Nicholas Searle - The Good Liar

me. I’ve grown very attached to you. Would you like me to speak of

love?’

She smiles. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. It just occurred to me. I wouldn’t like to force you to come up with something against your

conscience. And it is after all the English way, isn’t it? Not to speak of such things. We talk of fondness and attachment, because it’s

safe.’

‘Well, I suppose so. But if you’d like me to tell you I love you,

Betty, I’d most certainly do so.’

‘I’m sure you would, Roy. Thank you, but no. It really wasn’t

what I meant.’

He is relieved. The fact of the offer to share a life beyond com-

panionship, however bogus, may just have sealed the deal. Even

better that she declined. He would now not have to contemplate all

that, at least not for the moment.

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The Centre of Things

1

Berlin. Everything revolved around this city. Their six months in

Vienna had been fun, if that was the right word, but no one there

really wanted a full- scale search for the petty functionaries of the Nazi camps any more. The momentum was for speedy reconciliation and reconstruction, or as speedy as anything could be when

dealing with the Russians. The Western powers were now reason-

ably confident the Russians would pull back eastwards, keeping

Prague and Budapest in their ambit. Awkward characters like Roy

Courtnay and his interpreter, Hans Taub, their tenacity stoking dis-pute, were no longer required.

They had been assigned to Hannover, in the British occupied

zone of Germany, a relative backwater. They operated from a small

office opposite the main railway station. Hannover, like much of

the rest of the country, had been brought to rubble and to its knees.

Provincial and quiet, however, and they were allowed to go about

their business with little interference from above, levering assistance from other military units by sheer force of character. Captain

Courtnay was persuasive and the British soldier of almost every

rank was generally up for sport now the war was over and the

clear- up had begun, especially if it involved hunting down the bad guys.

Courtnay’s superiors had little interest in his activities. They had bigger fish to fry and post- war military careers to cultivate. He reported nominally to a major but kept himself away from HQ as

far as possible. He had a staff of five: his secretary, three NCO clerks and his German interpreter, Taub. Hans Taub and he were jokingly

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known as the Gruesome Twosome, after the cartoon film that had

come out the previous year. They’d hit it off the moment Taub had

been sent from London.

They were physically alike: tall, blond and imposing. Taub pos-

sessed certainty. He had not had the benefits of a rural upbringing and the conditioning of a minor public school education, designed

to insinuate an inchoate feeling of inferiority. He was not an Eng-

lishman by birth, swimming in compromise, awkwardness and

embarrassment. Perhaps not all Englishmen were like Roy – or

indeed all Germans like Taub – but Roy found Hans’s lack of diffi-

dence liberating. Taub, the son of a liberal journalist who had fled Germany and later committed suicide and a mother who had been

executed in 1939, was brimful of certainty when he might have been

burdened by grief and doubt.

Roy discovered in himself something hidden yet always present, a

confidence that at times surged in his physicality, his enthusiasms and his judgements. He could now begin to give it expression. Hans’s

simple attitudes made his petty repressions seem self- indulgently

and unnecessarily complex.

Generally the two of them would go out to do the interviews. If

arrests were in the offing, a call to the military police would serve up a team of beefy, maleficent- looking men to help with the dirty work.

He was doing scarcely more than going through the motions.

The work didn’t challenge him; nor did it result in a particularly

greater good that he could discern. Most of it could be done within the zone. The majority of the camp underlings had not travelled

far. They could be picked up, like rabbits stationary in the head-

lights, in the towns and villages around Celle. Their compatriots

were generally more than happy to give them up. The people who

really mattered had either already been detained or were long gone.

De- Nazification had become mere process, and a process in which

few believed. It was a means of returning to normal, whatever that

meant after these years. It amounted to something of a production

line: identify, locate, arrest, process, charge, prosecute, de- Nazify, jail or release.

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Occasionally they had to venture into the American or French

zones to undertake inquiries, but not beyond the dividing line of

the Harz Mountains to the Russian zone. Dealing with the Red

Army was simply too much trouble for the return. By design or

accident, they were shambolic and uncooperative.

Roy and Hans worked hard and played hard, immersing them-

selves at night in the hedonistic, morally questionable life of a city in chaos, escaping the sorrows and the grief. Not that there was

much of 1946 Hannover to paint red.

But Berlin. This was a first. Their search for Klaus Müller, a for-

mer administrator at Bergen- Belsen, had brought them here.

Müller, a Berliner, had moved to Celle when he married in ’37 and

now evidently thought his home city was a safer place to lie low.

Rather than passing the inquiry to the British authorities in Berlin, Roy had persuaded his bored boss to authorize him and Taub to

travel there. Roy hoped it might be a chance to find a route back to a function that he could plausibly describe to himself as important.

He was interested not in advancement, but in doing some measure

of good. Soon enough he would find himself back in Oxford, no

doubt to pick up his ecclesiastical studies again before taking a curacy in Dorset, close to the family home. Or would he? This war had

changed him, like so many millions of others.

He could not say it had brutalized him. His faith remained intact.

His instincts remained passive and pacifist, though he had been

required consistently to display the opposite behaviours. Moving

through Holland in 1944, he had led from the front, placing himself in the same danger as his men, and they had respected him for it. He had always insisted on compassion for the German soldiers they

winkled out in pockets of resistance from ruined buildings, even

when minutes earlier they had been killing and wounding his own

men. But what the war had taught him was the capacity for brutal

malice of one human being towards another, and this was some-

thing almost regardless of uniform, rank or social class.

He felt this when he typed his short poems, which with every

attempt took on a more worldly, cynical edge. His NCOs ribbed

him as he hammered at the keys at every lunch break. ‘ War and

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Peace ,’ they joked. But he loved the little portable that he carried with him. It conferred an odd sense of security and certainty that

his spidery scrawl could not, even in the letters home that he could not bear to write by hand, something else that amused his staff