Andrew Williams: The Interrogator

Rodger Winn pushed his chair back and reached for a cigarette. Mary was standing beside his desk with the U-500 interrogation file in her hands. ‘Lindsay was the first officer,’ said Winn, ‘and well, he…’

Winn leant forward and lifted a flimsy from the mountain of paper in front of him.

‘Have you seen this?’ he said, with the air of someone with more pressing matters to consider.

‘What were you going to say about Lieutenant Lindsay?’

Winn blinked curiously at Mary, then looked away, but not before she had caught the suggestion of a sly smile.

‘Did you notice his ribbon — the Distinguished Service Cross? Fleming says he picked it up on the night the ship was lost.’

Mary had not noticed.

Winn took off his thick black-rimmed spectacles and placed them carefully on the desk. Head bent, he rubbed his eyes wearily with his thumb and forefinger. ‘Fleming has a high opinion of Lindsay,’ he said from behind his hand, ‘a natural interrogator, but he says the loss of the ship has hit him hard. You can see it in his face, can’t you? He’s a little over-zealous too. This business of our codes — the Director and Fleming agree with me — he needs to be careful not to overstep the mark.’

‘I told him you’d think it was important and would want someone to look into it,’ said Mary.

‘Did you?’ Winn looked up at her, his brow knotted in a deep frown. ‘You’re ready to make that judgement? Yes, it needs to be investigated but not by Lieutenant Lindsay. Interrogators are under strict orders not to question prisoners about their codes in case they give away too much of what we know already. The head of Section 11, Colonel Checkland, will be asked to send all that he has on this to Code Security here at the Admiralty. Of course, it’s a possibility. They’re hammering away at our codes but…’ Winn held Mary’s gaze for a moment, then said with careful emphasis, ‘but we’ll know if one of them has been broken soon enough, won’t we, and from a rather more reliable source than Lindsay’s prisoner?’

Mary nodded. Special intelligence. It was the secret key to their work in the Citadel, or promised to be. Only a small circle in Naval Intelligence — ‘the indoctrinated’ — knew of the source. Lindsay was outside the circle.

‘Is there anything else?’ Winn glanced down to the papers on his desk as if to indicate that he hoped there was not.

‘Just that I’ve asked Lieutenant Lindsay to tell me a little more about the U-boat prisoners — morale, education, beliefs, that sort of thing. Is that all right?’

‘Fleming tells me there’s no better person.’ There was a cautious note in his voice that surprised Mary.

‘That’s his job isn’t it?’

Winn lifted his glasses very deliberately from the desk and slipped them back on. He stared at her intently, then he said: ‘Yes, it is his job. But be very careful what you say to him about ours. You see, he’s half German.’

The clock at the far end of Room 41 had stopped — one of the plotters was trying to coax it back to life — but Mary knew that it was at least ten. The cigarette smoke of the day hung eerily thick beneath the droplamps, softening the hard edges of the room. The plotters floated through it as if in a dream, distant and opaque. Mary’s eyes were stinging with fatigue. She reached beneath the papers on her desk for her watch. Yes, it was a quarter past ten. There was just one thing more she wanted to do.

The duty officer, Lieutenant Geoff Childs, a dry but cheery soul, a peacetime geographer, was standing at the plot table: ‘On your way?’

‘Almost. Just a little housekeeping.’

She picked up her bag and walked down the room to one of the large grey filing cabinets that stood against the wall just beyond the plot.

Pulling open the top drawer, she began to flick through the tightly packed files of anti-submarine warfare bulletins. It was in the October report — homebound fast convoy attacked first on 15 September 1940 — thirty-six ships in nine columns with four Royal Navy escorts — a depressingly thick bundle listing the hulls and the cargoes lost; oil, grain, lead and lumber. A very brief paper had been attached to the main narrative:

Subject: Loss of HMS Culloden :

At about 2210/16 a torpedo struck the ship on the starboard side, probably in No. 1 Boiler Room. At once the ship began to list and then broke in two. This took place within a minute of the explosion. The wreck of the stern wallowed on an even keel until 1145/16, when the order was given to abandon ship. HMS Rosemary was on hand to rescue twelve of the crew.

It was signed by the ‘senior surviving officer’: Lieutenant Douglas Lindsay. Mary checked all the September and October reports but there was nothing more on the loss of the ship. It was puzzling. Everything was written up and circulated in the Navy, a small forest consumed every day. But two hundred men and a ship had been sunk and there were just five lines in the file. Why? She closed the drawer of the cabinet with a resounding thump.

Mary stepped out into a world of unexpected noise and light. A heavy rescue squad in blue boiler suits was marshalling at the entrance to the Admiralty and she could hear the clatter and whine of a fire engine in the Mall. The all-clear had just sounded and people were beginning to trickle from the surface shelters in Trafalgar Square. The sky flickered an angry orange and searchlights were hunting madly overhead, careering back and forth through the darkness. Above them, a cold white moon — a bomber’s moon. A whirlwind of fire had rumbled and burst in the city, sweeping away warehouses, churches, homes, gouging great holes in streets and parks. And yet cocooned in her concrete world twenty feet below the ground, Mary had heard nothing, sensed nothing.

‘It’s the worst this year. They’ve got the Café de Paris.’

A naval officer she did not recognise was standing at her side. The Café de Paris: her brother had taken her to hear the West Indian Orchestra only two weeks before. It was expensive, smart and gay, one of the hottest nightspots in town and one of the safest. A waiter had told them the Café was untouchable.

‘That’s where this lot are going,’ said the naval officer, nodding to the rescue squad; ‘it’s a mess.’

The windows were out and smoke and brick dust seemed to hang over Coventry Street like a fog. Was it curiosity, or a need to do ‘something’, or both? Mary was not sure why she chose to follow the rescue workers. The anti-aircraft guns were still thumping in Hyde Park and yet the street was full of people like her, the anxious and the nosy, fat men smoking cigars, women in evening dresses who looked for all the world as if they were queuing for a West End show. She walked slowly on, slipping through the dust fog like a shadow, her shoes crunching across a carpet of glass.

The ambulances were full and the stretcher parties had begun to lay the wounded and dying on the pavement in front of the Rialto Cinema. A foot, stocking torn and shoeless, poked rudely out from beneath a rough pile of the Café’s tablecloths. A young woman was sobbing uncontrollably beside it, her face flecked with tiny splinters of glass. The Café was beneath the cinema, its entrance at the bottom of a long flight of steps, choked with rubble. A Dutch army officer was staggering up them with an elegantly dressed, grey-haired lady in his arms. She cried out in pain as he stumbled and Mary could see that her leg had been roughly set with a long-handled spoon from the Café’s kitchens. Then they brought up an RAF officer on a stretcher, face ashen, thick trauma pad pressed to a hole in his head, and more stretchers and more walking wounded. Lonely figures wandered in the smoke haze, numb and uncertain. Mary recognised a clerical assistant from the Citadel, her pretty face streaked with tears, and she stepped out of the crowd to put a comforting arm around her.