Horse Under Water

42 Hidden within treason

The 1945 press cuttings that Jean had photostated for me lay on the dusty table in the Admiralty Library. The dates on the cuttings helped me to locate the file I wanted to see. It had a grey cover with a reference number. The pages were fastened together with three star-shaped clips and numbered to prevent loss of one of them.[28]

Out of the medical envelope slid cards, flimsies and reports. Here it was, the clincher:

This was Fernie Tomas. Jean’s search of the Spanish Civil War files at the Home Office had found a name curiously like Fernie Tomas — Bernie Thomas: otherwise Bernard Thomas Peterson.

So Fernie was an expert frogman, a renegade R.N. officer. I remembered the two-stroke cycle that gave Giorgio a ride in the night, the capsizing of the boat ‘by a frogman’ and Giorgio’s voice as he told me that the stars were going out. And da Cunha had been a German naval officer; they made quite a pair.

My hands were black with dust. I borrowed the soap from the bent tin and used the small stiff towel that was kept for visitors to the Admiralty Library.

‘Don’t forget your pass,’ someone called, ‘you’ll never get out of the building without it.’