The Interrogator (27 page)

‘May I tell you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘The Security Service – Five – tried to question me and I think I’m being followed.’

She sat up, turning to look at him: ‘Followed? Why?’

He shrugged: ‘Kapitän Mohr is chasing me.’

He told her of his visit to the shop on the Commercial Road, of Mohr’s letter with its pointed reference to his cousin, of the telephone conversation with his father and the black Morris he kept seeing in St James’s Square.

‘I tried to talk to the driver but all I got for my trouble was a thick lip.’

Mary reached across to stroke his cheek but he took her hand and kissed it.

‘I can’t believe this, Douglas. This is terrible.’ Her voice trembled a little. ‘And Ian Fleming is involved too. Have you spoken to anyone else in the Division?’

‘I haven’t been into the Admiralty since all this blew up. The Director sent word he didn’t want to see me. They’ve got the report, of course.’

‘It’s bloody. It’s . . .’ She took a deep breath and tried to be calm but tears and resentment were welling inside her.

‘I’m sorry, Mary, I didn’t want to spoil the day. It will sort itself out. A cousin in the Kriegsmarine is not a capital offence,’ he gave a harsh laugh, ‘yet.’ He paused for a moment, then said: ‘It’s my mother I’m concerned about, and you. Sooner or later they will speak to you.’

‘Let them,’ she snapped crossly. Then she reached up with both hands and pulled his head down to kiss him hard. After a while, they broke apart and lay quietly side by side. The sun was lost behind a mass of blue-grey cloud and the air heavy now with the promise of thunder.

‘You should leave the Division,’ she said.

‘And go back to sea? I can’t.’

‘You may have to leave. Perhaps I should too.’

Lindsay raised himself to his elbow abruptly: ‘Because of me? No. No. They won’t let you and it would be madness anyway.’

There was a white flash in the west and seconds later the crack and rumble of thunder. Mary got slowly to her feet and began to brush the grass from her frock. By the time they reached the park gates heavy raindrops were spotting their clothes and rolling down their faces. Lindsay swung the hamper on to his back.

‘Can you run?’

‘Of course but I’d rather walk.’

He smiled and brushed a strand of wet hair from her face: ‘As you wish.’

Another sharp flash and almost at once the thunder. People began hurrying past under macs and umbrellas and the Sunday papers. Mary’s dress was clinging thickly to her skin and her hair hung in rat’s tails about her face. At the end of Keble Road she stopped to
balance on Lindsay’s arm and empty water from a shoe. Looking up, she saw he was blinking madly as the rain ran down his forehead into his eyes.

‘What on earth . . .’ and he pulled a face at her. She began to laugh. And for a time she could not stop, short breathless infectious laughter. He hugged her and she made him dance a little circle as the rain fell in a drenching sheet in the empty road.

They drove the steamy car through the city in search of a tea-room and found one close to the station. Its sympathetic owner showed them to a table close to a heater, then served tea and a biscuit. Lindsay held her hand across the table:

‘Thank you for today. I feel calmer. You know sometimes I worry I’m imagining those men in the car outside my home. They are there but perhaps they have nothing to do with Special Branch. They may be thieves going quietly about their business. Am I going mad?’

She smiled and gave his hand a squeeze: ‘Stark raving.’

He laughed and rolled his fingers over his bottom lip like a halfwit.

But in the car on the way home, silent except for the rhythm of the road, she wondered if he was right – was he a prisoner of his own imagination? In their secret world of possibilities and lies, wild thoughts would perhaps come easily to a fevered mind. They reached St James’s Square at dusk and there was no sign of a black Morris Eight or men in soft hats and raincoats.

‘Will you come in? I’ll drive you home later,’ he said tentatively. ‘If you have to go, I mean.’

She did not feel able to refuse.

There was a letter from the Admiralty waiting for him in the hall.

‘It’s from Fleming. The Director wants to see me first thing tomorrow.’

‘Good. You can sort things out.’

‘And he’s sent a cutting from today’s
Sunday Times
.’

It fluttered to the floor and he picked it up without glancing at it and put it in his jacket pocket. ‘I’ll read it later.’

In the apartment, he drew the blackout curtains, then switched on the sitting-room lights while Mary made some tea. She was loading
his mother’s bone china on to a tray when he shouted through to the kitchen:

‘Hey, come here.’

He was standing at his desk holding the newspaper cutting beneath the lamp. It was only a short piece, no more than the length of his index finger.

‘Listen to this:

A prisoner is reported to have committed suicide at a camp for enemy officers in the North Country. Camp guards found the body of the nineteen-year-old U-boat officer hanging from a pipe in the washroom last Tuesday. The camp for captured German naval and flying officers is known locally as ‘the U-boat Hotel’ because the prisoners enjoy special privileges. An MP who recently visited it described the rooms as ‘luxurious’ and claimed the prisoners were better fed than his own constituents. Military Police officers are still interviewing prisoners but are understood to be satisfied that the dead man took his own life.’

‘And that’s it,’ he said, looking up at her.

‘Why has he sent you that?’

He turned slowly away from her and drew back a curtain to look down into the square.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps because I interrogated him.’

‘Who?’

‘The dead man, of course.’

He held his fist to his mouth, tapping his lip thoughtfully with his knuckles, and when he turned to her again his eyes were their brightest blue: ‘Do you think this is something to do with Mohr?’

She slammed the tray on the table so hard that a cup jumped on to the rug: ‘Would that make you happy?’

‘Yes,’ he said and there was the old smile again, dry, a little supercilious, ‘I’m afraid it would.’

34

T

he Director of Naval Intelligence was in no hurry to see Lindsay the following morning. He was directed to a hard wooden chair next to the kettles and milk bottles in the messengers’ room and left to slide up and down it for an hour. The whispers, the grim faces and sideways glances suggested it was common knowledge that he was in for a ‘roasting’. No secret travelled faster.

He was shown into Room 39 at the Admiralty a little before nine. A meeting of Section heads had just broken up and a small group of officers was chatting and smoking around the large marble fireplace. There was no sign of Fleming and he stood there for a moment unsure whether to wait or knock at the Director’s door.

‘Sit down, Lindsay.’

It was Commander Drake, the Admiral’s slow-moving, easy-tempered doorkeeper, except that this morning he sounded uncharacteristically brusque.

‘Admiral Godfrey will be with you shortly.’

Lindsay took a chair by the baize partition in the corner of the room and watched the traffic come and go. After a few minutes the door to his right opened and Ian Fleming came out holding an Admiralty docket. He nodded curtly: ‘Step inside, Lieutenant.’

Rear-Admiral John Godfrey was sitting at his large mahogany desk. He did not speak, he did not smile, not a muscle in his face moved as Lindsay walked smartly across the carpet to pre-sent himself in front of it. He was a distinguished-looking man, fifty-three, severe, with a lantern jaw, thin lips and the bright eyes of a hawk. They did not leave Lindsay’s face. Fleming took up a position on his right, his arm resting on the black marble mantelpiece behind the Admiral’s desk. He looked as if he was at a funeral. When the Director spoke at last his voice was clipped and cool:

‘Do you want us to win this war, Lindsay?’

‘Yes, sir. I am a . . .’

‘“Yes” or “No” will suffice.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then it is hard to understand your behaviour. You put our codes at risk, disobeyed a direct order from a senior officer and you have been hiding your family’s connections to the Nazis.’

‘The Kriegsmarine, sir.’

‘Don’t fence with me,’ he barked. ‘If it weren’t for Commander Fleming you would be shovelling coal on a trawler somewhere between Rockall and St John’s.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The Admiral leant back in his chair and picked up a thin cardboard file marked ‘E
YES
O
NLY
’ in red.

‘You’ve seen this, haven’t you?’ He waved it lazily at Lindsay. ‘Commander Fleming says you opened it, although you didn’t have the authority.’

‘Yes, sir, but I was sure Commander Fleming wanted me to read it.’

‘So you know that both Military Counter-Intelligence and MI5 recommend your immediate transfer from the Division.’

He glared at Lindsay for a few seconds, then tossed the file back on to the desk.

‘Can you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t transfer you?’

Lindsay hesitated. His heart was bumping furiously.

‘Well?’

‘I am good at my job, sir.’

‘You haven’t proved that,’ he snapped.

‘No, sir.’

‘Thank goodness, humility at last.’

The Admiral looked at him closely, hard wrinkles about his eyes. Someone was giving orders on the parade ground below his window. A clock ticked lamely on the mantelpiece.

‘All right, sit down.’

And he pointed to the leather library chairs on the other side of his desk. Picking up the file again, he took out a closely typed sheet of foolscap.

‘This is the transcript of Mohr’s letter in full.’ He pushed it across his shiny black desk. ‘Read it.’

It was in German, unremarkable but for the references to Lindsay’s cousin and the evening at the jazz club with Mary and Lange. Mohr asked his friend to reassure his family that he was in good health and he wrote of shared memories, of days sailing on the Wannsee in Berlin, of walks and dinners. At the end of the letter he had added a few awkward words of love, dry and conventional, nothing that would offer comfort to a lonely sweetheart. Lindsay slid the paper back across the Admiral’s desk.

‘The jazz club, sir.’ He took a deep breath before continuing. ‘Dr Henderson left as soon as she was aware I was with a prisoner.’

Godfrey shook his head: ‘That isn’t important now. Why do you think he made such pointed reference to you? He knew we’d read the letter.’

Lindsay shrugged: ‘He knew it would cause trouble, sir. I think he believes it’s his duty to carry on fighting any way he can.’

The Admiral said nothing but reached across his desk for a silver cigarette box which he offered to Lindsay and Fleming.

‘Is there anything else about the letter that strikes you as strange?’

Lindsay took a cigarette, smelling it, then rolling it thoughtfully between his fingers: ‘Perhaps one thing, sir. It’s clumsy, badly written for an educated man.’

The Director of Naval Intelligence smiled. It was a tough little smile but it was the first that Lindsay had seen since marching into his office.

‘Yes, badly written and let me show you why.’

He opened the file again and withdrew a small square of light blue paper; on it were the dots and dashes of a signal in Morse code.

‘Look at Mohr’s letter again. Look at the first letter of each word in the opening and final paragraphs. Words that begin with letters from A to H are dots and words from L to Z dashes. Words that begin with letters from I to K indicate spaces. Here.’

Godfrey handed the signal paper to Lindsay: ‘It says:
Two Wabos at fifty. Security problem. Position known but mission safe
. And that’s it. With the exception of his swipe at you, the letter was written to conceal this message – that’s why it reads so badly. It’s not the first time U-boat prisoners have used this code. No doubt Miss Rasch has been instructed to forward everything Mohr sends to Dönitz’s headquarters.’

Lindsay pulled hard on his cigarette, savouring the hot sharp taste of the Admiral’s tobacco. Smoke curled about the paper on his knee, smudging Mohr’s secret dots and dashes.
Wabos
was just U-boat German for
Wasserbomben
or depth charges. The
U-112
was sunk by two depth charges exploding fifty metres from its hull. But the rest of the message was harder to disentangle.

‘Well, you’ve spoken to Mohr?’

The Admiral’s voice suggested he wanted to hear something that would justify the time and trouble he was taking with a junior lieutenant.

Lindsay frowned: ‘If Mohr was expecting us to read this, why did he risk a secret message?’

It was Fleming who replied: ‘He knew we would censor the references to you. If you look carefully you can see he has not used any of the words in that part of the letter in his message. He’s a clever chap. He may have wanted to embarrass you, yes, but he also wanted to disguise his real purpose – the coded message.’

‘Well, sir . . .’ Lindsay leant forward to extinguish his cigarette.

‘“Position known” I think he means his own position. You see I asked him about his time at U-boat Headquarters.’

‘You also asked him about codes,’ said Godfrey coolly.

‘Yes sir.’ Lindsay half turned to look at Fleming: ‘And the cutting you sent me? Does the dead man have anything to do with this?’

Fleming glanced across at Godfrey. The Admiral was watching Lindsay with the fixed gaze of a sleek cat in a garden full of birds.

‘It’s possible,’ said Fleming cautiously. ‘Was the
U-112
’s engineer one of your prisoners?’

‘Heine?’

‘You’re surprised?’

‘Yes.’ Lindsay nodded. Yes, he was surprised. Heine was a practical man with the patience and dogged determination of a born engineer, not the sort to take his own life.

‘It was Heine who told me that Mohr served as one of the six Staff officers responsible for all day-to-day operations in the Atlantic. A sensitive role. Heine was terrified his comrades would find out.’ Lindsay could picture his pinched, swarthy face across the table, fear
in his brown eyes. He had played with that fear to extract all he could from the engineer.