The Secret of Spandau

by Peter Lovesey

  ‘So you have passed on the offer I made?’ said Harald, seating himself in the chair opposite Pröhl. ‘How is Herr Hess?’

  ‘I am here to verify one or two things, Herr Beer,’ Pröhl said curtly.

  ‘Whatever you wish.’

  ‘First, your copy of the manuscript. It came into the possession of your firm some twenty years ago, is that correct?’

  ‘In 1964,’ said Harald. ‘As a matter of fact, I noticed only today that Herr Hess signed the agreement on April 26.’ He paused, but there was no reaction from Pröhl. ‘His seventieth birthday.’

  ‘Interesting. Tell me, how did it come into your possession?’

  ‘My father’s, actually. I was not aware that the book existed until I found it a few days ago in the safe over there.’

  ‘I see.’ Pröhl frowned slightly. ‘You understand that we would like to confirm its authenticity.’

  Harald assumed a slightly hurt expression. ‘I can assure you that Beer Verlag deals only in authentic works, Herr Pröhl. You are not suggesting that the script in our possession is some sort of forgery?’

  ‘I’m sure Beer Verlag is irreproachable. However, one has to be on one’s guard. You remember the lamentable affair of the so-called Hitler Diaries? The perpetrators fooled some eminent military historians as well as hard-headed journalists.’

  ‘There is a significant difference in this case,’ Harald pointed out. ‘Herr Hess is still alive to verify the work.’

  Pröhl made a dissenting sound with his lips and shook his head. ‘The authorities would not allow it. They are extremely agitated to learn of the existence of the book. Hess has been reprimanded by the directors and had his letter-writing privileges taken away. It is only thanks to a friendly warder that we are able to keep in communication.’

  ‘That is distressing,’ said Harald. ‘I would not have wished to be the cause of any discomfort to Herr Hess.’

  ‘It may be for the best,’ said Pröhl dismissively. ‘Tell me, do you have the original manuscript?’

  ‘His handwritten version? No. Presumably it was passed out of the prison on scraps of paper, as the Speer Diaries were. What we have is the top copy of the typescript. Would you care to examine it?’ Harald went to the safe and took out the package.

  ‘But you have no idea who typed this?’ said Pröhl as he took the script from its wrapper.

  ‘None whatsoever. My father dealt with it. That’s the agreement on top of the script. You can see that Herr Hess signed it.’

  ‘Do you happen to know of the existence of any other copies?’

  Harald shook his head. ‘I haven’t even made any spares for myself. It’s a very hot property, as you will understand when you get a chance to read it.’

  Pröhl looked up sharply, and his brown eyes locked with Harald’s. ‘What do you mean by that, Herr Beer?’

  ‘Some of it is explosive stuff. I can understand why the authorities are disturbed, if they have any idea what Hess has written.’

  ‘Such as …?’

  ‘The British are in for shocks when this is published. And the Russians will go berserk.’

  ‘The Russians? Why?’

  ‘Because of what he reveals about the massacre of Polish soldiers in the war. You’ve heard about the Katyn Forest graves?’

  Pröhl nodded. ‘Hess knew something about that?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Harald went on with relish. ‘I dare say you know the salient facts. In 1943, the German Army found mass graves near Smolensk containing over four thousand corpses of Polish officers, each shot in the back of the head. They accused the Russians of the atrocity, because the area had been part of Soviet-occupied Poland. They said it took place in the spring of 1940. But the Russians made a counter-accusation, saying that the Germans had carried out the killings when they invaded the Smolensk area in July and August of 1941.’

  ‘Herr Beer, this argument has been going on for forty years,’ said Pröhl. ‘The Germans deny responsibility and so do the Russians. The forensic evidence seems to point to the Russians, but so what? It was a tragic episode, but it’s not an issue any more, except to the historians.’

  Harald leaned forward challengingly. ‘With respect, Herr Pröhl, you could not be more wrong. I know Poland. I have many friends there. Katyn is still an open wound. Each Polish government since the war has endorsed the Soviet version – that it was a Nazi atrocity – but, believe me, the mass of the people are not taken in.’

  ‘They blame the Russians,’ said Pröhl. ‘So?’

  ‘Four thousand bodies were buried at Katyn, but up to fifteen thousand Polish soldiers disappeared from the face of the earth in the early part of the war.’

  ‘Numbers get exaggerated in stories of this sort,’ Pröhl commented, continuing to turn the pages of the typescript in a preoccupied way.

  ‘They were men taken prisoner by the Russians when they occupied Eastern Poland in 1939,’ Harald proceeded as if he hadn’t heard. ‘Over half of them were officers, the elite of the Polish Army. The Russians kept them in three large prisoner-of-war camps. They were permitted to write home until the middle of April 1940, when the letters suddenly stopped arriving. The camps were evacuated and the men transported in railway trucks to unknown destinations. The bodies at Katyn account for less than a third of the missing men.’

  ‘What does this have to do with Hess?’

  ‘Well, in 1940, he was head of the AO.’

  ‘The Auslandorganisation?’

  ‘Yes – which as you know was officially set up to strengthen links with Germans living in foreign countries, but was also set up as a cover for intelligence-gathering. If you study the chapter he has written on the events of 1940, you will see, Herr Pröhl, that he received reports from German agents that confirmed –’

  Pröhl said mildly without looking up, ‘Katyn?’

  ‘Not only Katyn. Dergachi and Bologoye.’ Harald noted with satisfaction the bemused expression on his visitor’s face, before going on to explain, ‘The two other sites where up to ten thousand more of the missing Polish soldiers were murdered and buried by the Soviet NKVD.’

  Pröhl raised his head in surprise. ‘These are places in Russia?’

  ‘Dergachi is ten miles north of Kharkov. The men from Starobelsk Camp were taken there. Bologoye, where the Ostashkov prisoners were liquidated, is on the main route between Moscow and Leningrad.’ Harald got up from his chair, too wound up to remain immobile any longer, and paced the room. ‘God knows what will happen in Poland when the book is published. Those murdered men are coming back to haunt the Russians. With Solidarity barely suppressed, it’s all that’s needed to trigger an anti-Soviet uprising.’

  A sniff from Pröhl indicated reservations. ‘Even if it’s true, it won’t ever be proved. No one is going to be allowed to dig for evidence in Russia.’

  ‘Don’t you see?’ Harald broke in excitedly. ‘This book provides overwhelming evidence. Turn up the chapter Hess has written, Herr Pröhl, and look at the precise dates, the locations, even the identities of the NKVD units responsible and the names of the officers in charge. And the whole point is that Hess was in custody in England when the Germans invaded Russia, so there can be no question any longer that the Russians carried out these terrible events.’

  Pröhl put down the typescript and said, ‘Fascinating. But why didn’t this come to light when it happened, and Hess got the information from his agents in Poland?’

  Harald turned to face his visitor, using his hands to reinforce the point. ‘This was 1940. Remember? We were friends of Russia then. We had signed the Non-Agression Pact.’

  ‘So Hess kept the news to himself?’

  ‘He told Hitler and Göring, but it went no further. And at the end of the war, Russia was one of the Allies in judgement over the Third Reich. It was not the time to tell the truth about the killings. Plenty of people knew about Katyn, but it was conveniently brushed aside at Nuremberg. The Germans were in the dock, not the Russians.’

&nbs
p; Pröhl appeared to have grasped the point now. ‘And Hess has lived with this secret since 1940?’

  ‘Right! The Russians are still not certain how much he knows, but they simmer with suspicion. The Soviet judge at Nuremberg was ordered to demand the death penalty, but it was over-ruled by the other judges. Hess played the amnesia card at the trial to fox the Russians. He said nothing about the massacre in his evidence. Yet his first years at Spandau were dominated by the secret. He suspected that the Allies would poison him if they learned what he knew. He didn’t even dare discuss his knowledge with the other prisoners.’

  Pröhl still seemed reluctant to be totally convinced, almost as if it were a point of family honour that was at issue. ‘If all this is true, I can’t understand why he has waited so long to tell the world about it. Is he still in fear of being poisoned?’

  ‘You must read the book!’ Harald almost cried out in his enthusiasm. ‘He is the most tenacious man I have ever come across. No, he isn’t concerned about himself. He has old-fashioned ideas about honour and justice. He wants the facts to be known, so that the Third Reich will be absolved of any suspicion over Katyn and the missing thousands. If he is ever released –’

  ‘He will never be released now,’ said Pröhl. ‘God knows, the family has tried to get him out.’

  This was the very point that Harald had wanted Pröhl to make. He pounced on it. ‘But there is a chance if we publish now. The effect will be sensational. Everyone will clamour to read the book. This won’t simply be his family and a few people holding banners outside the gate of Spandau Prison. The attention of the world will be focussed on his cause. The pressure to release him will be irresistible.’

  Pröhl nodded. It might have been in confirmation.

  ‘Would you care to discuss my offer now?’ Harald asked him civilly. As he spoke, he reached for the script. It was a gesture not without significance; the property had been licensed to him.

  Pröhl’s hand clamped down on the package first. ‘Before we do,’ he said, moving it away from Harald, ‘there is something I must check, Herr Beer.’ He got up and walked towards the door.

  ‘Just a minute!’ said Harald in alarm. ‘Where are you going with the script?’

  ‘Oh.’ Pröhl turned, smiled and rested the script on a table between them. ‘My mistake.’ He continued to move towards the door.

  ‘Is there anything wrong?’ asked Harald.

  Pröhl opened the door a fraction and looked out, as if checking for an eavesdropper. Harald meanwhile picked up the Hess memoir and held it possessively to his chest. Possibly Pröhl had heard something outside. The old building sometimes creaked as the temperature dropped in the evening.

  Pröhl stepped outside the door.

  Suddenly a second man had replaced him in the doorway. Harald stared in petrified amazement. The man was wearing a strange mask. He was holding a hand-gun, a clumsy-looking weapon with a long barrel. He was pointing it at Harald’s face. He squeezed the trigger.

  Harald Beer only had time to utter the words, ‘What is it?’ before he succumbed to the onset of vertigo and loss of breath. The respiratory centre of his brain was paralysed. He reeled, staggering into a pile of contracts and fell dying on them, permanently discharged of any more obligations.

  The murder weapon was a seven-inch gas-gun fired by a KGB hit-man. Really it was just a sophisticated version of that simple toy, the water-pistol, except that the spray it fired was concentrated hydrogen cyanide.

  The hit-man took a step backwards into the hall again and closed the door. Julius, the KGB agent known falsely to Harald as Pröhl, was waiting there.

  ‘Done?’

  ‘Done,’ answered the hit-man.

  ‘And now we must wait?’

  ‘Five minutes. There is a mask for you in the case.’

  They had brought in the briefcase containing their equipment when Harald had released the electronic lock on the front door to admit the visitor. The hit-man had come into the building with Julius and waited in the hall for his cue to kill. Had Harald greeted them in the hall, the hit-man would have been passed off as one of the Hess family.

  While they waited for Harald to die and the fumes to disperse, Julius reviewed the encounter. He felt he had handled it reasonably well. In a few minutes he would take possession of the typescript and the contract. That was the good news.

  The bad news was that Harald Beer had not been able to disclose anything about the present whereabouts of the original manuscript, the hundreds of scraps of paper that Hess must have managed to smuggle out of Spandau. Harald had not even known how his father had acquired the typed copy. At Karlshorst, they would not be overjoyed about that. This assignment was by no means completed.

  The other piece of news – about the mass slaughter of the Poles – was best forgotten. For Julius, it was superfluous, but dangerous knowledge. It would not be prudent to mention it at Karlshorst. The KGB chiefs would read it for themselves in the memoir. And he would make a point of mentioning that he had made only a cursory inspection of the typescript.

  The hit-man was looking at his watch. ‘Ready? Better put on our masks.’

  ‘One moment,’ said Julius. He took a cigar from his pocket and struck a match to light it.

  ‘You can’t smoke that thing now,’ the hit-man testily told him.

  ‘I need it.’ Julius inhaled to get the cigar well alight, then cleared his lungs with several deep draughts of air. Holding the cigar between two fingers, he drew the gas-mask over his head. Then he pushed open the door of Harald’s office.

  Harald’s body lay sprawled among the contracts, the eyes fixed in a hideous stare, the teeth clenched and traces of froth at the edges of the mouth. The hit-man felt for the pulse at the side of the neck, then confirmed with a nod to Julius that the job had been successfully executed. There would be nothing to tell that the death was due to anything except a cardiac arrest.

  Julius still had instructions to carry out. It was necessary to force each of the dead man’s fingers away from the Hess memoir to obtain it. He checked that he had the correct script. Then he opened a filing cabinet and spent a few minutes searching for the office copy of the letter Harald had originally addressed to Hess.

  When he had found it, he held the flimsy paper at arm’s length and touched the lighted cigar to one corner until a small flame was kindled. He placed the burning paper next to a heap of contracts, which soon ignited. There was enough paper in the place to ensure that the fire would not go out. The desk was of wood, and the walls were panelled oak.

  As a final touch, he pressed the cigar between the dead man’s fingers.

  The room was already filling with smoke as Julius and the hit-man left the building unseen and walked two blocks to where their car was parked.

  29

  ‘Forty-eight hours.’

  ‘One thing’s certain,’ said Dick. ‘I’m not spending a minute of it in the Public Record Office. Feel like a trip to Brighton?’

  Jane frowned. ‘The ex-MI5 man? I thought you’d got all you could from him.’

  Dick steered the Renault out of Shoe Lane into the flow of traffic westward along Fleet Street. ‘It’s true he answered my questions about Hess, but he was incredibly jumpy. He broke off the meeting very abruptly.’

  ‘You believe he could have said more?’

  ‘I didn’t press him as I should have done.’

  Jane turned to face Dick as they stopped at a traffic signal. ‘Are you sure you want me to come? I thought he didn’t trust women.’

  ‘Have you wondered why?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Women could be his weakness. Unfashionable in the spy world, but not unknown. One smouldering look from you, and he may open up.’ Dick eased the car forward again.

  ‘How are we going to find Stones? We don’t have an address.’

  ‘We’ll stop off at my flat and make a couple of phone calls.’

  The homeward movement west was already slowing the traffic, bu
t once they were through Knightsbridge, they had a clearer drive on the Cromwell Road and reached Dick’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush soon after 4.00p.m.

  Cedric was inquisitive when Dick got through to him at the office, but he could hardly refuse to provide Stones’ number.

  ‘What now?’ said Jane. ‘Will Directory Enquiries give us his address if we call them?’

  Dick shook his head. ‘We don’t even know his real name, do we?’ He tapped out Stones’ number.

  Jane stared at Dick in surprise. ‘You’re going to call him direct?’

  Resonant with suspicion, the voice at the other end said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is the telephone engineer, sir,’ said Dick breezily. ‘Just checking that your fault has been corrected.’

  ‘I didn’t report a fault.’

  ‘Didn’t report it?’ said Dick. ‘Are you Mr Hatton of Trafalgar Street?’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m Salter-Smith of Regency Square.’

  ‘My mistake,’ said Dick as he wrote it down. ‘Sorry to have troubled you, sir.’

  They stopped for beer and sandwiches in Putney on their way out to the A23, but were soon back on the road. A steady drizzle smeared the windscreen without providing enough moisture for the wipers to work, except with the washer. They were in the thick of the rush-hour now, and each car had its slipstream of mud particles.

  ‘I’m looking forward to this,’ Jane announced. ‘I’ve never met a real MI5 man. As far as I know, that is.’

  ‘Don’t expect too much of this one. He has no respect for the cormorant press, as he calls us.’

  ‘What are we going to call him – Stones, or Salter-Smith?’

  ‘Neither, if we can avoid it.’

  ‘We’ll get nothing out of him if we’re not civil.’

  It was around seven when the grey band of the South Downs was behind them and they cruised into Brighton in a stream of traffic. Their headlights picked out the floral displays along the edge of Preston Park, the sprinklers working on them, despite the rain. They kept straight on through the Grand Parade and the Old Steine to the lighted sea-front, and there turned right by the Palace Pier.