A Pious Killing

by Mick Hare

  She was excited and afraid at the same time. She wore a pretty fitted light green coat over a summer dress and a patterned cardigan. Her jet black hair framed her striking features. But there was no smile to ignite the beauty of that face. She looked at her reflection in the glass and was struck by the sombre expression her face took up in repose. It had not always been like that, but experience changes people.

  It had been two years now since she had first volunteered her services to the war effort as a fluent German speaker. She had written to the Ministry of Defence at the outbreak of war in 1939. If she had known at the time what repercussions would follow from that letter, she would never have written it. But the passing of a certain amount of time had managed to assuage some of the pain she had endured at that time. Today, despite her experiences at the hands of the British police, she still felt as strongly as she ever had about the Third Reich. So here she was at last, on her way to the War Office, summoned to “do her bit” as the Tommy’s so quaintly put it.

  At a time of war with Germany she had expected to be vetted. Fluent speakers of German, German ex-patriates, might easily be enemy agents. Most “enemy” civilians in Leicester were of Italian origin and their treatment had been nothing short of scandalous. Families had been rounded up and transported to separate camps as far away as North Yorkshire or the Isle of Man. In the end, Lily had escaped that fate, initially because of her work as a theatre nurse at the Leicester Royal Infirmary but then, later, because of her letter to the Ministry of Defence.

  The letter had saved her from internment but it had led to the subsequent sadistic investigation she was subjected to at the hands of Chief Inspector Peter Herbert of the City of Leicester Police Force.

  Herbert was a coward who had been mightily relieved not to have been conscripted to fight. He was not quite too old for conscription, but his age plus his occupation had conspired to let him off the hook. Twenty-five years as a chain-smoker had reduced his physical prowess to the extent that His Majesty’s Forces could manage without him. As a coward, Herbert was determined never to be thought as one, even by himself. To prove his great courage to the world at large he developed an over-zealousness in pursuit of his investigations. Investigations into suspected enemy aliens gave him the perfect excuse to step over the boundaries of conventional behaviour. In this way he saw himself contributing to the defence of the realm every bit as much as the private on the battlefield. When Lily’s file landed on his desk it elicited one of his snake-like smiles.

  Lily went to the door of her terraced house on Dronfield Street. It was situated in the respectable blue-collar district known as the Highfields. The three strong raps upon the door knocker had startled her, but she shrugged off her reaction as tiredness.

  She had just returned from an all-night shift at Leicester Royal Infirmary where she had participated in six emergency operations in succession. The patients were casualties of last night’s bombing raid on nearby Coventry. After the almost total destruction of Coventry last November who would have expected another attack now? Five times she had returned the bloodied floors, walls, furniture and instruments of the theatre to sterile cleanliness ready for the next operation. Then she had assisted the surgeons and theatre staff with the conduct of surgery.

  A four year old child with a severed arm had had no chance from the start. The ambulance dash from Coventry to Leicester had seen to that. But they had tried anyway. The removal of a house slate from a young mother’s skull had been completed successfully but they would not know for some time how the injury had affected her mental faculties.

  With such thoughts in her mind and with a craving for breakfast and sleep, she opened the door to find herself face to face with Chief Inspector Peter Herbert. He introduced himself, formally and politely, showing his badge. Lily invited the Chief Inspector in and they sat in the front room of the house, the room traditionally reserved for special occasions and special guests; not that Lily ever had either.

  “You’re an enemy alien, Miss Brett,” Herbert smiled humourlessly. He said it as if commenting upon the niceness of her room. The mismatch between tone and content immediately unsettled Lily and she looked at this man with increasing concern. He sat forward in his chair, back erect, elbows resting on the arms of the floral suite. His sharply creased trousers had ridden up his leg exposing pale grey socks, pulled up tight with emulsion white shins above.

  “I have applied for citizenship and I am loyal to the United Kingdom.”

  “Nevertheless, Miss Brett, you are an enemy alien. A German!”

  He got up from the armchair and moved to the mantelpiece. He reached out a hand and picked up a decoratively framed photograph.

  “You see, Miss Brett, if you were a loyal British citizen, I doubt you would have a photograph of a Nazi soldier on your mantelpiece.”

  Lily, roused to anger, strode across to him, “Get your hands off that,” she snapped. She snatched the photograph from his grasp. “It is not a Nazi uniform. That is a German army uniform from the Great War. It is my father and he was a hero in any man’s language. He was not a Nazi. He was an academic and a democrat.”

  “Well now Miss Brett,” returned Herbert, obviously affronted but still able to maintain his sinister grin. “That may be as you see it. But only an enemy alien would know the subtle differences between German military uniforms. And to an English patriot there’s no such thing as a German hero.”

  Whenever he spoke the word ‘German’, he spat it out as though the utterance offended his lips.

  In the face of this bigoted onslaught Lily felt her eyes begin to fill with tears. She inwardly cursed her own emotions and fought back the tears. She replaced the photograph of her father on the mantelpiece and stood between it and Herbert, as if protecting her past from his dirty presence.

  “What do you want, Chief Inspector?” she asked as assertively as she could manage in an effort to bring this unpleasant encounter to a conclusion.

  Herbert’s serpent grin spread irresistibly across his face as he savoured his reply. “I want to find out if you’re a German spy, Miss Brett.”

  Lily gasped involuntarily at the direct brutality of his reply.

  “If you’ll be good enough to get your coat, Miss Brett, we can continue this interesting chat at the police station.”

  “But Chief Inspector, I was working all yesterday and last night and I have eaten nothing for twelve hours.” Lily was aware of the uselessness of her protest even as she spoke it.

  Herbert enjoyed rebutting her, “I’m afraid I can’t help that,” he grinned. Then, with deliberate abruptness he lost the grin and assumed an expression of aggressive seriousness. “Stop stalling! Get your coat!”

  Lily stepped into the hallway to get her coat. As she slipped it on she heard a crash from inside the room. She dashed back in just in time to see Herbert in the act of lifting his heel from the broken frame of her father’s photograph.

  Lily’s introduction to wartime security at Leicester Police Station was brutal and swift.

  Having signed for her possessions at the front desk she was suddenly seized by two uniformed officers. With her arms clasped painfully behind her back she was pushed through a swing door into an area of the station which contained the cells. She screamed out in pain but her protests were useless. She felt a floor fall in her stomach but she refused to be overwhelmed. She experienced dislocation resulting from a feeling of complete defencelessness. In here they could do what they liked with her.

  Inside a cell she was confronted by Herbert and four uniformed officers.

  “Take your clothes off!” hissed Herbert.

  “You can’t make me do that,” gasped Lily, her voice catching in her throat.

  “That’s where you’re wrong Mrs Fritz,” yelled one of the officers, his bellow resounding off the walls of the hollow cell.

  “German spies have no rights – and we have all the rights we want.”

  The shouter walked forward and stood face to face with
her. Lily brushed the tears away from the corners of her eyes and held her abusers stare.

  “All right,” said Herbert, stepping forward. “We can’t waste any more time. Undress her!”

  What happened to Lily then and was repeated more than once over the next fourteen days was, she knew, tantamount to rape. It happened here at Leicester Police Station and it happened repeatedly at Leicester men’s prison, where she was transferred after three days.

  Her clothes were ripped from her and she was intimately searched. Each of the five men took it in turns to effect their own intimate search of her. All the while humiliating insults were hurled at her. They discussed her shape, size, proportion, all as if passing judgement on an animal for sale. They spoke disparagingly of her Teutonic breasts and pubic hair. They accused her repeatedly of spying for Germany.

  All alone in her Leicester prison cell she had to endure the taunts of the male inmates. Each night the guards told her that they would be bringing a few prisoners along to her cell to keep her company. Fortunately, each night they failed to keep their word; as they did in all things.

  She was interviewed daily by Herbert, who seemed to have no other case-work to pursue. Every two or three days Herbert would decide that it was necessary to strip search her again, as if she could have acquired something to hide from them in her cell. She always knew when that was about to happen because Herbert would be accompanied by one of his companions from the first night of her interrogation.

  During this period Herbert seemed to believe that he was getting somewhere. He established that Brett was not her real name but that it had been anglicised from the German, Brecht. That her father had fought in the German Army in the Great War, that he had been an elected member of the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic but that he had stood down from political activity in early 1934. Mysteriously, she and her father had emigrated from Germany to Britain in 1936. In 1938 her father had died of a burst spleen and resulting complications.

  “And now you are here,” concluded Herbert triumphantly, “successfully insinuated into English society, ready to spy for the country you love.”

  Lily repeatedly countered that, yes, all those facts were true, but they did not add up to a cover story for a sleeping spy.

  “My father was true patriot. He was a Social Democrat. He believed in the Weimar Republic. He did not believe the lies about the Jews being to blame for everything. My father suffered repeated beatings at the hands of the Nazi thugs. In the end he could take no more. He quit political office. He hoped he could settle to his academic work at the university. But by 1936 he could see the way things were going and he knew we had to escape. In the end we came here as fugitives from Hitler’s brutal government. The same government you accuse me of spying for. That same government would have killed me by now as an enemy of the Fatherland. It wanted my father dead too. Yes, I love Germany. I am German. But I loathe Nazism and I want to see it defeated every bit as much as you do.”

  So it went on. And it might have continued in this way for the duration of the war if intervention had not come forward from an unexpected place.

  After her fifth day of incarceration, her best friend and colleague, Janet Collins, became concerned. Janet worked alongside Lily in the theatre. She had never known Lily be absent before. She could not conceive of her taking this much time away from work without informing Sister.

  One night, on her way home from work, she had called at Lily’s house. She did so again the next night, to no avail. On her third visit a neighbour opened her front door and said, “It’s no good knocking there, duck.”

  “Why, what’s happened?”

  “She’s been arrested. Nazi spy! That’s what they say. Shootin’s too good for her if you ask me.”

  “Oh my God!” gasped Janet as she turned and raced to the bus stop to get straight back to the hospital.

  Janet had explained everything to Sister and Sister had spoken immediately to John Barberis, an experienced surgeon in his early thirties and a trusted colleague. He had been a Cambridge man. Once a Cambridge man, always a Cambridge man. That trite expression was in his mind as he picked up the telephone in his hospital office and dialled the number of his old college friend, Andrew Trubshaw.

  He was waiting on the phone to be put through to Andrew before it occurred to him that he had not stopped to consider if the accusation against Lily might be true. Perhaps he was being naïve. But no sooner did it occur to him than he angrily dismissed the idea.

  “John, you old dog. What a pleasant surprise. How are you old chap?”

  Andrew’s voice was immediately reassuring to John Barberis, who realised he was nervous now about what he was about to ask.

  “I’m fine, Andrew,” he replied. “Overworked, underpaid, just like everybody else. What about yourself?”

  “Oh, you know, just about keeping flesh and spirit together. We live in exciting times John, but you know, I’d give a lot to have a few of those college days back. What do you say?”

  “You bet!” John replied with genuine longing.

  John allowed the conversation to roam over past times and old friends for several minutes. John and Andrew had been room mates for the last of their undergraduate years and had shared a strong bond of friendship. It was only since the declaration of war that they had become remiss in maintaining contact. Until then they had regularly visited each other and had had whisky and beer drenched weekends in either Leicester or London.

  Although they had studied medicine together only John had had the ambition to practice. Andrew, although a brilliant student, had moved straight into military intelligence on leaving Cambridge. Recruitment for the Defence Security Services had been pretty active during those years and John had also been approached. MI5 or MI6 they were vaguely known as. He was never sure which one had approached him. For himself, he considered the idea a preposterous waste of his training. But that hadn’t been the case for Andrew. He had leapt at the chance. “No more sterile butchery for me,” he had joked. “A brolly, a bowler and a desk, that’s the life for me.”

  Until now the two friends had never discussed the work Andrew was involved in. Now John was about to presume to seek Andrew’s support and influence in solving the mystery of Lily’s disappearance. After listening to Andrew describe in detail the action of a college rugby match he had seen the previous weekend, John took the plunge and began.

  “Andrew, I need your help,” he said.

  “Just name it old friend. I can refuse you nought!”

  “No, Andrew,” John stumbled. “This is serious. If you are unable to help I will fully understand. It involves… your work… as it were.”

  “I see,” said Andrew, a note of seriousness entering his voice for the first time. “Well, until you tell me, I cannot decide can I?”

  And so John began the tale of Lily, or as much as he knew of it. He told Andrew about the best, hardest working theatre nurse he had ever encountered. He spoke of the endless hours she worked, often to the point of exhaustion. He painted a picture of a dedicated professional nurse without whom many English lives would have been lost within the walls of Leicester Royal Infirmary. He then told what he knew of her background. Yes, she is a German. But she is an implacable enemy of Nazism. Her father came here as a political refugee from the Nazis. His life was ruined by them.

  Then John went on to explain her disappearance and the terrible rumour that had found its way back to him. That she had been arrested as a spy. As he talked, John realised he was sounding more and more desperate. When he finally got to the end of all he could think of to say, he concluded with a comment he knew to be overly dramatic, but one he was unable to resist; “My God, Andrew. They are hanging spies, aren’t they!”

  Suddenly Andrew was businesslike, “Righto old chum, I’ve got your drift. Now listen carefully. I’m going to say two things. First, I will investigate Lily Brett for you and find out what has happened to her. Second, if she turns out to be a spy I will do my best to see to
it that she does hang. Leave it with me. I’ll get back to you within the week.”

  The line went dead as Andrew hung up. John looked at the mouthpiece in his hand in shock at what his best friend had just said and at the thought of what he might have just initiated.