Our Friends in Berlin Read online

  He shook his head. ‘The last time I saw her we talked about going to a concert.’ Elgar, as he recalled. He saw Castle and Traherne exchange another look. ‘Am I burned?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ Tessa replied carefully. ‘That depends on the nature of your relationship with her.’

  Hoste now realised where this was heading. ‘If you’re implying that we were – you’re way off.’

  ‘Hard to know how else you were compromised,’ said Castle.

  Traherne looked at him squarely. ‘We’ve got a heck of a leak to stop up. It would be better for all concerned if you come clean –’

  ‘Come clean about what? I’ve met Amy Strallen a handful of times. We went to dinner once. There is nothing else to tell.’

  A fraught silence followed. Hoste felt indignant that he was not believed, but he knew that protesting his innocence too hotly would damage his case. In the end it was Tessa who broke the impasse.

  ‘The lady may confirm that. I’d better get started.’

  Hoste squinted at her. ‘She’s already here?’

  ‘Downstairs, waiting to be interviewed.’

  Once the meeting had ended he followed Tessa out of the room. She was on the turn of the balustraded stairs when he caught up.

  ‘Hammond. Will you let me sit in?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Tessa smoothly. ‘You can listen, if you like.’

  ‘I need to talk to her.’

  She pulled in her chin. ‘Why? If you really have fooled her all this time she’s going to be pretty angry once she finds out.’

  ‘That’s why I need to talk to her.’ They were on the ground floor, heading for the interview rooms. He put his hand to her arm. ‘Please.’

  Amy looked at her watch; she had been waiting in this bare, windowless room for more than an hour. They had picked her up on the street that morning. She had just left the flat when a car pulled up alongside the pavement and a man in suit and trilby got out. His driver had kept the engine running. She thought at first he wanted directions: in fact, he asked her if she wouldn’t mind accompanying them – it concerned a report she had filed yesterday at Marylebone Police Station. ‘And what if I do mind?’ The man seemed not to hear the question, and held open the car door for her. They had dropped her here, at a municipal building in St James’s, without either of the two men addressing another word to her.

  Outside she could hear mumbling talk, and then the door opened. The woman who entered was the same one she had passed on the stairs at Hoste’s office. She introduced herself as Tessa Hammond.

  ‘I’m sorry they haven’t brought you anything to drink. Would you like tea?’

  Amy nodded. ‘Can you please tell me where I am?’

  ‘Of course. This is a government office dealing with affairs of national security. Your report at the police station was passed on to us …’

  She followed up with questions about Jack Hoste, how often they had met, what they had talked about – and why she had suspected him as an enemy agent. Amy went through her story again, in much the same way as she had to the police, though this woman – Hammond – didn’t seem surprised by it, not even by the discovery of the Nazi insignia. A stenographer quietly recorded their conversation at a desk nearby, and Tessa made an occasional note of her own.

  ‘There is one question I’m obliged to ask you, Miss Strallen. Did you and Mr Hoste have a sexual relationship?’

  Amy gasped out her surprise. ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

  ‘Well – the answer’s no. No, we didn’t. What’s happened to him? Has he been arrested?’

  The look on her inquisitor’s face suddenly softened with pity. ‘No, he’s not been arrested – because he works for us. A department of MI5. We know it as the Section. Counter-espionage. I am Jack Hoste’s case officer. He has in his pocket about two dozen Nazi sympathisers, who believe him to be the Gestapo’s man in London. He had been hunting Marita Pardoe for two years before he met you. She’s the most dangerous fifth columnist in the country. Your information regarding her whereabouts was absolutely vital.’

  Amy was for a moment too stunned to speak. The world had suddenly tilted into confounding new geometries. ‘But – the Iron Crosses. Why did he keep –’

  ‘They’re fakes. A sop to the recruits. While they believe he’s their conduit to Berlin, they’ll keep supplying him with intelligence – troop movements, air defences, new developments in radar. It all goes through Hoste, and he “rewards” them with medals – counterfeits. A handful of agents, like Marita, he pays by the week.’

  They weren’t the only ones to have been fooled, thought Amy. ‘It’s rather humiliating, isn’t it? To have been taken in like that.’

  Tessa shook her head. ‘Not at all. It’s his job. He couldn’t infiltrate the ring without deceiving people – good people as well as bad.’

  After a long pause she said, ‘What will happen to Marita?’

  ‘Nothing. As far as she’s concerned, Hoste is the Gestapo’s handler in London. No one must make her think otherwise, and that includes you. You must behave towards her as normal – don’t give her a hint you know about what’s going on. Is that understood?’ she said sharply. ‘It’s why you’ll have to sign a few things before we can let you go.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The Secrets Act, for one. You know enough about Jack Hoste now to be a danger to him.’ Something in Amy’s drawn, troubled face must have moved Tessa, because her voice dropped to a confidential hush. ‘You have to understand, this work he does is crucial to the war effort. He didn’t want to trick you – I believe he’s very fond of you.’

  Amy replied with a bitter half-laugh. How could she presume to match people with one another when she was such a bad picker herself? They sat there for a while longer, neither of them speaking. Eventually Tessa rose and said that she would fetch the paperwork – they wouldn’t keep her for longer than was necessary. ‘Thanks for cooperating,’ she said at the door. ‘This has helped the war effort, too.’

  Amy was too deeply sunk in her own thoughts to reply. From outside, the door still ajar, she overheard Tessa remonstrating with someone whose voice she took a moment to recognise. She got up from the chair and walked over.

  ‘… she’s in no mood to talk to you,’ Tessa was saying.

  There, in the corridor, was Hoste. His eyes lifted over Tessa’s shoulder and seemed to fill with an appeal on catching sight of her. She stood on the threshold, arms folded across her chest.

  ‘Miss Strallen – I’m sorry,’ he began. ‘I know you must think I’m a –’

  Tessa interposed herself between them. ‘Stop this, Hoste. You’re in enough trouble as it is.’

  ‘I’d just like to talk to her,’ he said. ‘Five minutes.’ Tessa turned round to Amy in silent enquiry. With a reluctant, barely perceptible nod she gave her assent.

  ‘I’ll be back in five minutes,’ said Tessa, looking rather sternly from him to her. She left them there, facing one another in the doorway. Having pleaded for her time he now seemed at a loss to say anything.

  ‘You must have thought me such an idiot,’ she said after a moment. ‘Your pretending to be a tax inspector, running into one another at the National Gallery, planting the file on Pardoe. That was all planned, wasn’t it?’

  Hoste nodded, not catching her eye. ‘But I never thought you were an idiot. I’m only grateful you helped me run Marita to earth. If I could have been honest about it I would have been, but this job – it involves being someone else, someone who’s not like me at all. It’s an act. It’s what I was recruited to do.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that it’s part of your job. But once you’d got what you needed – Marita – why did you keep me under surveillance? What possible use was I then?’

  His eyes closed and his hand went to his brow, which he began to knead in frantic agitation. ‘Marita had an idea that you might be … after
your time in Germany she believed you might be, I don’t know, a sympathiser.’

  Amy felt the colour drain from her face. ‘You mean – a Nazi?’

  ‘I never thought so,’ he said quickly, ‘but I had to check, if only to convince Marita I was a bona fide handler.’

  She felt a sudden cold grip on her heart: that this man she had – that he could have imagined her capable of such an allegiance. It took a moment to find her voice. ‘And was attending an Elgar concert another way of testing me?’

  He looked blank for a second. ‘No, no. Of course not. I suggested that because – because I hoped to see you again.’

  ‘I should have known,’ she said quietly, almost to herself. ‘I should have known that very first time you turned up at the bureau. The idea that you could have been a partner for someone.’

  His little flinch of surprise at this remark might have touched her once. But not now. He had forfeited any claim on her finer feeling.

  Well, he thought, that was an honest appraisal. ‘I realise you’d rather I was out of your sight, but there’s one more thing I need to tell you.’ She looked at him and wondered if he might save himself. ‘Be careful around Marita. I know that you’re friends, but you mustn’t forget how dangerous she is. She’s fanatical, she’s devious, and she won’t think twice about exploiting you to get what she wants.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘I’m just asking you to be on your guard,’ he said. ‘We’re pretty sure she’s responsible for murder. She is absolutely without scruple or conscience.’

  Amy laughed miserably. ‘Takes one to know one, I suppose.’ She held his gaze a moment longer, then stepped back and closed the door on him.

  When they let her go at last she walked back to the office through St James’s Park. She was in a blinding daze, not seeing the nannies pushing their prams or the boys putting out their toy boats on the lake. She paid no mind to the gravel path beneath her feet or the sunlight glinting through the latticed tops of trees. Nothing impinged on her but the shock of her debriefing – it felt as though she had been in an accident. When she had wavered about reporting him as a spy, the consequences looked likely to wreck any relationship she had with him. But this outcome was quite unforeseen, pitching her into a no man’s land of conflicting impulses. There was relief, of course, in discovering that he wasn’t a traitor, and an admiration for his courage and cleverness in neutralising the enemy within; wonderment, too, that he had maintained this audacious imposture for so long. Even Marita, the least gullible person she’d ever known, even she had fallen for it. Against this, however, she felt injured pride at having been duped, the more acute for the illusions about him she had harboured.

  She thought, as she often did, of the night he had saved her from the bomb blast, and of their bolt for safety down Charing Cross Road. They had sheltered in his flat for what, half an hour? – which at the time seemed edged with a sort of hysterical relief, for they had outrun the danger. Later, before he left for his warden’s post, that strange half-hour had breathed into life a tiny flame of enchantment, of encouragement – that they might mean something to one another. Alone in his flat she had sensed, for a few minutes, the possibility of a future with Jack Hoste in it. If she had not gone looking for matches, had not snooped in that chest of drawers, she would never have suspected that he was anything but brave, and honest, and kind … But now reality had come in a rush through the door, and the flame was out.

  On her way out of the office that evening Amy ran into Georgie Harlow.

  ‘Oh, I’m glad I caught you,’ she said. ‘Do you have time for a quick drink?’

  Amy felt so wretched and drained from the events of the morning that her instinct was to decline, but Georgie looked so eager, and perhaps after all a restorative might lift her mood. She had been brooding the entire afternoon. They found a pub just off Berkeley Square and settled with their drinks at a corner table.

  Georgie squinted at Amy for a moment. ‘You look a bit tired. Is everything –’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine. A hard day.’

  Pleased to have her solicitude deflected – as most people are when they have news to tell – Georgie began. ‘You know that man we were introduced to the other night – William? Well, he dropped me a line yesterday. He wants to take me to dinner.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Amy.

  ‘I know! Do you think I should?’

  Amy smiled. ‘I don’t know. Did you like him?’

  ‘Well … I like the fact that he’s keen. And he did seem very pleasant that night we met. I can’t see why not.’

  There was a tentativeness in her voice, as if she were asking for permission. Amy took a sip of her drink and said, ‘He did have a certain charm.’

  It did not sound, to her own ears, like a wholehearted endorsement. Georgie registered it, too. ‘A bit too forward, do you think?’

  ‘Perhaps. But it’s hardly indecent of him to ask. Did he write nicely?’

  She replied with a laugh, and nodded.

  ‘Then maybe you should give him a chance. It’s only an invitation to dinner.’

  This was evidently the response Georgie was hoping for; she ordered more drinks and began to speculate on what sort of prospects William O’Dare might have. On the night they had met he had talked about working in the export business in Ireland. Did that mean he was well off? Amy listened with a show of interest she hardly felt, offering encouragement and caution in about equal measure. Inwardly she wondered at her friend’s naivety, fearing a repeat of the express-like speed with which she had fallen for Christopher. It was strange to find a woman of high professional standing who had so little nous in matters of courtship. But her affection for Georgie, and her residual guilt over the last failure, muffled the distant siren of her misgivings.

  They could not be altogether silenced, however, and as she prepared for bed that night something came unbidden to her thoughts. It was Hoste’s warning about Marita. You mustn’t forget how dangerous she is … He had told her this with particular vehemence. Having tracked Marita for two years he probably knew what he was talking about; and if MI5 regarded her as a threat to national safety then she ought to take it seriously. Was there reason to suspect her friend William, too? Neither he nor Marita had talked about politics on the night – but she remembered telling them that Georgina worked at the Ministry of Defence.

  Was that why she had been so keen to throw the Irishman in her path? Hammond had told her that she must behave as normal towards Marita: easier said than done. How was she to behave in front of someone she knew to be an enemy spy, someone actively plotting Churchill’s downfall? One false word, one unguarded comment and Marita would notice – because she always noticed. And the stakes were now so much higher. Should the delicate clockwork of his deception be exposed, Hoste would be for it. Amy felt an abrupt surge of panic as a chasm opened up – the nerve it would require to bear all of this secrecy. They were more or less compelling her to act like an agent herself.

  This would be her life from now on. Constant vigilance, constant dread. To be the one who gave the game away – calamitous. The most dangerous fifth columnist in the country, Hammond had called her. Responsible for murder, according to Hoste. Sometimes it felt like Marita had only to be in her company to know what she was thinking.

  She followed her heartbeat into the kitchen and took out a bottle of Martell from the cupboard. Her hand actually shook as she poured a tot. Yes, this was her life now, and as the heat of the brandy spread through her chest she realised that responsibility already had its claws in her. It had to be faced, without delay. She returned to the bedroom and picked up the telephone. At the end of their interview Hammond had supplied her with a number ‘in case of emergencies’. She wasn’t sure if this constituted an emergency but she imagined that the Section would prefer a warning, even if it proved to be mistaken.

  On the third ring a voice answered. Hoste’s voice. She almost hung up. ‘This is Amy Strallen. I didn’t know it would
be – I was given this number by Tessa Hammond.’

  ‘Is there something the matter?’ His tone was businesslike, almost brusque; it was as though the awkwardness of the morning had never happened. ‘This line is reserved for –’

  ‘Emergencies, I know,’ she said, determined to match his brisk impersonality. ‘You said something about Marita – about how dangerous she was.’ She recounted the story of her friend Georgina, and Marita’s eagerness to play matchmaker. Even as she spoke she worried that her suspicions sounded absurd, or, worse, that she was pleading for attention. Perhaps if she had slept on the matter she would have seen it differently tomorrow.

  But Hoste in reply didn’t sound like someone who was humouring her. ‘This Irishman – William – can you describe him?’

  ‘Oh … good-looking, tall, swarthy. Early thirties, I should say.’

  ‘But you don’t recall his surname?’

  ‘I don’t, sorry.’

  ‘Has your friend met this chap on her own?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘There may be nothing in it,’ he said. ‘But where Marita’s involved that’s never a safe assumption. Tell your friend to be on her guard. She’s probably wise to people asking her about the MoD, but the less she tells him about her life the better.’

  ‘If he is one of Marita’s cronies mightn’t it be best if she just avoids him altogether?’

  ‘I’m afraid that might encourage suspicion. Marita would know something was up.’

  Amy didn’t like the sound of this. ‘Is Georgie putting herself at risk?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said after a pause. ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’

  There was a silence between them, and she wondered if he would make any reference to what had happened. Before he rang off he said, ‘If you happen to remember the fellow’s name, let me know.’

  She replaced the receiver and walked to the window overlooking the street. She half expected to spot somebody down there, in the shadows, watching the flat. But all she saw was the pale reflection of her own face in the glass. Half an hour later she dialled the number again.