The Fifth Man Read online

  “Continue to disclose the undecorated truth,” urged Hambledon.

  Chapter II. In Order of Appearance

  ABBOTT gave a detailed description of his life in one of Germany’s spy schools. “Being an Englishman, there were a lot of things I knew already that the Germans had to learn, but there was a lot to mug up all the same. Radio transmission, secret writing, how to set about collecting information, what to look for, the sort of things they wanted to know, and all that. Just like being at school again. It wasn’t too bad, really. There was plenty to occupy your mind, and physical drill in the mornings. No games, though, and you were barked at from morning to night. Very strict timetable, mustn’t be a minute late, ever. But after the prisoner-of-war camp it was wonderful.”

  “Any other British subjects there?”

  “Four others, sir.”

  “Their names?”

  “Nicholls, Little, Tanner, and Brampton.”

  “Tell me all you know about them.”

  “I don’t know much, really. We weren’t allowed to be together, and if they saw us talking they came and separated us. I did gather that we’d all had the same idea: it was just a scheme to get home again. Nicholls was some sort of an engineer, and Little was something to do with a newspaper—editor, he said. I never heard what Tanner was. Brampton wouldn’t talk about himself much, but he was a major, so he must have been in the Army before the war. He didn’t try to chum up with us at all.”

  “Was Major Brampton the only officer?”

  “No, Tanner and Little were lieutenants. I was a sergeant and Nicholls a private.”

  “How long were you at this school?”

  “Three months, sir; twelve weeks, to be exact. October seventeenth till January first. At the end of the course we had exams, which we all passed, and started on our travels next day, Sunday, January second—last Sunday week, that was. Seems longer ago than that.”

  “All five together?”

  “We started all together, but Major Brampton disappeared in Berlin.”

  “What d’you mean? That he was taken away by himself?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. I think he gave the guards the slip and went off on his own. They didn’t tell us anything, but I heard them talking about it. They were in rather a flap; they said they’d get into trouble but no doubt he’d soon be caught. So, no doubt, he was, sir; what could one man do all alone in Berlin?”

  “The rest of you went on, I suppose?”

  “Yes, by train. That’s when we got our first chance to talk, though even then the guards didn’t like it much.”

  “Where did they take you?”

  “To Brussels, first. I mean, that was the first place where we got out of the train. We were there for four days; I suppose they were arranging for us to be taken across. We stayed in quite a decent hotel; we had fresh guards there. I imagine the first lot went back to Berlin. We were given instructions about what to do when we landed. I was just to paddle ashore, deflate the dinghy, bury it in the sand, and wait. Someone would come and say, ‘How far have you come?’ and I was to answer, ‘Forty-seven miles as the crow flies.’ Then he would say, ‘But it’s sixty-three miles by road,’ and then we should each know we’d met the right man.”

  “Were the other three given the same password?”

  “Yes sir, except that there were only two others by then. Tanner was killed the night before they gave us our instructions.”

  “Do you know anything about Tanner’s death?”

  “Oh yes, I was there at the time. It was like this. We’d been kept pretty close in the hotel, just taken out for potty little walks and to see round one or two museums. I enjoyed the museums; the others didn’t. Then one evening the guards came and said as it was our last night on the soil of the Continent for the present, anyway, they’d give us a treat and take us out to dinner at a restaurant. It was quite an exciting idea—at least I found it so; I hadn’t had a meal in a restaurant for over three years. So we went to quite a nice place, not very big, and sat at a table in a corner, all six of us. The guards were quite friendly and the food was good. We were enjoying ourselves, when suddenly all the lights went out and somebody fired an automatic at us—at least it sounded like an automatic. I went down flat and so did Little; the guards shouted and one or two people screamed. Next minute the lights went on again, and there was Tanner dead in his chair, shot through the head, and one of the guards was wounded. Nicholls hadn’t moved, but they’d missed him; Little and I and the other guard weren’t hurt either, though they’d fired seven shots at us and smashed the mirror behind us.”

  “It is a little difficult to aim accurately in the dark,” said Hambledon.

  “They’d have done better with a tommy gun,” said Abbott.

  “So simple,” said Hambledon sarcastically, “taking a tommy gun into a restaurant without anyone noticing it. Go on.”

  “There was an awful row,” said Abbott. “Germans rushed about arresting people and swearing, and our wounded guard was bleeding like a pig all over everything till a first-aid chap came up and looked after him. We were hustled into a car, driven back to our hotel, and locked in our rooms. The guards said the men who shot at us were pigs of Belgians in the pay of the Allies, and they—the Germans—would make them regret it. Nicholls said, ‘Suppose you don’t catch them?’ And the guard said it didn’t matter; they could always shoot some hostages. Pretty beastly. I hope the men weren’t caught, though it was hard luck on Tanner, wasn’t it, when all he wanted was to get home? He’d got a wife and child in Liverpool, he told me.”

  Abbott described how the three survivors—himself, Nicholls, and Little—were taken to Ostend and put on board a submarine, which took them down-channel to the Dorset coast. The submarine surfaced after dark, and he was taken up the conning tower, pushed into a rubber dinghy, and told to paddle straight ahead. He could see the shore dimly about a mile away, and the sea was flat calm. Then the submarine started her engines again and moved off, taking Nicholls and Little with her. He understood they were going to be put ashore somewhere else.

  “So I paddled as fast as I could, jumped ashore, leaving the dinghy floating, and ran for it. I wanted to get away before the man came whom I was supposed to wait for. I got off the beach without seeing anybody and ran like blazes; I was happy. Back to England, home, and beauty, as they say; it seemed too good to be true. I ran into a tree in the dark, and you may think I’m a fool, but I put my arms round it and kissed it; it was an English tree, you see. I expect I was a bit hysterical; I’ve always been rather highly strung. Then the police stopped me, and was I glad to see them, or was I?” Abbott laughed and rubbed his hands together. “I expect you know the rest, don’t you?”

  Hambledon asked a few more questions and then touched a bell on his desk. A police officer entered the room.

  “I’ve done with this man for the present,” said Hambledon. ‘‘You can take him away. I shall probably want to talk to him again in a few days’ time.”

  “Where am I going?” asked Abbott.

  “Back to Brixton.”

  “Brixton Jail? But why? I haven’t done anything.”

  “Cheer up,” said Hambledon. “Remember, it’s an English jail.”

  Hambledon added a few comments to the notes he had taken during his interview with Abbott and then sent for Nicholls. This man was a good deal older than the schoolmaster; he gave his age as thirty-five. He was a short, stocky man with a faint reminiscence of a Scots accent, and he gave an address in London. He answered Hambledon’s questions readily but briefly, without any trace of Abbott’s tendency to explain too much.

  His name was Edward Nicholls and he had been trained as an engineer; he gave the name of the company. This firm had done a certain amount of business with a German engineering company which made dynamo components. Nicholls said that as he could see that this business was likely to increase he thought it worth his while to learn German. He went to a night school for the purpose.

 
“So you can speak German,” said Hambledon.

  “Not too well. I can read it and write it without difficulty, but I never had much practice in speaking it.”

  “Not even when you became a prisoner?”

  “No. I could understand what the guards said, but I didn’t want to talk to them.”

  Nicholls said he thought there might be a chance of being sent to Germany to represent his firm; that was why he took up German. It was about 1928 when he started to learn, and early in 1930 he told the firm that he knew enough German to get along in it, “particularly engineering technical terms.”

  “I see,” said Hambledon. “Did they give you a chance to show what you could do?”

  “More or less. I had a test, but the junior partner who talked to me said my accent was bad. Still, they put me in that branch of the office and I did some of the correspondence. Then one of the bosses went to Germany on business and took me with him. I was told to listen to how people talked and try to improve myself.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Stuttgart. We had a week there.”

  “Did you go anywhere else in Germany?”

  “No. We went home at the end of the week.”

  “Not very long to practise pronunciation.”

  “No.”

  “Did you like the Germans?”

  “Oh, they were all right. They were hot engineers, I’ll say that. Some of their machinery was wonderful.”

  “Did you make any friends?”

  “No, not to say friends. Some of the German engineers were quite nice fellows; they took me out one or two evenings. I found it a bit of a strain understanding what they said, or I expect I’d have liked it better. They all seemed to talk so fast.”

  Hambledon received a fairly clear picture of the stolid engineer being conducted round beer halls and listening to variety turns with a faintly puzzled frown whenever anybody made a joke and everyone else laughed.

  “Did you keep up with any of these men after you went back?”

  “One of them wrote once or twice and I answered, but it dropped.”

  “What happened after you got back? In the firm, I mean.”

  “Oh, I went on in the office for some time—nearly a year. Then the old chap retired, the one who took me to Germany. That’s when I thought I might get the job.”

  “And didn’t you?”

  “No. They gave it to a young fellow who hadn’t been with the firm long. The nephew of one of the directors. He’d been to school in Germany.”

  “So you were frozen out.”

  “You could put it like that, but I wasn’t much surprised. These things happen.

  “Didn’t you resent it rather?”

  “No. What’s the good?”

  “None at all,” said Hambledon. “I agree. I only thought you might have been annoyed.”

  Nicholls shook his head. “Disappointed a bit, that’s all.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Nothing. I went on with the firm for another couple of years. Till March ’34.”

  Hambledon sighed. He was beginning to feel like a corkscrew getting tired of extracting numerous small corks one after another.

  “What happened in March ’34?”

  “One of the Germans came over and saw me in the office. I mean he came to see the firm on business; he just happened to see me there.”

  “One of those you’d met in Germany?”

  “I had met him, of course, or he wouldn’t have recognized me. He wasn’t an engineer; he was one of the bosses.”

  “Go on,” said Hambledon wearily.

  “He told me they wanted a representative in London and would I like the job. The pay was better than what I was getting, so I said yes. Besides, it was a step up.”

  “Oh, quite.”

  “And if I was working in London it wouldn’t matter if my German accent wasn’t too good.”

  “So you took the job.”

  “Yes.”

  Hambledon sighed again and learned by degrees that Nicholls had run the German firm’s London office from 1934 till 1939, apparently to their mutual satisfaction. It seemed to be a perfectly straightforward affair, conducted on strictly business lines.

  “Did they ever ask you to obtain any information outside the normal current of your business?”

  “They did once, some question about aero engines. I told them I didn’t know and I didn’t propose to ask.”

  “And that settled that?”

  “Yes. They didn’t ask anything like that again. That was in August ’39; we all knew what was coming by then. I didn’t care if I was sacked; the job wouldn’t last much longer, anyway.”

  Nicholls’s office closed down on the outbreak of war and he promptly enlisted.

  “I should have thought you’d have been more useful in a munitions factory,” said Hambledon.

  “Maybe,” said Nicholls bluntly, “but I wanted a change.”

  He was taken prisoner at Dunkirk and remained in a prisoner-of-war camp till October 1943, when he was taken to the governor’s office for an interview. Nicholls’s account here followed Abbott’s closely, except that it was much shorter. “Big feller, with a clip off his right ear. Gassed a lot. Asked me if I’d go to England to work for German Intelligence.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said yes.”

  Hambledon looked at Nicholls. “Did he believe you?”

  “I suppose so, since I’m here. He talked a lot more about what they’d do to me if I let them down.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “Nothing much. ‘I understand,’ or something like that. I was thinking they’d have to catch me first.”

  Hambledon was thinking that German Intelligence must be extremely short of agents if they tried to enlist this lump of granite. Though that was, of course, always a Nazi mistake: the psychological error of thinking that any man could be bent to their will if they only pushed him hard enough. Nicholls described the German spy school in a few brief sentences; he did not seem to have been particularly impressed. He said it was “too much like the storybooks. Secret inks, and all that.”

  Asked about his fellow prisoners, Abbott, Little, Tanner, and Brampton, he said that they had not been allowed to talk together and he had not bothered to try. “It wasn’t as though we were trying to escape together. All we had to do was to sit tight and do as we were bid.” Abbott, he said, was “a gasbag. Always bursting with lots to say and nothing in it when it was said. A bit hysterical.” Tanner was “a very quiet gentleman, an officer. I was a bit surprised he’d gone in for it I suppose he wanted to get home, like the rest of us.” Little was also an officer, something to do with newspapers before the war. Nicholls had not much to say about Little. “He talked about things I wasn’t interested in. He and Abbott were pretty friendly. Lieutenant Tanner and I kept out of it.”

  “And the fifth man?” said Hambledon. “Major Brampton?”

  Nicholls shook his head. “Hardly knew him. He only travelled as far as Berlin with us.”

  “What happened to him, do you know?”

  “No idea, he just disappeared. Abbott said he’d escaped, but I doubt it. He couldn’t speak any German.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Quite. He was always getting cursed at the spy school for not understanding what they said to him. So was Little, but Abbott used to prompt him. Major Brampton was different.”

  “How, different?”

  “Oh, one of the huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’ crowd. You know, you can always tell. Good officer, I daresay, but a silly ass over things he thought weren’t important. He behaved as though the spy school was a silly game, but he came out top of the exams all the same.”

  “Oh, did he?”

  Nicholls actually laughed. “He used to rile the Germans no end. ‘My good man,’ he used to say.” Nicholls mimicked a rather haw-haw voice. “‘My good man, don’t do that.’ Always looked as though he wasn’t lis
tening, and then came out on top.”

  “I thought you said you hardly knew him,” said Hambledon with a laugh.

  “Never spoke to me at all, only ‘Good morning, Nicholls.’ And I’d say, ‘Good morning, sir.’ He used to speak to Mr. Tanner sometimes, don’t know what about.”

  When Nicholls was pushed off from the submarine in his rubber boat he made no attempt to row ashore at once, but lay off till it was daylight. He then waited till he saw some soldiers on the beach, rowed in, and gave himself up. “I thought if there was a reception committee waiting for me they could just wait.”

  “Quite,” said Hambledon. “Very sensible.”

  Nicholls was ultimately dismissed under escort. He made no fuss about returning to Brixton Jail.

  Little was then brought in. Hambledon put him through the same sieve as the other two but gained very little more information than he had already gleaned from Abbott and Nicholls. Little was rather of the Abbott type, but more intelligent and practical. He admitted frankly that he had been favourably impressed by the early achievements of the Nazi Party, but pointed out that he was not the only one; quite a lot of English people thought as he had. Little was editor of a small provincial newspaper, and after attending a couple of meetings arranged by German sympathizers and addressed by plausible and fluent Germans, he wrote a series of articles on the rebirth of Germany and published them in his paper. This was in 1935. Not long after this he was approached by an organization for the encouragement of Anglo-German friendly relations, thanked for what he had written, and invited to pay a visit to Germany to see the wonders of the rebirth for himself. He went.

  “Enjoy yourself?” asked Hambledon.

  Little had enjoyed himself, in a way. He was handicapped by knowing no German. “I still don’t,” he added. “I’m a complete dud at languages, always was.” He was taken about, beamed upon, and shown what it was thought advisable for him to see. It was very well done.