The Best of Our Spies (21 page)

The only other company in the area appeared to be starlings. Thousands of them. During the day they would gather in a dark mass in the trees, staring down at her as if they alone knew the truth. At dusk they would fly around silently, but if anything disturbed them then the sound would be deafening.

The dining room in the farmhouse had been converted into a classroom, with a blackboard on top of a large pine dresser. Upstairs there were three bedrooms. In a cupboard in the bathroom she had found newspaper lining the shelves where the sheets and towels were kept. They were copies of the
Lincolnshire Echo
from December 1942. She could not be sure if they had been left there deliberately to confuse her, or they were an oversight. If it was the latter, it was a bad mistake.

Nicole slept in one of the bedrooms and one of the other instructors, who always wore a beret and never a coat, in the other. His name was Claude. As far as she could tell, the other instructors who would turn up for a day or two at a time would sleep downstairs. There would always be at least two of them there.

The training divided into three main parts. Firstly, there was instruction on how to use the radio transmitter. She knew she would be hopeless at that, but she could hardly tell them that the Abwehr had so despaired of her inability to use the transmitter and master codes that they had lumbered her with that ghastly Belgian. This time the instructors were more patient and she made some progress.

Then there was the explosives training. Considering that she had trouble lighting the gas on their cooker in London, Nathalie surprised herself at how she was able to cope with the explosives. What she was meant to do with them once in France was another matter. She could hardly blow up a railway track. She also had weapons training. The American Sten Mark 3 was one she seemed to excel at and she got used to carrying the Webley revolver all the time.

The final part of her training was the hardest. Going over her cover story again and again. Knowing everything about her new self. How to conceal her true identity. What to do if captured (
hold out for as long as you can, but at least twenty-four hours — that will give your comrades a chance to escape
). How to arrange a rendezvous (
in as busy a place as possible
). What to do if the person you are meeting is not there (
keep walking at the same pace, don’t come back to the same place
). And so on. It was all rather familiar. This was the only time when she felt truly compromised. She needed to have every sense primed to ensure that she let nothing slip.
I’ve never had any training like this before,
she had to keep reminding herself.
I must make deliberate mistakes. I am an innocent nurse who had just been recruited to the SOE.

She must have dozed off, because she was woken with a start by the call of ‘
darling
’ as the front door of the flat opened.

Owen walked into the lounge, carrying a large box which he put on the table before rushing over to her.

Normally so talkative and enthusiastic, Owen said very little that long Christmas weekend. He seemed to be happy just to have her with him. They didn’t leave the flat at all on the Saturday, Sunday or the Monday. It was cold and wet and they both seemed to be happy to stay in, dozing in their armchairs and listening to the gramophone. The box he had brought in with him was a hamper courtesy of Captain Archibald and contained enough food and drink to keep them replete as well as banish all thoughts of rationing from their mind. Their neighbour, Roger, could be heard in the flat next door. He was a civil servant who had invited them round the previous Christmas, but neither she nor Owen felt obliged to return the invitation. Apart from him, the rest of the house appeared to be empty for most of the weekend.

Nathalie found she was catching up on lost sleep; invariably she would awake to find Owen staring at her, as if he’d been checking she was still breathing. And when she did emerge from her slumber, she’d smile at him and then he would come over and sit on the side of her armchair and stroke her hair, or cup her chin in his hand and pull her head towards his.

Owen never asked, not once, about where she had been or what she had been through. She assumed he must know something, but she had to resist the temptation to tell him.

He ought to know.

He ought to know, she thought, why she had recoiled when they were making love the first night she was back and he ran his fingers through her hair as he liked to do and as she liked him to do. But now it reminded her of the young man in the interrogation, running his cold hands through her hair. After they’d made love that night he was stroking her breasts when he suddenly stopped. He’d noticed that her nipples were reddened and slightly bruised.

I’ll tell him. Then he’ll realise.

But in the end she told an unconvincing tale about getting trapped as she climbed over a gate and no more was said about it.

He ought to know why she wanted to sleep with the bedside light on. She could not fall asleep otherwise, fearing she was still blindfolded.

The weather turned mild on the Tuesday, the day before she was due to return. In the afternoon they went for a long walk, both lost in their thoughts. Owen was as withdrawn as he had been throughout Christmas. It was so uncharacteristic, she thought. Normally he was bursting with enthusiasm and had so much to tell her. Now he seemed happy just to be with her and with little to say. She was exhausted: the journey that Georg Lange had told her she had irreversibly set out on would continue. She would give anything for it to stop.

They must have walked for hours because it had turned dark without either of them noticing; the city in blackout. They were in a small road in Chelsea, a single light above a shop which, despite the blackout, was throwing out a surprising amount of light around the dark buildings, picking out windows and doorways, bricks glistening. The light caught the shape of a tall dog sitting silently at the kerb. Its dark eyes reflected the light and its head turned slowly, watching them as they walked towards a pub they had spotted at the end of the road.

The inside of the pub was dim, bathed in a yellow light and silent. A cloud of brown tobacco smoke hung just under the ceiling. Two old men were sitting alone at either end of the bar, looking suspiciously at them and at each other. The benches around the sides of the small room were occupied by half a dozen people sat on their own, all occupied in their thoughts. The only noise came from a table which an army corporal shared with two women: both noticeably older than him and wearing too much cheap make-up.

‘You’re just trying to get us drunk, aren’t you?’ one of them admonished, as she knocked back another glass of what appeared to be gin.

At the next table sat an old lady, her large handbag onit. She was swirling around the contents of her drink, an improbably short cigarette unlit in her mouth.

Owen and Nathalie sat at the only other table, which was so rocky that they had to hold on to the top to keep it still. Despite this, their drinks still slopped onto the surface.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said to her.

‘Sorry about what?’

‘This place. Not very grand.’

‘It’s fine, Owen. Don’t worry. I quite like it actually.’

‘Like it! I thought you hated this kind of thing?’

‘What kind of thing?’

‘Pubs, English way of life – that kind of thing.’

She smiled, pulling little rivers out of the pool of beer that had spilled on their table. ‘Maybe I’m beginning to get to like English things then.’

He leaned over, taking both of her hands in his.

‘And does that include me?’

She leaned towards him and kissed him, to the raucous cheers of the table next to them.

ooo000ooo

Lincolnshire, January 1944

She was back in a ditch in Lincolnshire, covered in leaves, waiting for the dog to find her so that she could get back to the cold house and have a bath.

It was the end of January, the ground was frozen solid and the moon bright. Tonight they had given her a large, weighted knapsack that she had to carry across the fields and the ditches. She had to set up the transmitter and send a brief message and wait for the reply. She then had to scale a wall that was more than six foot high and break into a locked shed before laying explosives under a bridge over an icy stream.

She had done all that and then found somewhere to hide, all as instructed. She knew that as long as it took at least ten minutes for them to find her after she had left the bridge then she would have passed. More than twenty minutes had already passed when a large hand reached down into the ditch and hauled her up. Claude, the man with the beret, patted her on the shoulder.

‘You are ready,’ was all he said. There was still no warmth in his voice or his manner.

The woman was standing behind him. ‘
Très bien
.’

She had expected a bit more ceremony, a bit more elation but perhaps they were exhausted as she was.

Back at the farmhouse the bath water was only lukewarm and the bed felt cold. In a matters of weeks maybe, she could be back in France. She had expected to return in very different circumstances.

Tomorrow she would be back in London, with Owen. Her overwhelming thought as she drifted to sleep was how surprised she was that she found herself actually looking forward to being back with her husband. The cold does strange things to you.

ooo000ooo

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Berlin
January 1944

The chauffeur knew to check with his passenger before this particular journey.

‘Short route or long route, sir?’

Admiral Canaris looked at his watch. He preferred the long route. Anything to put off arriving in that wretched building. A pleasant drive through the Tiergarten would take the edge off his nerves. But the one thing you did not risk doing was keep them waiting. People had been shot for less.

‘Better go the short way, Karl.’

The long black Mercedes-Benz Tourenwagen pulled away from the Abwehr headquarters in Tirpitz Ufer and then turned left into Potsdamer Strasse, where they slowed down for the first checkpoint. The SS guards peered into the back of the car, clicked synchronised ‘
Sieg Heil
s’ and waved them through. Then into Potsdamer Platz, where they took the second exit into Hermann Goering Strasse. Canaris smiled. Their arrogance means they can’t even see the irony of naming a wide road after a fat man. Moments later they came to the security barrier at the entrance into Voss Strasse. More peering into the back of the car, a check on a clipboard, a word with the driver about where to park, a
Sieg Heil
or two and they were through.

Canaris never ceased to be both amazed and appalled at the same time by this building. When it opened in January 1939 the myth was that Speer had built it in a year. Imagine, how wonderful we are! This magnificent building, constructed in just one year! Canaris knew it had taken two years, but he also knew better than to contradict people in matters like this. As he was fond of saying, people had been shot for less.

He climbed the dozen steps into the front, high columned entrance, choosing to walk through the middle of it. In the main reception area he had to wait behind a fat SS general who was complaining that his driver was not waiting for him. He informed the woman behind the desk that he had arrived and sat down to wait for his escort, doing his best to avoid making eye contact with Heinrich Müller, who was on his way out of the building. The last thing he wanted now was to have to make small talk with the head of the Gestapo. The Bavarian was a small man with a thin face. It went without saying that Canaris did not trust him. What made it worse was that Canaris rated Müller’s abilities. He was not someone to underestimate. But look at him, that was the problem with Germany these days. The country run by sergeants and corporals. People with no class.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that Müller was now walking towards him. This was going to be difficult. Just in time, a tall young and appropriately blond and blue-eyed SS-Obersturmführer appeared next to him. They exchanged
Sieg Heil
s – one more enthusiastic than the other – and set off together. Admiral Canaris always thought of Daniel at this moment. He realised that Old Testament prophets were not people that immediately came to mind in this building out of all places, but he had an acute sense of being in the lion’s den.

The young SS-Obersturmführer was walking fast and Canaris was having to concentrate on keeping pace with him. Through the central courtyard and past the ridiculous statues of naked young men and towards the central part of the building.

They were now entering the heart of the Reichskanzlei, the Reich Chancellery. The office of Adolf Hitler.

Sentries were posted every few paces now and the corridors and the rooms off them were increasingly ornate. The SS-Obersturmführer’s jackboots were echoing around off the walls. Still they continued walking, the marbled floors reflecting the light from the small windows, magnificent crests adorning the walls. It was an extraordinary building, he thought. You had to hand it to Speer. He had managed to design a building that both impressed and intimidated those who entered it. The long walk was deliberate. You were left in no doubt as to the importance of where you were heading.

The SS-Obersturmführer wheeled right, leading Canaris into a stunning reception room. He clicked his heels and gestured towards one of the chairs arranged around an unlit fireplace. He then stood at ease on the inside of the door.

Canaris had a moment to reflect and to wonder. When you were summoned to the Reich Chancellery, you could never be quite sure what it was about. It was difficult to predict. Canaris had been good at it up to now, but he was growing weary at trying to stay one step ahead of trouble.

If he was lucky, it would be about Hitler’s current obsession: where would the Allies land in northern Europe – and when. At least he could tell him what he wanted to hear. He had been discussing it with Oster that morning.