Later, at her desk in the Tracking Room, Mary began to regret her sharp words to Lindsay. It was a terrible waste, maddening. He was fumbling for the truth, breaking the rules, and now his reputation was clouded by failure and distrust. And she had let him stumble into this mess. He was paying the price for her silence.
25
The silence was broken only once. Lindsay snatched up the telephone, hoping to hear Mary’s voice but it was his mother.
‘Are you all right, Douglas?’
She spoke to him in English for the first time. They had always spoken German in the family. His father was working too hard, his brother had joined the Royal Air Force — ‘Why don’t you ever ring? I’ve heard nothing from the rest of the family but the papers say they’ve bombed Bremen.’ And then there were tears. He was relieved when the call ended.
Rising from the couch, he drifted to the window of his little sitting room. It was half past eleven and St James’s Square was deserted but for a couple kissing in the shadows, entirely caught up in each other. Everything seemed to be falling apart. He shook his head, disgusted with himself for being so full of self-pity. The spooning couple separated and Lindsay watched them amble along the pavement. A black Morris was parked against the kerb opposite and as they passed it he was surprised to see the glowing orange pinprick of a cigarette behind the wheel. He stepped away from the window and drew the heavy blackout curtains. After a moment’s fumbling, he switched on the desk lamp and, reaching for a sheet of paper, wrote a brief note to Mary. If he delivered it now she would be able to read it in the morning, if not before.
The front door swung heavily to behind him and he stood on the pavement outside, catching his breath in the warm, still air. The city was humming restlessly even in the blackout and he could hear drunken voices outside the gentleman’s club on the opposite side of the square. Close by, a car engine grunted. It was the Morris and peering closely at it, he could distinguish the silhouettes of two men. It pulled away quickly from the kerb as he approached. The driver seemed to glance furtively across at him before swinging the car into Charles II Street. Were they spivs conducting a little night-time business? If you knew the right person you could still buy anything in London.
The house in Lord North Street was close-shuttered. Slipping the envelope through the letterbox, Lindsay turned to wander slowly back, glancing over his shoulder in the hope that Mary would find it at once and call after him. He considered returning to ring the bell but it was after midnight and her uncle was probably at home. He spent a long hour brooding, walking he knew not where before turning almost reluctantly for home. On the doorstep, his keys slipped through his fingers. As he bent to pick them up, he glanced through the iron railings to his left. The black Morris was now parked between two other cars in the north-east corner of the square. The driver and his passenger were lost in shadow but Lindsay knew they were there and that they were watching him. The door clunked firmly shut and he turned to lean against the wall in the dark hall, his chest tight with anxiety. They were not black-market wide boys, they were Special Branch policemen, he was sure of it, perhaps the Security Service. He had been identified as a risk. Perhaps they had searched his apartment. He raced up the stairs, his head pounding, giddy with breathlessness. He would ring Fleming, and he picked up the phone, only to slam it back a few seconds later. Collapsing into a chair, he closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on breathing deeply. Two, three, four minutes passed and his pulse began to slow. He must keep calm. They were probably ordinary policemen carrying out some sort of surveillance operation that was nothing to do with him. Lighting a cigarette, he sat in the darkness and smoked it slowly down to a small stub. This had happened before. Something in him snapped and he lost control. Foolish. Without bothering to look out of the window again, he walked through to the bedroom and flopped on to his lumpy old mattress.
That night, he had a dream. He was standing on the pavement below his apartment and the Morris was close by. The driver’s window was open and an arm with a black tattoo of a fouled anchor was resting against the door. ‘Who are you?’ Lindsay shouted. There was no reply. He bent to look inside. A head lunged towards him and he recoiled in disgust. The man’s face was no longer there, as if a giant hand had dashed it without mercy against a jagged rock. Tails of skin were clinging to the top of the skull and from one of these hung a tangled strand of auburn hair. And he knew the auburn hair belonged to a sailor from the
26
The news came with the rations. The guard hammered on the door at half past seven and half an hour later he was back with the breakfast tray. Helmut Lange was dressed but lying on his camp bed, trying to ignore the tortured grunts of his room-mate who was busy jumping and stretching in nothing but a vest and pants. Obersteuermann Eduard Bruns considered it his duty as a good National Socialist to be fit and ready. ‘Ready for what?’ Lange had asked him on their first day together. Bruns had shrugged his muscular shoulders and then, after giving the question a little thought, replied: ‘Victory.’ He did not explain how he hoped to contribute to this behind the wire in a British prisoner-of-war camp and Lange knew better than to ask.
‘Trent Park Hotel bed and breakfast,’ the British corporal said cheerily as he placed the tray on the table. Some porridge, some toast and a tin mug of evil brown tea. ‘Your last day, Fritz, your-last-day-here,’ the corporal enunciated the words carefully, as if speaking to small children. ‘New-hotel-tonight.’
Lange was glad to be moving at last. The formal interrogations had not troubled him because he had no secrets to betray, but Lieutenant Lindsay had taken him from the confines of his prison cell into the park and asked him very different questions, questions he was free but unable to answer. And at the club, the lieutenant’s girlfriend had pressed him in a gentle way, too, about the concentration camps, the duty of the Church, and the Jews. Eyes fixed on the white ceiling of his room, Lange had prayed for guidance. In the still hours of the night, Bruns breathing heavily close by, his prayers had been answered and although he was afraid, he took comfort from the thought that he could shrink behind the wire.
At eleven o’clock the guards ordered them from the room, with keys jangling and doors opening the length of the corridor like a scene from the Last Judgement. A military lorry was parked just beyond the double fence at the front of the house and a group of twenty prisoners was standing in a line close by. Lange stepped forward to join them but the young British army officer in charge shouted something at the guards and one of them grabbed his sleeve: ‘Not yet, Fritz.’
Bruns was at his side: ‘They’re our men from the
The two of them stood in silence together on the forecourt and watched as the line of men was escorted through the wire and into the back of the lorry. As soon as the last man had scrambled inside it began to pull away and was replaced by a green military bus. All the officers of the
The British officer was speaking loudly in English. Lange watched them drift through the gate to the bus until a guard yelled something he took to be an order to follow. On an impulse, he began rooting about in his little bag for a pencil and, tearing the back off a cigarette packet, he wrote a short note.
Mohr was still talking to the British officer a little way from the bus. He half turned as Lange approached and looked him up and down: ‘Yes?’
‘Herr Kapitan, I was hoping to leave this note.’
He took the scrap of cardboard from his pocket and handed it to the officer who read it carefully, frowned, then placed it in his jacket pocket: ‘All right. I’ll make sure Lieutenant Lindsay sees it.’
Lange was on the bottom step of the bus when he felt a firm hand against his chest. It was Mohr and he
