Death Order

by Jan Needle

  They were down the pass, they were on the last long road to Penrith. They were closer to their parting.

  ‘And will you come back?’ she said. ‘When you’ve…will you come back?’

  ‘Will you want to see me?’ he replied. ‘When I’ve killed this old man? Will you understand?’

  After a few moments, he said: ‘They couldn’t get enough of it, that’s what hurts me most. Death squads. I don’t understand it, Jane. I don’t.’

  As they pulled onto the car park, in front of Penrith station, he said: ‘And when Johnnie gets a little older, I’ll have lost him, too. It’s a bastard, isn’t it?’

  Jane was crying at the steering wheel as he disappeared.

  When Bill returned from Germany, his wife was out of hospital. She had gone to her parents’ home in Potters Bar, and John was with her. Bill had been given leave by Silversmith, with no time limit ‘as long as he behaved himself,’ and it was up to him to do what he felt best. The two men had shaken hands in London, as if they were old friends.

  ‘You said I could finish, if I wanted to,’ Bill reminded him. ‘Is that still true?’

  The officer shrugged.

  ‘What would you do though, boy?’ He had affected a Bristol accent. ‘I ain’t got room for no assistants in my electricals!’

  ‘I said,’ repeated Bill, ‘can I resign?’

  ‘If you want to. I suppose. Well, you could ask. But everybody thinks they’ve done right by you, now. They assume you’ll have seen the blessed light, realized what a prat you were making of yourself. Give it some time and thought. What would you live on? You’ve got the wife to look after, the little boy. Service housing may not be wonderful, but it’s free.’

  ‘Service housing drove her crazy in the first place. And me. I’d rather be in hell than go back to an Army estate.’

  They were standing in Gower Street, near the office, and it was drizzling. The air was wet, laden with diesel smoke, foul. Silversmith rubbed his head.

  ‘I’m getting wet,’ he said. ‘My bald spot. I hate that. Look, Bill, take your time to think it out. There are worse jobs. You can get taken off the killing, probably. There’s not so much of it in Ireland, now, it’s not so fashionable.’

  ‘And Hess is dead.’

  ‘Yeah, finally. At long last. I’m sorry about that, it was a shitty operation, but it had to happen. You brought it on yourself. Go and see your wife. Think it over. You’ve got my number.’

  They shook again, and the bald man turned and walked away. Bill breathed in deeply, diesel fumes, and rather hoped they’d choke him.

  Liz’s mother and father were quite old, and they’d lost whatever feeling they might have had for Wiley long ago. They had watched their daughter lose her youth, her spring, her gloss of innocence and they had blamed it on the grim determination with which their taciturn son-in-law had pursued his career. Like almost everybody else, they knew he was in intelligence, and like almost everybody else they had no idea what that entailed. This latest, great disaster in their daughter’s life had left them barely able to be civil to him. He had been invited to the house only because there seemed nothing else to do. Liz blamed him for everything, it appeared, but she was not entirely coherent. Johnnie wanted his father back, he missed him, so they agreed. The strain in the comfortable house was almost tangible.

  Liz was in bed, and she was on heavy medication. Her hair was long and stringy, her cheeks hollow, her eyes vacant. She dribbled. The idea that Army doctors had done this to her, that it had been deliberately induced, he found impossible to sustain, face to face. The family doctor, an old, stooped man, said she had had a breakdown, simply. Wasn’t that what he, her husband, had been told? But he had spoken to her parents, he was a lifelong acquaintance, he had suspicions about Bill and warned him that his wife needed rest, that nothing should be allowed to upset her or disturb her. The moment she expressed a desire for Bill to leave her, the room, the home, the area, he should comply. Otherwise, the doctor added bravely, he would be forced to order him to go.

  Johnnie, now that he was back with his mother, was lost. In her lucid moments – her quasi-lucid moments – she had told him things about Bill, made accusations. She had said all this was his fault, that he had made her ill deliberately, that he wanted to break up the home, that there were women. Johnnie treated Bill like a stranger in the house, he read the signals from his grandparents. In his eyes, at bedtime when Bill went to him, there was fear and doubt, but he would not put it into words. That was the worst thing, it filled his father with the pain of impotence: he would not tell him what was wrong.

  They went for a drive once, then a walk. They went to a wood and found a pond. It was a lovely day, and John seemed happy, almost relaxed. But in the end, Bill could not resist questioning him, even when a look of fear flashed across his face.

  ‘Don’t, dad,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘But why?’ said Bill. ‘It’s nothing difficult I’m asking you. I’m staying with you and your mother. I love you both. Don’t you believe me? Do you think something different?’

  Johnnie hunched his shoulders, but did not respond.

  ‘Johnnie! For God’s sake! How can I know what’s inside your head if you won’t talk to me? How?’

  His son burst into tears.

  Five

  It was two months before Bill met Jane Heywood, and she was back in Oxford. He did not ring before he went, because he could not imagine what he would say to her. He could not imagine, more importantly, that she would agree to see him. He had his own car now, an old Ford Sierra. He no longer had a Browning underneath his arm.

  The house was quiet as he stood at the front door, but there was a light on in the back. It did not occur to him that she might have someone with her, and she did not. He heard her feet on the carpeted passage, heard her turn the catch. He was caught, illuminated, as she switched the hall light on.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

  She was wearing jeans and a big, chunky brown sweater. Her hair was cut much shorter, she had slippers on. Bill followed her down the passage, into the back part of the knocked-through room. It was curtained off from the front, to beat the autumn chill. The electric fire was on.

  Jane had been working, sitting at her table. There were piles of books, pens, highlighters. Three empty cups, a dirty plate. Bill Wiley felt like crying, he was stabbed by an awful sense of loss.

  She faced him; a brittle smile.

  ‘You did it, then. I read it in the papers.’

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘They didn’t make me do the actual job. I wasn’t in the prison.’

  ‘Big deal,’ she said.

  Bill looked around for somewhere to sit. The sofa was in the curtained part. All the chairs were buried in books. Jane gestured.

  ‘Chuck some books off. Do you want a coffee? Oh Bill, I fucking hate you.’

  Before he could respond, she had slammed into the kitchen. Bill cleared a seat, gazed at the electric fire. The room smelled sweet, smelled lovely, smelled like home. Jane returned. He took a mug.

  ‘And?’ she said. She went and sat at the table. She put her coffee on a pile of papers, not caring about the stain. ‘Are you any the wiser? Did they tell you why they had to kill him? Do you know?’

  Bill sipped his coffee.

  ‘I imagine they were afraid of what he might say. Gorbachev was going to let him out. His family had been told in secret he could go. So had the Germans. We must have been afraid of what he’d say.’

  ‘What could he say?’ She was angry. ‘If it wasn’t Hess, what could he say?’

  Bill had thought for hours. Hundreds of hours. Little else.

  ‘That he wasn’t Hess, I suppose. That we’d locked an innocent man up for all those years, deliberately. That we’d made him stand trial in Nuremberg. Not just that he couldn’t be a war criminal because he spent the war in England, but he wasn’t even him. Maybe he knew we’d murdered Hess. He mu
st have known he was dead, otherwise the whole thing would have been a farce. Pretending he was Hess if the real one might turn up at any time.’

  ‘A farce?’ Her voice was bitter, furious. ‘But no one would have believed him, would they?’

  Bill said: ‘If they let him out he could have proved he wasn’t Hess, couldn’t he? The bullet wounds. Dental records. He may even have had a family of his own. Not Hess’s. He may have had a son he lost, as well.’

  There was a misery in his voice that she could not miss. It soothed her anger. She drank.

  Bill continued: ‘There were no pictures of the post mortem. The British wouldn’t allow them. Edward must have been amused. They won’t release the prisoner’s dental charts, either. They never have done. I’ve spoken to the people, I still have some friends left. The official line will be that there were scars, but it will be lies. There weren’t any. Just a scar he made when he tried to stab himself once, or pretended to. Two little marks well below his lung. They started pulling down the place while I was still in Germany. The evidence. It was so blatant. That’s why I said a farce, I’m sorry. The whole thing was a farce, from the day he landed till the day he died. The day we killed him.’

  ‘You killed him,’ she said, defiantly. Bill nodded, looking at her eyes.

  ‘If you like. I’m not in the service any more. Not in the Army, or the SIS. I’m unlikely to be done for murder, though. I’m sorry about that.’

  He sounded as if he meant it. Jane stared at him for confirmation.

  She said: ‘What if you confessed?’

  He moved his hand, palm down, a very small gesture.

  ‘I’ll be a double-glazing salesman soon,’ he said. ‘Or carrying wages for a security firm. I could confess till I was black in the face. Nobody would listen.’ A smile touched his lips. ‘Nobody would be allowed to. I really would be black in the face, I’ve got a couple of friends, a colleague. He’d be amused to get the job. How’s Edward? Erica?’

  ‘Not so good. Well, Erica isn’t. She’s had an operation on her jaw, she’s in a lot of pain, can hardly talk. Edward’s OK. He was very depressed after you’d left. By the implications. I think he sees too many parallels between the two of you, what you’ve had to do. And even you and Hess, the prisoner.’

  ‘The prisoner? I don’t get that.’

  ‘No. I didn’t at first. But Edward sees all of you as being part of a continuum. Horn, or whoever, was forced to do something absurd, bizarre, because it was deemed necessary by someone. Edward was forced to carry on the process. He interrogated the real man, in the basement of that club. He makes no secret of it now. He carried on the lie.’

  ‘Did he kill him?’

  Jane stood. She opened the back curtain and looked out into the dark garden. Only so that she could turn her back on Bill.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He says he didn’t. He says he interrogated him for two days, but there was no violence. Sensory deprivation, a bit of subtle torture, bright lights, no sleep, but no Gestapo stuff.’

  ‘No drugs, like the double got?’ said Bill, with acid in his voice. ‘No “minor, English, torture”?’

  She kept her back to him.

  ‘Edward said the Gestapo tactic was the coup de grâce. After he’d been interrogated, he was taken to another room and shot. Edward said he wasn’t there, but he was told. Hess could not believe it was going to happen, in England; that was funny, wasn’t it? He’d come to England because he admired it so much, he’d been born in Alexandria under British rule. He’d come from Germany because he thought Nazism had become corrupted, the thugs, the bully-boys had taken over. He wasn’t sure that Churchill was a man who could accept a concept so large as peace, but he never expected he would be interrogated then disposed of. That was why he’d run from Germany. Aunt Erica was in the room when he told me all this. He’d never admitted it before. It was his confession. For you, he said. He owed it to you.’

  ‘What did she say? Erica?’

  Jane turned into the room. Her face was strained, her eyes bright.

  ‘She said she knew. She said she’d always known. She cried for both of you. And for Hess and Horn. Edward said they gave their lives, they risked their lives, to try to end the war before the bulk killing began, the massive slaughter, before the thing went into the realms of screaming insanity. And one of them was killed and the other one was put on trial for war crimes and thrown into jail to rot. He had to be, otherwise people would have wondered why. We Britons just don’t do such things, do we? It was quite a cry-in, actually. Everyone in tears.’

  She walked past the table, closer to him. She was composed. She smiled, tightly.

  ‘No more tears for me,’ she said. ‘Erica made an interesting point. She said at least Horn got a son. He waited a damn long time to see him, in case Frau Hess recognized him as an imposter, but he got a son.’ She gave a sudden shout of laughter, a bark, that set up an echo in something, it resonated back. ‘He wasn’t allowed to touch him, mark you. He hugged him once, the son, in 1982, a foreign guard allowed it. The British formally complained. The British.’

  A big diesel grumbled past outside. The front window rattled.

  ‘How’s your son? How’s little Johnnie? How’s your wife?’

  ‘It could be worse. Liz is recovering. She’s up and out these days, at home.’

  ‘Where’s home? I suppose you’re still together?’

  ‘What can I say? Yes we are and no we aren’t. Both true. She had a full-scale breakdown, I can’t remember what you knew, it all seems months ago. She was in a mental hospital, they let her out, she went back to her parents. I lived there for a while, then got a flat, visited. She bad-mouthed me all the time, blamed me for everything, told Johnnie I was a whoremonger and a murderer, more or less. Fair comment, some would say.’

  ‘What did Johnnie say?’

  ‘He didn’t understand, I suppose. He didn’t understand the words and he wouldn’t understand the concepts. His mother told him I’d killed a very old man, a gentleman I think she said. I don’t think he believed that could be possible.’

  Jane made a noise in her throat.

  ‘Well, he knew about the whores, though. The lady friends. Me and Veronica, at least.’

  ‘He didn’t like Veronica so he believed the worst maybe. He liked you. He asked me last week where you were. If we’d ever see you again.’

  Jane sat down. She fiddled with her cup.

  ‘Will it work out? Will he get over it? Will you stay with Liz?’

  ‘Great questions. No ideas. I’ll stay with her if she needs me. There’s things I’d rather do, but I will. I used to think she was my problem, but now I know. I’m her problem, it was me. It’s been a long slow drag, but she can talk to me now, she can bear me in the same room as her. I think there’s hope in Johnnie’s head. I think one day he’ll trust me. But even if he doesn’t I’ll have to try and help her. Does that sound arid? Should I just give it all up and run away?’

  Jane did not respond. She was silent for some seconds.

  ‘It doesn’t sound arid,’ she said. ‘It sounds…’ Then she tailed off. She said, ‘Will you ever tell him? About the killings? The “old gentleman”? God, Christ, Jesus! What am I saying? What have you done, Bill, what have you done?’

  ‘For King and Country,’ he said, ironically. ‘What would you do, Jane? Who would you tell? “Son – beloved son – your Dad’s a fucking murderer.” Does anyone ever tell?’

  Jane Heywood did not know.

  ‘I’ll tell you what he came to offer us,’ said Edward Carrington, ‘and then you’ll know. If it hadn’t been a double in Spandau he would still have had to die, in case the world should ever realize. I’ll tell you what he offered, then you’ll know.’

  It was nearly midnight, and Edward had been in bed when Jane had rung him, to ask if they could come round and see him. When they had arrived he had been in his pyjamas and a dressing gown. He had stirred the fire up, and they found him staring into it. Aun
t Erica was in bed, asleep.

  ‘She’s in a lot of pain,’ Carrington had said. ‘She wants to see you, Bill. She doesn’t hold you guilty. But not yet awhile. She’s a fighter, but she’s had an awfully hard time.’

  There was a bottle of fine port, undecanted, waiting for them. In the event, nobody touched it.

  ‘I’ve told you all the history,’ said Carrington. ‘You know as much as I do, almost, you must be bored to death with it. I became an historian because of Hess, because of what I had to do in the war, because I wanted to make sense of it. Beaverbrook once said he looked at Britain with a detached eye, being a Canadian, not exactly one of us. Erica was the same, being an American in her soul. When we won the war, she was unimpressed. She said Russia had done the dying for us, and Uncle Sam had done the paying. What did that leave, I asked her, and she replied – the boasting. Churchill called us one of the ‘three great victorious powers’ and even to me it was dust and ashes. I couldn’t get that Yalta picture out of my head, earlier, when they’d known they were going to win, the three old men, fat and smiling. One of them had found the money, one of them had shed the blood, and one of them – I knew – should have stopped it.’

  Carrington’s eyes were turned inwards. He seemed older, smaller, than he had been in Cumbria. Bill and Jane stayed very quiet. ‘You think,’ said Edward to Bill, ‘that I’m cracked about Churchill, and perhaps I am. I told you at the very beginning not to trust in history, or historians. Most of us are liars, all of us delude ourselves as to the value of our observations. Most people, nowadays, look upon Churchill as the saviour of “these islands”, which is what he always claimed to be. Indeed, in many ways he was, even I can see that. He made the speeches, roused the pride, rallied the faint hearts, and he won great victories, too – the Battle of Britain, the Atlantic struggle. Given that the conflict was unstoppable, given that we were fighting to the finish, there’s some justice in the idea that only he could do the job. He never faltered when it came to sacrifice, he used his weapons and his allies with total ruthlessness, he accepted absolutely the necessity of spilling blood, and I mean that without cynicism. But in 1945 the British knew what we have forgotten now. We lost what we set out to save. And we were ruined.’