Cargo of Lies

Kapten Erik Lindqvist was counting crates in the rain when a docker came up his gangway alone.

It was October 1942, in German-held Cherbourg. For thirty-one years Lindqvist had signed what he counted, counted what he signed, carried any cargo for whoever paid for it under the neutral flag painted on his ship's side. The docker pressed a folded note into his glove. Minutes later he lay dead on the quay, shot forty metres from the gangway.

The note knew what Lindqvist had done in Danzig in 1939. It asked him to carry one man to Sweden: a German scientist with a failing heart, whose mathematics the Reich meant to turn into weapons for cities.

Lindqvist refused. Days later he sailed with the scientist folded into a crate in his hold - beside a passenger whose papers were too complete, a harbour officer's warning about drifting mines, eleven men who trusted him. One of them had already pointed the Germans at his ship.

From the quays of Cherbourg through the fogs of the North Sea, the minefields of the Kattegat, the frozen free port of Malmö, every flag lied to every other flag. Every boarding party knew where to knock. The only honest thing aboard was the ship's own trim.

Cargo of Lies is a story of neutrality as the lie a decent man tells himself - of what it costs, in the fourth winter of the war, to stop telling it.