Andrew Williams - The Interrogator

‘Do you think he was murdered?’ Duncan asked.

‘Do you?’

‘I don’t know. But I am sure they are all lying about the fight.’

‘Mohr?’

‘Oh, he just said it was regrettable…’

‘No. What do you think of him?’

‘Major Benson is impressed.’ There was a barely disguised note of contempt in Duncan’s voice.

‘And you?’

Duncan shrugged: ‘I think he knows how to get what he wants. The Ältestenrat runs this place.’

‘The Ältestenrat?’

‘The council of the eldest — the three senior prisoners.’

Lindsay turned away from the window and walked back to the desk. ‘I’d better look at the statement Mohr gave the investigating officers and the other ones they collected too.’

It took a little under an hour to read them all. Lieutenant Duncan returned at four o’clock with tea and a few damp biscuits. The military investigators had taken statements from all the officers of the U-112 , Heine’s room-mates and one or two prisoners who were known to have been on good terms with the dead man. No one was very forthcoming. There was the suggestion more than once that Heine was struggling with captivity and close to breaking. The second officer of the 112 , Schmidt, repeated that he had had an argument with Heine and it had ‘boiled over’. He refused to give any more details. The first officer of the 112 , Gretschel, said he had barely spoken to Heine since arriving at the camp and he knew nothing of a fight, but he would remember him as a good and dedicated comrade. ‘This sentiment was expressed with a great deal of feeling,’ the investigator had noted. Mohr’s statement was cooler. Heine was ‘young’, Heine was ‘highly strung’, Heine was ‘close to cracking’ before he became a prisoner. And Mohr implied that he had nursed him through two fraught war patrols that had shredded the young engineer’s nerves and then the trauma of the sinking. He said he had not been surprised to learn that Heine had picked a fight with another prisoner.

Lindsay flicked through the statements again, then tossed them back on Benson’s desk. ‘With the exception of Gretschel, there isn’t much warmth in these, is there? And I don’t recognise Heine.’ He picked up his cigarettes and leant forward to offer them to Duncan.

‘Do you know a man called Lange? Leutnant zur See Helmut Lange?’

It was stifling in the theatre and the three little maids were wilting in the heat. Mary slipped in and out of the first Act. With a supreme effort she dragged herself back for the second, ramrod straight, eyes fixed on the stage. Tears of make-up were rolling down poor Nanky Poo’s cheeks. The large man in the seat to her left smelt like a wet dog and she could feel the perspiration on her own face and neck. Her dress was clinging uncomfortably to her back and thighs. On her right, James Henderson was drumming his fingers and tapping his feet with something very like girlish glee. He had insisted on taking Mary out for the evening. Rationing was making a good dinner in London almost impossible, he said, and he had proposed

The Mikado

at the Savoy Theatre instead. Anxious to avoid anything but the most casual conversation, she had agreed. It was months since she had spent any time in her brother’s company or wanted to, but tonight he was on his best behaviour. During the interval they spoke of the land girls on their father’s farm and of a nurse James was chasing who had coal-black hair and a winsome smile, of Rommel in the Western Desert and the bloody, inexorable advance eastwards into Russia. He did not mention Lindsay and she was careful not to present him with an opportunity to do so.

At the final curtain they emptied gratefully into the Strand, breathing drunken lungfuls of evening air. James took Mary’s arm and marched her without ceremony across the road towards Covent Garden. Supper at a quiet club, he explained, and a chance to talk properly. Resistance was useless because there was plainly something he was burning to tell her: Mary was sure it was going to be something unpleasant. It came in the end with coffee. The club was almost empty but James bent his head a little closer. A choking cloud of his cigar smoke swirled about the table.

‘You know I saw Fleming yesterday and he mentioned your visit to Hatchett’s. He learnt of it from a letter, I think?’

Mary raised her eyebrows in a show of surprise.

‘Please don’t deny it. You were there with a German prisoner.’

‘I have no intention of denying it,’ she said coolly.

He leant even closer, an angry frown on his face: ‘Don’t you understand the risk you were taking? A woman in your position at the Citadel. Special Branch have spoken to me about you and Lindsay. Special Branch. You should show a little more loyalty, you know.’

‘Loyalty?’

‘To the Division, to Winn, to me. I helped you into that job.’ His voice was full of hushed resentment.

For a moment Mary could think of nothing to say. She stared at him, her mouth open in astonishment. Then with cold fury: ‘You pompous idiot.’

She dumped her napkin on the table and got quickly to her feet.

‘I don’t blame you, I blame your bloody boyfriend,’ James stuttered. ‘I got into a devil of a lot of trouble over that note the prisoner gave me for him. Should have gone to Security. You see, he doesn’t understand…’

His last words were lost in a shower of water. Mary had picked up a glass and emptied its contents over him. She heard with satisfaction his sharp intake of breath and the hiss of his cigar.

‘Leave Douglas alone. Do you hear? Leave us both alone.’

Then she turned her back on him and without glancing at the astonished faces to left and right, she walked swiftly from the club. She did not stop walking until she reached Lord North Street. Fumbling for her keys, she could not help smiling at the recollection of her brother goldfishing, a wet strand of hair across his forehead and a dark green patch on his shirt and uniform shoulders. She would feel guilty and apologise in time, in a few weeks or perhaps months.

But it was with more than a little trepidation that she settled at her desk in Room 41 the following morning. She did not expect it to be the last she would hear of Hatchett’s. Winn was going to have his say too. At the top of her in-tray, as always, were the urgent strips torn from the teleprinter run by the secret ladies, the traffic from Station X with its snapshot of U-boats in the Atlantic, the intelligence picture ever clearer.

And in these flimsy decrypts the fear of a change for the worse with a new coded number each week as yet another U-boat finished its work-up and set out on war patrol for the first time. The talk at the Tracking Room plot table was of a doubling of Dönitz’s fleet within months, a hundred U-boats operational by Christmas.

It was a little after ten when Geoff Childs touched her shoulder lightly.

‘Rodger would like to see you.’

She glanced past him towards Winn’s glass box. He was staring at her intently and she looked away and up into the thin brown face of Childs who frowned by way of a discreet warning.

‘Sit down, Mary.’

Winn was polishing his round spectacles with his handkerchief. He sounded friendly but businesslike, his jaw set, his lips tight with purpose. The nervous strain of the Atlantic battle was always written deeply in his face. His desk was covered in flimsy signal papers and well-ordered files but Mary knew it would be empty by the end of the day whenever that proved to be.

‘I want you to run a special check on the route of a ship outward bound to Freetown and from there to Egypt. They want me to authorise her detachment from the convoy.’