A Sailor's Honour by Chris Marnewick Page B

the back of the police car. They travelled in silence to the police station.
    They made De Villiers sit on a bench while they signed him in. There was a desk in the public section across from where De Villiers was sitting. A woman constable sat under a recruitment poster. There is a career in the police for you. PC Jones gave De Villiers a receipt for his possessions and they led him into a cell. It was the same size as his room. There was a steel bunk and a stainless steel lavatory. He smelled disinfectant. He ran his finger along the wall. It was clean. He lay down on the bunk and fell asleep. A defence mechanism.
    They returned two hours later and shook him awake. His mouth was dry and he needed a drink.
    â€˜You’re clean,’ PC Crosthwaite said. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
    â€˜Tell you what?’
    â€˜That your wife and children were murdered and that you were wounded in the same incident.’
    PC Crosthwaite shook his head. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.’
    De Villiers nodded. He followed them to the counter. ‘How can I become a policeman?’ he asked. He had no idea what made him ask that.
    â€˜You want to become a policeman?’ PC Crosthwaite said.
    â€˜Yes,’ De Villiers said. ‘What’s so odd about that? They took the two of you.’
    PC Jones burst out laughing. ‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘but I think their standards are a little higher nowadays.’
    â€˜There’s a recruitment officer there,’ De Villiers said. ‘I could join up right now.’
    â€˜Maybe not right now,’ PC Crosthwaite said. ‘We have to take you back to your place first.’
    PC Jones intervened. ‘And you’d better shave and clean up first. You need to make a good first impression.’ He winked at De Villiers. ‘That’s how we got in.’
    De Villiers signed for his possessions.
    The radio in the police car crackled as they were called to another scene. They dropped him off outside a small superette.
    I can do this, De Villiers thought.
    That was how De Villiers met Emma later, while walking the beat as a newly qualified police constable in Hyde Park. They were married in a private ceremony with a few work colleagues as their witnesses. After six years in London, they emigrated to New Zealand.
    Between them, they had enough money to buy a house cash. The SADF ’ S million plus their savings. They settled down in Auckland and had Zoë.

U-891

Operation Weissdorn
13
    When Johann Weber had come out of court and had sent De Villiers on his way, he sat down behind his desk with a cup of coffee and phoned his mother. It was an interesting case, the Alicia Mae . He could tell his mother about it. Although he owed his client the duty to maintain the confidentiality of the client’s case and all communications between them, he knew he could tell Anna Weber. Her memory for recent events was nonexistent.
    She listened in silence as he told the story, but asked a lot of questions when he mentioned Hamburg. She remembered Hamburg. Growing up on its outskirts. The beauty of the city before the war. The devastation when it was bombed to a state of burning rubble by the Allies. The sense of loss and fear. The irresistible impulse to hide. The death of her husband. And that she had never returned.
    Weber seized the moment and asked her, ‘Mutti, tell me again how we came here on a ship.’
    The seeds for Weissdorn had been planted in 1936.
    Sidney Robey Leibbrandt was a man of broad shoulders and narrow intellect, quick with his fists but slow-witted, the perfect soldier for an operation with virtually no chance of success. His handlers’ assessment of him was that he was unintelligent and incapable of working in a team, but they valued his fanaticism, his unshakable belief in Adolf Hitler’s vision of Aryan dominance of the world.
    A man like him could do a lot of damage to the enemy.
    After