another job in public relations.
‘May I smoke?’
‘Karl, please fetch our guest an ashtray. Shouldn’t you give up at your age?’
Lindsay’s wife was still badgering him to stop. After the Navy he had become a journalist and many of his colleagues on Fleet Street were unrepentant smokers too. Now in his seventies he was too old and too impatient to try. He woke each morning with a hacking cough, he was wrinkled and grey and a little short-sighted but a source of wonder to his friends — or so they said — and the doctors considered him fit for his age.
‘I saw Admiral Mohr last month.’ Gretschel reached across to hand Lindsay a cup of coffee.
‘Oh?’
‘A reunion of the old comrades in Kiel. Fewer and fewer of us now. There were veterans from HMS
‘No,’ Lindsay lied.
‘It suggested he gave vital intelligence to the British during the war. No one believes it.’
‘No.’
They did not speak for a moment but sipped their coffee, the silence broken only by the tinkle of the china cups and by Karl who was crunching a biscuit and showering crumbs on his coat and the couch.
‘Do you think of the war, Herr Lindsay?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I’ve begun to think of it again. I tell Karl stories of our boat. His mother does not like me talking of those times but… I’ve told him a little about the camp too.’ He chuckled and leant forward as if to share a confidence: ‘He knows you did something very secret. He thinks you’re James Bond.’
Lindsay smiled and looked across at the little boy: ‘Does he know we were enemies?’
Gretschel put down his cup and folded his arms slowly over his stomach in a way that suggested he had something of substance to impart: ‘I’ve tried to explain to Karl that sometimes those who appear to be enemies become friends and our friends become our enemies. War is a confusing business. And the battles we fight are often with ourselves — in here,’ and he tapped his head with his forefinger. ‘Of course he doesn’t understand. It was only at the camp in Canada that I began to understand it myself. Perhaps I didn’t dare to before. It was the business with Lange, the night he almost died, that made me wonder what I should render to Caesar. My conscience. Do you understand?’
Lindsay nodded quietly. Gretschel looked at him for a moment, then frowned: ‘You know, it was hard for Lange. Some of the veterans refused to speak to him because he helped the British. And the most ridiculous thing; the young — his own daughters — accused him of being a Nazi propagandist. Can you believe it? After all he went through.’
He glanced at his watch: ‘But we should be going. And your wife will meet us there?’
It was a short drive in Herr Gretschel’s large silver car. Karl came too. A bleak red-brick church and the nave less than a quarter full, the pine coffin before the altar covered with white chrysanthemums. Lindsay found Mary on her knees in prayer and settled into the seat beside her.
‘You’ve got ash on your coat,’ she said as she rose to sit beside him. ‘His daughters are there,’ and she nodded towards two short, very well-built women to the right of the aisle. Two large men were sitting behind with children. The organ was rumbling through some gentle counterpoint.
‘Dr Henderson,’ Gretschel had leant forward from the chair behind to shake Mary’s hand. ‘You look well if I may say so.’
‘You may, Herr Gretschel. You may.’
And she did look well, Lindsay thought, very well, straight-backed and trim and her face still youthful, her green eyes as light and bright as that first day in the Citadel.
The tinkle of a handbell and the priest and his two servers stepped up to the altar. A young priest almost lost in his heavy funeral vestments, his head bent slightly in reverence, his voice soft, a little soapy. And he began with a few words about the dead man. Helmut Lange was a loyal and much loved member of this church who had fought a courageous battle against cancer until it took him from us, missed by family, missed by friends. Funeral words, trite, anonymous words and Lindsay’s thoughts drifted to another place, smoky, half lit, and Lange’s eyes shining, his fingers drumming on the table to the rhythm of the band.
He leant across to whisper to Mary: ‘Do you think he made it to New York?’
She turned slowly to look at him and she was smiling but there were tears in her eyes: ‘You’re thinking of the evening at Hatchett’s. You know, he was a much better dancer than you.’
‘But not as good a lover.’ She pushed his shoulder in rebuke then looked away to hide her smile. In a way it was Lange who had brought them together as lovers again in those weeks after the attempt on his life in the camp. Lindsay remembered it as a sort of healing, scars inside and out — poor Lange carried the marks on his neck always but as a reminder of distant pain.
‘Stand up for this bit,’ and Mary pulled him to his feet.
A short time later and the first snow of winter was swirling lightly through the forest cemetery as they gathered beside the grave. It had been dug between tall pine trees and their roots scratched and rattled the coffin as it was lowered slowly into the hard ground.
Mary squeezed Lindsay’s arm tightly and he reached round her shoulders to hold her closer, her coat flecked with drops of melting snow. Only fifteen people had made the journey from the church to the cemetery. Most of them were Lange’s family, his daughters calm and their husbands indifferent, but there was also a young man shivering in a dark suit, with large brown eyes and long, rather greasy hair. A student, perhaps, without the means for a decent coat. Lindsay had not noticed him in the church but he seemed to be the most affected of those at the graveside. And there was something in his manner, his thin face and dark looks, that rang a distant bell.
The coffin slipped from the pall-bearers’ straps with a clunk and the priest stepped forward with his aspersorium to sprinkle it with holy water. And then he invited them to throw earth into the grave. Lindsay bent to pick up a frozen nugget from the mound for Mary, something to rattle the lid.
‘Make sure he knows we’re here,’ he whispered.
She smiled and squeezed his hand.
As the family began to make its way back to the cars Lindsay stepped up to the grave again and stood staring into the trench, his thoughts full of those few months fifty years before. He was dying for a cigarette. Lange would forgive him but the priest was still talking to the funeral director close by and there was something in his manner and voice, a righteous fervour, that reminded him of the men he used to meet in the interrogation room at Trent Park. Break expectation. As he slipped his hand into his coat pocket for a cigarette, someone touched his elbow.
‘Herr Lindsay.’
It was the young man with the greasy brown hair.
‘Yes?’
‘Herr Lange told me you would be here.’
‘Did he?’
‘My name’s Franz Lehmann,’ and he offered his bony hand. ‘I’m here on behalf of my family.’
‘Oh?’
‘My mother’s a little unwell and couldn’t make the journey.’
One of the cemetery men cleared his throat impatiently and gave them a ‘talk somewhere else’ glance. Three of them were standing ready with their spades. Fifteen minutes of mourning, get the job done, on to the next, order, efficiency, death by timetable.
‘Can we walk a little way?’ Lehmann asked. ‘Just to the chapel.’
Gretschel was hobbling slowly towards the cemetery gates with Mary at his side, their heads bent close in conversation.
‘All right, Herr Lehmann.’
The chapel was a short walk in the opposite direction, half hidden by trees, simple, wooden, windowless, like a pagan longhouse. Beneath the open porch at the west end there was a bench and Lehmann dropped on to his
