Andrew Williams - The Interrogator

That night, he had a dream. He was standing on the pavement below his apartment and the Morris was close by. The driver’s window was open and an arm with a black tattoo of a fouled anchor was resting against the door. ‘Who are you?’ Lindsay shouted. There was no reply. He bent to look inside. A head lunged towards him and he recoiled in disgust. The man’s face was no longer there, as if a giant hand had dashed it without mercy against a jagged rock. Tails of skin were clinging to the top of the skull and from one of these hung a tangled strand of auburn hair. And he knew the auburn hair belonged to a sailor from the Culloden . When he woke in the morning both his hands were hooked tightly around the frame of his bed. The Morris had gone.

The news came with the rations. The guard hammered on the door at half past seven and half an hour later he was back with the breakfast tray. Helmut Lange was dressed but lying on his camp bed, trying to ignore the tortured grunts of his room-mate who was busy jumping and stretching in nothing but a vest and pants. Obersteuermann Eduard Bruns considered it his duty as a good National Socialist to be fit and ready. ‘Ready for what?’ Lange had asked him on their first day together. Bruns had shrugged his muscular shoulders and then, after giving the question a little thought, replied: ‘Victory.’ He did not explain how he hoped to contribute to this behind the wire in a British prisoner-of-war camp and Lange knew better than to ask.

‘Trent Park Hotel bed and breakfast,’ the British corporal said cheerily as he placed the tray on the table. Some porridge, some toast and a tin mug of evil brown tea. ‘Your last day, Fritz, your-last-day-here,’ the corporal enunciated the words carefully, as if speaking to small children. ‘New-hotel-tonight.’

Lange was glad to be moving at last. The formal interrogations had not troubled him because he had no secrets to betray, but Lieutenant Lindsay had taken him from the confines of his prison cell into the park and asked him very different questions, questions he was free but unable to answer. And at the club, the lieutenant’s girlfriend had pressed him in a gentle way, too, about the concentration camps, the duty of the Church, and the Jews. Eyes fixed on the white ceiling of his room, Lange had prayed for guidance. In the still hours of the night, Bruns breathing heavily close by, his prayers had been answered and although he was afraid, he took comfort from the thought that he could shrink behind the wire.

At eleven o’clock the guards ordered them from the room, with keys jangling and doors opening the length of the corridor like a scene from the Last Judgement. A military lorry was parked just beyond the double fence at the front of the house and a group of twenty prisoners was standing in a line close by. Lange stepped forward to join them but the young British army officer in charge shouted something at the guards and one of them grabbed his sleeve: ‘Not yet, Fritz.’

Bruns was at his side: ‘They’re our men from the 112 . They’re separating the officers.’

The two of them stood in silence together on the forecourt and watched as the line of men was escorted through the wire and into the back of the lorry. As soon as the last man had scrambled inside it began to pull away and was replaced by a green military bus. All the officers of the 112 were assembled now, chatting and smoking in the sunshine. Lange recognised his first room-mate, the young engineer, August Heine. Then he heard voices in the outer hall and a thick-set British naval officer stepped through the door and held it open for Kapitän zur See Jürgen Mohr. The prisoners came smartly to attention. Mohr acknowledged their salute with a weak smile.

The British officer was speaking loudly in English. Lange watched them drift through the gate to the bus until a guard yelled something he took to be an order to follow. On an impulse, he began rooting about in his little bag for a pencil and, tearing the back off a cigarette packet, he wrote a short note.

Mohr was still talking to the British officer a little way from the bus. He half turned as Lange approached and looked him up and down: ‘Yes?’

‘Herr Kapitän, I was hoping to leave this note.’

He took the scrap of cardboard from his pocket and handed it to the officer who read it carefully, frowned, then placed it in his jacket pocket: ‘All right. I’ll make sure Lieutenant Lindsay sees it.’

Lange was on the bottom step of the bus when he felt a firm hand against his chest. It was Mohr and he was looking at him intently, his face set hard in a silent promise: Lange would be called to account for his note.

From the window of the interrogators’ office Lindsay watched the military bus pull away. There were a few things he needed to rescue from his desk but no ‘goodbyes’ he wished to say. Well perhaps one, he thought, a fond farewell to Sassoon’s ghost. It was difficult to take seriously because a small voice kept whispering, ‘This is all a mistake.’ Old notes, German newspapers, military handbooks — he swept them all into the large canvas bag he had once used for his rugby boots. It took just five minutes. He was trying to force the zip together when Charlie Samuels walked into the office.

‘I’ve done that already,’ he said, pointing to Lindsay’s empty desk.

‘I know. Sorry, Charlie.’

‘Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe, Douglas. At least they had the good sense not to try and make a sailor of me.’ Samuels lifted the plain cardboard file he was carrying with the satisfied air of someone preparing to hand over a fine present: ‘I’ve something to show you.’

‘What is it?’

‘Not here,’ he whispered conspiratorially. ‘Come with me.’

He led Lindsay out into the servants’ corridor and to the foot of the back stairs. Then, after checking that no one was about, he began to climb down quickly to the basement.

‘This is very cloak-and-dagger, Charlie,’ said Lindsay, behind him. ‘I feel like Guy Fawkes.’

Samuels did not answer but turned right into a long low badly lit passage way, its walls lined with large cream tiles. Doors to left and right opened on to empty wine racks, boot and dairy rooms, a silver store and an archive, neglected and dusty. It was Lindsay’s first time below stairs.

‘In here,’ said Samuels.

‘Here’ was a dingy barrel-vaulted cellar with whitewashed walls and terracotta floor tiles, lit by a single naked bulb. It was empty but for a rickety trestle table.

‘All right,’ Lindsay’s voice bounced about the room, ‘tell me.’

Samuels took a deep breath: ‘My friend at Oxford sent me this. It will tell you all you need to know.’ And he thrust a file at Lindsay in which there were four or five typed pages. The title in bold at the top of the first page was ‘ Administrative and Auxiliary Codes’.

The Administrative Code was brought into force in 1934 and used unrecoded for routine signals…

Lindsay glanced down the page. There was a section entitled ‘ Naval Code’, and on the next page, ‘ Long Subtractor System’ and ‘ Merchant Navy Code’. Lindsay looked at Samuels and down again at the file.

‘How on earth did you get this?’

‘I’ve told you, a friend. It’s a basic guide to the book codes we use. Be careful. My friend would be in very hot water for giving it to me.’

‘A good friend,’ said Lindsay.

‘Yes,’ said Samuels, ‘someone else who likes to break rules.’

There was something in Samuels’ voice that suggested his friend was a woman, perhaps an academic colleague and an old flame. Lindsay knew that the naval codes people had taken over one of the Oxford colleges and recruited some of the university’s dons.