A Time of Secrets

by Deborah Burrows

  Although I was not looking forward to witnessing an interrogation, I was anxious to see if the prisoner could provide some of the answers we needed. He was a Malay speaker, and I wondered if my fluency in the language would help me to pick up cues that would be lost in a written translation.

  The door opened and Ross appeared. He nodded at me and walked briskly towards the gate. I scurried after him and followed him onto Toorak Road. We walked in silence past Art Deco apartments; across the road I saw the AWAS huts amid the greenery in Fawkner Park. At Punt Road we turned left, away from the impressive bluestone spire of Christ Church. Ross hadn’t slackened his pace and I practically had to trot to keep up with him. The route was uphill, and the incline together with the cold air was affecting me badly.

  ‘Will there be a formal interpreter present for the interview? Or do you want me to interpret?’ My voice was loud, and a trifle wheezy.

  He stopped suddenly and whirled around to face me. ‘You’re wheezing.’

  ‘Don’t walk so fast, then.’ I pulled in a few raspy breaths.

  ‘How did they let you enlist if you’re bloody asthmatic?’ His tone was sharp.

  ‘I have good days and bad days – mostly good days. Cold air makes it worse. The Melbourne weather hasn’t been good for me.’ I tried to sound calm and reasonable, and not let his obvious irritation affect me.

  His mouth became tight as he continued to stare at me. I met his look defiantly. After a moment he blew out a breath and glanced at the low wall beside us.

  ‘We’ll rest a minute,’ he said.

  Ross sat on the wall, stretched his legs out in front of him and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. He lit one, inhaled, and tilted his head back to exhale a stream of white smoke. He hadn’t looked at me again. Feeling rather foolish I stood beside him, staring at the ground and concentrating on my breathing. By the time he’d tossed the butt into the small garden behind the wall there was very little wheeze.

  ‘I’m fine now.’

  Ross stood and brushed himself off.

  ‘They’ll provide an interpreter. Don’t let the interpreter or the prisoner know you understand Malay. I’ll want to know your impressions after the session.’

  He began walking along the road. I followed. We trudged up Punt Road at a more sedate pace until we reached the corner of Domain Road. Ross stopped to inspect a large house across the road from us, secure behind a high brick wall with armed sentries at the gate.

  ‘There it is,’ he said.

  Eric would have approved of Cranleigh, which was a lovely two-storey mansion, obviously built in the nineteenth century. I thought that it had been renovated fairly recently, because the high slate roofline and upper storeys were nineteenth century and sat a little uneasily with an elaborate front portico that I guessed was a 1920s or early 1930s addition. Still, it was a delightful house. And, like Goodwood, it was an incongruous headquarters for a wartime intelligence unit.

  A guard escorted us from the gate to the verandah, with its varicoloured tessellated tiles and massive front door. Our passes were checked again and we were allowed to enter a hallway that was dominated by a winding staircase. As we stood by the reception desk, I looked upwards to see a vibrantly colourful domed skylight and tried to imagine what the house would have looked like in its heyday.

  We hadn’t waited long before an AIF captain came striding along the corridor towards us. I didn’t recognise him, but Ross smiled.

  ‘Charlie Otway,’ he said. ‘Good to see you. Thanks for arranging this. Meet Sergeant Stella Aldridge.’

  I saluted the captain. ‘Sir.’

  Otway was a short man, with a round, pleasant face he’d attempted to make more interesting by the addition of a neat pencil moustache. He returned my salute. ‘I understand you speak Malay, Sergeant.’

  Surprised, I nodded. Ross was very still, beside me.

  ‘Did Deacon tell you that?’ he asked.

  Otway seemed to consider the question. ‘No. Can’t recall how I found out, actually. I think someone checked the sergeant’s record.’

  ‘Does the interpreter know she speaks Malay?’

  ‘I think he does, old man. Is that a problem?’

  ‘Of course not. Who is it?’

  ‘One of your APLO mob. A Sergeant de Groot. Grew up in Dutch New Guinea. Reliable chap, good interpreter.’

  Again Ross became very still. ‘I know him.’

  We followed Otway along the corridor towards the back of the house, then down a flight of stairs to the basement. A long corridor, with whitewashed walls and a low ceiling stretched in front of us. Typewriters clattered in a room to our left. We walked on and stopped outside a closed door at the end of the corridor. Three chairs had been placed against the wall in front of it. Sitting on one was an army corporal, whose yellow complexion suggested he was just down from the tropics. He was holding a revolver. Next to him was a lad of about nineteen, dressed in a private’s uniform and gripping a notebook. There was an air of suppressed excitement about him. Sergeant de Groot was sitting on the third chair. He raised an eyebrow when he saw me.

  ‘Stella. Are you the Malay-speaking sergeant?’ He glanced at Ross and said coolly, ‘Lieutenant Ross.’ De Groot’s accent seemed more pronounced as he spoke the lieutenant’s name.

  Ross looked across to Otway. His voice was a shade colder than de Groot’s had been. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

  Otway had been watching the scene with a look of interest, but he said nothing. I had a suspicion that Otway wasn’t as innocuous as he had seemed at first, and that he was making careful mental notes of all that was going on, possibly to be recounted elsewhere later.

  He nodded at the private. ‘Private James will transcribe the interrogation.’

  Then he turned to the guard. ‘He’s ready?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Shackled?’

  ‘Yes, sir. My word, he’s in a funny mood, though. Needed both the sergeant and me to get him inside and shackle him.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s very well,’ said de Groot. ‘He told me he felt ill.’

  There was an ache in my throat. I swallowed convulsively. This man was to be interrogated when he was ill and in shackles. I forced myself to remember that he was the enemy and I didn’t look at Ross.

  Otway nodded. ‘Open the door, then.’

  The guard stood, removed a key from his belt, unlocked the door and scanned the room. He covered us with his revolver as de Groot went in first, followed by Ross, then me and Private James. I heard the door close behind us and couldn’t help a shudder as the key turned in the lock. We were in a windowless room about ten feet square. Like the corridor, it had whitewashed walls and a tiled floor. A single light globe hung from a low wooden ceiling that was also painted white. The prisoner was a short man, obviously Malay, dressed in a maroon outfit rather like loose pyjamas. He was seated on a bench at the far wall and his arms and legs were shackled to a peg drilled into the concrete floor. Facing him was a narrow desk, behind which four wooden chairs had been set up in a row. The prisoner’s head was bent over his chest in an attitude of grief or despair. He didn’t look at all well and his hair and face were drenched in sweat.

  Without thinking I said, in Malay, ‘Are you well? Do you need help?’

  He raised his head to look up at me with dull hopeless eyes. He shook his head, and murmured something I couldn’t quite catch, before opening his mouth wider to vomit black, stinking liquid onto the floor of the small room. I watched in horror as his eyes rolled up and he fainted, twisting forwards to fall in a heap on the stained floor, his limbs tangled in the chains that shackled him.

  ‘Guard!’ yelled Ross.

  When I tried desperately to push towards him, Ross pulled me back hard against his body, then flung me at the private, who held me tight.

  The private and I
clung to each other like children, watching what was unfolding. I tried not to retch at the smell of fetid vomit that now filled the atmosphere around us and felt Private James’s body jolt as the smell turned his stomach, too. I pulled in a long, wheezy breath and Ross turned to glare at me.

  ‘Breathe,’ he said. ‘Shallow breaths. Hold your nose if the smell is too much.’ He raised his voice and yelled again, ‘Guard! Get in here, man.’

  De Groot had shoved aside the chairs and was kneeling beside the prisoner, pushing his fingers into the man’s mouth to clear it of vomit. The prisoner appeared to fight him at first, shaking his head wildly. Then he shuddered and suddenly relaxed into a terrifying stillness. De Groot gently lowered his head to the floor and pushed the inert body onto its left side. The man was lying very still indeed.

  The key turned in the lock and the guard came in, gun at the ready.

  ‘Put that away.’ Ross’s voice was hard, commanding. ‘Is there a doctor on the premises?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Get him.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ said de Groot. ‘The man is dead.’

  *

  I’d gone to Cranleigh to take part in my first interrogation, but I ended up being interrogated myself. It was an unpleasant experience.

  We waited together in a small reception room until, one at a time, we were shown into an office to speak with Lieutenant Sinclair, the army lawyer who’d been pointed out to me at Dolly’s party. He’d turned up with another officer, half an hour after the prisoner’s death. While we were waiting, Sam de Groot made me cups of tea and tried to take my mind off what I’d seen by telling me stories of New Guinea, where he’d grown up. We swapped memories of growing up in exotic places. Ross said nothing and spent the time scowling at the floor.

  I was questioned first. Lieutenant Sinclair was polite and unemotional and by the time I’d recounted the short, nasty story at least five times, I detested him and his needling questions. Eventually I was released. I waited for Sinclair to finish questioning Ross and Sam, then we were driven back to Goodwood together. I had yet more cups of tea in Ross’s office as he and I tried to make sense of it all.

  ‘Do they have any idea what caused his death?’ I asked. ‘It was so quick. Was it typhoid or some terrible tropical disease?’

  Ross seemed to spit out the words. ‘Poison. It looks like poison.’

  I stared at him, and a hysterical laugh bubbled up. ‘Someone was able to poison an important prisoner at Central Bureau HQ?’

  He rounded on me. ‘You think it’s funny?’

  ‘No. I think it’s bizarre. And I think he must have known something very important to risk killing him like that. Poison? How did they give it to him?’

  Ross shook his head. ‘It looks like he took it himself. Question is, how he got it in the first place.’

  I said, ‘No. The question is, why did he feel he had to die? He’d been interrogated before. What was different about this time?’

  Ross and I went over and over his two statements, looking for a clue.

  ‘He says that the Japanese knew about these bombing raids because of that enggan information,’ I said, pointing to a record of interrogation. ‘How would they have known? From a traitor here, or in Timor. How much do we rely on the Timorese people?’

  The lieutenant seemed to snarl his reply. ‘We need the local people. Without them we can do nothing. I’m worried that the enemy is torturing them, killing them, to stop them from helping us, but I have no way of knowing for sure.’

  ‘Surely the Destro people on the ground could tell you that?’

  ‘That’s just it. All we’re getting from Destro – according to Cole – is that it’s peachy in Timor. I don’t buy it, as the Americans say.’

  ‘Can’t Cole be ordered to give the information to you? Let you see the wireless transcripts for yourself?’

  ‘Blamey’s not willing to go that far yet. Not to give a direct order.’

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to get the information some other way,’ I said.

  He seemed amused. ‘How? Are you going to turn into Mata Hari?’ His face darkened. ‘Don’t try it with Lieutenant Cole. He’d eat you for breakfast.’

  I flushed, and said nothing.

  Back in my office I thought about what had happened that afternoon. The man had taken poison because he knew we were going to interrogate him again. What information did he have that made him decide to die rather than risk revealing it under duress? How had he got hold of poison? Was the traitor we were searching for in Central Bureau rather than APLO? Or were there traitors in both agencies?

  I scowled at the desk in front of me. There was no way I could answer the questions, and besides, I had other work to do. Ross had placed more buff folders marked Top Secret on my desk. So I forced away the memory of the prisoner’s face, opened the folder in front of me and began to read the papers inside.

  Nineteen

  At lunchtime on Saturday, I slid my latest letter to Eric into the mail tray under Betty’s amused gaze and walked along the hall to the kitchen. The trays of army sandwiches had been delivered, but I only ate them if I was desperate and today I’d brought Spam sandwiches from home.

  The kitchen was empty, but it would soon fill up. We had a small group of permanent APLO workers: two secretaries, a telephone operator, six clerks, four wireless intercept personnel who worked with Lieutenant Cole, two drivers, two privates who were general dogsbodies and four officers. The officers usually ate together upstairs, waited on by one of the privates, either Jim Pope or Ned Sparkman. The sentries worked shifts and they changed each day, as they were sent from army headquarters. There were often blow-ins from other APLO offices in New South Wales or Queensland and personnel from other intelligence agencies hanging around.

  As I was the first in for lunch, it was up to me to make the pot of tea. I’d just poured boiling water over the tea leaves when Mary Massey came in, carrying a paper bag with her lunch in it. Because Mary lived ‘out’ with her parents and her mother made her lunch each day, Jim Pope called her the Cut Lunch Commando.

  ‘I wish you still worked in the drawing room with us,’ she said. ‘We miss you.’ Her cheeks puffed as she blew out some air in a sigh, and she sank into a seat near me. ‘They’ve put Sergeant Ayers in your spot, and he’s no fun.’

  ‘It’s only been a week since I left,’ I said.

  I eased the tea cosy over the big brown teapot and wondered, as I did every day, who would choose to crochet together mustard yellow, lime green and maroon wool.

  ‘I loathe that tea cosy,’ said Mary, as we waited for the tea to draw. ‘It makes me bilious.’ She slumped in her chair and glared at the thing.

  ‘Is anything the matter?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  I laughed. ‘Because you’ve got a face as long as a fiddle.’

  ‘I hate that expression,’ she said sulkily. ‘What’s it mean, anyway, “a face as long as a fiddle”? I can understand it when people say that a face is as long as a wet week, because we all know how long wet weeks can seem in Melbourne, but a fiddle? It’s stupid.’

  She sat up and opened the paper bag she was holding. When she peered inside there was another exaggerated sigh. ‘Tomato sandwiches. Mum knows I hate them. Couldn’t she have made mock chicken?’

  I felt like saying she should be grateful to have a mother who was alive and who made her lunch every day, but instead I smiled.

  ‘I’ll swap you tomato for Spam.’

  ‘Spam?’

  ‘Courtesy of the Americans.’

  She perked up. ‘You bet.’

  We exchanged sandwiches. I poured out two cups of tea and put a spoonful of sugar into my cup and two into Mary’s, before pushing it towards her.

  ‘So, what’s the problem, Mary?’

  She chewed slowly, fingering th
e gold cross that was hanging around her neck. When she looked up at me, her chin was trembling.

  ‘Faye went out with Jim last night. And the night before.’

  ‘Oh.’ So that was the problem. It was bound to happen one day; I’d seen how Jim looked at lanky, good-natured Faye. I took a sip of tea and gave Mary a sympathetic look as she went on with her tale of misery.

  ‘Jane Corby says Faye didn’t get back to their lodgings until well after midnight. She had to climb in through a window because it was after hours. I bet Faye . . . well, you know.’ She leaned towards me, and dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘I bet she slept with him. And now she’ll . . . well, you know.’

  I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. ‘Now she’ll what?’

  The trembling of her chin increased. ‘Now she’ll marry him.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Why would she sleep with him, then?’ Green eyes gazed at me, perplexed.

  I forced myself not to laugh. ‘You don’t know that she did sleep with him. But if she did, then maybe she simply wanted to. Not everybody thinks that you have to marry someone if you sleep with them.’ My voice became sharper. ‘You must know that, Mary. You’re not a child.’

  ‘But it’s Jim.’ She bent forward over the table and laid her head on her arms.

  ‘Even if it’s Jim.’

  Her voice was muffled, but I heard her clearly. ‘Should I sleep with him? Would he like me then? See me as more than a kid? Sam de Groot likes me. He called me his le – liebling, his darling. Should I sleep with him? He’s nice.’

  We were steering into dangerous waters, and the kitchen would soon be full of APLO workers. I gulped down the rest of my tea and stood up.

  ‘Come on, Mary, let’s finish our sandwiches in my office.’

  Sam de Groot was coming out of Cole’s office when we got to my door. He smiled at us, but seemed surprisingly flustered. Mary lowered her eyes and smiled at the carpet as she crumpled the top of the paper bag holding her sandwiches. Sam murmured a hello to us both and carried on walking towards the stairs.