The Best of Our Spies (38 page)

Even hours after a bombing raid, the air would still be heavy with dust and the streets running with water where the drains or sewers had burst. Geraldine was no longer going into work; the factory had been blown up in the big overnight raid. Half the remaining population of the town now seemed to be homeless. Many were living in cellars or the ruins of their houses. Food was in short supply. Any illusion of normality that the Germans had been so desperate to encourage during the occupation was now gone. Children were seen begging in the streets for food. Lucien told them that when he was leaving work one day he had seen a young Wehrmacht soldier slip a piece of bread to a young boy who could barely stand. A few minutes later, he saw a passing SS officer kick the same boy into the gutter.

There was a sense that law and order was breaking down. There were reports of looting in some areas and some German soldiers no longer appeared to be quite as rigorous as before, though no less brutal. The Germans weren’t stupid. They would have an idea of what was going on, they would gossip in their barracks, rumours would be rife. They would know that the invasion of Normandy had not been repelled. They would suspect that defeat might not be long coming.

And it was not just the Germans that knew that. Françoise met a woman from the factory in a bread queue who told her about a young woman in her street who had done very nicely out of her relationships with a succession of German soldiers. People had been frightened of her, but recently they had started to laugh at her. Two nights ago she had thrown herself from the roof of an abandoned ruin.

One of the teachers at the school where Pierre taught had bumped into an official at the Hôtel de Ville. Before the war he had been a minor official, but his eagerness to co-operate with the occupiers had seen him promoted to a senior position. ‘Rising
like scum
,’ they said. He had been particularly efficient in carrying out their orders. In the autumn of 1942 the Germans decided to round up all the Jews in Nord Pas de Calais. He had been especially assiduous in tracking down the few Jewish families in Boulogne, a role he repeated in January 1944 when the Germans rounded up the Gypsies.

Now, according to Pierre’s colleague, he was acting like a man condemned: pleading to be understood, desperate to assure anyone he met that he had acted in the best interests of France, that he was only doing what he was told.

Françoise did find the factory manager. He was telling any workers that he could find that they should stay put. He did not know if the factory was going to reopen. So the people who still had homes stayed in them.

And that was the pattern for the remainder of June and into July. People trying to survive, the air raids, the anarchy of the occupiers and the rising fear of the collaborators.

They were still getting messages from London that they were to prepare for the landing: very soon now. It was always, very soon. Lange continued to be encouraged by this and told her that in order to maintain her credibility she needed to carry out some limited but successful acts of sabotage. They successfully blew up some points and a branch line. The damage did not seen to be enormous to the group at the time and Pierre was disappointed, but Lucien reported that according to the Germans at the station the damage was far worse than at first appeared to be the case.

By the end of June, the BBC was reporting that half a million Allied troops had landed in Normandy. The coded messages were still telling them that the Pas de Calais was the main target.
Soon. Very soon
. But a month after D-Day and with such a bitter battle still raging in Normandy, even from where they were it seemed hard to conceive that the Allies would be holding even more men in reserve to invade the Pas de Calais.

One night in the second week of July, Geraldine and Jean were eating at the table in the front room. Food was in short supply in the whole area and although Jean usually brought a bit extra back from the farm, he insisted on giving most of it to the family next door, where the children were noticeably hungry. Geraldine was toying with a watery stew that mostly consisted of thin carrots and turnips, with only a gristly hint of the rabbit that Jean had caught the previous night.

It was an unusually quiet night. The group had not been out for a night or two, they were very low on explosives and Pierre had decided that they should keep what they had until the invasion. For a few days now it had not been a matter of ‘when’ the invasion comes, but ‘if’. She wondered if it was her they disbelieved or the British. She was no longer sure who to believe herself.

‘Pierre does not think that there will be an invasion here, you know,’ Jean told her. He was staring at the plate, moving a piece of carrot around in the watery gravy with his fork.

Geraldine shrugged. ‘None of us know, do we? We only know what the British tell us. The Germans must still think that there will be something going on. Otherwise, they wouldn’t still have so many troops in the region, would they?’

Jean’s turn to shrug now. ‘I just know that Pierre is suspicious. About everything.’

He was trying to avoid eye contact with her, instead glancing uncomfortably around the room.

Silence.

‘What will we do after the war?’

Geraldine was shocked at the question. ‘Who?’

‘Us. You and me. After the war. Will you go back to Arras?’

‘I will have to. My family. They... what will you do?’

‘I would like to go to college. Pierre always said I had the ability. I would like to be an engineer. I will wait until my father returns from Germany. I don’t know...’

‘You are assuming the Germans will be defeated, Jean!’

‘Don’t you think they will?’

‘I don’t know.’

They went to bed after that. Geraldine could not sleep. It was not the heat, nor the silence. Jean had said something that she could not get out of her mind:
‘
I just know that Pierre is suspicious. About everything.
’
She knew that he was. She had seen the glint of suspicion in Pierre’s eyes. He now openly used the local patois in front of her and she suspected that he was often talking about her. She had seen his lack of trust in her on the night that the explosives failed and she had seen it since, when she kept reassuring them that the invasion would come. She knew that the moment they realised who she was she was finished. The best she could hope for would be enough time to make her escape. She thought of the man hanging from the tree near the Belgian border with most of his extremities hacked off. Maybe one of them had seen her with Lange? Could she have been followed from the factory one lunchtime?

That night she made up her mind.

ooo000ooo

For some reason she decided that a Monday would be best, though she was not sure why. The others would be at work and not back in the village until the evening. Lange had started worrying about how to contact her and had taken to leaving messages under some bricks by a farm gate between the village and the town. The last time she had seen him he was tense and blaming her. He was talking about having to go back to Paris. He was no longer even sure whether he was supposed to be working for the Abwehr or the SD. She was almost as afraid of him now as she was of Pierre. She was unsure of whom she was really escaping from, the Germans or the resistance. The very fact that she was so uncertain only made her more confused.

A message had been waiting for her on Sunday. Lange wanted to see her on the Tuesday morning near the post office. If she left on Monday, she reckoned, she would have a day to get away from all of them.

She waited until Jean left to go to the farm that Monday morning and then packed a few belongings. She had some extra money from Lange and an identity card in the name of Hélène Blanc she had found in the rubble of a house near the factory when she had been helping to dig for survivors a few days ago. The identity card came from the purse of a corpse she had helped carry from the building. Nathalie had made great play of placing the body carefully by the side of the road, removing its coat to cover her and using that opportunity to remove the purse from the coat. The woman was older than her, thirty-seven, but she could just about pass. The glasses were similar. It would have to do. She would just take a knapsack to carry some food, a jumper, some underwear and a spare pair of shoes. And the Webley. She would not be able to take the revolver very far, but she might need it for the first part of her journey.

She paused in the front room and looked at the photograph of Jean with his parents. They were all smiling. He was still a boy. She hesitated and then opened the drawer where Jean kept writing paper. She paused for a while, then closed the drawer. She must not allow sentiment or emotion to get in her way. She was being foolish. She half opened the drawer again and pulled out a yellowy sheet of paper and started writing. She left him a note on the table, under the bottle of wine. He was sure to see it when he got in that evening.

And then she left, not looking back once. She was well used to this, leaving one life behind, plunging uncertainly into another one. Now she realised that it was never without a cost, there was always a small part of her that remained. And the more that a small part of her remained, the more diminished she was as she moved on. She cycled out of the village, heading south east for Samer on the N1, the main Paris road. This was the most dangerous part of the journey. If one of the others had seen her then, she would have probably needed the Webley. The ride took longer than she had expected, her cycling was definitely slower now. After about three miles, with Samer in view, she pulled into a small wood and buried the pistol along with her old identity card, after ripping it up into small pieces. A few weeks ago she had abandoned Nathalie Mercier along with Nathalie Quinn somewhere over the Channel. Now, the remains of Geraldine Leclerc were buried under a tree. The wood was quite dense and showed little sign of being used, so she shoved the bicycle deep into the undergrowth and did her best to cover it.

It was a Hélène Blanc who now walked the last mile into the market town of Samer.

In Grand Place Foch a contingent of grey uniformed Wehrmacht troops were climbing into lorries. She waited in the shadow of the Mairie until the lorries sped off. It was silent in the large square, even though it was still the middle of the day. Outside the church she spotted a woman of her age, struggling to push a pram across the cobbles. ‘If there are any buses today
,
’ she said in answer to her question, ‘they’ll go from just over there.’

She was worried now. She had not thought what would happen if she couldn’t catch a bus from Samer. Not wanting to draw attention to herself, she walked slowly round the square. After about forty minutes, a bus pulled noisily into the square.

She approached the bus as the driver was changing the destination sign from
Samer
to
St Omer
. She asked for a ticket to St Omer.

‘We’ll see,’ said the driver without looking at her. ‘First, we go to Desvres then we’ll see if they let us continue.’ An exhausted-looking gendarme checked her identity card and allowed her onto the bus.

She was lucky. After a short stop in Desvres the bus continued on to St Omer, arriving there in the middle of the afternoon. She had planned to move on as quickly as she could, but the town was teeming with Germans and one of them looked at her and the identity card two or three times before nodding her through a checkpoint. Maybe the card was not good enough. She was concerned that it might attract attention if she caught another bus straight away, so she walked around the town for a short while and sat quietly on a bench in the Square St Bertin. On a bench directly behind her were two women of a similar age to her. One of them not only looked a bit more like her than Hélène Blanc, but even seemed to have a hint of the accent from her own region. No one noticed as she leaned quickly under the bench and swiftly got up, heading back to the bus station, where she was relieved to see that the sentries had been changed.

She was already on the bus to Lille before the woman on the bench in Square St Bertin realised that her handbag had been removed from under it.

When the bus pulled into Lille just after six that evening she had two identity cards on her: Hélène Blanc and Nicole Rougier. She had been having serious doubts on the journey to Lille. Nicole Rougier would almost certainly have reported her handbag missing by now. The French police would have reported the fact that it contained a missing identity card to the Germans. It would be too risky to use. She had become careless. She would have to stick with Hélène Blanc.

She glanced at her watch: Jean would be arriving home around now and would see the note. ‘Go to the forest as soon as you get this. Stay there,’ she had written. ‘Do not tell the others. It is not safe. I will find you
.
’ The last part was not true, but it ought to keep him away from the village for long enough for her to escape. She owed him that much, but she still found it hard to believe that she had allowed sentiment to get the better of her. So out of character.

She went into the toilet of a small café and looked through the handbag. She took money, a clean lace handkerchief and some perfume from the handbag, tore up the Nicole Rougier card into tiny pieces and flushed it down the lavatory, then stuffed the empty handbag behind the cistern, where it couldn’t be seen.

She only thought briefly about what she had left behind her. There was too much that she had left behind too many times to give much thought to it.

ooo000ooo

All would have worked out if Georg Lange had not been so impatient and Lange was only so impatient because Berlin was so impatient. Now that the show was being run by the SD there seemed to be a sense of panic about everything. They had been on the phone that Monday morning. He knew it was urgent as they were communicating in clear, no attempt at code.

‘We must know what is going on... situation in Normandy is desperate... what is she being told?... can we still trust her?… what do you mean you were waiting until Tuesday?’