Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  Even the police found Picard’s elaborate story “strange,” and what Mrs. Picard made of it can only be imagined.

  Early the next morning, a fisherman carrying a large shrimping net could be seen striding purposefully along the Plémont beach. Closer inspection would have revealed that beneath the fishing overalls the man was wearing business attire, and beneath that, a striped bathing suit belonging to Frank Le Quesne. Chapman had calculated that with holidaymakers enjoying the summer sun, a bathing suit might be a good disguise. In his pockets, he carried enough explosives to wage a small war.

  Later that morning, Mrs. Gordon Bennet reported that a man more or less fitting the description of the escaped prisoner had visited her tearooms on the cliff overlooking the beach. Centenier Percy Laurie, a volunteer policeman, and Police Constable William Golding were sent to investigate. Both were in plainclothes. Golding decided to explore the beach, while Laurie searched the caves in the cliffside. On the sand, some holidaymakers were playing football, observed, from a short distance, by a tall fisherman with a net. Golding approached the spectator. “Your name is Chapman,” he said.

  “My name is not Chapman,” said the fisherman, backing off. “You are making a great mistake.”

  “Are you coming quietly?”

  “You had better take me,” he replied. As Golding seized his arm, Chapman shouted that he was being assaulted, and called on the footballers to come to his aid. Laurie emerged from the caves, and ran to help, several spectators weighed in, and a free-for-all ensued,9 with the policemen trying to get the handcuffs on Chapman as they, in turn, were attacked by a crowd of seminaked holidaymakers. The fracas ended when Golding managed to land a punch to Chapman’s midriff. “This appeared to distress10 him,” said Golding. Chapman’s distress also doubtless came from the knowledge that he had eight sticks of gelignite and fifteen detonators in his pockets; a blow in the wrong place would have destroyed him, the policemen, the footballers, and most of Plémont beach.

  The Jersey Evening Post

  Friday, July 6, 1939

  PRISONER’S ESCAPE FROM GAOL

  ———

  DRAMATIC STORY OF ISLAND-WIDE SEARCH

  ———

  ALLEGED ATTACK ON MOTORIST

  ———

  GELIGNITE STOLEN FROM QUARRY STORE

  ———

  CAPTURED AFTER FIGHT ON BEACH WITH POLICE CONSTABLE

  After having been at liberty less than 24 hours, a prisoner who escaped from the public prison was recaptured. Every available police officer in the island had been on duty continuously in an island-wide search.

  The missing man was Edward Chapman, possessor of several aliases and a record of previous convictions. He was described as a dangerous man and associate of thieves and dangerous characters and an expert in the use of dynamite.

  Chapman was arrested at 2 o’clock this afternoon after a stand-up fight with a police constable on the sands at Plémont.

  When the prison van arrived a large crowd waited to catch a glimpse of Chapman. He appeared perfectly composed and looked around with interest at the people, a smile flitting across his face.

  Later, the constable of St Helier expressed his warm appreciation of all ranks of the police who had assisted in the most thrilling man-hunt which has taken place in Jersey for some years.

  * * *

  Captain Foster, the prison governor, was both enraged and humiliated. The prison board castigated him for his “gross misconduct11 [in] permitting a prisoner with such deplorable criminal antecedents as Chapman so much unsupervised liberty.” Foster took out his anger on the warders, the prisoners, and, above all, on Chapman, who was brought back to the prison and harangued by the governor, who bitterly accused him of inventing a military past to ingratiate himself: “You have never12 been a soldier as you informed me, you are therefore a liar and you deserve a flogging,” he bawled. “Why did you do it?” Chapman thought for a moment, and gave the only honest reply: “One, I don’t like prison discipline; and two, since I am sure of more imprisonment on completion of my present sentence in England, I thought I would make one job of the lot.”

  Back in his cell, Chapman made a bleak calculation. On his release, he would be sent back to the mainland and tried on a string of charges, just like Darry and Anson, who were now in Dartmoor. Depending on what Scotland Yard could prove, Chapman reckoned he would be in one prison or another for the next fourteen years. The Jersey community was close knit and law abiding, and the legal authorities took a dim view of this convict who dared to steal from its prison governor, throw its inhabitants over walls, and provoke pitched battles with its policemen.

  On September 6, 1939, Chapman was brought before the Criminal Assizes and sentenced to a further year in prison, to run consecutively with his earlier conviction. The news of his sentencing, somewhat to Chapman’s irritation, merited only a single paragraph in the Evening News, for by now the people of Jersey had other concerns. Three days earlier, Britain had declared war on Germany.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Island at War

  ALL WARS—BUT this war in particular—tend to be seen in monochrome: good and evil, winner and loser, champion and coward, loyalist and traitor. For most people, the reality of war is not like that, but rather a monotonous gray of discomforts and compromises, with occasional flashes of violent color. War is too messy to produce easy heroes and villains; there are always brave people on the wrong side, and evil men among the victors, and a mass of perfectly ordinary people struggling to survive and understand in between. Away from the battlefields, war forces individuals to make impossible choices in circumstances they did not create, and could never have expected. Most accommodate, some collaborate, and a very few find an internal compass they never knew they had, pointing to the right path.

  News of the war barely penetrated the granite walls of Jersey prison. The prison slop, always repulsive, grew ever nastier with rationing. Some of the warders left to join up, and those that remained provided fragmentary, unreliable information. The Nazi blitzkrieg, first the invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, then France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, did not touch Chapman; his was a world just six feet square. When the Germans entered Paris on June 14, 1940, he was barely midway through his three-year sentence.

  Chapman read all two hundred books in the prison library. Then he reread them. With some aged grammar books, he set about teaching himself French and improving his German. He memorized the poems of Tennyson, and read H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, a textbook purporting to describe the past but imbued with Wells’s philosophy. He was particularly struck by Wells’s idea of a “federal world state” in which all nations would work in harmony: “Nationalism as a God1 must follow the tribal gods to limbo. Our true nationality is mankind,” Wells had written. Meanwhile, the evil god of National Socialism marched ever closer.

  Chapman read and reread Betty’s love note on the Royal Yacht Hotel letterhead. But soon another letter arrived that temporarily extinguished thoughts of Betty. From an address in Southend-on-Sea, Freda Stevenson, the dancer with whom he had been living in Shepherd’s Bush, wrote to inform Chapman that he was now the father of a one-year-old girl, born in the Southend municipal hospital in July 1939, whom she had christened Diane Shayne. She enclosed a photograph of mother and child. Freda explained that she was desperately poor, barely surviving on wartime rations, and asked Chapman to send money. Chapman asked for permission to write to her, but Captain Foster refused, out of spite. Freda’s unanswered letters became increasingly anguished, then angry. Frustrated at his inability to help Freda or hold his first child and cut off from the rest of humanity in a seabound prison, Chapman sank into a bleak depression.

  The Jersey Evening Post

  Saturday, June 29, 1940

  FIERCE AIR RAIDS ON CHANNEL ISLANDS

  HARBOURS BOMBED

  ———

  HEAVY CASUALTIES IN BOTH ISLANDS

  ———

&nbs
p; Nine people are known to have been killed and many injured in a bombing and machine gun attack carried out by at least three German aircraft over Jersey last night.

  The Harbour was the chief objective and a bomb struck the pier, causing considerable damage to property belonging solely to civilians…

  * * *

  Chapman was lying on his plank bed when he heard the first Luftwaffe planes droning ahead. Three days later, the Channel Islands earned the unhappy distinction of becoming the only part of Britain to be occupied by Germany during the Second World War. There was no resistance, for the last defending troops had pulled out. Most of the population opted to remain. Chapman was not offered a choice. Idly, he wondered whether a bomb might hit the prison, offering either death or the chance for escape. The British inhabitants of Jersey were instructed to offer no resistance. The bailiff, Alexander Moncrieff Coutanche, who had presided over Chapman’s trial, told them to obey German orders, return home, and fly the white flag of surrender. Hitler had decided Jersey would make an ideal holiday camp, once Germany had won the war.

  With German occupation, the Jersey prison service was simply absorbed into the Nazi administration, along with the police. Sealed away behind stone and iron, the prisoners were forgotten. The prison food became more meager than ever, as the free inhabitants of Jersey competed for the few resources allowed them by the German invaders. There were no more letters from Freda. Chapman consoled himself with the thought that as long as the Germans controlled Jersey when he was finally released, they could not send him back to the waiting manacles.

  The Germans ran their own courts, parallel to the civil judiciary. In December 1940, a young dishwasher from the Miramar Hotel, named Anthony Charles Faramus, fell foul of both. A Jersey islander with a reputation as a tearaway, twenty-year-old Faramus was sentenced to six months by the Jersey court for obtaining £9 under false pretenses by claiming an allowance for a nonexistent dependent. The German field court slapped on a further month after Faramus was found to be carrying an anti-German propaganda leaflet.

  Chapman regarded Faramus, a furtive, delicate man, with a pencil mustache and darting blue eyes, as a strange but likable fellow. He was a hopeless crook. He blushed easily, and exuded a “sort of dispossessed2 gentleness,” though he possessed a sharp, obscene wit. Tall and slender, he looked as if a puff of wind might carry him off. He had worked as a hairdresser in a salon in St. Helier, before taking a job at the hotel. Chapman and Faramus became cellmates, and firm friends.

  On October 15, 1941, a few weeks short of his twenty-sixth birthday, Chapman was finally released. Gaunt and paper-faced, he weighed just 131 pounds. Faramus, released a few months earlier, was waiting for him at the prison gates. Chapman knew nothing of the Nazi invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia, the sinking of the Bismarck, or the siege of Leningrad, but the effects of war were visible in the transformation of Jersey. On his last day of freedom, Chapman had wandered a beach thronged with happy, well-fed holidaymakers. Now it was an island ground down by occupation, exhausted and hungry, beset by all the moral confusion that comes from the choice between resistance, acquiescence, or collaboration.

  Faramus had rented a small shop on Broad Street in St. Helier, and with a few chairs, some old mirrors, scissors, and razors, he and Chapman opened what they referred to, rather grandly, as a hairdressing salon. Their clientele mainly comprised German officers, since the Channel Islands—Hitler’s stepping-stone to Britain—were now a vast, heavily defended barracks, home to the largest infantry regiment in the German army.

  Faramus shaved German beards and cut German hair, while Chapman made polite conversation in basic German. One of the few British regulars was a middle-aged former bookmaker from Birmingham by the name of Douglas Stirling. An opportunist of the sort produced by every war, Stirling was a black marketer, buying cigarettes, tea, and alcohol from the Germans, and then selling them at a profit to the local people. The barber’s shop was the ideal front for what soon became a thriving trade that combined illegal profiteering with grooming the enemy.

  One morning, setting out on his bicycle from the flat he shared with Faramus above the shop, Chapman momentarily forgot that a new German law required everyone to drive on the right and rode straight into a German motorcycle dispatch rider hurtling around a corner. Neither man was hurt, but the German was furious. Chapman was duly summoned to the police station and interrogated by three officers of the Feldgendarmerie, the German military police. One of these, a small man who spoke good English, eyed Chapman unpleasantly and said: “Look, we’ve reason3 to believe you’ve got some German arms. Now, where is the German rifle?”

  “I haven’t got any German rifles,” Chapman replied, bemused.

  “Have you any arms?”

  “No.”

  “Now look, we’ve got our eyes on you, so if you try any trouble, we’ll make trouble too. I’m only warning you.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Chapman replied, and left swiftly.

  This was no warning; it was a threat. He was fined 80 reichsmarks for the traffic violation, but, more worryingly, the interview seemed to suggest he had been singled out as a suspected member of the resistance, or even a saboteur. The run-in with the Feldgendarmerie had unsettled him, and set Chapman thinking of another plan to get him off this island prison. He outlined his idea to Faramus and Douglas Stirling. What if they offered to work as spies for the Nazis? If they were accepted, there was surely a chance they might be sent over to mainland Britain, undercover. At the very least, it would break the monotony. Stirling was enthusiastic, saying that he would suggest the ruse to his son. Faramus was more cautious, but agreed the plan was worth a shot.

  With hindsight, Chapman admitted that his motives in 1941 were hazy and confused. He later claimed that the offer to spy for Germany was prompted by the simple and sincere desire to escape and to be united with Diane, the child he had never seen: “If I could work a bluff4 with the Germans, I could probably be sent over to Britain,” he wrote. But Chapman understood his own nature well enough to know that there was more to his decision that this. “It all sounds fine talk,5 now,” he later admitted. “Perhaps it was phony talk even then, and I don’t pretend there were no other motives in the plans I began to turn over in my mind. They did not occur to me, either, in one moment, or in one mood.” He felt a genuine animus toward the British establishment. Like many justly imprisoned criminals, he saw himself as the victim of cruel discrimination. Moreover, he was impressed by the discipline and general politeness of the Germans in their smart uniforms. Nazi propaganda relentlessly insisted that their forces were invincible, and the occupation permanent. Chapman was hungry, he was bored, and he longed for excitement. In his Soho days, he had mixed with film stars, and he had long imagined himself as the central character in his own drama. He had played the part of a high-rolling gangster. Now he recast himself in the glamorous role of spy. There was little thought, if any, given to whether such a course was right or wrong. That would come later.

  Chapman and Faramus composed a letter in carefully wrought German, and sent it to the Kommandatur, the German command post in St. Helier, addressed to General Otto von Stulpnägel, the senior officer in command of the occupation forces in France and the Channel Islands. A few days later, Faramus and Chapman were summoned to the office of a German major, where Chapman blithely explained that he and his friend would like to join the German secret service. He listed his crimes, stressed the outstanding warrants he faced in Britain, emphasized his expertise with explosives, and concluded with a spirited anti-British rant. “His whole theme6 was revenge,” Faramus wrote later. “He said he had no time for the English ruling class, and sought only a chance to get even with them.” The major nodded blandly, while a secretary took notes and wrote down the young men’s names and addresses. The matter, said the major, would be discussed with “senior officers.”

  After that, nothing seemed to happen. Over the next few days, Chapman made a point every time a German came into
the shop of reciting a “tale of loathing7 for the society that had hounded him, and his hatred for the English and all their works,” in the hope that word would filter back to the German authorities. But the days passed, and still there was no word from the Kommandatur. Clearly, their application had been rejected, or merely ignored, on the longstanding principle that anyone who applies to join an espionage service should be rejected.

  Chapman had all but forgotten the plan and was busy hatching a fresh scheme to open up a nightclub serving black-market alcohol when, one damp evening in December, he and Faramus were roused from their beds by a furious hammering at the door and the sound of raised German voices. On the doorstep stood two German officers. Chapman’s immediate assumption was that the application to spy for Germany had borne fruit. He could not have been more wrong. These were not members of the German intelligence service, but the Gestapo. Chapman and Faramus were not being recruited, but arrested. They were handcuffed, bundled into a Vauxhall waiting in the drizzle, and driven to the dock. The senior officer, a captain, or Hauptmann, brusquely informed the pair that they were now prisoners, and if they attempted to escape they would be shot. From the car, they were marched onto a small landing barge and manacled to an iron bar bolted to the wheelhouse. The boat engine roared and swung out of the port, heading due south, with the coast of France faintly visible through the drizzle. The Gestapo officers sat in the warmth belowdecks, while Chapman and Faramus shivered in the biting rain.