Andrew Williams - The Interrogator

For once the city was still. It was a cool clear night, the sky sprinkled with blackout stars. The party shuffled along shuttered eighteenth-century streets towards Palace Yard and Parliament and Lindsay trailed self-consciously in its wake. The breeze was freshening from the west, gently rocking the flabby grey barrage balloons that clustered above Horse Guards like tethered elephants. As they crossed the Mall, James Henderson fell into step.

‘Colonel Checkland rang me an hour ago with some extraordinary news. We’ve got that fellow Mohr.’

‘Jürgen Mohr?’

‘Is there more than one Mohr?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well it’s the one I’ve heard of,’ Henderson snapped. ‘The bugger who sent a personal signal to Churchill in the first months of the war, directing him to the survivors of a ship he’d sunk. There was a great brouhaha in the Commons at the time. One of their heroes. The most senior naval officer we’ve bagged. The Colonel says the First Sea Lord’s cock-a-hoop. HMS White picked up a contact off the African coast, pursued and depth-charged the U-112 to the surface. She’s on her way to Liverpool with the prisoners — expected in ten days. You’re to meet her.’

‘Fine.’

‘Good.’

They walked on in silence.

Lindsay parted company with Henderson in the Haymarket and five minutes later he was climbing the stairs to his flat. His father had lent him the pied-à-terre the family firm rented in St James’s Square. The apartment had been furnished by Lindsay’s mother with austere ‘Imperial’ pieces she had rescued from his grandmother’s home in Bremen. His father’s men had worked a small miracle carrying them to the top of the house. They were a sentimental anchor for Lindsay’s mother, a heavy dark echo of childhood and Germany. No one else liked them but no one was courageous enough to say so. The furniture made the small flat poky and uncomfortable, but it was rent-free and just a stone’s throw from the Admiralty and Piccadilly Underground station.

Once inside, he felt his way through the thick blackness of the hall into his bedroom. A soft white light was pouring through the open curtains and he was able to move more freely. He took the little piece of paper from his pocket and smiled as he remembered the light touch of Mary’s fingers: ‘Abbey 1745’.

‘Mary Henderson, Mary Henderson,’ he chanted softly to himself, ‘where will this take us?’ And he eased himself on to his lumpy old bed, the telephone number held to the light from the window.

The Easter Sunday service at St John’s was a dreary affair. Mary left before communion. Her uncle had invited two elderly colleagues from the Commons and their perjink wives to lunch. To the clink of silver and old china, they talked of defeat, of the losses in the Atlantic and the collapse of Yugoslavia, of thousands dying in the streets of Belgrade. As Mrs Leigh was clearing the plates the telephone rang in the hall. It was Lindsay.

‘Rescue me,’ she whispered into the handpiece.

He laughed: ‘From what?’

‘Please be quick.’

He arrived in Lord North Street between dessert and coffee. Mary left him on the doorstep and collected her coat and scarf before her uncle could draw them into conversation. A jeep from the Division’s transport pool was parked a little way along the street, its engine still turning. Lindsay had spent the morning at Section 11’s small office in nearby Sanctuary Buildings and was still in his uniform.

‘Hyde Park?’

‘Anywhere,’ she said.

Bowling through the streets, the wind plucking at her scarf and hair, Mary’s spirits began to lift. It was a warm blue afternoon, the sun was twinkling through the windshield and the plane trees in Park Lane were tipped with a promise of spring.

‘I’m so glad you rang,’ she shouted above the rattle of the engine.

‘But surprised?’

‘No. Why?’

‘It’s so soon after the party. But there were things I didn’t have a chance to say.’

He turned into a street off the Bayswater Road and parked in front of the shell of a once handsome early Victorian terrace. A muddy crater had cut the road in half. On the other side, Mary could see a house belonging to a friend of her mother’s. Mrs Proctor kept a large pram in her hall full of papers and clothes and a strongbox of jewellery, just enough of her life to wheel to the shelter. But she was fortunate; until now her home had been spared.

They walked south-east across the park, away from the hum of traffic and the Serpentine with families and spooning couples ambling at its edge.

‘Did Winn tell you?’ Lindsay asked. ‘Security has decided that none of our codes has been compromised, and there’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all, it’s just gossip.’

‘No, he didn’t tell me.’

‘But you don’t sound surprised.’

‘No.’

‘You know, they didn’t investigate it properly,’ he said with a little shake of the head. ‘They didn’t even speak to my prisoner, the wireless operator Zier.’

Mary said nothing.

The Royal Artillery had built a wire fence across the path to protect a battery of anti-aircraft guns and they were forced on to the grass, through the shaking daffodils.

‘Did I give the impression at the party that I was suffering from a conflict of loyalties?’ Lindsay asked suddenly.

‘Your cousin Martin, the U-boat officer?’

‘I want you to know, he despises Hitler.’

‘He’s fighting for him.’

‘He’s fighting for Germany.’

‘It amounts to the same thing,’ she said with slight irritation.

Lindsay shook his head: ‘Really, no.’

She stopped walking and turned away from him a little, hands buried deep in her coat pockets, shoes and stockings wet with dew the April sun was too weak to burn away.

‘This war, you know, I believe we’re fighting a new darkness,’ she said with quiet feeling. ‘Something evil. Really evil.’

‘Your brother said you were religious.’

She turned back sharply to look him in the eye: ‘I haven’t taken vows. But yes, I feel it’s my Christian duty to do something, don’t you?’

The question was flung like a gauntlet.

‘Perhaps my cousin feels the same,’ said Lindsay tartly. ‘German bishops say it’s a sin not to fight for the Volk.’

‘My goodness, you do sound confused.’

‘How patronising.’

They stared at each other for a frosty moment, then she reached across and touched his sleeve: ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.’

He smiled at her: ‘I haven’t forgotten — you like to be direct. But don’t apologise, we’re as bad as each other. And I’m rather protective of my cousin.’

Small white clouds were rolling east over the city now, their cold shadows scudding across the grass. They found the path again and walked on at a brisker pace. Lindsay asked Mary about her family and university and the years she had spent studying archaeology: ‘I can’t imagine you in a muddy hole.’

‘I’ll let you have my paper on Norse burial rites.’

He laughed. ‘Background for the new dark age.’

Mary hesitated, then said, half in jest: ‘My brother may have told you I’m an academic bluestocking. I deny it.’

‘He said men were frightened of you, and now I understand why.’

‘Don’t tease me. James’s friends are frightened of any woman who has something to say for herself but you must stick up for me. We’re both outsiders, thrown into the same den of lions.’

‘Then it is my duty to protect you.’

‘Duty?’ She looked at him steadily, chin slightly raised, daring him to catch and hold her eye. It was an unmistakable, thrilling challenge.