The Secret of Spandau

by Peter Lovesey

  ‘Dick told me you suspect the security services.’

  ‘It was always a risk,’ Cedric confirmed, trying to sound as if he had never been wholly in favour. ‘We couldn’t do this without making waves. I don’t hold anyone responsible.’

  ‘You’re serious?’ Jane said. ‘You want us back in the newsroom?’

  ‘Yes.’ His small eyes studied her. ‘My information is that you want to drop out anyway.’

  She made a sharp intake of breath. ‘Well, your information is wrong, Cedric. I have a personal stake in this now. My flat was broken into, and I’m angry. All right, I’ll admit it shook me up at first, but that’s turned to anger now. Why do these people think they have a right to invade my home? What have I turned up that is so fascinating to them? I don’t want to pull out. I mean to get to the truth.’

  Cedric shook his head. ‘There isn’t any point, Jane. They’d hit us with a D Notice before you could write the story.’

  ‘A D Notice has no legal force. It’s advisory.’

  He sighed wearily. ‘It’s a warning that we’d be risking prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘With a story about Rudolf Hess in 1941?’

  Dick chimed in, ‘The Sunday Times ignored a D Notice when it exposed Kim Philby as a spy.’

  ‘The case of Hess is in no way comparable,’ Cedric insisted in a tight voice.

  With a slight clearing of his throat, Dick challenged this assertion. ‘For one thing, it concerns the reputation of MI5.’

  ‘Mytchett Place?’

  ‘Yes. I meant to tell you something I got in Brighton from that agent you asked me to visit. Did you know Sefton Delmer, the Express man?’

  ‘Slightly,’ Cedric grudgingly admitted.

  ‘He was in charge of a secret service unit in the war. Black propaganda. His first assignment was to fabricate bogus news stories that were fed to Hess. Ugly stories, like the one that his wife and small son had been committed to mental institutions. Our people were doing that to Hess within a month of his arrival.’

  ‘War is a dirty business.’

  At that, Jane erupted. ‘For Christ’s sake, Cedric, don’t fob us off with old B-movie clichés! You know there’s a story, a bloody big story, that the people who run our country have tried to hush up for years. You know about the missing files on Hess, the stuff locked away until the next century. You know there’s no reason why he should still be sitting in a cell in Spandau almost twenty years after all the others were released.’

  ‘A life sentence means life to the Russians,’ Cedric pointed out.

  ‘Balls,’ said Jane. ‘You told us yourself that the only other lifers were released from Spandau in the fifties. Hess is still there.’

  ‘They were sick men.’

  ‘He’s a very old man. If they were sent home to die, why not Hess? You know, and so do we, that something prevents it. Somebody is terrified of what might happen. What do they think – that the Deputy Führer is going to address Nazi rallies at the age of ninety? And why are we about to be pulled off the investigation? Is it because someone on this paper is running scared as well?

  Cedric’s face had been reddening since Jane started her harangue. He said in a stilted voice held in check with an obvious effort, ‘Before we go any further, Jane, you can take back that remark you just made. The decision to shelve the story is mine. I am not running scared. I have made a professional judgement.’

  There was moment’s angry silence.

  ‘I apologise,’ said Jane flatly, ‘but I can’t accept that your judgement is right about this.’

  Before Cedric drew breath, Dick spoke up, gamely drawing the fire. ‘Why meet trouble half-way? No one has issued a D Notice yet. Won’t you give us more time, Cedric? You hooked us on this story. We’ve slogged through the research. Don’t you think –’

  The phone in front of Cedric buzzed. ‘This could be Red,’ he said. ‘I cabled instructing him to get in touch.’

  It was an amplifying phone, so they heard the switchboard confirm that Mr Goodbody was on the line from Berlin, then Red saying, ‘Cedric?’

  Jane felt a surge of hope at the sound of that broad west country accent. If anyone could make an impact on Cedric, it was Red. Her own emotional outburst had misfired horribly, and she could already sense the resistance to Dick’s more measured appeal.

  ‘Decent of you to call,’ Cedric responded with sarcasm into the box on his desk. ‘You’re still working for us then?’

  ‘Round the clock, your excellency.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘You’re going to be even more glad when I tell you this,’ Red said with disarming confidence. ‘I’ve got the line into Spandau. One of the warders. Doesn’t say a lot, but he’s a good lad. Just give me the questions whenever you and the others are ready, and I’ll tell him what he has to do.’

  ‘There’s a hitch,’ Cedric started to explain.

  ‘No hitch,’ responded Red. ‘I’m ready to go.’

  ‘A hitch on this side.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A problem. Some, er, unsolicited interest.’

  ‘Would you speak up? I’m in a bar.’

  ‘God Almighty,’ muttered Cedric. ‘I can’t explain now, but we’re stymied. Can’t go on.’

  ‘Back to the drawing-board, you mean?’ said Red with the disappointment clear in his voice. ‘Jesus Christ, Cedric! That’s all I need. I wasn’t planning on a delay. I’m ready to go now.’

  ‘That won’t be possible,’ Cedric told him firmly.

  Red’s voice now betrayed real concern. ‘Easy, Cedric. This is a delicate situation for me. As a cover, I’m dating this warder’s table-tennis partner, and she’s a very demanding fraulein. She’s match-fit. I’m short of training. I’m talking about another indoor sport. Get the picture?’

  Cedric rolled his eyes upwards, then tactfully announced to Red, ‘Dick and Jane are here with me.’

  ‘Good. Give them my best and tell them I’m counting on them. I can’t keep it up much longer. Dick’ll know what I mean.’

  Jane murmured, ‘We all know what he means.’

  ‘So let’s agree to a deadline, shall we?’ Red pressed. ‘I’m serious, Cedric. I’m taking ginseng with every meal.’

  ‘A deadline?’ Cedric repeated with aversion.

  Jane nudged Dick and they each nodded enthusiastically.

  Cedric glared back at them.

  ‘You give me a deadline, and I’ll give you a headline,’ promised Red. ‘Hess – The Truth.’

  Cedric rubbed the side of his face. ‘All right,’ he said resignedly into the phone, ‘Call me this time on Wednesday for further instructions.’

  ‘Will do. Love to all.’

  The line clicked.

  ‘Thanks, Cedric,’ said Jane.

  ‘You’ve got Red to thank, not me. The chance of a line into Hess is too tempting for any editor to pass up.’

  ‘So we have forty-eight hours,’ said Dick.

  28

  A day with the lawyers. Harald Beer was enjoying it, too. Unlike his father, he was a businessman first, then a bookman. The first few days since he had taken over at Beer Verlag had been devoted to the accounts. Now it was contracts.

  He had asked to see every contract in the building. They made a staggering sight in his office. They covered his desk and half the floor. Of course some of the older stuff had lapsed and could be thrown out immediately. He filled a tea-chest with half a century of his father’s and his grandfather’s mistakes and had them taken out before the lawyers arrived. There weren’t even any autographs worth saving.

  He sifted through the rest and set aside any that still yielded a profit, or might be worth renegotiating. There were some good things in the backlist: classics of German literature that would certainly ensure the survival of the firm and ought – with more discrimination – to have taken it to the top of the publishers’ league. The future was not wholly bleak.

  But there was still plent
y of dead wood to hack out, and he had brought in the lawyers to help. They were painfully cautious. They had to be harried and bullied into finding clauses that gave Beer’s a let-out, or at least the opportunity of paying off the unwanted authors. Harald rapidly developed a facility for locating the phrase … shall discharge the publisher of any obligation … and by the end of the morning he reckoned he had discharged obligations to the tune of six million Deutschmarks. It was salutary to discover how the costs of slim volumes of mediocre poetry and dull criticism mounted up.

  So by the morning’s end he felt elated. Beer Verlag was slimmer and in better shape. In future the policy would be to publish bigger books that appealed to a wider section of the public. The one he had foremost in mind was the Hess memoir. Without any doubt it was destined for the bestseller lists.

  The lawyers had gone to lunch and Harald was sipping a scotch and still contemplating Hess when a call was put through to his office.

  ‘Herr Beer?’

  ‘Yes?’ He answered warily. He had informed the switchboard that he was unavailable to incoming calls from authors or their agents. Any decisions about contracts or scripts would be communicated by post the following week. It was always possible, however, that one of the less experienced girls was doing the lunchtime stint on the switchboard.

  ‘This is in regard to your recent letter to an old gentleman.’ But it was not the voice of an old gentleman. The voice was firm and articulate, the accent local.

  ‘Which gentleman is that?’ Harald asked.

  ‘This must be confidential, Herr Beer.’

  ‘You may speak freely to me.’

  ‘You are alone?’

  ‘Yes. Who are you?’

  ‘The letter you sent indicated that you are in possession of a book in typescript that your late father negotiated to publish.’

  The Hess memoir. Harald reached for a pen. ‘That is quite correct. Before we go on, may I have your name?’

  ‘Pröhl. It is not important. I am just a go-between, speaking on behalf of the writer.’

  Pröhl. It was familiar to Harald, but in what connection? He was certain it had come up since his father’s death. Not in the contracts. Not in the accounts. Where?

  ‘Are you still there, Herr Beer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have been asked to thank you for the letter and the suggestion it contained.’

  ‘Merely a thought in passing,’ said Harald, trying to sound casual.

  ‘For obvious reasons,’ Pröhl went on, ‘the author of the book is unable to respond in person.’

  ‘I follow you, Herr Pröhl.’

  ‘He asked me to inform you that his wishes in regard to the book remain unchanged.’

  ‘Unchanged?’ Harald’s hand trembled. This was not what he had expected to hear. It was a blow he could hardly stomach. ‘Are you quite certain of this?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Has he considered the points I raised – the probable advantages that publicity would achieve?’

  ‘He has given his answer, Herr Beer.’

  Harald flicked his tongue around his lips. ‘Surely he is open to further discussion.’

  ‘I am sorry. He is inflexible. It’s not surprising, is it? He has lived with inflexibility for the past forty years.’

  ‘I am aware of that. I was suggesting a way of breaking the deadlock.’

  ‘But it’s not on. Goodbye, Herr Beer.’

  ‘Wait!’ Harald was desperate. The biggest opportunity of his life was slipping away from him. ‘May I contact you again about this?’

  ‘It won’t be necessary.’

  ‘But when he dies …’

  ‘… his executors will contact you, I’m sure.’

  ‘But I’d like to consult him about the illustrations,’ said Harald on an inspiration. ‘I know he is very particular about illustrations. He says something in the typescript about a picture several books have used that is supposed to be of himself and his sister as children. It’s incorrect. We at Beer Verlag have high standards. We can’t afford to make a mistake like that. I’d like to submit some agency pictures for him to approve.’

  ‘I’ll mention it,’ said Pröhl.

  ‘What is your number?’ Harald asked. ‘I’d like to be able to contact you about this.’

  To his profound relief, Pröhl gave a local number before putting down the phone.

  Harald was still shaking. He poured himself another scotch. There had to be a way of overcoming this. He couldn’t submit to the will of that stubborn old Nazi in Spandau.

  While his brain worked on the problem, he went to the safe, unlocked it and lifted out the packet, still in its wrapper with his father’s handwriting on it. He removed the typescript and the contract. This was one contract he would not be showing the lawyers.

  He leafed through the flimsy sheets of typing. To be brutal, Hess was a dull writer, but that would be no problem. There were professional editors upstairs who could whip the book into shape. Its selling power was Hess’s unique knowledge of events in the years before his capture. Things that would change the history books, sensational things that he had kept silent about for all these years. He meant them to be revealed to the world only after he was dead. Why? Could his silence have been his guarantee of survival?

  As Harald turned the pages, a name caught his attention, and it was the name he had tried to remember earlier. Pröhl. Hess had married Ilse Pröhl. So it was one of the family who had made the phone call.

  Harald’s mind worked faster. Who was likely to benefit from the huge advances that the memoirs were certain to attract? He took down a tax guide from his shelf and began to work on the figures. It was a question of comparing income accrued before death with the tax levied on an estate.

  After twenty minutes, he picked up the phone and dialled the number Pröhl had given him.

  ‘Herr Pröhl?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘This is Harald Beer. I have been thinking over what you told me. I wonder whether a compromise is possible.’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ said Pröhl.

  ‘We could take another look at the contract. I’ll be perfectly straight with you. We obtained the rights to this book in 1964 for two million Deutschmarks, which was a tidy sum then, but looks like a bargain now. Frankly, it will make much more money that that. The contract gives my firm the exclusive right to sub-license to other publishers throughout the world. It means that if we abide by the agreement, and no money changes hands until after the decease of the writer, there will be a very big pay-out to the estate for one or two years, and an extremely heavy tax-bill. I’ve been looking at the figures –’

  ‘Before you go on, Herr Beer,’ Pröhl put in, ‘I’m not empowered to discuss money with you.’

  ‘All right. But at least you can convey an offer from Beer’s?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Five million now into any bank account your client cares to name and another five million to his estate on publication. As well as increasing our offer fivefold, it will represent a tremendous saving in tax.’

  ‘I see.’ There was a pause. ‘I won’t promise, but if I were able to call you tonight …’

  ‘I shall be here at my desk until nine this evening,’ said Harald, smiling for the first time in an hour.

  The afternoon session with the lawyers went particularly well. He could confidently commit the firm to a five million advance. He would, of course, dangle the bait and then make it conditional on publication within two years, irrespective of Hess’s survival thereafter. Once the family had contemplated an immediate fortune, they would soon prevail on the old man to sign a new contract.

  He tried to keep occupied as the evening closed in, but time still dragged. He had asked the switchboard to let all incoming calls come through to his office, which meant taking a few tedious enquiries from people who had tried to reach him in the day, but he cut them short with some excuse about a call from New York on another line.


  By eight, he had the building to himself, and he was unable to concentrate on any kind of work. He sat by the phone, consuming claret left over from the last party. Across the room, his spade-bearded grandfather stared out of the portrait. Rolf Beer had been born only a few years earlier than Hess. He had once been Burgermeister. Very likely he had known the Hess family. There must have been some solid reason why Hess entrusted his memoirs to the house of Beer.

  9.00 p.m. Nothing. Harald’s nerves were on edge. He had promised himself not to phone Pröhl again. It would betray his eagerness. He was trying to cultivate the laid-back manner of the smooth negotiator.

  A buzzer sounded.

  He picked up the phone, but it was dead. For a moment he was disorientated, thrown by the unexpected. It was the intercom with the front door that had sounded.

  He switched it on. ‘Who’s there, please?’

  ‘Pröhl. We spoke earlier.’ Clearly enough, it was Pröhl’s voice.

  Harald pressed the button that released the door. ‘I wasn’t expecting you in person, but please come in. It’s the door at the end of the hallway.’ He quickly stowed away the claret bottle and glass just as the knock came on his door. ‘Come in, Herr Pröhl.’

  The visitor was a good match for his voice: about thirty-five, a slight, compact figure, neat in his movements, elegantly dressed in a grey pinstripe and white shirt with a gold collar-fastening under the dove-grey tie. ‘In the end I decided it would be more practical to come in person,’ he explained to Harald as they shook hands. He clicked his heels in the old-fashioned way. ‘These are highly confidential matters, and one hears such disquieting stories about telephone-tapping.’

  ‘True,’ said Harald, gesturing Pröhl into an armchair. This was encouraging, now that he had taken it in. The indications were that the family was ready to do business. ‘Would you care for a drink?’

  ‘I don’t take it, thank you.’

  ‘I must apologise for the state of the office,’ Harald said, waving his hand towards the contracts stacked against the wall. ‘There is so much paper-work when one takes over.’

  Pröhl nodded. The courtesies done, he appeared to be waiting to do business.