Early One Morning (23 page)

Williams had to be careful in Paris for other reasons, too. As a healthy man in his late thirties he was eligible for working in the Reich. His papers proclaimed him as an electrical engineer, a reserved occupation, especially when so many factories were being hit by allied bombing or, more rarely, sabotage. Even so, one false move during a routine check and such niceties could be forgotten and he could be heading east. He slowed as he came past the gushing lock gates and into the wide Basin La Villette. An elderly couple sat on the benches on the Quai de la Seine, throwing a few precious crumbs to the pigeons.

A little cluster of teenage girls, their wooden clogs clacking ferociously to the rhythm of their gossip, hurried by. The same noise could be heard all over Paris—the Wehrmacht had taken the nation’s entire leather supply, and decent shoes now only appeared for special occasions. At the far end of the Quai a lone woman studied a magazine—sunglasses, hair tied back, wearing a jacket and skirt made from thick felt-like material that were fashionable, despite their unsuitability for the summer weather.

Twenty metres away he slowed, unable to believe what he was seeing, then remembered himself. Don’t act surprised. Do not draw attention to yourself. He strode up and uttered his part of the pre-arranged greeting.

‘Mam’selle. I believe you have a bicycle for sale.’

Rose Miller looked up over her glasses. ‘Yes. Would you like a ride?’

‘I’d prefer to know how much first.’

‘Sit down and we can discuss a price.’

Williams quickly took his place beside her and whispered, ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘We had some accidents at Ringway. Terribly short of people this month.’

‘But you … if you are caught …’

She pointed to her brooch, a green emerald set in an arrangement of gold leaves and he understood that, somehow, it was lethal. Her L pill. ‘Listen, Bodington has been over twice.’

‘Bodington?’

‘Nick Bodington. Buckmaster’s deputy. Knows Paris from before the war. If
he
can chance it, so can I.’

Williams was unconvinced. It seemed like unnecessary bravado. Rose put a hand on his knee, briefly, as if to reassure him.

‘Besides, I needed to see what it is like. Changed, hasn’t it?’ She waved a hand to indicate the whole of Paris. ‘Even since you came over. How can I do my job unless I really know what conditions are like? You can’t beat first-hand experience.’

‘All right, all right. You are here now. Listen, I’ve changed my mind. I need a radio operator.’

Rose nodded. ‘You’ll have to wait. As I said, we are desperately short. The courier system is still working, obviously.’

‘For the moment,’ said Williams. ‘I think it’s time to change.’

‘Have you contact with any other groups. Prosper?’

He shook his head. He had heard of one group who met in cafés in central Paris who occasionally lapsed into English. Maurice told him they were being watched, hoping to snare others. If that was Prosper, Williams wanted no part of it. ‘So why are you here?’

‘I need a recce done. Something funny is going on. On the railways. Some trains heading east are stopping at a factory at St Just. You know it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a chemical works. I need to know what’s going on.’

‘Is that it?’ he asked, disappointed. ‘You came all this way to tell me that?’

Rose snapped. ‘Yes that’s it. Except I want you to film it.’

‘Film? With what?’

‘I have the equipment. I will show you. And afterwards Robert—he’s to come back with me.’

He felt a sudden panic at losing his friend. ‘What? Why?’

‘Training. See if we can make him a better radio man than you.’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘Not that it will be very difficult.’

Some way down the towpath a pair of German officers appeared, the familiar muddy green identifying them as Wehrmacht.

‘Are you in order?’ asked Williams, using the now automatic shorthand.

Rose nodded.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Claudette Duclos.’

They stood to walk casually away from the Germans, who seemed simply out for a stroll. But you could never tell. ‘What’s your cover?’

‘Typically French,’ Rose smiled, and stood on tip-toe to kiss his cheek. ‘You’re a married man, and I’m your mistress.’

Rose Miller spread the small rigid attaché case stamped SNCF out on the table and went through the mechanism once more. Outside a ferocious summer storm raged; raindrops like lead pellets rattled the windows, and low thunder sporadically underpinned it.

Rose, Robert and Williams had before them a selection of weapons, including a new Colt .45 auto that Williams had bagged as his, and three Sten guns plus Bakelite limpet mines, pencil sticks, plastic explosive. Behind them Chiquita, Robert’s Portuguese maid who had finally come back to work for him after reaching Lyons and getting stranded there during the exodus, was preparing a chicken stew with a stringy bird she had managed to barter from a nearby farm. She didn’t bat an eyelid at the hardware being tossed about.

Rose pointed at the concealed camera. ‘Focus, about fifteen feet. It’s a fixed lens, wide angle. All you do is set the aperture according to the amount of light. Trigger here. Point the case at what you want to film. Load and unload in this bag here.’ She held up the black velvet sack

‘How noisy?’ asked Robert.

Rose shrugged. ‘The case has been blimped. Soundproofed,’ she added when she saw the quizzical look on their faces. ‘I also have a new poem code. We are changing all of them. I know you don’t like it, Williams, but when you get an operator, I want you to use this. Not very cheery, but they are far less likely to know it than the Yeats you chose.’

The poems were the grids upon which the messages could be coded and decoded. The Germans knew this, and were aware that some poems were more popular than others. So the more obscure the better—one chap in SOE codes was even writing his own, although he was having trouble keeping up with demand, his muse not always working to the exact period of full moons. She cleared her throat and began to recite. ‘Sweet sister death has gone debauched today—’

The kitchen door flew open and crashed back on its hinges, making Chiquita jump. Williams pushed back his chair and levelled the Colt at the doorway. Eve, wet and bedraggled, stood there, eyes blazing, surveying the scene before her. Chiquita rushed over and eased her out of her coat. Williams looked at his watch. He should have met her at the station. He began to apologise but was cut off by the torrent of words spat at him.

‘You know what I heard in Normandy? Oh, the dogs are fine by the way, Will, thanks for asking. Last week the Germans raided the Leroux house. The son had a radio on the table. So they shot him. Shot the mother. Carted the daughters off to Christ knows where. You sit here with this pile of shit in plain view and you don’t post a look-out …’

Rose said. ‘I’m Claudette—’

But Eve hadn’t finished. She strode over to Rose. ‘I can guess who you are. These two idiots spent ten years trying to get themselves killed on the racetrack. Then you come along with your half-baked secret war. And they say, oh, how wonderful. An even more dangerous game to play. You, of course, think they are doing this for England and France.’ Eve picked up the Colt and flung it at the window. They ducked as it crashed through the glass and into the shrubbery.

Williams glared at her then turned back to Rose. ‘Finish giving me the new code.’

‘Now?’

‘Now.’

Rose cleared her throat. ‘Sweet sister death has gone debauched today and stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence—’

‘Strumpet?’ asked Robert distractedly as he watched Eve pirouette towards the doorway, her arms outstretched in some wild theatrical gesture. He wondered if she had been drinking. Perhaps that Normandy cider.

‘Strumpet,’ confirmed Rose.

‘As in tart,’ offered Eve.

Rose ignored her. ‘With strumpet confidence, makes no coy veiling of her appetite but leers from you to me with all her parts discovered.’

They jumped again as the door slammed once more. Robert touched Williams’ arm. ‘Better go after her, Will.’

Williams, embarrassed by the wilful display, said, ‘Let her stew.’

Rose got to her feet. ‘She’ll catch her death. I’ll go.’

She opened the door and blanched at the driving rain hitting her face. The wind wrapped something round her foot. A blouse. Rose followed the trail of discarded clothing, carefully picking up shoes, skirt and underwear as she went, squinting into the blackness until a flash of lightning illuminated in stark blue-grey, the chilled flesh of Eve, standing naked looking up to the heavens, a smile on her face, imagining it was ten, twelve years ago and all she had to do in life was disrobe now and then for a nice old man to paint her.

Eve was aware of someone to her side and looked around, surprised to see Rose. She looked the woman carefully up and down in grudging admiration, and said quietly, ‘He’s mine. I don’t care who you are. Touch him and I’ll rip your guts out.’

Before Rose could give any sort of reassuring reply Eve snatched the bundle of clothing from her hands and marched inside, leaving her standing, wondering what she had just witnessed, as rivulets of water streamed down her face and into her open mouth.

L
AKE
S
ENLITZ
, O
CTOBER
2001

D
EAKIN COULD TELL
the old woman was tired now. She sat slumped in the canvas chair while yet another body shrouded in black rubber was taken away. She had promised the police a full and frank statement, and they were happy with that. Nobody wanted to detain a fragile old woman about crimes that may or may not have been committed fifty-odd years previously.

The technician handed her a tightly wrapped box containing the rusty canister. ‘There is a plastic film over the label, which should protect it from further degradation, but I’ve taken photographs as well, just in case.’

‘Good man. Thank you.’

She glanced up at Deakin and caught the look on his face. ‘You have a question?’

‘We all have a million questions. Such as what are you going to do with that?’ He pointed at the box containing the cylinder.

Oh, finish off a few things. Loose ends, you know. Been nagging at me all these years.’

‘About Williams?’

‘And the others.’

‘How did he end up in the lake?’

‘All in good time, Deakin, all in good time.’

The first heavy drops of rain splattered around them and Deakin looked up at the black sky. ‘We should be going.’

Rose stood. ‘I have one last thing to do. Put that in the car will you?’

Deakin took the package and placed it in the boot of the hire car while, heart in mouth, he watched Rose struggle down to the shoreline, stepping gingerly over the rough stones, any one of them capable of breaking her thin, brittle ankles. Deakin said his goodbyes to Warner, promising him a full report back in London, and waited for her to make the journey back, relieved when she reached solid ground. Exhausted by the effort, she gratefully took his arm. Deakin looked down and saw the Carrier watch was missing from her wrist.

A
UGUST
–
S
EPTEMBER
1942

W
ILLIAMS CREPT UP
the stairs and into the spare bedroom, tiptoed up behind Eve as she darned a stocking and put his hands over her eyes. It was two days since her little exhibition. Robert had billeted Rose with Madame Lethias and gone off to visit his mother. Williams and Eve were alone, something everyone seemed to think was a good idea.

‘You don’t know what it’s like, do you?’

She grabbed his wrists and pulled the fingers from her face and turned, the mad anger no longer in her eyes. ‘To have your stomach knotted all the time? To feel the fear eating into you, lining your face, destroying your heart? I used to feel it just once or twice a month when you were racing, I could manage that. But now, every time someone appears at the door, every time you go out …’

‘It’s important, Eve.’

‘How many of you do you think there are over here? A hundred? A thousand?’

Williams shrugged. He didn’t know. Whenever he sat in a café he wondered if the surly, unshaven guy at the bar, the woman near the doors checking herself in the mirror every five seconds, the travelling salesman, which one of them might have passed through Arisaig and Beddington and been seen off by Vera Atkins or Rose Miller.

‘And you think you can make a difference. We need an army—a real army, not a secret army—to drive the bastards out.’

‘Every little helps.’

Eve stood up. ‘How will it help if you get yourself killed? Help the allies? No. Help me? No.’ She hugged him as hard as she could. ‘Tell that woman to go away. Tell her you’ll sit out the war till the second front starts. Let’s go to Normandy.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Which part?’

‘Any of it. Look.’ He turned her face up, brushed stray hairs out of her eyes. ‘Robert feels the same. OK, she is sending us off to do something that looks stupid, but what do we know? Do we see the big picture? No.’

‘Does that woman?’ Eve spat the words out.

‘That woman? Is that what your little show was about?’ he asked. ‘Was it about Rose?’

Eve looked down at her darning again. ‘Of course not.’

‘Not even a little bit?’

She looked up and held her thumb and forefinger a couple of centimetres apart. ‘Maybe this much.’

Williams put a hand under her chin. ‘Why? What are you thinking? That we are, were …’

‘Don’t say it. Don’t. It’s not that. It doesn’t have to be sex, you know.’ She paused to examine why her insides were still slowly, corrosively boiling. ‘I suppose I am jealous because she gave you this part of your life and I have no say in any of it. I can feel you excluding me, even when she isn’t here. You and Robert. It’s worse than when you were racing. Seeing the three of you, cooking something up like witches, forgetting all about me … it was too much.’

‘I don’t mean it to feel like that. I value what you do, what you think. You know that.’