The Fifth Man Read online

  The Fifth Man

  Manning Coles

  1946

  An Interesting Interview

  Bagshott went out, and Hambledon said, “Do sit down. I understand that you had some tale you wished to unfold. Who are you, for a start?”

  “Really,” said the man coolly, “I’ve been so many different people lately that I must stop and think. What’s more, I doubt if any of my various aliases would convey much to you. In the first place, I’m the man who sent you a note by an escaping R.A.F. officer about four men who were being landed from a German submarine on England’s shores with a view to their acting for German Intelligence. I hope the note reached you.”

  “I had a feeling,” said Hambledon, “that this interview was going to be interesting; now I’m sure of it ...”

  Chapter I. Who Comes?

  HE CAME WAVERING down the lane in the gathering darkness; to the watchers in the shadow of the holly hedge he seemed to be not without his troubles, for his front light was flickering off and on and every time it failed him he wobbled violently.

  “Not very expert, apparently,” said one of the watchers in a quiet voice. “Better stop him, Widgers.”

  Constable Widgers stepped into the road and flashed his torch as a signal, adding, “Stop, please, sir.” This sudden intervention was too much for the cyclist, who practically fell off, only remaining on his feet by an effort.

  “You startled me,” he said in an amused voice. “I nearly came a frightful crash and lost the most valuable part of my shopping. Who are you?”

  “P. C. Widgers of Chiddon,” said the constable. “May I see your identity card, please?”

  The constable’s torch illuminated a grossly fat man dressed in shabby flannel trousers with elastic bands round the ankles in place of unobtainable trouser clips, a high-necked sweater with a cardigan over it and an old tweed jacket over that. He wore no hat; his bald head, surrounded by a coronet of greyish curls, looked not so much as though the hair were missing as that the accretion of tissue had pushed its way through its thatch. He had a fat good-tempered face, creased in the lines of frequent laughter, and a soft fruity voice with a chuckle in it. He propped his bicycle carefully against one substantial thigh and produced his identity card from his coat pocket.

  “There you are, constable,” he said, and handed it over. The front wheel of his cycle swung round; he caught at the handle bars, and his lamp promptly went out.

  “Confound the thing,” he said. “It’s been doing that ever since I had to light up, but I don’t think it need perform in front of the police. Uncalled for. It goes on again if you hit it,” he added, giving the lamp a slap which had the effect desired. “The trouble is that I am by no means an expert rider, as you may have noticed, and every time I lean over the handle bars to give it a clout it makes me wobble.” He broke into a jolly bubbling laugh, so infectious that his hearers smiled with him, and the inspector came forward from the shadows to join his constable.

  “Bad contact somewhere, sir,” he said. “They ought to have fixed it up for you, whoever put your battery in.”

  “Not guilty,” said the fat man. “This is my wife’s cycle, really. She spins about everywhere like a bird on the wing; I don’t. I remind myself more of a penguin,” and again he bubbled with laughter.

  The inspector turned a torch upon his wrist watch and appeared to be satisfied with what he saw, for he offered to try to adjust the lamp. “I suppose you’re not very used to it yet, sir,” he said, pulling off the top.

  “I am not,” said the cyclist emphatically, “and to tell you the truth I don’t want to be, either, but I’m afraid I shall have to; Heaven reward Hitler with gumboils. When we laid up the car for the duration my wife said we’d better buy a lady’s cycle, as then we could both ride it—alternately, not both at once.” He chuckled. “All in order, constable?”

  “Yes, thank you, sir. Not been in these parts long, have you?”

  “Only a few weeks. We had a furnished house in London—ours was smashed up in ’41—and the owner wanted it back. So, as my wife was a bit overdone with war work and housekeeping and I can work anywhere, I took that cottage at Coveham, next the smithy. I expect you know it.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Like a fool, I missed the Bridport bus this afternoon and had to ride in, and I’ve a horrid feeling I’ve got off the road. This road will take me to Coveham, won’t it, if I can find a left-hand turn somewhere?”

  The inspector laughed. “You’re well off your road, sir. This one doesn’t go anywhere except down to the sea. You’d best go back to the crossroads you passed and turn right. That’ll take you home.”

  “What, about two miles back? I turned right there; I ought to have gone straight on.”

  “That’s right, sir. Do you mind if I just look in your basket?” There was a cycle basket on the rear carrier.

  The fat man laughed again. “By all means. I have no guilty secrets—at least, not in there.” There was a shopping list, and the contents of the basket tallied with a few omissions. “No suet obtainable,” explained the cyclist. “No matches, no mousetraps, no bath salts. I did get half a bottle of whisky, though—shan’t tell you where—and if you drop it I shall complain to the Home Secretary.”

  “I wouldn’t do anything so wicked,” said the inspector. “Well, I don’t think we need detain you any longer, sir. Your lamp’s all right now, look. You know your way, don’t you?”

  The cyclist thanked him gratefully, wished them a cheerful good night, and turned the cycle round. “I’ve never ridden in the dark before,” he added. “Pray for me, won’t you?” He hopped violently upon one foot some dozen tunes in the road before he managed to mount and ride unsteadily away, avoiding a brick with a yelp of comic alarm and another peal of laughter.

  “Merry old cuss, isn’t ’e?” said the constable.

  “Seems so,” agreed the inspector. “Well, it’s getting dark now, nearly five o’clock. Hope this fellow won’t be too long; standing in one spot in January isn’t my idea of a piece of cake. Better not smoke, either. Pity, but it can’t be helped.”

  The police retired to the shadow of the hollies again, and time passed in silence till at last the constable moved suddenly and said, “Listen!” in a low voice. He was right; there were footsteps coming up the lane from the sea, uneven footsteps, which sometimes hurried and sometimes ceased. The inspector waited till the newcomer was almost upon them and then stepped out smartly, switching on his torch and saying, “Stop, please,” in a peremptory voice. The beam showed a young man in a raincoat, as thin and eager as the cyclist had been fat and genial.

  “Who are you?” babbled the young man, who was evidently in a state of some agitation. “Are you—”

  “Police,” said the inspector.

  “Thank God,” said the newcomer, and clutched at them. “Let’s go—let’s get away from here. Take me to British Intelligence. I’ve got something frightfully important to tell them—what’s that noise?”

  “What noise?”

  “Behind the hedge,” said the young man, with the whites of his eyes showing in the torchlight.

  “Only a rat in the ditch; these ditches are full of ’em. You come along with us; you’ll be all right.”

  Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon looked across his desk at the man seated uneasily on the edge of a chair. He was a thin young man with untidy dark hair and an anxious expression; his eyes were fixed on Hambledon, and he had the air of one who is overcharged with urgent explanations. He waited, with parted lips, to be allowed to begin, and twisted his handkerchief about with his fingers. “Nerves or conscience?” said Hambledon to himself, and opened the interrogation with crisp authority.

  “Your name?”

  “Abbott
. Harold William Abbott.”

  “Home address?”

  The man gave a number in a street in Nottingham.

  “And before the war you were a schoolmaster, I think?”

  “Yes sir. I was modern languages master at St. Raphael’s School, Wigby, near Leicester.”

  “So you speak German?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Were you ever in Germany before the war?”

  “Er—no sir.”

  “Why did you hesitate?”

  “Because I had an invitation to go to Bergisch Gladbach, near Cologne, in the summer holidays of 1939.”

  “And you didn’t go?”

  “No sir. It was so obvious that war was imminent, I didn’t want to go and be caught there and interned. Besides, I was in the Territorials and—”

  “Who invited you?”

  “A German boy who came here two years running with one of those Youth Movement visits to this country which used to be organized before the war. Parties of boys from Germany used to come here in exchange, as it were, for parties of English boys visiting Germany.”

  “I remember,” said Hambledon. “How did you come to meet him?”

  “I used to help to entertain the German boys. They were sometimes accommodated in schools—St. Raphael’s had them twice—and sometimes we camped out. It was a great help, my speaking German, and I was used to managing boys.”

  “This boy’s name?”

  “Anton Petsch. He was the son of a chemist in Bergisch Gladbach. He was rather a nice boy and friendlier than some of them.”

  “Did you see him again while you were in Germany?”

  “No sir. No doubt he was in the Army. He—”

  “Or any of the other boys you had met here?”

  “No sir.”

  “Did you write to him?”

  “No sir.”

  “Or make any attempt to get in touch with him or his family?”

  “No sir. None.”

  “Oh. When the war broke out you were called up, of course.”

  “Yes sir. Actually, I was—”

  “Regiment?”

  “First Bucks, sir.”

  “In due course you went to France and were subsequently taken prisoner—when and where?”

  “At Hazebrouck in May 1940.”

  “And you remained in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany till—“”

  “October seventeenth, 1943. Three years and five months.”

  “Now tell me exactly,” said Hambledon, his voice hardening, “how you came to be landed near Coveham on the coast of Dorset in a rubber boat from a German submarine.”

  Abbott sat a little farther back on his chair, rubbed his hands together, and began:

  “It’s pretty awful, sir, being a prisoner. It’s the monotony. Especially to a man like me, always used to a lot of mental stimulus. You take up some hobby or study some subject with books from the Red Cross, but nothing seems worth while, if you know what I mean. It seems as though life has always been like that and always will be like that forever and ever. Every day the same duties, the same hours, the same food, the same faces, the same rules and restrictions, the same things to look at, never anything different unless they bring in some more prisoners—it’s killing. Especially, as I said just now, to a man like me—”

  “Get on with the story,” said Hambledon irritably.

  “It was on October eighth last year that I was called into the prison governor’s office and interviewed by a man I’d never seen before—”

  “Name?” snapped Hambledon.

  “I don’t know, sir. They didn’t say and I didn’t ask. He started by asking me if I was the same Harold Abbott who was formerly a master at St. Raphael’s and had had to do with the visits to England of the Jugenbund—that means the German Youth movement—”

  “I know a little German myself,” said Hambledon coldly. “Continue.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Abbott “I could not know that. When I said I was the same, this man became very friendly in manner. He said that that proved I was not so dominated by an ignorant and foolish prejudice against Germany as most Englishmen were—I am quoting his words. I said that that was because I didn’t know so much about Germany in those days,” said Abbott proudly, and looked at Hambledon for approval.

  “Go on.”

  “He talked a lot about how Germany was certainly winning the war and about how they had no intention of destroying English life and culture. They only wanted the war over without further unnecessary destruction and loss of life, and the sooner England gave up the easier the terms would be. England, he said, would still have a great part to play in the future history of the world under the guidance and direction of a victorious Germany. Whereas, if we persisted, they would be compelled to destroy utterly all our cities and crush this senseless defiance with an iron and irrevocable will to victory,” said Abbott with a sneer. “He said I had seen for myself the excellence of their methods of training youth. He talked a lot more in the same strain, and all the time I wondered what was coining. Eventually he said that I must, as an intelligent man, see that whoever assisted in the smallest degree in bringing about an early termination to a disastrous conflict would not only deserve well of Germany but would be serving England in the truest and highest sense.”

  “You have a singularly good memory,” said Hambledon without enthusiasm.

  “I always had,” said Abbott frankly. “When I was a boy—”

  “Get on with the story.”

  “Eventually he came to the point. Would I go to England and do some simple and interesting work for German Intelligence? Just the compilation of a few facts such as I, an Englishman, would find it easy to—”

  “What did you say?”

  “I refused, of course.”

  “And then?”

  “He would not take my refusal as final,” said Abbott. “He said I was to think it over and he would see me again in two days’ time. In the meantime I had better not tell my fellow prisoners the subject of our conversation. He suggested that I should tell them that I had been cross-examined about the city of Nottingham—industries, sources of power, and so on—”

  “All of which they could have got from a sixpenny guidebook before the war,” commented Hambledon. “Was that the end of the interview?”

  “Yes. Except that he hinted that if I didn’t agree I might find life a lot less pleasant than it had been hitherto. I laughed at that,” said Abbott. “Life in a prison camp pleasant! He said I should not find it a laughing matter, and I was shown out.”

  “Were you the only prisoner in that camp to be interviewed at that time?”

  “So far as I know, yes, but there might have been others interviewed without my knowing it.”

  “But surely an extraordinary interview like this would be the subject of discussion all over the camp—among the prisoners, I mean.”

  “If they talked about it,” said Abbott unwillingly.

  “Do I gather that you didn’t?”

  “No, I—you see, an idea struck me—”

  “Did you tell the others that you’d been sitting there for—how long, an hour and a half?—discussing the public services of Nottingham?”

  “Yes, I hadn’t time to think up—”

  “Think up a better lie. I see. Did your fellow prisoners believe you, d’you think?”

  Abbott wriggled uneasily. “They—I thought they were not quite so friendly—”

  “I see. Now, about this bright idea of yours.”

  “I thought if I agreed, it was a chance of getting home to England. That was all I cared about. Needless to say, I never intended to do a stroke of work for Germany. I proved that when I gave myself up as soon as I landed.”

  “You gave yourself up, certainly,” agreed Hambledon. “What happened next? In the prison camp, I mean.”

  “The same man came back two days later, as he said he would.”

  “Give me a detailed description of him.”


  Abbott paused for thought. “He was a biggish man, about five foot ten, I suppose. Grey hair, going bald on the top. Broad shoulders, but thin in the body. Blue eyes, sunburnt face. Something the matter with one of his ears—yes, I remember now. The top of his right ear was missing—a war wound, I suppose. He wore gold-rimmed glasses. Long thin nose, artificial teeth, clean-shaven—”

  “That’ll do. Now go on with the story.”

  “He asked me if I’d made up my mind. I said yes. He asked which way, and I said I’d been thinking over his arguments and come to the conclusion that he was right. ‘Let’s stop this rotten war,’ I said, ‘and we can sort things out afterwards.’ He said I had made a wise decision. He told me to wait there and left the room. Ten minutes later he came back and told me to follow him. We went out to a car and drove away then and there.”

  “Any of the other prisoners see you go?”

  “No sir. We went out of the governor’s front door, as it were. We drove off and he talked. He was quite nice most of the time, told me I was going to a sort of school near Berlin for training, that I wasn’t to be afraid because everybody would help me. I would be sent to England before long and met there by some more people who would show me what to do and all that. It would all be quite easy. Only, just at the end of the run, he told me what would happen to me if I let them down.” Abbott’s face turned grey, and he shivered. “It was simply beastly; it made me feel sick. And now I have let them down. You don’t think there’s any chance of their getting at me, do you? Can’t I change my name and go back in a different regiment, or into the Navy instead?”

  “You’re going into an internment camp for the present till I make up my mind about you. You’ll be quite safe there. Go on.”

  “Internment camp? Why, I—”

  “I said, go on.”

  “The car stopped at a railway station and I was told to get out. Two men came forward and took me away. He stayed in the car; I didn’t see him again. These two men and I got in a train and went to Berlin, and from there in another train to a place about half an hour’s journey. I couldn’t see its name; it was dark when we got there. Then we drove in a car for another quarter of an hour or so and came to a big country house. It was a nice place, had statues on the terraces. It was called Liesensee.” Abbott laughed self-consciously. “I said it was a good name for a place where people were taught to tell lies.”