The Interrogator Read Online Free PDF Page B

judgement? Yes, it needs to be investigated but not by Lieutenant Lindsay. Interrogators are under strict orders not to question prisoners about their codes in case they give away too much of what we know already. The head of Section 11, Colonel Checkland, will be asked to send all that he has on this to Code Security here at the Admiralty. Of course, it’s a possibility. They’re hammering away at our codes but . . .’ Winn held Mary’s gaze for a moment, then said with careful emphasis, ‘but we’ll know if one of them has been broken soon enough, won’t we, and from a rather more reliable source than Lindsay’s prisoner?’
    Mary nodded. Special intelligence. It was the secret key to their work in the Citadel, or promised to be. Only a small circle in Naval Intelligence – ‘the indoctrinated’ – knew of the source. Lindsay was outside the circle.
    ‘Is there anything else?’ Winn glanced down to the papers on his desk as if to indicate that he hoped there was not.
    ‘Just that I’ve asked Lieutenant Lindsay to tell me a little more about the U-boat prisoners – morale, education, beliefs, that sort of thing. Is that all right?’
    ‘Fleming tells me there’s no better person.’ There was a cautious note in his voice that surprised Mary.
    ‘That’s his job isn’t it?’
    Winn lifted his glasses very deliberately from the desk and slipped them back on. He stared at her intently, then he said: ‘Yes, it is his job. But be very careful what you say to him about ours. You see, he’s half German.’
    The clock at the far end of Room 41 had stopped – one of the plotters was trying to coax it back to life – but Mary knew that it was at least ten. The cigarette smoke of the day hung eerily thick beneath the droplamps, softening the hard edges of the room. The plotters floated through it as if in a dream, distant and opaque. Mary’s eyes were stinging with fatigue. She reached beneath the papers on her desk for her watch. Yes, it was a quarter past ten. There was just one thing more she wanted to do.
    The duty officer, Lieutenant Geoff Childs, a dry but cheery soul,a peacetime geographer, was standing at the plot table: ‘On your way?’
    ‘Almost. Just a little housekeeping.’
    She picked up her bag and walked down the room to one of the large grey filing cabinets that stood against the wall just beyond the plot.
    Pulling open the top drawer, she began to flick through the tightly packed files of anti-submarine warfare bulletins. It was in the October report – homebound fast convoy attacked first on 15 September 1940 – thirty-six ships in nine columns with four Royal Navy escorts – a depressingly thick bundle listing the hulls and the cargoes lost; oil, grain, lead and lumber. A very brief paper had been attached to the main narrative:
     
Subject: Loss of HMS
Culloden:
At about 2210/16 a torpedo struck the ship on the starboard side, probably in No. 1 Boiler Room. At once the ship began to list and then broke in two. This took place within a minute of the explosion. The wreck of the stern wallowed on an even keel until 1145/16, when the order was given to abandon ship. HMS Rosemary was on hand to rescue twelve of the crew
.
     
    It was signed by the ‘senior surviving officer’: Lieutenant Douglas Lindsay. Mary checked all the September and October reports but there was nothing more on the loss of the ship. It was puzzling. Everything was written up and circulated in the Navy, a small forest consumed every day. But two hundred men and a ship had been sunk and there were just five lines in the file. Why? She closed the drawer of the cabinet with a resounding thump.
    Mary stepped out into a world of unexpected noise and light. A heavy rescue squad in blue boiler suits was marshalling at the entrance to the Admiralty and she could hear the clatter and whine of a fire engine in the Mall. The all-clear had just sounded and people were beginning to trickle from the surface shelters in Trafalgar