The Interrogator (8 page)

‘Hyde Park?’

‘Anywhere,’ she said.

Bowling through the streets, the wind plucking at her scarf and hair, Mary’s spirits began to lift. It was a warm blue afternoon, the sun was twinkling through the windshield and the plane trees in Park Lane were tipped with a promise of spring.

‘I’m so glad you rang,’ she shouted above the rattle of the engine.

‘But surprised?’

‘No. Why?’

‘It’s so soon after the party. But there were things I didn’t have a chance to say.’

He turned into a street off the Bayswater Road and parked in front of the shell of a once handsome early Victorian terrace. A
muddy crater had cut the road in half. On the other side, Mary could see a house belonging to a friend of her mother’s. Mrs Proctor kept a large pram in her hall full of papers and clothes and a strongbox of jewellery, just enough of her life to wheel to the shelter. But she was fortunate; until now her home had been spared.

They walked south-east across the park, away from the hum of traffic and the Serpentine with families and spooning couples ambling at its edge.

‘Did Winn tell you?’ Lindsay asked. ‘Security has decided that none of our codes has been compromised, and there’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all, it’s just gossip.’

‘No, he didn’t tell me.’

‘But you don’t sound surprised.’

‘No.’

‘You know, they didn’t investigate it properly,’ he said with a little shake of the head. ‘They didn’t even speak to my prisoner, the wireless operator Zier.’

Mary said nothing.

The Royal Artillery had built a wire fence across the path to protect a battery of anti-aircraft guns and they were forced on to the grass, through the shaking daffodils.

‘Did I give the impression at the party that I was suffering from a conflict of loyalties?’ Lindsay asked suddenly.

‘Your cousin Martin, the U-boat officer?’

‘I want you to know, he despises Hitler.’

‘He’s fighting for him.’

‘He’s fighting for Germany.’

‘It amounts to the same thing,’ she said with slight irritation.

Lindsay shook his head: ‘Really, no.’

She stopped walking and turned away from him a little, hands buried deep in her coat pockets, shoes and stockings wet with dew the April sun was too weak to burn away.

‘This war, you know, I believe we’re fighting a new darkness,’ she said with quiet feeling. ‘Something evil. Really evil.’

‘Your brother said you were religious.’

She turned back sharply to look him in the eye: ‘I haven’t taken
vows. But yes, I feel it’s my Christian duty to do something, don’t you?’

The question was flung like a gauntlet.

‘Perhaps my cousin feels the same,’ said Lindsay tartly. ‘German bishops say it’s a sin not to fight for the Volk.’

‘My goodness, you do sound confused.’

‘How patronising.’

They stared at each other for a frosty moment, then she reached across and touched his sleeve: ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.’

He smiled at her: ‘I haven’t forgotten – you like to be direct. But don’t apologise, we’re as bad as each other. And I’m rather protective of my cousin.’

Small white clouds were rolling east over the city now, their cold shadows scudding across the grass. They found the path again and walked on at a brisker pace. Lindsay asked Mary about her family and university and the years she had spent studying archaeology: ‘I can’t imagine you in a muddy hole.’

‘I’ll let you have my paper on Norse burial rites.’

He laughed. ‘Background for the new dark age.’

Mary hesitated, then said, half in jest: ‘My brother may have told you I’m an academic bluestocking. I deny it.’

‘He said men were frightened of you, and now I understand why.’

‘Don’t tease me. James’s friends are frightened of any woman who has something to say for herself but you must stick up for me. We’re both outsiders, thrown into the same den of lions.’

‘Then it is my duty to protect you.’

‘Duty?’ She looked at him steadily, chin slightly raised, daring him to catch and hold her eye. It was an unmistakable, thrilling challenge.

And he held her gaze: ‘Duty? No. Not a duty.’

It was not until the following weekend that they were able to see each other again. By then the Germans had bombed the Admiralty, forcing daylight into dim, remote corridors, shaking even the sub-basement of the Citadel. Yugoslavia capitulated and Greece was on the point of doing the same. Lindsay took Mary to the Coconut Grove night club.

There was an expensive air of hysterical gaiety, with Society girls
wrapped around young men in Savile Row suits. The Latin Orchestra was very fine but there was almost no room to dance. They sat at a table sipping martinis, upright and self-conscious and too far apart for conversation. Lindsay said something she took to be an invitation:

‘Yes, if you like.’

‘I didn’t ask you to dance,’ he shouted. ‘We can’t, can we, it’s too crowded?’

He looked ill at ease, unhappy. ‘What’s the matter?’ She reached across for his hand: ‘Come and sit next to me.’

He squeezed in beside her, shoulder to shoulder, and she took his hand again, its palm a little rough and dry: ‘Are you all right?’

‘I haven’t been to a place like this for a long time.’

‘We can go?’

‘No, no, it’s fine.’

He smiled and raised her hand to his lips.

Later, she floated home, his arm around her, drunk with warm anticipation. They kissed in the blackout shadows at the end of Lord North Street, quiet, deliberate, intense kisses. And he pressed himself against her, breathed the scent of her hair and felt the weight of her head against his shoulder.

‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ he whispered.

At last they broke apart and Lindsay held her hands tightly and bent to rest his forehead against hers: ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to see you for a while.’

‘Tired of me already?’

He laughed and kissed her forehead: ‘I’m meeting prisoners in Liverpool, the crew of the
U-112
and then there are the interrogations.’

‘Winn’s very interested in the commander, Jürgen Mohr. He’s quite a catch.’

‘Perhaps it was your brother’s idea to send me to Liverpool, to save his sister?’

‘Perhaps he’s right.’

MAY 1941

MOST SECRET

It is of the utmost importance that the loyalty and integrity of any officer engaged in this work should be beyond question and that their discretion should be of the highest order. The closest enquiries should be made into the political past and views of prospective interrogating officers.

Admiralty NID 11
Notes on the Interrogation of Prisoners of War, 1941

10

HMS White
Liverpool

I

t was the old
White
’s finest hour. She swept into Liverpool in a triumphant cloud of steam, decked in crew and bunting. Her captain, Lieutenant-Commander Jack Thompson, was enjoying the spectacle from his ship’s open bridge. The brisk river breeze cut to the skin but he was too proud to care. He reached into his pocket and touched the rough edge of the signal paper.

From the First Sea Lord. The Prime Minister has asked me to pass on heartfelt congratulations to the captain and crew of HMS White. Keep up the good work
.

The destroyer came to rest beneath the great brick bond warehouses of the Albert Dock and up and over went her ropes. There was already a disorderly murmur below, excited voices in the for’ard mess, whistling and singing, as if the ship were haunted by a mutinous ghost. The crew was preparing to celebrate ashore with beer at the Roebuck and dancing at the Grafton Ballroom.

‘The local intelligence officer is here to talk about the transfer of the prisoners, sir.’ The ship’s first lieutenant was at Thompson’s side. ‘And some chaps from the press would like to take pictures.’

Thompson turned with a satisfied smile to the quay where the newspapermen had been joined by sailors and dockyard workers eager for a glimpse of the famous U-boat commander.

‘Very good, Number One, I’ll see the local IO in my cabin.’

The captain of the
White
was a deck officer of twenty years experience and it was his fixed view that only those who had seen service at sea were worthy of the King’s commission. It was quite apparent to
him that the plump, shiny-faced lieutenant who shuffled into his cabin a short time later had not.

‘Lieutenant Cooper, sir.’

Thompson looked the intelligence officer up and down with barely concealed scorn. ‘Please, sit down, Lieutenant,’ he said briskly, ‘It’s rather cramped in here but no doubt you’re used to that.’

Lieutenant Tim Cooper sank with some relief into the chair he had been offered: ‘The news of the
U-112
cheered us up no end, sir.’

‘Good.’

Thompson slid some closely typed sheets of paper across the table to him. It was a list of the prisoners, and a few general observations had been scribbled beside the names of the officers. ‘I don’t think there’s anything of great interest there, but that’s for you and your colleagues to judge, isn’t it?’

‘Has Mohr been co-operative, sir?’

Thompson stared pointedly at Cooper for a few seconds to indicate his displeasure, then said with careful emphasis: ‘Captain Mohr, Lieutenant. Captain Mohr behaved in an exemplary manner and we treated him accordingly.’

A sheet of paper slipped unnoticed from Cooper’s knees to the deck. He had the anxious air of someone with something on his broad chest but wisdom or fear got the better of him.

On the deck below, Kapitän zur See Jürgen Mohr could hear the stamp of soldiers’ boots and the orders barked at his crew as they were led along the ship’s side and down the gangway. He had been locked in the wardroom with the
White
’s silver trophies. The officers of
U-112
were standing stiffly before him.

‘They will be coming for us in a minute.’

Mohr’s voice was surprisingly high-pitched for such a tall man. He was too tall ever to be comfortable in a U-boat, lean, older-looking than his thirty–two years, his face weathered brown and creased.

‘We’ve spoken often of the days to come,’ he said with quiet authority, ‘but I must remind you again. We still have a part to play in this war. Carry on fighting for your Fatherland.’

He had warned them time and again: be silent, be strong. They
would be separated and questioned. It was vital they kept their discipline and the details of the mission locked tight. The British would work away at the smallest crack, prising it open until they knew all there was to know of the
112
’s mission.

There were voices in the passage and someone began to turn the handle of the wardroom door. Mohr got to his feet and picked up his white commander’s cap: ‘Remember, do your duty. Be vigilant. Victory is certain.’

11

I

t was still coppery bright when the sirens began to wail again, the last of the sun diffused in the warm haze of smoke rising from the city’s smouldering streets. Within minutes, a ragged tide of humanity was surging along Lime Street: travellers with suitcases, servicemen with their girlfriends, the very old and the very young. No one panicked or protested. They moved with hunched, weary resignation. Lindsay stepped from the shelter of a doorway into the street and looked up to a skyline of broken brick pillars and roofless gables. Liverpool was being stripped to its core. The sirens began to die away. Lime Street was almost deserted now. He turned and followed the stragglers to the corner of Hanover Street where a patient queue was filing down steps into a large underground shelter. A stout old woman hobbled past him on swollen feet, a basket of food on one arm, a bundle of blankets beneath the other. It was going to be oppressively close inside the shelter. Lindsay lit a cigarette and walked a little way along the empty street. Beyond a telltale mound of brick and broken plaster he could just make out the domeless silhouette of the old Customs House. The city was black now and almost silent as if it were holding its breath.

He had been five hours late into Lime Street, the platforms lined with ‘trekkers’, the anxious and the homeless waiting for trains to carry them to the safety of draughty church halls in the suburbs. By the time Lindsay had fought his way out of the station it was after six o’clock. But he was pleased he had missed the
White
’s quayside welcome, the little triumph orchestrated for the newsreel cameras. The hacks would have been given their instructions. Mohr was certainly a catch. A celebrity commander never out of the papers, a holder of Germany’s highest decoration – the Knight’s Cross – famous for his dash and style, or what passed for it in the Reich.

From the west, the distant drone of approaching aircraft, slow and heavy. Searchlights began to sweep in sinister arcs above him and soon
the horizon was peppered with the smoky flash of anti-aircraft shrapnel. He stood and watched as if in a dream. The first enemy flares were dripping on to the rooftops of the city, followed moments later by what sounded like a rattle of iron bedsteads thrown from a great height. There was a flash and a tongue of flame – incendiaries.

Then he heard someone shouting at him from across the street.

‘What’s the matter with you . . .?’ The man’s words were lost in a rising scream.

Lindsay instinctively hunched his shoulders. His feet were knocked from under him and his mouth was full of dirt. He looked up. A policeman was gesticulating wildly: ‘Run you bloody fool.’ Suddenly aware of the mad danger he had placed himself in, he covered the distance to the shelter at breakneck speed. He was just feet from the entrance when the ground rose, throwing him forwards against the sandbags. For a moment everything was a blur. Then someone was pulling his arm, dragging him down rubble-strewn steps towards the door.

‘It’s all right,’ he shouted as he scrambled to his feet.