The English Agent Read online

  ‘Do you like her?’ Kieffer said, gesturing expansively with the cigar. And Gerhardt thought of the girl: the pale silver reflection of her nakedness in the glass that he’d tried so hard to ignore. ‘I brought her with me from Germany – although I do need to find a decent tuner: she’s suffered from the journey.’ Kieffer walked back across the room. Gerhardt realised he was talking not about the girl, but the piano.

  ‘Very nice,’ Gerhardt said, pulling his hand out of his pocket. The poem wasn’t important, was it? He felt foolish for bringing it down here.

  ‘Do you play?’ Kieffer said, reaching the piano and stroking the woodwork appreciatively, as if it were the flank of a thoroughbred mare.

  ‘A little. My singing is better,’ Gerhardt replied.

  ‘Ah, a singer, wonderful. We must get some scores, something modern, from the movies. Perhaps the English girl can accompany you – she plays well, don’t you think?’

  Gerhardt was about to answer with a question: how long was Kieffer intending to keep the girl and how would they make use of her – when the door banged open and the light came on, blanching the room suddenly yellow-white. Gerhardt blinked.

  ‘We have to interrogate the prisoner immediately,’ screeched Dr Goetz, scuttling in, not bothering to shut the door.

  ‘Heil Hitler,’ said Gerhardt, saluting, but Dr Goetz ignored him.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Kieffer said, exhaling blue-grey smoke through his nostrils, gazing down at the little man. ‘You have her set and her crystals. Just get on with transmitting. If you leave it too long then London will start to suspect all is not as it should be.’

  ‘But we need her code,’ Dr Goetz hissed. ‘I told you, they don’t simply put the English into Morse, they encode it first, using something personal. You’ll need to question her thoroughly to get the information we need. You need to get her down here right now.’ Dr Goetz was wringing his hands, his pale hair almost transparent in the electric light, eyebrows twitching.

  ‘Very well,’ Kieffer said. ‘But first, please explain exactly what we’re asking for. What form will this code take, specifically?’

  ‘A poem, or some such. Maybe a song lyric, or a prayer. I’m told they usually learn these off by heart, but they will also often be written down, before encoding, because they will need to match each letter from their crib with a letter from the alphabet – most of them find this too hard to do in their heads at first,’ said Dr Goetz, pushing his gold-rimmed spectacles up to the bridge of his nose.

  ‘I see,’ said Kieffer. He took a side-step and threw the remains of his cigar into the fire, where it burst into a fist of orange flame. He turned back to Dr Goetz. ‘Then call Frau Bertelsmann and ask her to bring the girl here. I know exactly what to do. My prediction is we’ll have your precious code by midnight, if not sooner,’ said Kieffer.

  Gerhardt thought about the girl in the room, and what Frau Bertelsmann had done to her earlier. He thought about the slip of paper in his pocket. ‘I found this,’ he blurted, pulling out the poem.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Dr Goetz, snatching it from Gerhardt’s hand. He peered at the script. ‘An English poem. Where did you find it?’

  ‘On the prisoner’s rug, sir.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you say so before? This is precisely the kind of thing I’ve been after,’ said Dr Goetz, frowning. ‘I’ll get to work straight away.’ He almost ran out of the door, leaving it ajar. Gerhardt heard his footsteps scurrying up the stairs.

  Kieffer slapped Gerhardt on the back, a couple of hearty thumps between his shoulder blades. ‘Well, my boy, it looks like you’ve just saved the day.’ His smile was very broad, white teeth stretched across his face. ‘Boemelburg was right to take you on. Your uncle would be very proud of you, Vogt.’

  Chapter 6

  Vera

  Would he never shut up? Vera resisted the urge to yawn as Buckmaster continued. Everyone else round the table seemed extremely interested in what he had to say, nodding earnestly as he mentioned such things as ‘operational imperatives’ and ‘patriotic duty’, and even, at one point, ‘grateful acceptance of known risks’, whatever the hell that meant. Vera didn’t know anyone who gratefully accepted risk – what tosh. Still everyone else seemed entranced. Perhaps she was doing him a disservice, she thought, looking round the table at the very young men with their neatly slicked hair and polished medals. Perhaps he was a better rhetorician than she gave him credit for.

  Flames curled at the logs in the huge fireplace. The silverware shone, the crystal glittered. Pipe and cigarette smoke floated upwards, misting out the chandeliers. Candles flickered in a stray scud of breeze. And still Buckmaster continued. Vera tried to listen. But her mind drifted off, rising away with the smoky exhalations of her dinner companions.

  She felt underdressed here, even in her violet satin gown, with her white cotton gloves, and cigarette wedged into the long-handled ivory holder. Even with the diamond earrings. (There had been a matching choker, once. Surely not for travelling, Mother had said as they scrambled for their hand luggage that day in 1937, and Vera’s fingers fumbled with the catch on the necklace. Diamonds aren’t really suitable for a long voyage, darling, leave them in the safe – we can have them sent on, or come back for them, Mother had said. But Vera had known there would be nobody to send them on, and that she’d never go back.) Even dressed up to the nines, as Mrs Littlewood had said, catching her on the stairs on the way out that evening, Vera felt underdressed. Because everyone else here was in uniform: Air Force, Army, Navy – FANY, even. Everyone else here was part of the British establishment. Everyone – almost everyone. Scanning round the table she caught Dericourt’s eye. He had on a dinner jacket, another Savile Row purchase, no doubt, and a lit cigar was trailing from his capable fingers. Seeing her, he gave a slow wink. She looked quickly away, fixing her gaze on Buckmaster, words still tumbling from his port-lubricated lips: something about the only good German being a dead German.

  The boys had been knocking it back all night, all except for Dericourt, who’d be piloting a Lysander later, taking two agents – call signs Bombproof and Taff – to start up a new circuit in Pas-de-Calais. Soon, if Buckmaster ever finished his interminable diatribe, they’d change out of their mess dress and into their French civilian clothes. She’d check their pockets and wallets for anything obviously British. One couldn’t have them turning up in Occupied France with two bob and a train ticket from Paddington. She remembered doing the same thing for Yvette, in the last moon period, as Buckmaster continued to pontificate, brandishing his port glass like a vial of holy water.

  She’d been chatty, ‘Yvette’, friendly with everyone, so eager to please – wonderful manners, Vera thought, remembering her laughter, and that river of red hair. She’d taken the pre-departure checks with such good grace, even when Vera had had to take away her watch – you didn’t get Harwood’s in France, and one couldn’t be too careful. Vera had given her the option to back out. They’d calculated that she only had about a fifty-fifty chance of making it back alive: heads or tails? The girl said that she’d won on horses at point-to-point races with worse odds. Then, almost under her breath, she’d added that it was better odds than the bomber boys got, and they didn’t have a choice. Despite their differences in age, experience, background, Vera felt a connection with Yvette, because she, too, was running away from something. Hadn’t she been the same, in 1937, leaving it all without so much as a backward glance?

  Vera was startled from her thoughts by the scraping of chairs against the flagged floor. Everyone was standing up, holding their glasses aloft.

  ‘Gentlemen – the King!’ Buckmaster roared, finishing his after-dinner speech with the loyal toast.

  ‘The King.’ Vera added her voice to the rejoinder, and took a sip of port. She glanced across at Dericourt. He had a glass in his hand, too. Had he also toasted the King? Seeing her looking, he raised his glass to her. She saw his lips mouth ‘Miss Atkins’, silently toasting her, as the rest of
the group began lighting cigars and coagulating into clumps of bonhomie. She turned away, pretending not to have seen, not liking the way the heat rose in her chest every time that gypsy pilot so much as glanced in her direction. Nothing more than a charlatan, she thought. No breeding, just swagger.

  ‘Inspiring words, Buckie,’ she said, turning to her boss.

  ‘Yes, I think it went down rather well,’ he said.

  ‘It makes a change to have you with us for one of the send-off dinners.’

  ‘Well, normally I’m happy to leave all that sort of thing to you, Vee, but as it’s Dericourt’s first time, I rather thought—’

  ‘Oh, quite. My dear boy, I completely understand.’ She understood that he was here to show off the outfit to ‘the godsend’ Dericourt. But she didn’t say that, instead she continued to smile and offered to refill Buckmaster’s glass. ‘Say when,’ she said, tipping the decanter, letting the ruby liquid pour.

  ‘When!’ he said at last as the glass was brimming. ‘Oh Vee, in all the excitement, I almost forgot to say, I’ve heard back from the bods at the Home Office. Your form is being processed. Can’t see it will be a problem. Although they’ll need to interview you at some point.’

  ‘That’s marvellous, thank you,’ she said, thinking of Dick. At last she could write with good news, just as soon as she’d got through tonight, and seen off Dericourt.

  Dericourt

  He’d have her one of these days, Henri Dericourt thought, pulling the Lysander up into the navy-blue sky: Miss Atkins, Miss-holier-than-thou-Atkins, with her over-enunciated Kensington drawl – My dea-ah boy! and her pre-war fashion sense. I’ll kiss those pursed lips and grab her uptight tits until she’s begging for it. He dipped a wing, and the plane banked as they gained height. Down below he could glimpse Miss Atkins, a pale blur on the end of the runway, with one arm raised in a wave – although from this height it could equally well be a Nazi salute – saying a final farewell to ‘her’ agents, the two men he had in the back of the plane.

  He pulled the Lysander round and felt the surge as the tailwind caught them. They’d make good time tonight. He turned to the two agents huddled behind him. ‘Say goodbye to Britain,’ he said, and they did, both of them saying ‘Cheerio, Blighty’ and waving out of the window as the darkened shapes of fields and houses slipped away below. Henri had come to realise that people generally did what he asked them, so long as he assumed their compliance in advance. Just like he’d asked Jeannot to divorce her husband, and asked the Americans to sponsor his safe passage from Marseille to Britain, and when he arrived in Britain, asked the British for a job with the SOE. They’d all done exactly what they were told. And one of these days, he’d ask Miss Atkins for a fuck, and she’d do as she was told, too, he decided, as the plane gained more height and they headed towards the Channel.

  In the back he could hear the two agents chatting together as they passed a flask of brandy between them. They’d be drunk by the time they reached the rendezvous, drunk and so very easy for the Sicherheitsdienst to pick up, if someone had tipped them off. What was the English expression? Sitting ducks – yes, that was it. He heard the agents’ laughter cutting through the engines’ drone. They’d think that their shared secrets made them soulmates, when in fact it was nothing more than the proximity of death that made people feel close to one another.

  The plane sped over the doodled line where the east coast met the sea, and everything became silver-blue and serene: star-dappled sky above, wave-crested water below, and the moonlit pathway like a threshold they could never quite cross. The moon was high up to the right of his vision: pulling, pulsing, and constantly drawing his attention with its irritating shimmer. Sometimes he could understand why it affected Jeannot so badly when it was on the wane. But now it was waxing and he was on his way to France, at last. Ah, it would be good to see Jeannot again, his little chicken. The engines purred, the course was set, and the conditions were perfect. Henri smiled. He felt like a god. He turned back again to check on his passengers. ‘Okay?’

  Their little faces were like twin moons. They gave him the thumbs-up and asked if he’d like some coffee from the Thermos. He declined. He’d had one of the obligatory ‘wakey-wakey’ pills before take-off, and in any case, British coffee tasted like mud. He’d wait. There’d be decent black market coffee soon enough, once he’d discharged his load.

  The seascape slipped past like a pulled silk scarf. The stars were out, diamond chips scattered above. He thought about the diamond earrings he’d promised Jeannot early on in their relationship, when she was still married to the soldier. Divorce him and I’ll buy you diamonds, he’d said. They’d been married two years already, but still he had no diamonds to give her. No diamonds from the SOE: Miss Atkins had put a stop to that, but the pay was adequate. Perhaps the SD? Boemelburg had promised diamonds. But he thought he’d heard that Boemelburg was no longer in Paris, had been promoted to a desk job in Berlin. Henri wondered what his successor was like.

  Henri blinked, noticing that the moonshine was no longer tugging at his temple, and the sea had become a dull shadow. They were in cloud, and he hadn’t even noticed. He pulled up the nose, thinking to get the Lysander up, and continue the journey above cloud-level, but as he climbed, the cover merely got thicker, until he was blindly hurtling upwards, the plane at such a sharp angle it was a miracle she didn’t stall on him. Not too high, he reminded himself, checking the altimeter, wouldn’t want ice on the wings, but climbing was the only way to get out of it now. It was silent in the back. He imagined the agents huddled together amongst the suitcases and Sten guns.

  Without warning, the plane lifted up and sideways, hurling him about in the cockpit so that he banged his head against the instrument panel. He clutched the control column, cursing himself for losing concentration. There was a thud from the back, a stifled gasp. He was just beginning to regain control when, like a broken lift, they were gone, falling from the sky: an air pocket hurling them downwards. He heard one of the agents cry out.

  With a lurch they were below the cloud, but they’d lost so much height he feared they’d ditch in the sea. He hauled again on the control column, lifting the nose up, away from the breaking surf, but as he pulled away a cliff face reared up, so close he could see the seagull nests in the chalky rock. He banked, pulling the aircraft sideways, swerving away and following the edge of the cliff round, on and on like a white ribbon, until it cut into the land. Ah, the estuary. Now he knew where they were.

  Henri allowed the plane to gain a little height and steady herself before turning back to his passengers. ‘People used to pay me good money for a ride like that,’ he laughed. ‘Back in my barnstorming days!’ But they didn’t answer, petrified into silence.

  It had been close, he had to admit. But luck, as ever, was on his side. France unrolled beneath them like an expensive rug. And in the distance, towards Paris, there was a chink in the cloud cover, revealing two bright stars. Henri heard the agents rustling in the back, like hens in a coop. He smiled to himself. He’d get those diamond earrings, one way or the other.

  Hail hurled down like insults as the two agents were scooped up and magicked away to safe houses near by. Henri managed to get the Lysander into an empty barn without causing too much damage. He stood in the barn doorway now, his aircraft like a giant dragonfly crouching in the gloom behind him. He looked out into the night that twitched and jerked with the falling ice. The sound of it on the barn roof was like machine-gun fire. The air smelled of old manure.

  He’d been lucky to get them all down safely, he thought, when they’d hit the storm. He certainly wouldn’t be flying back to Tempsford tonight, or any time soon, with the weather piling in from the north-east. He could be stuck in France for days.

  Henri Dericourt drummed his fingers on the damp wood of the barn door, making uneasy percussion with the pelting hail. The obvious thing to do would be to make a run for his parents’ house: the one-bedroomed cottage on the outskirts of the town. That would b
e the obvious thing to do. He pulled a packet of Sobranies from his trouser pocket. They’d got a little squashed in the journey, these cigarettes that were Miss Atkins’ favourites: elegant, but rather the worse for wear – a little crooked. Like her, he thought, putting the filter to his lips and flicking his lighter open.

  How long was it since he’d been home? Years – long before the war. But nothing would have changed, nothing ever did. The fire would be dead in the hearth and his father snoring upstairs. If Henri turned up now, there’d be a need for explanations. But it wasn’t having to explain his long absence that caused him to pause and contemplate the storm. The Henri Dericourt from here – the son of the drunken postman and a maid from the big house, the boy who was regularly whipped at school for his lack of focus – that was not who he was any more. Nowadays Henri Dericourt was a dashing ex-French Air Force pilot, son of Picardie landowners: he’d left the snot-nosed peasant behind long ago.

  He sighed on a smoky exhalation. Something will come, he thought, flicking ash out into the storm; something always does. Lightning flashed across the distant sky. Moments later there was a tearing roar. The storm was getting closer.

  At first he thought it was another bolt of lightning, but then he recognised it as the twin beams of headlights, flashing up over the brow of the hill, parting the dark ahead of a vehicle. He threw the remnants of the cigarette into the night and ran towards the road.

  Inside the van smelled of mud and blood. ‘You’ve got a good haul, here,’ Henri said, feeling cold feathers tickle the nape of his neck as they jolted forwards.

  ‘They say there’s good money to be made in Paris these days,’ said the driver, his face dark and pitted as a pickled walnut as he frowned out into the driving hailstorm. ‘They say the Boche like game. I’ve got rabbit, duck and grouse here. I know you shouldn’t, but how is a man to make a living, these days? My son’s gone to the labour camps, and I can’t manage the land on my own.’ He squinted out of the mucky windscreen.