‘Sir!’
I went back into the interrogation.
‘You said in the bar that you’d sent about twenty through?’
‘It was twenty.’
‘How many got all the way through?’
‘All the way?’
‘America. North or South.’
‘How would I know? There was a hiccup in the line last year.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We were told to stop sending anyone. Back in February or March.’
‘Why?’
‘The line got stuck or something. I never heard why.’
‘Was that the time when Suhren went through?
‘Just before.’
‘How many of the twenty had you sent by then?’
‘A good dozen.’
I imagined a conveyor belt running from occupied Germany through Cuxhaven, north to Leith, through Glasgow, then boat to New York. Somewhere past Cuxhaven the belt had jammed. A contact arrested?
‘But a further eight showed up
after
the suspension of the line? Like Suhren?’
‘That was the trouble. They kept coming and we couldn’t send them on.’
‘What did you do with them?’
‘I hid three in my cellar. Suhren was one. The others were scattered around the town.’
‘But you eventually got them out?’
‘The teacher had to plead with someone. He argued it was better to get them to an unoccupied country than let them get caught here.’
‘What are their names?’ I had my pencil poised.
He looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m not good with names. Honest. I’ll do my best. Can I have a bit of paper and a pencil? I work best that way.’
I tore off a sheet and dug out another pencil. I drew a line across the middle and pushed the paper and pencil over to him.
‘This is the really important bit, Günter. Above that line, I want a list of the dozen who went through before everything got stuck, last February. Put the second batch of eight below it. The ones that got stuck here for a while.’
I sat and folded my arms. Günter laid his big arms on the table and took up the pencil. His tongue came out as he concentrated. I felt like an adjudicator at finals.
‘No pressure, Günter. Give me names and you can live.’
THIRTY-TWO
The court met on Monday 3 February to deliver its sentences. It hardly seemed possible, but the numbers of spectators in the Curiohaus appeared to have doubled. The air was steamy, the tension palpable. One by one the defendants were made to stand and the verdict and sentence read out.
Schwarzhuber, Ramdohr and Binz were sentenced to death by hanging, as were three fine members of the medical profession: Rosenthal, Schiedlausky, and Treite. A fourth wasn’t around to hear his fate. Dr Adolf Winkelmann had decided to skip his rendezvous with Albert Pierrepoint by dying the previous Saturday. His sixty-year-old heart had given out under the pressure of the trial. I wish I could say it was due to the guilt of knowing he’d sent some 4,500 women to the gas chambers, but he’d never shown remorse. Five others including Greta Bösel got the same judgment and sentence. All eleven would be taken to Hameln for execution, two by two on the gallows. Very economical.
Martin Hellinger, the dentist, was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He looked up at me as the verdict was read out and gave me the barest nod. I handed Günter Hoffmann over to our Military Police. They could do what they liked with him. The platoon I’d sent to Cuxhaven had come back without Erlichmann the schoolmaster; he’d vanished. Of the fourteen grumbling fishermen they rounded up, none admitted to trawling further north than the Dogger Bank, far less excursions to Leith.
That night, Iain, Sam and I met for a celebration drink. It felt more like a wake. Which of course it was. A pre-emptive one for the condemned and a belated one for Will Collins. I found when I was writing to his father that I’d got out of the habit. All I could do was assure him that his son’s death hadn’t been in vain. Had it?
There should have been some sense of triumph or at least relief that justice had been served. But remembering the ashen faces of the women with the numbers on their chests as they were told – one by one – that they would hang brought only despondency. As if we were compounding their inhumanity with our own.
Late in the evening I found myself telling Scrymgeour that he wasn’t as much of a prick as I’d expected. He put his arm round my shoulder and told me neither was I. Sam smiled on us like a fond aunt.
It wasn’t quite the end for Sam, Iain and me. There was no sense of exultation or even release. The legal team had a colossal amount of paperwork to finalise and cross-reference to help with the next trial. I was trying to make sense of what I’d wrung out of Günter.
I sent a confidential message to Sillitoe at MI5 telling him of my breakthrough and asking him to watch Leith. But I could give him no details. The Firth of Forth offered a long shoreline, north and south. The escapees could have landed anywhere.
Günter had managed to come up with fourteen names out of the twenty: eight above and six below my line. Günter couldn’t recall the names of four of the first batch of twelve, the ones that might well have already passed through Scotland. Of the names below the line one was Draganski, the other Suhren. In addition there were two mystery women identified below the line.
‘You really can’t remember their names?’
‘It’s not that. I never knew them. Nor their ranks. One was in charge. It was obvious by her bearing.
You
know what officers are like. She came with a younger woman. They refused to talk to me. I think the schoolmaster knew. They were given priority.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Their documentation came through in three days. The teacher was always calling his contact to see if the line was reopened. He wanted them gone.’
‘This Draganski. Why did you go to such trouble for a junior SS guard?’
‘It wasn’t for him. He was guarding a more senior officer.’
‘Suhren?’
‘Langefeld.’
I checked the other names he’d given me. ‘Hauptsturmführer Klaus Langefeld?’
‘That’s how it worked.’
‘Do you know Langefeld’s background? His SS role?’
He shook his head.
‘Who were the other senior officers?’
‘I didn’t always get their rank.’
I telegraphed the names to Sillitoe, but it was pointless. They were hardly going to use their real ones, and I had no descriptions except Suhren’s. I sent all fourteen names off to our team in Berlin asking urgently for details, including photos if possible. I included Dragan to check how much he might have changed by the time I encountered him in Glasgow. Günter had mentioned hair dye and beards but it would be hard to change the shape of a face. I told Berlin to pay particular attention to the second batch, the eight who might still be stuck in Scotland; though we knew Dragan was now a permanent fixture there. I asked if they were aware of any senior woman or women on the run who might fit the sketchy outline of the Cuxhaven pair. After that I could do nothing more than wait for details to come through. I phoned and sent telegrams daily. Berlin seemed to have no sense of urgency that more deaths could follow in Glasgow as the cornered rats fought to save their skins. I was equally worried that the rat line could unblock at any moment and the escapees could get through to freedom in the Americas – rendering Collins’s sacrifice meaningless. It would be particularly galling if Suhren got away after what Odette Sansom had said. After what he’d done to her three SOE colleagues.
‘I could get over to Berlin and shake them up personally, Sam.’
‘It would be counter-productive. You know what wee clerks with power can be like. Iain’s already getting complaints about you.’
So I had to sit out, going stir crazy in this cold hut by the desolate lake. The brief surge of hope and enthusiasm that had come with my birthday celebrations and the breakthrough with Hellinger had evaporated. Had died with Will Collins. I was drinking too much again, and now I had little to get up for.
The days mirrored our moods. The sun hadn’t been seen across northern Europe for days. We heard there were tenfoot drifts throughout Scotland and England. Hamburg matched it foot for foot. We got up in the dark; it grew grey; then it went dark again. They were skating on the Alster, even building fires on it and roasting chestnuts hoarded from last autumn. But there was no indication that life and light would ever return to this blighted land.
We were in bad shape. Or at least I was.
‘You can’t keep blaming yourself, Douglas.’
‘Who else can I blame, Sam? Will Collins didn’t have to die. I could have sent fifty men to round up Günter Hoffmann and his pals instead of just the two of us. I might even have caught the schoolmaster.’
‘You didn’t know who you were looking for till you got there.’
‘You were right, though, Sam. I was playing the hero. It was self-indulgence.’
Sam too was changed by it, more introspective, more hidden. We’d been gone barely a month but it felt like I’d done a five-year stretch at Barlinnie. I felt engulfed by the churned-up past. I walked through each day with a pack of black dogs snapping at my heels. If I stumbled and fell, they would tear me apart. At night we kept the connecting door open between us. Sometimes we slept together, spooning in the dark. But it was simply good to know she was there, a few steps away.
On 14 February I found a note in my diary and fired off a congratulatory telegram to a certain Police Sergeant Murdoch and his new bride Morag. Sam and I spent the rest of St Valentine’s Day holed up in our igloo while the winds howled outside and sabre-tooths fled in front of the advancing glaciers.
At least the information was dribbling in. Across all fourteen names a pattern emerged. About a third of the names were NCOs or camp wardens,
Aufseherinnen
in the case of females. Possibly the guardians of the bigger rats. The rest were former SS officers or medics at Ravensbrück, its sub-camps or other camps. Together they formed a roll call of the most terrible places on earth: Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka and Buchenwald.
Finally we were done. The last pack of papers came through from Berlin. I could have tried to send them by air courier but nothing was getting off the ground. As fast as they cleared the runway another blizzard took it out. Sam and I were packed ready to go by any form of transport – truck, train or plane – the moment there was a break in the weather. I’d be my own courier. But we couldn’t even leave the hotel, far less Hamburg.
We listened to the wireless whenever we could get a signal. Through the whines and the static, we learned it was no better in Britain. Atlee had cut power to nineteen hours per day. Factories were shut and the home fires had ceased burning. It wasn’t an attractive destination but we were desperate to get there. I wanted reprisals for Collins.
My patience snapped on the nineteenth and we made a break overland by a series of trains to the Channel. We got as far as Ostend only to find the service suspended because of pack ice off the coast. Europe was marooned. They sent icebreakers into the harbour on Friday, and on Saturday morning we caught an overcrowded ferry to England. By evening we were toasting each other in the bar of the officers’ mess at RAF Hendon.
‘Douglas, I don’t want to say it, but you’re not the man I set out with.’
I looked up at the mirror behind the bar. Looking back was a scrawny old man in an ill-fitting uniform. I pointed at him.
‘See. You hit thirty-five and it’s downhill all the way. You’re a wee bit ethereal yourself, Samantha Campbell, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
Her lovely face was hollowed out, her cheekbones beneath her specs emphasising her deep-set blue eyes. She’d had no weight to lose but now she was fragile, wisp-thin.
‘Let’s get ourselves home, laddie. A gallon or two of Isobel Dunlop’s Scotch broth will soon fill us out.’
The RAF did us proud. They cleared the runway twice next morning so we could take off, climbing above snow clouds to blue sky and sunshine. We hoped for a slow flight just to bask in the warmth and light. But by one o’clock we were diving into the clouds again and coming into land over the ice-age landscape that used to be Ayrshire.
Glasgow was a whiteout. The taxi from the station took three goes at the hill up to Sam’s. The house was stone cold. At least it was dust-free: Izzie had kept up the assault in our absence. As darkness fell, Sam and I pulled our chairs closer to the puny flames and nursed our whisky.
‘Now we’re back, Douglas . . . Look, I don’t know how to put this. One of my friends is a doctor.’
‘Who’d come and take me away in a straitjacket?’
‘Of course not. But you could get pills. Help you sleep.’
‘I’ve got this.’ I held up my glass.
‘That’s another thing.’
‘I’m drinking too much?’
‘
We
are.’
‘Look, it’ll calm down now. It’s finished. I can pass this over to the police. I’ll talk them through it, translate it. It’s all the information they need. I’ll tell Shimon and Malachi that the police or MI5 – or whoever the hell they like – will handle things from now on. Let them take it from here. And I’ll see if they’ll demob me again.’
‘You looked good in uniform. Shame you have to hand it back.’
‘There wasn’t a kilt.’
It was no night for passion and we went to our separate rooms. I jolted awake with the unfamiliar silence. The old Bear Hotel had creaked and groaned and the wind had howled over the frozen lake. Now there was nothing. I padded to the window and scraped a hole in the ice. Outside it seemed to be daylight, though my watch disagreed. A half-moon silvered across great scoops of snow. The streets were flooded with it. As I watched, new flakes began tumbling again, and soon the moonlight was obliterated in a white storm. I stood at the window for a while, feeling like a little boy, strangely excited for morning.
THIRTY-THREE
A soft touch on my face startled me until she spoke.
‘Douglas, Douglas. I have to go out now. Are you all right to leave?’
‘Where . . . I mean, what time is it?’
‘Eight thirty. You’re fine. Take the day off. I’ll phone the
Gazette
and say you’ve got the flu.’