The English Agent Read online

  For Chris, always

  Conservez vos meilleurs amis proches,

  mais vos ennemis plus près.

  Keep your best friends close, but

  your enemies closer.

  Chapter 1

  Edie

  Edie sat on the edge, legs dangling into the rushing darkness. The hatch was a circle of obsidian, the reverse of the full moon that shone, somewhere up there, picking out silvery skeins of tracks and field-edges lacing the shifting ground below. At least now her parachute cloche was on the noise wasn’t so loud, more of a vibration, right through her bones, into her teeth, which chattered against themselves.

  There was still time to back out. Even at the last moment; remember you are a volunteer, Miss Atkins had said. If you don’t think you can hack it, come back: the boys will still get their Stens and plastic explosives, and we’ll send another operator in the next moon period. But Edie said she would be absolutely fine, thank you. Miss Atkins leant towards her then, brushing her cheek against Edie’s, her breath warm, and whispered in French, ‘Conservez vos meilleurs amis proches, mais vos ennemis plus près,’ pressing a package into her palm as they shook hands before take-off.

  She’d opened the package once she got in the Lancaster. The black tissue paper was tied with a single white ribbon, and fell away to reveal a silver powder compact, with a creamy circle of powder already inside, pristine and unblemished, like a baby’s forehead. She smelled it – a musky, flowery scent – and it reminded her for a moment of her mother. What would Mummy be doing now, she wondered? Knitting in front of the fire, with the BBC Orchestra on the wireless, thinking that her only daughter was in London, doing translation work for the Inter Services Research Bureau, instead of on her way to Occupied France. Then the plane had coughed and roared into action, and she’d clicked the compact shut and put it away. It was in the breast pocket of her flight suit now, clattering against her compass.

  There was a tap on her shoulder, and she turned to see the dispatcher, who was showing her that he’d attached her static line. He raised his bushy eyebrows and she nodded to show that she’d understood. Her legs were getting cold, the wind biting through her bandaged ankles and the bulky flight suit. She thought she could see intermittent flashes below. It must be time, now?

  It’s not too late to back out, Miss Atkins had said. But Edith replied that she’d be fine. What was there to go back for, after all? The shame and chaos of last year: she wanted to leave it all behind her. ‘Adieu,’ she’d said to Miss Atkins, giving a final wave before heaving herself up into the fuselage. ‘Don’t say adieu, say au revoir, dear girl, because I’m quite sure we’ll see you again,’ Miss Atkins replied.

  The dispatcher was now kneeling next to the two lights opposite the hatch. His lips were pressed tightly together, as if he were trying to hold in a cough, and his face was tinted red by the red light next to him. She kept her eyes on him. It must be any moment now, and she couldn’t afford to hesitate.

  It felt like her first hunt: fear and exhilaration mixed. She recalled the feel of the horse’s flanks between her thighs, the baying of the hounds, and the rushing wind. Afterwards there was the blood from the vixen’s tail, sticky and strange-smelling on her cheeks. She hadn’t been hunting for years – couldn’t bear the killing these days.

  The dispatcher lifted his hand as the red light turned off.

  ‘Au revoir,’ Edie mouthed as the green light came on. She pushed herself off into the inky vortex and was gone.

  Vera

  ‘Well, that agent seemed raring to go,’ said the driver, holding open the car door as Vera walked towards it. The girl was new: obviously nobody had told her she shouldn’t speak unless spoken to. Or perhaps it was Vera’s lack of uniform that made her feel she could be so familiar. Vera sighed and didn’t respond. It had been hours since she’d seen off the new wireless transmission operator – there’d been all that nonsense with Major Wishaw to attend to – she simply wanted to get back to London now.

  But as she approached the car in the darkness, she was transported momentarily back to another black car, the door being held open for her by another driver – a man in uniform – and a solid presence at her shoulder, a hand resting lightly in the small of her back, guiding her forward. The air was warm, and she was wearing a navy silk dress, and in the background a gramophone was playing Stolz’s ‘Im Traum hast du mir alles erlaubt’: In the dream you allowed me everything.

  ‘Come, Vera, I must take you home, or I will be in trouble with your mother, again—’ That deep voice, rich as black coffee.

  ‘I’m not getting in your car with the flag up, I’ve told you.’

  ‘As you wish, Vera.’

  And the driver removed the swastika from the stubby flagpole, which poked like a finger from the bonnet of the car, as they got inside. She remembered the feel of the silk dress against her bare legs as she slipped onto the leather seat, and the hand of her companion resting casually on her thigh as they drove off into the night.

  Vera sighed again, banishing the memory as the driver slammed the car door shut behind her. She pulled her cigarette case from the pocket of her fox fur coat. The driver was fiddling with the ignition, and stalled twice before getting the car started, so Vera decided against offering her a cigarette – the girl was having quite enough trouble as it was. She clicked the lighter, and the flame curled up over the tip of her cigarette. She sucked, watching the little orange bonfire. She took the smoke in, but didn’t inhale, swilling it like a good brandy round her mouth and looking out of the car window as they pulled away from the old farmhouse buildings that bordered the airstrip and onto the pitted track. You could barely make out the empty ploughed fields in the darkness – a veil of cloud covered the moon now, and it had started to drizzle.

  ‘Are they always like that, the agents?’ said the driver, catching Vera’s eye in the rear-view mirror as they stuttered along.

  ‘Like what, exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know. Upbeat, I suppose. I mean – she can’t be much older than me, can she?’ said the driver, turning onto the main road.

  She wasn’t, Vera thought. She was the youngest agent they’d sent so far, and the first woman – just a girl, really. Too young, Vera thought. At her age, Vera had been – but the image of the black car appeared again in her mind’s eye. She tutted. ‘That agent was very well trained and she is fully aware of the risks,’ she said with finality.

  ‘Oh, quite, Miss Atkins, I didn’t mean to imply – I just meant that if it were me . . .’

  ‘Well, thank heavens it’s not you, then,’ said Vera, flicking ash into the little metal tray in the doorframe. It needed emptying; someone should have a chat with these wretched FANY drivers about standards, Vera thought, as the car growled and swerved. The airfield was gone, now, vanished between hedgerows and darkness.

  She checked her watch, the gold watch that he’d given her, letting her finger rest on its pale cream face for a moment, cool to touch. Midnight already – she leant forward to speak to the driver.

  ‘My dear girl, could you possibly put your foot down? Some of us have work in the morning, you know.’

  Edie

  Edie struggled to break away, but she was being dragged bodily across rough clods of earth, stones scraping her back, her body twisting. She kicked out with her feet, trying to catch hold of something, anything, but it was no good.

  At last she remembered, fumbled with the clip on her flight suit. She stopped moving as the parachute floated free, pulling the harness with it. She sat up, pausing momentarily to catch her breath. She could still hear the plane’s drone, and see its moving silhouette, black against navy, shooting away towards the low-slung moon. In the distance the parachuted crates of equipmen
t spun earthwards like sycamore seeds on the wind.

  The parachute had been carried up into a tree by the wind, so she got up to retrieve it, tugging at the harness and loose straps. Where were the reception committee? she wondered. The local Resistance had flashed out the drop signal on torches. Why weren’t they here? She hauled in the cords, pulling until it ripped away, leaving just a scrap of parachute silk fluttering madly in the branches, as if asking for a truce.

  The sound of the Lancaster had all but gone now, just a faint distant thrum. Other than that, there was just the sigh of the wind in the bare tree branches, and the smell of winter earth. She looked around; she needed somewhere to dispose of the parachute, which she held bundled up, slippery and tangled, like a huge jellyfish in a net. She walked to the edge of the field; the icy sods of earth were hard as cobbles beneath her French-style shoes with their cork soles. There was her flight suit and cloche hat to get rid of, too. Bury it, they’d said in training. There was a miniature shovel with a detached handle in her thigh pocket. She put down the parachute, standing on it so that it wouldn’t blow away again, and took out the shovel head, fixing it to the wooden handle. The whole thing was no bigger than a seaside spade. She tried digging with it, but the ground was frozen solid, and she couldn’t even make a dent.

  The wind made her eyes water, and sliced her throat with each breath. She chewed a fingernail briefly, and then made up her mind, shoving the parachute underneath the bushes. She took off her cloche and suit and bundled them on top, weighing it all down with stones and loose clods of earth. She left the useless shovel in the bushes, too. The wind was bitter, slashing through her good wool suit as if it were nothing more than thin silk. The wind must have blown her off course, she reasoned. She turned, facing it full on, and began to walk, counting her paces so that she could return to retrieve the parachute if necessary. If she walked in the direction of the wind, she’d find the reception committee eventually, she thought. Unless the Germans find you first, said a voice in her head, but she ignored it, walking along the hedge line – surely this field must have a gate at some point?

  Until now, she’d been able to see by the light of the moon, silver-plating the tree branches and chalky earth, but a cloud passed over, and suddenly everything was dark. She walked on blindly, stumbling a little, still counting. Something plucked at her sleeve. She gasped, turning, but it was just a branch. Of course it was just a branch, not a hand on her sleeve, not a Nazi to fight off – not yet, at least. She breathed out and walked on, remembering her first day of hand-to-hand combat training, all those months ago.

  Edie tumbled awkwardly for the umpteenth time onto the matting that had been placed on what had once been a croquet lawn, in front of the old manor house. She paused for a moment, breathing in the musky coconut-husk scent, not wanting to see the judging faces of the other agent recruits who were grouped round. Why couldn’t she do it properly? The others had all managed it – the others were all men.

  ‘All right, miss?’ The training sergeant’s voice roused her. She saw his chunky hand and reached out to grasp it, letting herself be helped up. ‘So you’re gonna fight the war and beat the Germans, right?’ he continued as she staggered upright. She nodded, looking down at her feet in the old canvas daps they’d given her to train in. ‘I beg your blooming pardon, miss, I didn’t quite catch that.’

  She looked up into his round brown eyes, the scar scoring his left brow. ‘Yes, Sarge.’ The sun shone square into her face, and she could feel the sweat beginning to dribble down between her shoulder blades.

  ‘Good. Now let’s try again.’ He moved back a few paces so they were facing each other across the brown rectangle. In the distance she could hear shots from the rifle range, and shouts from the assault course. But it was quiet here in hand-to-hand combat training, the others waiting to see whether the girl could hack it, or if she’d just funk it, again.

  The training sergeant shoved a Brylcreemed lock of hair off his forehead and began waving his right hand about. ‘I’m a Jerry, see, and I’m coming towards you, and I’ve got a big knife in this hand.’ He spoke slowly and loudly, cockney vowels drawn out and rubbery. ‘So this is the hand you got to watch, right?’ Edie thought she heard a suppressed snigger from somewhere behind her.

  She knew what she had to do. She’d watched the demonstration, seen the others do it: grab, twist and pull – capturing the weapon and hurling the man to the floor. In her periphery she glimpsed a figure approaching from the house, but there was no time to see who it was, because the sergeant had already begun to stride across the mat, waggling his invisible German knife. She rushed towards him, determined to do it right this time, reaching for his right forearm, getting the full weight of her body behind her as she twisted and – she fell backwards, where he’d shoved her, crying out, despite herself, as the air was forced out of her lungs when she hit the ground.

  ‘For Gawd’s sake, miss, if you’re going to fall, fall properly, like I taught you.’ He put out a hand to help her up. But this time she refused to take it, pushing herself up onto her feet. ‘All right, get back into line.’ He rolled his eyes and she shuffled back to join the group, catching her breath, still winded from the fall. ‘You’re up next, sunshine.’ The sergeant pointed to a tall man with blond hair, who stepped forward.

  ‘Hardly your most edifying moment, my dear girl,’ muttered a voice in her ear. Then Edie realised who the figure had been, walking from the house. It was Miss Atkins who’d come over to observe the training session – Miss Atkins had witnessed her humiliation. ‘I didn’t come all this way to see you let the side down,’ she added, flicking ash onto the grass.

  Edie walked on through the French fields, remembering how her cheeks had burned with the shame of it: I didn’t come all this way to see you let the side down. Well, she wasn’t going to let the side down now, she thought, as she strode on through the icy air, blinking in the blackness.

  What was that darker smudge up ahead? Could it be a gateway? If she could get to a road, and if the moon came out again, she could check her compass. There was a safe house in the village just to the east of the drop zone, near a bridge. Her thoughts slipped back to her training, that night exercise with Hugo and Vic.

  Edie shoved the box of matches back in the pocket of her slacks as the fuse caught, a sudden rip of sparks in the darkness. She ran back into the woods that bordered the stream, feet slipping in the wet autumn leaves.

  They’d been sent out in pairs on sabotage training, the brief being to evade capture and blow up a bridge. Except there’d been an odd number of them, so she’d been told to tag along with Hugo and Vic. As she made her way through the trees she could just make out the tips of their cigarettes, dancing orange spots in the black. It had taken her a while to clamber along the bridge joists, attach the explosives and run the fuse back. She’d thought it pretty decent of them to let her do the sabotage ops for a change – especially because it wasn’t really part of a wireless operator’s role – but she supposed the real reason was that they were glad of the excuse for a fag break, after the eight-mile walk to get here.

  She was almost at the track now, could make out Hugo and Vic as shadows separate from the tree trunks they leant against. It would be another minute or so before the bridge blew, and then if they were lucky they’d make it back to the training centre in time for breakfast.

  But what was that? A sudden engine roar, a vehicle with no headlights, skidding to a halt on the track in front of her. Edie ducked behind a log, crouched down, watched as the incandescent dots of Hugo and Vic’s cigarettes arced groundwards and were extinguished, heard the car door slam, footfalls on the muddy track.

  ‘Good evening, lads. You quite comfortable? I suppose you’re just biding your time, waiting for the bang?’

  ‘Yes, Sarge,’ Hugo and Vic replied in unison.

  ‘And in the meantime, if I’d been a German sentry, I could’ve come over ’ere, knocked you two off, gone over to that bridge, unplugged the
fuse, and gone ’ome and ’ad me dinner!’

  Edie shuffled forwards until she was right underneath the passenger side of the Land-Rover, close enough to see – but not be seen. Her breath was rasping, loud in her throat, but nobody had noticed her watching, waiting. The training sergeant was just a few feet away, his beret wobbling as he carried on shouting at her fellow recruits. Perhaps he’d forgotten that there were three of them in this group. Or perhaps he just assumed that she’d be snivelling in a ditch somewhere with a twisted ankle – like a girl. She shunted one knee up, into a sprint-starting position, readying herself.

  ‘Got your revolver, lads?’

  ‘Yes, Sarge.’

  ‘Tell me where it is.’

  ‘In my holster,’ said Vic.

  Edie’s heart was pumping. If she was going to do this, she’d have to pick her moment.

  ‘Oh, you’re keeping your precious weapon warm, I suppose?’ Vic didn’t reply. The sergeant’s voice rose to a bellow. ‘The number of times I’ve told you – never leave yourselves undefended!’

  Edie shot forward, head-butting the back of the sergeant’s knees and simultaneously grabbing his ankles, a classic rugby tackle, felling the sergeant. They hadn’t covered this one in hand-to-hand combat, but messing about with a rugger ball with Kenneth on his school exeat weekends had taught her something. She grabbed the sergeant’s scrabbling hands and pinned them behind his back, holding him in position, face down in the mud. Vic had the revolver out, shoving it into the back of the sergeant’s skull as he squirmed on the ground. ‘What was it you were saying about not leaving yourself undefended?’ Edie said.

  Just then came the giant sparking crash of the bridge blowing up. In the light from the explosion, Edie saw Hugo and Vic’s faces grinning down at her. But after it had blown, darkness pressed in on her eyeballs, and she could barely see at all. She let the sergeant’s hands go. Despite the ringing in her ears she heard his sputtered expletives as he got to his feet. And in the awkwardness that followed, there was another sound, coming from the passenger side of the Land-Rover: a slow hand-clap, and a woman’s voice: ‘Oh, brava, my dear girl, jolly good show!’ – Miss Atkins had been watching all along.