A Very British Ending (Catesby Series) (2 page)

Catesby already knew the answer, but he asked the question anyway. ‘Why are we doing it?’

‘Look around you. Look at that lean clerk scraping the butter off his bun and wrapping a chicken leg in a piece of paper. His poor, freezing family have probably used up their ration coupons. Not good management, but hungry people don’t always make wise choices.’

‘What are we getting back from the Russians?’

‘That’s for Wilson to negotiate. We need 800 tons of grain, cattle fodder and timber.’

Almost on cue, the Minister for Overseas Trade and his boss got up to leave. Wilson nodded a greeting at Bone as he passed by – and gave Catesby an odd look.

‘I think,’ said Bone, ‘your former comrade was surprised to see you supping with the devil.’

‘He has an excellent memory for faces and names.’

‘The rest of his memory is just as formidable. During our most interesting discussion he rattled off figures and facts with uncanny accuracy.’

‘A bit like the classroom swot showing off?’

‘No, Catesby, not at all. He’s passionate and sincere about his job. There is, however, something of the insecure little boy about him. Wilson wants to win approval by doing a good job.’ Bone paused. ‘He needs hardening up. I don’t think he fully realises how malicious and dangerous this world, the world of power, actually is.’

‘Will he be all right in Moscow?’

‘I should think so. I explained to him about Moscow Rules and
how to avoid honey-trap compromises. But I was a bit concerned when I warned him about the dangers of marathon vodka sessions; he said that as a Yorkshire man he could drink any Russian under the table.’

‘Bravado.’

‘I hope so. He won’t have any problems because the Sovs are desperate to get those jet engines.’ Bone paused. ‘But there is a problem, a big problem. The Americans are not going to like this. They’re going to be furious.’

‘Why don’t the Americans buy the engines instead?’

‘Because they think we should give them the technology for free. The Yanks say it’s part of a wartime agreement to share expertise and intelligence. They’re impossible. I think Wilson is going to find the Americans far more difficult than the Russians. We talked at some length about this.’

‘Did you convince him?’

‘To some extent. He confided that Stafford Cripps had warned him that negotiating the jet engines deal could turn out to be “a poison chalice”. Ironically, Wilson had nothing to do at all with the original decision to sell those engines to Moscow. It was made before he was appointed. But the deal will always have his name on it. That is how ministerial responsibility devolves.’

‘Not very fair.’

‘Nothing is fair in our game. Mark my words, the Americans will never forgive Harold Wilson for selling those jet engines to Moscow. It will come back to haunt him over and over again.’

Bremen:
May, 1951

Catesby had chosen the ruins of the U-boot bunker as the best place to carry out the execution – remote and off-limits. It was the first time that Catesby had killed a man face to face. Killing in the war had been different, impersonal. Afterwards, Catesby was surprised – and shocked – by how little he had felt.

Catesby didn’t regard what he had done as murder. It wasn’t revenge either. He didn’t know a single person who had been killed in the massacre. But the images were still haunting him seven years later. Catesby thought that by killing a war criminal, one who had operated in the region, he could get rid of the ghost that haunted him. It was a form of exorcism. Catesby wanted to remove the phantom of Oradour-sur-Glane so he could sleep at night and stop the recurring images. He didn’t know that you can’t kill a ghost – you had to find a way of living with it.

Catesby had been parachuted into France in 1943 along with a radio operator and a courier who doubled as an explosives expert. Their principle job was to send intelligence back to London about the enemy. The resistance group they worked with, the Maquis du Limousin, was the largest in France and numbered more than 10,000. The resistance fighters were busiest in the days following the D-Day landings as German units streamed north to join the fight in Normandy. The Maquisards sabotaged rail lines, blew up bridges and attacked troop movements. The Germans responded with reprisals against the civilian population. Owing to a stroke of luck, Catesby’s resistance group captured a high-ranking German officer, SS -Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe. What to do with the captured SS officer became a problem and a matter of contention. One of the resistance leaders wanted to execute him; others wanted to use him to negotiate a prisoner exchange.

Catesby never found out exactly what happened, but never forgave himself either. He wished that he had stood up to the Maquis leader who wanted to execute Kämpfe. Catesby couldn’t see the point of risking reprisals for the satisfaction of killing an SS officer. But what happened? No one seemed to know – or
wanted to admit knowing. Was Oradour-sur-Glane a reprisal for the killing of Helmut Kämpfe? Or was the execution of Kämpfe a reprisal for Oradour-sur-Glane?

Catesby had been warned not to go to Oradour because the Germans were still in the area. But he needed to verify whether or not the rumours were true. It was a long cycle ride through the dark forests of Limousin warmed and scented by the summer sun. His fake identity papers were in order and his French was so fluent that he was sure he could talk his way out of confrontation with the
Milice
, the French paramilitary police who collaborated with the Gestapo. In any case, the
Miliciens
were pretty thin on the ground in a sparsely populated countryside dominated by increasingly well-armed resistance fighters. Just north of Limoges, Catesby rendezvoused with a Maquisard who accompanied him the rest of the way to Oradour. When Catesby asked him what had happened, the resistance fighter simply shook his head and remained silent. The news was unspeakable.

It was the day after the massacre and the ruins of the village were still smouldering. The first thing that Catesby noticed was the overpowering stench of burned flesh. It was inescapable – and most of it seemed to be coming from the church. The second thing that he noticed was the large number of lost-looking dogs. The animals were prowling around sniffing with their tails down – probably, thought Catesby, looking for their owners. Other dogs were howling and whining in a chorus of despair. The sound made his flesh crawl.

The people, on the other hand, were silent. There were fifty or so wraith-like figures poking through the ruins looking for loved ones. When people did speak it was in hushed whispers. Everyone seemed numb. Catesby heard one person whisper that the Germans had left only a few hours before and weren’t far away. Another said they were on their way back. But no one seemed afraid – and neither was Catesby. The enormity in front of them blanked out all other emotions. If a tank appeared in the village square and started firing, no one would have dived for cover.

Catesby was drawn to the church whose ancient stone walls
had survived the flames within. He couldn’t resist its dark pull. He didn’t want to look inside, but he had to. The whispers he had heard were still echoing in his head:
all the women, all the children; burned alive.
He was later told that the church contained the bodies of 247 women and 205 children, but on the day he was unable to count – or even to recognise the charred corpses as women or girls or boys. In many cases, the only remains were blackened carcasses with thigh and upper-arm bones sticking out. The only thing that differentiated the bodies was their size. The smallest blackened bundles were obviously infants. There were other charred body parts that could have belonged to children or adults. It was a confusion of dead burned flesh that defied description. The smell in the church must have been terrible, although Catesby couldn’t remember it. It was as if some of his senses had been abruptly shut down. But the visual image stuck in his brain forever.

Catesby had wanted to explore further into the church, only it was impossible to move forward without stepping on the bodies. The floor of the church was a singed carpet of women and children. He couldn’t member how long he stared at the horror. But it wasn’t a horror then; it was just dead bodies. The images on his brain were like a film that hadn’t yet been fully developed. Eventually, he felt someone touching his elbow. It was the Maquisard he had cycled with. He gestured for Catesby to follow him.

There were more bodies to see: a bedridden elderly man burned alive in his bed and a baby baked alive in a bread oven in the village
boulangerie
. But most of the bodies, nearly 200 in number, were those of men who had been machine-gunned or shot in various barns and outbuildings – and then covered with straw, wood and petrol and set on fire while they were dead or dying. Once again, there were few bodies that were identifiable – just trunks of carcasses with bones sticking out, a grotesque reminder of Sunday roasts. Catesby felt more and more numb. It was too much to take in.

At the time, it was impossible to find out exactly what had happened. Some said there were only two survivors; others said there were twenty. It seemed certain that a few boys had escaped
by running into the woods – and a woman had jumped from a church window and hidden in a patch of garden peas. But she was badly injured and had been taken to a hospital in Limoges. Confusion in the wake of chaos.

Catesby knew it was important to identify the troops who had carried out the atrocity. A boy of about eight, probably one of those who ran away, said the soldiers were dressed in greenish-brown camouflage smocks. Another survivor turned up – a male of about nineteen. He said that he and five others had fled a burning barn after hiding under dead bodies, but one of his companions had been shot and killed. There were rumours that many of the soldiers spoke good French, but with strong Alsatian accents. It turned out to be true. The revelation that former French citizens, from German annexed Alsace-Lorraine, had taken part in the massacre rocked France for years afterwards. There was always a twist.

The people were more talkative now and Catesby took notes with a shaking hand. The entire population had been ordered into the marketplace to have their identity papers checked. But once they were there, the Germans didn’t bother to check their papers at all. Following a brief conversation – oddly polite – between the commanding officer and the mayor, the men of the village were led into outlying barns to be questioned. The women and children were ordered into the church and the doors locked behind them. The executions soon followed. The village was then looted – someone showed Catesby a few dozen empty champagne bottles – and set on fire.

Catesby later found out that the atrocity had been carried out by a battalion of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, also known as
Das Reich
, under the command of Otto Diekmann. The battalion had been involved in other war crimes – in Russia as well as France. Diekmann was killed in Normandy two weeks later.

The ruins of the U-boot bunker weren’t the ideal place for a clandestine rendezvous. The bunker was dark, massive and echoed every footstep. And Catesby didn’t like being dressed as a Roman Catholic priest either. It brought back too many childhood
memories. His Belgian mother had brought him and his sister up as Catholics in an East Anglia where Catholics were an oddity and minority. Children don’t like feeling different. It wasn’t so bad speaking Flemish and French in the home, because that was hidden and private – and when school friends came around they always reverted to English. But being marched down Lowestoft High Street to Our Lady Star of the Sea on Sundays and holy days of obligation was public and humiliating. By the age of fourteen Catesby was a sceptic; by the age of sixteen, he was a militant atheist. As he used to explain to his smart new friends at Cambridge: ‘I lost my faith as soon as I found my brain.’ During visits home he used to humour his mother by going to Mass, but it soon became apparent that she didn’t care what he did – and he stopped going all together. He began to realise that his mother didn’t do things out of faith, but out of habit. But perhaps habits, however empty, give people a moral centre. Maybe, thought Catesby, if I hadn’t lost the habit of Mass and confession I wouldn’t be waiting in the ruins of a submarine pen with a greasy pistol in my pocket. But the priest disguise was, for a lad who had grown up among East Anglian fishermen, amusing and ironic. The wooden club that Lowestoft fishermen used to knock out cod thrashing about on the deck was called ‘a priest’.

The U-boot bunker was a dark and spooky place. A few weeks before the end of the war two eleven-ton Grand Slam bombs had finally managed to penetrate the fifteen-foot-thick roof rendering the submarine pen useless. Steel reinforcing rods now hung down from the blasted concrete roof like the venomous snakes dangling from Medusa’s head. Catesby didn’t like being alone there in the middle of the night. It was a place of monsters where hidden eyes seemed to be tracing his every movement. Catesby touched the Webley MK IV revolver, a dead dank weight that stretched his trench-coat pocket. He liked the Webley. It was big and awkward – two and a half pounds and ten inches long – but simple and reliable, like a friendly black Labrador. The Webley could vanquish a gunman who was a poor shot or an assassin coming at him with a garrotte or a knife. But it couldn’t silence the ghosts.

How many ghosts were squeaking and gibbering against
those massive concrete walls? Catesby didn’t know. No one ever would. The deaths of the Polish and Russian slave labourers who built the U-boot bunker were too numerous and insignificant for the construction company to keep a record. Not long after the war Catesby had been assigned to the intelligence branch of the Control Commission for Germany. His real job was spying, but his cover job had been compiling a report on the activities of Organisation Todt, the construction company that had used
Zwangsarbeiter
– forced labour – in Bremen. One of his sources of information had been a mild-mannered bespectacled man who had been an accountant for Todt during the construction of the Weser submarine pens. The accountant was very apologetic about his role – and desperate to avoid a trip to Nuremberg – but he was safe. There were far bigger fish to hang. The accountant estimated that the project had used 10,000 slave labourers, of whom 1,700 were registered as dead, however he admitted – sighing and wringing his hands – that the actual number of deaths may have been 6,000 owing largely to
Unterernährungoder physischer Erschöpfung
– malnutrition and physical exhaustion.