SS-GB

‘Give over, Sylvia,’ said Douglas. He looked back to be sure they were out of sight of the patrol, then he unlocked the handcuff and released her arm.

‘That’s what we are as far as you’re concerned –foreigners! The Germans are the ones with a right to be here; we’re the intruders who have to bow and bloody scrape.’

‘Give over, Sylvia,’ said Douglas. He hated to hear women swearing like that, although, working in a police force, he should by now have got used to it.

‘Get your hands off me, you bloody Gestapo bastard.’ She pushed him away with the flat of her hand. ‘I’ve got friends who don’t go in fear and trembling of the Huns. You wouldn’t understand anything about that, would you. No! You’re too busy doing their dirty work for them.’

‘You must have been talking to Harry Woods,’ said Douglas in a vain attempt to turn the argument into a joke.

‘You’re pathetic,’ said Sylvia. ‘Do you know that? You’re pathetic!’

She was pretty, but with the rain making rats’ tails of her hair, her lipstick smudged, and the ill-fitting raincoat that had always been too short for her, Douglas suddenly saw her as he’d never seen her before. And he saw her, too, as she’d be in ten years hence; a tight-lipped virago with a loud voice and quick temper. He realized that he’d never make a go of it with Sylvia. But when her parents were killed by bombs, just a few days before Douglas lost his wife, it was natural that they sought in each other some desperate solace that came disguised as love.

What Douglas had once seen as the attractive over-confidence of youth, now looked more like unyielding selfishness. He wondered if there was another man, a much younger one perhaps, but decided against asking her, knowing that she would say yes just to annoy him. ‘We’re both pathetic, Sylvia,’ he said, ‘and that’s the truth of it.’

They were standing near one of the Landseer lions, shining as black as polished ebony in the driving rain. They were virtually alone there, for now even the most stalwart of German servicemen had put away their tax-free cameras and taken shelter. Sylvia stood with one hand in her pocket, and the other pushing her wet hair off her forehead. She smiled but there was no merriment there, not even a touch of kindness or compassion. ‘Don’t be sarcastic about Harry Woods,’ she said bitterly. ‘He’s the only friend you’ve got left. Do you realize that?’

‘Leave Harry out of it,’ said Douglas.

‘You realize he’s one of us, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘The Resistance, you fool.’ The expression on Douglas’s face was enough to make her laugh. A woman, pushing a pram laden with a sack of coal, half turned to look at them before hurrying on.

‘Harry?’

‘Harry Woods, assistant to Archer of the Yard, protégé of the Gestapo, scourge of any who dare blow raspberries at the conqueror, and yet, yea, verily, I say unto you, this man dare fight the bloody Hun.’ She walked to the fountain and looked at her reflection in the shallow waters.

‘You have been drinking.’

‘Only the heady potion of freedom.’

‘Don’t take an overdose,’ said Douglas. It was almost comical to see her in this sort of mood. Perhaps it was a reaction to the fear she’d felt at the spot-check.

‘Just look after our friend Harry,’ she called shrilly, ‘and give him this, with all my love.’

The hand emerged from her pocket holding the SIPO pass. Before Douglas could stop her, she lifted her arm and threw it as far as she could into the water of the fountain. The rain pounded the stone paving so heavily that the water rebounded to make a grey cornfield of water-spray. She walked quickly through it, towards the steps that led to the National Gallery.

Under the rain-spotted water it was only just possible to see the red-bordered pass as it sank to the bottom amongst the tourists’ coins, Agfa boxes and ice-cream wrappers. Left there, it might well be spotted by some high-ranking official, who would make life hell for the whole department. Douglas stood looking at it for a moment or two but he was already so wet that it would make little difference to go into the water up to his knees.

Chapter Five (#u34757546-68c2-5f77-aa05-3a0133075a98)

When Douglas got back to his office that afternoon, he had barely enough time to clean himself up, and put on dry shoes, before there was a message from the first floor. General Kellerman wanted a word with Douglas, if that was convenient. It was convenient. Douglas hurried upstairs.

‘Ah, Superintendent Archer, so good of you to come,’ said Kellerman as if Archer was some sort of visiting dignitary. ‘I seem to have such a busy day today.’ Kellerman’s senior staff officer passed his chief a teleprinter sheet. Kellerman looked at it briefly and said, ‘This chap from Berlin, Standartenführer Huth…you remember?’

‘I remember everything you said, sir.’

‘Splendid. Well, the Standartenführer has been given a priority seat on the afternoon Berlin-Croydon flight. He’ll be arriving about five I should think. I wonder if you would go there and meet him?’

‘Yes, sir, but I wonder…’ Douglas couldn’t think of a good way to suggest that an SS-Standartenführer from Himmler’s Central Security Office would consider a welcome from one English Detective Superintendent less than his rank and position merited.

‘The Standartenführer has requested that you meet him,’ said Kellerman.

‘Me personally?’ said Douglas.

‘His task is of an investigative nature,’ said Kellerman. ‘I thought it appropriate that I assign to him my best detective.’ He smiled. In fact Huth had asked for Archer by name. Kellerman had energetically opposed the order that put Douglas Archer under the command of the new man, but the intervention of Himmler himself had ended the matter.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Douglas.

Kellerman reached into the pocket of his tweed waistcoat and looked at his gold pocket watch. ‘I’ll start right away,’ said Douglas, recognizing his cue.

‘Would you?’ said Kellerman. ‘Well, see my personal assistant so that you know all the arrangements we’ve made to receive the Standartenführer.’

Lufthansa had three Berlin–London flights daily, and these were additional to the less comfortable and less prestigious military flights. Standartenführer Dr Oskar Huth had been given one of the fifteen seats on the flight which left Berlin at lunch time.

Douglas waited in the unheated terminal building and watched a Luftwaffe band preparing for the arrival of the daily flight from New York. The Germans had the only land-planes capable of such a long-range, non-stop service and the Propaganda Ministry was making full use of it.

The rain had continued well into the afternoon but now on the horizon there was a break in the low clouds. The Berlin plane circled, while the pilot decided whether to land. After the third circuit the big three-engined Junkers roared low over the airport building, and then came round for a perfect landing on the wet tarmac. Its hand-polished metal flashed as it taxied back to the terminal building.

Douglas half expected that any man who had his doctorate included with his rank on teleprinter messages might have retained a trace of the bedside manner. But Huth was a doctor of law, and a hard-nosed SS officer if Douglas had ever seen one. And by that time Douglas had seen many.

Unlike Kellerman, the new man was wearing his uniform, and gave no sign of preferring plain clothes. It was not the black SS uniform. That nowadays was worn only by the Allgemeine SS – mostly middle-aged country yokels who donned uniform just for village booze-ups at weekends. Dr Huth’s uniform was silver-grey, with high boots and riding breeches. On his cuff there was the RFSS cuffband worn only by Himmler’s personal staff.

Douglas looked him up and down. There was something of the dressmaker’s dummy about this tall, thin man, in spite of the state of his uniform which was carefully pressed and cleaned but unmistakably old. He was about thirty-five years old, a powerful, muscular figure with an energy in his stride and demeanour that belied the hooded eyes that made him seem half-asleep. Under his arm he carried a short silver-topped stick, and in his hand a large briefcase. He didn’t go to the door marked for customs and immigration, he rapped the countertop with his stick, until a uniformed Lufthansa official opened the gate for him to go into the reception hall.

‘Archer?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The, officer shook his hand perfunctorily, as if his briefing had said that all Englishmen expect it.

‘What are we waiting for?’ said Huth.

‘Your staff…your baggage…’

‘Shotguns, golf clubs and fishing tackle, you mean? I’ve no time for that sort of nonsense,’ said Huth. ‘Have you got a car here?’

‘The Rolls,’ said Douglas, pointing to where, seen through the doors of the terminal, there stood the highly polished car with uniformed SS driver and Kellerman’s official pennants.

‘Kellerman let you have the Rolls-Royce, did he?’ said Huth as they got into it. ‘What is he using this afternoon, the coronation coach?’ Huth’s English accent was perfect, with the sort of polish that comes only from multilingual parents, or a multilingual mistress. And yet, for all Huth’s smooth polish, there was no mistaking the hard ambition that shone beneath it.

Huth’s father was a professor of modern languages. The family had lived in Schleswig-Holstein until, after the first war, the new frontier had made their home a part of Denmark. Then they had moved to Berlin, where Oskar Huth had studied law before going on to complete his studies at Oxford, where Douglas Archer had gone a few years later. In spite of the disparity in their ages, Douglas Archer and Huth were able to find memories and acquaintances in common. And Douglas’s mother had, as a young woman, been an English governess in Berlin; Douglas knew it from her stories of that time.

‘What are you working on at present?’ Huth asked very casually as he looked out of the window. The car slowed for the traffic at Norwood. A long line of people waited in the rain for the bread ration to arrive. Douglas half expected Huth to comment on them but he leaned forward with balled fist, and used his signet ring to rap against the glass of the driver’s compartment. ‘Use the siren, you fool,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’ve got all day!’

‘Double death in Kentish Town Tuesday. They fell on the electrified rail of the Underground railway. I treated it as murder at first, but then decided it was a suicide pact; the man was an escapee from the camp for British POWs at Brighton.’ Douglas scratched his cheek. ‘A shooting in a nightclub in Leicester Square on Saturday night. A machine-pistol was used, about one hundred and fifty rounds; no shortage of bullets it seems. All the signs of a gang killing. The proprietor says the takings were about six thousand pounds – if you allow for what he’s probably falsifying on his tax returns, it’s probably double that – in used notes: O-Marks mostly. Manager and cashier both dead, three customers injured and one still in hospital.’

‘What about the Peter Thomas murder?’ said Huth, still looking out of the window at the drab, rainswept streets.