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  To Algy

  Berlin

  27 September 1938

  Dearest Father,

  By the time you receive this letter he will be dead. The newspapers will say that his assassin was an unknown German officer. It wasn’t. It was me.

  It is quite likely that I will also be dead. So I want to explain to you why I killed him.

  When I was a boy you taught me that war is wrong. I listened to you then, but it was only when I had lived through eight months of hell in Spain that I knew what you meant. War is coming, and we have both seen how horrific modern war can be. Millions will die: this time it won’t be just the young men; it will be the children, the women, the old, the innocent. I am an historian, trained to analyse economic and social causes for everything, but if ever in history there has lived an individual who through the force of his own will can destroy a continent, it is he. He is evil and he must be stopped: I am fortunate to be able to stop him.

  I remember once we were on Yarmer Hill, overlooking Chilton Coombe, I was perhaps fourteen. You told me that my life would be a success if I left the world a better place than I found it. Well, I’ve tried to make a small difference over the last few years in Oxford, in Spain and now in Germany, and most of the time you and I have disagreed over my methods. But I hope, I pray, that in this last act I will have succeeded.

  For all kinds of political reasons it is best that my identity be kept secret; I can trust you to do that. But I need you of all people to know what I have done.

  Please give my love to Mamma and to Millie. I am sure they will understand. And to Charlotte and Reggie, of course.

  In haste,

  Your son,

  Conrad

  Prologue

  July 1937

  Thyme. Whenever Conrad smelled thyme, he thought of Spain. Not the Spain of matador and bull, of flamenco and guitar, of Goya and Velázquez, of castle and cathedral, but the Spain of death in the name of brotherly love.

  In particular he thought of the sunrise at the beginning of his last week as a soldier, his nose brushing through the thyme as he crawled towards the crest of the ridge ahead of him. To his left, the metallic blue fingers of the dawn caressed the black humps that rolled towards Madrid thirty miles to the east. Behind him, in the distance to the north, loomed the heights of the Guadarrama Mountains, just distinguishable against the night. What lay ahead, over the crest of the next hill, Conrad had no idea. That was what he and his two comrades of the International Brigade had been ordered to discover.

  Conrad had volunteered for the patrol. Dawn was his favourite time; the air was cool; tiny droplets of moisture hung on the leaves of the thyme and rosemary bushes; the hills were quiet, guile and cunning could keep you safe. The three of them, himself, David Griffiths, an old friend from Oxford, and Harry Reilly, a stocky stevedore from Liverpool, made a good team. Conrad was the best shot in the British Battalion, Harry was not much worse and David’s eyesight and hearing were exceptional. They all looked after each other. Conrad preferred operating against the enemy, the Fascists whom he had travelled a thousand miles to fight eight months previously, than worrying about the commissars, the secret police and the dogmatic generals on his own side.

  They reached the crest of the hill. Below them lay a small valley, at the bottom of which ran a narrow ravine. A few yards beyond that stood an old stone chapel, and a cluster of ramshackle buildings, wreathed in a thin layer of mist hovering a few feet above the ground.

  ‘Any sign of life?’ Conrad whispered.

  ‘There are people moving about down there,’ David answered. He was holding one of the battalion’s few pairs of binoculars to his eyes. The son of a Methodist preacher in the Rhondda valley, he was a wiry man, strong for his size, with a nut-brown face and a restless energy. At Oxford the energy had been channelled towards the cause of international socialism; here it was concentrated on killing fascists.

  ‘Let’s go and take a closer look,’ said Conrad.

  ‘If we wait ten minutes, we’ll be able to see much better,’ said David.

  It was true. The blue fingers to their left had turned to red, and the darkness of the valley was lightening to a bluish grey. The mist was lifting.

  Then, to their amazement, a single bell tolled from the chapel.

  ‘Those are nuns,’ said David.

  Sure enough, figures emerged from the buildings and made their way towards the chapel.

  The Republican forces had advanced swiftly over the previous two days against lacklustre opposition, and these nuns, safe behind Nationalist lines for months, had been caught out.

  ‘No sign of the Fascists?’ Conrad asked.

  Before David could answer, they heard the crack of a rifle, then another and another. Pieces of stone flew off the cross on the chapel roof. The nuns screamed and ran into what they presumed was the sanctuary of the chapel.

  Conrad and his two comrades leaped to their feet and hurried down the hill, but the chapel was a quarter of a mile away across the small but steep ravine. A group of about a dozen soldiers appeared, all carrying rifles. They wore the ragged medley of dusty clothing that was the uniform of the Popular Army. They began to cheer and run towards the convent. Conrad could make out the words: ‘Putas de Dios!’ – ‘Whores of God!’ The hatred of many of the Spanish Republican soldiers towards the Church and the priests and nuns who served it was legendary. For them, the institution was inextricably connected to the Nationalists and to the landlords who had taxed the peasantry for generations. The hatred the foreigners could understand; the way it was expressed they could not.

  As Conrad reached the edge of the ravine, he paused. ‘Wait!’ he called to Harry and David, who were already scrambling down. ‘Let’s stay at the top. It’ll take too long to get up the other side.’

  The soldiers were already dragging the women out of the chapel. One of the nuns was pulled down on to the ground by three of the men. A fourth was unfastening his trousers.

  ‘Oye! Basta!’ Conrad shouted. He stood up and waved. The soldiers paused for a moment. Two of them waved back and then the man standing over the nun dropped his trousers.

  ‘Fire over their heads,’ said Conrad. He aimed his own rifle at the wall of the stone chapel a few feet above the group of soldiers and nuns and pressed the trigger. Three sharp cracks rent the air as the three rifles discharged, and the man with his trousers around his ankles crumpled.

  Shocked, Conrad glanced at David, whose face was grim and determined. ‘The bastard deserved it.’

  The nuns screamed and the soldiers reached for their own rifles. Conrad took aim and fired, as did Harry and David. Three more of the soldiers fell, and then the rest ran. David nicked one on the shoulder as he ducked through the scrub.

  There was trouble the next day. The Russian commissar from the Popular Army brigade the soldiers had belonged to paid a visit to his counterpart in the British Battalion. He was a short balding man with a tiny paunch and the hint of a double chin, which set him apart from the scrawny soldiers around him. The commissar of the British Battalion, who was British himself, told the Russian to piss off. But the visitor had brought with him a soldier nursing a shoulder wound. As they were leaving the British Battalion HQ, this soldier caught sight of Conrad and nudged his commissar.

  The Republican offensive pressed on towards the village of Brunete, but the Fascists quickly put together a stiff resistance. Two days later Conrad found himself a few miles further on, his body pressed flat in a shallow indentation he and Harry had scraped into the hard-baked
soil. Ahead was a low bump, which had just earned the nickname Mosquito Hill because of the bullets whining all around it. The previous day the British Battalion and the American Washington Battalion had thrown themselves in useless waves at the hill, ably defended by the Nationalists. The bodies lay in front of Conrad, scattered about the brown earth, already putrefying in the sun. Many of them had been his friends, his comrades.

  The sun blazed, turning the ground in front of the hill into a nightmarish oven of death. There were shell-blasted scraps of thyme bushes even here, but in the middle of the day their aroma was overwhelmed by the smell of rotting flesh and human excrement. The noise was overpowering: the relentless crash of shells from the Fascists’ guns, interspersed with the crackle of small-arms fire and, in the all-too-brief moments of quiet, the buzzing of thousands of flies dancing from corpse to corpse.

  Conrad was tired and he was thirsty. Everyone was thirsty. The streams shown on their maps had turned out to be dry, and the Republican Army’s logistical capabilities were not up to bringing enough water to the front to slake the thirst of all its soldiers.

  To their left, a Spanish Popular Army brigade was moving up to support yet another attack. It was the unit from which the soldiers who had tried to rape the nuns had come. Once they were in position, the order would be given for the British Battalion to attack again. These days it was always the International Brigades or the anarchist units who were thrown into the offensives, with the elite communist units held back from the worst of the fighting.

  The order came to advance. Although Conrad was exhausted, as soon as he was on his feet adrenalin spurted through his veins and he ran, crouching low, dodging from left to right, Harry by his side, David slightly ahead and to the left. The Popular Army brigade had machine guns and they were spraying bullets in the general direction of the Nationalists on the hilltop.

  Conrad threw himself down behind a small boulder and rested his rifle on it. He fought to control his breathing and his rapidly beating heart as he aimed at a head two hundred yards up the hill. The marksmanship of the average Republican soldier was appalling, not helped by their ancient weaponry, much of which dated from the previous century. But Conrad’s rifle was a new German-made Mauser K98k that he had lifted a few months before from a legless Fascist soldier groaning on the battlefield at the Jarama River, and Conrad knew how to use it. There was no wind, but he allowed for range, and pressed the trigger. The head jerked backwards and disappeared.

  ‘Come on!’ David, who was squatting down beside him, set off up the hill. He had covered barely five yards when he was hit. In the back. He was thrown forward and landed on his face. Conrad crawled over to his friend. The bullet had gone through the heart; David was dead. Conrad turned towards Harry to tell him to watch out, but he was too late. Harry was lying a few yards away, face pressed down against the hard earth, his back a bloody mess.

  Conrad pulled himself to his feet and began a crouching run. He felt a bullet tear into his upper arm; there was a flash of pain and then numbness. That bullet too had come from behind. He turned and darted back towards the boulder, throwing himself down on the side facing the enemy. All around him the remaining soldiers from the British Battalion stormed the hill.

  Conrad peered around the stone back towards the Popular Army brigade’s lines. Fear and adrenalin had turned to fury. If he had had his own machine gun he would have turned it on the Spanish brigade and blasted them to hell. Harry and David were two noble, brave men, who had given up their lives for Spain, to save Spain from fascism, and this was the thanks they had received.

  But Conrad didn’t have a machine gun, only a rifle. And it wasn’t just the Republican Spanish who were firing. Nationalist machine guns were raking the hillside and their mortars were dropping shells around Conrad. Then, over the crash and crack of the battlefield, he heard the sound that the International Brigade had grown to dread. Aircraft engines.

  Three aircraft, German Messerschmitts from the Condor Legion, flew low over the hill, strafing the attacking infantry; they had already knocked out all the Republican tanks. The Germans and Italians had won control of the skies over Brunete, which made the assault on Mosquito Hill even more foolhardy.

  The attack faltered, and Conrad saw his comrades first dive to the ground and then try to make their way back to their own lines. Those that could move, that is. Many lay still on the mountainside, others groaned and screamed in pain and fear.

  Conrad raised his head above the stone, preparing to sprint back down the hill. A rifle bullet ricocheted off the rock. In the midst of the battle, the Spanish brigade had a sniper zeroed in on him, someone with a rifle as good as his.

  The Messerschmitts wheeled around for another run.

  Stuck on the open flank of that hill, his face pressed against the hot earth, Conrad realized he had a choice of how he could die: a Nationalist machine gun from up the hill, a Republican sniper from below, a German aeroplane from the sky, or, if he was really lucky, one of the International Brigade’s own machine-gun units lined up just behind the lines to catch any deserters. And if by some miracle the war didn’t kill him, it would destroy his soul, just as it had destroyed the souls of so many of the men on both sides blasting away at each other all around him.

  A few months before, while defending Madrid, Conrad would have been willing to die for the cause he believed in so passionately.

  But no longer.

  He had to get out of there. Not just from behind the boulder, but from Brunete, from Madrid, from Spain, from the whole damned war.

  Part 1

  June 1938

  1

  It was still possible to have fun in Berlin, even in 1938. You could go out to a nightclub, you could drink champagne, speak of old times, drink more champagne, perhaps say more than you should. In more normal countries in more normal times the consequences of such a night might have been a sore head and apologies for the rash words of the night before. In Nazi Germany the consequence was death.

  Conrad de Lancey was looking forward to the evening. He had arrived by train from the Hook of Holland that morning, dropped his things off at his hotel and spent the afternoon wandering from the former Imperial Palace past the grand buildings that lined Unter den Linden, through the Brandenburg Gate to the Tiergarten, where he had lost himself amongst the trees and ponds.

  After a miserable year spent licking his wounds, he was glad to be out of England.

  He had escaped from Mosquito Hill. Unable to go forward or back, he had run sideways, away from the Spanish brigade and towards the retreating Washington Battalion on his right. He had successfully mingled with the American walking wounded staggering back from the front. His luck held out when he managed to hitch a lift to Valencia with an outfit known as ‘the Scottish Ambulance Unit’, commanded by a formidable nurse wearing a voluminous tartan kilt. From there he stowed away on a ship bound for Marseilles. A week later, his arm in a sling, he was back in Oxford.

  He had hoped to return to his old life: his unfinished thesis, his pretty cottage in Manor Road and his beautiful wife. But he came home to find Veronica gone and everything changed. As autumn became winter, the cottage, which Veronica had professed ‘divine’ when she had moved in, and ‘a pokey hovel’ when she had moved out, had become a damp, chilly rebuke, a daily reminder of warmer, happier times.

  When Veronica had first left him, Conrad had felt shocked, numb. After a couple of weeks the numbness had been replaced by a slow, burning anger. He had tried to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t there. Whenever his friends or his family tried to speak to him about her, he parried with finely honed banalities.

  Spain hadn’t helped – those memories of the rotting corpses of his comrades on Mosquito Hill, of the desperate faces of the bombed-out orphans of Madrid and above all of the cruel betrayal of the idealistic young workers by the commissars and the politicians which had led to bullets in the backs of Harry and David. A noble cause had been corrupted into a hell of violence, cruelty a
nd death.

  Back in Oxford, he tried to work on the thesis for his D.Phil., about Prussia’s war with Denmark in 1864. This little war, which had comprised two campaigns of a few weeks each, had eaten up four years of his own life, and he was sick of it. Oxford was damp and miserable without Veronica. When one morning in December Conrad had spied an advertisement in The Times for a teacher at a prep school in the depths of Suffolk, on a whim he had applied.

  He was there for the beginning of the Lent term in January, covering for a member of staff who had been badly injured in a car smash. He laid low for a term and a half, not seeing anyone, his family, his friends and certainly not Veronica. He enjoyed teaching small boys French and Latin, and the isolation helped. But when the teacher he was covering for returned to school for the second half of the summer term, Conrad turned down the headmaster’s offer of a permanent position.

  For almost a year he had ignored all those issues that had been so important to him that he had risked his life for them: peace and war, socialism and fascism, the disaster that was engulfing Europe. But he had had enough of skulking in the lanes and water meadows of Suffolk. He decided it was time to face up to what was happening in the world.

  So he bought a one-way ticket to Berlin.

  It was a warm night, but unlike London, which had been shrouded in low grey cloud when Conrad had left Liverpool Street station the previous day, the air here was fresh and clean. Even at this hour the Kurfürstendamm was busy; tall blue-uniformed traffic policemen expertly marshalled the cars, trams and buses swishing along the street. It had only just got dark, and the pavements were alive with people flitting in and out of the pools of light emanating from the shop fronts, cafés, restaurants, cinemas and theatres. Many wore uniforms: greenish-grey for the army, brown for the Party functionaries and black for the SS. Many didn’t. All of them had a sense of urgency, a sense of purpose.