Horse Under Water

45 Man and boy are this

It was damn nice of H.K. to leave the car outside Number 12 Praca Miguel Bombarda. Charly said that it looked as though we had collected a parking fine. Which was Charly’s idea of a joke; the white envelope under the wiper was a note from H.K.:

Sorry to hijack the sled but when you got to go, you got to go. I didn’t think you were levelling with me when you promised; but like I said, when winter comes you find which trees are the evergreens!

Al Content [obviously H.K.’s guarded way of naming Fernie] is moving like a scalded cat. What you said I could take I ain’t taking but you can bet Charly’s pants that Al wants it instead. [This could only mean the power boat.]

What I didn’t tell you is that Al has the sweetest blackmail set-up of all time and do I mean all time. If the name Weiss List means anything to you you’ll know I ain’t kidding.

Watch what I ain’t taking and you will get your file closed — AND HOW!!

Yours in a million years,

HARRY

Singleton was not expected back from Lisbon for another twenty-four hours. Anything to be done had to be done alone. I went into Joe’s old room and prised up a floorboard with one of the kitchen knives.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Charly. I told her to buzz off and fix some strong tea. I was feeling very tired what with one thing and another.

From under the floorboard I got the small radio transmitter with which Joe had contacted London. I set it to transmit, raised the antenna and set the cipher numbers on the Kurier.[31] I cranked the handle at twenty-three minutes past the hour (as our arrangement with R.N. Gibraltar demanded) and then put the apparatus away.

Charly brought tea. I told her I had sent a signal to London and she was now free to take any action she wished in respect of the narcotics processing. I also cautioned her that under the Official Secrets Act any mention of the operation in which we had been engaged at Albufeira was actionable, and that if there was any reason to suspect her of indiscretion in this respect her employment by the Federal Narcotics Bureau in the U.S.A. made her liable for trial as an agent of a foreign power. I thanked her for the tea and gave her a reassuring and not too brotherly kiss.

‘You must row me out to H.K.’s boat,’ I said. I was dog-tired.

Charly brought the dinghy alongside the forty-foot cabin cruiser with skill befitting an admiral’s daughter. I scrambled on to the teak-laid deck in my stockinged feet — I couldn’t risk leaving wet footmarks across it. Charly spun the dinghy round and rowed back to the cove. I watched the cliff-top and willed Fernie Tomas not to appear until she was over the headland by the steep high path. Then I walked across the bridge and got into the big stowage locker under one of the extra bunks. It was a bit coffin-like, but I jammed a pencil under the lid, which gave me air, although not enough to dispel the smell of tar and mothballs. I waited.

Something struck the side of the boat with a thud. It wasn’t very Royal Navy and I began to wonder whether it was Fernie Tomas. Perhaps H.K. had lured me into a trap. I flushed with sudden fear at the thought of this locker really becoming a coffin.

A woman’s voice — Fernie’s wife — gabbled in Portuguese, the dinghy was drifting away. Hold the rope. Couldn’t he help her. Take the suitcase. There is water in the bottom of the boat. An oar has slipped into the water. The conversation went the way it does when women are in boats.

I heard Fernie’s voice telling her to hurry in rapid Portuguese. Reassuring and direct. I realized why he had been so taciturn when I had seen him before. His Portuguese had a strong English accent. There were splashes and thumps, and then a third voice, rather higher than Fernie’s, which spoke least of the three. They seemed to be an age getting aboard, and then I heard the woman’s voice, this time from some way off. She was returning to the shore in the dinghy. There was a click as someone switched on the small light over the controls. If I held my face horizontal, with my ear pressed against the cold locker-lid, my left eye had a narrow range of vision that included the top half of the person at the controls.

I could see Fernie in profile — the egg-shaped head with its black domed moustache hanging over the mouth. Upon his head was the black trilby hat of the peasant. The anchor came up like a curtain and the motors beat a drum-roll as we began the last act at Albufeira. Fernie engaged the screws and I felt the water thrash under the hull. The light above his head threw his eye sockets in black piratical patches. His hands moved across the controls, articulate and smooth, his head watched the beams, the compass, the rev. counters. This was a Fernie I had never seen, Fernie at sea, Fernie the sailor. From the seat at the controls he couldn’t see the ship’s clock. Every few moments he would call to the boy with him, ‘What time is it?’ and the boy would tell him.

He moved the throttles as far forward as they could go and at 3,000 r.p.m. the hull began hammering against the water like a pneumatic drill. When he was satisfied with the course, Fernie told the boy to hold the wheel steady. I heard the clicks of a suitcase being unlocked. I pushed my ear harder against the lid of the locker and raised it two inches. The boy was staring into the dark, while Fernie crouched on the floor over a radio chassis into which he was pushing small valves. Then his footsteps clattered down the saloon staircase and he reappeared with a black cable from the 24-volt supply to which he connected the radio machinery. He shouted, ‘Port — keep the lubber line on 240.’ The boy he had brought aboard was Augusto, who had secured a lock of Fernie’s hair for me.

Augusto sat on the high stool like a child at a tea-party, holding the wheel tightly between his small grubby hands. Fernie spoke in Portuguese about ‘the strong American at the railway station’; it must have been a question, for Augusto said that ‘the strong American’ (which was what the local people called H.K.) had unloaded a crate of sardines at the station to be put on the morning train to Lisbon.

There was a click and Augusto was bathed in reflected light as Tomas moved the beam of the big searchlight out across the waves. Slivers of rain and water droplets snipped at Augusto’s halo as the boat slammed into the swell and the sound of shipped water rushed along the deck outside. The little radio had warmed up and emitted a high-pitched note like a badly adjusted TV set. Tomas reappeared; his hand was on the radio. He tuned it. ‘Make it 245,’ he shouted above the noise.

I felt the boat vibrate as it turned at high speed. So far, and then it straightened again.

Tomas’s hand came into my view and he moved the radio. The signal it was receiving became stronger. ‘250,’ he shouted, and in his excitement broke into a gabble of Portuguese as he demanded that Augusto should give it more throttle. Augusto said it was as far advanced as it could get, and he pushed at the big levers with his child’s hands in order to prove it. Suddenly from the radio came a sound like ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’ played at double speed on a flute. Tomas put the set down roughly and moved out of my sight. Augusto’s head was one moment illuminated by an intense light-beam and the next moment drawn in dark silhouette against the bright heaving water.

Tomas was sweeping the ocean, looking for something in the roaring foam. The something was a metal container.

The flute-like sounds of the high-speed Morse stopped and the steady whistle replaced it. There was a cracking sound, and for some minutes I puzzled over it. It was difficult to imagine an ex-R.N. officer slapping his own face in Latin excitement and anger. ‘Too late!’ he shouted to Augusto, ‘too late, too late, too late, it’s down again to the sea bed.’ He snatched the wheel from Augusto and spun it viciously. The boat slid sideways, uncontrolled, the propellers screaming to get a hold on the water as the deck heeled over towards the dark sea.

It was unfortunate that I chose that moment to emerge. I fell forward, sprawling across the deck with my knees still trapped in the locker. My face walloped against the starboard bunk, my arm twisted under me, and I heard my Smith & Wesson pistol slide forward and drop with a crash into the saloon. ‘Steady amidships,’ I heard Fernie call, and the deck came level.

‘Get on your feet,’ Fernie said, like something out of a Greyfriars school story. I wasn’t too keen to get on my feet if it meant I was to be knocked down. On the other hand, lying there could earn me a slam on the kisser too.

‘I don’t want to fight you, Fernie,’ I said.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ said Fernie. He didn’t say it like a killer but like a prefect about to administer a thrashing.

‘You are making a mistake, Fernie,’ I said. But it was no use; when a man has fitted into the system as badly as Fernie had done, he has stockpiled spite and sadness, rage and revenge, until violence has built up under the surface like boiling lava.

Augusto had the boat on an even keel; he throttled back slightly. Fernie faced me across the bridge. He advanced slowly, keeping an even balance. His eyes stared into mine, sizing me up and judging my probable actions. We were an arm’s length apart when his hands moved slowly and easily upward. He put his hands higher than his waist and I detected a very slight turn of the shoulders. It told me what I wanted to know. Punching fighters hold themselves in a boxing stance, one hand and one foot slightly advanced. Judo fighters stand flat. Fernie was a left-handed puncher.

A rivulet of sea-water meandered across the deck, caught the light and became a scimitar under Fernie’s feet. I opened my left hand and advanced it in a protective, flinching manner across my chest and towards his rocksteady advanced right fist.

I watched his eyes deciding that I was going to be a pushover. He decided to clip me with a short left jab. My body was wide open. My fingers closed upon his advanced cuff, as my left toe kicked his right ankle under him. Fernie grabbed at my extended left knee to spin me to the ground. It was the correct counter but he was slow, far too slow. Before I had pulled his sleeve more than an inch to the left he’d lost balance. A man off balance thinks of nothing but getting balanced again; aggression disappears. He began to fall. My left hand pulled and continued to pull as I turned to my left. Right hand high. My turn was complete, right armpit clamped upper arm, left hand threatened his ulnar and radius bones. I heard a sharp intake of breath against my ear, and saw Augusto’s face turn towards us, his eyes like Belisha beacons.

Even at that instant Fernie did not allow the pain to influence him. He kicked. The radio set slid across the deck slowly, and gently fell over the side. There was a flash as the cable from the batteries shorted and a thud as the radio swung against the hull. At a slower speed, perhaps the radio would still have been plugged on the end when we hauled the cable in.

He was a character, this Fernie. He fell away and sat on the floor rubbing the arm I had so nearly broken. He said, ‘You know I could just throw you overboard — and no one could ask any questions?’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but there is just the chance that I’ll wring your neck while you’re trying.’

The electric cable had wrapped around the port screw, Augusto said. I heaved Fernie below into the cabin and into a bunk — he was too old for this sort of caper, he was badly shook up. I told Augusto to head back to Albufeira, using only the starboard motor. It would be a slow journey and the wind was backing against the dawn sun. This floating Cadillac was no sort of boat to face bad weather in. I retrieved my pistol, put it away and went across to Tomas.

‘I’ve got a Portuguese passport,’ Tomas said.

‘When you are in Tarrafal[32] you might wish you had some other sort of passport.’

‘I’ve served my time in prison; I don’t have to put up with the British Gestapo around my neck for the rest of my life.’

‘That doesn’t have to be too long,’ I said. ‘If you peddle narcotics across the world you must expect to attract a little attention. It’s captious to complain afterwards.’

‘Save your lies for when you write your report,’ said Tomas. ‘You aren’t interested in narcotics.’

‘No? What am I interested in, then?’

‘You’re interested in the “Weiss List”, the item I nearly tugged out of the ocean a few minutes ago.’

‘That’s exactly right,’ I told him, ‘I am.’

‘It’s lost,’ he said, ‘lost for all time. You can never get it.’

‘But you know what it consisted of?’ Tomas’s face went grey — he was frightened and he didn’t take fright easily.

‘Let me help you remember,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you one name that was on it.’ I named Smith. Tomas said nothing. ‘The man that you and your friend Ivor Butcher decided to blackmail,’ I prompted.

‘You know about Butcher,’ said Tomas. ‘Leave him out of it. He’s just a nice little fellow trying to help me. He’s not to blame.’

‘He’s not, eh?’ I said, but I didn’t disillusion him.

I sat down. I was as limp as a Dali watch.

Fernie tugged at his moustache, paused and then said, ‘I was the only survivor from the U-boat. I thought at first …’

‘Look, Fernie,’ I said, ‘I seldom interrupt people when they’re talking; especially when they are inventing complicated lies, because they are often far more interesting than the truth. However, for you I’ll make an exception; start telling the truth or I’ll sling you over the side.’

‘Very well,’ said Fernie affably, ‘where shall I start?’

‘You can forget all that fairy-story stuff about dead sailors washed up with sovereign dies and digging graves to prove it. Also forget any nonsense about your career in the U-boat. Unless you know what caused it to sink.’

‘No,’ said Fernie, ‘I don’t know that.’

‘Did your friend da Cunha deliberately open the valves before he rowed ashore with the “Weiss List”?’

‘No,’ said Fernie quietly, ‘he would never do anything like that. He is a man of great honour.’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘you all are; you, Kondit and da Cunha. An honourable bunch of thugs. Look, Peterson’ — it was the first time I had used his English name — ‘you’re just trying to kick a step out of a moving staircase. Behind me is another agent, behind him another. I’m a soft touch compared with some of the yahoos that are going to descend on you in any part of the world you go. All they want back in Whitehall is a nice clean file with the word “Closed” written across the front so that they can put it in the cellar. Try to be a bit sensible and I’ll write a little note about what a help you have been. You never know when a little billet doux like that could be useful.’

‘What do you want to know?’ he said.

‘I don’t know what it is that’s missing until I hear it; if there are any bits you don’t want to tell me, miss them out.’

‘Very cunning,’ said Tomas, ‘the gaps tell you more than the story in between.’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’m the Attorney-General travelling incognito with a Japanese tape-recorder under my toupee. Or it could just be that you are a little on the paranoiac side.’

Fernie sipped at the big glass of whisky I had given him.

He said, ‘Do you remember the Spanish Civil War? Do you remember the newsreels? Dead horses, wounded babies.’ He removed a fleck of tobacco from his lip. ‘Frightened, I was so frightened. People like you don’t understand. Do you?’ he said. He wanted a reply.

I said, ‘As long as you don’t say it’s my lack of imagination.’

He went on staring into space and smoking. ‘That was this same Spanish Civil War that H.K. said you were a hero of?’ I said.

Fernie Tomas nodded. For a moment I thought he was going to smile.

‘Yes, I was there. There are times you’re so frightened of something that you have to make it happen sooner. I was just someone who wanted to come to grips with my trauma. Everyone I knew who had volunteered had gone to fight for the government; so I went to fight for Franco just to be different. They posted me to an Italian unit. I was with General Queipo de Llano’s second division at the fall of Malaga. Kondit thought I was defending Malaga. He liked it that way so I never disillusioned him.’

‘You didn’t like it?’ I said.

‘Yes. I used to lie on the beach watching the cruisers Canarias, Almirante Cervera and Baleares come up to bombard Malaga. It was just like an exercise, a crash and a puff of smoke and then after a couple of hours they would clear off down the coast again for dinner. It was pretty. Nice clean boats. Nice impersonal fight. No view of what you are hitting. No one trying to hit you. It was a gentleman’s war. When we got into Malaga … well, you’ve seen a town after bombardment.’

‘Who hasn’t nowadays?’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said Tomas. ‘I remember …’, but he didn’t go on. It was as though he were dragging it out of a crystal ball. ‘I remember,’ he said again, ‘the last time I saw my old lady. I got compassionate leave because our house was bombed. The old man died of his injuries and my mother was living in the kitchen with a tarpaulin rigged across the ceiling. She didn’t want to go to a rest centre because of “all the happy times she’d had there”.’

‘Happy times.’ He shook his head as he remembered. ‘It was a slum, and she’d worked herself half to death there. She kept saying that they’d taken the old man to a hospital in “a proper ambulance, not one of these A.R.P. things”, she said, “it was a proper ambulance”. Well, that’s what Malaga was like; dead, swollen horses and a smell of brick-dust and drains.’

I could see that in some curious way the destruction in Malaga and London had fused into one, and he wouldn’t be able to sort them out. I remembered how, when he was arrested, he had said that it was all the same war. I wondered about that.

‘When I came back I joined the British Fascist Movement. I met Mosley in person. He’s a much misunderstood man, that Mosley, dynamic and honest. All the really Machiavellian supporters of the B.U.F. had seen the war coming for years and they buried themselves deep in the Conservative Party. Half the boys that give you your orders from Whitehall and gave us all those rousing anti-Nazi speeches were kicking themselves rotten that they didn’t have a nice big armament factory in Germany. But we were simple-minded idealists. Later, the war, and more especially the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had changed our minds. I stopped trying to understand it. I went into the Navy as a telegraphist and then got a commission …’

‘Was that difficult for you?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Tomas, ‘anyone who bought a pipe, a pair of pyjamas and walked around with Penguin books about Paul Nash was singled out as officer material.’

‘No, I meant difficult on account of your having been so political.’

‘If they’d kept out the politicals in 1940 there wouldn’t have been enough recruits to man a dinghy. The only English people who knew the slightest thing about fighting a modern war were the people who had been in Spain.’

‘Yes, I suppose you are right,’ I said.

‘I went to Prince Arthur at Brighton and became a naval officer in four months. I loved it. You spend a long time with the same people inside a small ship. You get to know every nut and bolt of the ship and every nut and bolt of the crew. When the boat is sunk it’s worse than being divorced after a happy marriage. You lose your home, your personal gear, your friends are dead, wounded or posted. You have nothing left. After the second time in the drink I wandered around the London pubs for twelve days hoping to see a face I recognized. I decided that I couldn’t go through that again. I volunteered for the submarine service. If you get sunk there you stay down. But before I ever got near a submarine I found myself in Scotland, messing around with frogman gear.’

Tomas asked for a cigarette. After lighting it he said, ‘You don’t want to hear about frogman training?’

‘Just tell me what you think is interesting.’

‘You are a funny sort of bastard.’

‘Touché,’ I said.

‘I had orders to report to the depot. Everything had gone wrong that Thursday; the bank manager was gunning me for a lousy £12 and the MG had plug-trouble on the Great North Road — you remember what motor spares were like during the war — and this fat swine in the garage where I stopped was fiddling some petrol for two blokes with Boston haircuts and a van full of tinned fruit. I hung around fuming, but he told me I should be grateful for one of his precious spark plugs. “I reckon it all goes to you blokes in the services nowadays,” he said, as though we were living on the fat of the land. “Yes,” I said to him, “it must be a tough war back home, listening to Itma and knitting socks,” and then these other two got nasty and after some words he said he didn’t want any money for the plug, so I left. I can remember every minute.

‘It was from that time that I began to feel afraid of the deep water. I was quite O.K. diving in daylight or near the surface, but I couldn’t bear working with the thought that under me there was just darker and darker depths of water until you were just swallowed up.’

Fernie Tomas shouted to Augusto to make sure he didn’t forget the engine temperature, and Augusto said he wouldn’t.

‘You don’t know what it’s like on a midget,’ said Tomas. It was a plain statement of fact. I didn’t. ‘Imagine that you’ve crossed the North Sea inside the bonnet of a motorcar, jammed against the engine. You dress yourself in underwater gear. Much more incredible and inefficient than modern equipment. You dress in a space much smaller than a telephone booth, and then clamber through the flooding chamber, which has a nasty habit of going wrong and leaving you jammed in a tight-fitting coffin. But you may be lucky; the hatch cover isn’t jammed or fouled so you can crawl out into the ocean. You walk along the top of the midget submarine — it’s not much wider than a plank and getting narrower and narrower as you move forward. The pointed bow upon which you are finally balancing is bumping with great metallic crashes against a vast anti-submarine net which stretches as far as you can see in every direction. The rungs of the net are nearly as big as a steering wheel and you hold on to one to steady yourself as you wield the cutting tool. All the time the skipper keeps the motor running so that the bow will continue to nudge the net, but the deck grinds and grates and perhaps a flow of fresh water throws the buoyancy out, or rain makes it even darker than before. Your metal boots slip off the tightrope you are on.’

Tomas rubbed his arm and shivered. ‘I had a recurring nightmare in which I slipped off the deck and fell into the bottom of the sea.’ He shivered again. ‘So of course it happened. I grabbed the net as the submarine slid to one side. The motor had failed and the current swept it back out of control. I was alone in the sea hanging on to the net.’

Tomas rubbed his forehead and took a stiff drink. I poured him another. He said nothing until I said, ‘What did you do?’

‘I climbed up the net rung by rung.’ Tomas’s white hands clasped the blanket. ‘I held on to the top of the net until a German boat came along in the morning to check it. They told me afterwards that they had to prise my fingers away from the metal to get me into the boat. I was the only survivor of the force that attacked. They gave me food and I slept the clock round in the local navy barracks. I could only speak schoolboy German, but it was enough to hold a conversation. On the second day I had dinner in the German officers’ mess, and I supposed I’d had a few extra drinks to celebrate being alive. In the normal way I would have been sent to a P.O.W. camp and there the matter would have ended, except for something one of the officers said at dinner that night.

‘Two bodies had floated up under the port screws of the big cruiser. They had tried to move them but there was no diving unit within a hundred miles. He said there was no option but to run the screws. He hoped I’d understand. It wasn’t a thing a sailor liked to do, he said.’

Tomas sniffed and swirled his whisky around in his glass. ‘I said that if they would give me my equipment back and recharge the oxygen cylinder I’d have them up in a jiffy. Everyone in the mess said what a sense of comradeship that showed — that I would do that to retrieve my friends’ bodies for a ceremonial burial, which the German Navy would be honoured to give them.’

Tomas looked up at me; I hadn’t smiled.

‘It’s easy to be cynical now and see it as a put-up job, but at that time the propaganda pundits had got us all acting like the cast of a British film. You know what I mean?’

‘Don’t I just,’ I said.

‘Anyway, they had a couple of Kriegsmarine officers accompany me and they said could they use the apparatus. I wasn’t keen about that. They didn’t press it. They were professionals, just as you’re a professional. They knew what sort of process getting information really is.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘collecting information is like making cream cheese from sour milk. If you squeeze the muslin bag to force it — it’s ruined.’

‘Yes, that’s the way it went; they collected their information drip by drip, and all the while I was living in their officers’ quarters and had a servant and good food and they were telling me not to hurry and perhaps I would like to be sure that there were no other bodies near by. After they’d had a big funeral with lots of stuff about fellow-sailors challenging the mighty ocean deep and all that, I was sent down to Cuxhaven to a P.O.W. unit. The food was ghastly and I was treated like a convict. One night, when I was feeling as low as it’s possible to get, one of the German officers that I’d stayed with in Norway visited me, together with a man named Loveless.’

‘Graham Loveless?’ I asked. It was Smith’s nephew.

‘Yes,’ said Tomas. ‘I told them that I had been a member of the British Union of Fascists. They said that if I joined the Legion of Saint George (what was later called the Britische Freikorps) they could arrange that I lived with German naval officers. They said that I would only be called upon to use the underwater equipment to save life or property or against our mutual enemy — the sea.’

Tomas looked at me and shrugged.

‘And you fell for it?’ I said.

‘I fell for it,’ said Tomas.

‘Then you met Giorgio Olivettini?’

Tomas didn’t fall into the trap; he walked into it slowly and deliberately. He looked at me and said, ‘Yes, I saw him soon after that. He told you?’

I tried a simple lie. ‘I guessed,’ I said, ‘when I saw you on the U-boat the night Giorgio died.’

‘That was you, was it?’ said Tomas. ‘Yes, I sometimes did a night swim for pleasure.’

I knew he was lying. He had obviously been out doing his heroin-delivery service that night, but I said nothing.

I poured a drink for both of us; the whisky helped Tomas to relax. He finally said, ‘It was a Moray eel.’

I offered him some ice from the refrigerator. ‘It was a Moray,’ he said again. I put a cube into his glass and two cubes into my own. ‘It was a Moray,’ Tomas screamed as loud as he could scream, ‘a Moray, do you hear?’

‘O.K.,’ I said.

‘They tear you to pieces. Huge Moray eels as big as pigs, they have teeth like razors. They terrify me. There are thousands along this coast, many of them eight feet long. They live in the rocks as a rule, but these were living in the cracked pressure hull.’

I remembered the gashes across Giorgio’s body. Perhaps it was true. Tomas began to speak quickly. ‘He was a lieutenant when I first met him. The Wehrmacht had a pretty low opinion of the Italian armed forces, but these frogmen were different. Everyone hung on their every word. It was funny really. Giorgio was the only person that understood what a farce the whole bloody war was. We both fought on both sides. He had a German medal and an American medal.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.

‘Yes, I saw him presented with a German Eagle Order of Merit with star.’

He picked up his drink and sipped at it. ‘He was a fabulous underwater man.’ He drank some more. ‘Kill him, I couldn’t have killed him. You can’t imagine a trapeze man pushing another trapeze man off the wire, could you? Well, it’s like that.’

‘Tell me about the period immediately before V.E. Day,’ I asked him.

‘You know my real name, so you have read the court martial?’ asked Tomas.

‘It doesn’t give a clear idea,’ I said.

‘Loveless was a big man with the Germans,’ Tomas said. ‘People said that when the Germans won the war they’d make Loveless the Prime Minister of England. When Loveless said to me that it was all up, I knew it was all up. It was his idea to go to Hanover. I wanted to go farther south to the sector where the Americans were advancing, but Loveless said if we went to Hanover we wouldn’t have to worry any more, so I went. There was a Wehrmacht Archive Unit in Hanover and Loveless had got permission to examine certain of the documents.

‘He went to the Archives and photographed the “Weiss List”.’ I nodded, hoping that Tomas would explain further.

‘It was about the size and shape of a paper-back novel. It had thick grey card covers. Inside were the names of British Nationals and their addresses. They were in alphabetical order. Between each section there were plain pages with pink ruled lines for additions. Each name was that of a person who would actively assist the Germans when they invaded Britain.’

I said, ‘Did Loveless think that these people would be best to negotiate a German surrender through?’

‘Perhaps you are not following the story,’ said Tomas. ‘Loveless didn’t give a damn about the Germans and the sort of surrender that they were likely to get.’

Outside it was blowing a Force 5 and in the warm, well-lit cabin it was easy to think that we were back again in that world of 1945.

Tomas poured himself another drink and shouted to Augusto to cut the engine revs, and told me that we were just wasting fuel. We agreed that Augusto was a bright boy and that the Portuguese were natural sailors, and Tomas took a generous throatful of H.K.’s firewater and continued.

‘Loveless photographed the “Weiss List” (it was called that as an antonym for black list) and buried the prints in a garden in a badly bombed part of Hanover. We were held in a German prison for some time. The lights were on all the time, day and night, everything was white, tiles shining like false teeth and slamming doors that would echo like a thunderclap and the constant jangle of bunches of keys that the warders carried. Now and then the spyhole in the cell would flip open and the psychiatrist or the quack would be spying on you and you knew he was writing everything down and attributing reasons. They thought everyone was nuts except themselves. Apart from the odd eyeball the prisoners seldom saw a sign of any other human life. But now and again I would hear Loveless’s voice asking the guard some foolish question in order to let me know that he was still there. I finally got a chance for a short talk with Loveless when the R.N. sent two C.P.O.s to escort us back to the U.K. He was a Commander R.N.; they were very impressed and got us cabins on the Harwich ferry. Loveless told me that he intended to go into the witness box and reel off the name of every Englishman on the “Weiss List”.’

‘That must have made him popular,’ I said.

‘They didn’t want that at any price. They told him that if he would quietly plead guilty to the five charges they would do a deal with him.’

‘A deal?’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said Tomas. ‘He was told that if he pleaded guilty he would be sentenced to death but that it wouldn’t be carried out. They would declare him mentally sick.’

‘Why did he believe that?’

‘That’s what I asked him,’ said Tomas. ‘I make it a point of honour never to trust anyone.’ If he intended it as a joke he gave no sign; I nodded. ‘After sentence,’ Tomas went on, ‘the President of the court martial signs the sentence of death, seals it and it’s conveyed to the prisoner. But before sentence can be carried out the confirming officer examines the proceeds of the trial and ensures that no irregularities or illegalities have occurred. As you know a court martial isn’t like a civil trial. Most of the people present have never had legal training or even seen a trial before. It’s a shambles.’

‘Luckily I’m in no position to contradict your first-hand experience,’ I said, ‘but continue about this deal.’

Tomas said, ‘One of the things the confirming officer checks is the mental health of the prisoner. Under Section Four of the Lunacy Act of 1890, a J.P. and two medical certificates are all a confirming officer requires to remove the record of the conviction and send the prisoner to a civil mental hospital. Admiralty Instructions are that after one month the Admiralty shall discharge him from the service.’

‘And Loveless believed that this would happen to him if he pleaded guilty?’

‘He did; you see, someone brought his daily medical reports and let him burn them. He was told that they would post-date others to show a symptom of mental trouble.’

‘You didn’t ask for the same treatment?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Tomas, ‘the officer preparing my summary of evidence before the trial mentioned the “Weiss List”, but I pretended that I didn’t know what he was talking about.’

‘Was Loveless tried before you?’ I asked.

‘Yes, he pleaded guilty, was sentenced to death and came down to his cell. They weren’t ready to start my hearing, but next day they began. Then that night, the night of the first day of my trial, it happened.’

‘What happened?’ I asked.

Tomas wiped his hands on a handkerchief with a dozen darns in it, sipped his drink and eased his shoulders back on the pillow as though about to doze off. I went closer and leaned across him.

‘What happened?’ I said again. Tomas had his eyes closed, he winced from the pain either of arm or memory.

He said very quietly, ‘I heard Loveless screaming, he was shouting, “help me Bernie, help me,” and then there were the footsteps and jangle of a guard running and I heard a low voice that I think was the chaplain, I couldn’t hear what he said. Then I heard Graham’s voice again. It was high-pitched and more distinct than the others. “They’re going to hang me, Bernie,” he shouted, then he shouted “help me” again. There was a jangle of keys and a door clanged and it was all quiet.’

‘Did you shout to him?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Tomas. ‘I’ve thought about it, perhaps every day of my life since. But what could I say — “I told you so”, or “hold on I’m coming”, or “it’s all for the best” — what could I have shouted at him?’

‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘there wasn’t much you could say, they hanged him anyway.’

Somehow I knew it was all true.