Captain. Served RMP Hounslow HQ and Tidworth Garrison.
Left Army in 1989.
‘He went into Special Investigation Branch. He was chasing squaddies for petty pilfering, for being drunk louts on Saturday nights, for flogging equipment out of the stores. They made him up to a commission. He would have been a cuckoo in the mess, too old for his junior rank, never works. I saw him at Tidworth camp… I was told he was very cold and very bitter, poor company. Actually, he was ostracized, ignored like he didn’t exist. There had been a touch of a scandal the month before, a major who was popular had a finger pointed for pocketing a very small amount of money. Mantle had played it by the book, and the regiment involved thought it should have been handled internally. Mantle went for prosecution. He’d gained that awful bloody sense of duty that afflicts bitter men, everything lined up against him. When the downsizing started at the end of the Cold War, he was top of the list.’
Civilian occupation: Social Worker 1990/1994. Unemployed 199411996. Solicitor’s clerk, qualifying as Legal Executive, 1996…
‘He came out. He would have been a lost man. He would have thought that the Army had rejected him, and he’d have been right. He worked with juvenile offenders, car thieves, yobs, but to him they’d have been disadvantaged by the system. A police officer in Thames Valley told me about him. Then he was married, a very wealthy woman. She died. Don’t expect me to score points. He would have crumpled. He went right off the rails, went downhill, lived rough… He was lifted out of the gutter by the solicitors who had handled his late wife’s affairs. Outwardly he’ll have pulled himself together. Inwardly he’ll have blamed the world, every symbol of authority, for what has happened to him.’
Status: Married Elizabeth (Libby) Harris (nee Thompson), divorcee, 1994. No children. Died 1996.
‘That was bad luck. Up to then, his marriage, he’d seemed like one of those men who just couldn’t make it with women. No girl-friends before. One plunge, and again the failure. He has no one to love, and no one to love him. At his age, now, he’s left on the shelf. As a substitute, he will attach himself to any cause and to any unfortunate that happens along…’
The city had been the gateway to the world. But the gate of Rostock was now rotten and decayed. In medieval times, under the same grey-black clouds of late winter, Rostock had been the trading gateway to the Baltic but the Hanseatic League had fallen apart under the spite of war and been rebuilt. It had been destroyed again by the grey-orange tongues of flame in the fire of three centuries ago.
The great churches and the university and the timbered homes of merchants had risen again in Rostock and then collapsed, lost, under the incendiaries of the bombers flown from Britain to target the shipyards and the submarine pens beside the grey blue of the sea.
The Soviet Army had come. On the coat tails of the Soviets had been the Party, the German Communists, the Stasi and the lorry convoys bringing the grey dull concrete for rebuilding the shipyards. Rostock was once more the gateway.
All crashed down again, as surely as if the bombers had returned to the city sprinkled with grey-white snow. The bureaucrats and business men had travelled from Bonn in the wake of ‘re-association’, from Kiel and Hamburg and Bremen. They spoke of ‘self-determined democratic renewal’, and for every ten jobs in the shipyards they took nine men and threw them on the refuse tip of unemployment. In the grey, tired and suffering city, fragile hope again fell, as it had through history.
Each morning of late winter the grey-brown mist was settled on the Warnow river that split old Rostock from new Rostock. The city, the people of Rostock, suffered again, sullen and hostile to the disasters brought by strangers, as they had been through history.
Under the cloud bank, by the sea, in the mist, spattered with snow, the city struggled for survival.
The city, Rostock, its people, would fight to hold the little they had. Each man for himself in the grey cold jungle. It was a bad place for strangers who came to throttle the little that was left, as it had always been.
She heard the key in the door. He had been gone a week. He had not telephoned her.
She sat in the comfortable chair, new, and watched the television, new, and slipped her feet into her shoes, new. The programme on the television was a game show, new, imported from America. She switched the programme off with the remote control, new… Everything around Eva Krause was new. The house in the refurbished terrace beside the Petrikirche was new for her.
In their generosity, they had allowed her to choose her new clothes and had provided the money, but everything else around her had been chosen by them, by the man from Munich and by the little Jewish shit, as if Dieter and Eva Krause were not permanent but only on trial. If Dieter failed in what they wanted of him, a removal van would come and carry away everything that was new and provide it for the next manipulated man and his family, and the house would be closed to them, locks changed.
Eva Krause stood. She smoothed her dress and touched the styling of her hair. She tidied the magazines.
He came into the living room. They had been married for fifteen years, the wedding a week after she had passed her vetting, after he had been told she was suitable. She gazed at his face. He had been told that, as a full-time official of the Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund in the shipyard, she was acceptable as the wife of a Stasi officer. He came across the room. She saw the tiredness, and she saw the scars. He bent to kiss her and the thickness of his trimmed beard brushed her chin.
She twisted her face away so that his lips, beside the raked scars, touched her cheek and not her mouth. They had been equals, she in the trade union office at the shipyard, he at the headquarters of the Staatssicherheitsdienst on August-Bebel Strasse; they were not equal now because there was no job for a trade unionist in the castrated shipyard. She had only the money that he gave her, that they gave him. The scars were alive, knitting angrily, raw dark red. Now that she no longer had a position of importance, she had the time to manicure her nails. She understood the scratch scars on his face, either side of his mouth. Her nails used to be pared short: now she had the time to grow them, shape them.
‘A good trip, a good journey?’
He would not try to kiss her again. He looked into her eyes.
‘You were made welcome, you met new friends?’
His eyes seemed to yearn for her, not wanting love but comfort. ‘The one who made you welcome, why did she scratch your face, Dieter? Was that part of the entertainment provided for an honoured guest? But did the young woman not like you, Dieter?’
He turned from her. He had the palms of his hands against the wall beside the oil painting of the nude bathers on the beach at Rugen Island. They would mark the clean paint.
She no longer taunted. She spat the accusation: ‘Is that the life when you go with them? Do they find you whores? Were you too clumsy for the bitch? Did you come too early for her? Couldn’t you do it for her? Does the Jew have a whore? Does Raub? Or is it only Doktor Krause who must be amused when he goes to talk of Pyotr Rykov, his friend? How will it be when you come back from America? Will you be more marked?’
He lifted his head. He shouted to the ceiling, ‘You do not understand.’
‘I understand that some whore, a bitch, has scratched your face.
Did you pay extra for that? Did they pay extra? Do we have, from
England, presents to compensate for your time with a whore?
What, Dieter, with their generosity, have you brought us?’
‘There was no whore. I have brought you nothing.’
‘Nothing? No rubbish from duty free, no trinket from the airport, nothing? Could you not go to the shops because you were too busy with whores? You promised Christina -,
‘If you let me tell you-’