Andrew Williams - The Interrogator

‘You’re from Bavaria, aren’t you?’ he said at last. ‘I can tell by your accent — Munich?’

‘Yes, Munich.’

‘And your father’s a teacher.’

Lange shifted anxiously in his seat again. ‘How did you know?’

‘I’ve picked up a few things.’

‘I’ve told you I don’t know any secrets.’

‘Yes, so you say.’ Lindsay leant forward earnestly to look Lange in the eye: ‘I believe you, really I do. But the other interrogator, the soldier, he doesn’t, you see. You must help me convince him.’

By the time Lindsay had collected his papers, the prisoner had gone. Three hours’ gentle probing and he knew Helmut Lange’s life story. Only time would tell if it was worth the effort. He could still hear prisoner and guard clumping up what was once the private staircase to the top of the house. Trent Park was too grand and airy for anything as mean as a cell block. The chinoiserie and old masters had been replaced by camp chairs and wall charts but an air of bright elegance lingered yet. It was a strangely self-conscious air. The house was not what it seemed. The grand Palladian façade had been built only ten years before with eighteenth-century bricks salvaged from Devonshire House in Piccadilly; the portico was from Chesterfield House, the obelisks from Wrest Park: stones, stairs and statues, almost everything, had come from somewhere else. Trent Park had acquired its history. It fascinated Lindsay because it spoke eloquently to him of its creator: Sir Philip Sassoon — Eton and Oxford, Member of Parliament and Under-Secretary at the Air Ministry — the lisping, swarthy scion of Jewish merchant princes.

Sassoon was reputed to have lured anybody who was anyone in fashionable society to his home. The newspapers listed politicians, princes, even the King of a small country. Their cars had swept up the long drive and on to the forecourt where a Union flag was picked out in pink-and-white stone rescued from the old Westminster Bridge. But Sassoon was an outsider. No one Lindsay knew personally had been on the guest list but he often wondered if all that blue blood had whispered, ‘Nice fellow but a little foreign.’ Sassoon had died in the summer before the war and the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre — CSDIC — had taken his home. Now young Nazis lived under his roof and strolled under escort through his gardens.

It was a little after four o’clock when Lindsay made his way down the grand oak staircase into the entrance hall. A low shaft of sunlight was pouring through the west-facing window, its smoky brightness shifting and swirling about the guards at the security desk.

‘Lindsay, I’ve been looking for you.’

Lieutenant-Commander James Henderson was squeezing his broad frame through the half-closed porch door: ‘May I have a word.’ His voice bounced roughly about the elegant plaster ceiling and pillars: ‘Let’s walk.’

Lindsay followed him out of the hall and through the security fence on to the broad brick terrace at the east end of the house. They stopped by the gate to the swimming pool, once the heated height of luxury, empty now but for last autumn’s curling leaves.

‘I haven’t wished you a happy birthday,’ said Lindsay, offering Henderson his hand.

‘You’re coming tonight, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

Henderson began to push at a loose piece of brick paving, edging it backwards and forwards with his shoe. He was an awkward-looking man, an inch or so shorter than Lindsay but broader and heavier, an East Anglian farmer even in his well-tailored blue uniform and an unlikely recruit to Naval Intelligence.

When he lifted his chin at last, there was a dark frown on his face and his lips were tightly pursed. There was clearly something difficult he wanted to say.

‘Cards down, Lindsay, Colonel Checkland is cross because you went behind his back to the Citadel. It wasn’t your place to speak to Winn about our codes.’

Lindsay almost smiled — Checkland was always cross with him. The Colonel was the head of Section 11 and had been for as long as anyone could remember. But Naval Intelligence was changing. Reserve officers twenty years his junior called the shots, clever amateurs with an academic contempt for rank and naval discipline — men like Rodger Winn and Ian Fleming. It was Ian Fleming who had found Lindsay his job as an interrogator and Checkland was certainly not going to forget that.

‘The Colonel wants you to drop it,’ said Henderson firmly. ‘It was just idle talk, gossip. The right people at the Admiralty have looked into it and they’re satisfied there is nothing to suggest any of our codes are compromised.’

‘Did they interrogate my prisoner, Zier, the wireless operator?’

‘Drop it. It’s nothing. You’ve been here four months, you’re good at your job but you’re wrong about this, and there are important security issues at stake here.’

‘Of course there are — the security of our codes,’ said Lindsay crossly.

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not important for you to know.’

Henderson paused to make eye contact and when he spoke his voice was cold:

‘Do you think you know better than everyone else? Don’t rub people up the wrong way. Look, we’ve taken a chance with you. Don’t give us reasons to doubt you. The Director of Naval Intelligence has instructed interrogators not to question prisoners about codes. This is not for you. Leave it alone. Oh, and that’s an order, an order from the Director.’

It was unambiguous, final, and it needled. Code and Cipher Security at the Admiralty had slammed the door shut without taking the trouble to interview Lindsay or Prisoner 530.

‘It’s a pity Colonel Checkland isn’t prepared to back the judgement of his interrogators,’ he said with a bitter shake of the head.

Henderson sighed pointedly. ‘If you want to take it up with him in person, be my guest, but I would hate to see you have to go.’

Lindsay knew that was a lie. There was no love lost between them. But what was the point of brow-beating the messenger when in three hours’ time he would be standing, glass in hand, at his party. Henderson must have read the resignation in his face. Touching his elbow, he began to propel him gently along the terrace in pursuit of the sunshine. A couple of well-dressed clerical assistants were perched on the stone balustrade at the far end, chatting animatedly beneath a vigorous lead statue of Hercules. He stopped well short of them and turned to face Lindsay. ‘You’re doing a good job, Douglas,’ he cooed. ‘Don’t spoil it. Look, I need to be away. I promised Uncle I would be at his house by seven.’ He hesitated, then said: ‘I can’t take you all the way — things to collect — but I’ll drop you at the station.’

The Alvis roared up to the front of the house. Lindsay stepped through the security fence and flung his coat and case in the back. It was a five-minute run from Trent Park to the station at Cockfosters but in a little under two miles they would pass from open countryside into the grimy bustle of the city. Sassoon’s great park was at the very outer edge of London: to the north, the woods and rolling hills of Hertfordshire, to the south, the steady creep of pebble-dashed suburbia. It was Hitler who had brought the city’s march to a halt at the gates of Trent Park.

‘Mary seems to have taken to you, old boy,’ Henderson roared over his engine. They were batting between the limes that led in a long avenue to the gates, the sun yellow and blinding already.

‘She’s a lovely girl. I’m a little afraid of her — a bit of a scholar — the first in our family. Not sure I approve really. She was offered a Fellowship at Oxford, you know, but turned it down to join the Division.’