British Bulldog (10 page)

The woman tightened her grasp on the scissors and kept jabbing at Mirabelle, who dodged left and right before turning and hammering down the stairs. Panting for breath, she burst onto the rue du Jour and raced up the street to get away. Across the road the waiter peered laconically out of the café window.
Mirabelle turned and looked back. Christine was hovering in her doorway, still brandishing the scissors and swearing so fiercely that Mirabelle could hear her from the corner. At least she was not in pursuit. Mirabelle felt a sense of relief as she rounded the top of the road, half running, looking back over her shoulder. Her mind was buzzing. What on earth had Jack done to deserve this kind of behaviour at the mere mention of his name? And Matthew Bradley too. Was the poor woman mad? What had they done to her?

As Mirabelle turned the corner Christine stopped shouting and Mirabelle heard the slam of the woman’s front door. She realised that her heart was hammering as she moved towards the church of Saint-Eustache, almost staggering with shock. She lingered for a moment beside the concert notice before pushing herself up the stairs and into the gloomy interior, out of the rain. With shaking hands she slipped into a pew towards the back, holding on to the filial for support. It was early afternoon, and apart from three or four people praying and lighting candles near the altar, the place was all but deserted.

It was a long time since Mirabelle had visited a church for anything but a funeral. It must be three years, she remembered, and then only to speak to a friend, Father Sandor. She wondered what Sandor would make of all this, but of course he was dead. They were all dead. Mirabelle tried to control her breathing. It’s what Jack would have told her to do, but the thought of Jack just made her feel more confused. She tried to remember what it had felt like to love Jack without wondering what he was keeping from her, but all of a sudden his image was blurred. There was Jack Duggan who was married to Mary. Jack Duggan, hero of the SOE, who had done something terrible to Christine Moreau. And Jack Duggan, the man who had promised her the world – something she had believed he would deliver. Had she been a fool? If he had lived would Jack only have strung her along? Mirabelle rubbed her face. She felt exhausted.

The church door opened, casting a weak light from the street onto the flagstones and letting in a stream of fresh air. A man genuflected and slipped into the pew behind Mirabelle. She rose, and as she turned she caught the newcomer’s eye. It was the man who had been reading earlier in the café on the rue du Jour. He was wearing a Mackintosh now, and a brown homburg, and he appeared to have left his newspaper behind. He smiled and tipped his hat.

‘Madame,’ he said. His French was accented but Mirabelle couldn’t quite make out its origin. ‘You appear to be having a difficult afternoon. Are you all right?’

Mirabelle nodded. He held her eye steadily. Suddenly she felt like crying, but she wouldn’t do it in company.

‘Would you like a drink? I know a bar on rue Rambuteau. It serves good brandy.’

‘Thank you, but I want to go home,’ Mirabelle replied firmly. Men in Paris were notoriously flirtatious. One mustn’t encourage them. Had he followed her inside hoping for an assignation? He clearly thought she was vulnerable and an easy target. Mirabelle drew herself up and moved towards the door without saying goodbye. She had too much on her mind. The urge to sob receded and the puzzle that Christine Moreau presented began to niggle instead. For a start, if Christine hated the English so much why was she still doing business with them? Mirabelle cast her mind back, reconstructing the dressmaker’s room in her mind’s eye. Yes. The gin. Boodles was a tiny distillery. You could hardly get their gin at home, never mind here. And it was expensive, which was to say overpriced. It wasn’t especially good. The bottles must have been a gift from someone. Had Eddie mentioned Christine Moreau because the department was still doing business with her? Mirabelle wondered who the woman was working for. It wasn’t Eddie Brandon. His department would know their gin. They would have sent Booth’s – High & Dry. At least there were some certainties in life upon which one could definitely rely.

Chapter 14

The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it
.

O
utside, Mirabelle headed in the direction of the river. For the first time since he died, she found she didn’t want to think about Jack, so she decided to ignore the drizzle and walk for a while as she focused her attention on what she told herself was the real matter in hand. Philip Caine. A cluster of raindrops fell from a tree overhead as she passed. The bright droplets splattered on the paving stone. She needed to think. Turning onto the rue de Rivoli, she halted outside a fancy-looking hotel sporting the French flag over its doorway. Eddie had said that France had recovered from the war more quickly than Britain, but it seemed that wasn’t the case for Christine Moreau. Seeing Mirabelle stop, the doorman at the hotel’s entrance stood to attention ostentatiously.

‘Madame.’

She cast a glance up the street, hesitating only a moment before going inside. Suddenly the instinct to call home was strong – you always reported back, even if, these days, she was her own boss. The thought of the office on Brills Lane was comforting. At least Vesta and Bill were always on her side. McGuigan & McGuigan was gloriously uncomplicated.

At reception she asked if she might make an international call. The porter directed her across the marble hallway to a telephone booth with a frosted glass window, beside a very grand staircase. The booth housed a comfortable velvet chair, a telephone and an overflowing ashtray. Mirabelle was glad to
sit down. She put the ashtray outside on the carpet and closed the door. Being enclosed felt cosy. She regarded the telephone for a moment before lifting the mouthpiece and dialling the international operator, giving the exchange and number in French. When she hung up she had to wait only a few minutes before the bell trilled loudly. Mirabelle pounced on the receiver.

‘Vesta? Are you there?’

At the other end Vesta squealed. ‘You’re in Paris!’ she said needlessly. ‘What’s it like?’

Mirabelle was unsure how to explain her afternoon. ‘It’s raining,’ she said, rather lamely.

Vesta giggled. ‘It’s raining here too. It’s been terrible weather. Gosh, Mirabelle, you sound as if you’re only next door. I’m glad you called. I wasn’t sure how to get hold of you.’

‘Why? What’s happened?’ Mirabelle envisioned something dreadful. A body. Perhaps two. She wished she was in the office with Vesta making toast and Bill spoiling the dog. That way they could tackle things together. Vesta sounded pleased as Punch.

‘I came up with something from the papers. You know, in the library.’

Mirabelle caught up slowly. She hadn’t realised the girl would continue her research after she’d left. Brighton seemed distant – certainly more than a day away. Vesta carried on, oblivious.

‘I couldn’t turn up anything about Philip Caine so I went back to looking for Bradley and decided to keep going forwards to see what happened next. After Bradley got married in October 1942. To Lady Caroline Bland, you remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well. It’s the baby, you see – Jennifer June Bradley.’

‘What about her?’

‘They announced the birth the following June in
The Times
but they didn’t give a date, and that’s what I thought was fishy.
I mean, you ordinarily say “Last Thursday born to” whoever it was … There’s usually a date or a day or something. The Bradleys didn’t put it like that. The announcement just said, “A daughter born to” or something. So I ordered the little girl’s birth certificate and lo and behold she was born on the seventh of February 1943. Now, a baby born that far before its due date would never survive, so the little thing wasn’t just early. Do you see?’

Mirabelle leaned back against the wall. ‘Yes. If she was born in February that means …’

‘I know,’ Vesta enthused, overjoyed to have uncovered something that constituted gossip. ‘It’s a cheeky middle name to give her, don’t you think? Quite clever. I bet they’ve been throwing her birthday parties in June all her life. But she’s a February baby. The child must have been conceived in May 1942 or perhaps June at the outside. And at that time Matthew Bradley was in a prisoner of war camp in Germany and Lady Caroline was still engaged to Philip Caine.’

‘It’s Caine’s baby,’ Mirabelle said slowly. ‘Of course. Caine and Lady Caroline planned to get married in the summer, before the pregnancy started to show, but then Caine was shot down over France. At the Army and Navy Club the man I spoke to called Caroline Bland a firebrand. She kicked up an awful fuss when Caine went missing in action. Well, no wonder – she was left in a sticky situation. She must have been beside herself.’

‘And then Bradley came home and married her.’

‘For his friend’s sake.’ Mirabelle pieced it together. ‘All this time I assumed he was a cad who had stolen her away, but now it would seem he did it to save the woman’s good name. I wonder if Caine knew. Do you think the men planned it? And that’s why Mrs Bradley came down to Brighton when she heard I was trying to find Caine. She doesn’t want any of this coming out. It was years ago – she thought they’d got away
with it and then her husband put the bequest in his will and she was terrified it might all unravel. That’s what she meant about dragging people’s names through the mud – it was her name she was worried about, and her daughter’s.’

‘The thing I don’t understand,’ Vesta said, ‘is that if Bradley got out of France and made it home, why didn’t Caine too? He had something important to come back to, after all. Something worthwhile. Why on earth did they split up when they were over halfway? Men who escaped tried to stay together.’ Vesta had by now leafed through several escape memoirs and was becoming something of an expert. ‘Instead of that, only one of them made it, and when he got back he must have hooked up with Lady Caroline immediately – made an agreement, like you said. By my reckoning, he got home late in August and the couple married in the first week of October – that’s six weeks at most, perhaps more like five. They could hardly have done it more quickly, what with them having to announce the banns.’ Vesta knew the drill – she and Charlie had looked into a church service before they discarded the idea. ‘It takes three Sundays, and the wedding was in Durham Cathedral on a Monday. I reckon they tied the knot as quickly as they could.’

Mirabelle’s mind whirled. ‘You’ve done a marvellous job. Well done,’ she said.

Vesta’s grin was palpable down the phone line even at a distance of several hundred miles. ‘I’m not finished yet. I thought I’d go back to the library this afternoon. How’s it going over there?’

Mirabelle wasn’t sure how to put it. ‘Well, Paris is lovely. And Caine was alive if not well here in 1944, all right. But I haven’t found a trace of him since.’

She didn’t want to tell Vesta about being pursued by an unhinged woman brandishing scissors. The story of Caroline Bradley’s illicit pregnancy felt comfortably distant and she was glad to be able to focus on that.

‘It would be good to know why he stayed all that time in occupied territory – two years,’ Vesta mused. ‘That’s a big decision. I mean, surely he’d have preferred to come home and marry his sweetheart. And why didn’t he come home after the war to see her and the little girl? I’d have thought he would be curious.’

‘Perhaps it was too painful.’ Mirabelle tried to dismiss the uncharitable thoughts about Mrs Bradley that were now passing through her mind.

‘How shall I get hold of you if I turn up anything else?’ Vesta was nothing if not a grafter.

‘Send a telegram. I’m at the Hôtel Rambeau. It’s on the rue Lentonnet, close to the Gare du Nord.’

Vesta sounded the words as she noted them down and Mirabelle helped with the spelling.

‘I’d best get off. This is long distance.’

‘Have a nice time!’ Vesta hung up.

Mirabelle loitered a moment in the booth as the line went dead. She imagined the girl underlining the words and then putting aside the notepad. She stared at the telephone, realising slowly that there was no one else in the world she wanted to call. Pulling on her gloves, she emerged into the hotel hallway. Her heels clicked as she crossed the marble and paid the bill in cash at the reception desk. Well, she couldn’t help thinking, Mrs high-and-mighty Bradley had found herself in a ticklish situation. She was lucky. Although perhaps ending up marrying someone other than the man she presumably loved might not have been an entirely lucky break. She wondered how Matthew Bradley had felt about it. Had that night in the club in London been his last hurrah? When he had flirted with the pale-eyed secretary had he already booked his Monday morning wedding in Durham? No wonder his eyes had been so blank.

Mirabelle slipped back onto the rue de Rivoli with a shiver.
The rain had not abated and she felt the chill. She asked the doorman to hail her a taxi and tipped him well for doing so. Were wives only lovers who got lucky, she wondered? Some of them were, it seemed. It was unfair. With a flick of her wrist, she directed the taxi to take her back to her hotel. She wanted to draw a bath and get some rest. It had been a momentous day, and now she needed to sift through the information she’d uncovered and think through what to do next. She settled into the leather seat, counting the lamp posts as the car went by, her eye drawn to one or two of the grander shops and to the wide grey sky above.

About halfway back to the hotel, rounding a corner, at the very edge of her field of vision she noticed an old Peugeot following the taxi. Her heart slowed, and then, as if she was on automatic pilot, she directed the driver to turn next left.

The driver objected, telling her it was the wrong way. But she was insistent.

He shrugged and turned left. The Peugeot followed. The car hadn’t even indicated. Mirabelle swivelled in her seat.

She asked the driver to turn left again. The driver did as she asked, and when the Peugeot followed once more Mirabelle strained to see who was inside, but it was impossible. The rain was too heavy to make out anything. Barring that, she knew only one way of finding out who it was. She directed the driver to drop her at the Gare du Nord. It would be easy there to disappear into the crowd and watch to see who emerged from the vehicle to follow her. Busy places were friendly places for a woman who didn’t want to be seen.

The station wasn’t far. As the cab drew up at the concourse, Mirabelle paid the driver and hurried towards the entrance without waiting for her change. The Peugeot halted only a few yards behind and lingered to one side, parked at an angle. It was a good vantage point for peering through the crowd – people with cases and without, businessmen and families. A
small group of schoolgirls in blue uniform coats and red berets clustered together. Mirabelle darted round them and took up a position just inside the station entrance. A moment later the man in the Mackintosh and brown homburg got out of the car. This was intriguing. She had misjudged him. He hadn’t been hoping for an assignation after all – even in France this behaviour would be on the keen side. But what on earth was the fellow after if not that? She pulled behind a pillar, out of his sight line, and he ran past her into the station, looking left and right as he went.

Mirabelle slipped out of her hiding place and onto a side street. She waited round a corner, peering towards the concourse. The man came out again about two minutes later and looked around, his arms akimbo. Then he checked his watch and ran back into the station. From her vantage point Mirabelle sighed with relief. He would think she had caught a train. As she turned up the street and headed in the direction of the Hôtel Rambeau she couldn’t help smiling. The chap clearly had no training to speak of. The thought drew her attention back to the real conundrum – what had Jack Duggan and Matthew Bradley done to Christine Moreau that was so unforgivable and where on earth was Philip Caine?