Free The Interrogator by Andrew Williams Page B

the details of the mission locked tight. The British would work away at the smallest crack, prising it open until they knew all there was to know of the
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’s mission.
    There were voices in the passage and someone began to turn the handle of the wardroom door. Mohr got to his feet and picked up his white commander’s cap: ‘Remember, do your duty. Be vigilant. Victory is certain.’

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    I

t was still coppery bright when the sirens began to wail again, the last of the sun diffused in the warm haze of smoke rising from the city’s smouldering streets. Within minutes, a ragged tide of humanity was surging along Lime Street: travellers with suitcases, servicemen with their girlfriends, the very old and the very young. No one panicked or protested. They moved with hunched, weary resignation. Lindsay stepped from the shelter of a doorway into the street and looked up to a skyline of broken brick pillars and roofless gables. Liverpool was being stripped to its core. The sirens began to die away. Lime Street was almost deserted now. He turned and followed the stragglers to the corner of Hanover Street where a patient queue was filing down steps into a large underground shelter. A stout old woman hobbled past him on swollen feet, a basket of food on one arm, a bundle of blankets beneath the other. It was going to be oppressively close inside the shelter. Lindsay lit a cigarette and walked a little way along the empty street. Beyond a telltale mound of brick and broken plaster he could just make out the domeless silhouette of the old Customs House. The city was black now and almost silent as if it were holding its breath.
    He had been five hours late into Lime Street, the platforms lined with ‘trekkers’, the anxious and the homeless waiting for trains to carry them to the safety of draughty church halls in the suburbs. By the time Lindsay had fought his way out of the station it was after six o’clock. But he was pleased he had missed the
White
’s quayside welcome, the little triumph orchestrated for the newsreel cameras. The hacks would have been given their instructions. Mohr was certainly a catch. A celebrity commander never out of the papers, a holder of Germany’s highest decoration – the Knight’s Cross – famous for his dash and style, or what passed for it in the Reich.
    From the west, the distant drone of approaching aircraft, slow and heavy. Searchlights began to sweep in sinister arcs above him and soonthe horizon was peppered with the smoky flash of anti-aircraft shrapnel. He stood and watched as if in a dream. The first enemy flares were dripping on to the rooftops of the city, followed moments later by what sounded like a rattle of iron bedsteads thrown from a great height. There was a flash and a tongue of flame – incendiaries.
    Then he heard someone shouting at him from across the street.
    ‘What’s the matter with you . . .?’ The man’s words were lost in a rising scream.
    Lindsay instinctively hunched his shoulders. His feet were knocked from under him and his mouth was full of dirt. He looked up. A policeman was gesticulating wildly: ‘Run you bloody fool.’ Suddenly aware of the mad danger he had placed himself in, he covered the distance to the shelter at breakneck speed. He was just feet from the entrance when the ground rose, throwing him forwards against the sandbags. For a moment everything was a blur. Then someone was pulling his arm, dragging him down rubble-strewn steps towards the door.
    ‘It’s all right,’ he shouted as he scrambled to his feet.
    The door clanged shut behind him.
    By the half lantern-light he could see a score or more of frightened faces. His rescuer was shouting something but it was impossible to hear above the scream and crump of bombs. He collapsed on to a bench and rested his chin in his hands. The air was thick with dust and the shelter shook and heaved, the explosions reverberating along its length like a blow on a tremendous kettledrum. The bedlam