by Hylton Smith
Horace Pattinson warmed to such disregard for authoritarian intransigence, after all he didn’t have a passport when he was asked to put his life and livelihood on the line, and in a fog of anonymity at Dunkirk.
Devlin and Karl had to mimic basic communication with sign language. They pulled it off admirably, and Devlin thought it was because Horace and his sons actually wanted to believe it. Karl’s performance was largely truncated because he was constantly leaning over the side, depositing undigested porridge into the heavy sea. It helped the deception and instilled an atmosphere of good humour during the seemingly endless journey.
They anchored well offshore, roughly between Noordwijk and Katwijk aan Zee, and waited for night to fall. It would be a tricky and slow inward journey. With the engines finally silenced, the elder son of Horace, Sam, launched the dinghy, and was joined in this rubber air bag by his brother. Karl, and then finally Devlin, made their ungainly transfer into the bobbing craft. They got within fifty metres of the shore and Devlin said they would make it from there. It produced a smile from Sam, and a shake of the head. The receding tide was too strong. Another few minutes and the two fugitives made landfall. No one spoke as the dinghy headed back to the lightless boat. Step one had been achieved.
Chapter 34
Prudhoe, Northumberland
Hilda told Black she could ring the factory where her son worked and tell him that the police wanted to speak with him.
“Can you just leave that for now Mrs Smyth, first I’d like to ask you about some events which occurred in the distant past. Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious, it involves the P.O.W. camp at High Spen, specifically in 1945.”
“Oh, I see, in that case Harry may not be too helpful, he was only five at the time. It was his grandmother, who would have been most use to you, but sadly she passed away in 1972.”
“Did you visit the camp?”
“Very rarely, but Harry used to keep me up to date on things, he was fascinated with the airmen. So, as you can imagine, I’ve heard every story.”
Black’s anticipation was verging on cerebral salivation, if there was such a thing.
“Can you remember any of the names of these airmen?”
“I did know quite a few, but I can only recall two. You really should speak to Harry as soon as you can, he’ll probably remember them all. His favourite was Karl, because he had been loaned his identity disc for a few days, and felt important for the first time in his young life. The other one I remember was called Gunther, and he took Karl’s disc back from Harry, because Karl had escaped in the meantime.”
“I’ll just write that down. What about their surnames?”
“I hope I can get them the right way around. Harry wrote them down. Let me think. Yes, I’m pretty sure now, Karl Heinz Buchwald, it’s a strange family name – it apparently means ‘Bookforest’. The other man I’m not sure about but it will be in the old records of the village constable.”
“Do you think Harry would remember the details on this identity disc?”
“He almost certainly will, but anyway, he drew it over and over. It’s probably amongst his old toys, in a special box. I know it seems silly to have kept them all these years, but I didn’t see as much of my son as I’d wanted in his early years. I have them in the cupboard under the stairs.”
Hilda scratched around for several minutes before she found the box she was looking for. She took out the toys one at a time, as if they were the crown jewels, handling them with great fondness. Here we are, his favourite drawing book.”
When Black saw the meticulously copied dog tag, his brain immediately summoned the one they had recovered from the coke works. The word ‘match’ flashed before his eyes. Every detail was clear, because this was drawn forty years before the disc had been pulled out of the stinking mud.
“May I borrow this, Hilda? It would really help us.”
“Of course, would you like me to ask Harry to call and see you at the station?”
“Yes please, and thank you again, lovely cup of tea, made the proper way, no damned tea bags. I’ll definitely be in touch.”
While he was on his way back to Newcastle, Black was bristling with the aura of nailing a key element of the case, convinced that they had at last found the name of the man whose skeleton had clung on so stubbornly to its secrets.
Concurrent with this joy, Moss and Maggie had made their own little discoveries. Maggie had unearthed a complete list of names of the airmen from the High Spen camp, nestled away in the village constable’s records which had been spirited away to Durham, but fortuitously recovered, thanks to a flash of lateral thinking by the boss. Flushed with success, Moss promptly charged upstairs and interrogated the decorators, threatening that if they had disfigured any of the files he’d virtually abandoned in the attic…! He needn’t have worried, they were under a gigantic dust sheet.
He instructed one of the juniors to begin carrying them down to his office. He was pumping pure adrenalin by now and began spreading them out on his desk, pulling a couple to one side which had interesting descriptions on the covers. He then stopped at the first page of the thinnest file. A transcript of the transfer of a German stowaway on a Danish freighter caught his eye. As he avidly devoured the content, he sat back and reflected on the name which was underlined on both the Master of the Port’s sheet, and the police interview statement. Karl Heinz Buchwald was described as a Luftwaffe serviceman, who’d escaped earlier from a P.O.W. camp in High Spen, been on the run for some time, and finally tried to get back to Germany.
Maggie put her list on Moss’s desk without saying anything. Moss showed her his own discovery, and they were engaged in self-congratulation when Black walked in wearing a mischievous grin. His drawing completed the focus-lock on Karl Heinz Buchwald, even though Black felt a tad less buoyant, being just one of a trio which had clinched this major breakthrough. But it was a fleeting thought, it was dogged persistence and solid team work which had won the day.
*
Prague
Marion Wentworth was mulling over all possible aspects of Hajek’s value now that they had been escorted to an expensive hotel overlooking the iconic King Carlos Bridge. The senior of the three Czech intelligence officers knocked on the door of her room.
“Before we speak in detail with Hajek, I thought you might be interested in what our man from Cologne has told us.”
Marion’s jockeying of all acceptable scenarios was put on pause.
“I should have known you had him followed as well, shouldn’t I? By the way you haven’t introduced yourself.”
“Yes, that is correct, but neither have you, anyway, I know who you are, and your reputation is very high in my country. It would be a pity to begin by throwing dirt at each other. My name is Pavel Banved, and I am at your service.”
He showed his ID for the second time, but on this occasion, left it open for her to digest as much as possible.
“On this assignment, I report to the highest rank in our service. We are still plagued with fallout from the war, notably with the Sudaten population. You will be aware that our position with the Soviets is not much better than the occupation by the Germans. The Sudatenland is and always has been complicated, and Hajek has certain things to answer for in that respect.
“However, during his conversation in Cologne, we were pleased with what we saw, more than what your man or ours actually heard. We have been monitoring Hajek’s contact person for a long time, but this has given us a real breakthrough. He is now quite elderly, but has not lost much of his influence. He works mostly behind the scenes, but he is very – shall I say – persuasive. Maybe you know of him, he was a prisoner in your country until the end of the war, a Luftwaffe pilot, by the name of Gunther Klein. Do you have information on him?”
Marion mentally scrolled through various summary documents and recalled a hit with Devlin’s report. The name Gunther Klein had been underlined several times, she thought, but the clearest recollection she had was t
he comment that Klein was at the centre of the dubious activities in High Spen. She’d therefore known that he wasn’t the man in the muddy coke works, as Devlin’s list had clearly shown he had returned to Germany.
“I’ve heard the name somewhere. The North of England I believe. He was sent back to Germany after the cease-fire.”
“Impressive recall, I must say. He wants to carefully erase all events of espionage which took place in England without, how do you say it – any rocking of the cradle?”
“It’s the boat actually, not the cradle. But the war has been over for forty years, why is that so important for an elderly ex-pilot?”
“No, not the boat, he wants the baby to go to sleep without rocking the cradle, the boat would be too obvious. I suppose he wants the same as you do, or am I wrong?
“You have been watching Hajek recently, and it isn’t all about a silly ring, which means it may have another purpose. I have a proposal which I would recommend you consider carefully. Eastern Europe still has quite a few Soviet satellites, but the uprisings will continue and someday the Russian domination of these peoples will come to an end.
“You would do well to imagine how things will be shaped then. Hajek is just a small, unlubricated cog in this murky political evolution, but he can help us with certain problems in the Sudatenland. He has little value to you in reality, as both of our men heard him tell Klein that the ring is in the hands of your police. You don’t really need Hajek to spring your trap, it would be more convincing coming from a deception that he divulged the means to obtaining the ring and whatever goes with it - but from one of our Sudaten-domiciled people.
“After all, he is one of them himself, and they still believe they are German in their roots. I can see by your face that you didn’t suspect he was more than a collaborator, and you didn’t know his real name. He did a good job on you.
“Listen a little more please, before you decide. We will make sure that Klein hears that Hajek has been interrogated here, because the Germans will have followed you both to Prague. They will hear that his shop in your country lies abandoned. They will know we have forced the truth out of him, but which truth? Maybe one in which your police do not have the ring. They may wish to believe that this story was just to guarantee his protection. We will inform you when the bait has been laid, and you can put surveillance on his shop. Or maybe you aren’t interested in Gunther Klein?”
Marion said she would need to make a phone call. Banved said it would not be wise to do it from the hotel. He agreed to let her use his office. They left and Hajek was in the safe hands of the hulks.
Banved’s office was in a classic old building and as she waited to be put through to the number she gave to the operator, a glance upward disoriented her. The room was of modest floor space, but the incredibly high, vaulted ceiling made her feel as if some invisible, weird, anti-gravitational force was pulling her up from her chair.
The main question for Marion, when her call was put through, was in relation to Hajek’s British citizenship. Pavel Banved had also hinted that Hajek was possibly registered in the UK under a false name. This could affect his status in the immediate term. There was also the small matter of how Banved seemed to be so certain that the police in the UK didn’t actually have the ring, when she was sure that they did.
Her mind went back to Devlin’s report, and that Karl had led him to it in the woods near High Spen. She couldn’t remember any entry which said he’d disposed of it. This had always intrigued her.
She was cleared to leave him in Prague, while his history was checked more thoroughly than it had been when he applied for British citizenship. The consequence of this call was bad news for the jeweller from Heaton, whoever he really was.
*
Newcastle C.I.D.
The combined discoveries of Moss, Black and Maggie, for a brief moment, brought a showdown with Marion Wentworth into focus. It was Moss who shook his head.
“We owe her nothing, and I prefer to speak with Sophie Redwood again after we see what the reaction of the spooks is to her printing ‘that the police are treating the case as murder’, even if we haven’t made this declaration ourselves.
“All Marion has ever said about the identity of the skeleton is that it’s not Max Vogt. I’m being terribly cautious, but why didn’t she tell us it was Karl Heinz Buchwald when she saw the disc with his identity plastered all over it, top and bottom? She must have known this, even though she strenuously denied it. Sophie will have to give us the answer to that, if she has it from her source.”
Reluctantly, Black and Maggie nodded. The champagne was put on hold.
*
Prague
While Marion waited for her flight to London to be called, she caught sight of the headline of yesterday’s Clarion on the adjacent table, which was not yet cleared of the food debris left by the previous occupant. She picked it up and read the whole story. Sophie Redwood was becoming a nuisance, and she would be more difficult to silence than the police. She now needed to swat and discourage two pests without leaving a corpse.
Chapter 35
Noordwijk, Holland 1945
The journey to Rotterdam wasn’t going to be free of risk. Despite the liberation of the Netherlands, and the uplifting of spirit which came in the wake of it, there was a dedication to cleanse what remained of German presence and influence from society. Karl was therefore still a problem, but at least he could respond in his best English.
He had to be mindful of certain words. He’d been briefed before he left for his mission in England, that in the event of being shot down or being forced into emergency landing in Holland, there was one particular taboo. The Dutch resistance were able to hunt down German spies by manoeuvring them into mouthing the name of a town in the west of the country. Apparently the embedded Teutonic linguistic capability failed most of them when trying to articulate ‘Scheveningen’. They couldn’t quite handle the guttural ‘ch’. Karl warned Devlin of this verbal booby-trap as they changed a small amount of English money into Guilders. This wasn’t risky in Holland so soon after the war, because the allies were held in such high esteem, and were not to be insulted by over-officious bank clerks, while they were presumably making an inventory of their fallen liberators, on Dutch soil.
The train from Noordwijk chugged its way to the city of Leiden, a well-respected seat of learning, where they changed for Rotterdam. The journey had been accomplished without incident, but the sternest test now faced them. Asking for directions to the residence of a resistance man was not considered to be a good idea. They didn’t want to be continually stopping to peruse a tourist map either. Devlin went to one of many canal-side information cabins. He apologised for his inability to speak the language, and merely tried to pronounce the name of the street where he could expect to find Cees Verdel. The obliging lady offered a city map, and when he’d paid for it, she marked the quickest route to get there on foot, and circled famous landmarks like the Feyenoord football ground, which had been fallow for so many years. He thanked her and they set off having memorised the first few major street names.
Although they headed off in the wrong direction at a couple of the canal bridges, and they’d stopped for coffee, they finally made it. The moment of truth arrived. They pushed one of the five intercom buttons but received no response. Rather than involve any neighbours Devlin suggested that they passed the time by buying bread and cheese, and sit by the canal for lunch. It wasn’t quite that easy, as the food supply was still chasing the post-war demand.
The shops were emptied almost as soon as they opened, and there were queues at every one. Loyal customers were given precedence, having goods reserved. Devlin and Karl had to decide, a very expensive hotel, or the residual scraps from the street vendors. They both needed a bath, and their grubby clothes would have attracted undesired attention, so they ruled out a hotel. They sat on a seat by the canal and chewed away at half a loaf of stale bread, which was speckled with mould. They looked at one an
other and laughed as they took turns to spit green-flecked crumbs to the ducks. The vigil finally came to an end when Devlin spotted Verdel entering the apartment block, four hours later.
*
Winlaton Mill
It became clear to Max Vogt that he hadn’t thought the situation through carefully enough. It hit him like a sledgehammer, the instant he stepped off the bus and tried to pass through the gates of the coke works. It was no consolation that he’d been influenced by the gun barrel, and his humiliation at having to use public transport was now the least of his worries.
“Can you wait here please,” said the gateman respectfully, “I am instructed to inform Mr Westlake that you have returned.” The man put down the receiver and said Mr Westlake would be down immediately.
Having then ascended to the inner sanctum together, the edict was delivered.
“I have been given extremely clear instructions from the Central Board regarding your future.”
Vogt was ready to sit down and explain away the arrest by Devlin. He was told to remain standing.
“This won’t take long. You are to remain at the plant until you can be collected first thing tomorrow by car. They will drive here overnight, so they should be here around daybreak. You will not go home, you will be chaperoned for the entire time between now and their arrival. You won’t speak to anyone, including those who will guard you. I have decided that the boardroom will be the most appropriate location for this temporary confinement.”
Vogt protested.
“I must be given a chance to tell you what is going on here, you have no idea of….”
“No, I am instructed that I must not listen to you, not one word. I’ll have you know that this is also most inconvenient for me, not least of all because the pouring of the concrete foundation of the new engineering block is scheduled to commence at 6 am tomorrow, after all of the damned delays we have suffered. Now, I will walk with you to the boardroom, as I have to report back to HQ. They need to know you have returned.”
