The Interrogator

by Andrew Williams

  The camp commander’s office was in the old lodge at the entrance to the park, a comfortable distance from the enemy. Lindsay was shown up to a dingy little waiting room on the first floor. An orderly was leaving with the remains of the Major’s lunch and he left the door ajar. Benson was grumbling volubly.

  ‘. . . it’s disruptive and quite unnecessary, but I’ve been ordered to do all I can for him.’

  The Major’s secretary gave Lindsay an embarrassed smile and slipped out from behind her desk to knock at his door.

  Benson was a tall, heavily built man in his early forties with a florid complexion and glassy limpid eyes. He was a drinker. Lindsay noticed his hand tremble a little when he stepped forward to shake it. Beside him was the camp’s intelligence officer.

  ‘Lieutenant Duncan will be able to help you with the details of the case,’ said Benson, waving airily at the files on his desk. ‘It’s not often Naval Intelligence gets involved in this sort of matter.’ The frostiness in his very military voice suggested that this was altogether a good thing.

  Duncan greeted him with a warmer smile. They sat at Benson’s desk and he ordered some coffee.

  It was a ‘tragic’ but ‘straightforward’ business, he said. He had seen it happen before. Some men just fell apart behind the wire and Heine was the type.

  Lindsay raised his eyebrows: ‘Really?’

  ‘The senior German officers had been watching him for some time. He was very highly strung.’

  Duncan shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  ‘The Military Police found nothing suspicious,’ said Benson, ‘and I don’t expect you to.’

  The clinking of cups at the door signalled the arrival of coffee. Lindsay glanced over at Duncan. He was in his early thirties, stocky, with bad skin and curly black hair. He reminded Lindsay of the senior foreman at his father’s works in Glasgow. There was something in his watchful silence and tight body language that suggested he did not see eye to eye with the commander of the camp.

  ‘I expect you would like to see how we found him?’

  Benson reached for an envelope and drew out a bundle of photographs. He waited until his secretary had left the office, then handed them to Lindsay: ‘Not pretty.’

  Heine was dangling from the pipe like a broken carnival puppet. His face was swollen and twisted, his tongue lolling thick and blue from his mouth. His feet were only inches from the washroom floor and in the corner of the photograph there was an upturned chair. His arms hung freely at his sides. It was an undignified way to depart this earth.

  ‘He killed himself a little before morning roll call when the washroom was sure to be empty and his body was discovered almost as soon as it was over.’

  ‘And the police think he took his own life?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you agree?’

  ‘Of course. There was no evidence to suggest his arms and legs had been tied at any point. His neck wasn’t broken – the poor fellow strangled himself.’

  Benson pulled a face: ‘A ghastly way to go; his mind must have been completely unhinged.’

  Duncan gave a pointed little cough. Lindsay turned to look at him.

  ‘There were the bruises on his face and body, sir.’

  His tone was measured, his accent reassuringly familiar, like a Glaswegian bank manager, the sort your grandmother might trust with her life savings.

  ‘He received those injuries in a fight with one of the other prisoners,’ said Benson, addressing Lindsay only. He was clearly irritated. He was the sort of man who expected life to tick like a clock, each little cog in the mechanism turning beautifully on to the next in a predictable well-ordered movement. And the camp was his empire – he was going to guard its reputation jealously. ‘You will find the details of the fight in the statements here.’ He laid his hand on the files in front of him. ‘Duncan will take you through them.’

  He pushed his chair back suddenly and got to his feet. There were other things he wanted to attend to in the camp, he explained. Lindsay wondered if he needed a drink.

  Lieutenant Duncan breathed a sigh of relief as the door closed behind him.

  ‘You’re the intelligence officer. What do you think?’ Lindsay asked at once.

  Duncan looked at him cautiously: ‘I don’t know if he took his own life but I don’t think he got those bruises in a fight. I can’t prove anything because none of the prisoners will talk to me – not even the friendly ones. A fellow called Schmidt – he was with the 500 – came forward to say he got into an argument with Heine. Mohr brought him to us. But neither of them would tell us what it was about.’

  ‘And the police?’

  ‘Why spend time on a dead German? Aren’t we trying to kill them by the thousands?’

  ‘Is that your view too?’

  ‘No. I helped cut him down.’

  Lindsay nodded in acknowledgement, then asked, after a moment’s thought: ‘Don’t you have a trustee, an informer inside the camp, one of the prisoners?’

  ‘No. It’s very tight.’

  Rising from his chair Lindsay walked slowly over to the window. They were changing the guard at the gate and along the perimeter wire. An elderly-looking sergeant was barking aggressively at his men, every bristling inch the parade-ground martinet. It was the Army at its most senseless. And it seemed to Lindsay that the wire and the guard offered no sort of challenge to a resourceful prisoner intent on escape, but where was there to run to here?

  ‘Do you think he was murdered?’ Duncan asked.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I am sure they are all lying about the fight.’

  ‘Mohr?’

  ‘Oh, he just said it was regrettable . . .’

  ‘No. What do you think of him?’

  ‘Major Benson is impressed.’ There was a barely disguised note of contempt in Duncan’s voice.

  ‘And you?’

  Duncan shrugged: ‘I think he knows how to get what he wants. The Ältestenrat runs this place.’

  ‘The Ältestenrat?’

  ‘The council of the eldest – the three senior prisoners.’

  Lindsay turned away from the window and walked back to the desk. ‘I’d better look at the statement Mohr gave the investigating officers and the other ones they collected too.’

  It took a little under an hour to read them all. Lieutenant Duncan returned at four o’clock with tea and a few damp biscuits. The military investigators had taken statements from all the officers of the U-112, Heine’s room-mates and one or two prisoners who were known to have been on good terms with the dead man. No one was very forthcoming. There was the suggestion more than once that Heine was struggling with captivity and close to breaking. The second officer of the 112, Schmidt, repeated that he had had an argument with Heine and it had ‘boiled over’. He refused to give any more details. The first officer of the 112, Gretschel, said he had barely spoken to Heine since arriving at the camp and he knew nothing of a fight, but he would remember him as a good and dedicated comrade. ‘This sentiment was expressed with a great deal of feeling,’ the investigator had noted. Mohr’s statement was cooler. Heine was ‘young’, Heine was ‘highly strung’, Heine was ‘close to cracking’ before he became a prisoner. And Mohr implied that he had nursed him through two fraught war patrols that had shredded the young engineer’s nerves and then the trauma of the sinking. He said he had not been surprised to learn that Heine had picked a fight with another prisoner.

  Lindsay flicked through the statements again, then tossed them back on Benson’s desk. ‘With the exception of Gretschel, there isn’t much warmth in these, is there? And I don’t recognise Heine.’ He picked up his cigarettes and leant forward to offer them to Duncan.

  ‘Do you know a man called Lange? Leutnant zur See Helmut Lange?’

  36

  I

  t was stifling in the theatre and the three little maids were wilting in the heat. Mary slipped in and out of the first Act. With a supreme effort she dragg
ed herself back for the second, ramrod straight, eyes fixed on the stage. Tears of make-up were rolling down poor Nanky Poo’s cheeks. The large man in the seat to her left smelt like a wet dog and she could feel the perspiration on her own face and neck. Her dress was clinging uncomfortably to her back and thighs. On her right, James Henderson was drumming his fingers and tapping his feet with something very like girlish glee. He had insisted on taking Mary out for the evening. Rationing was making a good dinner in London almost impossible, he said, and he had proposed The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre instead. Anxious to avoid anything but the most casual conversation, she had agreed. It was months since she had spent any time in her brother’s company or wanted to, but tonight he was on his best behaviour. During the interval they spoke of the land girls on their father’s farm and of a nurse James was chasing who had coal-black hair and a winsome smile, of Rommel in the Western Desert and the bloody, inexorable advance eastwards into Russia. He did not mention Lindsay and she was careful not to present him with an opportunity to do so.

  At the final curtain they emptied gratefully into the Strand, breathing drunken lungfuls of evening air. James took Mary’s arm and marched her without ceremony across the road towards Covent Garden. Supper at a quiet club, he explained, and a chance to talk properly. Resistance was useless because there was plainly something he was burning to tell her: Mary was sure it was going to be something unpleasant. It came in the end with coffee. The club was almost empty but James bent his head a little closer. A choking cloud of his cigar smoke swirled about the table.

  ‘You know I saw Fleming yesterday and he mentioned your visit to Hatchett’s. He learnt of it from a letter, I think?’

  Mary raised her eyebrows in a show of surprise.

  ‘Please don’t deny it. You were there with a German prisoner.’

  ‘I have no intention of denying it,’ she said coolly.

  He leant even closer, an angry frown on his face: ‘Don’t you understand the risk you were taking? A woman in your position at the Citadel. Special Branch have spoken to me about you and Lindsay. Special Branch. You should show a little more loyalty, you know.’

  ‘Loyalty?’

  ‘To the Division, to Winn, to me. I helped you into that job.’ His voice was full of hushed resentment.

  For a moment Mary could think of nothing to say. She stared at him, her mouth open in astonishment. Then with cold fury: ‘You pompous idiot.’

  She dumped her napkin on the table and got quickly to her feet.

  ‘I don’t blame you, I blame your bloody boyfriend,’ James stuttered. ‘I got into a devil of a lot of trouble over that note the prisoner gave me for him. Should have gone to Security. You see, he doesn’t understand . . .’

  His last words were lost in a shower of water. Mary had picked up a glass and emptied its contents over him. She heard with satisfaction his sharp intake of breath and the hiss of his cigar.

  ‘Leave Douglas alone. Do you hear? Leave us both alone.’

  Then she turned her back on him and without glancing at the astonished faces to left and right, she walked swiftly from the club. She did not stop walking until she reached Lord North Street. Fumbling for her keys, she could not help smiling at the recollection of her brother goldfishing, a wet strand of hair across his forehead and a dark green patch on his shirt and uniform shoulders. She would feel guilty and apologise in time, in a few weeks or perhaps months.

  But it was with more than a little trepidation that she settled at her desk in Room 41 the following morning. She did not expect it to be the last she would hear of Hatchett’s. Winn was going to have his say too. At the top of her in-tray, as always, were the urgent strips torn from the teleprinter run by the secret ladies, the traffic from Station X with its snapshot of U-boats in the Atlantic, the intelligence picture ever clearer.

  And in these flimsy decrypts the fear of a change for the worse with a new coded number each week as yet another U-boat finished its work-up and set out on war patrol for the first time. The talk at the Tracking Room plot table was of a doubling of Dönitz’s fleet within months, a hundred U-boats operational by Christmas.

  It was a little after ten when Geoff Childs touched her shoulder lightly.

  ‘Rodger would like to see you.’

  She glanced past him towards Winn’s glass box. He was staring at her intently and she looked away and up into the thin brown face of Childs who frowned by way of a discreet warning.

  ‘Sit down, Mary.’

  Winn was polishing his round spectacles with his handkerchief. He sounded friendly but businesslike, his jaw set, his lips tight with purpose. The nervous strain of the Atlantic battle was always written deeply in his face. His desk was covered in flimsy signal papers and well-ordered files but Mary knew it would be empty by the end of the day whenever that proved to be.

  ‘I want you to run a special check on the route of a ship outward bound to Freetown and from there to Egypt. They want me to authorise her detachment from the convoy.’

  The ship was the Imperial Star and she was travelling in a well-protected convoy with aircraft parts and carrying some specialist fitters. But she was an old White Star liner capable of more than fifteen knots and the convoy was travelling at half that speed. The Ministry of Shipping was anxious to give her her head, to let her break free and sail alone, unescorted.

  ‘This is the fourth time they’ve asked me,’ he said, waving a blue message paper at her, ‘four times in four days. But I don’t feel comfortable about it. The hunting has been good for them in African waters and two of the larger Type IX U-boats sailed from Lorient a fortnight ago. They may be somewhere close to Freetown. I want you to check. Go through what we have. Go through it very carefully.’

  Winn leant forward to pick up his cigarettes, took one and lit it with a frustrated snap of his lighter.

  ‘And one thing more.’ His voice was no longer businesslike but severe.

  A slow anxious charge tingled down Mary’s spine.

  ‘What on earth did you think you were playing at? I was this close to having you transferred,’ he said and there was only an inch between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘I . . . I left at once,’ she stammered.

  Winn stared at her for a moment, cool, unblinking, appraising. And then with his eyes steady upon her face: ‘Does he know?’

  ‘Does who know what?’

  ‘Don’t play games with me, Dr Henderson,’ he said coldly.

  ‘I am not, Commander Winn. I want to hear you ask me properly.’ And her voice was hard and defiant.

  ‘Does Lieutenant Lindsay know we’re reading the enemy’s signals? Have you told him?’

  ‘You know he’s working for the Director, Admiral Godfrey. He’s back in the fold.’

  ‘Have you told him?’

  ‘No.’ And Mary shook her head crossly. ‘No, of course not.’

  Winn studied her face carefully for a few seconds more, then lifted his cigarette to his lips: ‘Good.’

  Later, as she leant over the plot table with her notepad, she wondered at her own cool mendacity. It was wrong, the Bible said so, and yet with alacrity she was becoming a hardened and practised liar. Was it Lindsay or was it the secret world they both inhabited, with its half truths and deceits, that was scratching at her old certainties? She was not a natural rule-breaker and she felt uncomfortable lying to Winn but it had been shockingly easy and it was shocking, too, that it pricked her conscience only a little. But she would need to be careful, very careful.

  There was nothing on the Atlantic plot to indicate an immediate threat to the Imperial Star. Homebound SL 76 was attacked on 29 and 30 June by at least two submarines and ships were lost. The U-123 sank another off the African coast four days later. But there had been almost no recorded activity or signals traffic for a fortnight. The black U-boat pinheads were concentrated in the North Atlantic. Mary checked the files for reports of sailings from the French coast and examined the special intelligence for anything that mig
ht indicate an imminent threat. The Imperial Star did not appear to be in danger. It was impossible to be entirely sure, even with the benefit of the Germans’ own signals, but perhaps this time Winn was being a little too cautious. It was the middle of the afternoon before she was ready to tell him so. He stomped out of his office to stand at the edge of the plot and she slipped out from behind her desk to join him.

  ‘And you’ve checked everything?’ he asked.

  ‘I could ring the Naval Section at Bletchley Park – with your permission, of course. They may have something more on the two larger U-boats that sailed a fortnight ago.’

  ‘No. That’s fine. We’ve done enough already. I’ll tell Admiral Godfrey I have no objections. The Ministry can release the Imperial Star from the convoy and route her separately.’

  Winn turned away from her to lean over the plot: ‘And I hope to God we’re right.’

  She spent the rest of the day bent over the latest batch of signals, weather reports from outbound U-boats, convoy sightings, damage reports, a constant flow of small pieces, some to be discarded, some to be fitted into the picture of the battle. At a little before seven Commander Hall from the Trade Division was back to confer at the plot table, then at eight the Director and his entourage. Was Dönitz moving his U-boats westwards? Was he supplying them at sea? And what size of fleet would attack convoys to Russia? Godfrey wanted answers to all these questions and more.

  But by ten the smoke was beginning to settle beneath the drop lamps once more. Mary was clearing her desk mechanically, her eyes stinging and wet with fatigue. The plotters would be busy with signal bearings throughout the night and the secret ladies would ghost in and out with their pieces of teleprinter paper. In the morning a fine layer of smoke would still be hanging there like mist on the sea’s face in winter. A day that never seemed to end would begin again. For now, the bridge was the night duty officer’s. Freddie Wilmot was in Winn’s office with someone from anti-submarine warfare. Mary could hear their laughter and Wilmot’s excited voice. A moment later he came out clutching a teleprinter signal.