The Nazi Spy

by Alan Hardy

  She had started to live again. She was once more that young woman giggling with school-chums in unquestioning, half-undressed intimacy, sprawled on dormitory beds, speaking childishly outrageous words about how it would be for them in years to come with the men of their dreams.

  That private world of hers had re-emerged from the stultifying fog of her marriage and its soul-destroying years. As well as her schooldays, she’d also re-connected with her early twenties when she had still clung to her teenage dreams, if only in thoughts and fantasies she kept hidden from the world.

  All such youthful fancies, however, disappeared again. A world of duty re-asserted itself. Garden fetes, boring dinner-parties, visits from bawling and brawling nieces and nephews, all of which had to be faced with a half-smile and half-grimace. Once more she stepped back even further from the world, and resided in a self-centred arena where only she and her suspicions, and secrets, held sway. But no longer those other, more personal secrets. They became unacknowledged again, just unnamed urges, bodily itches and pangs, unvoiced moments when her hands strayed over her body and her breathing came faster.

  Then, shortly afterwards, Group Captain Jenkins, Freddie’s station-commander, came to visit her, and commiserate with her, as they did on such occasions.

  You know, “Dear Fiona, he died defending his country. We won’t forget his sacrifice. His name will live on, with all the others…”

  That sort of thing.

  Only, he let slip a piece of information which immediately made Fiona suspect that poor Freddie had been murdered. Not killed in combat by the enemy, but deliberately targeted. Maybe even by the gorgeous Flight Lieutenant Matthew Manfred.

  2

  Group Captain Jenkins was a typical RAF type. Bluff. Direct. No frills. A handlebar moustache, just like Freddie had. In fact, he was an older version of Freddie, the same plumpish, oafish dullard.

  “A really decent chap, Freddie, as you know, Mrs MacIntosh…” he murmured, taking a sip from the floral-designed tea-cup Fiona had just poured his tea into. “Chaps were just returning from a sortie over Northern France. Freddie must have thought he was already home, when he got bounced… Was brought down just as he was approaching the south coast. His parachute didn’t open, y’know. Devilish bad luck. Went straight into the drink, I’m afraid… One other chap was lost over France on the same mission…Flying Officer Wentworth…”

  “Has his body been recovered, Group Captain Jenkins?” Fiona asked, resting her cup and saucer on her lap, her knees pressed close together.

  Her thighs gave a little twitch as she sensed the Group Captain’s gaze veer towards her legs, while he gave a throaty cough.

  Yes, she thought, most definitely an older version of her own dirty, beloved spouse.

  “Er…’fraid not, Mrs MacIntosh,” he murmured, scratching his own thigh. “If anything should…y’know…wash up, we’ll of course…”

  “Of course.”

  A few more sips of tea, and clinks of best china on best china.

  “And the aeroplane, Group Captain?”

  “Well,” he mumbled, raising his gaze towards Fiona’s upper body, his eyes perusing her breasts primly cupped in her sedate, brown cardigan, “that came down over Beachy Head, crashed just beyond the cliff-edge… Managed to make it back to dry land, so to speak…”

  Insufferable old rake, Fiona thought, as she returned his licentious gaze with absolute distaste.

  “Were there any personal possessions found…you know, log-book, lucky charm or anything?” asked Fiona automatically, feigning interest.

  “Burnt out, I’m afraid, Mrs MacIntosh,” answered Group Captain Jenkins. “Nothing to report, really. Nothing of note, apart from the…”

  His words trailed off, as he bit his lip and a flush of stupid embarrassment crossed his bland features.

  “Apart from..?”

  “Well…I shouldn’t really…” mumbled the half-wit, looking confused, as well as stupid.

  “C’mon, Group Captain,” pleaded Fiona with a sweet smile, tightening her muscles as she brought her legs even closer together. “I think I have a right to know…”

  “Oh well,” relented the red-faced Group Captain, wriggling uncomfortably in his armchair, “I shouldn’t really…but, just between you and me, you understand… Flight Lieutenant MacIntosh’s Spitfire was riddled with 20 mm cannon shells.”

  “So?” Fiona said curtly, eyeing him narrowly.

  “20 mm cannon, Mrs MacIntosh. Spitfires fire 20 mm cannon.”

  “I see, Group Captain…” she murmured, looking down, cradling her empty cup in its pretty saucer.

  “Fog of war, Mrs MacIntosh,” stated the Group Captain abruptly, if a little callously. “Friendly fire and all that… It does happen…”

  “Yes…”

  That was how the situation had stayed for a couple of months.

  Freddie had gone to the land of no return. The ‘set’ she mixed with had commiserated with her, over their gin and tonics and hors-d’oeuvres, until in no time at all both she and they completely forgot the insignificant little toe-rag.

  The same two problems remained.

  Who had been writing letters to her all the time up to Freddie’s thankful departure, and beyond? And why?

  And who had sneaked up on Freddie over Beachy Head and pumped his Spitfire full of 20 mm cannon?

  She was sure it was deliberate.

  Partly because Freddie had sent her a strange telegram shortly before his death.

  She kept it upstairs in her dressing-room. She must have another look at it.

  The conundrum of the letter-writing, and Freddie’s demise—namely, the continuation of the letters after his death—couldn’t be explained away by a bit of insignificant overlap. It had gone on too long. There must have been a deliberate plan.

  She knew that because of the secrets in her head. The things she couldn’t divulge. The things she hid away. As well as the telegram.

  The letter-writer had always been careful not to give too much away. The letters had been personal, even intimate at times, but they hadn’t let anything slip about the writer’s true identity. They had been circumspect about such details, in fact about any details at all. Even her questions probing local information about airfields, the daily aerial combats and the progress of the conflict had been largely ignored. The letters had used a broad brush in all matters. They had been argumentative, flirtatious, philosophical at times, but with a general, poetic hue which was exciting, persuasive and intriguing, but not informative. Voluble, but tight-lipped. Gushing and guarded at the same time.

  Fiona had been completely overwhelmed by them. Left gasping for more.

  Group Captain Jenkins had divulged another bit of interesting information.

  287 Squadron was returning to its home base here in Scotland, near Scapa Flow, the major naval base. It was taking up its duties protecting the convoys coming in from America, and the naval base at Scapa Flow from attack or reconnaissance by the occasional marauding Heinkel or Dornier.

  It was something of a quiet backwater, hardly in the thick of the action, although the incident involving HMS Tamworth the previous year had caused quite a stir.

  That incident had occurred a month or two before the squadron had been transferred south.

  The squadron had been rushed south in 1940 in the middle of the Battle of Britain when the Luftwaffe was fully engaged in its attempt to smash the RAF prior to the invasion of Britain, and the British air defences needed every available plane they could muster.

  287 Squadron had done what it had been required to do. It had performed well, as had many other RAF squadrons. It had done its duty.

  The RAF had held its own, and fought off the Germans.

  Their daylight raids had ceased, or at least those in massive formations out to obliterate airfields, radar and defences. The Luftwaffe had resorted to night-bombing to smash the will of the people by carpet-bombing London and other big cities. The Blitz had started.

>   Squadrons like 287 could take something of a rest. The Spitfire had done its work for now. It was now the turn of the night-fighters like the Blenheim or Defiant to do what little they could against the night-time Blitz.

  So, 287 Squadron was on its way back to Scotland, and Scapa Flow.

  That was where and how Fiona had met Freddie in 1928. RAF officers often intermingled with her ‘set’. They would bump into each other at country houses, dinner parties, garden fetes and dances. Fiona got to know a good many of them in that vague, polite way of the British upper middle-class.

  She and Freddie drifted into a standard, traditional relationship which developed from courtship to engagement and eventually to marriage, without ever attaining any intense feeling or passion.

  Fiona probably just felt that he would do. Maybe he would even surprise her in a positive way.

  But he hadn’t.

  3

  When the squadron had been back for a few days, Fiona asked to see Group Captain Jenkins again.

  He came at the earliest opportunity, looking very spruced-up, with glistening hair, and emitting a particularly unpleasant odour of after-shave.

  He had the totally wrong idea of the motive for Fiona’s summons.

  She asked him about the squadron and its members.

  She sighed sympathetically over the three pilots, further to Freddie and Flying Officer Wentworth, who had been shot down and killed during last summer’s dogfights.

  “Have all the other pilots returned here, Group Captain Jenkins?”

  “Well, apart from three other chaps who were posted to other squadrons at various stages, y’know, promotions and such…” replied an increasingly suspicious-looking Group Captain.

  His shiny, expectant face was gradually hardening into a disgruntled look of annoyance, as it became clear Fiona was picking his brain, and totally disinterested in any other part of his corpulent body.

  “And they were…Group Captain?”

  “Well, let me think…” mumbled an irritated Group Captain Jenkins. “Well, John Granville, George Turnbill, and Matthew Manfred… Do you recall them, Mrs MacIntosh?”

  “Yes, vaguely…” she replied. “Once married, I just had the usual contact with the squadron, you know, dances and official dos… It wasn’t that Freddie brought his colleagues here that often… If anything, I think you mixed the most with him, didn’t you? You both shared the same circle of friends, didn’t you?”

  Fiona flashed him a direct, rather contemptuous look, which he acknowledged with an awkward, very stiff nod.

  “Group Captain, can I be very open with you?”

  Group Captain Jenkins perked up a bit, his lips parting excitedly and his unwieldy torso wobbling markedly as he sat itchily on his armchair.

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “I can be quite blunt?”

  “Of course, of course… Don’t hold yourself back,” he whispered, his body stirring more and more.

  “Well, as I’m sure you know, Group Captain Jenkins, Freddie—”

  “Dennis.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Please dispense with formalities, Mrs MacIntosh. Call me Dennis.”

  “Well, Group Captain, as I was saying, Freddie was never a great letter-writer, as I’m sure you know…”

  “Yes?” inquired the Group Captain, beginning to look miserable again.

  “Well, he had never been a great letter-writer during our whole marriage, but, following his move to Tangmere down south, he never stopped writing to me.”

  “I don’t follow…”

  “Well, Group Captain, I have a question for you,” said Fiona, pausing for a moment. “Who wrote those letters?”

  The puzzlement etched on his stupid face instantly morphed into a flushed embarrassment.

  “Well, war can change people, y’know,” he muttered. “Chaps who seemed pretty solid suddenly need a woman’s…well…a woman’s…well…you understand…”

  “That may well be, but Freddie did not write those letters,” Fiona stated baldly, sitting upright, her hands held together on her lap, as her right hand nervously rubbed the wrist of her left hand.

  “How do you know?” he asked, with a curious glimmer in his big eyes.

  “Because they continued for a while after he was dead.”

  “I see,” he murmured, looking down.

  He fell silent, while Fiona, her eyes smarting, and her right hand rubbing her left wrist frenetically, stared at his bowed head.

  “Look, my dear,” he said, slightly raising his head, “Freddie never was the sort of chap to go in for namby-pamby stuff…well, letters and that… You know what he was like. Salt of the earth. True as an arrow. He—”

  “So, he got someone to write those letters to me, did he? He couldn’t be bothered to do it himself, so he got a mate or two to pretend to be him and—”

  “With the best of intentions, my dear,” he cut in. “Didn’t want to hurt your feelings, that was all. Y’know, he said it would keep the dear lady happy, and…”

  “I assumed it was that,” stated Fiona flatly.

  Despite herself, and the contempt she held for the oaf in front of her, she felt quite ashamed and belittled.

  “Probably you all had quite a laugh about it all, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “No, no, my dear!” insisted a red-faced Group Captain. “After all, it lasted just for a few letters, just a handful… I mean, no harm was intended…”

  “So, it was a shared joke, was it?” Fiona spat out, hardly able to breathe. “You sat around reading my letters, and concocting replies… It must have been hilarious, I assume? Something to do to ease the tension of waiting for the next order to scramble? An alternative to playing cards or reading books while waiting?”

  “But, my dear, just a handful of letters… I do apologize, but… It was just a question of helping out a comrade, and keeping his memsahib in good spirits. Nothing untoward was intended.”

  As Fiona stood by the bay-windows in the spacious drawing-room and watched the Group Captain’s car make a relieved, hasty escape along the driveway to the gates, she felt both chastened and intrigued.

  The letter-writing subterfuge had obviously started off by being something of a group giggle, an all-boys-together jape at her expense, a way of Freddie wangling out of having to write to her, by making her available to his comrades as a figure of fun. It was at just a slightly lower level than passing her on to his friends to be man-handled. He had made her an object of shared derision and abuse. How she hated him! And how she rejoiced that he was dead. Serve him right!

  But the half-witted Group Captain knew less than she did.

  He’d been part of the group of silly males, that was obvious, but he had no idea that it had gone on as long as it did, or in the volume that it did. Just a handful of occasions, he kept repeating. But there had been loads and loads of letters.

  So, what had started off as a group of war-weary males indulging in a bit of harmless female-bashing—basically, chaps having a good laugh—had changed into something quite different.

  It had changed at the point when the letter-writer asked her to address her letters to the Post Office Box number he provided.

  That was the point when it changed from being a group activity to an individual activity. It changed from being some men’s mockery of her to one man’s interest in her. From men’s disgusting treatment of her to a man’s affection for her. At least, that was what she hoped it was.

  And it must have happened when one of them was transferred to another squadron nearby.

  John Granville, George Turnbill, and Matthew Manfred.

  They were the three posted to other squadrons.

  It was one of them. It had to be.

  But why had he done it? Why had he continued writing to her? Or rather, why had he chosen to write to her in a personal and individual way? Was it just for the obvious reasons? Or was it something else? What did he know of her? What did he suspect?

&
nbsp; She remembered all three of them vaguely.

  Well, it would be more exact to say she knew all three of them vaguely, but she remembered one of them more vividly than the others. And that was Matthew Manfred.

  John Granville she recalled as a fairly nondescript man, short, pale-faced and unobtrusive.

  George Turnbill was a well-built, muscular young man, full of confidence, chat and amiability. It was just that he thought too much of himself. In particular, he was too full of himself physically. Fiona remembered one particular instance when she and a crowd of her chums had been at the local public baths, and she had found his behaviour quite off-putting. She disliked the way he had pranced around. He gloried in his near-nakedness, puffed out his chest and moved his hairy limbs about like an ape. She found it far too primitive. There was something obscene about a man preening himself like that, excited by his own biceps and rippling muscles.

  Such men really should be eliminated. There, eugenics was right. Certain human strains should be eradicated. Fiona shuddered at the thought of him.

  Such men had a lack of control. They couldn’t be trusted. A woman had to be on her guard.

  Matthew Manfred was a puzzle.

  He was certainly a good-looking, young man. Probably no more than twenty-two or twenty-three.

  He didn’t disgust Fiona, but he disturbed her.

  Whenever she had observed him, he hadn’t tried to own the room as Turnbill did; if anything, he hovered in the corners, just like Granville. But it wasn’t shyness or insecurity which made him keep out of the limelight. It was secrecy. He wanted to keep himself hidden, whether out of contempt for others, or fear they might discover something to his disadvantage, she wasn’t sure.

  She was a shy person herself, and she always felt uncomfortable under the gaze of his intense, blue eyes. She was convinced, on the few occasions their paths crossed, that he spent most of the time staring at her. Observing her. Judging her. Reaching into her mind, and searching out her secrets. Whatever she felt needed to be kept hidden.