English policeman finds out anything about the secrets Muncaster may hold, he is to be disposed of. There and then. We will deal with the Home Office afterwards.’ What Gessler said had been in the back of Gunther’s mind all night. He had been shocked. Policemen didn’t kill their own.
NEXT MORNING, SUNDAY, David left the house shortly before nine. He was to take the tube to Watford, meet Geoff and Natalia there and drive to Birmingham. Sarah was still asleep when he got up; he dressed in a sober suit. Downstairs, he ate some cereal and toast, several slices. It would be a long day. He remembered Sarah was going into town again, for another meeting. He hoped she would be all right.
He had a little time before his train, so he went into the garden and stood smoking a cigarette. It was cold, a light rime of frost on the grass, the sky milky-white. His eyes felt sore and gritty. He had lain awake most of the night. David admitted to himself that he was frightened. He knew he was not a physical coward, his service in Norway had shown him that, and it had needed courage to spy at the Office. Yet in a curious way, although what he did there was treasonable, he had still somehow felt enfolded, even protected, by the Civil Service. What he was about to do now was utterly different and he felt exposed. He looked at his watch. Time to go.
Natalia and Geoff were already in the car park when David arrived at Watford, waiting in the front of a big black Austin. Church bells sounded somewhere nearby as he went up to the car. Natalia wore a white trenchcoat with a scarf, a jumper underneath. For the first time since David had met her, her face was carefully made up; she looked like an ordinary middle-class woman driving her boyfriend and his friend on a weekend mission of mercy.
‘Is everything all right?’ Her manner was even more practical and direct than usual.
David answered a brusque yes. ‘Sarah believed the story about my great-uncle. I left her asleep.’
‘Remember both your identity cards?’ Geoff asked, with heavy-handed humour. He, too, was dressed quietly and formally.
‘Yes, the false one for the hospital and the real one for anything else. Though no-one’s likely to stop us, are they?’
‘You never know,’ Natalia said. David saw now that she, too, was tense, perhaps even afraid.
‘There’s going to be fog in the Midlands later,’ Geoff said. ‘According to the forecast.’
Natalia said, ‘After we visit your friend remember that we are going on to Birmingham to look at his flat, see if there is anything of interest to us there, any papers. Our man at the hospital is getting the key.’
David didn’t answer. He felt uncomfortable at the thought of breaking into Frank’s flat.
They pulled out onto the new M1 motorway to the North, modelled on the German autobahns. Natalia drove smoothly, maintaining a steady pace. There was little traffic, a few family cars and some lorries. Outside Welwyn Garden City an army truck passed them. The tarpaulin flaps at the rear were open, a row of khaki-clad soldiers looking back. Seeing a woman driving the Austin they made obscene gestures, then the truck, moving fast, sped away.
‘I wonder where they are going,’ Natalia said.
‘Up to one of the army camps in the North, I expect,’ David answered. ‘They say there’s another miners’ strike coming.’
She looked at him in the mirror. ‘You were in the army yourself in 1939–40, I think?’
‘Yes. In Norway.’
‘What was it like?’ She smiled but her eyes were sharp.
‘For the first few months nothing happened, and I spent the winter in a camp in Kent.’ He turned to Geoff and said jokingly, ‘You were all right, nice and warm out in Africa.’
‘They wouldn’t let District Officers like me join up. I wanted to.’
David continued, ‘Then the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway out of the blue. My regiment got sent to Namsos, up in the north.’
‘I heard it was a chaotic campaign,’ Natalia said.
‘All the 1940 campaigns were.’ David remembered after they finally set sail, the troopship ploughing through massive, heaving seas, all the soldiers seasick, then blizzards that turned the decks white. Their first sight of Norway, giant white peaks rising from the water. ‘When we arrived we disembarked and marched out immediately to meet the Germans. We had on thick army greatcoats, you’d get covered with sweat inside and then during the night it would freeze. Our boots just sank into the snow as soon as you stepped off the roads. But I heard at other landing points the soldiers didn’t even have winter clothing.’
‘The Germans must have had the same disadvantages, yet they just smashed their way through,’ Geoff said.
‘They’d planned for it. We hadn’t. It was the same in France.’ David remembered marching down a Norwegian road, mountains and forests and snow on a scale he could never have imagined. He saw again German bombers and fighters roaring down on them, the fighters coming so low he could see the pilots’ set faces; gunfire smashing into the column, fallen men lying on snow that turned red. The picture in Natalia’s flat had reminded him of that. ‘The Germans seemed invincible,’ he said quietly. ‘I got frostbite, I was back home recovering when they served up the same medicine in France. I didn’t see how we could fight on after that.’
‘Nor me,’ Geoff agreed. ‘I remember thinking, if we don’t surrender London will just be bombed to annihilation, like Rotterdam or Warsaw was.’ He frowned, a guilty look.
‘They are not invincible,’ Natalia said, her tone certain. ‘Russia has shown us that. In many places there they do not even have a front line, the Germans control one village and the partisans the next, and it all changes from season to season. They are completely bogged down.’
‘But Russia hasn’t beaten the Germans either,’ David replied. ‘It’s a stalemate. I think it’s going to boil down to who runs out of men first,’ he added bitterly.
‘Not just through the fighting,’ Geoff added, ‘if what we hear about the cholera and typhus epidemics on both sides of the line is true.’
Natalia shook her head. ‘There are more Russians than Germans. And they have General Winter on their side, Russians deal with the climate better than the Germans. They know what to wear, how to survive in the forests, what seeds and mushrooms you can eat.’
David thought the remark cold. ‘I expect you have hard winters too where you come from.’
Natalia nodded. ‘Yes, long winters with a lot of snow.’
They passed an ancient country church where the service had just ended, the warmly dressed congregation talking in groups beside the porch. A red-faced vicar in his white surplice was shaking people’s hands. David said, ‘They look a contented bunch.’
‘Yes,’ Geoff agreed. ‘They’ll be with Headlam’s lot.’ The Church of England had split two years ago – a large minority opposed to the government forming their own church as the German Confessing Church had – but this prosperous-looking congregation was more likely to have stayed with the pro-German Archbishop Headlam.
‘Were you brought up an Anglican, Geoff?’ Natalia asked.
‘My uncle was a vicar. I believed for a long time, that’s partly why I joined the Colonial Service, going out to help the poor benighted natives.’ He gave his sharp little bark of laughter and ran a finger quickly over his fair moustache in an oddly cross, peremptory gesture. ‘David and I used to argue about religion at university. He won the argument in the end, so far as I’m concerned.’
‘You would have been brought up a Catholic, David, with your Irish family.’
‘My parents had had enough of religion in Ireland.’ He turned to Natalia. ‘What about you?’
‘I was brought up a Lutheran, though most people in Slovakia are Catholics. But I also became disillusioned with religion. Did you know that our little dictator, Tiso, is a Catholic priest? His Slovak nationalists were glad to help Hitler break up Czechoslovakia, and now we have our own little Catholic Fascist state, just like Croatia and Spain. Our Hlinka guard, the equivalent of your Blackshirts, loaded the Jews onto trains when the Germans wanted them deported in 1942.’
There was an anger in her voice David had never heard before. Geoff said, ‘I thought all Czechoslovakia had been occupied by Germany.’
‘No. We are a satellite state with our own government, like Britain and France.’ She looked away, concentrating on the road as a little sports car passed them, a young couple out on a Sunday drive.
