A Very British Ending (Catesby Series)

by Edward Wilson

  It was the day after the massacre and the ruins of the village were still smouldering. The first thing that Catesby noticed was the overpowering stench of burned flesh. It was inescapable – and most of it seemed to be coming from the church. The second thing that he noticed was the large number of lost-looking dogs. The animals were prowling around sniffing with their tails down – probably, thought Catesby, looking for their owners. Other dogs were howling and whining in a chorus of despair. The sound made his flesh crawl.

  The people, on the other hand, were silent. There were fifty or so wraith-like figures poking through the ruins looking for loved ones. When people did speak it was in hushed whispers. Everyone seemed numb. Catesby heard one person whisper that the Germans had left only a few hours before and weren’t far away. Another said they were on their way back. But no one seemed afraid – and neither was Catesby. The enormity in front of them blanked out all other emotions. If a tank appeared in the village square and started firing, no one would have dived for cover.

  Catesby was drawn to the church whose ancient stone walls had survived the flames within. He couldn’t resist its dark pull. He didn’t want to look inside, but he had to. The whispers he had heard were still echoing in his head: all the women, all the children; burned alive. He was later told that the church contained the bodies of 247 women and 205 children, but on the day he was unable to count – or even to recognise the charred corpses as women or girls or boys. In many cases, the only remains were blackened carcasses with thigh and upper-arm bones sticking out. The only thing that differentiated the bodies was their size. The smallest blackened bundles were obviously infants. There were other charred body parts that could have belonged to children or adults. It was a confusion of dead burned flesh that defied description. The smell in the church must have been terrible, although Catesby couldn’t remember it. It was as if some of his senses had been abruptly shut down. But the visual image stuck in his brain forever.

  Catesby had wanted to explore further into the church, only it was impossible to move forward without stepping on the bodies. The floor of the church was a singed carpet of women and children. He couldn’t member how long he stared at the horror. But it wasn’t a horror then; it was just dead bodies. The images on his brain were like a film that hadn’t yet been fully developed. Eventually, he felt someone touching his elbow. It was the Maquisard he had cycled with. He gestured for Catesby to follow him.

  There were more bodies to see: a bedridden elderly man burned alive in his bed and a baby baked alive in a bread oven in the village boulangerie. But most of the bodies, nearly 200 in number, were those of men who had been machine-gunned or shot in various barns and outbuildings – and then covered with straw, wood and petrol and set on fire while they were dead or dying. Once again, there were few bodies that were identifiable – just trunks of carcasses with bones sticking out, a grotesque reminder of Sunday roasts. Catesby felt more and more numb. It was too much to take in.

  At the time, it was impossible to find out exactly what had happened. Some said there were only two survivors; others said there were twenty. It seemed certain that a few boys had escaped by running into the woods – and a woman had jumped from a church window and hidden in a patch of garden peas. But she was badly injured and had been taken to a hospital in Limoges. Confusion in the wake of chaos.

  Catesby knew it was important to identify the troops who had carried out the atrocity. A boy of about eight, probably one of those who ran away, said the soldiers were dressed in greenish-brown camouflage smocks. Another survivor turned up – a male of about nineteen. He said that he and five others had fled a burning barn after hiding under dead bodies, but one of his companions had been shot and killed. There were rumours that many of the soldiers spoke good French, but with strong Alsatian accents. It turned out to be true. The revelation that former French citizens, from German annexed Alsace-Lorraine, had taken part in the massacre rocked France for years afterwards. There was always a twist.

  The people were more talkative now and Catesby took notes with a shaking hand. The entire population had been ordered into the marketplace to have their identity papers checked. But once they were there, the Germans didn’t bother to check their papers at all. Following a brief conversation – oddly polite – between the commanding officer and the mayor, the men of the village were led into outlying barns to be questioned. The women and children were ordered into the church and the doors locked behind them. The executions soon followed. The village was then looted – someone showed Catesby a few dozen empty champagne bottles – and set on fire.

  Catesby later found out that the atrocity had been carried out by a battalion of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, also known as Das Reich, under the command of Otto Diekmann. The battalion had been involved in other war crimes – in Russia as well as France. Diekmann was killed in Normandy two weeks later.

  The ruins of the U-boot bunker weren’t the ideal place for a clandestine rendezvous. The bunker was dark, massive and echoed every footstep. And Catesby didn’t like being dressed as a Roman Catholic priest either. It brought back too many childhood memories. His Belgian mother had brought him and his sister up as Catholics in an East Anglia where Catholics were an oddity and minority. Children don’t like feeling different. It wasn’t so bad speaking Flemish and French in the home, because that was hidden and private – and when school friends came around they always reverted to English. But being marched down Lowestoft High Street to Our Lady Star of the Sea on Sundays and holy days of obligation was public and humiliating. By the age of fourteen Catesby was a sceptic; by the age of sixteen, he was a militant atheist. As he used to explain to his smart new friends at Cambridge: ‘I lost my faith as soon as I found my brain.’ During visits home he used to humour his mother by going to Mass, but it soon became apparent that she didn’t care what he did – and he stopped going all together. He began to realise that his mother didn’t do things out of faith, but out of habit. But perhaps habits, however empty, give people a moral centre. Maybe, thought Catesby, if I hadn’t lost the habit of Mass and confession I wouldn’t be waiting in the ruins of a submarine pen with a greasy pistol in my pocket. But the priest disguise was, for a lad who had grown up among East Anglian fishermen, amusing and ironic. The wooden club that Lowestoft fishermen used to knock out cod thrashing about on the deck was called ‘a priest’.

  The U-boot bunker was a dark and spooky place. A few weeks before the end of the war two eleven-ton Grand Slam bombs had finally managed to penetrate the fifteen-foot-thick roof rendering the submarine pen useless. Steel reinforcing rods now hung down from the blasted concrete roof like the venomous snakes dangling from Medusa’s head. Catesby didn’t like being alone there in the middle of the night. It was a place of monsters where hidden eyes seemed to be tracing his every movement. Catesby touched the Webley MK IV revolver, a dead dank weight that stretched his trench-coat pocket. He liked the Webley. It was big and awkward – two and a half pounds and ten inches long – but simple and reliable, like a friendly black Labrador. The Webley could vanquish a gunman who was a poor shot or an assassin coming at him with a garrotte or a knife. But it couldn’t silence the ghosts.

  How many ghosts were squeaking and gibbering against those massive concrete walls? Catesby didn’t know. No one ever would. The deaths of the Polish and Russian slave labourers who built the U-boot bunker were too numerous and insignificant for the construction company to keep a record. Not long after the war Catesby had been assigned to the intelligence branch of the Control Commission for Germany. His real job was spying, but his cover job had been compiling a report on the activities of Organisation Todt, the construction company that had used Zwangsarbeiter – forced labour – in Bremen. One of his sources of information had been a mild-mannered bespectacled man who had been an accountant for Todt during the construction of the Weser submarine pens. The accountant was very apologetic about his role – and desperate to avoid a trip to Nuremberg – but he was safe. There were far
bigger fish to hang. The accountant estimated that the project had used 10,000 slave labourers, of whom 1,700 were registered as dead, however he admitted – sighing and wringing his hands – that the actual number of deaths may have been 6,000 owing largely to Unterernährungoder physischer Erschöpfung – malnutrition and physical exhaustion.

  Catesby looked through the huge hole in the ceiling. The clouds had parted and starlight poured into the bunker illuminating the rubble like ancient ruins. He knew that he was alone and safe from anyone other than himself. He touched the revolver again and wondered if the American was going to turn up. Kit Fournier wasn’t always reliable. Catesby knew that Fournier had his own demons. He had bribed Fournier’s Putzfrau to do some snooping. The Putzfrauen, the cleaning women of post-war Germany, were Catesby’s most reliable agents. Fournier’s Putz didn’t even require training; she had used a Minox spy camera before. The snaps of Fournier’s private diaries, letters and sketches revealed a private passion that had tortured the American since adolescence, if not before. The blackmail card would always be ready if Fournier didn’t do what was asked.

  The ruined bunker wasn’t a quiet place. There were drips of water and the scuffling of rats – and the grinding tectonic shifts of loose rubble. But a footstep was distinct and human. Catesby froze and gripped the handle of his revolver. He was good at making enemies – and his extracurricular vendetta against Nazis had singled him out as a troublemaker. The problem – and a constant source of friction with his American intelligence colleagues – was the Gehlen Organisation. Reinhard Gehlen, the Wehrmacht’s former Chief of Intelligence for the Eastern Front, had cut a deal with the CIA. In return for generous funding and immunity from prosecution for their agents, the Gehlen Org provided intelligence to the Americans about what was supposedly going on in the East Bloc.

  Catesby knew that Gehlen Org intelligence was useless. Nazis were terrible spies. The real purpose of the Org, thought Catesby, was to save war criminals and mass murderers from the Nuremberg hangman. One Org operative had been in charge of the Drancy concentration camp in the bleak northern suburbs of Paris and was responsible for the deaths of 140,000 Jews. But it was too late to get him – he had escaped to the Middle East. Others had winged their way to South America – a place that cynical US intelligence officers called the Fourth Reich. Catesby and a French colleague were still on the trail of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon. When the French found out that Barbie was in American hands they demanded that he be handed over for execution, but the US High Commissioner for Germany, John McCloy, refused. Catesby had since heard that Barbie had been ‘ratlined’ to Bolivia with the help of a Croatian Catholic priest. That’s why Catesby was wearing a Roman collar – Nazis on the run always expected priests to help them. Catesby was sure there were good priests – and tried hard to think of one.

  Another footstep echoed in the bunker. Catesby checked that he wasn’t silhouetted by the starlight pouring in from the broken roof and took out his revolver. Someone coughed. Catesby called out: ‘Ich sehe dich; Hände haut.’ Catesby was bluffing. He couldn’t see the other person in the darkness and would have had no idea whether or not their hands were up.

  A disembodied voice answered, ‘Wer sind Sie, bitte?’ The ‘who are you, please’ was unmistakeably American and disarmingly polite. It was Kit Fournier.

  ‘It’s me – Catesby.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Fournier, ‘you had me worried. You sounded just like a genuine kraut. Where are you? The sound in this place bounces all over the place.’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes. I left your present in the car.’

  ‘Have you got a torch?’

  ‘No, but I’ve got a flashlight.’

  ‘Same thing. Shine it in your face so I can see where you are.’

  A light flashed on and Fournier’s boyish smile appeared – a cheerful out-of-place Disney-esque cartoon in a tomb where thousands of slave labourers had sweated out their lives. But there was something fragile and false about Kit’s smile – he only pretended to be the American naïf. It was part of his act. Spies shouldn’t only be taught to stalk and use secret codes – they should go to drama school too.

  Catesby removed his hand from the revolver and crunched across the rubble to the American. ‘Why didn’t you bring your friend?’ said Catesby.

  ‘He isn’t my friend.’

  ‘Is he alone in the car?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘How do you know he won’t run away?’

  ‘He thinks I’m his friend – and he knows this is his last chance.’

  Catesby looked at Fournier. His face was shiny with sweat and beads were forming under the brim of his trilby. ‘You don’t look well, Kit.’

  ‘Kraut food gives me wind.’

  ‘And too much schnapps?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Catesby was afraid that Fournier was going to blow it. ‘Do you want to practice your lines again before you hand him over? It could be awkward if he smells a rat.’

  ‘Maybe I’m not going to hand him over.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘You haven’t done your part of the deal.’

  ‘I have,’ said Catesby. ‘I’ve told you everything I know and answered all your questions.’ Catesby was lying, but they all lied.

  ‘My boss in Washington keeps pestering me for more. He wants stuff that he can pass on to the state to put pressure on London. You guys aren’t doing enough – and you owe us a big favour after selling those jet engines to the Sovs.’

  Catesby knew that the Labour government was under a lot of pressure from Washington to increase military spending and send more troops to Korea. The Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, had scrapped free NHS prescriptions and specs in order to spend more on defence. A handful of ministers on the Labour Left had resigned in protest – and the CIA man in London had ringed their names.

  Fournier continued, ‘Last month was bad, real bad. The worst day was called “Black Thursday”. Did you know, Catesby, that most pilots shit themselves when they get shot down?’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘And their last words are seldom a prayer, but almost always “shit” or “fuck”.’

  Catesby knew that the Americans were taking a kicking in Korea on both the ground and in the air – and London’s biggest fear was that Truman might give into his generals and use atom bombs. It could spiral into another world war that would destroy Britain.

  ‘A lot of our guys,’ said Fournier, ‘are calling for blood, British blood. They think there are people in your government who betrayed the alliance and are siding with the Russians.’

  Catesby sighed and shook his head.

  ‘Why did you sell Moscow those jet engines?’

  ‘We made a mistake,’ said Catesby.

  ‘I’m glad you admit that.’

  ‘We made a mistake because if we had known the Russians were going to use our jet engines in their MiG-15s, we would have made them display the Union Jack on one side of the fuselage red star and the Rolls-Royce trademark on the other.’

  ‘That’s not funny, Catesby.’

  ‘Then why are you laughing?’

  ‘Because I like your dark sense of humour. But, Catesby, don’t ever try making that joke in front of my American colleagues or they will have your guts for garters.’

  ‘Then maybe I’d remind them that Britain fought in the war twice as long as America and took five times as many casualties per head of population – and now you’re squeezing us dry over the war loans.’ Catesby smiled. ‘If you didn’t want Moscow to get those engines, why didn’t you outbid the Sovs?’

  Fournier shook his head. ‘It doesn’t excuse trading with the enemy.’

  ‘What about Wall Street financing Hitler?’

  ‘We were neutral then – but we’re not now. We’re fighting to stop the spread of Communism.’

  Catesby yawned.

  ‘Sorry if you find me tedious.’

  �
�Because we’ve had this conversation so many times before. Listen, Kit, you said I hadn’t done my part of the deal. What part of the deal?’

  ‘My boss wants dirt to throw.’

  ‘Which boss?’

  Fournier smiled bleakly. ‘I can’t tell you that – but I think you can figure it out yourself.’

  ‘He thinks he’s a genius, but he isn’t.’

  ‘Regardless, my boss thinks there’s a Communist conspiracy at the heart of the British government. Why are you laughing?’

  Catesby answered in Russian.

  ‘I don’t know the language. What did you say?’

  ‘It’s a Russian proverb: it’s about people who believe you can milk chickens and use cows to hatch eggs.’

  ‘Pigs might fly.’

  ‘That’s right; you got it.’

  ‘You’re being glib, Catesby. Americans don’t like smart asses – especially when they’re British.’

  ‘Washington has gone mad about Reds-under-beds. Your leaders need psychiatric help as much as they do lessons in foreign policy.’

  ‘No more lectures. Tell me more about the guy who sold the jet engines to the Commies.’

  ‘Look up the newspaper files. It’s all public. The decision was made by Stafford Cripps, the President of the Board of Trade, with the approval of the Prime Minister.’

  ‘We need dirt, Catesby.’ Fournier smiled. ‘The sort of dirt that only a London insider like yourself can provide. Tell me straight, is Cripps a Communist?’

  ‘No, he’s a vegetarian.’

  ‘Your so-called English sense of humour is getting on my nerves.’

  ‘I wasn’t being funny. Stafford Cripps is not just a vegetarian; he’s also a puritanical non-drinking evangelical Christian. Let me tell you, Kit, something about Britain that you might not know. We may be a complex people with many contradictions, but there are no British Communists who are teetotal vegetarian Christians – not a single one.’