Lindsay glanced up, then handed him the note. Duncan looked at it carefully and when he had read it he folded it gently in two:
‘I’m sorry.’ He cleared his throat nervously: ‘It’s a war crime, a bloody war crime.’
‘What?’
‘The U-boats. The attack on our merchant ships.’
Lindsay felt an urge to laugh. Instead he looked away, an angry knot in his stomach. Shafts of sunlight were streaming through a high window on to the wall at the end of the washroom, bleaching the colour from the blue- grey tiles. And then the room was plunged into shadow again.
‘Shall I tell them to take Mohr back?’
‘No. I’ll see him now.’
‘Are you surprised to see me, Mohr?’
Kapitan zur See Jurgen Mohr raised his dark eyebrows and his lips twitched in a small smile: ‘No. I’ve been looking forward to talking to you again, Lieutenant.’
He was standing in front of the table. The guard had removed the other chair. ‘But couldn’t we have met somewhere pleasanter than the shithouse?’
Lindsay glanced up at the pipe above their heads and Mohr followed his eyes: ‘Terrible,’ and he shook his head a little. ‘And it was terrible news about the
Lindsay stared at him coldly. ‘Isn’t the BBC propaganda?’
‘We sort the truth from the fiction,’ he said with a smile. ‘The
‘Honour?’ Lindsay almost spat the word at him. Leaning forward to the table, he flipped open the brown cardboard file that was lying in front of him, then slid it towards Mohr. ‘And was this for Fuhrer and Fatherland too?’
Mohr glanced down at the swollen blue face of Heine, his tongue hanging obscenely from his mouth.
‘No. Take a good look, Herr Kapitan,’ Lindsay snapped.
Without taking his eyes off him, Mohr reached across the table for the picture, lifted it deliberately and looked at it again. And for a fleeting moment his expression changed as he struggled to maintain his composure, his weathered face cut by lines of pain and regret.
‘Poor man.’
In an effort to disguise his feelings he casually tossed the picture back on to the table, sending it spinning towards Lindsay.
‘The sinking of our boat. The humiliation. And prison drives men to terrible things.’
‘Spare me the lies. You pushed him very hard, didn’t you?’
‘Pushed him?’
‘You interrogated him. You interrogated a number of the prisoners. The evening with the PK man at the jazz cafe — remember?’
Mohr smiled: ‘Leutnant Lange is fond of the story, he tells it to everyone.’
Lindsay lifted his hand and rested it on the thick file in front of him: ‘I’ve spoken to the other U-boat officers and I know the Altestenrat wanted to know what they’d said to us. You were looking for someone who gave away just a little too much and you thought you’d found him — Heine. But this…’
He pushed the picture back across the table: ‘You authorised this senseless killing, this murder.’
‘Is this going to go on much longer? Perhaps I can have a chair?’ There was an impatient, contemptuous note in Mohr’s voice and he turned to look at the guard who was standing stiffly to attention at the far wall.
‘A chair, please,’ he shouted in English. The soldier did not move a muscle.
‘Well?’
The guard just stared back at him belligerently.
‘You’re a prisoner, Mohr,’ said Lindsay coolly. ‘Remember?’
Mohr flinched as if the words had stung him between the shoulders and he turned quickly to face Lindsay, his boots squeaking sharply on the stone floor. Was it the affront to his dignity? Something inside him seemed to snap. ‘You’re the murderer, Lieutenant. You drove him to it.’
Mohr didn’t shout or thump the table, his voice was only a little louder but his face was livid and blotchy red and there were anxious scratch marks on his throat, a sort of wildness in his eyes. The quiet military veneer had cracked for the first time.
‘You interrogated Heine, you threatened him. He told me you were going to tell me he was a traitor. He was a vulnerable prisoner. His mind was clouded — he was sure he’d betrayed his U-boat comrades and his country. He could not live with the guilt and he took his own life. So you put the rope around his neck, Lieutenant, you did — not me.’
Mohr looked down at the photograph still lying in the middle of the table between them and his shoulders seemed to drop a little as if the anger was draining from him. When he spoke again his voice was cool and reflective: ‘Heine was a casualty of your war.’
And he lifted his head to make firm eye contact with Lindsay: ‘Our war. The dirty little war we’re fighting.’
Their dirty war. The thought beat long after Mohr had been led away. It was beating in the mess over lunch and in the camp commandant’s office as Lindsay said goodbye to smug, self-satisfied Benson. It was beating in his head now as the jeep swung him backwards and forwards along country lanes to the station. Was it dirtier than the one being fought in the Atlantic? Perhaps Mohr had become the demon he was fighting inside himself. But it was the same war, it was cold, it was ruthless, and to the victor the spoils — there were always casualties.
AUGUST 1941
TOP SECRET:
A breaker is born and not made. Perhaps the first-class breaker has yet to be born. Perhaps he has yet to be recruited from the concentration camps, where he has suffered for years, where, above all he has watched and learnt in bitterness every move in the game.
Top Secret ‘C’
The security of a source is worth more than any product or by-product, however spectacular.
40
The last of the sun was settling into the ocean behind the ship, painting her high funnel and masts an eerie tropical orange. She was an old liner of more than twelve thousand tons, perhaps a troopship,
