Sea of Spies

by Alex Gerlis

  There were half a dozen of them in the main police station in Reading on the Tuesday evening and the inspector in charge gave Prince the impression he knew what he was doing and could be relied upon. ‘We could approach the house tonight once Mr Summers returns from work but my preference would be to do so first thing in the morning.’

  ‘And you’ve got someone watching the house?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir, as we have since we received the letter yesterday.’

  When Richard Prince later recalled the events of that Wednesday morning it was as if he’d observed it from a height, somehow detached from it. He hadn’t slept on the Tuesday night and they’d gathered at the police station at five in the morning before driving to the address. They waited until Colin Summers appeared in the porch where he was approached by the police officers. Prince stood behind the inspector, his trembling hands thrust deep into his pockets, his chest tightening and a sense of trepidation sweeping over him. The inspector spoke very clearly.

  ‘Are you a Mr Colin Summers… Is your wife a Jean Summers… Do you have a child living here called Neville… Perhaps we could come in, sir?’

  Colin Summers looked terrified as he fumbled with the lock and by the time they all entered the house Mrs Summers had appeared at the top of the stairs asking what on earth was going on. The inspector said they were making enquiries about a missing boy who’d been taken from St Christopher’s hospital in London and they had reason to believe that Neville may be that boy. Mrs Summers was defiant.

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous. Neville is our son!’

  Later Prince vividly remembered how she appeared so confident he feared there’d been a dreadful misunderstanding, but at that moment Prince moved to the stairs and shouted he was Richard Prince and he was searching for his son Henry. As he did so a small figure appeared on the landing behind her and pushed in front of the woman, squealing in utter delight as he did so.

  ‘Daddy!’

  * * *

  For the first few weeks – until the end of March, in fact – the euphoria of his reunion with Henry occupied every moment of his existence.

  The first few days had been difficult but then a friend pointed out he was acting as if he was nervous of Henry. Just act normally, she said, and within days it was if they hadn’t been separated. Henry had been three when Prince had last seen him in November 1942. Now he was nearly five, happy to be home and with his father and reluctant to say anything about what had happened to him. Prince decided to follow his son’s lead.

  March turned to April, Henry started school and they fell into a happy routine. Prince told Gilbey he’d like to go back to being a detective and Gilbey reluctantly agreed. But as settled as his life now appeared to be, Prince was not at peace.

  He realised it one Sunday afternoon when they’d gone for a walk in the countryside and he was walking back to the car with Henry on his shoulders. Out of the blue he thought of Hanne and that caused him to stop dead in his tracks, Henry demanding to be let down.

  He realised he’d allowed her to drift from his thoughts in recent months. The escape and Henry had occupied all of his emotions, but it was unforgiveable how he’d forgotten about her. He didn’t know if she was still alive or – if she was in captivity – where she was being held.

  But he did know he had to find her.

  And he knew more than ever how much he loved her.

  * * *

  By the beginning of April 1944, Hanne Jakobsen had been an inmate of Ravensbrück concentration camp for over a year. She was only alive because she was still fit enough to work, though it wasn’t as if death was not a daily visitor to the camp and didn’t haunt every corner of it. The lifespans of the Jewish and Roma women was noticeably short: they were often taken away to be subjected to medical experiments or transported to death camps in the east. And prisoners who were injured or too ill to work all knew their days were numbered.

  There were many times when Hanne thought despair would overwhelm her and she’d question whether surviving in hell for so long was such an achievement after all. But she knew she needed to grasp at any glimmer of hope, and by the onset of spring 1944 the rumours sweeping the camp on a daily basis had a consistent ring to them: the war would soon be over, the Germans were on the run.

  As the war had gone on Ravensbrück had become increasingly important as a centre for armaments’ production, and at the Siemens factory where she worked she was now seen as being particularly able. She stopped short of acting like a kapo, but her German was excellent and she’d carved out a niche as someone who’d mastered the tedious schedule for maintaining and servicing machinery. This meant spending part of each day in a warm office where she could sometimes sit down for an hour or two at a time as she drew up work schedules for the engineers.

  One of the German managers in the office had begun to make a point of discreetly leaving food for her – an apple in her desk drawer, a piece of bread under a pile of papers, sausage and cheese placed in front of her when no one else was in the office.

  But Hanne Jakobsen knew there was another reason for her survival and perhaps why her working conditions were so good. As long as the Gestapo continued to hunt the English policeman she knew as Peter Rasmussen then her life would be spared.

  So she thought of the Englishman every day, the man she owed her life to.

  And the man she loved.

  Postscript

  In April 1944 – shortly after Sir Roland Pearson and Mehmet Demir met in Cairo – Turkey ceased all exports of chromium to Germany and the countries it occupied in Europe.

  A few months later, in August, Turkey broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and six months later –two months before the end of the war – Turkey ended its neutrality and declared war on Germany, although it was never involved in combat.

  It had taken time but in almost every respect the aim of Richard Prince’s mission had been realised. Two months earlier – in June – he resumed his old job as a senior detective with the Lincolnshire police, and early in September Tom Gilbey had persuaded Prince to join him for dinner at his club off the Mall to thank him for his work. Prince agreed on the condition that Gilbey wouldn’t raise the prospect of him rejoining the Service. Tom Gilbey complied, but did remark to Roly Pearson that this presupposed one ever left the Service. The dinner was a pleasant enough affair and Tom Gilbey went out of his way to assure Prince that his mission had certainly helped to blunt the German war machine, if not shorten the war.

  As they parted that evening Prince asked Gilbey about Hanne Jakobsen.

  ‘Was there really no news?’

  Tom Gilbey said there wasn’t, but rest assured finding her was one of his priorities, and in the meantime – and he accepted this was a cliché – no news was good news. As Prince walked back to his hotel he realised that despite his scepticism he didn’t doubt Gilbey meant it when he said finding Hanne was one of his priorities. He was unsure of his motive, but he certainly believed him.

  By January 1945, Hanne Jakobsen was approaching the second anniversary of her incarceration at Ravensbrück concentration camp. To have survived that long was something of a miracle, although words like anniversary and miracle were not ones Hanne would choose to describe her desperate situation.

  In January 1945, Henry Prince was approaching his sixth birthday, so much so he’d started counting down to it in days rather than weeks. Richard Prince found his son’s recovery from their separation to be remarkable. Henry appeared unscathed: he was happy, doing well at school, slept well and never mentioned the couple who’d adopted him. The same friend who’d advised Prince not to be nervous around his son said this was a case of Henry’s memory simply blotting out everything. It was as if the gap between his father leaving for Denmark in November 1942 and their being reunited some fifteen months later didn’t exist. She also assured Prince that one of the reasons for this was that Henry was almost certainly not badly treated in that time. But he did notice the occasional sign, the tightening of
his hand if a woman looking like Jean Summers came near them, or hesitation if they passed by a church.

  But all in all Henry couldn’t have been more settled and his happiness slowly drew his father away from the no-man’s land between life and death which he’d inhabited ever since his return.

  By January 1945, Richard Prince had been back in England for almost a year and back in the police force for more than six months, with little more than a succession of easy-to-solve robberies and routine thefts to occupy him. There wasn’t so much of a hint of a murder and certainly nothing to approach the sheer intensity and – it had to be said – exhilaration he’d found in the world of espionage.

  It came as little surprise to Tom Gilbey – though not without a degree of persuasion – when in that January he was able to prevail upon Richard Prince to undertake one further clandestine mission into Nazi-occupied Europe.

  It was Prince’s inability to hide his boredom on returning to policing; the way his eyes lit up when he talked about the mission; his longing for Hanne.

  When Gilbey told Sir Roland Pearson his former schoolmate was most impressed. ‘You did terribly well to persuade him, Tom – don’t know how you managed it.’

  ‘Don’t forget, Roly, one never really leaves the Service. They always come back.’

  Author’s Note

  Sea of Spies is a work of fiction so any similarities between characters in the book and real people should be regarded as purely coincidental, with the obvious exception of references to well-known people such as Winston Churchill and Hitler.

  However, Sea of Spies is closely based on the Second World War and so many of the locations and events mentioned in the book are genuine. In particular the central plot of the story – neutral Turkey selling large quantities of vital chromium to the Nazis – is true, as are the statistics used by (the fictional) Professor Miles Harland in Chapter 8. Likewise chromium was shipped across the Black Sea to, among other places, the port of Constanța, and from there by various routes – including up the Danube – to the centres of armaments’ production.

  The giant Škoda factory in Pilsen was renamed Reichswerke Hermann Göring during the war and was turned by the Nazis into a major armaments’ manufacturer. Turkish chromium did indeed end up there.

  The name of the country where Pilsen was located during the war should be mentioned here. Before the war it was, of course, Czechoslovakia. Once the Nazis occupied the country it was divided in two. The eastern part, Slovakia, became a Nazi puppet state, while the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia – Böhmen and Mähren as the Germans called them – became the Protectorate, ruled directly by the Germans.

  Winston Churchill did indeed fly from Cairo (after meeting with President Roosevelt in Casablanca) to Adana in January 1943 to meet with the Turkish President İnönü. The meeting actually took place in the railway station at nearby Yenice in a failed effort to persuade Turkey to join the Allies. Churchill and his entourage did fly in his personal Liberator aircraft, named Commando.

  The events referred to in Chapter 3 and elsewhere regarding the fate of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki are true. From 15th March 1943 some 45,000 Jews from the city were deported to the Auschwitz death camp, where they were nearly all murdered. The Nazi concentration camp of Ravensbrück north of Berlin where Hanne Jakobsen is a prisoner is also based very closely on known fact.

  The hotels mentioned in Istanbul – the Bristol and the Park – did exist during the Second World War, the latter being well known as a place where spies, diplomats and journalists would mingle, and was indeed on the block next to the German consulate. Shepheard’s Hotel was regarded as the most prominent hotel in Cairo in the 1940s.

  Thanks to the very helpful press office at the Swiss Foreign Ministry in Bern, the addresses of their country’s consulates in Prague and Munich in 1944 are accurate.

  The Bayerischer Hof hotel on Promenadeplatz in Munich is still there and the famous Wittelsbach Palace was taken over by the Munich Gestapo as their headquarters during the war.

  There were regular scheduled civilian flights between Swiss and German cities throughout the war, so the Swissair flight in Chapter 26 would be quite feasible.

  The British embassy in Bern is still at the same address on Thunstrasse. It was heavily involved in helping to facilitate the repatriation of escaping British prisoners of war. Prince’s escape route through France and across the Pyrenees is based on the eastern escape route known as the Pat Line. The bravery of the passeurs and the French resistance in helping many British escapees make it safely to Spain and from there back to Britain should be acknowledged here.

  I’d like to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to the many people who’ve helped bring about the publication of this book, not least my agent Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown. My publishers Canelo have done a fantastic job and my thanks there go to Michael Bhaskar, Kit Nevile, Sophie Eminson and all the team. To Seán Costello for his skilful copy-edit and to the many people who helped me with aspects of the book and answered seemingly odd questions as I was writing it. And finally to my family – and especially my wife Sonia – for their encouragement, understanding and love.

  Alex Gerlis

  London

  April 2020

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Canelo

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  Copyright © Alex Gerlis, 2020

  The moral right of Alex Gerlis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788639026

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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