Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

Back in 1941, the war had seemed as good as lost, the papers filled with defeats, yet Hawkins was winning small victories every few days across the interrogation table. The first story Rotheram heard about him was how he once questioned a suspected spy for thirteen hours straight, cracking him in the end only when he told the man he was free to go — told him in German, that is — and saw the fellow’s shoulders sag in relief. Hawkins made winning the war seem a matter of wit and will, and Rotheram had been thrilled when the CO personally selected him from the translation pool to sit in on interrogations. Hawkins spoke excellent German himself, of course — he made Rotheram self-conscious of his own accented English — but he didn’t always want to let on to the prisoners. “Helps sometimes to let them think they know more than me.” It was a tactic he’d learned from his days as a journalist between the wars. Springing his German on them when they weren’t expecting it was one of his simpler tricks.

Over the months they came up with other stunts. A couple of times, Hawkins had Rotheram translate so sloppily that the infuriated prisoners lost patience and broke into English themselves. Later, he began leaving Rotheram alone with a prisoner, stepping out to the WC while Rotheram offered the man a cigarette, warned him what Hawkins was capable of, advised him to talk: “It’s nothing to be ashamed of; anyone would.” He posed as a British student of German literature, professed an affinity for things German. “You’ve a talent for sympathy,” Hawkins told him.

In truth Rotheram despised the prisoners, loved to see Hawkins break them. Once, they’d reversed the roles — boredom, as much as anything, dictating their tactics — and Hawkins had played the sympathetic one, hamming it up so much Rotheram thought he was being mocked. He listened from behind the door as Hawkins offered the prisoner a smoke, warned him that Rotheram was a German Jew, implacable in his desire for revenge. The man had talked even before Rotheram returned to the room. He’d felt a stark thrill, but afterwards, in Hawkins’s office, he told him, again, that he wasn’t a Jew, and Hawkins eyed him carefully and said, “I know, old boy, I know. It was just a ruse. No offense intended.”

“None taken,” Rotheram told him. “Why do you think he believed it though?”

And Hawkins said, “The reason most men believe anything. He was scared it was true.”

Rotheram had laughed. He couldn’t say if loyalty to one man could grow into patriotism, but the harder he worked for Hawkins, the more suspects he questioned, the more British he felt.

Still, by the late summer of 1944, there were fewer and fewer prisoners at the London Cage, and Rotheram was missing the interrogations, missing the war, really. He’d been agitating for a transfer for a month. Quayle and his gang had moved across the Channel in late July; most of the questioning was being done in Cherbourg or by roving teams at the front. According to Hawkins, it was a miserable detail, France or no. So many men surrendering, hundreds a day — it was nothing but paperwork. “Besides, I need you here, dear boy, to help put the jigsaw together.” They were beginning to identify defendants and witnesses for the prospective war crimes trials. The pieces of the puzzle. Rotheram had nodded and gone back to the dry work of processing the boxloads of interrogation reports coming in from Normandy.

There wasn’t even much doing at Dover by then. In June and July, in the wake of D-day, he’d been used to heading down there two or three times a week, to the old racetrack where the POWs were processed, for a “chat,” as they called it, with the more interesting and recalcitrant cases. Once or twice he persuaded the local MPs to give him a captured uniform and put him in with the unprocessed men to eavesdrop. He’d been shocked by the thrill of it — playing with fire, he’d thought — delighted in calling himself “Steiner.” He’d gotten results, too, bagged a handful of officers posing as noncoms. By mid-August, the Allies closing in on Paris, he’d begged permission to make another visit to Dover, and tried the stunt again, but he must have seemed overeager. He’d been rumbled, had a rib broken before the guards could get to him.

Hawkins was furious when he heard about it. “Why would you take such an idiotic risk? Seriously, what do you think you were playing at?”

Rotheram shrugged. “I was going round the bend, sir. And now with Paris liberated…” The news had broken two days earlier. “Sometimes it feels like I’m the bloody prisoner here.”

Hawkins smiled thinly.

“Then you should be able to fake it better. How did they spot you, by the way?”

“Lice,” Rotheram said, making a face. “I didn’t have any. They saw I wasn’t scratching.”

The other shook his head.

“And how’s the rib?”

“Sore, but I can work.”

“All right. You want some excitement, then?”

“Sir?”

Hawkins began writing out a chit on his blotter, and Rotheram felt a surge of excitement. Paris!

“I’m giving you a staff car, sending you on a little trip. You’re off to Wales, my boy.”

“Wales?” It sounded like a joke. “With respect, sir, I want to go east, not west.”

“Think of it as a little holiday,” the CO said drolly. “You’re going to see Hess.”

Rotheram paused, watching Hawkins’s pen twitch across the page.

“Rudolf Hess?”

“No, Rudolph ruddy Reindeer. Who do you think?”

Rotheram had seen Hess once before, in Germany, in ’35. The only one of the party leaders he’d ever glimpsed in person. It was at a football match. Hertha Berlin and Bayer Leverkusen. Hess had arrived with his entourage a little after kickoff. There’d been a popping of flashbulbs, a stirring in the crowd, and then the referee had blown the whistle and stopped the game for the players to give the Heil Hitler. Hess had returned the salute smartly and gone back to signing autographs. He’d been deputy führer then, a post he’d held until 1941 when he’d flown to Britain. It had been a sensation at the time — was he a traitor? was he on a secret mission? — but now Hess was almost an afterthought.

“Even if he has any secrets left they’d be old hat,” Rotheram observed.

“He still has at least one, apparently,” the CO said, placing the travel orders on top of a thick file. “We don’t know if he’s sane or not. He’s tried to kill himself a couple of times, and he’s been claiming selective amnesia for years. Says he has no recollection of anything important. Not of his mission, not of the war. It’s all a fog, supposedly.”

“He’s acting?”

“If so, he’s doing a splendid job. He’s been maintaining the same story pretty much since landing in Scotland.”

Rotheram looked at the file on the desk between them, the dog-eared pages bound together with ribbon.

“What makes you think I’ll be able to crack him?”

“Not sure you will, my boy. Plenty of others have had a go. Medics, intel bods. The Americans.”

“But you don’t trust them.”

The CO sighed. “Hess is the biggest name we have so far, and if there’s a trial when this is all over, he’s likely to be a star in it. Only not if he’s gaga. Not if he’s unbalanced, you follow? It’ll make a mockery. Problem is, if we don’t put him up, it’ll smell fishy to the Soviets. They’re convinced he came here to conclude a peace between us and the Nazis to leave them free to concentrate in the East.” Hawkins shook his head. “The one thing for sure is if he does end up in the dock, we’ll be the buggers building the case. I just want someone I know to have a look-see.”

“This isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I asked for a transfer.”