‘Don’t you know anyone who can put her up?’
He sighed and tutted and looked everywhere except at me. ‘You know what it’s like. Too many people and not enough accommodation. More arriving every day.’
I knew what it was like. Between demobbed servicemen, families who had spent the war in the country or overseas finally dribbling back, and those who had never left but had been bombed out, finding somewhere to live was at a premium.
‘Aren’t there some empty rooms where you live?’ he asked.
‘Only because the bloody building’s on the verge of collapse,’ I replied.
‘You live there. And that old girl on the top floor.’
And Sam the housebreaker, I thought. But I wasn’t going to start discussing my dodgy neighbour with Stan. He was more civic-minded than I’d lately become and if he thought Sam really was a burglar he’d expect me to inform the police. Particularly if it resulted in an empty flat.
‘They’re going to knock the place down any day,’ I protested.
Stan grunted mirthlessly. ‘If the Luftwaffe couldn’t do it I can’t see the Ministry of Works getting round to it any time soon. Com’on boss,’ he said, spotting a chink of indecision in my reply and putting his big boot into it. ‘It’ll only be till I can fix her up with something better. Temporary, that’s all.’
Everything in London was temporary but that didn’t stop it still being there when you woke up in the morning.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘but you’ll have to come with me when we knock off and take a look. There’s nothing worth having now. The scavengers had been through the place before I moved in. There’ll be nothing useful in it even if we find a room that’s habitable.’
‘That’s grand,’ said Stan, grinning at me and bouncing out the chair as if someone had just taken a bag of cement off his head. ‘It’ll just be somewhere to get her head down, that’s all.’
And his, I thought, and almost warned him against getting too involved with the woman——a married woman. But it was probably too late for that and none of my business anyway. The others came back from lunch and the noise level rose so I took my break and walked all the way down to the river, breathing deeply to try and clear my headache.
Barges were still hauling rubble downriver and what looked like a police launch was heading the other way, making heavy weather against the current. I watched it thinking that might not be a bad job, cruising up and down the Thames checking the odd boat and pulling the occasional corpse out of the water. But I’d seen as many corpses as I wanted to and decided there were probably better occupations to aim for. My brother George, for instance, having developed a taste for chicken shit and cow dung, now had ideas about becoming a farmer. There were opportunities and the country needed to up its production if we were going to get out of the financial hole the war had dropped us in. But I wasn’t holding out much hope if we had to rely on people like George to do it. Knowing him as I did, I suspected he thought marrying Penny might be a good move; some of her family had land somewhere up on the Welsh borders and, if they had no more sense than to let him get his hands on it, they deserved him. I pictured Penny in Wellington boots humping bales of hay for the cows to munch and thought what a waste it would be. But, like Stan and Ida, it was probably now too late and none of my business either.
On the way back to the office I stopped in a pub for a sandwich and half a pint and drank it without gagging. I was cured.
*
Stan came back to Clerkenwell with me after work and, climbing out of the tube station and rounding the corner to where my building stood like a badly-balanced cardboard box on end, I saw a woman hanging around the door clutching a battered brown suitcase.
I gave Stan an accusing glance but he just shrugged.
‘She’s got to look at the place, hasn’t she?’
I had called her a woman but, closer to, saw she was really little more than a girl. She had to be twenty at least if she had been engaged to Arnie Poole but he must have snared her straight from school and she couldn’t have grown much since. The worn coat and dress beneath, the badly-cut shoulder-length dark hair and scuffed shoes said she had been through as much as the rest of the population, even if it didn’t seem to have aged her face. What had left its mark was her husband’s fist, leaving a dark bruise below her left eye and a half-healed cut on her lower lip.
‘Ida,’ Stan began awkwardly as we reached her, ‘this is my superior officer, Captain Tennant.’
I didn’t feel particularly superior and even Ida’s attempt at a bob as she shook my hand didn’t qualify me for the high ground. Maybe it was the look of the building I lived in, or the lack of enthusiasm that must have been plain on my face, but I could see she was in two minds about the whole idea.
‘Oh, Stan,’ she said in a broad Lancashire accent, ‘maybe I shouldn’t have come.’ Then her lower lip began to tremble and I thought the cut might reopen and she’d cry and bleed at the same time.
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ I said, trying to sound cheerful, aware that in parts it was even worse.
I was going to make us some tea in my flat but between entertaining Penny and stumping up my share for the office I’d used up my ration. So instead I thought she’d better see the worst of the place before the slightly better, and we started at the top where there were some vacant rooms next to the old girl, then worked our way down. The gaping roof at the back of the top floor precluded several rooms there, and some shattered joists where a bath had fallen through to the floor below, another. We did find an iron bedstead in a flat along the hall to me, bolts too rusted to allow disassembly and theft, but there was no mattress to go on it, never mind bedding. Stan said he knew where he could lay hands on an oil stove, some dishes and cutlery, and I had a rolled rug in my flat that I used to keep out the draughts that I said she could have. Her little round schoolkid’s face hadn’t perked up much, but when we finally went into my flat she suddenly brightened, looking around as if the place had come straight out of Ideal Home. I didn’t know what she had left in Blackburn but neither word was one I’d have used to describe where I lived. Even despite the state Berlin was in when I left, most of my German billets had been far better than Clerkenwell. And the last time I had lived in London it had been at Julia’s, complete with Adam fireplaces, moulded cornices and servants.
‘Just till we can find something better,’ Stan assured her, seemingly oblivious to the irony that his superior would still have to live there after he had taken Ida on to finer things. I was daydreaming about the prospects of Julia taking me back when Stan asked if it would be all right if Ida stayed on my settee until they could fix up one of the other rooms.
Startled, I’d barely had chance to open my mouth when Ida said, ‘Oh, thank you Captain. I won’t be no trouble,’ and then did start to cry.
Stan and his big pugilist’s face turned sheepish. He muttered something and I didn’t even bother to ask him to repeat it.
11
June 21st
On Friday morning, while Peter was trying to pin down exactly which Panzer Grenadier companies were in the vicinity of Maltot on July 10th, Stan was keeping his mind off Ida by continuing with his self-appointed task of reading through all the files we had in the office. He was looking to turn up anything on an SS-Unterscharführer Otto Vogel, or any other 25th SS-Panzer Grenadier who might have a bearing on the case.
He glanced up as I walked in, a mute question written all over his face.
‘I left her sleeping on the settee,’ I assured him. ‘Poor kid must have been knocked out.’
When our section had first been set up we found a dozen boxes of files stacked outside the office door waiting for us. Mostly smudged carbon copies of statements given by POWs, or verbatim reports of interrogations, I had left them for Stan and Jack to sort through, put in date order and collate. We had planned to index them but before we got round to it found they were of little use if you were seeking a particular reference or g
eographical location. For the most part they had sat on the shelves against one wall of the outer office ever since, taking up useful space. Now and then one of us might consult one of the files in the vain hope of finding what we were looking for, and it usually proved such a frustrating exercise that more than once I had been tempted to box them all up again and dump them on some bombsite.
Since he’d got back from Blackburn, Stan had been methodically working his way through each file in the hope of finding something on the Hitlerjugend Division. The sight of him blowing the dust off each successive report before opening it had become a feature of office life.
It was while I was brewing up a pot of tea that he grunted with the kind of satisfaction he had probably got back in the days when his right uppercut found his opponent’s chin.
I turned to see him scan through several pages of the file he was consulting, and then get up and carefully replace on the shelves the stack of files he had accumulated on the floor around his desk. He was wearing an oddly smug expression that didn’t sit particularly well with his bent nose.
‘What?’ I said.
‘I knew these files would come in useful one day. I’ve found a couple of names.’
He knew no such thing, of course, and had moaned as vociferously as any of us about them cluttering up the office. But I didn’t want to spoil his mood so I put a mug of tea on his desk and asked:
‘Where from?’
‘25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers.’
‘Hitlerjugend? I didn’t know we had much on them.’
‘More than you’d think,’ said Stan. ‘When the bodies of those missing Canadians turned up at the Ardenne Abbey it seems the Intelligence Corps interrogated any SS from Meyer’s regiment they could get their hands on. Meyer had used the place as his HQ so they knew who they were looking for. The thing is, they made copies of everything for circulation and we got some of it.’
‘I thought they’d wrapped up the Ardenne Abbey investigation before we were established.’
‘Yes, but I suppose someone must have thought their reports would come in handy.’
That sounded to me like a military wrinkle on policing methods I was familiar with from before the war: once you’ve got your hands on a known villain, peg every unsolved crime you possibly can on him. From the lofty heights of the upper ranks they had seemed to think it a better way of clearing up unsolved cases than looking for the real culprits.
A pragmatic way of dispensing justice. One that was a mite too cynical for me. I’d never been entirely happy with that sort of thing, but being on the bottom rung of the force I didn’t have an opinion and was expected to do as I was told. It wasn’t that I was concerned one way or the other about the known villains, more that I was conscious of the unknown ones getting away with something. Now it seemed to be much the same with the 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers: once you’ve given a dog a bad name, one more crime won’t make their name any blacker. Jekyll had said he wanted the matter wrapped up quickly and it seemed I was still in the position of being expected to do as I was told.
‘Who have you got?’ I asked Stan.
He pushed the file towards me. ‘An SS-Mann named Werner Richter.’
‘Was he at the abbey?’
‘No, but that’s the point.’
‘Is it? Why?’
‘Werner kept a diary. When they started questioning him about the abbey, he was able to furnish a day to day account of where he was from the day the battalion arrived in Normandy to the day they put him in the bag. That was the end of August when the Canadians broke through the Falais pocket.’
‘The Canadians took him?’
‘I know what you’re thinking, boss, that the Canucks settled a lot of scores with Hitlerjugend, but Richter was only wounded. He was interrogated about the massacre but was able to show them that when the Canadians were murdered at the abbey he was with his platoon in Caen, not at Meyer’s HQ.’ Stan consulted the file again. ‘Platoon commander was a lieutenant, SS-Obersturmführer Franz Müller.’
‘What about July 10th?’
‘Whoever wrote up the interrogation wasn’t interested in July 10th. They were investigating the abbey massacre.’
‘What good is it, then?’
Stan’s face turned smug again. ‘His diary names some of the other men in his platoon. One of them was SS-Unterscharführer Otto Vogel.’
‘Vogel? Well done Stan,’ I said. ‘So, do we have the diary?’
‘Not the diary, no——’
‘Where is it? Don’t tell me they gave it back to Richter...’
‘Doesn’t say.’
‘Have we got anything on Müller?’
‘Not a file, boss, no, but we do have this,’ and he passed some sheets of paper to me.
There were about a dozen sheets, smudged photocopies of small handwritten pages that appeared to have been taken from a notebook.
‘What are they?’
‘Copies of excerpts from Richter’s diary. At least, the pages that cover the time from when the 12SS-Panzer Division arrived in France until Richter and the rest of the platoon were put in the bag.’
It was barely legible. Smudges, as I said, faint from an over-used photocopier, and worst of all, of course, in handwritten German.
‘You can make out the dates,’ Stan said. ‘There are entries for July 10th and 11th.’
That was about all I could make out. My time in Germany had furnished me with enough of the language to hold up one end of a very basic conversation and to be able to buy a beer or a bottle of schnapps.
‘Where’s Peter?’
Susie looked up from her desk. ‘He’s still going through the War Diaries of the 7th Hampshires.’
‘Couldn’t he get copies? Never mind. When he comes in give him this.’ I put the photocopies on her desk. ‘Priority.’
Peter had better German than any of us. Not as good as his French, but good enough. Whether he’d be able to decipher SS-Mann Richter’s handwriting was another matter. If not, I supposed I’d have to make other arrangements. At least we’d found a lead to SS-Unterscharführer Vogel, the man on whose body they’d found William Kearney’s ID discs.
I left Stan to comb through the rest of our files for the five or six other names Richter had given his interrogator and went back into my own office.
‘We’re looking for the interrogation report on an SS officer,’ I told Jack. ‘SS-Obersturmführer Franz Müller, 25th SS-Panzer Grenadiers. Don’t know what POW camp he’s in now but he would have been picked up sometime between July 11th and the end of August forty-four. Stan’s got some more names for you, too.’
Jack’s shoulders slumped like a man who’d just been handed a hundredweight sack.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘but it’s the leg-work that gets results.’
‘Wouldn’t mind some leg-work,’ Jack complained. ‘Sittin’ in this bleedin’ chair’s giving me blisters on my arse.’ He sighed ostentatiously and wrote down the name, then passed me a letter that had come in that morning.
It was a reply from the Red Cross about POWs named Kearney. I took it to my desk and lit a cigarette. Jack had already sorted through the possibles, which left us with just two Kearneys named William, both of whom might fit the dates. Of them, the least likely of the two had been captured at Arnhem following the airborne landings, been badly injured and died of his wounds two months after being taken prisoner. It hardly seemed likely to me, though, that our William Kearney would have made his way to Arnhem, seeing as at the time he disappeared——as well as at the time of the airborne landings——it was a long way behind enemy lines. The other Kearney had been bagged during the German Ardennes offensive, their last throw of the dice in the west. He’d been in an infantry battalion and had spent five or six weeks as a POW before being released and repatriated. There was an Edinburgh address for him but no phone number. I thought it was hardly likely that our Kearney would be in Edinburgh——excepting a Random Harvest loss of memory and the thought of how Susie wo
uld react to that persuaded me not even to contemplate the possibility.
Between his phone calls I irritated Jack further by asking him to check the Red Cross information with the battalions given, and see if he couldn’t get some clarification. It was hardly unknown for lost men to wind up in units other than those they had begun with, but that was more common during retreats than offensives. Having said that, though, the fighting in the Ardennes Forest had been so confusing it hadn’t been easy to tell who was going which way. An Edinburgh phone number might be enough to sort the matter out or, failing that, Colonel G might arrange for a local man to visit. What I didn’t want, was to have to send one of us up there on what was most likely a wild goose chase. Particularly as we now had a possible link to the Hitlerjugend, and in the vicinity of Maltot.
*
Since it was Friday we expected a visit from Colonel G who, no doubt, would be bringing along expectations of our having made some progress. So I spent the next hour preparing a report for him, then I went out for lunch and treated myself to a pint and a sandwich.
When I got back I found to my surprise Jack had already received an answer to his enquiry concerning SS-Obersturmführer Franz Müller. He’d started with the office that had dumped the boxes of files on us when our section had first been established. They told Jack they had had the original file of Müller’s interrogation.
‘Are they sending it on?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Not available,’ said Jack.
‘What do they mean, not available? Is someone else using it or have they lost the thing? Or perhaps they’re worried if they give it to us we might lose it. Haven’t they got another copy?’
‘Didn’t specify,’ said Jack.
‘Well get back to them and ask them to specify.’
‘Right-you-are,’ said Jack.
‘Did Stan give you the other names?’
‘Still working on it,’ said Jack.
‘Better still,’ I decided, ‘find out what camp Müller is being held in if they know. SS-Mann Werner Richter, too. Richter was wounded but unless it was a bad injury he won’t have been repatriated yet. Don’t know what condition Müller was in. Tell them we want to interview both of them, particularly Müller. Let them know who we are and if a mere captain isn’t good enough for them refer them to Colonel G. And I still want to know what happened to the original interrogation file on Müller.’
The Unquiet Grave Page 10
