Death Has Deep Roots (3 page)

“Thousands of French girls did as much, I suppose.”

Thousands of French girls did as much,” agreed Nap. “I don’t think it makes it any less creditable. It certainly didn’t make it any less unpleasant for them when they were caught – as Vicky was.”

Nap paused for a moment and looked out of the breakfast-room window, over the sensible, sunlit, rose garden: and tried to re-create in his mind something of life as he had known it in France during those times: the hate and the fear, the hysterics and the exaggeration and the heroism.

“Here’s where we’ve got to be careful,” he said, “because things which happened at that time always seem, somehow, to get a bit twisted in the telling. From what I know of the way things were worked, I should imagine that Père Chaise’s farm was really a sort of flytrap. The old man was much too noisy to be a conspirator. You can bet your bottom dollar the Gestapo knew all about him. But they let him alone, for the time being, until something really worthwhile should turn up. And in August of 1943 it did turn up, in the form of a British agent – a young and very inexperienced agent, I’m afraid, called Wells – a Lieutenant Julian Wells. I expect the planners in London had their eye on the Basse Loire. It lay in the flank of the turning movement in Normandy which must already have been on their map boards. Quite a lot of agents were flown in. Some were lucky; some weren’t. Wells had been told that his first job was to contact the British officer who was running the district – a very tough and crafty character called Thoseby – Major Eric Thoseby.”

“Good Lord above,” said Mr. Rumbold, “not that schoolmaster.”

“That’s the one. You remember him?”

“Yes. I do. Good heavens! So that was the chap Wells was sent to contact.”

“Yes,” said Nap. “But he didn’t do it, that was just the trouble. He must have been dropped a bit off-course. He had to do the best he could for himself, and he holed up at the Père Chaise farm; he was there for about three weeks, hidden under a haystack, whilst the local Maquisards went to look for Thoseby. Unfortunately, before they could contact him – he happened to be across the Swiss border – the Gestapo descended on the farm and roped everyone in. Père Chaise and two other men were shot. Vicky, as being somewhat less deeply involved, was locked up whilst they made their minds up about her.”

“And Wells?”

“That’s just it,” said Nap. “We don’t know. After a raid of that sort the German policy was to keep the different prisoners separate. They could work on them better that way. One would believe the other had said things – and so on. Of course they told Vicky that they’d got Wells. They had a very good reason to think that they could influence her through him.”

“You mean?”

“I mean,” said Nap slowly, “that it soon became apparent that Vicky was going to have a child. Once she knew it was coming, she made no bones about it. She said it was Wells’s child. And to do her justice, she has stuck steadily to that story ever since.”

“One of them must have been a fast worker,” said Mr. Rumbold. “Two perfect strangers of barely three weeks’ acquaintance—”

“Well, do you know, I can believe that part of it easily enough,” said Nap. “They were both living under tension – a hothouse sort of life; these things were apt to happen much more quickly than they might in normal times.”

“And the Germans,” said Mr. Rumbold, “believing this, used threats about what they would do to Wells in order to get information out of this poor girl.”

“Good Lord, no.” Nap looked mildly at his father. “They could have got any blessed information they wanted out of her in five minutes, with a blowlamp. In any case, I don’t suppose she knew anything useful. As I said, she wasn’t deeply involved. The few actual Maquisard locations which she knew about would have been changed within half an hour of the news of her arrest. No, it was rather more than that. They wanted her to work
for
them. Then they would have released her and used her as a decoy. But if they were going to play that game they needed a good permanent hold over her. Hence Wells.”

“She never actually saw him in prison?”

“No. On one occasion, when she was getting difficult, they produced one of his boots, covered with blood—”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Nap. “I really don’t know… the gentle Gestapo I knew would have been more likely to have shown her one of his boots with the foot still in it. Even that wouldn’t have proved anything. You could fake a boot just as easily as you could fake a foot. On balance I’m inclined to think they did have him, but he came to pieces in their hands, so they buried him quietly. Anyway, nothing’s been seen of him since. Time went on, and in the end she had the child, actually in the Gestapo prison hospital, just before D-Day. I don’t suppose it was exactly like a high-class London nursing home, but I think they were reasonably efficient. It was a boy, called Jules – an afterthought for ‘Julian’ perhaps. Then D-Day happened – and she was moved back with a lot of other prisoners, to a place near Strasbourg. They didn’t take her into Germany. Might have been better if they had. You know what France was like during the last year of the war. The baby must have had a hell of a time. He was never very strong. Vicky’s one idea was to get hold of Major Thoseby. She had two reasons for this, she says. He knew about her work with the Resistance, and might have persuaded the British Army authorities to look after the baby. Also he might have known where Wells was. Anyway, that’s her version of it, and it’s got to be borne in mind, in view of what happened later. She never caught up with Thoseby. As soon as his part of France fell he was flown back to London and he got an immediate job on the War Crimes Commission and spent most of the next three years in Germany.

“After the war things didn’t improve much in France, and Vicky often thought of coming to England. She speaks quite good English, and she still hoped to find Thoseby. Then, in that very lean and very bitter spring of 1947 something did happen – it was sad, but in a way it made things easier. The child died. Vicky took what money she had, wangled her permit and came over and began looking for a job. There she struck oil almost at once – a man called Sainte who came from the same Basse Loire province. She didn’t know him – but he happened to have known Père Chaise. He was running a hotel on Pearlyman Street, near Euston. He knew something of what Vicky had been through – and gave her a job and looked after her. It wasn’t entirely charity. She worked hard for her keep. The French take a pretty realistic view of what constitutes a good day’s work for a woman.”

“Not a bad thing, in the circumstances,” said Mr. Rumbold.

“No. It didn’t give her too much time to think about things. Any spare moments she did get were spent pestering the War Office for news of Thoseby – and Wells.”

“Judging from the upshot,” said Mr. Rumbold dryly, “she anyway succeeded in contacting Major Thoseby.”

“In fact,” said Nap, “Thoseby found her. The French run an organisation in London – the Société de Lorraine – which keeps an eye on all the French who, for one reason or another, decided to stay on here after the liberation. It’s a sort of offshoot of their Embassy, and it has an office in Charles Street. Thoseby called in at this office when he was on a visit from Germany. He saw the name of Victoria Lamartine and asked the clerk about her. The clerk then remembered that Vicky had been inquiring about a Major Thoseby, did an unusually lucid bit of putting two and two together for a bureaucrat and turned up her address, the upshot of which was that Thoseby wrote to Sainte and booked a room at his hotel for the night of March fourteenth. He wrote on March twelfth, but I gather there was some difficulty at first in fitting the time in, as Thoseby was due back in Germany on the sixteenth and he was busy all day at the War Office. However, that’s the way he arranged it, and he wrote this letter to Sainte, who, of course, told Vicky. On the fourteenth Thoseby telephoned to say he would be at the hotel sometime that same evening.”

Nap turned over the papers.

“Various versions of what happened on the evening of March fourteenth can be found in the depositions at the police court—”

“All right,” said his father. “I’ll read these now.”

And read them he did, from beginning to end, without any comment, whilst Nap sat on the window seat and smoked his pipe and thought about a number of things.

“This case has been remarkably well cobbled,” said his father at last. “That’ll be Claudian Summers. He started life as a Chancery draftsman and he’s got a most damnably logical mind.”

Nap nodded his agreement.

“You know,” went on his father, “there’s only one person who could have done this.”

“And that’s—?”

“Your young lady – Miss Lamartine.”

“That’s rather what Spence and Company thought,” said Nap, “and I rather gather that’s why they’ve had the case taken away from them.”

“When you say that,” said Mr. Rumbold gently, “you display to my mind a misunderstanding of the role of a legal adviser. I am prepared to take on this case, because I think that I ought to help anyone who went through what Miss Lamartine did, particularly when it was the result of her efforts – even indirect efforts – to help this country. Also I happen to be old – fashioned enough to think that a woman in distress ought to be helped. Especially when she is a foreigner and about to be subjected to the savage and unpredictable caprices of the English judicial system—”Nap had noticed before, in one or two men of his father’s age, a certain conditioning of their adjectives, the result, no doubt, of five years of Churchillian oratory—“but you must not imagine that we are playing the heroes of this melodrama to Spence’s villain. The only real difference between Spence and me is that I happen to be prepared to do some work on this case, whilst he is not. He is quite plainly prepared—” Mr. Rumbold ruffled over the depositions—“to go to the jury on what amounts to an admission of guilt with a plea in extenuation. Now I – assisted by you, Nap – am going to contest every step of the way. We’re going to fight a long, dirty blackguarding campaign in which we shall use every subterfuge that the law allows, and perhaps even a few that it doesn’t – you can’t be too particular when you’re defending. If we can’t get witnesses of our own we must shake up their witnesses. If we can’t shake them, we must discredit them. We’ll have to brief the counsel best suited to such tactics—”

“They’ve already got Poynter.”

“That old windbag,” said Mr. Rumbold. “If we mean business it would be about as much good putting him up against Claudian Summers as it would be for you or me to bowl legs breaks to Bradman with a ping-pong ball. That’s exactly what I meant when I said that they weren’t prepared to do any real work. If you look at the paper you’ll see Poynter’s got two more cases in the same list. And no doubt he’ll find time to do all three of them, the way he prepares them. No. If we mean business, there’s only one man for our money and that’s Macrea.”

“Would he take it?”

“I’ve already had a word with his clerk on the telephone. Just on the chance. I think he’ll take it. I hope he will. There’s no one I’d rather have with me in a roughhouse. We’ll get him to ask for a postponement. In the circumstances Arbuthnot can hardly refuse it.”

“Wouldn’t it be better still to get an adjournment?”

“I’d thought of that. But I don’t think these adjournments do a case any good. Bound to create prejudice. Besides I can’t honestly think of anyone I’d rather take the case in front of than Arbuthnot. He’s strict, but very very fair. And he does decide cases on facts, which is a good deal more,” Mr. Rumbold added libelously, “than you can say for all of ’em.”

“We’re going to have to work fast.”

“Fast and hard,” agreed Mr. Rumbold. “You and me and anyone else we can rope in. What we must have is facts. Good hard provable facts. There’s nothing here but wind and water.” He shook Mr. Spence’s dossier angrily in the air. “Nothing solid at all.”

“Where do we start?”

“We’ll start with the girl herself. We’ll both go and have a word with her tomorrow afternoon – I want to spend most of the morning with Macrea. We shall have to do something about guaranteeing his fee, too. What’s the present arrangement?”

“I gather that Spence’s costs were being paid by Vicky’s employer, M. Sainte. I also gather that he wasn’t a particularly rich man and funds were running a bit low.”

“Which accounts, no doubt, for his lack of enthusiasm,” suggested Mr. Rumbold uncharitably. “Well, we won’t worry too much about our fees, but we shall have to fix Macrea.”

“I’ve got an idea about that,” said Nap. “If it comes off, it might solve the financial difficulties. There’s a sort of M.I.5. fund – a very privy purse – for cases like this. I know the chap at the War Office who might be able to pull the strings.”

“Splendid,” said Mr. Rumbold.

He had no objection to pulling any number of strings provided they worked in his direction.

Mr. Hargest Macrea had his chambers on the east side of King’s Bench Walk. He was their real, though not their titular head. His name appeared no higher than fourth on the long list in the hallway; but Sir Ernest Puckeridge, the expert on Privy Council Appeals, now devoted most of his time to the cultivation of tomatoes under glass; Judge Trimble had long ago sunk into well – merited oblivion by way of the County Court Bench; whilst Mr. Barter – Shaw (who confined himself to written opinions on canon law) had been quite mad for years.

Macrea was not a specialist. If called upon to define his pursuits he would have said that he specialised in advocacy. For a quarter of a century he had been bickering profitably with judges of every type from the rare heights of the House of Lords down to the earthy depths of the Land Tribunals. Be the going firm and the hedges stiff he had never yet refused to join in the hunt. He was the possessor of a Scots accent, which was apt to become more marked as the hearing grew more acrimonious (for he had early discovered that there was nothing which annoyed the opposition more than to have the name of their client repeatedly and markedly mispronounced). But his greatest single weapon was his monocle. It was a monocle of peculiar distortion and its application had more than once unnerved a recalcitrant witness. In addition he possessed a truculent intellect and a remarkable memory. Mr. Rumbold had been sending him briefs for more than twenty years.