The Secret of Spandau

by Peter Lovesey

  There was a note of desperation in her voice that Red couldn’t understand. Frustration, yes. But desperation? And tears? It wasn’t like Heidrun at all. She should have been kicking a tree or throwing stones at the swans.

  He said, ‘You’re really in deep, aren’t you?’

  She gave him a penetrating look. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I know you’re upset about the table-tennis match, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? You made a pitch for Cal and it didn’t come off.’

  She started walking back in the direction of the Palace.

  ‘OK, he didn’t succumb to your charms,’ Red persisted, increasingly interested in rooting out the truth. ‘He’s an idiot, but there it is. You win some, you lose some. Maybe he’s a fag.’

  Her cheeks were glistening with tears. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘You’re scared of something.’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘Is it that guy who turned up at your apartment this morning? Valentin?’

  She stopped and looked up at Red with her moist eyes as if she were making up her mind.

  ‘What is it, love?’ he asked.

  She reached out and held both his hands. ‘Take me back to your place now and let me stay.’

  32

  On the same afternoon that Red had his meeting with Cal and Heidrun at Charlottenburg, important things happened in England that transformed the Hess investigation.

  The task of tracing the legless ex-pilot, Warrant-Officer Perry, was right up Dick Garrick’s street. He had spent the morning putting out requests for information to as many organizations as he could reach on a Sunday. He had started with the RAF Association and the British Legion. An Air Commodore (retired) was given an urgent message at 9.45 on Banstead golf course and abandoned the fifteenth hole to drive to London and consult an Air Ministry list of disabled pensioners. He reported at 11.50 that Warrant-Officer Perry had received regular payments from the RAF Benevolent Fund until 1977. He had lived in Motspur Park, Surrey, and supplemented his pension by working at home, wrapping cutlery in plastic for a catering firm who supplied British Airways passenger flights. His wife had died that year, and he had notified the Trustees that his circumstances had altered, and he no longer needed assistance. He had moved from Motspur Park, and the RAF had lost touch with him.

  A phone call to the house was unproductive. It had changed owners three times since the Perrys had left, and none of the neighbours could help. The catering firm, too, reported that they knew nothing of Warrant-Officer Perry’s present whereabouts.

  The trail went cold. At the back of Dick’s mind was the stark possibility that Perry was dead by now. The RAF records showed that he would be eighty-three if he had lived this long.

  ‘Where else can we try?’ asked Jane, who had sat with him by the phone for the whole of the morning.

  ‘Pensions and Social Security,’ said Dick, ‘but not until tomorrow when the offices are open again, and God knows how long it will take to trace him in their records. It might save us time tomorrow if we check the Death Registrations.’

  ‘We’ve got to assume he’s alive.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Medical records? He must have had a doctor in Motspur Park. The doctor must have known him well. He would remember an amputee.’

  Dick clicked his fingers. ‘Better than that, the limb-fitting centre at Roehampton. He must have gone there for artificial legs. It’s the only place this side of London. They must keep up-to-date records.’

  He got on the phone again. A few minutes later, he lifted his thumb to Jane. ‘Found him! He’s alive and well and living on Richmond Hill at the Star and Garter home for disabled ex-servicemen.’

  They were there within the hour, presenting themselves to a sister who told them how pleased she was that they had come. ‘I can’t remember when he last had a visitor, and he’s such a darling. I wheeled him out onto the terrace.’

  ‘How’s his mental state?’ asked Dick.

  ‘I won’t answer for it if you give him too much of that,’ said the sister, eyeing the bottle of scotch in Dick’s hand. ‘In the normal course of events, he’s very sharp for a man of his age. Would you like to come this way?’

  Warrant-Officer Perry was in a wheelchair, looking down on the sinuous sweep of the Thames. He appeared so frail under his blanket that Jane hesitated to shake his hand, but he extended it, bony and heavily pigmented with liver spots, and gripped hers surprisingly hard. Under his straw hat, his eyes were misty brown behind glasses that magnified them strongly. Receding gums had given him the nutcracker look of old age, but he kept up appearances with an RAF tie.

  Once the introductions were over, and the whisky stowed away under the blanket, Dick explained that he wanted to talk about the war.

  ‘You can call me Frank if you like,’ said the old man.

  ‘Fine. This is Jane and I’m Dick,’ he said, for the second time. ‘As I said, I’m interested in what you did in the war.’

  Frank said, ‘I appreciate the hard stuff. Good of you to bring it.’

  ‘I believe you were a pilot, Frank.’

  ‘I’ll keep it in my cupboard. It’s not the others I don’t trust. It’s the nurses.’

  Jane said quietly to Dick, ‘Don’t rush him. He’ll tell us in his own time.’

  ‘I was in the RAF,’ said Frank. ‘We’re in a minority here. The place is full of the army. I did plenty of flying until I was bombed out in 1944 and lost my legs. Direct hit on my house in Raynes Park. One of them VIs. Buzzbombs, we called them. I was down the Anderson shelter in the garden, but we caught the blast, you see. The door blew in and the whole damn thing fell in on us. The wife got out with just a few scratches, but I was trapped. They had to take one of my legs while I was lying there. The other was no good either. I didn’t know much about it.’

  Having got his story over, Frank said, ‘Got a cigarette?’

  Jane produced one from her bag and helped him to light it. She said, ‘What were you flying, Frank?’

  ‘Ansons mostly. You wouldn’t have heard of them. I don’t mind betting you’ve heard of Spitfires and Hurricanes, though. I wasn’t one of them glory boys in the Battle of Britain. I was ferrying people about in my old bus.’

  ‘VIPs?’

  ‘All sorts.’

  ‘It was important work, though,’ ventured Dick.

  Frank Perry drew thoughtfully on the cigarette. ‘Who sent you here? You must have had the dickens of a job to find me.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know his name,’ Dick started to explain.

  ‘D’you mind?’ said Frank quite sharply. ‘I may look old to you, but I haven’t lost my faculties. I can remember plenty of people I knew in the war. Flight Sergeant Whittingham. He was a card.’ It was the beginning of a rambling catalogue of RAF personnel, a roll-call of everyone still billeted in Frank Perry’s memory. As it was plainly a point of self-esteem that he remembered so many, it was difficult to cut him off without offence. Probably he recited this list by the hour to anyone in the home who would listen, and probably no one would.

  The question in Dick’s mind was whether the old man’s memory would recall anything it had not included in the recitative. He exchanged a look with Jane, and broke into the monologue: ‘Did you ever make a flight to Dublin?’

  Frank Perry carried on for a moment as if he had not heard, and then asked, ‘Where?’

  ‘Dublin. Did you fly on missions to Dublin?’

  There was a long hesitation. ‘Why do you ask me that?’

  Dick sighed, and Jane took over. ‘It could be important to us. We work on a newspaper.’

  The old man chuckled. ‘And you come to me for news? Young lady, the only news I ever get is who gets out on the terrace first in the morning. I gave up reading the papers when my eyes got bad.’

  ‘People want to know what really happened in the war,’ persisted Jane. ‘We were told that you flew on several secret missions.’

  ‘Who told you?’r />
  ‘A former MI5 officer.’

  ‘MI5 told you?’

  ‘That’s how we heard about you,’ said Dick.

  Warrant-Officer Perry stared down at the Thames Valley as if he had never seen it before. ‘They told me to keep my mouth shut. Why do they send you to see me if I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut?’

  Jane was about to speak, but Dick mouthed a negative and shook his head slightly. The crucial question had just been put. Its impact would be greater if it had an unrestricted drop.

  Frank Perry made up his mind. ‘I suppose it’s not important any more. In my day, if you made a promise, you kept it, and I have until now. I’d almost forgotten about it. But if those secret service Johnnies have changed their minds, I suppose there’s no harm in it any more. Yes, I’ll tell you about my trips to Dublin. The first one was in 1940, before the Battle of Britain, but not long before.’

  ‘July?’ suggested Dick.

  ‘About then. I was based at Uxbridge. One morning, the CO calls me into his office and leaves me there with two blokes in civvies. I didn’t know it at the time, but they must have been secret service. They give me a lot of stuff about top security and then brief me for a flight to Dublin. I have to pick up a party of four civilians at the airport and fly them to Kidlington. That’s Oxfordshire.’

  ‘We know,’ said Dick.

  ‘They kept telling me it was top secret, dangerous talk costs lives and all that, and even my CO didn’t know where I was going. I was a steady sort of bloke and I think they picked me out for this one. Anyway, I flew into Dublin and found myself being shunted out to the edge of the airfield, a mile away from the main buildings. There was one small hangar there, for private planes. I refuelled and had a cuppa, and I remember I had to pee against the hangar wall, begging your pardon, miss.’

  Jane smiled. ‘We’ve all had moments like that.’

  ‘Yes, well, in no time at all a big black car drives out to the hangar, and four men get out. One is English, your civil servant type, very nobby, and the others are foreigners.’

  ‘Germans,’ said Dick.

  ‘As I discovered,’ Frank Perry confirmed. ‘Well, the Englishman gets them aboard and tells me to take off. I ferry them over the Irish Sea and down to Kidlington using the flight path MI5 had given me. When we land, a staff-car comes out to the runway to meet them, and off they go. My orders are to make the return trip next morning, and that’s what I done.’

  ‘Just the once?’ asked Dick.

  ‘No, six times.’

  ‘Six?’

  ‘That’s what I said. In the end it was getting as regular as a twenty-seven bus.’

  ‘Can you remember any of the dates?’

  ‘I can, as a matter of fact. The second trip was on my birthday 18 September 1940. There was another one about three weeks later, and then nothing until the middle of March. Then it got busy. One in April and one in May. Then it stopped.’

  ‘This was May, 1941? Do you happen to remember the date of the final trip you made?’

  ‘Yes, it was the first Friday in May. There was always a NAAFI dance at Uxbridge, and I had to miss it, more’s the pity.’

  Dick was making notes. He asked Frank Perry to confirm the dates again. July, 18 September, and October 1940; and mid-March, April, and 2 May 1941. ‘I expect you wondered what it was all about,’ Dick prompted him.

  ‘Wasn’t my business,’ said Frank firmly. ‘I’d been told to keep my nose out of it, and I did.’

  ‘But you discovered they were Germans.’

  ‘Well, it was obvious, really, from the way they talked. They was speaking English most of the time, but you can tell it’s a Jerry from the way he says certain words, can’t you?’

  Dick nodded. ‘Did you overhear them, or did you speak to them yourself?’

  ‘I never spoke to them myself. But in the old bus, they had to shout to be heard above the engines.’

  ‘We heard that one of them knew your name.’

  Frank thought for a moment. He seemed to be tiring. ‘Now you mention it, something happened on one of the later runs. I got to Dublin and refuelled at the hangar as usual, and when the motor-car arrived, the British bloke who always escorted them told me one of the Germans wanted to search the plane before we took off. I wasn’t too pleased and I told him. I mean, what did they expect to find – a bleeding bomb? Well, these civil servants know how to smooth you down, don’t they? He told me they had a security wallah with them. Gestapo, I suppose he was. Quite a young fellow. We had to play along with him. So he went through the plane with me, and of course he didn’t find anything except my flying-jacket on the back of the pilot’s seat. Blow me if he didn’t pick it up and take my documents out of the pocket. “So you’re Warrant-Officer Perry,” he said. “Yes,” I said. “Want to make anything of it?” He gave me a dirty look and handed back my papers and that was the last I saw of him. He must have stayed behind in Dublin, because he wasn’t on the trip to England.’

  Dick went on probing, as conscientious in his way as the Gestapo officer had been. ‘Were the Germans you flew to England the same individuals each time?’

  ‘I think two of them were,’ answered Frank. ‘There was always a third one in the party, but I can’t recall that I ever recognized the same bloke on another trip.’

  ‘Would you say they were probably diplomats?’

  ‘I don’t think they were servicemen, anyway.’

  ‘And it was always the same routine in England? You flew to Kidlington and there was a staff car waiting?’

  ‘Yes.’ Frank took off his glasses and wiped them. ‘I mean no. We didn’t always fly into Kidlington. Once it was Brize Norton and another time it was Benson. And there’s something else I wanted to tell you, if I can remember it.’ He replaced the glasses and stared around the terrace. There were only two other residents outside, and they were well out of earshot, but he still leaned forward confidentially. ‘The driver. I had a word with the driver of the car a couple of times, when we were getting the party aboard. He was in the Army. A Sergeant in Transport Command. One time I asked him where he took them, and he said it was usually some big house in the country, miles from anywhere.’

  ‘The same one?’

  ‘No. Different each time. But there was one thing the same. Whichever house he had to take them to, there was always this big saloon car standing in the drive. Being in Transport Command, he knew all about cars. It had no markings, no flag or anything, but he knew who those Germans had come to see. Who do you think? Only the blinking Prime Minister, Winston Churchill!’

  Jane’s mind reeled. Churchill, the greatest Englishman, the man who had exhorted the nation to defy the Third Reich in the darkest days of the war, had been secretly, regularly, receiving its envoys. Churchill, who had pledged that Britain would go on to the end, fighting in France, on the seas and oceans, the beaches, the landing grounds, the fields, the streets and the hills, defending her island, whatever the cost might be.

  She was numb with the enormity of it. She was not a blind worshipper of Churchill. She had often rebelled against her parents’ image of the man as a mix of the finest qualities of the British bulldog, St George and Jesus Christ. She would remind them of blots on his war record, like the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Dresden. Yet how could anyone begin to account for this massive inconsistency? She was so stunned that she totally failed to notice the silver-haired man in a dark blue suit who was waiting to intercept Dick and herself as they moved off the terrace and into the building.

  She just heard his voice saying, ‘May I have a private word with you both?’ She and Dick stopped together. She found herself looking into a pair of expressionless grey eyes above a thin, insipid smile.

  Dick came down to earth first. ‘What about?’

  ‘If you would kindly step outside the building …’ His voice was mild in tone, but so overloaded with reproach that he might have been apprehending shop-lifters.

  ‘Who are you?’ Dick ask
ed.

  ‘Not here, if you don’t mind.’

  Dick exchanged an uncomprehending glance with Jane and they allowed themselves to be led through the building to the main entrance. Three or four old soldiers were outside in wheelchairs, watching the traffic pass in and out of Richmond Park. The grey eyes flicked over them and then focussed in the opposite direction.

  ‘Let’s walk towards the Terrace Gardens.’

  ‘If you’ve anything to say, you can say it here,’ Dick obdurately told him.

  Another glance at the war veterans. ‘Very well. I think it right to inform you that the residents of this home are all ex-members of the armed forces, and come under the jurisdiction of the Official Secrets Act. They are not at liberty to disclose information to the press about sensitive matters.’

  ‘Just who are you?’ Dick angrily demanded.

  ‘A member of the security services.’

  ‘There’s nothing illegal in what we’re doing,’ said Dick. ‘It’s supposed to be a free country.’

  Jane added, ‘We phoned the matron to arrange this visit.’

  ‘I know you did, Miss Calvert-Mead,’ said grey-eyes, pausing to let the fact that he knew her name sink in. ‘But you omitted to advise the matron of the matters you wished to raise with Warrant-Officer Perry.’

  ‘He was under no duress,’ said Dick.

  ‘He is an old man, Mr Garrick. Sometimes people take advantage of old men. As I mentioned, he is covered by the Official Secrets Act. Any information he may unwittingly have disclosed to you is also likely to be covered by the Act.’

  ‘So what do you intend to do about it?’ Dick snapped back. ‘Prosecute? Haul the old man into court in his wheelchair? Is that the way this country treats its war veterans?’

  ‘No, but we can prosecute journalists who take advantage of the same old man.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’ said Jane.

  He ignored her. ‘I doubt if this line of enquiry will reflect much credit on your newspaper, either. I believe you pride yourselves on being one of the more reliable organs of the press. Old men’s memories are notoriously unreliable.’

  Jane started to say, ‘We wouldn’t publish anything we hadn’t confirmed,’ but Dick gripped her arm, over-riding her words with some of his own.