The Secret of Spandau (9 page)

Red was frowning as he asked, ‘Are you telling us Hess had nothing back from the Duke and still went ahead with the mission? That doesn't strike me as good German organization.'

‘It may surprise you, then, that this was Hess's fourth attempt to make the flight. He had been trying since December. Technical problems or bad weather caused him to turn back each time.'

‘It doesn't square with all the preparation,' Red persisted. Would the Deputy Führer of Germany fly into enemy territory and throw himself on the mercy of some guy he'd never even met?'

‘That's what happened,' murmured Jane.

There was an affirmative grunt from Cedric. ‘Red's right. It's naive to suggest that Hess didn't have other information to act on. He had his own intelligence agency, the
Verbindungsstab
, sending back reports from Britain and other places. Anglo-German contacts were secretly maintained in several neutral countries besides Portugal. No, he wouldn't have come without some strong signal from a British source. The indications are that it was an acutely sensitive one.'

‘We're back to the brainwashing,' said Red.

Cedric nodded. ‘I think MI5 did their best to scrub it from his memory at Mytchett Place.'

‘But you have a whisper who it was?'

Cedric eased his way around the question. ‘Consider what happened after Hess parachuted down. He gave a false name and asked to see the Duke of Hamilton. When it was fixed, he insisted on speaking to the Duke without anyone else present. According to the report that Hamilton later wrote for Churchill, Hess claimed that his arrival was proof of his sincerity and Germany's desire for peace. He said Hitler was convinced that Germany would win the war, but he wanted to avoid unnecessary slaughter. Hess then asked the Duke to call together certain leading members of the Conservative Party to negotiate a peace, but the Duke told him there was only one party in Britain now, and that was the Coalition. Finally, Hess asked the Duke to contact the King, to secure a “parole” for him.'

‘At what point did Winston Churchill come into it?' asked Dick. ‘Presumably
he
wasn't on Hess's list of leading Conservatives.'

Red laughed. ‘You've got to be kidding! The Nazis wanted Winnie out on his arse.'

‘A fair summary,' Cedric agreed. ‘Hess made it clear that Hitler would not negotiate with Churchill. He counted on the right wing of the Party forcing Churchill out of office when they were offered a peace settlement.'

‘Where did things go wrong?' asked Dick.

‘Right at the start,' answered Cedric. ‘He was banking on the Duke of Hamilton's help.'

‘He was on to a loser there?' suggested Red.

Cedric shrugged. ‘It must have made sense from the German point of view. The Duke had been a Conservative Member of Parliament until just before the war and presumably knew the people in the Party who might favour a settlement.'

‘You told us Albrecht Haushofer was friendly with the Duke,' Jane challenged him. ‘He must have believed he would fall in with the plan. He must have had some grounds –'

Red cut in: ‘It wouldn't have mattered if the Duke wore a brown shirt and jackboots. He was useless to Hess once MI5 had intercepted that letter.'

Jane was galled by the interruption, but she had to admit that Red had seized on the vital point. His thinking was sharper than hers, and probably anyone else's, and she was going to have to find a way of responding to him without rising to the bait every time. The mix of boorishness and dynamism, arrogant male chauvinism and sexual attractiveness was difficult for her to handle.

Cedric said evenly, ‘Shall we keep to the known facts? After his meeting with Hess, the Duke drove to Turnhouse Airport, phoned the Foreign Office and asked for Sir Alexander Cadogan, the top civil servant there, to motor out to Northolt and meet him on a matter of the utmost urgency. He wasn't believed. The secretary who took the call believed it was a hoax. Then, by one of those curious quirks of history, Winston Churchill's Private Secretary, Jock Colville, walked into the room and overheard the conversation. In minutes, Churchill was informed, and Hamilton was flying south to report to him in person.'

‘Mission aborted,' remarked Red.

A silence settled over the empty coffee cups. Don fiddled with the edge of his moustache. Jane studied her finger-nails. Dick stared, frowning, into space.

Red leaned confidentially towards Cedric. ‘Are you going to tell them, or shall I?'

At one end of the sports-hall in Charlottenburg, West Berlin, two mixed-doubles pairs were playing table-tennis, and excited cries were coming from the benches at the side. Erich Ritter and Heidrun Kassner were practically unbeatable, but they still trained as if they were fighting for their places on the team. They had been at the table almost two hours with the club second pair, Frank and Renate, and the play was fast and intelligent. At this stage of the evening, they weren't scoring, but simply practising shots.

‘Time to stop, I think,' Frank appealed to the others. He had a job as a drummer in a strip club, and liked to be away by 9.30.

‘Not yet,' said Heidrun flatly. ‘Erich's return of service is still rising too high.' She appealed to the benches. ‘Yes?' She was popular with the club juniors, because she knew them all by name and took an interest in their progress, often sparing time to coach them. She'd come up from the juniors herself, made the first team as a singles player, and only changed to mixed doubles for the sake of the club, to strengthen one of its obvious weaknesses. The pairing of Erich with Renate had never been dependable. Naturally, there had been some red-eyed looks from Renate when Heidrun had displaced her, but it had been obvious that Erich deserved a better partner.

‘No,' Renate declared, affirming it by laying her bat on the table. ‘That's enough for me, too.'

Erich picked up his tracksuit top and turned to Heidrun, who was signalling her obstinacy in the way she was bouncing the ball on her bat. ‘A coffee before I see you home?'

‘What's the hurry?' asked Heidrun off-handedly. ‘I fancy a swim. Renate, would you care for a swim?'

Renate gave her a long look. Everyone knew that Erich was hopelessly in love with Heidrun. He waited for her each evening outside the coffee-shop where she worked as a waitress. ‘That's not a bad idea. Why don't you join us, Erich?'

But something had snapped. Erich reddened and said, ‘No, thanks. I'm off.'

Frank offered him a lift, and the men left together.

There were times when Renate found Heidrun's treatment of Erich insufferable. When she had taken him over as her partner, it was all kisses and clasped hands and would you like to take me home, darling? Now that they were the regular first-team pair, she had switched off the sweet-talk, only resorting to it when Erich showed signs of losing interest in table-tennis.

As the two girls showered after their swim, Renate found herself doubting whether Heidrun had ever actually taken Erich to bed. She had no other lovers, but she was undeniably attractive – curvy, clear-skinned, big-breasted, all the things guys lusted over. Standing there now, massaging shampoo into her short, silver-streaked hair, Heidrun was clearly untroubled about Erich's leaving. Sport apparently gave her all the fulfilment she wanted. If those shapely thighs ever parted for Erich, she'd probably still be going on about his return of service.

‘Something amusing you?' Heidrun suddenly demanded.

Renate reddened and turned away.

Heidrun shook her hair. ‘Is this how you get your kicks – grinning at girls in showers?'

Insulted, Renate said, ‘There's no need to be coarse. This is free Berlin. I'm allowed to smile if I wish.'

Heidrun stepped out of the shower and picked up her towel. ‘It might not be a bad thing if people this side of the Wall were more serious.'

‘They have reason to be serious on the other side,' Renate replied.

‘Yes, but they beat the world at sport.'

Red's casual revelation that he was somehow in collusion with Cedric had made Jane coldly angry. Just when she was making efforts to modify her reactions to Red, she had to face the possibility that he was Cedric's sidekick. If he asked her to write the woman's angle on Hess, she'd bloody resign. It was so unjust. There she was, thinking she'd earned the right to be on an investigative team and lapping up the boss's praise, reciting her pieces like a good girl, when all the time she was way down the ladder. She was certain of one thing: she wasn't going to let any of them, least of all Red Goodbody, spin her around and make a fool of her. She'd find out what was trumps and then they could all watch out.

Cedric stood waiting for his guests to settle in the room where they had first met. ‘I neglected to tell you at the beginning that Red has done some preliminary work,' he said without preamble. ‘I should have mentioned it when we looked at the BBC news item on Hess's ninetieth birthday. Red was on the spot in Berlin, so I asked him to follow up the statements attributed to Hess's son.'

‘Blaming the Western powers?' Dick prompted.

‘Yes. And I also caught something on ITN. Their coverage of the birthday was briefer, but even more intriguing. They quoted Wolf Hess as saying that his father was being kept prisoner because he knew too much about British efforts to make peace with Germany in 1941.'

‘British
efforts?'

Cedric gave a nod. ‘That's what they said. I obtained a transcript, just to be sure. This was a new angle so far as I was concerned, and I wanted to know more, so I asked Red to follow it up.' With a wave, Cedric invited a report from his Berlin correspondent, who had given up his window-seat to squat on the carpet with his back against the wall. Relieved to step out of the spotlight, Cedric picked up his cognac and sat down.

‘You want to know what I got from Wolf Rüdiger?' Red asked without looking up. ‘He says there were secret peace initiatives between Nazi Germany and Britain. Our people knew in advance that Hess was coming. Hess came over expecting to negotiate with the War Cabinet.'

‘If that's true, it's dynamite,' said Dick. ‘Britain
expected
Hess?'

Cedric must have been gratified. His team exhibited all the symptoms of shock, incredulity and craving for more information that sell a newspaper in millions. Dick fired a volley of questions at Red. Jane was pink with disbelief at this challenge to the legend of defiant Britain going it alone.

‘Where did Wolf Hess get this information?' she pressed Red. ‘From his father?'

‘He's not saying.'

‘Why?'

Red gave a shrug. ‘Prison regulations. Hess still wants out, doesn't he? If you ask me, it comes from someone else. Hess isn't given a chance to talk about the war.'

‘So who do you put your money on?' asked Dick.

‘Maybe someone feeling angry about the way Hess has been treated.'

‘But is the source reliable?'

‘Wolf Rüdiger said he has proof.'

‘Proof? Do you believe him?'

Red was non-committal. ‘It's a new card to play, isn't it?'

‘He won't say any more, off the record, I mean?'

Red shook his head.

‘Cedric, it's bloody nonsense!' Jane said in a rush. ‘Britain was in no mood for peace in 1941. It was all-out war, for God's sake! The country had come through Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. Churchill said victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror –'

‘Don't quote Churchill at me, Jane. I was around at the time,' Cedric told her sharply, and then softened it by adding, ‘even though I look so well-preserved. It wasn't all good old Winnie and knees-ups in the shelters, you know.'

Methodically, Cedric took his scalpel to the legend of a people united in the great war effort. He described the effects of months of night bombing by the Luftwaffe. He spoke of the homeless, refugees and evacuees, of looting and tragedy in overcrowded shelters. He destroyed the myth of a dedicated workforce with the information that over a million working days were lost in industrial stoppages during 1941, and absenteeism doubled in the munitions factories.

Jane was restive. She was being manoeuvred into something alien to her thinking. ‘All that may be true, Cedric, but the nation was solidly behind Churchill. There was no question of doing a deal with Hitler.'

Cedric shook his head. ‘Churchill's credit wasn't so high as you make out, my dear. I can tell you from personal experience that those stirring speeches of his were greeted in at least one not untypical home with mild derision. You see, in 1941, he hadn't yet earned the right to undisputed leadership. He was rather a suspect politician.'

‘People still wondered whether Chamberlain's way might have been better in the long run?' suggested Dick.

‘I can tell you that many Conservatives still harboured resentment at the way Chamberlain had been ousted,' Cedric confirmed. ‘What's more, we had a series of humiliating defeats abroad. In April of the year we're talking about, the British forces were swept out of Greece inside three weeks and out of Cyrenaica, by Rommel, in ten days. The Greek campaign was described as “another Winston lunacy” by Churchill's own military planners.'

‘Hess certainly picked his moment to fly in,' said Dick.

‘Too true. Three days before the Hess flight, Churchill faced a vote of confidence in the House of Commons, and took some flak from Lloyd George about the conduct of the war. The Commons backed Churchill handsomely, but the rift was there.'

‘Not to mention the House of Lords,' added Dick.

Jane gave vent to an agitated sigh that said she was surrounded by bigots.

Cedric eyed her keenly, betraying concern. Clearly, he was uneasy at the prospect of one of his team out of sympathy with the others. If she was to be won round, it required a show of sensitivity from someone besides himself. Oddly, he decided that she might respond best to the least sensitive man in the room.