‘I didn’t want to hurt him but it was the only way I could think of to trap Mohr.’ He was looking at her now and his voice was hard and defensive as if surer of his ground. ‘The Director wanted me to do all I could to break Mohr. The national interest – it will save lives. You know what was at stake.’
‘It was in your interests and you’ve admitted as much.’
‘They were one and the same.’
‘Lange was your friend, you promised to protect him.’
‘He was never a friend but of course I’m sorry I had to drag him into it. Look, is this getting us anywhere? I’m sorry I messed things up for you, really I am.’
He didn’t sound that sorry now. He sounded irritated and she wondered if he was thinking, Why is this woman so unreasonable?
‘You can dress it up as your duty and in the national interest if you like but I don’t think I can love someone who is so ruthless with his friends, someone who lies and will betray anyone.’
‘You lied to Winn.’
‘Yes, for you, God forgive me,’ she said bitterly.
‘We’re fighting a war.’
‘But what’s the point of winning it if we don’t have something better to fight for? You behaved like a Nazi.’
He flinched and looked away. And she was pleased because now she wanted to hurt him. ‘You’ve been trying to prove something too. What? Your loyalty?’
‘That’s rubbish. I don’t have to do that. Lives will be saved. You know that.’
‘It’s all about you.’
He stepped forward to look at her intently and she was struck as always by the light blue of his eyes.
‘Gosh, how you love the moral high ground,’ he said sharply. ‘It must be very lonely up there.’
That was cruel. She knew she was close to tears and that he knew it too. And it was too much. The frustration and the resentment and the anger burst from her. She slapped him. She slapped him hard on the cheek. It happened so quickly that for a moment she was not quite sure she had done it. But he had flinched and was reaching up to touch his cheek with his fingertips. And it looked hot and very red and her hand felt hot. His blue eyes were moist with tears. She wanted to reach out and stroke his cheek but she turned away instead, her hands at her mouth. For a few seconds, he stood there, his breath shaking, then she heard him push through the branches into the wood. She listened to him stumbling awkwardly on until she could hear him no more and she knew she was alone. A thin mist was rising from the land and, in the dying light, the hedges and trees and the sharp little stubble stalks at her feet were shapes in an almost colourless landscape. It was closing in on her, changing by the minute, by the second, into a cold and unfamiliar place. And it was so desperately sad. She brushed a tear from her cheek, and another, and another, and then she stopped trying. And she leant forward with her head bent and her hands on her knees for support and she sobbed, sobbed so hard her body began to shake uncontrollably and it was impossible to breathe.
How long did she cry for? It was dark when she stopped and she could barely see her hand in front of her face. She was tired and cold and empty. She did not want to go back to the house but knew she would have to or her father would come looking for her. The short walk through the wood was difficult and slow in the dark and she scratched her face and then her hand on a thick bramble. Through the walled garden and into the stables where she slipped out of her boots and into a pair of old shoes. Cook had gone home and the kitchen was empty, the pans and supper dishes washed and tidied away. There would be something for Mary in the range. She did not feel hungry. She wanted to slip quietly upstairs to bed but she knew she would have to speak to someone first. Her father was standing in the large stone-flagged entrance hall with a copy of The Times.
‘Are you all right? You’ve been crying,’ and he folded his newspaper and took half a step towards her as if to put a protective arm around her shoulders.
‘No, honestly, I’m fine. Tired, that’s all. I’m going to have a bath.’
‘Not yet you’re not,’ he said with a dry smile. ‘You’ve got to deal with him first,’ and he waved the paper in the general direction of the door. ‘I’ve had the devil’s own job restraining your brother. Your man’s sitting in his car.’
How foolish of her to have missed the Humber. It was still parked in front of the stable block. She could see Lindsay behind the wheel and the pinprick of light from his cigarette. She was sorry she had slapped him and she would say so but nothing more. Short, businesslike, no mention of Lange or the Division. A brief goodbye. She turned the handle of the passenger door and slipped on to the red leather seat.
‘I’m very sorry I struck you. It was unforgivable,’ she said quickly.
There was his small, slightly supercilious smile, the one she had marked at their first meeting and so often since.
‘So many things seem to be unforgivable. Actually I deserved it. You can do it again if you like,’ and he turned his head to offer the other cheek.
And she could not help but smile: ‘Please. Christ-like isn’t you at all.’
‘No?’
He looked exhausted and the car’s ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts.
‘Here,’ and she leant across to brush a little mud from his jacket. ‘I thought you’d gone.’
‘I can’t go.’
They sat there in silence for a moment. He was trying to catch her eye but she looked away.
‘Do you want me to go?’
‘Yes.’
‘Here,’ and he picked a sheet of blue writing paper from the dash-board and offered it to her. It was a handwritten note in German from Helmut Lange. Just four short lines.
‘Read it to me,’ and she handed it back to him.
‘It says: “Dear Lieutenant. The doctors say I am well enough to be transferred to a camp in Scotland. Will you visit me . . .” ’
His voice choked with emotion and he paused for a few seconds to regain some composure.
‘And he says: “You know it’s strange but after all that has happened to me I feel at peace with myself and happier. Please come and visit me before I go. Your friend, Helmut.” ’
He folded it slowly and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
‘And will you visit him?’
‘Yes.’
She gave a slight nod of the head, then looked away. There was nothing more to say. She should leave. And she leant towards the handle of the door.
‘You’ve cut your face.’
‘I must be quite a sight.’
‘Yes. You are,’ and he reached for her hand, opening her fingers, kissing her palm, small tender kisses. And then he pressed her hand against his cheek. Her bottom lip began to tremble. It was impossible. And without thought she pulled her hand away and opened the car door.
‘Mary, please.’
The driver’s door opened too.
‘Mary.’
He was standing on the other side of the car. ‘I’m so sorry, really I am.’
‘No, Douglas,’ and she began to walk away. ‘Please go home. It’s over. It’s over.’
PART THREE
50
Dahlem
Berlin
December 1990
T
he little boy at the gate was blowing into his hands, trying to capture the warm vapour in a tight ball of fingers and thumbs. Even in his best coat and hat and scarf he was beginning to shiver. Grandfather’s friend was late. The street was white with a hard frost and the old man opposite was scraping the ice from the windscreen of his Mercedes. The boy glanced over his shoulder to the house. His grandfather was at the study window, his head turning up and down the street. And a few seconds later, with a broad smile, he began gesturing frantically to the boy’s right. An elderly but tall and upright man in a long black coat was walking carefully along the icy pavement towards him. Tears of frustration and disappointment welled inside the little boy and he ran towards the house. The door was already open and Herr Hans-Gün
ther Gretschel was standing on the steps, leaning heavily on an ebony stick.
‘Come here, Karl. Wait with me.’
But the little boy slipped past his grandfather’s outstretched arm and disappeared inside the house. It was an imposing villa with a yellow and cream façade and sweeping red-tile roof, set back a little from the road in a mature garden. The little boy’s great-great-grandfather had built it when Dahlem was just a village.
‘Herr Lindsay. So very good to see you,’ and Gretschel dropped a step to offer his hand in greeting. ‘And looking so well.’
In the years since the war Gretschel had perfected the English he had begun to learn as a prisoner.
‘My grandson Karl was watching for you. I’m afraid he’s a little upset you surprised him.’
‘Are you well, Herr Gretschel?’
‘Old and tired and fat.’
And it was true he had put on a great deal of weight since Lindsay had last seen him a few years before. His black flannel trousers looked as if they were under enormous strain. Arthritis had left him much less mobile: ‘My wife says I am turning into a large grey ball.’
He led Lindsay through the hall into the drawing room where Frau Gretschel had left a tray of coffee and cakes. Karl was sitting on the couch in his coat, his cheeks stained with tears. It was a light and modern room quite out of keeping with the imperial character of the façade. The house had been reduced to a shell in the battle for Berlin. Lindsay had visited it for the first time just a fortnight after the city had fallen, drunken Soviet troops roaming the streets, and he had found Gretschel’s elderly parents and sister living in the cellar.
‘Have you seen this?’ Gretschel held out a framed photo to Lindsay. ‘It’s me with your Prime Minister. What a wonderful lady. I admire her so much.’
‘And did you tell her you were the first officer of a U-boat that sank twenty British ships?’
‘Of course not,’ said Gretschel impatiently. ‘It was a happy occasion. The Berlin Chamber of Commerce. Poor Lange was there too.’ He put the photograph back on the shelf alongside a large collection of family pictures.
‘Lange’s daughters have made all the arrangements for today.’
They had moved in different social circles but they had always kept in touch. Lange had worked in the city’s information bureau until a newspaper article forced him to retire. A young hack anxious to make his name wrote a story with the headline, ‘Nazi PK Man Briefing the Press’. Gretschel had used his business contacts to find him another job in public relations.
‘May I smoke?’
‘Karl, please fetch our guest an ashtray. Shouldn’t you give up at your age?’
Lindsay’s wife was still badgering him to stop. After the Navy he had become a journalist and many of his colleagues on Fleet Street were unrepentant smokers too. Now in his seventies he was too old and too impatient to try. He woke each morning with a hacking cough, he was wrinkled and grey and a little short-sighted but a source of wonder to his friends – or so they said – and the doctors considered him fit for his age.
‘I saw Admiral Mohr last month.’ Gretschel reached across to hand Lindsay a cup of coffee.
‘Oh?’
‘A reunion of the old comrades in Kiel. Fewer and fewer of us now. There were veterans from HMS White there as our guests. The Admiral made a generous speech. He’s in good health and sends his regards.’ He paused for a moment, then: ‘I did sense he was a little troubled. Did you read the profile of him in Spiegel?’
‘No,’ Lindsay lied.
‘It suggested he gave vital intelligence to the British during the war. No one believes it.’
‘No.’
They did not speak for a moment but sipped their coffee, the silence broken only by the tinkle of the china cups and by Karl who was crunching a biscuit and showering crumbs on his coat and the couch.
‘Do you think of the war, Herr Lindsay?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I’ve begun to think of it again. I tell Karl stories of our boat. His mother does not like me talking of those times but . . . I’ve told him a little about the camp too.’ He chuckled and leant forward as if to share a confidence: ‘He knows you did something very secret. He thinks you’re James Bond.’
Lindsay smiled and looked across at the little boy: ‘Does he know we were enemies?’
Gretschel put down his cup and folded his arms slowly over his stomach in a way that suggested he had something of substance to impart: ‘I’ve tried to explain to Karl that sometimes those who appear to be enemies become friends and our friends become our enemies. War is a confusing business. And the battles we fight are often with ourselves – in here,’ and he tapped his head with his forefinger. ‘Of course he doesn’t understand. It was only at the camp in Canada that I began to understand it myself. Perhaps I didn’t dare to before. It was the business with Lange, the night he almost died, that made me wonder what I should render to Caesar. My conscience. Do you understand?’
Lindsay nodded quietly. Gretschel looked at him for a moment, then frowned: ‘You know, it was hard for Lange. Some of the veterans refused to speak to him because he helped the British. And the most ridiculous thing; the young – his own daughters – accused him of being a Nazi propagandist. Can you believe it? After all he went through.’
He glanced at his watch: ‘But we should be going. And your wife will meet us there?’
It was a short drive in Herr Gretschel’s large silver car. Karl came too. A bleak red-brick church and the nave less than a quarter full, the pine coffin before the altar covered with white chrysanthemums. Lindsay found Mary on her knees in prayer and settled into the seat beside her.
‘You’ve got ash on your coat,’ she said as she rose to sit beside him. ‘His daughters are there,’ and she nodded towards two short, very well-built women to the right of the aisle. Two large men were sitting behind with children. The organ was rumbling through some gentle counterpoint.
‘Dr Henderson,’ Gretschel had leant forward from the chair behind to shake Mary’s hand. ‘You look well if I may say so.’
‘You may, Herr Gretschel. You may.’
And she did look well, Lindsay thought, very well, straight-backed and trim and her face still youthful, her green eyes as light and bright as that first day in the Citadel.
The tinkle of a handbell and the priest and his two servers stepped up to the altar. A young priest almost lost in his heavy funeral vestments, his head bent slightly in reverence, his voice soft, a little soapy. And he began with a few words about the dead man. Helmut Lange was a loyal and much loved member of this church who had fought a courageous battle against cancer until it took him from us, missed by family, missed by friends. Funeral words, trite, anonymous words and Lindsay’s thoughts drifted to another place, smoky, half lit, and Lange’s eyes shining, his fingers drumming on the table to the rhythm of the band.
He leant across to whisper to Mary: ‘Do you think he made it to New York?’
She turned slowly to look at him and she was smiling but there were tears in her eyes: ‘You’re thinking of the evening at Hatchett’s. You know, he was a much better dancer than you.’
‘But not as good a lover.’ She pushed his shoulder in rebuke then looked away to hide her smile. In a way it was Lange who had brought them together as lovers again in those weeks after the attempt on his life in the camp. Lindsay remembered it as a sort of healing, scars inside and out – poor Lange carried the marks on his neck always but as a reminder of distant pain.
‘Stand up for this bit,’ and Mary pulled him to his feet.
A short time later and the first snow of winter was swirling lightly through the forest cemetery as they gathered beside the grave. It had been dug between tall pine trees and their roots scratched and rattled the coffin as it was lowered slowly into the hard ground.
Mary squeezed Lindsay’s arm tightly and he reached round her shoulders to hold her closer, her coat flecked with drops of melting snow. Only fift
een people had made the journey from the church to the cemetery. Most of them were Lange’s family, his daughters calm and their husbands indifferent, but there was also a young man shivering in a dark suit, with large brown eyes and long, rather greasy hair. A student, perhaps, without the means for a decent coat. Lindsay had not noticed him in the church but he seemed to be the most affected of those at the graveside. And there was something in his manner, his thin face and dark looks, that rang a distant bell.
The coffin slipped from the pall-bearers’ straps with a clunk and the priest stepped forward with his aspersorium to sprinkle it with holy water. And then he invited them to throw earth into the grave. Lindsay bent to pick up a frozen nugget from the mound for Mary, something to rattle the lid.
‘Make sure he knows we’re here,’ he whispered.
She smiled and squeezed his hand.
As the family began to make its way back to the cars Lindsay stepped up to the grave again and stood staring into the trench, his thoughts full of those few months fifty years before. He was dying for a cigarette. Lange would forgive him but the priest was still talking to the funeral director close by and there was something in his manner and voice, a righteous fervour, that reminded him of the men he used to meet in the interrogation room at Trent Park. Break expectation. As he slipped his hand into his coat pocket for a cigarette, someone touched his elbow.
‘Herr Lindsay.’
It was the young man with the greasy brown hair.
‘Yes?’
‘Herr Lange told me you would be here.’
‘Did he?’
‘My name’s Franz Lehmann,’ and he offered his bony hand. ‘I’m here on behalf of my family.’
‘Oh?’
‘My mother’s a little unwell and couldn’t make the journey.’
One of the cemetery men cleared his throat impatiently and gave them a ‘talk somewhere else’ glance. Three of them were standing ready with their spades. Fifteen minutes of mourning, get the job done, on to the next, order, efficiency, death by timetable.
The Interrogator Page 35