The English Agent Read online

  Chapter 12

  Vera

  How could he, Vera thought, staring out across the sparse yellowed grass towards the bone-white mausoleum. How could Buckmaster ignore such clear evidence that their agents were in jeopardy, and yet still refuse to act? She wanted to shake him.

  My darling . . . she wrote, turning her attention back to the aerogramme. It fluttered at the edges, where the breeze nagged. The ink bled through the thin paper and onto one of Buckmaster’s old copies of The Times she had on her lap. She began again: My darling Dick, I have good news. Very soon I shall be all yours!

  She paused, contemplating how to continue. For once she’d decided to give herself a proper lunch break, get out of the office and go to Paddington Square Gardens to sit in the sunshine and write to Dick, without the distractions of home or work to intrude. She tapped her pen against her lip, looking out over tree-lined grass, noting how the distant winter sunshine turned everything sepia. It was like looking at a memory. She shifted, feeling the wooden slats of the bench dig into her buttocks. The park was empty. She was alone.

  ‘It’s just you and me, darling,’ she said aloud, knowing there was nobody to hear. She began to write again:

  I want to tell you about visiting Felbrigg. It was just as you described. Your car was parked outside. I felt the urge to run to it, imagined us racing off through the country lanes. Do you remember my birthday in June, when you whisked me away to that hotel? I remember driving along those tiny roads, the mudguards brushing the cow parsley. I remember the wind in my hair. And I remember that night, too. My best birthday present was you, darling. And there can be so many more birthdays like that, now the naturalisation process is nearly complete, and we can be married, at last, and not have to keep our love secret any more.

  She wanted to write on, but found her mind snapping back to work, to the message on her desk waiting to be filed:

  CIPHER TEL FROM BERNE. REPORT. YVETTE HAS HAD SERIOUS ACCIDENT AND IN HOSPITAL. FELIX AND JUSTINE GONE HOME. ADVISE FAMILY. CLAUDE.

  Usually she and Buckmaster went through an agent’s message together. Usually they agreed a response, before sending it back to the coders for transmission to the field. But Buckmaster had dealt with this one himself, not even bothering to mention it to her, simply leaving it on her desk for filing. As if she were nothing more than his secretary.

  The message had come via a circuitous route, sent by an agent calling himself ‘Claude’, who had escaped to Berne, he said. Having a ‘serious accident’ and being ‘in hospital’ was code for being captured by the Germans. Moreover ‘gone home’ meant dead. Vera knew that – for heaven’s sake, everyone knew that – and yet Buckmaster’s looping pencil marks in the margins questioned the veracity of the report: Who is Claude? Who are the Felix and Justine he refers to? No evidence this is genuine – no action required.

  Vera looked back at the letter she was trying to write. It was gushing with happiness and love. But the words on the page seemed very different from the reality of her life – a life Dick knew nothing about. She couldn’t tell him anything about the work she did with Buckmaster and the Baker Street team: not now, not ever. Their marriage would be pocketed with secrets from the very outset. She sighed.

  She’d tried, gently, to tackle Buckmaster about the message, bringing it up discreetly, before he went to lunch.

  ‘I have some concerns about the information we’re getting from the field.’

  ‘Perhaps we could discuss this another time, Vera?’

  ‘But there are implications for the Paris depot sabotage, not to mention the safety of all our agents.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re driving at.’

  ‘If Yvette has been captured with her set, then the SD could be transmitting to us in her stead, don’t you see? I had my suspicions when she transmitted without her security check – do you remember? – and I’m rather afraid this appears to confirm them.’

  ‘Not at all. I think it’s a red herring. Her messages have been perfect – even encrypted in her “fist”. Nobody could fake the particular idiosyncrasies of her Morse. Ask the coding chaps – it’s like a fingerprint. No, the messages are definitely from her. This thing from “Claude” is just meant to frighten us, that’s all.’

  ‘What if she is working for the other side, Buckie? What if she’s swapped sides?’

  ‘But why would she swap sides, just like that?’ Buckmaster said, chewing impatiently on his pipe stem.

  ‘Why indeed,’ Vera said.

  There was a pause, where she and Buckmaster faced each other across the office, and neither of them spoke. There was nobody else in the room. She wondered momentarily whether Buckmaster could be deliberately affecting naivety. Was he really so credulous, or did he too have something to hide?

  ‘How is the naturalisation coming along?’ Buckmaster said, breaking the silence.

  ‘The interview went well, I think,’ Vera said.

  ‘Do you suppose they’ll need to speak to me, in support of your application?’ Buckmaster said.

  Was that a threat, she wondered, some sort of veiled threat, to keep her in line? ‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ she replied.

  ‘Because I’m terribly busy at the moment. Taking time out for an interview would be inconvenient. I may not even have the time for it at all, if we can’t progress things at work. If I get embroiled in some kind of communications technicality I certainly won’t be able to take time off to go through your paperwork with the bods at the Home Office, d’you see? And it would be such a shame to put the dampers on it, when I know how keen you are to get matters concluded.’

  Yes, Vera decided. He is telling me to pipe down and comply. ‘Well, if there is anything I can do to make things run more smoothly at work, then I shall of course do my very utmost to assist,’ she said.

  ‘Jolly good. You can make a start by filing those old messages from the field,’ he said. So she did as she was told and tucked the slip of paper with the message from ‘Claude’ inside the manila file, thinking of Yvette – call sign Cat – and wondering where she was, and what she was doing.

  Vera sighed again, and tried to concentrate on writing to Dick. My naturalisation interview went well, and it should just be a matter of rubber-stamping it, barring some disaster, she wrote. She thought of Buckmaster, chewing on his pipe stem: he could very well be a ‘disaster’, if she didn’t continue to give him the kid-glove treatment. But I think we’re home and dry, she added. So you can feel confident in telling your mother all about us, at last, and we can finally make real plans for our wedding.

  She paused. The sun was a tiny white sphere, like a tossed tennis ball, thrown up to serve. The light glinted off her watch face, and she thought how the rubies in the Ketton-Cremer family engagement ring would also sparkle beautifully in the sunshine. Soon, soon. When do you think they’ll let you have leave? she wrote. I do miss you so. My sweet, my darling, my love.

  She looked up. A man in a long coat was entering the park gates, hat pulled low over his eyes against the sun. Vera signed the aerogramme, folded it and put it in her handbag. She’d send it out with the office post, later.

  The newspaper still lay on her lap, spotted with blue ink that had bled through the airmail letter. Vera checked her watch, and took her notebook and pencil from her bag. The man had begun to walk down the path towards the mausoleum. She opened her notebook and wrote something down, pressing hard into the paper. Then she ripped off what she’d written, took out her lighter and burnt it. She had to cup her hands over the flame, and was left with just a tiny triangular slip of paper, blackened on one edge. She let it go, drift off like a daydream. The sheet on the top of the notepad was unmarked, but gouged by the impression of the pressed pencil marks. She ripped it off and placed it inside the old copy of The Times, on page seven, next to an advertisement for Andrew’s Liver Salts. She folded the newspaper into a neat wedge and put it down on the bench next to her.

  When she looked up again, the man had di
sappeared, out of sight behind the mausoleum. She checked her watch again. Just before she left, she opened the waxed paper packet of sandwiches her mother had made: plum jam, made with saccharine to save the sugar ration – vile. She took one bite, and threw the rest onto the grass, food for the scrawny pigeons that fell from the winter skies at the sight of it. She couldn’t see the man anywhere.

  She left The Times on the bench and walked quickly out through the park gates.

  Chapter 13

  Edie

  ‘Tell them we’ve gone firm on the prototype depot sabotage,’ the interpreter said, saying a date and looking over her shoulder. Edie wrote the request down on her pad as she sat wedged between the interpreter and Dr Goetz at the small table where they kept her wireless set. Dr Goetz said something else. ‘And ask for more plastic explosives in the next drop,’ the interpreter translated.

  ‘Do you want to request specific amounts of armaments?’ she said, looking up, pencil poised, as if the date she’d just written was of no consequence. But her mind was working. They were using her for this radio game – a Funkspiel, they called it – tricking London into believing that the French Resistance were planning to blow up the depot on the outskirts of the city where a secret weapon was being developed. But once the date of the fictitious sabotage had passed, what then? Wouldn’t Allied air intelligence see that the depot was still there? Wouldn’t the War Box realise it was all a Nazi bluff? And what would happen to her, once the Funkspiel was over and the SD had no more use for her at avenue Foch?

  Dr Goetz shuffled through a pile of papers. Edie looked up at the blurred grey rectangle of window, where two pigeons were cloudy daubs. One was puffing out its chest, pacing. She heard the faint flutter of feathers against glass. She caught the interpreter looking at her, three quarters on, and she returned his gaze. He had to sit close to her, close enough to see what she was writing on her pad, to check her coding to ensure she didn’t include any hidden messages to London. He sat as close to her as a lover would in a darkened cinema: close enough to hold hands, to steal a kiss. He must have realised, as she had, that he’d carried her suitcase that day on place de la Madeleine. He must have recognised her. And what was it he’d almost told her, in her room the other morning? His eyes were such a dark brown that it was hard to tell where the pupil ended and the iris began, but she was sure the dark circle swelled, just as it had done when he’d had her pinned to the floor.

  Then Dr Goetz waved a piece of paper in front of her face with a list on it, and the moment had gone. The interpreter watched her transpose her plain English into her code, so practised now that she no longer needed the copy of her poem, the one he’d found on the floor of her room the day she arrived. She reached for her wireless transmitter in front of her on the table; it click-hissed as she switched it on.

  Dr Goetz’s office was, as ever, stiflingly hot. A fire raged in the hearth, reminding Edie of her life before all this began. When Pop was home they’d always stoked the fire, and the smell of wood smoke had mingled with pipe smoke as he sat with his whisky and newspaper. What was it Pop used to say? Play up and play the game – yes, that was it. She began to turn her transposed text into Morse, tapping the dots and dashes that would speed all the way across to Miss Atkins and Major Buckmaster in London, telling them to send weapons, rations for Resistance fighters – weapons and rations that would get harvested by German soldiers, late at night in French fields, and London would be none the wiser.

  As she completed her transmission the men began talking across her. Despite her lack of German, she knew they were saying something about her, and about the Funkspiel. She listened, but the words still made no sense.

  Outside the window one of the pigeons – the female – flapped away. The male, chest deflated, bobbed its head twice, and followed. She heard the word ‘Funkspiel’ again, and the word ‘fertig’. Didn’t that mean finish? The interpreter was asking Dr Goetz something now, and gesturing at her. Dr Goetz pushed his gold spectacles further up his snub nose and shrugged. Then he said something – it could have been a date, his pale hands flapping, indicating a going away.

  It’s about me, she thought, and the radio game ending, and going away, or being sent away. The interpreter had started to respond, and she strained her ears, trying desperately to understand something of what he said, but as he began, there was a knock at the door. The fat woman was there. ‘Kieffer,’ she said, panting, eventually continuing through uneven breath. Edie watched her cough out her words.

  ‘Kieffer wants us both in his office immediately,’ the interpreter said.

  Vera

  ‘I’d like to know what’s going on!’ Vera said, storming into the office. She’d spent half the night down in the shelter with Mother because of an air raid that never materialised, and the start of a cold was making her throat feel as if someone had poured sand down it, like corn down a foie gras goose. Coming in to find Monsieur Dericourt canoodling with Margaret was too much to bear.

  ‘Nothing, Miss Atkins,’ said Margaret, red-faced, springing away from the pilot. There was a funny smell in the air: sharp.

  ‘I was just showing Mademoiselle Margaret how to peel an orange,’ Dericourt said, straightening up with a slow smile.

  So that’s what the smell was, cutting through the fusty office air: oranges. How long had it been since she’d last tasted an orange?

  Margaret began wiping her fingers on a handkerchief. ‘Monsieur Dericourt brought them with the agents’ post,’ she said.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Vera, forgiving Margaret, but still angry with Dericourt for invading her office.

  ‘Everyone thinks you need a knife to peel oranges. Not so,’ Dericourt said, turning to face Vera. ‘Sometimes the best tool for the job is not the most obvious.’ He held a dessert spoon in his right hand. Vera tutted, thinking that she didn’t have time for this. But she couldn’t help but pause, watching his capable left hand cup the plump fruit as he carefully pushed the bowl of the spoon underneath the orange peel. The zesty citrus smell intensified. She saw how Dericourt held the spoon upturned, so the bowl mirrored the curved outline of fruit, how he pushed the peel from the flesh, digging gently into the pithy white layer, following the swell of the fruit below until the peel was released in an unbroken, hollow sphere. He held up the inside, creamy and crenellated like a miniature moon. ‘Voilà.’ Then he slowly peeled away the pith, tugging at the white skin with his fingertips until the fruit lay bare in his palm. ‘Ah, now she’s ready,’ he said.

  Vera could feel saliva rising in her mouth. She wrenched her gaze away from Dericourt and his party trick. Outside the windows the sleet pelted down, a grey curtain. Inside was the office clutter: desks, chairs, cabinets, telephone cables, lino floor, files and maps – all shades of brown and beige, everything dull and bland and so very British. Her gaze focused back on the naked orange in Dericourt’s hands and she thought of the baking heat of Bucharest in summertime – long, long ago.

  ‘Shall we?’ said Dericourt, smiling that smile of his. Vera struggled to remember how Dick smiled. It was open and generous, she thought. But Henri Dericourt smiled as if he were withholding a secret.

  He began to pull the orange apart, prising it open with his fingers. Juice ran down his wrist and his tongue flicked out to lick it off. Vera cleared her throat. She should really be getting on with her work and not engaging with this pantomime.

  ‘Let’s not get your fingers sticky again,’ Dericourt said, leaning over to pop a segment directly into Margaret’s mouth. Momentarily Margaret’s lips closed over Dericourt’s fingers, and her face flushed. Vera looked away. She heard Dericourt mutter something, and Margaret giggle. Enough of this. Vera strode over to her desk and sat down.

  Dericourt had deposited the agents’ mail on her desk. There were postcards, blueprints, maps, even canisters of film. Buckmaster had been right: having a pilot flying in and out of Occupied France during the moon period was a significant boon to their operational effectiveness. She rifl
ed through the pile, making a mental note of which cells were using the new system of communication. Nothing from Yvette. Strange – she’d been transmitting clearly and regularly since that wobble with the security check. But what if—

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ Dericourt was in front of her now, interrupting her thoughts, and blocking out the watery light from the window. He held out the final segment of orange in his open palm. She wanted to refuse. But to taste orange again, after so very long – she reached out, but as she touched the fruit he began to curl his fingers over hers. She plucked her hand away, taking the slice of orange before he could catch hold.

  ‘Thank you, Monsieur,’ she said, holding the segment between thumb and forefinger. She looked up at him as she spoke. His teeth were a cream chink in his shadowy face. ‘There’s nothing here from Yvette or her cell,’ she said, gesturing at the pile of post.

  He shrugged. ‘I pick up what I’m told and I deliver what I’m told, that’s all. As you said, Miss Atkins, the less I know, the better.’

  Vera could hear Margaret’s typewriter; she’d be concentrating on work. The flesh of the orange segment was firm. It smelled divine. Vera tapped it against her lips, pausing before deciding how to respond. ‘Sometimes I wonder whose side you’re really on, Monsieur,’ she said in a voice too low for Margaret to hear.

  She saw his eyes narrow. ‘I think we both know how to choose the winning side, don’t we, Miss Atkins,’ he said, before turning on his heel and abruptly walking off, slamming the office door behind him.