The Dark Chronicles (3 page)

It contained a sheaf of documents telling of the execution of two British commandos at a German concentration camp in November 1943. There were photographs of the corpses and eyewitness accounts, all of which pointed to one man as having ordered the deaths. Bodhan Shashkevich was a Ukrainian who had led an Einsatzkommando—an SS mobile killing unit—that had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women and children. The British commandos had interrupted some of his fun and games, but had been made to pay.

I looked back at the wardrobe, and at the other folders in it. ‘Why do you need me?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t my field.’

Father smiled tersely. ‘Since May, SAS have been building up dossiers on suspected war crimes committed against their men and other British commandos. Last month a team moved into a villa at Gaggenau, over in the French Zone, and started trying to track down the perpetrators in order to bring them to trial. Henry is part of that team.’ He nodded at the younger man, who smiled at me: for some reason, I wished he hadn’t.

‘Henry contacted me while he was on leave in London last month,’ Father continued. ‘He was concerned that some of the guilty parties could evade justice even if they were to be brought before a court. In cases where our men were out of uniform, their lawyers are bound to argue that the conventions did not apply. As a result, they may escape with light sentences, perhaps as little as five or ten years. Worse, some may not even come to trial at all: under the terms of Yalta, most Ukrainians, for example, are being sent back to the Soviet Union. Many of them will be killed on arrival, but the likes of Shashkevich survived the war against strong odds – if they have enough money or other influence, they may yet slip through the net.’

He stood up and walked over to the window. It looked onto a small garden, surrounded by a high wall. He turned back to face me.

‘Henry showed me six files, concerning the very worst offenders. As soon as I read them, I realized it was an intolerable situation: many of the victims were British officers, and we should do everything
in our power to see they receive justice. I set about trying to get in contact with the PM, and when he gave the go-ahead, came out and secured these premises. Henry has helped prepare a lot of ground for the job I have in mind – unfortunately, his leave ends on Wednesday, and his absence from Gaggenau would be too conspicuous if he did not return. You, however, are off everyone’s radar, and that, to answer your question, is why you’re here. We will be working very much along the same lines as the team at Gaggenau, with one major distinction: we will not be bringing any of these men to trial. We will have very limited access to supplies, fuel and transport, but Henry has put together papers identifying both of us as members of a British war crimes investigation team, and those should be accepted everywhere apart from the Soviet Zone. Once Henry leaves, though, we are on our own. Do you have any questions?’

I wondered if the two of them had lost their minds and begun weaving fantasies; many were these days. But they didn’t look mad: that was the frightening thing.

Although barely in my twenties, I was already an old hand at the spy game, having been attached to several cloak-and-dagger units over the course of the war. This was something else entirely – an execution squad, pure and simple – and the war in this part of the world was meant to be over. But as I looked into Father’s grim face flickering in the candlelight, I knew I had no choice in the matter, and shook my head meekly.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘We start tomorrow – Henry’s located Shashkevich.’

*

It was a beautiful morning. The air was crisp and clean, and the fields seemed almost to be glowing as the sunlight travelled across them. Somehow it made what we were about to do even worse. Father had briefed me on the day’s job, but he hadn’t told me how I would feel: as we cut our way through the countryside, a chasm
of despair opened up in my stomach and I became terrified I would have to ask him to stop driving so I could vomit. For the first time in my life, I felt like a child playing at soldiers.

When we reached the camp, the guard on duty hardly glanced at our papers, waving us through at the sight of our jeep. In the central reception hall, Pritchard showed our papers again and we were led through to an area of stone cell blocks. A young American corporal marched us down a dimly lit corridor, unlocked one of the doors, saluted us, and marched away again without a word.

Shashkevich was seated on the bed, shivering under a rough grey blanket despite the morning sun filtering through the small window set high in one wall. He was still a large man, but the imperious-looking officer of the photographs in his dossier had been all but extinguished. His eyes were now deeply sunken and his skin pitted and sallow. He looked up at us, confusion spreading across his face as he registered our uniforms and berets. He wasn’t shivering, I realized then, but rocking back and forth and mumbling something to himself in his own language. Whether he was reciting a prayer, a list of everyone he had ever met to keep his mind active or the defence he planned to use when he reached court I do not know.

Father told him to get up in Russian, and the fear turned to defiance.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘Get up,’ Father repeated, gesturing with his Luger.

After he and Pritchard had cuffed him, I held the door open as they marched him into the hallway and out to the jeep.

We headed out towards Frankfurt, taking small lanes to avoid the delays on the crater-heavy
autobahn
. It was mid-morning now, and the lines of refugees tramping across the fields, either on their way to DP camps or simply foraging for food, had grown. On the outskirts of the city, we took a turning into deep woods and kept going.

I breathed in the fresh air and tried to fix the moment in my mind: the birdsong, the smell of the trees, the strange emptiness
of the sunlit ruined land. The engine stopped. We walked into the middle of a clearing and Father handed me the Luger. I released the safety and pressed the muzzle against the back of Shashkevich’s pale neck. The coldness of it woke him up, and the fear came over him in a rush. His hands started shaking violently and I had to clutch him towards me to restrain him. I called out to him in a voice that sounded surer than the one in my head to stop moving or I would shoot. It was an absurd thing to say, because by now he knew I was going to shoot him anyway, and something in me realized this, but I suddenly couldn’t stomach the position I was in, shooting him from so close. Without even considering it, I let go of him and stepped away, at the same time jerking one of his arms towards me so that he swivelled around as though it were a ballet. It all took place very fast, and contrary to everything we had planned – we hadn’t considered the possibility he might lose control. Shashkevich’s hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and his eyes were staring out of his skull like a maniac’s. I thought hard of the photographs I had seen in the dossier and squeezed the trigger.

‘Pockets,’ said Pritchard after. ‘Don’t forget his pockets.’

I leaned down and ripped away some papers and trinkets, then handed them to Father and staggered off into the trees.

*

Pritchard returned to Gaggenau a couple of days later, leaving Father and me to work together. We had five more men to find, and it didn’t appear that any of them were in custody. We began following the clues contained within the dossiers, re-reading the testimonies and tracing possible escape routes on large-scale maps in the makeshift operations room set up in the house. The pace was furious, and we worked all day, every day, and often through the night. We visited scores of rundown barns and cellars all over the Zone, and I grew accustomed to the look in the eyes of children as we questioned their parents and grandparents. On one occasion, a
young boy tried to rush us as we entered a disused stable where he and his family were hiding, and Father very nearly shot him. I began to know what it felt like to be part of an occupying power, and it frightened me. Sometimes I would lie awake in my bed in the attic of the farmhouse and watch the spiders making webs in the beams, thinking back to before the war and dreaming of a future when it would finally be over for me.

Father had no such doubts about the mission, of course. It was his crusade: there was a light shining in his eyes and a spring in his step. He was meting out justice. Although we never spoke of much aside from the work, I was initially pleased that he had felt the need for my assistance, and did all I could to show him I was worthy of his trust. He never mentioned Shashkevich again, and in time I forgot that I had almost botched it and was pleased that I had at least contributed to getting rid of one of them.

It took me several weeks to realize the true nature of my role in the operation. As well as helping him in the field, it was also my job to polish our boots, care for our uniforms and, once we had got the electricity back, cook from the stores in the larder. He never thanked me for any of it, and it slowly dawned on me that this was the primary reason he had wanted me with him. It was his operation, but he needed someone to deal with the household chores and offer support – I was effectively his batman. I felt like I was twelve years old again, lugging his gear around Brooklands. Did he not know what I’d been through in Finland? Hell on earth! Only to be followed by weeks underground in Sweden. And for what? I’d thought he had finally realized that I was now an officer, and a highly capable one at that – but he still saw me as a boy.

My resentment was muted by fear, however: I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a dirty job. With the war over, there were no longer any hard and fast conventions to follow – or if there were, we certainly weren’t following them. I remembered the righteous anger that had overtaken us all the previous year when we’d heard about Hitler’s Commando Order, which said that we could be
shot without trial. In avenging the men killed under that order, weren’t we committing the same crime?

By the end of August, four of the targets were dead. But the final name on the list was the one Father wanted most: Gustav Meier. He was an SS officer, and there was compelling evidence that he had raped and tortured the families of suspected members of the Resistance in France, including children. We hunted for him throughout September, but with no luck. Father was acutely aware that the chances of finding him were fading with every day that passed: he might have jumped on a boat to Argentina by now. But in the last week of September, there was a breakthrough. Father returned from a long excursion and barged into my room. ‘I’ve found him!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve found the bastard!’

He had discovered from the papers of one of Meier’s colleagues that he had relatives living near Hamburg, right across the road from a British army barracks. We had conducted surveillance on the area for several days, but to no avail. But Father had returned for another look and had chanced to spot Meier as he had driven through the nearest village. He was working as a gardener, and further enquiries revealed he had been living with the family under an assumed name.

Father had come back to the farmhouse for a very particular reason. On the two previous targets, he had found pea-sized suicide capsules hidden in their clothing, similar to the potassium cyanide ‘L-pills’ SOE gave its agents. Himmler had bitten into one when he had been captured in June, and Father was determined not to allow any of our targets to take the same way out: he didn’t want them to have that control, and I suppose also felt they deserved to know that vengeance was being served on them. Some reports had claimed that Himmler had been equipped with
two
capsules – one in his clothing and one that he had kept in his mouth. Although they were rubber-cased to avoid accidents – they could be swallowed with no harm done – there was clearly a danger that in a tussle someone might bite down without meaning to. Father wanted very
much to deal with Meier on his own terms, so to be doubly sure no accidents happened, he needed another pair of hands: mine.

That evening, he came up with a plan. It involved me dressing up as a displaced person and him as a policeman. We would approach Meier and I would accuse him of some crime – a petty theft. Meier would naturally protest and, taking the opportunity of surprise, I would pretend to fly into a rage and pounce on him: in the resulting mêlée, either Father or I would retrieve any capsules he had on his person. As soon as this was done, Father would ‘arrest’ Meier, and it wouldn’t be until we were some distance away that he would realize what had happened.

After going over it several times, we set out for Hamburg the next afternoon. We found Meier soon enough, working in one of the gardens as he had been the previous day. We approached him in our respective garbs and I claimed that the tools he was using were mine, stolen from me the previous week. But either Father’s plan wasn’t as clever as we’d thought or my acting was poor, because he saw through it at once and made a dash for it across the garden and into a nearby field. We had no choice but to go after him, but when I caught up and leapt on top of him, I found that he didn’t have any capsules on him – but he did have a knife. Where he had hidden it, I don’t know, because he had been dressed in very little in the afternoon sunshine, but I felt it go in, and it was the last thing I remembered when I woke in the sanatorium.

*

I have very little recollection of the first few days after the stabbing: I was blacked out for most of it. I do remember being forced to drink endless amounts of a tepid broth that seemed to stick in my throat. And I was occasionally lucid enough when being given a bath or being taken to the bathroom to feel enough residual shame at the indignity of being exposed to strangers that I lashed out at a few people who, after all, were only trying to help me.

One of those was Anna, but I only became aware of her once I
had fully regained consciousness and was already a fair way along the road to recovery. She had explained how I had been brought there by a British officer one afternoon with a great gash under my kidneys, and had given me the letter from Father, still sealed in its envelope. The letter enraged me, because he had couched his abandonment of me in a mixture of military jargon and euphemisms: I was now ‘on the bench for the remainder of the game’ – that sort of thing. As an emergency measure, he left encoded directions for a dead drop near an abandoned well a few miles from the hospital. He said he would check this each day as long as he was in the area, which should be a few weeks more. But the main message was clear: recover, return to England, and forget I’d ever been to Germany.