Andrew Williams - The Interrogator

‘Let me,’ and he took it and pressed the wax home. Then he lifted her hand and turned it over and was on the point of kissing her wrist when she pulled it away: ‘Not here.’

‘Sorry.’

They stood in silence for a minute, mesmerised by the flickering light, then, with his eyes still fixed on the candles, Lindsay said: ‘Why do you need to talk to Winn again this evening?’

She did not reply but concentrated on the small yellow flame of her candle.

‘If it’s about our codes, I think you should tell me.’ His voice was calm but insistent, even steely.

‘Not now,’ she whispered sharply, ‘this is neither the time nor the place.’

‘Is there a time and a place?’

‘No. I don’t know.’ Why was he pressing her? Hadn’t she risked enough already? ‘For goodness sake, Douglas, we’re in a church. I didn’t come in here to be interrogated.’ She turned quickly from him and began striding back along the aisle, careless of the noise she was making, the rough echo of her footsteps resonating through the cathedral. A young priest in a cassock stopped to watch her pass, his hands on his hips in a show of disapproval.

Lindsay caught up with her in the piazza. ‘Look, sorry, but you know what this means… how much I’ve risked already.’

‘Just find me a cab, would you?’

He stopped suddenly to look at her, hoping she would turn back, but she walked briskly on and this time he did not follow her. A taxicab was crawling down Victoria Street and she hailed it from the kerb. At once she regretted her haste and turned to look for him. He was gone.

‘Where to, dear?’

‘Oh no,’ and she pressed her hands to her temples and cursed herself for handling him so badly.

‘The Admiralty.’

It was too late and she was left with the frustration and the bitter disappointment and the doubt. When would they talk again or touch?

Winn was standing at his office door. As soon as he saw Mary he called to her: ‘Come in, I’ve got something to show you’, and for once his cool barrister voice betrayed his excitement.

‘You’ve seen Geoff Childs then?’ she asked flatly.

‘Childs? No,’ and he waved a dismissive hand, showering ash from the cigarette he was holding on to the desk of his secretary.

‘So no one’s told you? We’ve found something important.’

‘All right, you tell me,’ and he stood aside to let her into his office.

Lieutenant Childs slipped back into the Tracking Room as she was beginning her brief. He had enjoyed what only he could describe as a ‘satisfactory’ canteen supper. Unlocking his desk drawer, he took out the decrypts and presented them to Winn with the hushed reverence of a wise man before the manger. Winn dragged his anglepoise over and switched it on with a purposeful click, then began reading and shuffling the little pieces of paper in its light.

‘B-Reports,’ he muttered after a minute and glanced up at Mary, then across at Childs.

‘There isn’t much doubt, is there?’

He looked at the flimsies again then with an exasperated grunt tossed one back towards them: ‘My favourite: “Admiralty issued warning of a U-boat”. That’s us, here, the Tracking Room. What a mess.’

Reaching for his cigarettes, he lit one, then said:

‘And I have news too. I’ve been at Bletchley and the Naval Section there has done some analysis of the Bismarck operation. There are some indications that the enemy was able to follow the British hunt for the battleship.’

Winn picked up a file from his desk and removed a report stamped ‘Most Secret’: ‘There’s a long list of German signals here that seem to draw on our own. Here, for instance, sent on the twenty-fifth of May:

ENEMY AIRCRAFT OF SQUADRON ZB6 REPORTED TO PLYMOUTH AT 1405: AM IN CONTACT WITH ENEMY BATTLESHIP.

‘I’m going to ring the Director tonight. He knows about Bletchley’s work but he’ll want to know about yours too. The maddening thing is our Code Security people at Section 10 were given some of this stuff a fortnight ago. Sheer bloody incompetence.’

Winn sighed and eased himself back in his chair: ‘It isn’t clear how far this goes. The enemy will be working on all our codes and ciphers, the question is, which ones has he broken — one, perhaps two or more? And how can we be sure?’

Mary looked at her hands, neatly folded in her lap, and the angry mark on her wrist, still smarting from the candle burn. And she wondered for a fanciful moment if it was a sort of punishment, a stinging reminder: Lindsay, the codes, the Imperial Star and all those ships setting out in ignorance across the Atlantic.

‘Marvellous. They’re reading ours and we’re reading theirs,’ said Childs with a small dispassionate smile.

Winn gave him a disapproving look: ‘We don’t know how many of our signals they’re reading yet but one is too many. One signal sank the Imperial Star .’

Childs wriggled uncomfortably.

‘All right, I’ve a call to make to the Director,’ and Winn picked up the green phone on his desk. ‘Go to bed. And thank you.’

They both got up and Childs moved towards the door but Mary hovered at the edge of his desk: ‘There’s Jürgen Mohr, of course.’

Winn did not bat an eyelid but kept dialling. Only when he had finished did he look up at her, his face impassive, the receiver to his ear: ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’

It was nearly midnight when Mary left the Citadel. As the Admiralty’s doors swung open into Spring Gardens she touched the tightly folded square of paper in her pocket. Fine summer rain was beading her brown wool jacket. Her wrist was throbbing lightly. A strange comfort. She set off across the Mall and did not stop walking until her finger was on the bell of Lindsay’s apartment. She felt purposeful but calm, as she had done when they had met in Trafalgar Square all those weeks before. Why? Was it her need or his? Did she need him more or less than he needed her? Did it matter? She could hear him thumping wearily down the carpeted staircase to the door. What was he thinking? Then it opened and without speaking he reached out to brush her cheek with his fingers.

Later she lay small and naked beside him in bed, the sweet smell of his sex on her body, the sheets and blankets hanging in shameless folds on the floor. And she tried to concentrate and hold those moments when past pain and fear and the future were lost in the strange stillness she felt in his arms. And she reached over to touch his hard shoulder and run her fingers lightly across his chest to his stomach. Then she rolled quickly on to her side and stretched down to the floor and felt in the darkness for where her jacket must have fallen. And when at last she found it she lifted it, crumpled, by the sleeve and reached into the pocket with two fingers.

‘Here.’

‘What is it?’

‘What you want.’

He unfolded it carefully, then leant across to switch on the bedside light: Admiralty issued warning of a U-boat…

The bell rang in the grey half-world that was always his just before dawn, at the edge of consciousness when memories and images form and shift and dissipate like clouds at a front. An uncomfortable but familiar place, a rattling place, a place Jürgen Mohr could smell and taste in his sleep, and the faces always the same. Sometimes they were smiling, more often wide-eyed with fear and screaming, and then that tight grey world shuddered until it was lost in an impenetrable blackness. But at such times he was calm, he was careless, he knew that darkness so well, knew its deep, deep emptiness. Perhaps one day he would be caught and it would hold him for ever. Twice now he had been drawn from it by a small red light. Groping towards it, clutching at nothing, he had found himself between the smoking engines of his boat. And Heine’s slight frame was bent over the starboard diesel with an oil can. He had reached out to touch his shoulder. The engineer had turned with a smile of recognition and pleasure. But his face was the beaten face of Lindsay’s photograph, one eye closed, his cheeks purple and the weal about his neck scarlet and black. And then the roll-call bell had rung in the hall below, as it was ringing now, and there was the comfort of boots on the boards outside the room and the sharp knock of his batman at the door.