The Shadow Network, page 1
About the Author
DEBORAH SWIFT is a USA TODAY bestselling author of historical fiction, a genre she loves. As a child she enjoyed reading the Victorian classics such as Jane Eyre, Little Women, Lorna Doone and Wuthering Heights. She has been reading historical novels ever since, though she’s a bookaholic and reads widely – contemporary and classic fiction.
In the past, Deborah used to work as a set and costume designer for theatre and TV, so enjoys the research aspect of creating historical fiction, something she was familiar with as a scenographer. More details of her research and writing process can be found on her website www.deborahswift.com.
Deborah likes to write about extraordinary characters set against the background of real historical events.
Also by Deborah Swift
The Silk Code
UK
US
The Shadow Network
DEBORAH SWIFT
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2024
Copyright © Deborah Swift 2024
Deborah Swift asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © February 2024 ISBN: 9780008586836
Version: 2023-09-05
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Deborah Swift
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Note to Readers
Chapter 1: Berlin, 1938
Chapter 2: England, 1940
Chapter 3
Chapter 4: England, 1941
Chapter 5: Brandenburg, Germany, 1941
Chapter 6: Wavendon Tower, Bedfordshire, 1942
Chapter 7: England, 1942
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10: Milton Bryan, Bedfordshire
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22: A few weeks later
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
A Letter from Deborah Swift
Keep Reading …
Historical Notes
Selected Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Dear Reader …
About the Publisher
For Jean
fellow traveller to unpathed waters and undreamed shores
‘With the help of a clever persistent propaganda,
even heaven can be represented to the people as hell,
and the most wretched life as paradise.’
Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
Note to Readers
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Chapter 1
Berlin, 1938
Lilli tucked her scarf into her coat and braced herself against the chill of the November day. The examinations would start next week, so as she hurried down the steps from the main building of the university, she was still repeating the lines of Shakespeare under her breath.
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
The lines of the sonnet rang bitter-sweet after the cringing humiliation of losing her boyfriend Bren. Brendan Murphy – five years older, with rangy good looks and the easy confidence of a postgraduate student. He was an Irish student in Berlin, there to top up his German language skills, and they’d bonded over Goethe and Hermann Hesse.
Until Hilde, that was.
Even now, months later, as Lilli lugged her bag of books across the rain-wet compound, she was watching out for Bren and cursing Hilde Bollmann. Hilde, who’d swooped in with her blonde ponytail and flawless skin, and almost spirited Bren away from right under Lilli’s nose. But now Hilde had gone too, moved out of Germany, vanished like so many other students who were worried about the strange way Germany was going. But Bren had never rekindled his romance with Lilli, and it still hurt like toothache.
Lilli sighed, and hurried on, but seeing a crowd ahead, slowed to a crawling pace. Crowds were never good these days. Her path was blocked. She hesitated, fear uncoiling in her gut. The Brownshirts were always hanging around on the university steps and she’d learnt to side-step to avoid them. The warning came to her as a stench that seemed to swamp the street – harsh at the back of her throat like burning oil. Lilli had a quirk in her perception, something they called synaesthesia, and always felt atmosphere in colour and smell, just like she heard music in colour and shape.
Bracing herself, she strode forward. Today there were more of them, gathering like flies.
Best ignore them.
Further down the street, the Brownshirts were massing in smaller knots, staring at the girls who walked past. She wove swiftly between two parked cars to avoid them. The atmosphere was febrile, belligerent. She heard a tall, gangly boy make a ribald joke as she passed on the pavement. All girls suffered the butt of their attention. Ahead of her, two other young women were pushed into the road with shoves and shouts.
Lilli tightened her grip on her bag of books and walked on, her head up, but stony-faced, as if they didn’t exist.
‘I’d have that one,’ said the shortest youth in the group when she hurried by, head down, huddled into herself for protection.
One of the other lads laughed loudly, but then stifled it. He was about seventeen years old, she guessed, a lot younger than she was, but taller, with the swagger that comes from being in a gang. Lilli felt her shoulders tense, but lowered her eyes like the girl ahead of her. It wasn’t worth courting trouble. The low winter sun sliced between the buildings, dazzling her, and she hurried on with a hand shielding her face.
A boy with darting eyes and thick fleshy lips stuck out a foot, aiming to trip Mindel, the girl who was walking in front of her – a slim, dark-haired girl of about fourteen, whom Lilli knew from choir practice. Like her, Mindel wasn’t a member of the Bund, the League of German Girls. Mindel tried to dodge the boys’ attention, but another long-limbed boy stretched his foot out further so she stumbled and fell headlong, both arms out in front. The boy booted her in the ribs.
Lilli cringed at the thud as his boot connected, but instinctively stopped to help as the youths sniggered and jostled. One of them kicked again at Mindel, grabbed her notebook and taunted her, holding it high above his head, shouting, ‘Jump for it!’
‘Louts! Give it back!’ Lilli shouted.
Mindel snapped to her feet in an instant, scraping up her books. She kept her eyes to the ground and didn’t even try to get her notebook back, just dodged onwards, leaving it in her tormentor’s hands.
‘Ignorant swine,’ Lilli muttered under her breath.
‘Get her!’ a boy called.
Lilli shot sideways and ran, feeling someone grab her cardigan, but she kept running and it ripped from their hands. ‘Juden’, came the yell. Jews.
‘Are you all right?’ She caught up with Mindel around the corner. ‘Let me see your hands. Your knee’s bleeding.’
‘I know. Leave me alone. I just want to get home.’
‘Where do you live?’ Lilli asked, catching her by the arm.
‘Rosenstrasse. But I won’t go back there yet. They wait for me and throw stones. I’ll go to the bakery. Frau Brockdorf’s kind and will let me wait there, though her shop has hardly anything left in it now.’
‘Do you want a handkerchief for that graze?’
A shake of the head. ‘They always do it. They know my father’s house, and it’s too near the Nazi Party’s new Assembly Rooms. But there’s something different about them today. They’re bolder. They’ve never done that before, kicked me in plain sight.’
‘You’re sure you’ll be okay?’
‘Just a bruise.’ A nod and a wave before she shot away down the side street, but Lilli had felt her fear, like a shiver of blue-grey.
Lilli continued towards home, checking over her shoulder that none of the boys had followed her. As she arrived warily at her front door, she noticed several more of the Brownshirts loitering at the end of the street. They were holding sticks in their hands, a fact that made her insides turn liquid. They were facing away from her, thank goodness, as she silently prised open the gate at the front of the house and took out her key.
Her breath grew faster and shallower because she was aware they could turn to see her any moment. The back of her neck bristled as she unlocked the door. Once inside, she turned the key in the lock, wiped the sweat from her hands onto her skirt, and bounded breathlessly up the apartment steps to the first floor.
It was time to leave, like Hilde. She must tell Papa.
The door to their apartment was open as usual, and Papa was at his desk amid the metallic smell of solder, with the innards of a radio in front of him. An untidy pile of papers was stacked at his elbow.
He looked up distractedly. ‘That time already?’ He rubbed a hand through his hair, and then pinched the bridge of his nose where his glasses sat. ‘I haven’t been to the shops. I got involved.’
It was nothing new; he often forgot things. She peered over his shoulder at the calculations, pages of figures scrawled and crossed out; dozens of equations, like a language only he could understand, along with discarded diagrams of circuitry. To see him sitting at home like this made her sad.
‘Hello, Papa.’ She patted him on the shoulder. ‘There are Brownshirts outside,’ she said. ‘They look like trouble. Papa, we need to talk about leaving.’
‘Give me a minute while I finish this,’ he said.
She sighed, frustrated. She sensed change coming like an approaching wave, a roiling cloud like ink in water, yet Papa turned his back on it hoping it would go away. But the truth that stares you in the face has its own timing, and sometimes, it won’t wait to be heard.
‘Papa?’
‘In a minute.’
Still Papa refused to think it had come to this. She sat down next to him and peered at the wiring in the device he was working with. It was a Bakelite body with a single round speaker in the front. On the sideboard they had the official Nazi Volksempfänger radio, much lauded by Goebbels, and produced by a rival company. Her father was always wanting to improve on the design. The set in front of her, with its trailing wires, employed three vacuum tubes, which should make it fairly powerful.
‘Is it longwave?’ she asked him, used to these conversations about the insides of machines. She helped him in the long winter evenings, fascinated by the concept of invisible radio waves.
‘Mmhm. About 150 to 350 kilohertz.’
‘And what about the aerial?’
‘Three jacks, for antennae of different lengths, so we can optimise reception on the different frequency bands.’
‘There are Brownshirts loitering outside, Papa,’ she said again. ‘They tried to beat up Mindel. For nothing.’
‘Is the front door locked?’
She nodded and watched him take a small sharp-nosed pair of pliers to the wiring inside the radio. He just didn’t get it. She tapped a foot, frustrated that he didn’t pay more attention to the world outside. Most of his colleagues had gone, yet they were still here. A law in 1933 had made it illegal for any non-Aryan, specifically Jews, to be a professor or teacher in Germany and so fearing they would target him because he was married to a Jew, Papa had given up the university and gone to work at Blaupunkt, developing new radio receivers and headphones. But now, even Blaupunkt had, in their words, ‘let him go’.
‘We have to let you go,’ they’d said sadly, their faces not sad at all. They closed their doors to him despite his skill. So many scholars, and most of his colleagues with Jewish connections, had fled Germany.
Every day her instinct told her it was time to leave, but Papa was always too distracted, preferring to brush things under the carpet. Mama would have chivvied him. But Mama was gone, dead of cancer five years ago, and now they were alone in this sinking boat. Lilli knew the Nazis had started targeting what they called ‘Mischlinge’, those of mixed Jewish and Aryan heritage, for deportation, but Papa was sceptical.
‘I’m a good German citizen’, was Papa’s mantra. ‘German through and through, and you’re an exceptional student, the cream of your class.’ He thought now Mama was dead that the Jewish part of the family could be swept away, or ignored. Though he hadn’t joined the Party, and it terrified Lilli that he hadn’t.
She drew her chair nearer so she could hold the soldering iron. Maybe it would speed him up if she helped.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I can manage. Go get yourself some bread and cheese.’ Outside, shouting and the noise of a car horn. ‘Ignore it,’ he said. ‘Nothing to do with us.’
She picked up a plate, and went to the larder but the bread bin was empty.
‘Is there no bread?’ Papa called. He’d heard the clank of the bread bin lid. ‘Would you go across to Frau Kirchner, borrow a slice?’
‘I think we should lock the apartment door, Papa. Will you give me the key?’
‘In a minute. Just bob over to Frau Kirchner, would you?’
‘Haven’t you eaten, Papa?’ He would have forgotten again. Since her mother had died, food was always a little unpredictable; it was never the first thing on her father’s mind.
‘I don’t like to ask Frau Kirchner again,’ Papa continued, waving ink-stained hands, ‘but tell her I’ll return it when I get to the bank, all right?’
Lilli stepped out across the landing to knock on Frau Kirchner’s door.
As she passed across the landing, she saw from the window that a bigger crowd of Brownshirts had gathered at the end of the street. They were milling around, obviously waiting for something. A car was overturned there, its windows smashed.
She knocked insistently on Frau Kirchner’s door until she opened up. Frau Kirchner was a solid-looking woman of about forty years, dressed in a brown knitted twin-set and pleated skirt. The piano stood open near the door, for Frau Kirchner was a piano teacher and often she and Lilli would play and sing together. Papa was keen on her music; he said music was the sound of mathematics, but Lilli found it too stimulating, all the notes jangling in colours and shapes. She preferred to sing, where she could control it all.
Lilli asked Frau Kirchner politely for a bit of bread.
‘I can let you have the end of a loaf,’ Frau Kirchner said. ‘I baked yesterday with that sawdust they call flour. Wait, while I go and get it.’
A sudden bellow, shouts and thuds, crashing glass. Both of them looked to each other and rushed to the window. A gang of Brownshirts were breaking the windows opposite with their sticks. One aimed a kick at the remaining teeth of glass until it fell in.
‘Whose house is that?’ Lilli whispered, horrified.
‘The Kalinskys. She’s Polish. She used to have the milliner’s on the corner, before they …’
Frau Kirchner didn’t continue. There was no need. Lilli knew what she was going to say. Before they trashed it. The Juden sign was still scrawled over the door in yellow paint.
Neither of them could look away. A crowd of men were trying to shove past one another in their eagerness to force entry into the house. One of them, a fair-haired, skinny youth, was climbing over the windowsill, tearing a net curtain out of the way.
‘What are they trying to do?’ Lilli asked.
Frau Kirchner shook her head dumbly. The house opposite seethed with pushing men, until finally the Kalinskys were dragged out of the door. Herr Kalinsky gripped a suitcase to his chest. He’d been battered around the face, and blood dripped into one half-closed eye. The Brownshirts kept on hitting him, like a mule they were whipping into motion.
An excited red-faced youth dragged Frau Kalinsky out by the hair.
‘Leave us al—!’ she cried. But her words were quashed as four of the men threw her on the ground and raising their arms, beat her down until she curled into a ball.
‘What shall we do?’ Lilli whispered.
Frau Kirchner shook her head but didn’t move, her eyes fixed on Frau Kalinsky. ‘Nothing. We can’t get help. They’re like beasts, not men. Come away. It’s none of our business.’
None of our business.
