Night Crossing

by Robert Ryan

  ‘I wonder what happened to Uncle Otto.’

  Something very similar to Canaris and involving piano wire as Ross recalled, but he didn’t want to go into that. He wondered why she was ignoring what he was telling her. ‘Uli. I said—’

  ‘Ross,’ she interrupted. ‘There’s something I need to know. About the night they murdered Erich.’

  ‘Christmas Eve. Yes.’

  ‘When your father came into the room and said they’d hanged someone. You asked if it was Erich.’

  ‘Did I?’ He furrowed his brow. ‘I don’t really recall. I’d been drinking.’

  She smiled. ‘Bong. Red light. Yes, you do remember.’

  He gulped half of the pint in one and wiped the froth from his mouth. ‘Yes. I just thought … that he’d been found out.’

  She felt her throat go dry, but she forced the words out. ‘You didn’t drop hints to Schuller?’

  ‘Hints?’

  ‘Cameron. Look at me. This has been on my mind. I can’t shift it, no matter how hard I try. The thought that you might have … Look, it sounds awful—’

  ‘You thought that I might have told Schuller that it was Erich who betrayed them,’ he said flatly, recalling that his father had suggested much the same thing.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even before I read the letters he gave you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He lit a cigarette and smoke wreathed his face, blurring his features, as he said: ‘It’s not true, Uli.’

  She picked up her handbag from the floor.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘if I take this along to EMI and have it enhanced, I won’t find anything incriminating on it.’

  Ross looked inside her handbag. It was a wire spool. ‘It’s incriminating having that, Uli. You stole a recording? Government property?’

  ‘You forget what I used to do, Ross. Sound recording was my business. I didn’t steal the original. The night Erich was murdered, I went back to the transcript room at Stanhope House. I flicked through the files. Guess what I found? Your records. I made a duplicate of the interview between you and Schuller, and took a copy of its transcript and tape. I know how to have the parts of the transcript marked “inaudible” boosted.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. And I’ll come with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you do it. I’ll come with you. We can listen together. You’ll hear me tell Schuller that the traitor was Kroll.’

  ‘Kroll?’

  ‘The man killed on the beach while trying to make a run for it. I put him in the frame. Schuller figured the truth out all by himself, I’m afraid. Our mistake was not getting Erich out, in thinking that moving him would create suspicion and make reprisals elsewhere more likely. We followed my father’s dictum—“hide in plain sight”.’ Strange how the Colonel’s once mighty maxims now seemed so arbitrary and arcane. ‘That’s where I was in the wrong. I should have insisted that we move him, Christmas or no. And that’s all, Uli. That’s what I have to live with.’

  ‘Oh.’ She gazed hard into his face. Uli could see that Ross was telling the truth, and suddenly she felt wretched. All those months of suspicion and doubt gnawing at her, but there was a warmth of relief in there somewhere, too. ‘Oh, Cameron. I—’

  ‘Is that why you left? Because you thought I’d had Erich, my rival, taken out of the picture? You really thought that of me?’

  ‘No. Not exactly.’ Even if it had been true, she would have thought that in some way Ross’s actions were her responsibility, the inevitable result of the triangle of emotions that she had created. She felt that Erich’s death was as much her punishment as his.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ross. It was unforgivable. But to have read his letters, and then have him killed on the same night. It left me … distraught. And confused.’

  ‘About which of us you really loved?’

  ‘The letters upset me. Mostly because of what he’d been through in the submarine, all the time thinking, hoping, that I was out there for him somewhere. But before you came upstairs, before you read them, before your father appeared, I had already made up my mind. If Erich hadn’t been killed, I would have stuck to my choice.’

  Ross didn’t ask her what that choice had been but reached into his pocket and brought out the delicate silver filigree box he had bought for her Christmas present. He placed it on the table in front of him. ‘These past months have been difficult for me, too, Uli. By necessity I have seen a side of the German people that …’ He shook his head. She must know what he had seen and heard, that Canaris had been the tip of a black iceberg. ‘I think I need someone to remind me about Goethe, Schiller and Bach and Brahms and …’

  ‘Mörike.’

  ‘Especially Mörike.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what I had decided that night as I fell asleep after reading the letters?’

  He should be angry, Ross knew, because of her suspicion, but he couldn’t deny the thought had a clear but hateful logic. Would he have sacrificed Erich to keep her? No, not in that way. Otherwise he would have had no right to pass judgement on others these past six months—he would be as damned as them. ‘Don’t tell me. Just show me.’

  From the velvet-lined silver box in front of him Ross removed the bottle of perfume that Max Goldschmidt had made up for him in the autumn of 1938, the label now curling at the edges but the wax seal unbroken and the blue-black ink of Uli’s name still glistening as if it had been freshly written. He placed it in the centre of the table, watching her eyes widen as her memory flashed back to the hallway in Alte Westen, and the frighteningly intense desire she had seen in his face that day.

  Cameron Ross listened to his heartbeat mark out the seconds before Uli reached out with her hand and placed it over his, and with the other picked up the glass-stoppered perfume bottle and clenched it in her fist, so tight that it was as if she was determined never to let go of it ever again.

  Author’s Note

  ALTHOUGH NIGHT CROSSING is a work of fiction, much of it has its roots in fact. The passage of the SS City of Hamilton is based on a number of incidents. My good friend John Goldschmidt told me about the experience of his father, a respected Austrian publisher interned by the British. He was on the SS Dunera in 1940, which was out of Liverpool heading, eventually, for Australia, when it was attacked by U-56. The first torpedo missed (there actually were problems with them running too deep). The second one hit but failed to detonate, the third, again, missed. When U-56 surfaced to sink the liner with gunfire, it found evidence floating on the water of Germans on board—thanks to the ransacking of the cabins, as depicted here—and called off the attack.

  In 1941, U-616 fired three torpedoes at a large ship. All three missed. It seems likely that they too were faulty. Only when they reached port did the U-boat crew realise that they had nearly sunk the Ile de France, which had on board 2,000 children bound for Canada.

  The Rome attack on the SS police and the subsequent brutal reprisals also happened more or less as depicted in this novel. German SS volunteers were introduced into the British PoW system to try and stir up trouble, although the fictitious Axel Schuller wasn’t one of them.

  However, Germans really did escape from some of the 600 camps in the UK. There was indeed a plot at Devizes (Camp 23) to free thousands of Germans and create havoc to coincide with the Ardennes offensive, where Skorzeny’s Kommandotruppe, dressed in American uniforms, had infiltrated the US lines. (Many were shot out of hand; Skorzeny survived.)

  The UK escape plot was foiled and the culprits moved to Comrie in Scotland. A German PoW was subsequently beaten and lynched in the shower block and after the war five Germans were hanged at Pentonville for his murder, following a trial at the London Cage.

  The details can be found in the book For Führer and Fatherland by Roderick de Normann (Sutton Publishing). The March on London by Charles Whiting (Pen & Sword) gives a somewhat racier account, but places the events in a larger context. I first came across the incident in the memoir The London Cage
by Lt Col A. P. Scotland (Evans Brothers), now long out of print. Some of Colonel Ross’s background is based on Scotland’s—such as the meeting with Hitler—but the character is totally fictitious, as is the son, although PSIW and MI19 are historical fact, as is Tin-Eye Stephens. The book Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies (PRO) is an intriguing look at the interrogation of the Abwehr’s agents and details what went on at Latchmere House under Stephens’s direction.

  The geography of Stanhope is based on Ickworth House, near Bury St Edmunds (there were camps nearby at Newmarket and Bury St Edmunds itself), a fine Italianate building which was never a PoW camp. Part of it is now an excellent hotel, managed by Peter Lord, who didn’t mind me requisitioning his grounds, chopping down his trees and moving his sheep. The most successful escape by German PoWs was at Island Farm (Camp 198) in Bridgend, Wales, where seventy prisoners tunnelled out in March 1945. For details see the fascinating website www.islandfarm.fsnet.co.uk.

  The background to internment on the Isle of Man, the persecution of musicians by the Third Reich, the ability to read micro-expressions (here called a Duchenne, although that is not a recognised term), Canaris’s resistance to Hitler and his attempts to pass information to the Allies at the beginning of the war, and Heydrich’s secret flying lessons are also based on fact.

  For anyone interested in U-boats, first port of call should be U-boat Net (www.uboat.net) which is run out of Iceland, and is an astonishingly detailed and endlessly fascinating resource. The real U-40, by the way, was sunk in the English Channel in October 1939. Also see Type VII U-boats by Robert C. Stern (Caxton), Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim (Cassell), U-boat Adventures by Melanie Wiggins (Naval Institute Press) and The Secret Diary of a U-boat by Wolfgang Hirschfeld (Cassell).

  The background concerning music and musicians in the Third Reich was provided by The Twisted Muse by Michael H. Kater (Oxford) and Trial of Strength by Fred K. Prieberg (Quartet).

  Testimonies of internees on the Isle of Man and other places are widely available, but I would recommend A Bespattered Page by Ronald Stent (André Deutsch), Island of Barbed Wire by Connery Chappell (Robert Hale) and, on more general aspects of the positive impact of exiles from Germany, The Hitler Emigrés by Daniel Snowman (Chatto & Windus).

  For Berlin in 1938, I referred to the excellent A Dance Between The Flames by Anton Gill (Michael Joseph), Berlin by Giles McDonough (Sinclair-Stevenson), Blood & Banquets by Bella Fromm (Birch Lane) and The Ghosts of Berlin by Brian Ladd (University of Chicago Press), among many others.

  The Third Reich Tour of Original Berlin Walks (www.berlinwalks.com), which meets outside Zoo Station every Saturday and Sunday at ten a.m., is a good taster for what is left standing of Nazi Berlin (the tour commentary is in English). I am indebted to Nick Gay of the outfit for reading an early version of the manuscript.

  The golf course at Stoke Park Club (Stoke Poges) is real—it is where Sean Connery took on Gert Frobe. However, I have taken some liberties with the layout and the description of the holes.

  Thanks for their tireless support as always to: Martin Fletcher, David Miller, Sabine Stiebritz, Amy Philip, Kim Hardie, Kerr MacRae, Julie Manton, Peter Newsom, Barbara Ronan, Katherine Ball, Paul Erdpresser and all at Headline; Deborah, Bella, Gina and Gabriel; Susan D’Arcy; and to Bill Massey for the invaluable golf tips.

  About the Author

  Robert Ryan was born in Liverpool and has worked as a race car mechanic, journalist, jazz composer, university lecturer, and more. He has written many novels, including Early One Morning, a Sunday Times (UK) bestseller. He lives in North London with his wife, three children, a dog, and a deaf cat.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Robert Ryan

  Cover design by Michael Vrana

  978-1-4804-7761-2

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10014

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  ROBERT RYAN

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