The Interrogator (2 page)
Authors: Andrew Williams
‘Swim, swim.’
They were too close. It would drag them under. There was a frenzy of splashing and the raft raced forward. Then with a blinding yellow-white flash, the sea lifted in a huge dome beneath them. Confused, only half-conscious, Lindsay let go of the raft. His eyes were stinging, his arms heavy as if he were swimming in treacle. The wreck had gone and the sea was on fire, shrouded in choking black smoke. A dark shape floated close by and he reached out to touch it. It half turned, a body, face burnt black, features unrecognisable, and he could taste its sickly smell. Through the smoke he glimpsed another seaman waving frantically. He was lost between waves for a moment but reappeared only feet away. His face was oily black and almost all his hair had gone.
‘Where’s the
Rosemary
?’ Lindsay shouted, but the sailor was too frantic to listen or care. After a few seconds his head slumped forward on to his life vest. Lindsay tried to support him, to keep his mouth and nose clear of the water, but he felt weak and cold to his very core. ‘I’m
going to die,’ he thought, and was surprised by how little it concerned him. He could see himself drifting on, pushed from wave to wave, held upright in the Atlantic by his life jacket, and he wondered if he had the strength to take it off.
And then someone was pulling at his arm and shouting, ‘Give me your fucking hand.’ More hands were pulling at him, lifting him up and over the side. And the last thing he remembered was his cheek against cold steel.
In the spring our U-boat war will begin at sea, and they will notice that we have not been sleeping . . . the year 1941 will be, I am convinced, the historical year of a great European New Order.
Adolf Hitler Speech at Berlin Sports Hall 1941
1
The Citadel
London
M
One of the bunks creaked threateningly. Mary surfaced, grabbed the bag at the bottom of her bed and swung her legs into the darkness. The bolt on the bathroom door slid into place with a satisfying clunk. She turned reluctantly to the mirror. Her sandy-green eyes were red-rimmed and weepy. Two days without sunlight had cast an unhealthy shadow on her white, even skin and her thick black shoulder-length hair fell in unruly curls about her face. Her girlfriends told her that she should make more effort with her appearance; she was pretty and, at twenty-six, too young for sensible shoes and badly cut tweed. Perhaps it was acceptable in the university libraries she used to frequent, but naval officers preferred a little glamour. Mary knew her friends were wrong. A spring frock from the collection at Adèle’s might turn a head or two above ground but it would do nothing for her authority in the subterranean world of the Citadel.
Huge, featureless, it was a cruel brown block of concrete just a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square, Whitehall and Downing Street.
The Citadel was a little like a submarine with its squat tower on the Mall and its deck stretching aft to Horse Guards Parade, and rather like a submarine, it was larger below the surface than above. Mary had visited her uncle at the House of Commons the autumn before and he was the first to mention it to her. Hitler’s bombers were pounding London by day and night and it had struck her as strange that a small army of workmen was busy throwing up a new building when so many were in need of repair. In the time it had taken to complete, she had abandoned her academic post at an Oxford college to become part of its secret life. Workmen were still crashing about the upper floors and there was the sharp smell of wet concrete in the corridors but the Navy’s Operational Intelligence Centre had moved into its new home next to the Admiralty
By the time she felt presentable enough to leave the ladies’ room it was almost half past seven. A couple of cross-looking Wrens were shivering in their dressing gowns in the dimly lit corridor. She gave them her sweetest smile. Room 41 was in the bowels of the building, down drab cream stairs and corridors, past the convoy wall-plot, the signals girls in Room 29 and the watch-keepers in 30. At its blue door, she paused to catch her breath, then turned the handle and stepped quickly inside.
‘Good morning, Dr Henderson’ – it was the duty officer, Lieutenant Freddie Wilmot. He liked to tease her with her academic title. ‘Sleep well?’
‘No.’
Wilmot frowned and shook his head in mock sympathy: ‘Sorry to hear that but then I didn’t sleep at all.’
‘You’ll be off duty in an hour – you’ll be able to breathe again.’
Heavy pools of smoke swirled beneath the droplights like winter smog. The atmosphere was always impossibly thick in the Tracking Room. Everyone smoked – everyone but Mary. It had the stale smell of a room that was never empty. With the smoke, the half-light and the clatter of typewriters, at first her head had throbbed continually. But she was used to it now and perversely it helped to induce a strange, exhilarating mental clarity.
Mary Henderson was the first woman to be given a senior role in Naval Intelligence. Her crustier male colleagues had grumbled that
the Submarine Tracking Room was no place for a ‘female’, an Oxford archaeologist. In her first weeks, they had made her feel as useful as a village bumpkin press-ganged into service on a man-of-war. What with the shrugs and snatched conversations, she had floundered in a sea of acronyms and potent initials: ‘Put DDOD (H) on the distribution list’; ‘don’t forget DNOR and please be sure to ring the SOI. to FOS’. It seemed like a ritual designed to confuse the interloper in the clubhouse. She found it easier to nod and pretend, then secretly search the Citadel’s telephone directory for clues. Her head of section, Rodger Winn, caught her with one on her knee, like a naughty schoolgirl with a crib sheet in an examination. But Winn was an outsider too, a clever lawyer with a twisted back and a limp. The Navy would have classified him as ‘unfit’ in peacetime but now the heavy duty of tracking the enemy’s submarines in the Atlantic rested on his awkward shoulders.
Winn took Mary’s education upon himself. Calling her into his office, he roughed out the structure of the Naval Intelligence Division on a blackboard. ‘At the top, the Director or DNI, that’s Admiral Godfrey in Room 39, entrance behind the statue of Captain Cook on the Mall. Under the Director, nineteen sections dealing with everything from the security of our own codes to propaganda and prisoners of war.’ For more than an hour, he shuffled back and forth in front of the board, presenting the facts with the austere clarity of a High Court barrister. ‘We’ll only win the war at sea if we win it here in the Citadel first,’ he told her.
The Citadel was the heartbeat of the Division, where threads from fifteen different sources – enemy signals, agents in the field, photographic reconnaissance – were carefully gathered. A thousand ships had been lost in 1940 and with them food, fuel, steel and ore. The country was under siege. The Germans held the coast from Norway to the Pyrenees and were busy establishing new bases for their U-boats. ‘They’re playing merry hell with our convoys. If we can’t stop them, they’ll cut our lifeline west to America and the Empire and we’ll lose the war.’ Winn was not a man to gild the lily.
Mary settled behind her desk and lifted a thick bundle of signals and reports from her in-tray. The first flimsy was from HMS
Wanderer
in the North Atlantic. At 0212 the destroyer had registered
a ‘strong contact’ with a submerged submarine on her echo detector. Two hours later and fifteen miles to the west, HMS
Vanoc
reported another. Was it the same U-boat on a north-westerly course? Perhaps the enemy was preparing a fresh pack attack on convoys south of Iceland. A timely warning would save ships and lives. Mary’s task was to pursue the German U-boat as mercilessly on paper as a destroyer might at sea. It was careful work that called for a trained mind and the memory of an elephant. My sort of work, she thought with the self-conscious pride of a novice.
A few feet from her, Wilmot was dictating the night’s ‘headlines’ to a typist and at the far end of the room, the plotters were clucking around a wall chart of the British coast. Room 41 was long and narrow, bursting with map tables and filing cabinets, too small for the fifteen people who would be weaving up and down it within the hour. It resembled a shabby newspaper office with its rows of plain wooden desks covered in copy paper, black Bakelite phones and typewriters. The main Atlantic plot was laid out on a large table in the centre of the room: a crazy collage of cardboard arrows, pinheads and crisscrossed cotton threads. At times the enemy’s U-boats could be tracked with painful certainty – a distress call from a lone merchant ship or a convoy under attack – but at other times the plot was marked with what the section called ‘Winn’s Guess’.
‘Good morning to all. A quiet night I hope?’
Rodger Winn had shuffled through the doorway, peaked cap in one hand, brown leather briefcase in the other. He blinked owlishly at the room for a moment, then began to struggle out of his service coat. The well-tailored uniform beneath was embroidered with the swirling gold sleeve-hoops of a commander in the volunteer reserve. He was in his late thirties, short, stocky, with powerful, restless shoulders, twinkling eyes and a good-humoured smile. Wilmot stepped forward with his clipboard to hover at his elbow: ‘Good news, Rodger – Berlin has confirmed the loss of the
U-100
.’
‘I heard that on the BBC,’ replied Winn brusquely.
Mary bent a little closer to the signals on her desk in an effort to disguise an embarrassingly broad smirk.
‘It’s the only good news. I was trying to spare you the rest.’
‘Don’t.’
Wilmot led Winn to the plot and began to take him through the night’s business. A tanker and three freighters had been sunk in the North Atlantic and four more ships damaged. ‘But here the news is worse.’ Wilmot’s hand swept south across the table to a cluster of pinheads off the coast of West Africa. ‘Homebound convoy from Sierra Leone – SL.68. Six more ships sunk – three of them tankers – that’s twelve ships in three days.’
Winn groaned and reached inside his jacket for his cigarettes. He shook one from the packet and lit it with a snap of his lighter: ‘Any idea how many U-boats they’ve sent into African waters?’
‘Perhaps three,’ said Wilmot with a doubtful shrug of his shoulders. ‘A French source in the naval dockyard at Lorient thinks one of them is the
U-112
. The crew was issued with warm-weather clothes.’
Winn half turned from the plot to blink over his glasses at Mary: ‘Dr Henderson, what do we have in the index?’
Mary reached up to a small box on top of the battered filing cabinet beside her desk. She flicked through it, found the
112
’s file card and handed it to Winn.
‘Kapitän zur See Jürgen Mohr: a very capable commander,’ he grunted. ‘What’s our source – can you check?’ He paused to remove a thread of tobacco from his lip. ‘The most senior U-boat officer still at sea. The darling of the newsreels. They’ve credited him with twenty five of our ships – perhaps after last night’s attacks, a few more.’
Winn handed Mary the card: ‘You’ll need to update this.’
He turned back to lean over the plot, resting his weight on his hands. He had suffered from Polio as a boy and found it uncomfortable to stand unsupported for long. The pile of signals and reports on Mary’s desk seemed to have mysteriously grown. She would have to work her way through it before the midday conference.
‘He’s winning, Mary. Winning.’
She looked up in surprise. Winn was gazing intently at a small portrait photograph on the wall above the plot table. It was of a thin, severe-looking man who sat primly upright, hands held tightly in front of him. He was wearing the rings and star of a German admiral and the Ritterkreuz – the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross – hung at his
throat. It was the face of the enemy, their particular enemy, the commander of the German U-boat arm:Karl Dönitz.
‘Always a step ahead of us.’ Winn drew heavily on the last of his cigarette, then squeezed it into an ashtray at the edge of the plot. ‘A step ahead.’
Mary did not speak to Winn again that morning but she was conscious of his presence at the plot. He shuffled out of his office three, perhaps four times, to stand beside it, stroking his cheek thoughtfully, cigarette burning between his fingers. After an unpleasant lunch in the Admiralty canteen, she returned to her desk to find a note from him in her in-tray.
An interrogator from Section 11 visiting tomorrow at 1100. He says he has something for us. Talk to him
.
Mary groaned and glanced resentfully at Winn’s office but he was out. She pushed the note away. Who was this interrogator and what was so important that he could not send in a report like the rest of his Section?
2
Camp 020
Ham Common
London
T