The Interrogator

by Andrew Williams

  He washed in cold water and changed, then ate breakfast in the mess canteen and it was there Lieutenant-Commander James Henderson found him. His brisk manner suggested he had forgotten nothing since their last meeting in June and was anxious to spend as little time in Lindsay’s company as possible.

  ‘Fleming’s telephoned. Says he will be here at ten. He wants to see you in Colonel Checkland’s office.’

  But the Director’s Assistant was late. Checkland was sitting alone in his office.

  ‘Come in,’ and he pointed to a chair in front of his desk.

  ‘You’re back for the Director?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The head of Section 11 stared at him for a few seconds, his face empty, then pushing his chair from the desk, he got up and walked a little stiffly to the window.

  ‘Our codes,’ he said thoughtfully. Then he turned to look at Lindsay and his face was almost lost against the window: ‘You don’t think much of me Lindsay, so you’ll be surprised to hear that I think quite highly of you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘I know what you’ve been through, you know. I saw people like you in the last war. I spent some time at the Front, did you know that?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘It takes people in different ways. Some fall apart but others just draw into themselves – stand back from everyone.’

  He paused for a moment, then turned back to the window, his face very white. When he spoke again his voice was tight with suppressed emotion: ‘Sometimes you lose your compass. Guilt, anger, you distrust others, hate yourself. Believe me.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ It was difficult to know what to say. Lindsay knew he was speaking from the heart and he suddenly felt very sorry for the man. Sorry too for the things he had said about him.

  ‘. . . And you need to seek help, guidance, it’s not something that . . .’

  But before he could finish Fleming was shown into the room. ‘Help is at hand,’ he said breezily. Checkland pursed his lips a little sourly and walked, head bent, back to his desk where he picked up the report he had been reading.

  ‘Do you need me, Ian?’ he asked with a nonchalance that sounded forced.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Very good. Then I’ll leave you.’

  Fleming remained on his feet tapping a cigarette on the back of the packet until the door swung to, then flopped into the chair beside Lindsay.

  ‘And do you need help?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘There are the interrogators here. Do you want that chap Samuels back?’

  ‘Yes, that would be useful.’

  Lighting his cigarette, Fleming inhaled deeply, his eyes narrowing a little as if preparing to throw a punch at Lindsay: ‘The Director wants to know what progress you’ve made.’

  ‘I know what happened to Heine before he died, and why. I can’t be sure he didn’t take his own life.’

  ‘. . . But Mohr . . .’

  ‘I was going to speak to him today.’

  ‘There is a new urgency to this business. We can’t wait six months, we can’t wait six weeks. A lot of lives are at stake here. We need to know what he knows.’ Fleming got to his feet and walked across the room to peer at a photograph of a battleship that had been cruelly nailed to the oak panelling.

  ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘. . . I think I can . . .’

  Fleming turned to look at him, drawn by the hesitancy in his voice, searching his face for meaning. Checkland’s secretary was clacking her typewriter in the outer office and a small carriage clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the seconds. Their eyes met for a moment. Fleming understood.

  ‘Whatever you need to do.’

  ‘Gilbert here.’

  The line crackled and hissed as if the Colonel’s office at MI5 was burning around him.

  ‘Fleming from NID. Admiral Godfrey asked me to ring you, Colonel, about our man. He thinks it’s time we called your chaps off.’

  ‘Really? Would you mind explaining why?’ Gilbert’s voice was clipped and cool and sceptical.

  ‘Of course we’re grateful for their good work. They certainly seem to have made their presence felt . . .’ Fleming smiled at the recollection of the punches traded in a London square. ‘But they haven’t come up with anything to suggest Lindsay’s a spy or a security risk, have they? Nor has Duncan at the camp. Quite the contrary – he seems impressed.’

  For a matter of seconds there was only the angry crackle of the line. Fleming slipped behind Checkland’s desk and into his chair: ‘So I’ll let the Admiral know you’re happy to let this thing drop now, shall I? . . .’

  ‘I think you should let me question him again. Duncan says he was very upset about the death of his cousin – the U-boat commander . . .’

  ‘Yes. I read that,’ said Fleming drily. ‘I think I’d be a little cut up about my cousin too. Wouldn’t you?’

  A few more hostile seconds crackled by until Fleming spoke again:

  ‘I don’t think you like Lindsay, Colonel . . . that’s a pity because I was hoping Five would help him . . . help us out.’

  ‘It’s too soon to give him a clean bill of health.’

  Fleming paused: ‘Well, that’s as may be but for now we’re rather in his hands and we would appreciate some assistance – if you don’t mind.’

  Mit Käse fängt Mann Mause. Lindsay left the prisoners in the sticky heat of their rooms and walked with the thought all afternoon. Bait to catch the mouse. It was the only way. He stood for a while beneath Lange’s willow tree throwing the occasional pebble into the lake, the ripples twinkling in an ever-widening circle until they were lost in the bright sunlight. Consequences, consequences. To risk one man’s life for the many. It was at the edge of what he knew to be right but the thought had chased him all night, all day. ‘Whatever you need to do.’ Surely a conscience was a luxury in the war they were fighting. It needed to be an elastic conscience at least. But he wrestled with the thought that it was for more than the greater good, more than duty, it was his demon. A conviction – confused but firm – that in vanquishing it there would be some sort of release. Once the idea had taken hold of him, it held him in a breathless embrace, squeezing him tighter, tighter. ‘Whatever you need to do’: he needed to do this.

  Jürgen Mohr was sitting at the table with a copy of yesterday’s Times. Lindsay stood aside to let the guard remove the supper tray with its half-eaten meal of pork and potatoes and something that might have been gravy.

  ‘This is how you hope to break me,’ said Mohr in English and he pointed to the plate. The door closed behind Lindsay and he leant back against it.

  ‘I don’t need to break you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You and your officers are going back to the camp – for now. ‘I have your old statement,’ and he lifted the file he was holding. ‘And fresh statements from the others.’

  ‘May I have a cigarette?’ Mohr sounded tired. Two days spent sitting, waiting, with only old English newspapers and a battered copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost to relieve the boredom, and that special anxiety, the uncertainty of the prisoner, the frustration, the helplessness. Lindsay took out his cigarettes and tossed them on to the table.

  ‘There is going to be a trial. We’re preparing the papers. Two, perhaps three of your officers.’

  Mohr took a cigarette and waved it at Lindsay, who stepped forward to hand him the lighter.

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘And your part in the Council of Honour and the interrogation of Heine will be examined too.’

  Mohr drew deeply on his cigarette. But for a small frown hovering at his brow, he looked calm, his chin in his hands, his elbows on the table.

  ‘You’re leaving tonight.’

  Their eyes met for a moment, then Mohr looked away, the ghost of a smile on his face, and he picked up the Milton.

  ‘This is hard for me, but I understand enough to admire.’ And he opened the book at a small paper marker. ‘The hell w
ithin. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’

  He raised his eyes slowly from the text to Lindsay’s face. And Lindsay felt tense and uncomfortable for a moment. He turned to rap on the door. Heavy boots in the corridor, the drawing back of bolts, and as it began to swing open he looked again at Mohr.

  ‘Keep the cigarettes.’

  Rain brought the late summer smell of decay to the park on the following day, the horse chestnuts curling brown and the first fall of beechnuts and acorns. Helmut Lange was allowed to walk between showers, a guard at his heels. They walked in silence and he preferred it that way. Lindsay had sent a note with his apologies; did he want another book, what about cigarettes? Its warmth would have surprised the sergeant who delivered it if he had been able to read German. There were half a dozen prisoners with their escorts in the park and sometimes Lange was permitted to offer them a smoke. He did not see any of those who had travelled with him from Camp Number One. And it was the same the next day. No one seemed very interested in him any more and he spent hours on his camp bed day-dreaming of home, his mother never far from his thoughts. What would happen to him? He had never thought to ask. He had felt numb with exhaustion after the evening he had spoken of Heine, too full of grief to think of the future. Lindsay would come in time to tell him. There were other camps, perhaps they would send him to Canada. But in the stillness of early morning, as the rain beat against the shutters, a profound anxiety crept through him, penetrating every fibre until his nightshirt clung to him cold and wet. What, what, what was going to happen? Oh God, what was going to happen?

  The breakfast tray was still on the table untouched when the guards came for him on the fifth day. Down the stairs at the double and through the fine civilised entrance hall, out to the forecourt and the old military bus, its engine idling roughly on the same note. The same, the same, everything the same. Where was Lindsay? There were other prisoners, officers, men in leather and Luftwaffe-blue chatting in hushed voices. Someone asked him a question but his mouth was sticky and dry and he could not think of an answer. Where was Lindsay? He tried to speak to the British Air Force officer in charge of the escort: ‘Please, I must talk . . .’

  But the guards were pressing the prisoners up the steps and on to the bus. Someone held his shoulder:

  ‘Come on, Fritz. It’s a long way.’

  And in a daze, his heart sick, he was pushed to the door, tripping on the step, past the sour-faced soldier behind the wheel, and shaking to his seat.

  46

  I

  t was Dietrich who noticed the short muscular figure in naval uniform shrinking at the back of the line. He looked frightened at six hundred yards. He was walking slowly towards the gate at the eastern end of the terrace, almost hidden by the new Luftwaffe officers shouting their greetings to friends behind the wire. But my God, he had a nerve. Kapitän Mohr was at the blackboard with his English class when Dietrich threw open the schoolroom door:

  ‘He’s back, Herr Kap’tän.’

  Mohr looked at Dietrich for a moment, then calmly put down the chalk and walked over to the bay window. The class followed his example. The prisoners were parting like a river washing round a rock but for a few seconds he was lost behind their shoulders. Then Mohr saw him at the end of the line, white, unshaven, unkempt, clutching his sack to his chest like a tramp with a schnapps bottle. Shabby Lange, frightened Lange, one of the guardians of the German Navy’s reputation. What would dapper Dr Goebbels have thought of his reporter? The British had held him for two additional days. Why? The camp was sure it knew; it was whispered a hundred times over lunch, on the touchline as the football pitch, and in the rooms after lights-out: ‘Lange broken’, ‘Lange an informer’, ‘Lange’, ‘Lange’, ‘Lange’. Fresh evidence, statements, a trial. And yet here he was again shuffling into Stapley camp.

  The new prisoners who knew nothing of Lange were speaking, laughing, shaking hands with comrades. But the rest were silent and some were turning away, presenting their backs to Lange in disgust. He was quite close to the window now and Mohr was surprised and struck by the stillness of his face, stiff, white, yes, but he seemed to have found a new strength from somewhere, an inner calm. But it was only a glimpse; the stocky frame of the 112’s navigator, Bruns, had stepped in front of him, those intimidating shoulders blocking the view.

  ‘Shall I ask Bruns to bring him here, Herr Kap’tän?’ Dietrich was poisonous, a man who loved raw violence.

  ‘No. I’ll see him later,’ said Mohr coldly.

  Someone was pushing his way through the crowd towards the two of them – Fischer, the commander of the 500 – and he placed a warning hand on Bruns’s shoulder. Strong words, an order and Bruns stepped smartly away. They spoke for a few seconds, then Fischer took Lange by the arm and began leading him across the terrace. As they passed the window he caught Mohr’s eye but looked quickly away as if ashamed of his small kindness. They disappeared into the house but Mohr stayed at the schoolroom window for a moment longer. The same number of guards in the same places, the wire, the gate, the watchtowers, no, there was nothing that struck him as out of the ordinary.

  ‘I want to see Kapitänleutnant Fischer and Major Brand in my room as soon as possible. And organise the Council for tonight.’

  The expression on Lieutenant Duncan’s face was eloquent testimony to the unpleasantness of the scene he had just witnessed.

  ‘Of course he protested and asked to speak to you and then he wanted the camp commander. He was cold-shouldered by the prisoners. He was surprisingly brave and dignified. Poor sod.’

  ‘Yes. It’s tough.’ Lindsay instantly felt ashamed of himself for uttering such a hopeless platitude. He was standing at the intelligence officer’s desk, anxiously rolling a glass paperweight from hand to hand.

  ‘How you got approval for this desperate enterprise I’ll never know,’ said Duncan hotly. ‘Goodness, I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  He lifted a pot of tea on to a small filing cabinet beside his desk and began stirring it with a knife. ‘And what if you get it wrong, time it badly? Lange could end up in the graveyard next to Heine.’

  He stopped stirring the tea to fix Lindsay with a pulpit frown that a minister of the Free Kirk would have been proud of: ‘Or don’t you care?’

  It was not worthy of a reply. There were listening devices in the old drawing room which the prisoners used as their mess, the kitchen and in the washroom, and a listening station in the west wing of the house. They had also worked on night-time positions for a large detachment of military policemen. Lindsay had considered placing one of the park’s German refugees among the new prisoners as a stool pigeon but that would have been even riskier. Yes, he was taking a risk, a terrible risk, but he had promised the camp commander he would pull the operation the moment Lange was in danger. There was just the doubt, the fear eating at him as he played restlessly with the paperweight: would he know when to take action?

  ‘Mohr will deal with this at once so it will happen tonight,’ he said with a certainty he did not feel. ‘We need to keep the prisoners busy before supper and roll call. Guards in and out of the house.’

  ‘It’s organised.’

  ‘And you’ve checked the microphones?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lindsay spent the rest of the afternoon skulking in Duncan’s office. It was important that none of the prisoners saw him but the time ticked too idly by and it was as much as he could do to control the old panic welling inside him. He was depending on Duncan and the Military Police for the arrangements. Major Benson visited him once to rumble anxiously about his ‘mad scheme’; it should be a job for the Police not the Navy, his camp was being turned into ‘a circus’. Then at eight o’clock Duncan returned to report on the evening roll call. Lange had stood a little apart, a lonely figure but in good health and calm, and surprisingly he had made no request to speak to the camp commander.

  ‘I hear he’s being ostracised by the camp. T
he Ältestenrat has let it be known that no one is to speak to him until he’s cleared his name,’ said Duncan, settling into his chair. ‘But there is no news of an investigation or a Council of Honour.’

  The men listening to the hidden microphones had heard only the cursing of the cooks in the kitchen, the songs and banter of the washroom.

  ‘I don’t expect anything to happen before lock-up,’ said Lindsay, glancing at his watch.

  Half an hour and then the game of cat and mouse would begin. The Military Police would move into position close to the west wing of the house ready to force their way in if called upon to do so. One group at the entrance to the old crew yard, the other close to the covered passage that offered direct access to kitchen and washroom. They would have to be discreet because Mohr would post his lookouts too. Could ordinary soldiers be discreet? Lindsay wondered. There were so many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, so many. A frisson of fear coursed through him from neck to toes. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that it was going to be a disaster. Since the Culloden everything had been a disaster. Duncan was right, what if they were too late? Call it off now. He should call it off. But he knew he wouldn’t.