Midnight in Berlin (45 page)

Lord Halifax sat quite still, arms crossed, his beak-like face showing no signs of interest. Rimless reading glasses hung from a loop around his neck. From the corner of the room came slight tapping sounds as the stenographer's fingers flew over her keyboard. The prime minister merely looked down at the document before him and said nothing.

He raised his head as Menzies finished and looked at Halifax.

“Well, Arthur?” he said.

Lord Halifax uncrossed his arms and picked up the paper. He adjusted his spectacles and looked at it for several moments. He too was a countryman at heart, finding the greatest pleasure in walking the moors of his native Yorkshire at weekends. As a fellow Old Etonian and member of White's, he had supported Menzies's appointment as C.

“If I understand you correctly, Sir Stewart, you're telling us this in order to justify the assassination of Hitler,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“And Colonel Macrae here is the man who will carry out the killing.”

The word “killing” seemed to galvanise the prime minister, who looked at his intelligence chief.

“Are you serious, C?”

“Deadly serious, Prime Minister.”

“What would the world say if it were revealed that we had actively carried out the assassination of a legally elected European head of state?”

“By the time the world finds out, if they ever do, Germany will be in the hands of the generals, the Nazis will have been driven from power and the world will be a safer and better place,” said Menzies.

“Well, I have heard of many strange things in this room, but I think this paper takes the biscuit. Arthur, what do you think?”

The reply was well prepared and calculated to end the meeting. The prime minister and his foreign secretary had planned this response, Macrae realised.

“We have not yet reached a point in our diplomacy where we can substitute assassination for negotiation,” said Lord Halifax.

“I agree absolutely. We can't go round killing foreign leaders because they behave badly, besides …”

Here the prime minister got to his feet, drew a pen from his inside pocket and wrote something in the margin of the briefing paper. He handed it across the table to Menzies.

“I thank you both for coming and I apologise, Colonel Macrae, that you have had a wasted journey.”

At six that evening, Macrae stood on the bridge in St James's Park looking towards Buckingham Palace. It was dusk but the Royal Standard was clearly visible above the building, which meant that King George and Queen Elizabeth were in
residence. They would be preparing for the evening ahead: drinks perhaps with foreign dignitaries and then a formal dinner. They would talk about their regular Easter visit to the royal lodge in Balmoral and maybe the forthcoming summer tour of the United States. They would be as insulated from the world around them as an Egyptian mummy in the British Museum.

He had not been able to remind Chamberlain that a much earlier monarch had met a bloody end on a scaffold in Whitehall for the crime of defying parliament. In fact, he had not been asked to say anything at all at the meeting. It had been an ambush carefully organised by Lord Halifax, and the fox-hunting C had ridden straight into it. Chamberlain's final scrawled comment on the paper outlining the case for the assassination had been one of utter contempt for the whole idea: “This would not be sportsmanlike behaviour,” he had written.

Macrae looked left and right, hoping to see the familiar dirty white raincoat flapping around the portly figure of a man who must be as disappointed as he was. Halliday was always late.

He watched a line of ducks ripple up the lake – drake, hen and three smaller birds from last year's brood. There was a flash of coloured feathers as they lifted from the ruffled water and rose like flowers in flight, their petalled wings beating against the darkening sky.

“Beautiful, aren't they?” she said.

He turned, gripping the railing tightly, knowing the voice so well yet feeling the shock of a surprise so total that for a moment he thought he must have imagined the words.

She was standing there beside him, looking older and thinner, smiling, dressed in a smart brown woollen coat with mother-of-pearl buttons.

“What are you doing here? How did you know? When did you …?”

His words trailed away as she leant up, gave him a kiss on the cheek and slipped an arm through his.

“The pubs are open; let's get a drink,” she said.

“Hold on. My colleague is meeting me here.” He wasn't thinking clearly; he couldn't think. Where was Halliday?

“
I'm
meeting you here. It's all been arranged. Come on.”

“No, let's walk,” he said.

He took her arm and steered her across the bridge towards Birdcage Walk. They swung left on the path around the park. He gripped her arm tightly. She didn't seem to mind. He needed the cold air of a darkening spring evening to clear his head. He needed to understand and work out what had happened. Halliday had fixed this. It was always Halliday. Where was the bastard? Why hadn't he told him?

She began talking in a low voice, as if the plane trees branching over the path were listening. They walked three times around the lake in the gathering dark before she finished. Twice he had tried to interrupt, but she had shushed him. When she had finished her story, they stopped on the bridge, looking back at the lights of Whitehall and across to the gas lamps casting a golden glow along the Mall. There were too many questions to ask, too much more to talk about. It was dark now and getting chilly.

“Let's go to that pub,” he said. He put his arm around her waist and drew her to him as they left the park. He felt her arm around him as they walked through streets churning with commuters heading for the nearby Victoria Station. They went into the first pub they came to.

She unbuttoned her coat, placed it over the back of her chair and smoothed her skirt. She was wearing an office-style
suit, he noticed. She must have a job somewhere. He wondered if Halliday had arranged that as well.

He went to the bar. She wanted a large gin and tonic with lots of ice. He asked for half a pint of bitter. When the gin was placed alongside the beer on the counter, the bubbles fizzing up through the ice and a slice of lemon, he changed his mind. He would have a large gin as well, he said. The barman sighed.

They raised their glasses and clinked them.

“I never thought I would see you again,” he said.

“You saved my life. That's why I am here,” she said.

“I think
you
did that,” he said.

“Without that permit I would have been in Sachsenhausen by now – or more likely dead.”

“Even so, you were lucky. I am amazed you did it.”

“What, kill him?”

“Yes. I mean no. I'm not surprised. You had to. I'm just amazed you managed to get away.”

“I worked out that they wouldn't find the body until late in the day, or maybe not until the night. I knew Kitty wouldn't say anything – she would just take the money and run. So I had time.”

“And Halliday followed you all the way? I can hardly believe that.”

She laughed then, an exhilarating laugh with her head back.

“He told me he had a hunch when he saw me that morning at the Ostbahnhof. He's a crazy man.”

“And he introduced you to his people?”

“Yes. I have told my story many times, too many times.”

“And now?”

“They offered me a job using my language skills in some research.”

“What, secret stuff?”

She nodded. “I said no. I want to be a teacher.”

They drank their drinks in silence for a while.

“I'm going back to Berlin tomorrow,” he said.

“I know.”

“Shall we eat somewhere?”

“That would be nice,” she said, and she reached across the table and took his hand, squeezing it hard. Her eyes were on his. She raised her glass, drained her gin, still looking at him. In those eyes he saw two figures in the Tiergarten that night, their urgent bodies colliding and coiling on the damp earth under the trees, hearing only whispered words of love and the quiet conversation of the leaves above them. But it was a lie, he quickly told himself. She was surely using him – and why not? Her body, those whispered words, her urgent gasps as she clawed her nails into his back, they were all part of the unspoken arrangement, were they not? My body and a fleeting moment of passion for a laisser passer, a ticket to freedom, that was the deal, wasn't it? There was nothing cynical about that, it was a question of her survival. After all she had murdered a senior Gestapo to make her escape – what would a tryst in the woods with a British diplomat mean to her when her life was at stake? And for him, what had he found as he held her half naked in his arms on those frozen nights in the Tiergarten? A little solace for a wounded heart, comfort denied him at home, was that it?

She released his hand. She was smiling now. “Let's get another drink,” she said. Then he knew it was more, much more.

Macrae took the gun case from the cupboard under the stairs. He had pushed it as far back as he could behind the brooms, buckets and mops used by the cleaning lady. It was the one place in the house he knew Primrose would not look.

He took it into the kitchen, blowing dust off the initialled leather case, and undid the buckles on the straps. He placed the rifle on the table, took it out of the oilcloths, drew up a chair and sat down to begin the delicate job of attaching the telescopic sights to the barrel. He had bought those sights from Holland & Holland in London twenty-four years ago. Every sniper on both sides of the war had their own favourite make of sights, and the best were custom-made to conform to the optical measurements of the owner's eyes.

Macrae had gone to Holland & Holland because he knew they made first-class sporting rifles. He reckoned that the gun sights that enabled a stalker to drop a stag in the Scottish Highlands at a range of eight hundred yards would be good enough for the trenches. So it proved.

He paused, hearing a sound somewhere in the house. The fridge was whirring quietly behind him. A door creaked
somewhere upstairs. Maybe a window had been left open. He knew there was no one else in the house. Primrose had gone off with the other wives from the embassy to take her seat in the stand for distinguished guests.

The civilian parade of local bands and children from every school in Berlin would begin to file past the reviewing stand at 10 a.m. An hour later, the military march-past would begin and it would last for three hours. The climax would come with a fly-past of every type of military aircraft in the Luftwaffe, and especially the new Me 109 fighter, the aircraft that would streak over the city in tight formation only a few hundred feet from the ground with a thunderous roar.

During this time, Hitler and his senior ministers, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Hess and Speer, would not leave the reviewing stand except for brief calls of nature. Their arms would rise and fall in salute to the tributes being paid to the Führer on his fiftieth birthday. Their arms would ache, their smiles would freeze into rictus grins and their ears would be deafened by the clamour. It was going to be a very noisy day on the avenue. The rumble and clatter of military vehicles, the cheers of the crowds, the music of the military bands, the planes overhead – all would create a continuous wall of sound. That is what Macrae was counting on. He could already hear the rising tide of sound from the avenue as people gathered and the bands began to tune their instruments.

He stopped fitting the telescopic sight and listened. It was not the cleaner's day. There was a window banging somewhere upstairs. He was not nervous, just curious. He walked upstairs to make sure. In the drawing room, a small side window had been left unlatched and was swinging slowly in the breeze. He closed it and went to the French windows.

Through the trees he could see crowds milling in their thousands, jostling for position. He could also see the reviewing
stand very clearly. A lectern had been set up for the big speech that afternoon. There was a table beside it with water bottles and glasses. But no chairs. The Nazi leadership was never to be seen sitting down in public. That was the rule. But Sir Nevile Henderson would be sitting down with all the other heads of mission. He was probably there somewhere already. He would not want to miss a minute of this.

Macrae looked down at his hands. His knuckles were white. He unclenched his fists. The last meeting with the ambassador had been a shock. Primrose still had not recovered from the news – or forgiven him. Because naturally it was his fault. Worst of all, Henderson actually seemed to enjoy telling him.

It had happened a week after he got back from London. He had been asked to stay behind after another tense staff meeting. The ambassador had remained seated at the conference table and gestured Macrae to do likewise. There were two official white envelopes in front of him. Macrae could see his name typewritten on both. Sir Nevile Henderson came to the point with uncharacteristic speed.

“It has been decided that you have fulfilled your duties here with, how shall I put this, with vigour. It is now time for a new posting. I have here a letter from the War Office in which you will see you have been gazetted as full colonel. Congratulations. Here is a second letter from the Foreign Office in which you are designated as HMG's military attaché in Lourenço Marques.”

“Where?”

“Lourenço Marques. Capital of Portuguese East Africa. Pearl of the Indian Ocean. An important listening post, given
German submarine traffic in the Mozambique Channel. SIS has a man there. The Abwehr and the Italians are also pretty thick on the ground.”

“I don't understand.”

“I think you understand very well, Colonel. You are being transferred. I am sure you will have an interesting time.”

“When is this to be effective?”