The Man Who Never Was Read online

  “Well, come on then, spit it out.”

  “I told you I’d seen something similar to this disc before, but I couldn’t remember where. It was years ago, when I was a little girl, that’s why it took me a while to nail it down. It’s a military service identity disc.”

  Black’s eyes rolled back and forth from the disc to Maggie’s face.

  “Go on, how do you know that?”

  “Because my father has one exactly like it.”

  “Your father? He hasn’t done any military service, has he?”

  “No, he inherited the disc from his father.”

  “Are you going to get to the point? Is there a point to all this?”

  “I believe there could be. My grandfather was in the Luftwaffe.”

  It silenced Black for once, but not for long.

  “And the remains were buried under the concrete in 1945, immediately after the war. Shit and corruption! I’m sorry Maggie, I’m stupid, you’re right, this could be vital information and I wasn’t listening. You’re bloody right, I, we should look into it before I mention this to Moss. Now that we have a cleaned-up image from the university, we can try to connect the code to a person. But how would a German airman end up here in the northeast?”

  “You should talk with my father, his name is Reichert too you know, a bit of a giveaway don’t you think? Apparently, there were some bombing raids over this region during the war, targeting shipyards, power stations, and other fuel sources. My dad says that almost all power stations at that time were coal or coke-fired. Ring any bells?”

  “Christ! When can we speak with… what’s your dad’s name?”

  “Frank Aaron Reichert. My grandfather was a pilot in the Luftwaffe, serving over the eastern front against the Russians. His aircraft was shot down, but he parachuted safely to the surface. My dad never talked about this much, despite my fascination with my family history. I had to drag it out of him, and I can almost recite it chapter and verse. I hope I’m not boring you.”

  He was hooked and shook his head.

  “Granddad was one of many German youths who were pressed into the ideology of the Third Reich. He had to choose that path or one which would ultimately define him as a traitor to the cause.

  “The S.S. apparently didn’t agonise over such protestations. Somehow he survived, thanks to having learned English at college. He had come down near to the Polish border and was welcomed back by the occupying German forces for rehabilitation. He was almost ready to be discharged back to the Luftwaffe, but he went AWOL and sought out the Polish underground resistance.

  “He was treated with extreme suspicion at first and then he was handed over to the British. They took a long time to check out his story and eventually set him a test, which was designed to turn him into a spy against the Fatherland. He apparently refused to cooperate at first and he was taken to a prisoner of war camp, otherwise known as a P.O.W. unit, in the south of England.

  “Finally, he accepted what most ordinary German servicemen did not want to believe – that some of their civilian citizens were being systematically exterminated. His pride in his country had taken a bit of a nose dive, no pun intended. That’s how my granddad came to live in England, under a new name, courtesy of British Intelligence.

  “When the war was over he insisted on taking back his German identity, believing he’d served the right cause in helping the allies. That’s not how it was perceived by the powers that be or the community he lived in.

  “It was just as difficult for grandma, even though she was English by birth. After granddad passed away, my father persuaded his mother to return to her native northeast and start a new life. She was reluctant, but accepted that there were still people who despised Germans long after the war ended. She reverted to her maiden name of Hewitt, while my dad at least had the cover of an English sounding first name - Frank.

  “Although I’ve never had a problem with the name Reichert, my dad says it wasn’t easy for him in the south of England. He said the northerners seemed to be more prepared to accept that many German people hated Hitler. Possibly that was because the intensity of bombing was much higher in the south. Shall I ask my father to come and see you?”

  “I think we should do him the service of talking in the privacy of his own home, Maggie. I get the feeling there may be even more personal stuff which he may find difficult to speak about. Let’s make this an unofficial chat, after all, we only want to find the name of our man at the coke works.”

  “Ok. I’ll set it up and let you know when we can meet with him. In the meantime, if you give me the cleaned-up image I can ask him to look at it. It may save us time if he compares it to the one belonging to my granddad. What do you think?”

  “Leave it until we can go together, Maggie. We would have to log it out of the evidence file just as we did for the university. Let’s keep this between us until we’ve spoken with your father.”

  PC Reichert left the room in a strangely subdued mood. She couldn’t help connecting the skeleton at Winlaton Mill with possible skeletons in cupboards within her own family. Why had it taken a discovery like this to get her father to open up about Ernst Johan Reichert, her grandfather, for the very first time?

  By contrast, Black’s mind was ablaze with all kinds of conspiracy theories. Someone from the Luftwaffe involved in a suspicious death forty years ago! In downtown Winlaton Mill! All because an untrained puppy had escaped its owner on a filthy day, ignored ‘Keep Out’ signs, and sniffed out something irregular. ‘Give a dog a bone, would you believe it?’ It had turned the investigation from being a chore to one of local historical notoriety, or so he thought.

  Chapter 5

  High Spen 1945

  “How many times have I told you that you’re not to climb on that air-raid shelter,” screamed Isabella Henderson at her grandson, “you’ll fall off the damned thing and break your neck. And who do you think will get the blame?”

  Little Harry Smyth was almost five years old, but had yet to clap eyes on his father. He’d seen his mother on a few occasions but he didn’t understand why she didn’t come home more often. Jack Smyth, Harry’s father, had been away for most of the war, and after miraculously surviving the desert campaign against Rommel, he was shipped to Italy, advancing steadily toward of the horrors of taking Monte Cassino. Finally, his unit of the Durham Light Infantry was involved in sweeping up through the occupied low countries of Belgium and Holland. Here he avoided capture by the German enemy forces, but only by hiding in the cellar of a friendly Dutch family in Venlo, for several weeks.

  The array of medals which he was about to be awarded, including the Africa Star, didn’t seem to compensate for five years of cheating death in roughly dugout trenches, and eating hard-tack biscuits with powdered egg. He hoped time would soften the awful guilt of surviving, when so many comrades did not. His demobilisation would at least let him try to come to terms with a new start, his somewhat estranged wife Hilda, and the rest of his family, including a son whose photograph he’d seen, but to whom he had never spoken.

  His brother Jim had fallen near Ypres, during the First World War, at the ripe old age of eighteen, and Jack was not yet a teenager at the time. The concoction of it being all over, coming home, leaving friendships on the battlefield, and the prospect of civilian life weighed heavily in his thoughts when he so desperately wanted to feel unrestrained joy.

  For the first two years of the war, Hilda had worked in an Italian-owned ice cream parlour to help make ends meet. Harry had been conceived before Jack and Hilda were married, primarily because of the slim odds set against him ever coming home.

  Figliolini’s parlour was in the neighbouring village of Chopwell, and Hilda had to walk the one and a half miles each way along the railway line every day. That the Italian nation had aligned with the Axis doctrine would normally have threatened ‘Figgy’s’ business, but the family had built up a strong social standing in the locality over several generations, with door-to-door deliv
ery of all manner of goods by a fleet of vans, which were truly mobile shops.

  Hilda had waited patiently for her chance to fulfil her dream of becoming a teacher. When the letter of acceptance for training college at the imposing architectural retreat of Wynyard Hall arrived, she wept without restraint. She would have walked the fifty miles of countryside paths to deliver the completed forms by hand.

  It was a three year course and she had to reside on site. Isabella, known only as Bella, agreed that she and her husband, also named Jack, but nicknamed ‘Cappy’, would take care of Harry until the family could be re-united. Hilda’s aspirations were firmly on the rise, whereas Jack Smyth had issues to confront.

  “Harry, this is your last warning, now, will you get down?” shouted Bella. The little boy sighed.

  “Ok, Grandma, can we go and see the men?”

  She knew he meant the men in the P.O.W. camp. Even in those days, political correctness made cameo appearances. The camps were officially named ‘Units for Displaced Persons’. There was, however, no fooling the villagers, and in any case, everyone knew that the occupants were exclusively those men who had fallen from their flying machines. Luftwaffe boys, young lads who also had mothers back in Germany. The surrounding villages contained extremely polarised views on these intruders from the skies. Male leanings were skewed toward immediate retribution in various forms, whereas the women, many of whom had suffered the agony of sons in a reciprocal predicament at the hands of the Reich, exercised a more tolerant attitude.

  They somehow managed to muster enough detachment to equate the possibility of their own progeny being locked up in some faraway place. In their eyes, it was a perfect example of the futility of war. Even so, the existence of the camp divided families which had been cohesively behind the principle of stopping the Fuhrer in his increasingly evil tracks. Especially now that the war was over, wasn’t it?

  Bella was fifty-five and well known for her feisty demeanour, stout in build as well as character. She had to work, because her husband, Cappy Henderson, had fallen victim to a disease which was very common amongst coal miners, colloquially referred to as ‘Consumption’ at the time.

  Everyone knew it was caused by breathing in dust every day at their workplace. It relentlessly degraded their lungs, but there was no choice, it was work or starve. In addition to falling seriously ill, Cappy was on a collision course with the management of the mines, on behalf of members of the Miner’s Union.

  He wanted better conditions, proper breathing masks, and most of all, acknowledgement of the plight of those who were dying as a direct result of their work. It would take decades for any kind of compensation to be agreed for pneumoconiosis. The distillate of his own failing health and the fight against the owners of the mines was his referral and regular treatment at the Spa Baths of Harrogate. It had to be paid for and there was no other means available to Bella than to become the only breadwinner.

  She worked for the Cooperative Wholesale Society – locally known simply as The Store. She was the caretaker of the library, reading room, and concert hall, a massive undertaking, as all of these facilities were on the upper floors of the Co-op ‘Empire’ in High Spen. The stairs were over ten feet wide and there were many of them. They were, together with the actual rooms, expected to be cleaned every day. And clean meant both floors and tables fit to eat from.

  One tangible benefit of this burden was the continual interaction with virtually everyone in the village. They all knew the tyrant who implemented the wishes of ‘The Store’ and nobody wanted their quarterly dividend openly discussed. The consequent respect Bella had garnered over the years helped her to get some of the women to exercise their own decisions over whether or not it was morally acceptable to visit the Luftwaffe Boys.

  “Very well, Harry, go and get a few biscuits from the barrel in the kitchen, but we can’t stay long today.”

  Harry slid down the corrugated metal sheeting of the shelter and landed at her feet. He hugged his grandma and disappeared into the terraced house.

  The camp nestled in the hollow between High Spen and Greenside, villages which had similar populations, peering at one another over the valley. The allocated meadow was dotted with army issue tents, and ringed with high, wired fencing. A stream ran through one edge of the containment and served as a latrine. When Bella and Harry arrived, there weren’t many other residents around, because a couple of local young men were shouting abuse at what they called Nazi sympathisers.

  Bella Henderson had been through many hard years, and evidence of this was etched into her face, a ruthlessly honest face, and one which was always ready to confront such bullies.

  “If your lot practised what they preach, you’d have been over there fighting the Germans instead of spouting off at women. The miners and shipyard workers in this area are doing their bit, and lots of women joined the land army. You aren’t even conscientious objectors, you’ve never got off your backsides to do a day’s work in your life. Now bugger off or I’ll smack you around the ears and report you to the village constable. I know who you are, Jimmy Jackson, I’ll be talking to your father about your behaviour.”

  Bella approached them with a raised hand and a fierce scowl, at which point they retreated, chanting more obscenities, nevertheless conceding temporary defeat.

  The few scattered women and children regrouped and waved at some of the prisoners who had observed the spat. One or two of them came to the fence and smiled, amazed at the bravery of one lady in particular. There wasn’t much exchange of words, primarily because there was an edict of no fraternisation, but in any event none of the villagers could understand a word of German, other than Hitler, yet a couple of the airmen knew a few English phrases.

  Harry threw some ginger snap biscuits toward one blond-haired young captive in particular, and three made it over the fence. There was no scuffling amongst the recipients, they just divided the biscuits by breaking them into fractions. Harry was determined to get the remaining ginger snap over at the second attempt. The young blond pilot caught it and spoke in broken English.

  “How much years you are?”

  Harry was startled and Bella grabbed his hand as she held up all the fingers of the other and mouthed, “Five.”

  In Harry’s developing young mind, he had a fascination with dangerous caged animals. Pictures of lions, tigers, crocodiles and snakes filled him with foreboding, culminating in shivers. So, if these airmen had to be fenced in, they must by deduction be dangerous. Throwing biscuits to them was exciting, but they could actually say things, and this disturbed him. The blond man spoke once more.

  “I Karl, who you are?”

  Bella responded.

  “His name is Harry, he is very shy but he likes to come and see you and your friends.”

  Karl couldn’t make out much more than the boy’s name, and brought another pilot into the conversation.

  “Hello, Karl was wanting to thank you and Harry for your being kind to us. We all say this. Some have little boy like Harry as brother at Germany, if they are not killed now. We don’t know.”

  Bella felt a rush of sadness. These men, under normal circumstances would have been considered polite. Perhaps they themselves couldn’t really understand what they were doing in a remote village, living like stone-age primates, and with no immediate prospect of ever seeing their families again.

  After all, the blitz of London and other urban manufacturing centres had been reciprocated one hundred times over in places like Berlin, Dresden, Essen and many more. It was the true beginning of impersonal warfare, in which infrastructure and people could be obliterated from the distance of the skies. The days of seeing the whites of the eyes of the adversary as a bayonet skewered them were receding very quickly. Mass destruction, soon to be accurately delivered upon Japan would become a perfect example. Bella responded sympathetically.

  “Is there anything else we can give you other than a few biscuits? I don’t mean more food, we haven’t much of that
ourselves, but what about something to keep your mind off what is happening in Germany?”

  “Oh, I can understand only a little bit please. I am Gunther let me say. Just one minute.”

  He conferred in his own tongue and it produced rare smiles. After more than five minutes there was consensus and Gunther spoke again.

  “We could all ask the same, for a ball, for making fussball game. Is Harry having a ball like this? We give back after we play. This would be, how must I say, very lovely for us. Will it be allowed by the commandant? I am not knowing how he will say about it.”

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out. But first I have to talk to Harry about lending his football to you.”

  “Sorry, what is lending?”

  “Lending is taking something for a little while, not keeping it forever.”

  “Aha, yes this is it, for a while, a small time.”

  Harry wasn’t impressed with this at all. His football was his most precious possession and these strange people might burst it. How would it be replaced? Bella reasoned with him that his own dad, who he’d only heard about, could be in a similar camp to these men. She knew he desperately wanted to find his father, and it was becoming quite an acute longing, exacerbated by his mother only being there once in a while, and other children all seemed to have fathers in the pits or factories.

  “Well, they might have something for you to borrow in return for the ball, should we ask? They could have secret things which nobody else knows about.”

  This seemed to do the trick, mystery was right up Harry’s street. Bella explained the situation as best she could and Gunther eventually got the message. There was quite a long discussion before he spoke to Bella again.

  “We are not having things for a little boys, but Karl has asked if his plate would be ok.”

  “Plate? We have plenty of plates, we are short of things to put on them to eat, and Harry doesn’t often ask for a plate.”

  “Oh yes, I mean I say the wrong word, look – it is this.”