The Waiting Time

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘Who are you?’

  Christie was pushing himself up from the floor beside the door.

  ‘Ben Christie, Captain Christie.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I thought it best . . . with the prisoner . . . I was with the corporal in case she said—’

  ‘Is this a holding cell or is it a kennel?’

  The dog was on its side, its tail beating a slow drumroll on the tiles. It lay under her feet with its back against the concrete slab of the bed.

  ‘Nowhere else for him to go. Sorry.’

  Perkins shook his head, slow, side to side. Johnson recognized the treatment. The tack was to demean, then to dominate. She sat on the bed. She did not seem to have moved, knees drawn up and arms around her knees. She was awake, she watched. Perkins didn’t look at her. He rapped the questions.

  ‘When she attacked Krause, how was the attack stopped?’ Christie said, ‘One of his escort hit her, one kicked her.’

  ‘Has she been seen by qualified medical staff?’

  Christie shook his head.

  ‘She’s been interrogated — once, twice?’

  Christie nodded.

  ‘You did, of course, caution her first?’

  Christie shook his head.

  ‘She was told her rights, was offered a solicitor?’

  Christie grimaced.

  ‘Before her room was searched, did you have her permission? Did you have the written authorization of the camp commander?’

  Christie’s chin hung on his chest.

  ‘During the interrogations did you use profanities, blasphemies, obscenities? Was she threatened?’

  Christie lifted his hands, the gesture of failure.

  Perkins savaged him. ‘If she had said anything to you, fuck all use it would have been. Oppressive interrogation, denial of rights, refusal to permit medical help. This isn’t Germany, you know. It isn’t Stasi country. Get out.’

  They went. Christie called his dog. Perkins kicked the door with his heel. It slammed. Christie and Johnson stood in the corridor.

  Johnson understood the tactic: Officers rubbished by a civilian in front of a junior rank so junior rank would bond with civilian. Basic stuff. The hatch in the cell door was open. They could hear him. He was brusque.

  ‘Right, Miss Barnes . . . Tracy, isn’t it? I’ll call you Tracy, if you’ve no objection. I’m rather tired. I had a long day, was about to go to bed, and I was called out. I don’t expect you’ve slept, so let’s do this quickly. I deal in facts, right? Fact, ‘eighty-six to ‘eighty-nine, you had lance-corporal rank. Fact, ‘eighty-six to ‘eighty-nine, you were a stenographer with Intelligence Corps working out of Berlin Brigade, room thirty-four in block nine. Fact, in November ‘eighty-eight, Hans Becker from East Berlin was being run as an agent by room thirty-four. Fact, on the twenty-first of November ‘eighty-eight, the agent was lost while carrying out electronic surveillance on the Soviet base at Wustrow, near to Rostock. I’m sure you’re listening carefully to me, Tracy, and you’ll have noted that I emphasized “lost”. Fact, on that date, Hauptman Krause ran the counter-espionage unit at the Bezirksverwaltung des MfS in Rostock. All facts, Tracy. The facts say an agent was “lost”, the facts say that Hauptman Krause was responsible for counter-espionage in that area. The facts don’t say murder and they don’t say killing. Do you have more facts, Tracy? Not rumours running up the walls of room thirty- four. Got the facts or not got the facts? Got the evidence of murder and killing or not got the evidence?’

  From the corridor they strained to hear her voice, a whisper or a sobbed outpouring, and they heard nothing.

  ‘I’m tired, Tracy. Can we, please, do this the easy way?’

  Johnson thought it was what a hangman would have said:

  ‘Right then, sir. Let’s get this over with, no fuss, nice and simple, then you can go off, sir, and get nailed down in the box and I can go for my breakfast.’

  He thought she would be looking back at him, distant, small. He realized she was like family to him. Who spoke for her? Not him, not Ben Christie, no damn man, not anywhere.

  ‘Tell you what, Tracy. You try and get some sleep. Soon as you’re asleep I’ll be told. I’ll come and wake you, and we’ll start again. There’s an easy way, Tracy, and a hard way. What I want to hear about is facts and evidence.’

  The lorry driver spat. The target of his fury was Joshua Frederick Mantle. The spittle ran on the back window of the taxi and masked his face, which was contorted in rage.

  The prison officer tugged sharply on the handcuffs they shared, jerked the lorry driver from the window.

  The lorry driver was driven away, the taxi lost in the traffic.

  He watched it go. He wasn’t wearing a raincoat and the drizzle flecked his shoulders. It wasn’t necessary for him to have stood ten minutes at the side gates of the court. He had gained little from having waited, from having seen the last defiance of the lorry driver, except a small sense of satisfaction. A detective constable wandered over to him, might have been about to cross the road but had seen him and come to him. His eyes followed the taxi until a bus came past it.

  ‘You going over the pub?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have thought so. Got a deskful to be getting on with.’ He had a soft voice for a tall man.

  ‘Come on — don’t know whether I’ll be welcome, but she’ll want to see you.’

  He hesitated. ‘I suppose so.’

  The detective constable took his arm and led him into the road. They waited a moment at the bollard half-way across.

  ‘Mind if I say something, Mr Mantle? Whether you mind it or not, I’m going to say it. Times in this job I feel proud and times when I feel pig sick. I feel good when I’m responsible for a real scumbag going down, and I feel pig sick when it’s my lot or Crown Prosecution Service that’s chickened out. First time I’ve watched a private prosecution. . . Come on, through the gap.’

  They hurried across the road, and again the detective constable had a hand on his arm. ‘Why I’m pig sick, Mr Mantle, it was your witness statements that nailed him. I worked eight months on that case and what I came up with was judged by CPS as sufficient only for “without due care and attention”. What you got was “death by dangerous driving” . . . Fox and Hounds they were going, wasn’t it?’

  They walked on the pavement. The women with their shopping and their raised umbrellas flowed around them.

  ‘I was wondering, Mr Mantle, were you ever in the police?’

  ‘I wasn’t, no.’

  ‘Didn’t think so. If you had been, at your age all you’d be interested in was growing bloody tomatoes in a greenhouse — wouldn’t have put the work in.’

  He said quietly, ‘It wasn’t that complicated. If there was an industrial estate then it stood to reason that someone was coming or going, or looking through the window, or had gone outside for a smoke. Someone must have seen the lorry hit him.’

  ‘We’d had posters up, all the usual appeals, nothing. Nobody wants to get involved. How many did you go and see? A hundred?’

  ‘Might have been more.’

  ‘You found the star witness, Mr Mantle, and I didn’t. You put that scumbag away, and I didn’t. You should feel quite proud for having done the graft, stood up for her when we failed her.’

  ‘Decent of you to say it,’ he said.

  ‘Gives you a good feeling, doesn’t it, if you’ve given your hand to someone when nobody else will? Fox and Hounds, yes? Wish I had. You’re only a legal executive, aren’t you?’

  ‘Afraid I’m not quite that, not qualified yet. Just a glorified clerk.’

  They went inside. The pub had opened only minutes earlier. The bar smelt of yesterday’s beer and the polish on the tables. The barrister was clapping his hands, the beam of success on his face, for the attention of the woman behind the bar, who stubbornly polished glasses. The senior partner, Bill Greatorex, was talking with the widow. She wasn’t listening — she caught Mantle’s eye. She was a pre
tty young woman. She’d dressed in black for the court, skirt and jacket, and deep tiredness showed round her eyes. He’d thought of her, and her small children, all the hours that he’d tramped round the industrial estate in search of a witness. He’d kept her in his mind through all the disappointments and all the shaken heads and all the dismissals from those who hadn’t the time to stretch their minds back to the moment of the death of her husband. The barrister bellowed, ‘God, there’s a serious risk in here of death from thirst.’

  She walked away from Bill Greatorex, left him in mid-sentence and came to Mantle. The detective constable backed off. ‘What they tell me, Mr Mantle, is that that bastard who killed my Bob, if it had been left to the police, would have been fined five hundred pounds and banned for twelve months. Because of you, he’s been put away for three years where he can’t drink, drive, kill. Me and the children, all the family, we’re very grateful.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  She reached up, rather too quickly for him, took his face in her hands and kissed his cheek. ‘Very grateful.’

  She was gone, back to Greatorex. The barrister had the barmaid’s attention and was reciting the order.

  The detective constable was beside him again. ‘Don’t think I’m out of order, Mr Mantle, but what age are you? Fifty-three, fifty- four? I’ll bet you’re on the money a twenty-year-old would get, a kid with spots all over his face. What that tells me, and I’m no Sherlock, you’ve a bit of a history.’

  ‘A bit,’ he said. ‘You’ll excuse me.’

  He went towards the door. He heard the shout of the barrister behind him, what was ‘his poison’, pint or a short? He went out onto the street. He did grubby little case-work in a grubby little town, and across the road was a grubby little court-house. He walked back in the drizzle to the offices of Greatorex, Wilkins & Protheroe. He touched the place on his cheek where she had kissed him, then took out his handkerchief and wiped the skin hard.

  The sleep was in her eyes and her head rocked. She sat on the bed. The food on the tray beside her was untouched.

  Perkins yawned, grinned. ‘Yes, Tracy, we know there was a man-hunt on the base, across the peninsula where the base was — actually most of it’s a wildlife park now, we know that from radio traffic. Yes, we can assume that Hauptman Krause would have been called out from Rostock when the Soviets started howling. The radio traffic ended, and we didn’t have a monitor on their landlines. We have a lost agent, we have the assumption that Krause arrived in that area at some time that evening. That is not evidence of murder. You should try and get some sleep. As soon as you’re asleep, I’ll wake you and I’ll ask you again about evidence...’

  ‘Bloody movement, at last.’

  ‘You going to do a note?’

  They were old friends, good friends, and had to be. For twelvehour shifts they shared sandwiches and body odours and a plastic piss bucket.

  ‘What Mr Fleming said — doesn’t want to wait for the tape to be transcribed. . . They’re waking him.’

  ‘You got good German?’

  ‘Good enough, and Italian and French. If my water’s right I’ve good Lebanese Arabic. . . His two minders are in...’

  ‘Arabic’s a right bastard.’

  ‘Here we go.’

  The parking meters where the van was parked were covered over — they always carried the hoods so they could stop where it was best for the reception.

  (Conversation started, Room 369, 12.11 hours.)

  KRAUSE: They come to Rostock, they come pushing their noses

  — (Indistinct) — I deal with it. I and my friends, I take what

  action...

  MINDER 1: But, Dieter, there is nothing to find, you gave your word to the Committee. . . (Indistinct.)

  The van was in front of the hotel, in a side street. On the roof was a small antenna, inconspicuous, but sufficient for quality reception from the microphone in the third-floor room.

  MINDER 2: You told us that all compromising files were cleaned. If there was evidence of crimes against human rights, a problem—

  KRAUSE: There is no evidence because there was no crime.

  MINDER 2: We have an investment in you, we have the right to your honesty. If there was a problem. .? (Indistinct.)

  The two men were in the closed rear of the van. A different team had put the microphone in position so it was not their concern whether it was in the room telephone, the bedside radio, the television zapper or behind a wall socket. They were concerned with the reception from it and immediate translation of the conversation.

  KRAUSE: There is no problem. Now, I want to shit and wash — I tell you, if anyone comes to Rostock and tries to make a problem — (indistinct) — I don’t ask your help. My friends and I remove the problem, if anyone comes to Rostock. Can I, please, shit...

  MINDER 1: We cannot accept illegality.

  KRAUSE: Do not be afraid, you will not hear of illegality, or of problems. You want to come with me and see me shit?

  (Conversation ended 12.14 hours.)

  ‘You may, Tracy, be under the misapprehension that I am some sort of policeman. Not true, couldn’t care less about prosecuting you. What I care about is that you called Hauptman Krause a murderer. Let me backtrack, Tracy. The last days of the regime and the Stasi were frantic, burning, shredding and ripping the key files. Everything was on file, you know that. The fires couldn’t handle the weight of paper they tried to destroy, the shredders failed, and they were reduced to tearing paper with their hands — what we’d call the removal of evidence. OK, the very heavy stuff went by air to Moscow, but it was left to the lowlife guilty men to do the slog for themselves, burn and shred and tear. Hauptman Krause would have reckoned to have sanitized his past. . . That’s December ‘eighty-nine. Let’s jump to March ‘ninety-seven and yesterday. Krause is the star billing now. He’s important to his new friends, and they are not, I assure you, going to chase after evidence that knocks him down. If there is evidence, if you have evidence, then we can demand that he is charged with murder, prosecuted. I can’t go digging for evidence, Tracy — that’d be a hostile act against a beloved and respected ally. I have got to be given it, have to be handed it. Tracy, what is the evidence?’

  Mrs Adelaide Barnes, Adie to her friends at bingo on Fridays and in the snug lounge of the Groom and Horses on Saturday nights, had two jobs through each working day of the week. She trudged home in the last light of the afternoon, and her feet were hurting. Buses cost money, and there wasn’t much money in cleaning. The chiropodist cost a fortune. She walked in pain at the end of each day back to Victoria Road. Her street, little terraced homes, was off Ragstone Road, almost underneath the railway embankment. Two things were worrying Adie Barnes as she turned off by the halal butcher’s on the corner, went past Memsahibs, the dress shop, the Tandoori take-away and into Victoria Road. At the afternoon house she hadn’t left a note for the lady to say she’d finished the window cleaning fluid, and that bothered her. Her second worry was that she hadn’t been able to speak to her Tracy last evening, and she must try again tonight. That nice Captain Christie, that her Tracy spoke of so well, had been short with her.

  She saw the big police wagon half-way down Victoria Road, and the police car. She saw her neighbours, the Patels, the Ahmeds, the Devs and the Huqs, standing in the street with their children.

  As fast as her bruised and swollen feet could take her, she hurried forward. The door of her house was broken and wide open, the wood panel beside the mortice lock splintered. She stopped, breathing hard, and a policeman carried two bin-liners out of her front door and put them in the wagon. She pushed past her neighbours, and through the little open gate. The policeman with the bags shouted after her.

  Her hall was filled with policemen and men in suits, and there was a young woman in jeans and a sweater with a yapping spaniel on a leash. One of them in a suit came to her. It was like she’d been burgled — not that the thieves had ever been in her house, but they’d been in the Patels’
next door, and she’d seen the mess when she’d gone to make Mrs Pate! a good cup of tea. Adie could see into her living room: the carpets were up and some of the boards, and there were books off the shelf, and the drawers were tipped out.

  ‘You are Mrs Barnes, Mrs Adelaide Barnes? We have a warrant issued by Slough magistrates to search this property because we have reason to believe that a possible offence under the Official Secrets Act may have been committed by your daughter. I apologize for the mess we’ve left you. I can provide you with a list of items taken from your daughter’s room for further examination. If you find that anything not listed is missing, if you find any of your possessions to be broken, then you should put that down in writing and send it to Slough police station. I regret that I cannot offer you a fuller explanation, and I wouldn’t go bothering the police because they are not authorized to make any statement on this matter.’

  She stood in front of him in shock.

  He shouted past her, ‘Get that door fixed, made secure.’

  The yapping of the spaniel filled the hail. In the kitchen, down the end of the hall, was the fridge-freezer her Tracy had bought her. On top of it, crouched, arched, was Fluff. She wished that the young woman in jeans would let go the bloody leash so that the spaniel could jump at Fluff and have its bloody eyes scratched out. Behind her she could hear the hammering of nails through plyboard and into the old wood of her front door. She started up the stairs.

  A young constable was on the landing. He looked at his feet. He whispered, ‘We’re really sorry about this, love, all of us locals are. It’s a London crowd in charge, not us. I shouldn’t tell you... We weren’t told what they were looking for — whatever, they didn’t find it.’ He went down the stairs heavily, noisily.

  Tears welled in Adie Barnes’s eyes. She was in her Tracy’s room. Her Tracy’s clothes were on the floor, carpet up, boards up. She heard the quiet, then the noise of. the wagon engine starting. Her Tracy’s music centre was in pieces, back off, gutted. Her Tracy’s bookcase had been pulled apart. The books were gone. Her name was called. Her Tracy’s bear — she’d had it since she was eight — was on the stripped bed and it was cut open. Mr Patel was at the door of her Tracy’s room.