Chapter 44
Lizzie and Hannah hurried into the station, which was much the same as the previous night when Lizzie saw the Kaufmanns off, and Herr Vogel sealed his fate by stalking her. He would still be alive if he hadn’t been so devoted to his sinister volunteer role.
As they crossed the grand concourse, acting as naturally as two female agents who had just committed a cold-blooded assassination could, Lizzie found herself wondering what Herr Vogel’s civil servant job entailed.
She had presumed he was some kind of low-level bureaucrat.
For many ordinary people with dull jobs, wartime brought with it the rare opportunity to glory hunt.
The block warden had taken it too far, and it had cost him his life.
Lizzie’s heart thumped as a rail guard checked their papers, but he waved them through. ‘The last train leaves in two minutes. You’d better hurry.’
On the platform, Lizzie recalled Liesel’s sad eyes when they parted.
She prayed the little Jewish girl, and the family were safely in Bern with Hildegard’s mother by now.
Like the others she had helped escape from occupied France, she realised with a dull ache in her chest that she might never hear whether they had made it.
The chances were she wouldn’t see Hildegard or Liesel again.
Smoke and steam billowed through the icy air, and slush trailed in on people’s footwear, melting into the ground like a thin grey carpet.
The platform was poorly lit, and Lizzie watched as last-minute passengers rushed to catch the train.
The shrill sound of a whistle made her jump as they boarded the locomotive, and a loud announcement informed them that the train for Stuttgart was about to leave and the doors were closing.
The stragglers hurried to the doors, and the soldiers’ boots squelched on the stone floor. Lizzie tensed as they scrambled next to her, but she reminded herself: the soldiers were travelling to their posts, not searching for them.
A Gestapo thug stood to one side, studying the passengers as they boarded, but the door closed before his gaze moved to her.
Her senses were on overdrive as she turned to Hannah. ‘Let’s find seats.’
They pushed through the crowded corridor, clutching their small cases, and a freezing draught rushed through the train as passengers opened and closed the doors, which made a hissing sound.
A strong smell of coal smoke hung in the air, and Lizzie saw weary faces in the yellowish light.
The passengers were exhausted before the journey had begun. It was going to be a hard night.
They eventually found two seats next to each other in a third-class compartment, stashed their cases overhead and sat down on the benches.
They were lucky to get seats at all, and Lizzie rested against the hard back as the fatigue of the past few days caught up with her.
Her whole body ached, and she was still in shock from the brutal incident with Herr Vogel, but she was too tired to process it.
The train shot forward, and Lizzie’s eyes opened in the harsh yellow light, and she squinted. She’d dozed off without realising, but Hannah was alert and watching closely as others took their seats and the compartment filled.
They slid out of the station and rumbled along the tracks as the train gathered speed, passing factories and buildings with broken windows.
A bombed apartment block caught Lizzie’s eye; half of it still standing and the rest a heap of rubble.
The moon was barely visible in the black, starless sky.
It was fortunate she wasn’t relying on an aircraft to pick her up, guided to the rendezvous point by moonlight like on previous missions.
Lizzie had never visited Switzerland, so this would mark another first for her in her work with the SOE.
The last thing she glimpsed before the conductor pulled down the blackout blinds was the fluttering of a fresh snow shower.
He checked their tickets methodically whilst Lizzie hoped the snow wouldn’t slow the train down.
They had to make it to Basel by early the following morning, or they would be sitting ducks once Herr Vogel’s murder was discovered.
She imagined Frau Fischer serving breakfast and going to search for him when he didn’t appear.
He was always at breakfast before Lizzie and Hannah, so his absence would be immediately noticeable.
The Berlin-Basel route was direct. At least they had that in their favour, barring weather-related catastrophes.
The landlady probably wouldn’t find his body in the attic until sometime later, after the lodgers left for work and she could get away for more than a minute.
She would see he hadn’t slept in his bed, but when might she enter their room?
Only then would she discover he had been murdered and logically conclude it was her war widow lodgers who had done it.
Lizzie regretted not breaking into his room and ruffling the bedclothes, so it looked as though he had spent the night there and been called out first thing. It might have bought them more time before Frau Fischer thought to report him missing if she hadn’t stumbled upon him first.
Lizzie explored numerous scenarios to keep her mind active so she wouldn’t drift off again.
Once they were in the depths of the countryside with no stations in sight, they would take it in turns to close their eyes, but for now that luxury was one that they couldn’t afford.
High-ranking Nazi and government officials and soldiers filled the other compartments, with some spilling into the corridors, so they must be on their guard.
Lizzie touched her steel knitting needles, one of which she had cleaned and returned to her pocket.
Now she extracted them with the ball of drab grey wool.
When she was in London planning for the Berlin mission, in-between intensive German language and ethnic German culture classes, the knitting ruse had come to her suddenly and she realised it was a clever way to hold a weapon in her hand whilst performing an innocuous task no one would suspect.
Knitting for the German army was a patriotic duty, and Lizzie had already knitted several squares for a blanket drive Frau Fischer told her about that was organised by the Nazis for soldiers on the Eastern Front.
A young woman knitting on the train. What could be more mundane?
She started a new square and after concentrating for a few minutes whilst she cast on, she glanced around, then sank back in the hard seat and let the steady rhythm of the clicking needles soothe her.
She tried not to think of Herr Vogel’s vacant, bulging eyes and awkward position after they heaved him under the bed, but with every movement of the knitting needles she wondered which needle was the murderous one.
At one point her hands started shaking as she relived the second when she plunged the needle into his flesh at close range.
Repeated SOE training bootcamps, as she developed her skills and experience, had prepared her for close-quarter combat, so she hadn’t hesitated, but the reckoning always came after the event.
No matter how much she told herself she had done what she had to do, visions of her dead foe haunted her mercilessly.
The wartime secrets she kept carried a heavy price, and Berlin was no different.
With every mission, she lost more of her innocence.
Since the first time they dropped her into occupied France as a novice in Reims, she had quickly learnt it was rare to achieve her objectives without having to kill someone who stood between her and the success of her mission.
If they had let Herr Vogel haul them into the Gestapo for questioning, she wouldn’t have his blood on her hands, but it would have meant the end for her and Hannah, and for Ingrid Becker, Mother Clara, the convent, the forger, and Hildegard too.
More significantly for the war, it would mean the latest critical intelligence extracted by the courageous Ingrid Becker and Hannah, who smuggled it out of the ministry, would never reach London.
That could cost them a far greater price—an untold number of civilian casualties if the new rockets were mass-produced at Peenemünde, which was the Nazis’ plan.
The flying bombs sounded dangerous enough, but the rockets were on another scale of devastation.
The intelligence stated that they would fly and fall faster than sound and hit before anyone knew they were coming.
No siren or air-raid system could save them.
Resuming knitting, her hands steadier, she pushed the memory of the German’s shocked expression firmly out of her mind and focused her thoughts on stopping Hitler’s secret weapons. That was why she sacrificed her peace of mind, and it was worth it.
The memories of the Blitz, which started shortly after Lizzie arrived in London from Jersey in 1940, would never leave her. The attacks raining down on London every night were something she was certain would hover in her consciousness forever.
The train rumbled off into a siding, which was a regular feature of wartime and had happened frequently on the route to Berlin when they gave way for military trains.
Once they started moving again, Lizzie whispered to Hannah to get some sleep, and she would keep watch, but Hannah said she was too wide awake, and Lizzie could go first. The exhaustion had caught up with her, and she laid her knitting down, and within minutes she was asleep.
Her dreams were anything but peaceful as she pictured the Gestapo hunting them down and boarding the train to search for them.
Lizzie’s eyes opened when she heard the train screech, and they lurched to a sudden stop. With the blackout blinds shut, they could only guess at what each stop was for and hope for an announcement.
‘What’s happening?’ she murmured.
Hannah shrugged.
Lizzie looked at her watch. 4. a.m. They had been travelling for hours, but still had a long way to go before they made it to the Swiss border.
The clock was against them, and every delay meant they could be caught before they reached their safe haven.
There were no refreshments or food on the train, and Lizzie’s stomach rumbled, and her throat was dry and scratchy.
A voice boomed over the speaker that they had reached Stuttgart and would have a brief stop.
Lizzie watched, her eyes foggy from sleep, as passengers navigated the corridor to disembark, and others boarded.
She calculated they were already running several hours late because of the frequent delays to allow military and freight trains to take precedence, as well as the snowy conditions.
The guard checked the newcomers’ tickets but only glanced at Lizzie and Hannah, remembering them from Berlin.
Hannah said, ‘If we move soon, we should cross into Basel by about 7. a.m. They both knew the significance of the hour. If luck was on their side, no one would discover Vogel’s body for another hour, which would give them plenty of time to get their papers checked and get across the border.
‘Once we reach Basel, we will still have to make it out of the German station,’ Lizzie whispered in Hannah’s ear.
Hannah pulled a confused expression.
‘Even though the station is in Basel, it’s still under German jurisdiction.’
Hannah nodded, grasping the nuance, and Lizzie considered the difficulties that still lay ahead.
The journey seemed to roll on endlessly, and she was grateful the SOE had briefed her in such detail on the unusual location of the station, or she would have assumed they had already made it into Switzerland when they arrived.
It would be a simple mistake to make, and one that could cost them their lives. Lizzie drifted off to sleep again later, and when the train jerked to a stop and she awoke, daylight permeated the blinds and the announcement said they had reached Badischer Bahnhof.
Gathering their luggage and checking that they had left nothing on their seats, they walked towards the door.
Lizzie’s stomach clenched as fear gripped her, and she told herself to breathe.
They had almost made it, but despite a night of being surrounded by German soldiers and Nazi officials, this last hurdle could be the most dangerous.
Badischer Bahnhof was their gateway to freedom.
No matter how much Lizzie tried to calm down, her thumping heart warned her of the imminent danger.
Would a German border guard already have been alerted to look out for the war widows and have their full descriptions?