The English Agent Read online

  The gap in the sash window let the aerial out, but also the winter air in, snapping at her fingertips and down the neck of her dress. Cold – she hadn’t remembered Paris being this cold when she used to visit her grandmother. She had on both sets of clothes: the cream blouse underneath the dress, which in turn was tucked into the charcoal-grey skirt – she’d lost so much weight already that it fitted underneath – and the jacket covering the blouse and dress. It was tight under the arms from all the layers of fabric. Lately she’d taken to doing what the French did, wrapping newspaper round her trunk for an extra layer of insulation. She rustled when she moved and the paper scratched her skin. She wore cut-off gloves that Justine had knitted her, keeping her fingertips free for tapping out transmissions. But still she was cold. She shivered, and shifted the dial. She should get started or risk being chastened by Miss Atkins again.

  She’d picked up a long message in the café this morning. Justine had slipped it inside a copy of Pariser Zeitung before disappearing on her bicycle. Miss Atkins had asked for so many details last time about the planned depot sabotage: grid references, numbers of personnel involved, names even, and provisional timings. And Felix had responded not just with answers, but a whole list of requests: explosives, guns, grenades and luxury food supplies to keep their contacts sweet – chocolates, corned beef, cigarettes.

  She picked up the little metal contact pad and began. Tap-tap-tap. In training they’d been taught to remember the Morse letters as musical phrases, just as the dot-dot-dot-dash of the letter ‘V’ for Victory was implied by the use of the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth in the BBC’s Radio Londres broadcasts. Edie imagined the decoder at the other end, sitting in his warm office in Baker Street, probably with a cup of tea next to him and a hot dinner to go home to. She paused, hugging herself and running her fingers up and down her arms, rubbing heat into her frozen limbs. Her fingertips were white, except for the index finger on her left hand, which was red and inflamed from the continual tapping of Morse on the metal contacts. She was concentrating so hard on getting the message out that she wouldn’t have noticed the piano music if a gust of wind hadn’t suddenly caught the curtain, sweeping her code off the table and onto the floor. It was only when she bent down, scrabbling to catch the little slips of paper, that she heard it: ‘Au clair de la lune’, thumped out rapidly, with the loud pedal held down – Madame LeBlanc’s signal that the detector van was coming.

  For a moment she felt like she was on the high diving board: breath squeezed clean out of her chest and vision narrowed to a pinprick. She gasped, gulped for air, then grabbed the stray sheets of paper and shoved them into her mouth, chewing as she slammed the suitcase lid down on the still-humming equipment, and ripped the cable from its umbilical attachment. Terror drove her on. She snapped the catch shut on the suitcase and heaved up the heavy sash. There was no time to untangle the aerial, take it with her. Her tight skirt and layers of clothing threatened to catch on the window, but she shoved herself out, pulling the heavy suitcase, and ran blindly up the empty cobbled passage, away from the sound of ‘Au clair de la lune’, away from the sound of a van drawing closer to the steps at the end of the street.

  She ran without looking back, cork heels sliding on the cobbles, heavy suitcase thumping against her knees, skirt ripping at the seams as she forced her legs into a wider stride. Her mouth was still full of the crumpled messages, but she couldn’t chew or swallow, her breath came in forced gasps, the wad of paper like an extra tongue restricting her breath. The street got narrower and darker, running up at an incline, like the entrance to an animal hole. She felt like a vixen going to ground. She ran on, almost choking on the paper stuffed in her gasping mouth. As she reached the far end, she could hear footfalls, loud on the steps running up to the street entrance.

  She skidded sideways at the top, where cobbles turned to paving slabs. There were sounds of shouting in German from the passage she’d just turned off, and the thudding of fists on a wooden door. She jumped as a hand reached out to close a shutter on a window next to her: nobody wanted to witness what was about to happen. She leapt onto a pathway of slabbed steps between high-sided buildings, tumbling down the twisting walkway, which led to the market. She could lose herself there, she hoped, amongst the crowds and the stalls. The case was heavy, unwieldy. She kept having to shift it from side to side as she slipped and stumbled down the steps. Where the alley opened out into the marketplace there was a pile of rubbish: rotting potatoes, straw and horse dung. She spat out the gobbet of paper, stamping it into the pile with her foot, before rushing on. She’d thought she’d be safe here, but the market was all but empty: skeletal stalls like winter trees. There were just a few stall-holders packing up, faces pinched and sallow, and a handful of Jewish women, chests branded with yellow stars, as always forced to be last in the queue, having to make do with whatever was left behind after the rest of the population had taken their pick. Hunched up and hungry in the icy wind, they barely had the energy to notice her. Neither Jew nor stall-holder, she’d easily be spotted here: the girl with the suitcase. Edie rushed on, over vegetable peelings and splinters of broken crate.

  She hurried out to the main road, where there were cyclists, a horse and cart and – thank goodness – an empty vélo-taxi winding disconsolately in the opposite direction. ‘Monsieur!’ she yelled, as loud as her rasping lungs would allow. ‘Monsieur, arrêtez-vous!’ The driver stopped pedalling and turned to look at her, his waxy face showing no emotion under his beret. He didn’t bother to come and get her, merely motioned with his head. She thought she could hear the sound of boots on the steps to the market. With one last surge of effort she ran to the little cart behind the cyclist and threw herself inside, shoving the suitcase down at her feet.

  ‘Wohin?’ said the driver. With a start, she realised he was speaking German. And then she remembered what Justine had told her: only Germans and collaborators took vélo-taxis.

  ‘Gare du Nord,’ Edie said.

  The driver grunted and started to pedal. The vehicle jolted over the potholes as they moved off. She shrank down into her seat and pulled up the collar of her jacket. She could hear shouts coming from the marketplace, but the driver pedalled quickly, and they’d soon turned off onto the road towards the river. She let out a breath, no longer cold, but throbbing with the heat of panic and fear. She was just a young woman in a vélo-taxi, with a suitcase, going to the station. And the taxi driver spoke German. She’d be fine, wouldn’t she?

  Vera

  ‘Still nothing from Cat?’ Vera said. Margaret shook her head. Vera tutted. Her scheduled spot had gone hours ago. Buckmaster made it clear he wanted to get things moving now that new Lysander chap was on board. At his desk Tonkin was chuntering down the telephone to someone. Vera checked her watch: 12.45 already – Buckmaster must be down at lunch. The window was a depressing charcoal oblong – they said it was going to snow later. ‘And have you disseminated the titbits already?’ said Vera. Margaret said that she had. ‘Very well, you may take your lunch break. I’ll hold the fort,’ said Vera. Margaret began to tidy her desk. She was a fastidious girl, Vera thought, never so much as a leaf of paper out of place. Perhaps at some point she could be useful with the airfield runs, if she were thoroughly briefed, of course.

  Just after she’d left, Dericourt appeared, saying he was looking for Buckmaster. He had a new grey suit on, Vera noticed: Savile Row, if she wasn’t very much mistaken. Tonkin, his over-oiled brown hair making his head look like a schoolboy’s conker, glanced up from his phone, grinned at Dericourt and motioned for him to stay, all the while continuing to mutter into the receiver. Vera said to Dericourt that Buckmaster was most likely in the canteen and why didn’t Dericourt join him. She had mountains of memos to attend to, and really wasn’t in the mood to talk to ‘the godsend’ herself. ‘Too early for me,’ Dericourt said, sidling across to Vera’s desk and leaning on the edge. ‘I shall eat later, at the hotel.’

  ‘Oh, where are you staying?’ sai
d Vera, slicing open an envelope with her ivory-handled paperknife.

  ‘The Dorchester.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Vera, scanning the contents of the letter and deciding it could be dealt with later. She wondered where the money was coming from to put Dericourt up in the Dorchester. She knew exactly what was available for agents’ expenses. Unless Dericourt had some kind of undisclosed private income? But if Henri Dericourt had the kind of money that would see him through a stay at the Dorchester, why on earth was he coming to work for them? ‘If you don’t want to meet Buckmaster then perhaps it’s something I could deal with,’ she said with a sigh, looking up.

  ‘I have a few questions about how exactly I will be liaising with the agents,’ he said, looking down at her from his perch.

  Vera cleared her throat and stood up. ‘I think that will be on a need-to-know basis. The wireless operator will send in grid references, which we’ll let you know when you fly. The fewer details you know, the better.’

  ‘And their training? Perhaps you could tell me a little about how they prepare for these missions?’ Dericourt said. Vera shook her head. She remembered observing how even ‘Yvette’ had evolved from ham-fisted ingénue to calculating saboteur over the course of just a few months. If Henri Dericourt thought she was going to breathe one word about all the tricks the agents learnt up in the Highlands and at Beaulieu, he had another think coming. Who knew who he’d be hobnobbing with in France?

  Dericourt stood up, his eyes on a level with hers now. They were grey, she noticed. Not blue, like Dick’s. ‘I just think that the more I know the more useful I can be,’ he said with his disarming shrug.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not how it works, my dear boy,’ said Vera.

  ‘But Buckmaster said—’ he began. Vera had to resist the urge to roll her eyes. Buckmaster – why couldn’t he see Dericourt for what he was?

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve agreed with Buckmaster, but my first priority is the agents in my charge,’ she said. ‘Security protocols are imperative to ensure the safety of the men and women in the field.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Dericourt said, pulling out a packet of Sobranies from his pocket and offering one to her. She took it with a nod, wondering who had told him about the under-the-counter arrangement at Fox’s. She definitely hadn’t mentioned it herself. Dericourt flicked open his lighter. The flame flickered between them as she sucked in her first drag. She was close enough to notice a faint scar below his lower lip – a flaw in the otherwise symmetrical face. He lit his own, and continued on his exhalation, ‘But surely you wouldn’t imagine that I pose a security risk – not after what I went through to get here?’

  ‘I’m not imagining anything, dear boy,’ Vera said.

  ‘And then there’s the question of payment,’ he continued. ‘Currency can cause problems. As you know I’ll be operating both here and in France, depending on the moon.’ She nodded, regarding him through an uncurling thread of smoke. ‘Diamonds are easiest, but I can also take bullion,’ he said. Vera almost gasped like a shop girl. Diamonds indeed.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve heard, but that’s not how we operate, here in F-Section,’ she said, lifting the cigarette slowly to her lips again.

  ‘What I’ve heard?’ Dericourt said. Was that a smirk on his lips? ‘Oh, I get to hear all sorts of things, Miss Atkins,’ and he moved towards her, close to her neck, as if about to whisper something in her ear. She could smell his hair oil, like pine resin, feel his breath warm against her cheek.

  There was a sudden chiming thump as Tonkin slammed the phone down. Vera and Dericourt turned to look, pulling apart. ‘Ruddy idiot!’ he whispered, glowering at the telephone. He stood up. ‘Sometimes I think the RAF would be better run by a cage of monkeys. Pity all pilots aren’t a bit more like you, Dericourt,’ he said. ‘Jolly good to see you. How’re the digs?’

  ‘The digs?’ Dericourt looked quizzically at Vera.

  ‘He means your hotel,’ she translated.

  ‘Yes, very nice,’ Dericourt said. ‘I am going there for lunch shortly. Would you like to join me?’

  ‘Would I?’ Tonkin said. ‘After the morning I’ve just had, I may decide to book myself a room! You too, Miss Atkins?’ Vera shook her head. The last thing she wanted was to spend any more time in the company of Monsieur Dericourt.

  When the men had left, she checked again in the coding room. At last Cat’s transcript was in, hours late, and full of inconsistencies. What was she playing at? Vera hastily formulated an immediate response, dashing off the words and handing the slip of paper straight back to the coder: Keep to your scheduled times in future. Your delay has blocked other agents’ transmissions. Get back on track. It’s not all about you.

  She stalked back to her desk. The office was empty: Buckmaster still in the canteen, Margaret out, and Tonkin off to the Dorchester with ‘the godsend’. Tonkin’s phone was ringing shrilly, but she ignored it, sitting back down and ripping open envelope after envelope with the paper knife, and tossing the contents to one side. Out of the window she could see that the snow had at last begun to fall: fat white flakes like down. By the time she left for home they’d be brown sludge in the gutter, she thought. Dericourt came back to mind, his easy confidence, and his unnerving charm. He was a fraud, she knew.

  It takes one to know one, nagged her inner voice.

  Chapter 5

  Edie

  When it happened it was almost a relief. The door banged open and the room was suddenly full of them, a grey-black swarm. They didn’t shout. She’d expected shouting, violence, but it was nothing like that. The tall one must’ve seen her take the crystals from her set, and he prised them from her fist before handcuffing her. But apart from that, they barely touched her.

  She’d been lucky to escape when Madame LeBlanc’s piano playing alerted her to the detector van’s approach. She’d found a new room, across the river, in one of the passages in rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. It was small and filthy, but safe. She’d been told that the landlady, Madame de Jouvenal, had links with the Resistance, that she was onside. Even so, Edie had existed in a fog of fear, knowing it only took one whispered word or nod towards her doorway to alert the authorities, knowing that it was only a matter of time until the detector van triangulated her signal. And now it had happened. No less terrible for expecting it.

  There were only four of them, but her little room was thick with bodies. It was like someone pouring a jar of ink all over a patchwork quilt, suddenly all the pastel colours blackened out and ruined.

  It felt as if it were all happening with painful slowness. Her mind slithered like a climber’s foot on a sheer rock face, feeling for purchase. There must be something she could do, some way out? No, nothing, nothing.

  Three of them searched: knocking on walls; slashing open pillows; fingering windowsills. The fourth – the tall one with the bony hands – stood next to her, one hand circling her upper arm. He watched her intently, perhaps waiting for a visual tic, to show that his colleagues were close to finding something.

  A fifth man appeared in the doorway carrying a wooden crate full of pairs of black leather boots. Edie looked down, realising how they’d been able to approach her room so silently – they had taken off their boots. The man with bony fingers said something to the others, and they all laughed, stopped what they were doing and went to put on their boots. Edie watched them kneeling down beside her bed. For a surreal moment it was as if they were saying their bedtime prayers. Bony fingers gripped tighter on her upper arm. One of the soldiers, the short one, had a hole in his sock.

  Edie found herself thinking about sitting with Joan and Bea on barrack nights, mending uniforms. It was Bea who’d taught her how to darn. How far she’d come from that silly girl soldier, who couldn’t even peel potatoes properly. Her memory of larking about with her pals on the gun emplacements was like looking the wrong way down a telescope: so far away, so insignificant. Now she was the woman who knew how to parachute, to code and transmit in Morse,
and to assemble and fire a weapon. And who knew the snap of danger and the plummet of fear.

  When they were up on their feet, the short man switched places with the bony-fingered one, gripping her upper arm. There was a moment when as they swapped two sets of fingers were around her arm at the same time, like fleshy bangles. Then the bony-fingered one went off to get his boots on, the only remaining pair in the crate. He had a long straight nose and a slice of close-cropped white-blond hair, so short it looked almost granular, like sand. When he’d finished tying up his laces he swapped places again with the short one. She could feel bruises starting to form where his fingers dug in.

  The others were stamping on the floorboards now and listening with their heads on one side. Edie was reminded of the way seagulls stomp on rain-drenched ground, teasing out worms to eat. They pulled up a couple of floorboards, but found nothing underneath. There was nothing to find: they already had her crystals, and her poem-code was still hidden between the leaves of newspaper wrapped underneath her shirt for warmth.

  The bony-fingered one barked out an order of some sort, and black-covered notebooks were taken out. Things were written down. She saw the short one with the hole in his sock was drawing a picture of the room’s interior. The tip of his tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated.

  They had her set, and the crystals to transmit on her frequency, but they didn’t have her poem, the words she used to transform messages into code, before sending them in Morse. They could search as much as they wanted, but they wouldn’t find the poem here, she thought, as she was shoved towards the doorway. The narrow stairs couldn’t accommodate two abreast, but three of the men walked in front of her, and two behind. Bony-fingers kept a hand on her cuffs, and grabbed her upper arm again as soon as they reached the hallway at the bottom of the stairs.