on to life, they did not have time to tidy up the furniture, or to arrange the lamp flex round his neck, or even to unplug it from the wall. They did not worry. They knew that someone else would see to that. Their back-up was extraordinary. The best.
Before the remains of Prisoner Number Seven had even been formally pronounced lifeless, they were on their way to Hanover again. They were staying at the Holiday Inn…
Two
The house that Edward and Erica had in Cumbria could not have been more different from the rooms in Oxford where Bill Wiley had first met them, and nor could the regime. When he had taken Johnnie there – a sullen, silent, miserable Johnnie – he had been worried that it could not work out, that the combination of old people, grandeur, and the strange young woman who had met them at the station, would tip the boy into open rebellion. But the house up on the moors had not been grand, it had been inaccessible and remote. When the planked front door had been pushed open, it was not a butler that had scuttled into view, but a mouse. Johnnie, who had been sunk in gloom for more than an hour, squeaked in sheer surprise. And smiled.
The smile had not lasted long, but that might have been too much to hope for. The previous twenty-four hours had been an ordeal for an eleven-year-old, made harder by the lack of sleep. They had left Ireland in the cab of a lorry, Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead, after being driven down-country by Veronica. John had wanted to see his mother, and had become cold and withdrawn when told he could not. He had not cried, but Bill had felt the hurt. The boy had watched Ireland disappear from the stern of the boat with anxiety and loss clear on his face.
In the Donegal holiday home, Bill had tried to explain to him that they had to go to England and hide, but had kept bogging down. Johnnie wanted to know who was ‘after them’ and why, and what it had to do with Mum. He was obsessed with the thought that it was some subtle and obscure lie, that Bill was merely, in reality, running out on his marriage, that at the end of it would be a man in a black robe and a curly wig who would solemnly pronounce a divorce. Bill, in turn, could think of no way to tell his son that he was running from his own side, from his job, from the Army, without it becoming simply too complicated for the boy to understand. He reiterated several times his ‘no lies’ formula, knowing that he was lying by omission and elision if not in fact. Worse, he felt as if John knew.
But he hid himself, when told to, and he nodded gravely when Bill asked him if he ‘felt all right’. He burrowed under sleeping bags in the lorry cab, he stayed close to Bill on Preston station, and he stood without complaint on the crowded Glasgow train that took them to Penrith. Bill felt the tension increase when they were met at the station by Jane Heywood – another woman, another ‘friend’ from his father’s shaming life – but Johnnie remained polite. As he got into the back of her car he said to Bill, out of the blue: ‘Will we see Mum soon, Dad? Will she be coming out of hospital?’ – thus forcing Bill into an acknowledgement, a public one.
‘Yes, he replied, ‘I hope so, love. Very soon.’ Another lie, he guessed.
After a day or two, the house on the hill seemed to suit John. In ways it was like Ireland, without the bits he hated. It was raining almost constantly, or rather they lived so high up the fellside that they were in a semi-permanent mist. The house was built halfway up a steep hill on a small plateau of grass and smooth tarmac, and most of the time the nearby village – Garrigill – was invisible.
To the boy, Jane and his father remained just friends, and they behaved strictly as if that were true. He did not ask many questions, for fear perhaps of hearing things he could not believe, and when he and Bill went walking, he made it clear that Jane should be excluded. Aunt Erica he would have gladly had along, but she could not walk much farther than the edges of the tarmac, and Edward he was indifferent to, without at all disliking. Slowly he thawed with Jane, and allowed her to play football beside the house. She was much more energetic that way than his father, who preferred to sit on the low stone wall and kick out at the ball when it rolled near him. Gradually they all relaxed.
But Liz would not go away. He wanted, always, to know if she would write, or why they could not ring the hospital to see if she was getting better. Bill, not sure if it was even true that she had had the so-called breakdown, worried too. But he was terrified his movements had been traced, that even Veronica’s phone would be unsafe. He promised John there would be news soon, in a few days, and swore all would be well. At night, even having sneaked into Jane’s big old-fashioned bed, he worried.
They usually got a couple of hours alone at night, and they accepted that they were in love. Edward and Aunt Erica, told the story before Bill and John had arrived, played the part of odd old friends without irony or remark, and behaved towards Jane and Bill as if they were brother and sister. To Johnnie they played grandparents – the remoteness and uninterest of Edward offset by Aunt Erica’s kindly attention, her baking of rock buns and the sweet-tins that appeared from nowhere for his pleasure. John liked them both, and modified his pattern of long walks with Bill to frequent shorter ones with the old, frail lady. There was a stream near the house, two hundred yards or so, which Erica could get to with great care and a lot of help from Johnnie. Once there, they would sit down on the rocks and watch the rushing water. They saw young trout.
In bed, Jane and Bill tried for happiness, and achieved constant sexual delight. The bed, which she had used on her vacations since she had been a teenager, was deep and ridiculous, like a high-sided canyon bridged with feather eiderdowns, into the middle of which they tumbled. They made love quietly, because the house, although of stone, had thin internal walls and they were both afraid for John; and of him in a way. But their bodies, as they always had been, were perfectly in tune. Which made for lovely fucking, and for sadness.
Johnnie did not forget his mother, but he modified his nag for information, and when Bill announced one day that he had to drive to Newcastle, he actually preferred to stay with Erica. Bill was glad, because he was going to try to find out what was happening, which would have been difficult to keep from the boy. Newcastle, nearly fifty miles away, he thought the safest place to ring from, in case the call was intercepted.
Jane drove him, because she said there was shopping she could get, but despite the pleasant weather and the beauty of the fells, there was a tension between them. She knew why he was going, naturally, and she found she was curious about Liz. She had pieced together something of her lifestyle from things he’d said since they had re-met, and things remembered from their first affair. It was a world she’d never been in, and it fascinated her. A half-world of valium and depression, of unhappy acquaintances and afternoon booze in front of the soaps. Not unnaturally, at the moment, Bill would rather have talked of anything but his wife.
Jane said quite aggressively, as they passed Scotch Corner, ‘But this idea the Army might h
ave caused her mental state, somehow. It sounds insane to me. Isn’t it more likely that—’
He interrupted: ‘Jane, for Christ’s sake! It’s insane but it happens. Not just in Russia. If you call someone mentally ill, they’re ruined in this country, they get treated as unstable for ever more. Maybe the Army’s just decided she’s having a breakdown, the MO’s put her on drugs. Why should anyone disbelieve it? She’s on medication, she looks terrible, so isolate her. Good God, according to Edward it’s what they did to Hess, or Horn, or whatever they called him at the time. Prisoner Z was slightly bonkers, but sane enough to be tried at Nuremberg. It works.’
‘Isn’t it more likely,’ Jane resumed, with dignity, ‘that the fact you worked for eighteen hours a day, that you were never ever there? Couldn’t that have helped?’
‘No!’ he snapped. ‘It was my job, my duty, she knew that when she married me. It didn’t help, but that was hard luck, she wasn’t really interested anyway, we were different types of people, she went her separate way. Veronica says the Army sent a medico, and Liz went overboard, immediately. Veronica says—’
‘Veronica says anything you want to hear, it strikes me! Perhaps Veronica…’
‘What? Perhaps Veronica what?’
‘Oh bugger off,’ Jane muttered. ‘I don’t want to hear.’
When they got to Newcastle it was Veronica he had to ring, however, because there was no reply to his own phone or his neighbour network. But Veronica could tell him very little. Liz had left the house in an ambulance some time ago, and none of the neighbours knew where she’d gone. Sally Kimber had tried everyone she knew who might have information, but had drawn a blank. The house was locked, the curtains drawn, the milk and papers cancelled.
‘How are you, Bill? How’s Johnnie? Do take care, old love, do take care.’