That Old Black Magic

by Cathi Unsworth

  Standing on the tarmac in front of the aircraft, he felt the last vestiges of confidence in his ability to carry out his orders draining away. The Heinkel HE 111 looked like a thing of nightmare. It had been painted black for its mission: to fly across the North Sea and drop Karl in the part of England that most resembled the land he was leaving, the marshy lowlands of East Anglia dug out of the swamp by Dutchmen three centuries before. Karl was to parachute, under the cover of darkness, to a co-ordinate on a map called Bury Fen. It was not a name that inspired confidence. He touched the amulet around his neck as he followed Captain Gartenfeld, head of the secret airborne division, up the steps and into the bowels of the sinister craft. He knew for sure now that, at heart, he was a coward. His fate had been written in darkness all along.

  They were nearly two hours into their flight, himself and Gartenfeld in the gunner’s gondola that hung below the fuselage, when the navigator’s communication crackled over from the cockpit, announcing they had made it into enemy territory. Gartenfeld slapped him on the back and relief coursed through Karl’s veins. Throughout the whole, swaying, juddering journey, with the cold gradually seeping through the fur-lined flying suit he was wearing, the English-cut tweeds beneath that formed his disguise, to the very marrow of his bones, Karl had been expecting a burst of enemy fire; a desperate battle to stay airborne followed by the inevitable, sickening plunge into the North Sea.

  The respite from that paranoia was short-lived. Now came the nausea-inducing prospect of the jump. Karl had never parachuted before and, despite the training he had received for the job he was about to do, a trial run was deemed out of the question. Although he had lived by his wits for most of his forty-three years, leaping from an aircraft thousands of feet over a strange and hostile land in the middle of the night was not the sort of test of nerve Karl would have willingly challenged himself to.

  As if reading his mind, the captain turned towards him, the traces of a smile on his features that was not reflected in the cold blue of his eyes. Gartenfeld had had no say in the selection of this agent and it was obvious he resented it.

  “About ten minutes until you make your jump, Kohl,” he said. “Let’s check through your kit once more, shall we? Make sure that everything is as it should be.”

  Karl had been issued with a compass, a set of maps and codes; a wallet stuffed with over £400 in English notes, a bogus ID card and ration book; a revolver and box of ammunition; a helmet, torch and spade and an attaché case containing a wireless set powerful enough to transmit over 500 miles, which he would use to make contact with his accomplice once he had safely landed.

  “Now, let’s make sure everything is secure,” the officer continued, as if addressing a small child. Her face flashed through his mind again as Gartenfeld redid the straps binding his kitbag to the front of him, the parachute to his back. He pictured her sprawled out on black silk sheets, the glow of candles on her naked skin, smiling her gap-toothed smile and winking at him. He saw the flash of a ceremonial dagger, the smell of burning hair and herbs, the ceremony she had performed to bind them together for eternity, back in Hamburg, back before the war…

  It was no time to be having such thoughts. He blinked rapidly, forcing her image away, as the aeroplane began to descend, taking his stomach with it.

  “All is good,” the captain nodded and consulted his watch. “Of course, you know what to do if you are captured, don’t you?” His eyes narrowed.

  Before Karl could answer, there was a crackle of static and the navigator’s voice carried over the engines’ roar: “Approaching target, sir. Get ready.”

  Gartenfeld moved swiftly to open the down-facing window. An icy blast rose up to meet them. As Karl knelt down before it, for the first time in many years, he found himself offering up a prayer to a god he had thought he had abandoned long ago and wondering if He had chosen to wash His hands of this sorrowful sinner now kneeling before Him. Karl could see nothing but blackness below.

  “Now!” the captain commanded.

  But Karl remained frozen to the spot, his gloved hands holding onto the bottom of the exit window for dear life. As if he had been expecting this, Gartenfeld gave him a hefty push. Karl lurched forward but managed to bend sideways, so that he was blocking the hole with the width of his own body. As he did so, his right foot caught against the side of the opening and twisted. A vicious stab of pain seized the joint and ran up his leg.

  “Dummkopf !” the captain pushed again, forcing him to cleave into the gap while uttering increasingly vicious curses that were swept up by the wind roaring in Karl’s ears and up his nose, knocking the breath out of him. Gravity, abetted by Gartenfeld, did its work and he pitched forward.

  “Don’t forget to pull the cord, Kohl,” was the last thing he heard before the captain closed the hatch doors and Karl plummeted into the blackness.

  “Clara!” he screamed into the void.

  When Karl opened his eyes again, he thought he was in heaven, surrounded by a bright, white light. Then the pain in his ankle coursed like wildfire up his leg and torso, through his neck to the receptors in his brain and he realised that the pure white waves billowing around him were actually the silks of his unfurled parachute. He must have passed out the moment it opened, as he could remember nothing further than that point. It was only the kitbag strapped to his chest that was keeping his face from contact with the snow-topped furrow of hard earth on which he had landed.

  Gingerly, he rolled onto his uninjured left side, trying to think what he should do next. His hands were stiff with cold but he could still move his fingers inside his gloves, so he set to the task of trying to unbuckle himself from the harnesses attached to his silk cocoon. In tight spots in the past he had found ways of blocking out pain when he had to, and so it was he began to murmur the words to Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt while he concentrated on this task. It wasn’t until he had succeeded in freeing himself from his kitbag and the parachute that he remembered why he was singing it – the ballad she had been performing the first time he laid eyes on her. The realisation jolted him back to reality, and for a moment he thought he might pass out again with the pain. He shut his eyes, concentrating on his breathing, until he was back in control of himself.

  Lifting his lids again, he tried to take stock of his surroundings. The yards of fabric were replaced by another layer of infinite whiteness – of snow-covered fields stretching into the wide, low horizon, broken only here and there by thin rows of trees and huddles of farm buildings. A red sun was beginning to emerge from behind that long line, winking its colour into the greyness of the sky. It was bitterly cold.

  A skein of wild geese flew over him, their sudden caterwauling bringing a jolt of panic to his chest. The captain’s words about being captured boomed back into his brain. He was a sitting target out here.

  Gritting his teeth, he crawled onto all fours and tried to balance himself on his kitbag to see if he could stand. It was no good. Even if he could manage to get upright, there was no way he could walk on this ankle: a mere touch was agony. The best solution he could think of was to pack it with snow and see if that would numb it sufficiently so that he wouldn’t feel it any more. But, by the time that happened, he would likely have died of cold.

  A snowflake drifted down from the heavy clouds above and settled on his lashes. Karl made no move to cuff it away. Coming from the direction of the farmhouses to the east, he could hear a distant barking. As a second flake fell, and then a third and a fourth, he could discern the outlines of two figures coming his way.

  He felt inside his coat for his revolver.

  “He’s found it,” said Charlie Baldock, as the Jack Russell streaked down the lane in front of them, guttural curses flying from his canine throat.

  “Whatever it be,” replied Percy Clifton, the owner of Hollow Heap Farm, the collection of buildings that Karl had seen in the distance. Both he and his companion, from the neighbouring Froghall Farm, had been woken in the night by the al
arm cries of cock pheasants echoing across the coppices that dotted the fens. Over the last six months they had come to recognise what this heralded. The pre-dawn chorus was a prelude to the throbbing woom-woom of Heinkel engines in the skies above.

  The craft had passed over them without any attendant explosions, but that hadn’t settled Percy’s dog. At first light, the farmer and his neighbour strode off on reconnaissance, letting the terrier lead them to what had been worrying him.

  “Oh, look at that,” said Charlie, straightening the twelve-bore he had been carrying cocked over his elbow.

  The dog had gone straight underneath the gate. As the two men stared out onto the field, they could see a dark lump in the middle of the furrows. Only with the snow falling so thickly, neither of them could quite work out what it was.

  Until the gunshot rang out.

  Karl fell backwards onto the snow, tears rolling down his cheeks. In the end, he hadn’t had the courage to put the gun to his own head and had fired it instead into the air so that the people he could see coming towards him would have no chance at all of mistaking him. Perhaps what the British would do to him now would be worse than the quick dispatch the captain had demanded of him. The blood-curdling sounds emitting from the small, brown-and-white dog hurtling towards him suggested that it would. But mercifully, he had blacked out again before the creature’s hot breath touched his face.

  “What d’you reckon that is?” Percy held the whimpering terrier back by his collar.

  “That’s a German, in’t it?” Charlie considered, prodding the inert form with the barrels of his gun. “Must have dropped him over here last night, Perce. Looks like he’s gone and broke his leg and all. That in’t half at a funny angle.”

  “What should I do then?” Percy considered. “Fetch the Home Guard?”

  “That’s right.” Charlie nodded. “Go down Dovehouse and get Harry Godfrey. He’ll know what to do. I’ll keep an eye on him ’til you get back.”

  “D’you want to keep the dog?” offered Percy. “Case there’s another one of ’em lurkin’ about?”

  Harry Godfrey telephoned the police station in Ramsey and gathered his First Aid kit before he set off. When he reached Charlie, he saw that his friend had used the parachute silk to insulate the German against the snow. Not that Charlie had any love for the enemy, of course, but he thought he’d better try to keep him alive in case he was on some kind of secret mission that the government needed to know about.

  Harry congratulated his quick thinking and set about binding the man’s bad leg into a splint, a process not made easy by the fact that his patient kept lapsing in and out of consciousness, writhing and muttering indecipherable things in his own language. Still, he had done a good enough job by the time Percy came back with his horse and cart for them to be able to hoist him up on a couple of planks and transport him, and the kitbag they had found with him, down to Ramsey police station.

  Sergeant Ernie Pottle and Harry went through the German’s belongings and found all the evidence they needed to call the spycatcher, Detective Sergeant Thomas Mills, of the Huntingdonshire County Constabulary. Then Sergeant Pottle called the local doctor.

  The doctor found the prisoner’s right leg to be broken at the ankle and gave him painkillers and a fresh dressing, with a proper splint, that would keep him as comfortable as possible until it could be set. The suspect was still slipping in and out of consciousness, but the doctor was able to tell the others that the language he was speaking appeared to be a mixture of French and German, so he thought perhaps he was Belgian.

  DS Mills arrived as the doctor was leaving. He studied the maps found in the prisoner’s kitbag and noticed that there were pencil rings drawn around a nearby large RAF station and its smaller satellite, situated close to the field where the prisoner had landed. Further to the west, he found another pencil ringed around the market town of Royston. Then he turned his attention to the attaché case. He found another item in there, previously overlooked. Half a German sausage wrapped inside waxed paper and placed in a sock.

  The next time Karl woke up, he was lying on his cot in the Ramsey police station cells. DS Mills was sitting beside him.

  “I hear you can speak French as well as German,” the detective said. “How d’you fancy giving English a try? Only, I wouldn’t mind having a chat.”

  Karl looked down from him to his newly dressed leg. The pain had subsided to little more than a dull ache. He was as warm and comfortable as it was possible to be in his condition. Things could, apparently, be worse than being captured by the British.

  As if to confirm this, Mills took a cigarette case out of his jacket pocket, flicked it open and offered it across.

  “What do you want to know?” said Karl.

  Following their conversation, the detective went off to make a phone call and another policeman brought Karl something to eat – bully beef in two thick slices of farmhouse bread. Karl hadn’t realised how ravenous he was until he bit into it. When Mills came back with a mug of tea and more cigarettes, he had rethought his situation. While he enjoyed these pleasures, the detective asked a few more questions about the marks on the maps and who he was to contact with the radio.

  No longer delirious, Karl was deliberately vague in his replies. He felt the information he had to impart should only be heard by someone higher up, agreeable though this officer seemed to be. So he asked if he might be able to talk to someone from MI5. Mills went away again. When he came back, his expression was graver than before.

  “I hope you’re well enough rested,” he said, “because I’ve now got to take you up to London.”

  “To speak with MI5?” asked Karl.

  DS Mills nodded. “You’ve got your wish,” he said.

  2

  HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE

  Sunday, 9 February 1941

  Detective Sergeant Ross Spooner stood on the west side of Hammersmith Bridge, staring upriver at the Thames. The wind on his back was bitter, scratching icy fingers through the woollen scarf around his neck, blowing his thick, red hair out of its brilliantined shape.

  Icicles hung from the pointed parapets and heraldic castings of Joseph Bazalgette’s elaborate green and gold construction; a fresh dusting of snow lay across the rooftops to his right and on the tree-lined pathway along the south bank of the river where a flotilla of barrage balloons listed against their tethers. Yet the sun was winking at him through a crack in the clouds and he couldn’t keep the smile off his face.

  Last night, he had received a telephone call from the Chief. Now he was back in London.

  Spooner had spent the past five months working from the ancestral seat of the Prime Minister – albeit in one of three huts in the forecourt, rather than inside Blenheim Palace itself – deep in the Oxfordshire countryside. A far cry from the place where he had first encountered the man he was waiting for. But when he had first volunteered to do war work and been selected to transfer from Scotland Yard to MI5, the organisation had taken up residence at Wormwood Scrubs, the fortress-like Victorian prison that brooded over the ragged stretch of common from whence it took its cursed name.

  Spooner had been working on files of subversives, suspected Nazi sympathisers, secret agents and potential fifth columnists, all of whom belonged to networks of often interconnecting secret societies. His job was to shadow them at meetings around the capital, where men dressed in jodhpurs and black shirts stood in front of black and red banners with lightning-flash designs and made shrill addresses bent on stirring up hatred. Spooner, cutting as forgettable a figure as possible, would listen into the conversations going on around him, join the dots between speakers and audience and assess how immediate a danger they posed. He was ideal for this task: he had always been a listener, rather than a talker, careful to blend in with the background with his slicked-down hair and habitual grey trilby and suit. The oval, wire-rimmed spectacles that sat across his nose further served the anonymity of his features.

  The reports he made were forw
arded to the upper echelons of the Secret Service, who would decide whether to detain the suspects he had been tailing. He never confronted one himself, or attended subsequent interrogations, lest his cover be blown. His apparent blandness was, in fact, his strength, enabling him to travel unnoticed through fraught and paranoid worlds. But the documents he prepared were the opposite, rich in detail.

  Spooner hadn’t been doing this work for very long before he was joined one afternoon in the former cell that served as his office by a very tall, well-built man in his late thirties, wearing a dark green Harris Tweed suit. His face was dominated by a bulbous nose and pale blue eyes, overhung by dark eyebrows that matched a thick head of hair. His lips were clamped around the stem of a large half-bent Billiard pipe. He carried a brown trilby in one hand and a thick grey folder in the other.

  “Ross Spooner?” he enquired, in a baritone that completed his avuncular demeanour. “I gather you’re the man to go to for Warlocks, Witches and Wizards?”

  The subversives Spooner had been tasked to follow were those with occult and mystical leanings – of which there were many. The Nordic League was rife with worshippers of Wotan; the Right Club held gnostics and former members of the Golden Dawn; there were Pan’s people within the Kibbo Kift, and interconnecting Venn diagrams full of White Russian exiles, bright young socialites and society grand dames for whom a nightly spin on the Ouija board was nothing out of the ordinary.

  It turned out that his visitor had a keen interest in these Venn diagrams himself. He explained he was studying the links between the occult philosophies of the Nazis and their followers, then spent the next four hours getting Spooner to talk him through the most interesting Warlocks, Witches and Wizards – or Triple-Us, as he dubbed them – contained in the grey folder he carried. The air became so blue with smoke that, to anyone who had pulled back the hatch in Spooner’s door and peered in, it would have looked as though there was a full-blown séance in progress, the air swirling with ectoplasm.