The Secret of Spandau (12 page)

‘Heavily censored?' asked Dick.

‘Bird states that his original manuscript amounted to 160,000 words. Anyone can do the arithmetic. The book is at least 50,000 words short. It's still the only substantial account we have of life in Spandau.'

‘So watch out for the men with bulges under their jackets,' said Red.

Dick looked up bleakly. ‘I suppose that leaves me the cantankerous old sod from MI5?'

Cedric reached for another chicken portion. ‘I'll set up a meeting. I have a hunch about him.'

‘And after that?'

‘The Public Record Office,' Cedric informed him with a reassuring beam. ‘We need cast-iron evidence. Documentation first; then corroboration from people who took part in the events of 1940 and '41; and finally …' He leaned back in his chair and beamed at Red. ‘… a word or two from old man Hess.'

When lunch was over and the table cleared, Cedric invited Red for a stroll along one of the woodland tracks. It was not to admire the trees. He told Red candidly that he was worried sick. ‘… . and if you want to know why, it's because of you. When I picked you for this job, I didn't have much choice. I needed a fluent speaker of German who knows Berlin, and that's you. You're a competent writer with a lively style. You're also foolhardy, impetuous and you shoot off your mouth too much.' Cedric paused, practically inviting a riposte from Red, but none came. ‘I knew that, of course. I knew I was taking a blind running jump with you. I tried to tell myself that your cocksure manner is an asset that you might even use to charm your way into Spandau. I just hope the charm works better over there than it has on me. I'm handing you the greatest assignment of my editorial career. If you blow it, Goodbody, so help me, I'll see you never work on a newspaper again.'

Dick Garrick had not visited Brighton in years. The last time was in the early seventies with his parents. Then it had seemed to him a town in a time-warp, locked in the thirties with Woodbines and peep-shows, peppermint rock and characters from Graham Greene. It had its high-rise buildings and electronic games, but the pre-war atmosphere prevailed. So it was not inappropriate that Cedric's veteran secret service agent had selected as a rendezvous the beach in front of the Old Ship Hotel, approximately midway between the two piers. The period charm of the encounter was diminished only by Dick's dislike of early starts; he had to drive the fifty miles from London and be at the meeting-place by 7.00 a.m.

There were compensations. At that hour he was able to park the Renault at a meter along the seafront, almost opposite the hotel. And Brighton beach in the low-angled morning sun, with a minimum of people – a jogger and a few dog-exercisers – was a postcard scene of glittering shingle and flashing water. The only drawback was that the stretch of beach in front of the Old Ship appeared deserted.

Beside his car, Dick checked the time and found he had two minutes in hand. Possibly his contact was sitting at a window overlooking the beach and waiting for a positive move on Dick's part. There was nobody within sight along the promenade. He picked up his copy of yesterday's edition of the
Daily Mail
and sheepishly slipped the envelope Cedric had given him between the centre pages. This was pre-Greene in conception, he reflected, more out of Edgar Wallace or John Buchan. He was to carry the paper folded in his left hand, with the title prominent.

The watch showed 7.00 a.m. and no one had made a move. He had not driven fifty miles just for a sniff of the sea. There was nothing for it but to go down on the beach and stand where he could be seen.

He took the stone steps down and crunched across the pebbles. Within a few paces, he realized what he had not appreciated from the road above: that there was a steep shelf, where the beach dropped by all of ten feet. Standing on the finer stones at the foot of the shelf was the grey-haired figure in the white Burberry and black trilby Dick had been told to expect. He was facing the sea, holding his copy of the
Daily Mail
behind his back.

Dick slithered clumsily down the slope, but the man ignored him until he was at his side. Mercifully, there was no secret form of words.

‘I'm Dick Garrick. Cedric Fleming sent me.'

The man glanced at the paper in Dick's hand. He had sunglasses and a neatly-trimmed white beard. The thought crossed Dick's mind that perhaps, as secret agents in retirement got more remote from the trade, they compensated with this kind of role-playing.

‘Garrick.' The man in the raincoat spoke the name thoughtfully and stared along the length of the beach, as if he were looking for a landing-craft. Apparently satisfied that Dick was not an enemy invader, he exchanged newspapers and thrust the one he had got from Dick into his raincoat pocket. ‘So far as you are concerned, my name will be, em …' He stared around him again. ‘… Stones. Understood?'

‘All right.'

‘I thought it would not be long before the cormorant press descended on me. What morsels from my memoirs have whetted the appetite? I take it you have read my memoirs?'

After an uncomfortable pause, Dick answered, ‘Not yet. Cedric Fleming isn't letting the manuscript out of his office as far as I know.'

‘Sensible,' Stones decided. ‘We'll walk along the water's edge.' He set off briskly down the incline, shouting over his shoulder, ‘I'm happy to report that I'm in the pink of health, and I attribute it to walking by the sea. Brighton beach has a more invigorating air than anywhere else along the south coast. The locals tell you it's the ozone, but of course it isn't. Rotting seaweed is the secret.'

When they had stepped over several fly-infested heaps of Brighton's secret and reached the narrow fringe of damp sand, Stones said, ‘One of those pocket tape-recorders wouldn't work too well down here by the waves.'

‘I haven't brought one.'

‘You're not making notes,' Stones pointed out accusingly. ‘Why aren't you making notes?'

‘I'm not looking for a statement. I simply want your version of certain things that happened in the war.'

Stones gave a snort. ‘Your editor told me. Hess, isn't it? Not much story to him.'

‘Did you have anything to do with him?'

Stones appeared unwilling to answer directly. ‘He behaved like a madman, you know. Tried to kill himself barely a month after he arrived. He jumped over the stairs at Mytchett Place.'

‘Why was that?'

‘Stress, probably.'

‘You said
behaved
like a madman.'

‘Well, he was playing up, wasn't he? Cunning old fox.'

‘To impress MI5?'

‘I dare say.'

‘There are suggestions that he was brainwashed,' Dick ventured. ‘Is that possible?'

‘Brainwashed?' The sunglasses flashed as Stones looked out to sea. ‘I don't believe brainwashing had been thought of in 1941.'

Dick said doggedly, ‘He was handed over to the psychiatrists as soon as the Foreign Office had extracted all the information it could.'

‘Psychiatric care.'

‘At Mytchett Place – the headquarters of the MI5 field security police?'

Stones gave a thin smile. ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.'

Dick was silent for a few paces. ‘They said he was paranoid. Delusions of persecution.'

Stones made a sound of amused contempt. ‘Delusions, my foot! Hess
was
persecuted by our people. I can tell you that for certain.'

Without appearing as eager for information as he felt, Dick asked. ‘In what way?'

‘I'll give you an illustration. You must understand that this was in time of war, mind. If he hadn't been wearing a service uniform when he landed, we would probably have shot him as a spy. When did Hess arrive?'

‘On Saturday, May 10.'

‘Well, about that time, a secret unit known as GS1 was set up near Woburn by Sefton Delmer.'

‘The
Express
man?'

‘Yes, a journalist – but with a first-class mind,' Stones added pointedly. ‘GS1's contribution to the war effort was to produce black propaganda.'

‘What did that consist of?'

‘Basically, misleading information to confuse the enemy. The first assignment Delmer and his people were given was to produce an edition of the official Nazi newspaper,
Volkischer Beobachter
, to plant on Hess. They took a page from the actual issue of May 21, and grafted in a short paragraph of their own in similar type in the bottom right-hand corner.'

‘For Hess to read? What did it say?'

‘It was supposed to be a denial of certain rumours in the foreign press that Hess's wife and four-year-old son were being held by the Gestapo. It said the truth was that Frau Hess and her son were in a mental hospital in Thuringia.'

‘Nasty.'

‘That isn't all. They followed it up with this.' Stones took a newspaper cutting from an inside pocket, unfolded it and handed it to Dick.

‘The
Telegraph
?'

‘Another fake,' Stones explained. ‘Just three copies were secretly printed for GS1.'

The piece was an account of statements allegedly made by Dr Paul Schmidt, Chief of the press section of the German Foreign Office, to John Cudahy, former US Ambassador to Belgium.

‘Most of it's of no consequence,' Stones told Dick. ‘Take a look at the paragraph marked with a pencil.'

Dick studied it.
Schmidt, like other intimates of Hitler's circle, had taken great trouble in the talks I had with him to impress upon me that Hess was mentally deranged. Rudolf Hess, he said, had long been suffering from an incurable disease which had now affected his brain. His small son Wolf Rüdiger had inherited his father's malady and was now undergoing treatment in a mental institution.

‘Totally without foundation, of course,' said Stones.

‘Call it black propaganda – to me it sounds sick,' said Dick. ‘When did we plant this on Hess?'

‘The date of the issue is on the reverse.'

Dick turned the cutting over.

20 June 1941.

His voice was tight with outrage. ‘Five days after his suicide attempt! What were they trying to do to the man?' After a moment, he said more evenly, ‘May I keep this?'

‘Certainly. It's only a photocopy.'

‘I see the point of that quotation about the gods now. The treatment amounts to much the same as brainwashing.'

‘Destroying his mental equilibrium?'

‘And his memory of recent events,' Dick said in the hope that disclosures on his part would encourage Stones to open up even more. ‘Highly sensitive matters.'

Stones commented drily, ‘Which brings us round to your editor's theory about the right-wing conspiracy.'

‘Cedric Fleming told you about that?' Dick asked in surprise.

‘I
have
held an important position in the security service for many years, Mr Garrick.'

‘Sorry.' But he still felt peeved, considering what a big deal Cedric had made about confidentiality.

‘You want the facts?'

‘Please.'

Briefly, conversation gave way to the slap of waves against massive wooden piles as the two men passed under the delapidated structure of the old West Pier.

‘You're in for a shattering disappointment, but here goes,' Stones told him. ‘The pro-German people in Britain were very well known to us. The most extreme of them were detained in prison under the Emergency Regulations.'

‘Fascists?'

‘And others. One of the first was the Conservative MP for Peebles, Captain Ramsay. Parliamentary privilege didn't stop us locking him up. They were well known, you see. We had tabs on them all.'

‘The nobility?'

‘Everyone from the Duke of Windsor downwards. There was no secret about it. The noble lords didn't get interned, but they knew damned well that a conspiracy with Nazi Germany wasn't on.'

Dick stopped in his tracks and stared at Stones. ‘Are you sure of that?'

‘As sure as I can be.'

‘In that case, what the hell was MI5 up to with Hess? He was a mental and physical wreck when you people finished with him.'

‘He had to be sacrificed.'

‘For what cause?'

‘I never discovered. Very few of us did, if any.'

‘Yet it
still
requires him to be locked up in Spandau Jail?'

‘That is a fair assumption,' said Stones.

‘They must be afraid of what he knows. Is it possible that something erased from his memory in 1941 could have resurfaced later? Is that why we haven't released him?'

Stones stopped and faced Dick. ‘Mr Garrick, I am a superannuated secret servant, not a psychiatrist. I have told you everything I know about the unfortunate Herr Hess. I have sung for my supper. The song is ended. And now I think we should separate and make our way independently off the beach.'

The death of Siggy Beer, Germany's most venerable publisher, was widely mourned. St Peter's, Munich's oldest parish church, was crowded for the funeral. Academics, civic dignitaries and writers stood shoulder to shoulder in the pews with a surprising number of tearful, good-looking women who had mingled inconspicuously with the congregation as they arrived. The local press had reported that Siggy had died alone in his apartment after one of the famed parties at the Beer Verlag publishing house, but it fooled few of Siggy's female friends. It is more than likely that in the quiet moment at the end of the service, there were many silent prayers of thanks that the old publisher had not had his cardiac failure on a previous party night.

Siggy's son, Harald, was not available for comment. After the private service at the crematorium, he returned to the office, had one scotch and a sandwich at the chairman's desk, and spent the afternoon and evening examining files and assessing the current commitments of the firm.