The Danger of Life

by Ken Lussey

  And yet, though the castle was utterly familiar to everyone living in Edinburgh, it was also somewhere outside the experience of most of them. As the headquarters of the army’s Scottish Command, large parts of it were inaccessible to most people.

  As a teenager, Bob had visited on one occasion. Some of the boys from his school had been brought to the castle to be shown around. They’d visited the then very new Scottish National War Memorial at the top of the castle and gone to look at the display of the Honours of Scotland, the nation’s crown jewels. They’d also toured the barracks, probably with the intention of interesting them in a career in the army. But to boys brought up in the years following the Great War, however protected they had been from the detail of the horrors faced by their fathers and uncles, the army had not seemed a very attractive idea.

  Bob showed his pass to the armed guards at the foot of the Castle Esplanade, and to another outside the castle gate. He wasn’t sure that the car would fit through the gateway, but it did. ‘Do you know where we are going, Taffy?’ asked Bob.

  ‘Yes sir. Colonel Duncan used to be a regular visitor. I’ll drop you outside the headquarters building, which is in part of what they call the New Barracks, even though they were built centuries ago. I suppose they are “new” relative to everything else here.’

  Bob’s credentials were checked for a third time at the entrance to the castle’s headquarters building.

  Chapter Six

  Lieutenant General Sir Charles Gordon was a larger than life man whose physical presence dominated the very fine office he occupied. With the formalities over, the general waved back towards the door that Bob had just entered by. ‘We might as well go straight through to lunch. I’ve asked my deputy to join us.’

  The dining room into which Lieutenant General Gordon led them was little short of magnificent. A large and obviously antique dining table was set in an even larger room whose walls were painted in dark green, the effect being offset by a deeply piled carpet. The walls were hung with individually-lit oil paintings depicting scenes of battles and portraits of senior officers in dress uniform. A sideboard groaned under the weight of a formidable display of regimental silver, while more was on display in an illuminated cabinet standing against the wall opposite the door. A fire was burning brightly in a highly decorated marble fireplace, while the final wall was home to three large windows, which Bob could see offered extensive views south west over an extremely smoky and very damp city.

  An officer, also wearing a general’s uniform, had been standing by one of the windows, and now walked over to greet Bob, with his hand outstretched. Lieutenant General Gordon did the introductions. ‘Group Captain Robert Sutherland, can I present Brigadier General Sir Richard Blackett?’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ said Bob. ‘I think we almost met last month. You were on your way to Fort George as I left it to head north.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Blackett. ‘I must tell you, Sutherland, how impressed we were with the way you resolved things.’

  ‘Most of the hard work was done by your Colonel Urquhart, sir, the commander of the Seaforth Highlanders at Fort George.’

  ‘Perhaps, but it was your personal intervention that brought matters to such a satisfactory conclusion, with the loss of just one life in the final confrontation and the safeguarding of the king.’

  ‘Can I ask, sir, what became of the German soldiers we captured? The men of the Brandenburg Regiment?’

  Blackett said, ‘The German commandos? Well, they were all wearing Polish uniforms, or British uniforms with Polish insignia if you want to be pedantic. We could have taken the view that that made their position tricky under the Geneva Conventions. On the other hand, they did surrender when you called upon them to do so. The decision was taken at the highest level that they should be treated as ordinary prisoners of war.’

  ‘I’m pleased about that,’ said Bob.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Lieutenant General Gordon, ‘if it happened today, we might take a different view. You won’t know this, Sutherland, but last Sunday, Hitler issued an order called the “Kommandobefehl” or “Commando Order”. Under the terms of this, any British or Allied commandos captured on small scale raids into Europe will be executed, even if wearing British uniform. The Germans don’t know we know this yet, and we are still working out a response.’

  ‘Good God, sir, that raises the stakes!’

  ‘It does,’ said Gordon. ‘It follows the Dieppe Raid back in August, and a small raid by the commandos on the island of Sark in the Channel Islands at the beginning of this month. The Germans believe that some of their men on Sark were killed after being taken prisoner and while bound. Look, should we sit down for lunch? We’re only having something fairly light.’

  Bob remembered the dinner invitation from Monique and found himself pleased at the idea of a light lunch. Lieutenant General Gordon sat at the end of the large table, with Bob sitting at the nearest end of one long side, looking across the table at Brigadier General Blackett. As the onion soup was served he turned to Gordon and asked, ‘Do all army units in Scotland report to you, sir? Talk of the commandos reminds me that I have a team up at Achnacarry Castle in the Highlands.’

  ‘Most do, but the Commando Basic Training Centre is rather different. The commanding officer is Lieutenant Colonel Edward White. Whenever my people here at Scottish Command or in the North West Highlands District try to exert influence over how Achnacarry is run, White tells them in no uncertain terms that he is responsible to Commando Group H.Q. and Combined Operations H.Q. I strongly suspect, though, that he plays the same game in reverse when those units also try to exert more control than he wants.’

  Bob spent a moment trying to find a diplomatic way of asking the question on his mind. ‘Is that something you’re happy about, sir?’

  Gordon laughed. ‘The thing is that everyone agrees White is doing an outstanding job. Achnacarry only opened for business in March this year and he has already raised standards and increased the throughput of men available for posting to the commandos very significantly. I could wish that he wasn’t the largest single user of live ammunition in Scotland, but I’ve enough sense to let him get on with what he’s doing.’

  ‘They train with live ammunition?’ asked Bob.

  ‘Yes, and large amounts of it. But the results are there for all to see. The commandos had a patchy first couple of years of existence, but although the Dieppe Raid in August was a fiasco, the commandos involved on the flank of the main raid performed superbly well. Much of that improvement in performance is attributed to Colonel White.’

  As the main course was served, Bob wondered whether most residents of wartime Britain would regard grilled Dover sole and potatoes as a ‘light lunch’.

  ‘So, the answer to your earlier question, Sutherland, is that not all army units in Scotland report to the general officer commanding Scottish Command. It’s a job with some nice touches, though. Since 1936 the officers who’ve held my position have also been appointed governor of Edinburgh Castle. It’s not often you get to command anything quite so tangible or historically important.’

  Brigadier General Blackett asked, ‘I understand you know Edinburgh well, Sutherland?’

  ‘Yes sir, I was born and brought up here.’

  ‘What decided you to join the Glasgow police?’ asked Blackett. ‘I always get the sense the two cities have very different outlooks on life and on the world.’

  ‘You are right, sir,’ said Bob. ‘But my father was a senior policeman here in Edinburgh, and still is for that matter. He thought, and I am sure he was right, that if I really wanted to join the police rather than go to university, then it needed to be a police force in which I could make my own way.’

  ‘But the war intervened?’

  ‘Yes, it did, sir. I’d started to learn to fly in 1933 and joined the Auxiliary Air Force a few years later. When war came around it
seemed natural to mobilise with my squadron rather than stay in the police.’

  ‘And during the Battle of Britain you shot down over twenty enemy aircraft and were commanding a fighter squadron when you yourself were shot down and wounded? And you shot down another enemy aircraft last month?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Bob wondered where this was going before deciding that perhaps it was just the brigadier general’s way of making polite conversation.

  ‘How are you finding the move from command of a training unit to MI11, Sutherland?’ asked Lieutenant General Gordon.

  ‘It’s very early days yet, sir,’ said Bob, ‘but it’s throwing up some interesting challenges.’

  ‘How do you feel about the overlaps between MI11’s work and the work of people like the Intelligence Corps and the three armed services’ Special Investigations Branches?’

  ‘I understand that was discussed in detail fairly recently in Whitehall, sir. My own perspective is that there is a role for MI11 that allows us to make a distinct contribution to the war effort and doesn’t conflict with the organisations you have referred to, or with others such as the Security Service for that matter.’

  ‘I suspect you will find some on the military side of the War Office who would question that, Sutherland,’ said Gordon. ‘But the important thing for those of us out here at the sharp end, so to speak, is to make sure that we keep one another closely informed of issues of mutual interest. I’d be grateful if you would use Brigadier General Blackett here as your day to day point of contact in Scottish Command. We will of course endeavour to keep you informed of anything likely to be of interest to you that comes up.’

  ‘Of course, sir, thank you.’ Bob wondered as he looked around the dining room whether the men manning anti-aircraft guns out on the islands in the Firth of Forth would agree that this was the ‘sharp end’ of the war effort and smiled to himself as he imagined the likely response.

  Having moved past what Lieutenant General Gordon clearly saw as the central point of the meeting, the discussion drifted on to an analysis of the pros and cons of Edinburgh as a city, and Bob found himself wondering how soon he could decently leave.

  On his return to Craigiehall, Bob found Flight Lieutenant Buchan wanted to speak to him. ‘I thought you’d like to know where we got to with Sergeant Winograd, sir.’

  ‘Yes please, George,’ said Bob as they sat either side of his desk. Bob realised that he was nearly a working week into the job and wondered if he’d spent more than an hour at his desk during that time.

  ‘You were right, sir. When Sergeant Bennett went through Winograd’s effects more closely, he came up with a page that looked like it had been torn out of a school exercise book. It was folded up tightly in a jacket pocket. I had a photograph taken of the document, which I’ve got here.’

  Bob took the offered photograph. ‘It’s a series of initials, short words and arrows.’

  ‘We wondered whether it was the checklist you wanted to find, sir.’

  ‘You know, I rather think it might be,’ said Bob. ‘If you assume that the order on the page is a sequence, then the initials could refer to actions needed in starting up a Mosquito. On that basis, “FC” would be fuel cocks, “Th” the throttle levers, “RPM” the RPM levers; “SC” the supercharger controls, “Rad” the radiator shutters, and so on.’

  ‘What about the arrows, sir?’

  ‘Well the arrow next to the “Th” points to about eight o’clock, and “Mag”, which I assume means magneto switches points to about two o’clock. I’d need to sit in a Mosquito again to be sure, but I think it’s highly likely that this is a basic guide to starting up the aircraft, with the arrows pointing to where the relevant switches or controls are in the cockpit. It’s as if someone has been shown how to start up a Mosquito while sitting in the cockpit or from photographs and made notes to help them remember when they came to do it on their own.’ Bob stopped as he saw Flight Lieutenant Buchan’s grin. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘That was exactly what Wing Commander Gill said when we showed him the photograph first thing this morning, sir,’ said the flight lieutenant. ‘It was he who suggested I show it to you, to see how much you’d remembered from your flight yesterday.’

  Bob could see the joke and smiled. ‘Well I’m pleased I passed the test. Have the Poles come up with anything more on Winograd?’

  ‘Not a lot sir. It seems he volunteered for the 4th Polish Parachute Battalion a couple of months ago while serving in a Polish tank brigade stationed down in the Scottish Borders. He came highly recommended, but the very nature of the arrival of most of the Poles in Britain means that there isn’t much of a paper trail. I saw Major Kaminski this morning and he was at pains to emphasise how much trouble the Poles take to screen anyone whose loyalties are suspect. It seems they have a vetting and detention centre on the island of Bute, but there was nothing about Winograd that raised suspicions in anyone who knew him.’

  Bob sat back. ‘But despite that, we are now fairly sure that Winograd was a pilot, and that somebody was able to train him on the cockpit layout of a new and, until fairly recently, supposedly secret aircraft? Is there anything more we can do?’

  ‘I’ve talked to a contact in MI11 in London, sir, and it seems that it’s the norm for the Polish Army in Britain to look after its own security. Unless we think it’s important enough to make a case to the Polish Government in Exile in London, then we must stay at arm’s-length. The Poles will continue to see what they can find out about him, but I’m not sure how much more there would be, even if we had the resources to pursue it ourselves. I know that Major Kaminski is deeply unhappy about what has happened, which he feels reflects badly on him personally, so he’s certainly not going to allow it to be dropped without a thorough job being done.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Bob. ‘What’s next on your agenda?’

  ‘Sergeant Bennett and I have some reports to catch up on this afternoon, sir. Then over the weekend we are going to make ourselves unpopular with unannounced visits at RAF Drem, RAF East Fortune, RAF Lennoxlove and RAF Macmerry, all in East Lothian. Sometimes people let their guard down a little over the weekend, which makes it a good time to visit.’

  Bob had been trying not to think about the large and growing pile of paperwork on his own desk, but after the flight lieutenant departed in the direction of the office he shared with Sergeant Bennett, Bob settled down to the part of the job he was least looking forward to.

  Other than a few minutes spent in surprisingly cordial discussion with Major Miller, who put his head around Bob’s office door in the middle of the afternoon, Bob worked solidly on his paperwork until he realised he needed to head back to his accommodation at RAF Turnhouse to smarten himself up for dinner.

  Chapter Seven

  As they drove along Princes Street, Bob tried to see the time on the clock on top of the North British Hotel, but it had got far too dark and in the blackout the clock wasn’t illuminated. Not that it would have been the best guide anyway, he remembered, as the hotel clock was traditionally set three minutes fast to allow passengers a better chance of catching their trains in nearby Waverley Station. ‘Are you going to want picking up and running back to Turnhouse later, sir?’ Private Jenkins had stopped the car in front of the hotel’s grand Princes Street entrance.

  ‘No thanks, Taffy. I’ll make my own way back. You have a Friday night off. It’s the least I can do after last night.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Monique was sipping a drink in the hotel bar when Bob was shown through to join her. ‘The effect is better now you’re out of the rain, Bob, and aren’t carrying that umbrella. You do look very smart.’

  ‘And you look ravishing, as ever, Monique. I take it you still want me to call you “Monique”?’

  ‘Flattery will get you anywhere, Bob. And yes, for reasons I will explain to you, I would prefer it if you referred to me as
Monique Dubois.’

  Monique looked around the busy bar. ‘It might be best if we go through to the dining room I’ve booked, Bob. It’s a bit crowded in here for a private discussion. Can you get yourself a drink, and a gin and tonic for me?’

  The room turned out to have a comfortable seating area at one end, and a small dining table set for two at the other. The window was heavily curtained to comply with the blackout regulations, and lighting was subdued.

  ‘This is all very romantic,’ said Bob.

  ‘More importantly,’ said Monique, ‘it’s also very private. I hope you’re not too hungry yet. I’ve arranged for dinner to be served a little later. That should give us more than enough time to get business out of the way before we eat. It also ensures we don’t have waiting staff coming in while we are trying to talk.’

  ‘That’s fine by me,’ said Bob.

  They sat down, each taking one of the sofas that had been arranged either side of a low table.

  Monique took a sip from her drink and smiled as she looked across at Bob. ‘Jack Callaghan asked me to remind you that you agreed to visit him and Flora. I take it that Flora is his wife?’

  ‘You visited Jack Callaghan this afternoon? Yes, Flora is his wife. I attended their wedding back in the days when it was the norm to form an honour guard of policemen holding truncheons outside the church after a policeman’s wedding. It was the first time some of my colleagues had ever been in a Catholic church, and you could almost see them checking one another to make sure they’d not grown horns and a tail because of it. Jack was popular enough, and thick-skinned enough, to overcome the bigotry, but it wasn’t nice to see it so near the surface.’

  ‘Yes, I thought I should thank him for releasing Thompson and Smith to you yesterday. I also asked for his help in putting what we are trying to achieve in Hillington on a slightly more open-and-above-board basis, while still keeping it completely secure. That led to a meeting later this afternoon with the head of security at the Rolls-Royce factory in Hillington.’