Andrew Williams - The Interrogator

‘Yes.’

‘I understand from Major Benson that you don’t have your own pastor at the camp, Captain.’

‘No.’

The Humber roared, its wheels spinning wildly, throwing soggy divots across the road.

‘I would be prepared to take a service from time to time — in English, I’m afraid, I speak very little German.’

The passenger door flew open and a naval officer climbed awkwardly out. He spoke briefly to the driver then began walking by the church wall towards them. His face was lost beneath the shadow of his peaked cap but Mohr recognised him at once.

‘Thank you. I will speak to my men.’

He turned from the priest and walked through the gate to the truck. Helping hands reached down to pull him into the back and the guards lifted the tailgate and pushed the pins into place. He was a prisoner again. They sat in silence, shoulder to shoulder on the benches, studying their shoes, listening to the English voices a few feet away.

‘…Yes, Lieutenant Lindsay, we were expecting to see you yesterday.’

There was no warmth in Benson’s voice.

‘I’m sorry I missed the funeral.’

‘Shall we meet in an hour with the camp IO, Lieutenant Duncan — he’s a Scotsman too by the way.’

‘Thank you. I would like to begin at once…’

There was a grinding roar and the lorry began to shudder. The driver engaged the clutch and it rattled forward a few feet. Mohr leant across the body of the truck. There was at least one other person who recognised that soft Scottish voice. Lange was sitting at the end of the bench opposite. He seemed to have made himself very small in the shadows. His knee was bouncing anxiously, his hands restless; his face was turned away but Mohr could see that he was biting his lip. Mohr turned back to the mouth of the truck. Through an evil cloud of exhaust, he watched as Lindsay picked his way between the headstones. The soldiers were bent over their spades, dark patches of perspiration on their shirts, and most of the conical mound of earth above the grave had already gone. Lindsay stood and watched them for a few seconds, then bent to pick up something at his feet. It was the wooden cross. He turned it over to read the inscription.

The engine roared again and the truck lurched forward, throwing Mohr against his neighbour. He reached up for a canopy pole to steady himself. When he looked again Lindsay was staring back at him, the cross still in his hands. The truck was gathering speed and in a matter of seconds the churchyard was lost from view, but those troubling few seconds were in Mohr’s thoughts for the rest of the day.

The camp commander’s office was in the old lodge at the entrance to the park, a comfortable distance from the enemy. Lindsay was shown up to a dingy little waiting room on the first floor. An orderly was leaving with the remains of the Major’s lunch and he left the door ajar. Benson was grumbling volubly.

‘…it’s disruptive and quite unnecessary, but I’ve been ordered to do all I can for him.’

The Major’s secretary gave Lindsay an embarrassed smile and slipped out from behind her desk to knock at his door.

Benson was a tall, heavily built man in his early forties with a florid complexion and glassy limpid eyes. He was a drinker. Lindsay noticed his hand tremble a little when he stepped forward to shake it. Beside him was the camp’s intelligence officer.

‘Lieutenant Duncan will be able to help you with the details of the case,’ said Benson, waving airily at the files on his desk. ‘It’s not often Naval Intelligence gets involved in this sort of matter.’ The frostiness in his very military voice suggested that this was altogether a good thing.

Duncan greeted him with a warmer smile. They sat at Benson’s desk and he ordered some coffee.

It was a ‘tragic’ but ‘straightforward’ business, he said. He had seen it happen before. Some men just fell apart behind the wire and Heine was the type.

Lindsay raised his eyebrows: ‘Really?’

‘The senior German officers had been watching him for some time. He was very highly strung.’

Duncan shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

‘The Military Police found nothing suspicious,’ said Benson, ‘and I don’t expect you to.’

The clinking of cups at the door signalled the arrival of coffee. Lindsay glanced over at Duncan. He was in his early thirties, stocky, with bad skin and curly black hair. He reminded Lindsay of the senior foreman at his father’s works in Glasgow. There was something in his watchful silence and tight body language that suggested he did not see eye to eye with the commander of the camp.

‘I expect you would like to see how we found him?’

Benson reached for an envelope and drew out a bundle of photographs. He waited until his secretary had left the office, then handed them to Lindsay: ‘Not pretty.’

Heine was dangling from the pipe like a broken carnival puppet. His face was swollen and twisted, his tongue lolling thick and blue from his mouth. His feet were only inches from the washroom floor and in the corner of the photograph there was an upturned chair. His arms hung freely at his sides. It was an undignified way to depart this earth.

‘He killed himself a little before morning roll call when the washroom was sure to be empty and his body was discovered almost as soon as it was over.’

‘And the police think he took his own life?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you agree?’

‘Of course. There was no evidence to suggest his arms and legs had been tied at any point. His neck wasn’t broken — the poor fellow strangled himself.’

Benson pulled a face: ‘A ghastly way to go; his mind must have been completely unhinged.’

Duncan gave a pointed little cough. Lindsay turned to look at him.

‘There were the bruises on his face and body, sir.’

His tone was measured, his accent reassuringly familiar, like a Glaswegian bank manager, the sort your grandmother might trust with her life savings.

‘He received those injuries in a fight with one of the other prisoners,’ said Benson, addressing Lindsay only. He was clearly irritated. He was the sort of man who expected life to tick like a clock, each little cog in the mechanism turning beautifully on to the next in a predictable well-ordered movement. And the camp was his empire — he was going to guard its reputation jealously. ‘You will find the details of the fight in the statements here.’ He laid his hand on the files in front of him. ‘Duncan will take you through them.’

He pushed his chair back suddenly and got to his feet. There were other things he wanted to attend to in the camp, he explained. Lindsay wondered if he needed a drink.

Lieutenant Duncan breathed a sigh of relief as the door closed behind him.

‘You’re the intelligence officer. What do you think?’ Lindsay asked at once.

Duncan looked at him cautiously: ‘I don’t know if he took his own life but I don’t think he got those bruises in a fight. I can’t prove anything because none of the prisoners will talk to me — not even the friendly ones. A fellow called Schmidt — he was with the 500 — came forward to say he got into an argument with Heine. Mohr brought him to us. But neither of them would tell us what it was about.’

‘And the police?’

‘Why spend time on a dead German? Aren’t we trying to kill them by the thousands?’

‘Is that your view too?’

‘No. I helped cut him down.’

Lindsay nodded in acknowledgement, then asked, after a moment’s thought: ‘Don’t you have a trustee, an informer inside the camp, one of the prisoners?’

‘No. It’s very tight.’

Rising from his chair Lindsay walked slowly over to the window. They were changing the guard at the gate and along the perimeter wire. An elderly-looking sergeant was barking aggressively at his men, every bristling inch the parade-ground martinet. It was the Army at its most senseless. And it seemed to Lindsay that the wire and the guard offered no sort of challenge to a resourceful prisoner intent on escape, but where was there to run to here?