The Best of Our Spies (24 page)

So somewhere between the noisy and uncomfortable plane taking off from that field in southern England to it landing in a field in northern France, she knew that she had to discard Nathalie Mercier and Nathalie Quinn over the Channel and never let them enter her mind again. Any regrets or emotions that Nathalie may have had should go into the sea along with her identity. But she was unsettled. It may be easy enough to discard your identity and the details that go with it, but the emotions – they were an altogether different matter. On occasions she had surprised herself in England and nothing had surprised her more than the fleeting glimpses over the past few months of feelings that she had for Owen. Very fleeting at first, but in the past few weeks, far more frequent. They had taken her aback at the time and she had attempted to dismiss them; maybe she had simply been reciprocating his very strong feelings for her, playing the part as always. It simply meant she had been doing her job well, but it would be wrong to pretend that they had not confused her and made her think. It would certainly account for why she felt so utterly sad tonight.

It was Geraldine Leclerc who climbed down the steps of the plane in a field near Boulogne. Magpie was her job and now Rider was a second job. It was all clear in her mind. And her true identity was still neatly locked away in her mind, although it had come somewhat closer to home.

The landing had been unpleasant. The pilot had crossed the French coast south of Boulogne and then dropped altitude quite suddenly. They approached the landing zone very low and very fast. The summer storms meant the ground was wet and this caused the plane to slither as it hit the ground. The pilot struggled with the controls (‘
No one told me it was on a sodding slope!
’), the Lysander skidding from left to right and back again as it bounced on the greasy field. They soon came to a halt, with the engine still running. The man with her unstrapped her belt, opened the window and told her to climb down the ladder. ‘Quick.’ No goodbye. No good luck. No time.

A man helped her down at the bottom and passed her over to a woman who took her by the arm and led her quickly over to a copse, part running, part walking and part slipping over the greasy ground. She glanced round and saw that the canisters were being unloaded. Behind the copse was a small track, with bicycles propped against trees, and beyond that a field, with a mass of trees in the distance.

When all the equipment was out of the plane, the engine revved up and within a minute it was airborne again, its grey shape quickly merging into the black sky and soon becoming invisible. Three men were still carrying the canisters into the copse. The woman who had led her by the arm had run back into the field to extinguish the beacons. A hole had already been dug between the trees and the canisters were being lowered into it and then covered up. A young man with dark hair covering his brow smiled at her as he spread leaves and twigs over the area. He pointed to the canisters. ‘We will collect them tomorrow.’

He and another man were both carrying guns, which she recognised from her training as American Mark 3 sub-machine guns. The older man – the one who had helped her from the plane – held a Colt automatic pistol in one hand as with the other he checked the covering over the hole into which they had hidden the canisters, kicking an extra covering of leaves over the surface as he did so. When the woman rejoined them in the copse the older man motioned for them all to crouch down. The five of them sat in a small circle, surrounded by the trees. The ground around them was covered in bluebells, their colour just evident in spite of the darkness. Geraldine was fascinated by their presence. High above them, the wind was causing the leaves at the very top of the trees to rustle. There was a smell of wet earth and of France. She was conscious of her glasses and kept removing them. The bridge was hurting her nose. She was quite unused to wearing glasses.

The older man leaned over to her, offering his hand. ‘Pierre.’ ‘Geraldine,’ she replied.

The others introduced themselves. ‘Françoise’, the woman who had brought her over to the copse. ‘Lucien’, the older man, and ‘Jean’, the younger one with the dark hair flopping down his face and the smile.

‘We wait here for a while. It is a very clear night. If the Germans head this way we will soon hear them.’

And so they sat in silence. There was a rustle in a field on the other side of the track, causing Geraldine to turn sharply.

‘Germans?’ she whispered.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Pierre. ‘Just cows.’

‘Same thing,’ said Jean. Nervous smiles and more silence.

‘Do you have your pistol?’ asked Pierre.

Geraldine got out her Webley, struggling to pull it out of her jacket pocket. Pierre nodded, with a quizzical look on his face. ‘You prefer it? That’s good.’

After what was probably only ten minutes but seemed much longer, Pierre sent Jean and Françoise out in different directions to check all was clear. When they came back, Pierre spoke in a dialect she didn’t recognise.

‘
Asteur
.’

He made an apologetic gesture towards her with his hand.

‘Sorry. I was saying now. We use the local patois here a lot. The Germans don’t understand it, so it is a useful habit to have. We leave here one by one, at five minute intervals. Apart from you. You will go with Jean. You will be staying at his father’s house. Lucien will come back with Jean tomorrow to collect the canisters. You stay in the house all day tomorrow. I will call by at some stage. I will have more papers for you then.’

They moved off into the night, like bats darting silently in different directions. She and Jean were the last to leave. When they moved out of the wood into the field, she could see him clearly in the moonlight. He was barely a man, probably not yet out of his teens, but he moved with a confidence and experience of one much older. He guided her with an arm round her waist to the side of the field and under the cover of first the hedge and then trees they walked for a good fifteen minutes. They crossed two roads, sat silently while dogs in an unseen farmyard reluctantly stopped barking and then climbed over a stile. Ahead of them she could just begin to make out the silhouette of the village. They edged down a gentle hill, hopped over a small river and landed on the springy grass on the other side. They were now just yards from the back of a row of a dozen cottages, with not a flicker of light in any of them. To their right the dark shape of a church was picked out against the sky. It was two in the morning. An owl hooted and she thought she heard the sound of a vehicle moving away on a distant road. A line of tall trees towered above the cottages, the tops of them gently swaying in a strange unison

They waited while she caught her breath. Suddenly she heard a dramatic screech ahead of her, like a cat screaming out, four times in a row. A pause, then three more times. She jumped and Jean placed a reassuring hand on her thigh. He leaned close to her and whispered.

‘Don’t worry. It’s the peacocks. They live in the chateau. You’ll have to get used to them.’ He pointed ahead of him. ‘The second house on the left is my father’s. I will go first. When I have been in for one minute, I will send a signal with my torch, one short flash, two long ones. That means it is clear. Come to the house then. The back door will be open. If you see no signal from me after three minutes you will have to go back the way we came as quickly as possible. When you come to the second road we crossed, follow it into Boulogne. Hide when you get to the town then go to the station when it is busy and ask for Lucien. You saw him tonight. But be careful, Boulogne is full of Germans. Everywhere.’

Within a couple of minutes she had entered through the tiny kitchen of the little house. Jean was already in the small hall, pointing up the stairs. He took her into a tiny bedroom, checking that the curtains were shut. There appeared to be just one other bedroom.

‘This will be your room. It used to be mine. I will get you a drink. Are you hungry?’

‘No, I am fine. A drink would be good though. Where is your father?’

‘Germany. Compulsory Work Service. Thousands of men from this region have gone, like slaves. My father is an electrician. They need people like him in their factories.’

‘How long has he been gone?’

‘Two years now, nearly. He writes every week. It is much harder for him.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She died when I was eleven.’ Jean smiled, not wanting her to feel embarrassed. She realised she was probably asking too many questions, but she had one more.

‘How old are you, Jean?’

‘Eighteen, but I am nineteen on the sixth of June.’

As she lay down in bed she did not expect to sleep that night. Her body was exhausted, but her mind was everywhere. She had failed to dispose of Nathalie over the Channel; part of her last identity remained stuck inside her, which meant that Owen did too. She tried to stay awake, fearful that she would call out his name, but drifted into an uneasy sleep which only became a deep one after Owen told her not to worry, that he understood. She was woken just after seven as Jean tapped on her door and asked her to come down. Pierre had arrived. She dressed quickly and went into the small front room, which the front door opened straight into, shielded by a curtain. The room was sparse, more utilitarian than comfortable. The dark wooden floor was covered by two frayed rugs, which overlapped. An oak table with six chairs around it was the main feature of the room. There was a battered armchair in front of the fireplace. The mantelpiece held a few photographs: the young Jean; the young Jean and his parents and a beautiful woman in her thirties. She presumed this was his mother. Like most of the surfaces in the room, they needed dusting. The other side wall of the room, opposite the mantelpiece, was dominated by a large gilded mirror. Some of the mirroring had faded away in patches, but the gold coloured frame was ornate, sitting incongruously in the room.

There was a half empty bottle of Calvados on the table. She noticed it was the proper Calvados, farm produced. She remembered her father making a big fuss about buying some from a farmhouse when they had holidayed not far from here. It was his favourite drink. A sticky glass was beside the bottle, along with two unwashed cups that appeared to have once held coffee. A small sideboard contained a dusty bible and three unopened bottles of red wine and another picture of the beautiful woman.

Pierre was at the table. She could hear Jean in the kitchen and water boiling.

‘It is unusual that you stay here with another member of our group, but the situation has been helpful for us. Last month the Germans checked all the houses in the village and told people who had spare rooms that they must allow workers to stay in them. The bigger houses have Germans billeted with them. So, you are staying here with the approval of the Germans, I suppose.

‘I teach at a school in Boulogne. Jean was a student of mine until a year ago. He is a bright boy, he could have continued his studies, but it was too risky for him to stay at school. He now works at a farm on the other side of the village – most of the men in the village work in agriculture, at least they did before the war. It means that the Germans class Jean as essential labour and so he is less likely to be sent to Germany, for the time being. It also gives him good cover to move around the countryside.

‘Lucien is a
cheminot
, a railway worker. He is based at Boulogne-Ville, which is the main station in Boulogne. The railway line passes just south of here. Lucien is married to Françoise, who you also met last night. Françoise is a supervisor at a factory in Boulogne. They assemble electrical equipment like light switches and plugs. Some of it is for the German Army. They are very short of staff, so it was very easy for her to find you work at the factory. You start there on Monday. Françoise was also born in the village. With all the Allied bombing of the town, she and Lucien were worried about the children when she was at work, so now they live with her parents in the village. They are on the other side of the church. This was a very small village before the war, but the bombing in Boulogne has been so bad that many people have moved out here. And then we have our guests: the Germans don’t want their troops to be staying in the town either, so we have plenty of them staying here. We need to be careful, of course, but there has been very little resistance activity in this immediate area. We’ve only come together as a cell in the last few weeks. We assume that we were brought together as a cell to help you.

‘You have a bicycle and that is how you will travel into the town. It is not safe in Boulogne. The Allies bomb it all of the time. The port is important to the Germans and, of course, it is a big submarine base. You just have to be very careful there.

‘Today you can cycle into the town. You will need to register with the authorities and also get your work documents from the factory. Here, I have drawn you a map of where you need to go. Memorise it, don’t take it with you. If you get searched and they find something like this on you, they will find that very rewarding. Your cover is good, you should be all right when you register. It is good that you are from Arras, that was a clever touch by London. The town has been so badly destroyed that it is almost impossible for the Germans to check out someone’s details if they say they are from there. Try to affect a Picardy accent. It’s not easy.’

Geraldine nodded. The accent was one of the most distinctive in France, so she had to concentrate on subtle differences, like pronouncing the final ‘s’ in a word.

‘The Germans will certainly believe your accent,’ said Pierre. ‘But it is not them you need to worry about. I am ashamed to say, it is other French people you need to worry about. Even in this area, too many people have been happy to have an easy life and go along with the occupation. And the collaborators, there are too many of them. The police, local officials. Trust no one, assume nothing. Anyone could be an informer. Say very little and just remember to keep what you say as simple as possible, otherwise you can get caught out by your own detail. Do you understand?’