by D A Kent
She had enrolled on a secretarial course, and then worked for a law firm in the West End, dealing with high profile divorces. One evening, she had met Richard, a young Canadian officer, at a dance. They were married within six weeks, at the local Registry Office, with two strangers pulled in from off the street as witnesses. Their happiness was short-lived; Richard was killed in Italy. Sometimes, she wondered whether she had dreamed the whole thing. She had received a sweet letter from his parents in Manitoba, offering her a home with them, but after years of being under someone else’s control, that was the last thing she wanted.
Sylvia rarely told people about her marriage. It had only lasted a few weeks and scarcely seemed real now. Sometimes it crossed her mind that it might have complicated things with the trust, which Edward’s firm was managing.
‘One up on young Master Cumberland,’ Gunn remarked.
She had joined the army, before going over to work at the Nuremberg trials and the rest, as they say, was history. Fuelled by vodka, she leaned across the table.
‘You’ve never told me about your family. I mean, was there ever a real Mrs. Gunn?’
The effect was astonishing, like shutters being pulled down on an Oxford Street shop window. Gunn parried the question, saying he was far more interested in hearing about her antics with the other little minxes in the dormitory. The conversation turned back to Clements and plans for the future. Much later, they staggered out of the restaurant, arm in arm.
In no time, they were back at Rue de Plâtre, just before Madame locked up for the night. They clattered up the stairs.
‘I would carry you across the threshold, Mrs. G,’ offered Gunn, ‘But in my present condition I might drop you.’
He gallantly averted his gaze while Sylvia got ready for bed and then stretched himself out on the floor, on an old army groundsheet which Sylvia had stuffed into one of the bags, thinking it might come in useful.
After a while, he ventured: ‘Sylv?’ Then, after a pause. ‘It’s bloody uncomfortable down here.’
Back came the retort ‘Don’t even think about it!’ A rock-hard bolster, and a huge cloud of dust, flew towards him. ‘Anyway, this bed’s shot to pieces. You’re probably better off on the floor. Night.’
Gunn punched the bolster a few times, more in hope than in expectation, and then stretched out like a cat and flirted with sleep. For the most part, it eluded him, though he did dream for an hour or two and found himself again behind a clock face. He woke with a start. He needed a cigarette, but did not wish to disturb Sylvia, whose even breathing spoke of decent sleep.
He unfolded his clothes and drew them on, picked up his shoes and padded out into the dimly lit corridor and down the stairs. At the bottom, he sat and put his shoes on, and slipped past the snoozing night porter and out into the street. It was 5 am. He was beginning to make a habit of this, he thought.
Back in London, Edward had also had a patchy night’s sleep, after a steaming row with his father. He did not like what was alluded to in the Jones Confidential file one bit. Much of it was in German; even the part that was in English made little sense. ‘Assets of importance.’ What the deuce was that supposed to mean? He had tracked Joan down at Clements, secretly rather admiring her gumption, although nobody could make a cup of tea quite like her, and established that Sylvia and Gunn had already left for France, were probably in Paris already and yes, she would contact him immediately if she heard from them.
He had placed an urgent call to Maître Meunier last night and instructed him that the pair were on no account to proceed any further without first speaking to him. He had a fleeting fancy to get on the next boat train and go to Paris himself. Then, he remembered the Tennis Club Dinner that night, with Caroline and her parents. There would be hell to pay if he didn’t turn up. He paced up and down, watching the clock, willing it to get to a civilised hour in France.
Quentin Meunier finally took a call from Edward at around 11 am. He had been much too busy, and the curves on his new secretary far too interesting to make too much time for a former RAF pilot, a man that the aesthete in Meunier regarded with a certain amused contempt, his war having been spent in a villa in the hills outside Marseille. He had been a resistant of the last hour, just to make sure, and he glided through life like a cat on a smooth surface. He smiled, and allowed a sip of coffee to pass his lips before speaking to Edward and confirming that he had yet to receive any visit or call from Gunn or Sylvia.
Chapter 5
While Edward was digesting the less than reassuring news from Meunier, Sylvia and Gunn had made their way to the Gare de Lyon and found a direct train to Chartrettes, fortified by strong coffee and croissants. Sylvia had been less than appreciative about being hauled firmly out of bed by Gunn.
‘God, my head,’ she groaned. ‘All your damn fault. Plying me with vodka.’
Some hours later, they alighted onto a deserted platform and made their way out into the dusty streets. A group of elderly men were playing pétanque. They looked up from their game to acknowledge them as they passed.
‘The mayor will know there are foreigners in town in about five minutes’ observed Gunn, somewhat moodily. ‘Nothing we can do about that though. Might as well get a cab, if that’s possible around here.’
He looked up and down the Rue Joffre in front of the station. There was one tired long-nosed Citroen Black. A taxi sign was bolted to its roof. Sylvia dug his ribs. ‘Let’s get that one; can’t see any others.’
Gunn grunted a response, something Sylvia could not make out. She cleared her throat.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Right, well, let’s get this taxi. We haven’t got all day. I’m not sure when the trains stop running back to Paris. Don’t want to be stuck here all night.’
‘All right’ he said, absently.
Sometimes, Sylvia thought, Gunn’s moods were very difficult to fathom. Coupled with those impenetrable silences, they could be really irritating. She much preferred him when he was teasing her and regaling her with his stories, incredible though they often seemed. Would she ever be permitted to get to know the real Gunn? What would that be like? Exasperated, she turned to him.
‘Look, what is your problem with this car?’
‘It’s the make and colour of Citroen that the Gestapo used to use.’
‘For goodness sake. Well, it will have to do,’ she said, testily. She consulted her notebook. ‘Edward said he had a smallholding out on the eastern edge of town, in the Bois de Saint Denis. An old hunting lodge.’
Gunn opened the door of the Citroen to allow Sylvia in, grumbling to himself before stepping in behind her. He was clearly going to be as much use as a lead parachute today, she thought crossly. Well, as usual in these situations, she would have to take control. She decided to ignore him.
Leaning forward, she instructed the driver:
‘La ferme de Monsieur Jones, s’il vous plait. Au Bois de Saint Denis.’
Gunn noticed that the driver knew straight away where to go. No questions asked. Rather a taciturn sort. Presumably, though, Jones and his missus would have been accustomed to taking cabs from the station. Edward and Louis had mentioned that the couple often went to Paris in those carefree pre-war days. It wasn’t exactly far.
Soon, the Citroen was speeding through the forest, following the line of the river. The River Seine, thought Sylvia. In her guidebook, she had read that they once produced grapes in the area but the vines had all succumbed to phylloxéra. She wondered what Mr. Jones had been cultivating. The Citroen came to a smooth stop outside the gates of an old house. It made her think of Le Grand Meaulnes. French had been one of the few lessons at school where she had paid attention. With its shutters firmly drawn, the house looked as if it had closed itself up against the world.
‘Vous voulez que je vous attende, madame?’ asked the taxi driver.
‘Bien sur,’ Sylvia smiled, folding a note of considerable size into the driver’s calloused paw. He
grinned and settled back in his seat, his cap pulled over his eyes. Sylvia shook her head and stepped out of the Citroen followed by Gunn.
The hunting lodge was probably 16th century, stone and wood with a low and tight stone porch, leading onto a stone path, slick with last winter’s moss. They crunched through the gates and over the gravel towards it. A few weeds were peeping through.
‘Doesn’t seem to look after the outside much, does he?’ Gunn commented. ‘Poor old boy. Maybe he lost heart when his wife was killed. And he is getting on, I suppose.’
Sylvia went up to the door while Gunn peeled off and nosed about the side and back. There was no response to her knock but she had not expected one. She followed in Gunn’s footsteps and found him at a small arched door at the foot of some steps below ground level. He looked up at her.
‘Remember that key? Fifty francs says it opens this door.’
Gunn blew at the keyhole. There were fairly fresh scrap marks around the lock. Somebody had been here, not so long ago. Could have been Jones, of course. He turned. Sylvia was close, peering over his shoulder. Her scent was good. She reminded him of someone. Closing his eyes for a moment, he observed: ‘Interesting how the taxi driver knew exactly where to go, without question. What does that suggest?’
Before Sylvia could answer, Gunn fished in his pocket for the key and looked about him. There were two stable blocks, a barn with a hayloft and beyond them a line of trees, hunting ground. He shook his head. ‘The Gestapo had a listening station in Chartrettes.’
‘Relevant?’
‘Not a clue.’
Gunn shrugged and handed the key to Sylvia. ‘Want to do the honours?’
Sylvia was becoming a little weary today of rhetorical questions and cryptic utterances. What was the matter with him? They had both supped deep of the horrors of war, for God’s sake. Opening the door with some difficulty, she made her way inside.
Gunn continued his patrol of the outside, taking his camera with him. One thing he hadn’t minded bringing from the props cupboard was decent photographic equipment. The house and grounds, as he had remarked earlier, looked slightly unkempt. Pieces of masonry were falling off. That roof needed attention. Whoever had been here recently hadn’t come to help with maintenance; that was for sure. His reverie was broken by a scream which turned his blood to ice. What had he been thinking of, letting her go in on her own? ‘Sylv?’ He rushed round to the arched door and found her in a corridor.
‘Flies. Swarms of them. And the smell. Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick.’ She pushed past him, into the open air.
She was right. The smell transported him back to somewhere he had no wish to revisit. She had obviously opened another door somewhere and released these pestilential creatures.
‘Hope they don’t carry disease,’ he thought, fastidiously. ‘They probably do; typhus, bubonic plague, all sorts.’
He felt Sylvia’s hand in his.
‘Come on. We can do this.’
Gunn wrapped a handkerchief about his nose and mouth, and pushed at the wooden door with a scuffed shoe. The door swung lazily open, and he could see into some kind of dining room or salon, buzzing with angry flies. There was a brass door stop at his feet. He picked it up, feeling the weight in his hand. It would do. He threw it at the middle of three windows and the ancient glass crumbled rather than smashed, giving the flies a sudden exit route.
Jones was sitting foursquare on one of the dining chairs, his hair still thick but heavily grey, his nose sharp. His mouth was open and his throat cut and crusted black with blood. Gunn took a few shots of him. It seemed faintly disrespectful. There was no sign of a weapon.
‘Let perpetual light shine upon him,’ he heard Sylvia say softly.
‘Sylv, we’re going to have to involve the gendarmes’ he said gently, after a moment.
‘But Louis said…’
‘Sod Louis. Those old boys by the station clocked us. The taxi driver knows we’re here. Think about it. The last place we want to be is in some stinking French gaol. Trust me. I reckon we have about fifteen minutes, if we’re lucky, before our driver finishes his kip and starts wondering where we have disappeared off to. Better have a look round, I suppose. Nothing we can do for the poor bugger now.’
The salon would have been a magnificent room once; gracefully proportioned though sparsely furnished. It looked as if someone had been emptying it. Perhaps, as Gunn suggested, the old man’s heart had gone out of the place after his wife’s shocking death. Sylvia’s eye was caught by a beautiful walnut writing desk. The lid was down and the drawers pulled out, as though someone had been rummaging through. She gave one of the drawers a hard tug. Jammed tightly into the back was a large wallet stuffed with photographs. She put it into her handbag.
Gunn, meanwhile, had wandered outside again with his camera. He had noticed a few more outbuildings to the side of the house. Two of them had been used for animal feed, presumably before the war - no animals in evidence now. A third, larger building caught his eye. It was not locked.
A moment later, he exclaimed:
‘Sylv, come and take a look at this.’
Sylvia followed the sound of Gunn’s voice, with a final regretful glance at the dead man. She picked her way across the yard, the long grass brushing her ankles. He was waiting in the doorway of one of the outbuildings. His normal sangfroid had slipped a little; he seemed almost happy, inviting her in without due ceremony.
The barn was long and low, and had a couple of old fruit wagons in storage against the far walls, Gunn grabbed her by the elbow and pointed: ‘Look.’
Sylvia was not sure what she should be looking at. She peered along the line he was indicating, noting a thick layer of dust on the floor, which had been undisturbed for some time, and the faint indentations of a trail of footprints in the soil. It might have been a long time since anyone had been there but it was clear they had been, nonetheless. She looked at Gunn and he grinned.
‘I think we should, don’t you?’
The trail came to a halt at the far wall, having skirted a stack of barrels, old brick and crumbling mortar. Gunn leaned in, placed his cheek to the wall and squinted along the eyeline. ‘Got it.’ He fished a clasp knife from his pocket and, releasing the blade, started to lever at one of the bricks which was slightly proud of the wall. It fell, with a soft crump. ‘I reckon we’ll find something in there.’ Gunn stepped back so that Sylvia could inspect the opening.
She peered in to a small hollowed-out recess and, as she felt her way, her fingers came across the comforting solidity of an iron cash box. She eased it out. The key was still in it. She turned it, and drew out a pile of documents. One looked like a will. There was also a stack of letters and a photograph of a lady that she took to be Louise Vogel.
‘I think we should go straight to the gendarmerie and report Jones’s death,’ said Gunn ‘My instinct is to keep this lot with us and go through it later. Lock the box up and leave it here empty. Don’t say anything in the car.’
Putting the documents into her handbag with the photographs from the writing desk, Sylvia followed Gunn back down the drive, where they found their driver just coming round from a deep sleep. Gunn opened the door for Sylvia and then leaned forward to speak to him:
‘La gendarmerie, s’il vous plait. Aussi vite que possible.’
‘Oui, monsieur’ came the response.
Soon, the Citroen was dropping them off outside a low, modern building. The tricolore flew outside.
‘Let me do the talking, Sylv.’ Gunn turned to her. She nodded. A new assertive, decisive Gunn, with a dash of chivalry added to the mix, was emerging. The sulks and the morose silences annoyed her, but this other aspect was strangely attractive; back on familiar ground, no doubt. Reproving herself for thinking such things with that poor old man lying dead just up the road, she walked into the gendarmerie with Gunn. A young gendarme was manning the desk, reading a book. He sprang out of his chair as they approached, quickly putting his kepi on.
/> Gunn presented himself as a British officer, formerly of the SOE, who had come to visit an old friend, Mr. Jones and to introduce him to his fiancée, Miss Fordred. Nice touch, thought Sylvia, looking down at Richard’s ring, which she had put back on for the trip, just in case. He had found Mr. Jones dead, with his throat cut. The gendarme made furious notes as Gunn spoke. Gunn noted that in his professional judgment, Jones had been dead a week or so. He asked when the last time was that anyone else might have paid Mr. Jones a visit.
The gendarme paused in his writing and shook his head. ‘I have no idea, M’sieu. We used to drop in when passing but Mr. Jones is – was – a private gentleman, although always courteous and kind.’
After a few more formalities, the gendarme noted down Meunier’s address; Gunn was deliberately vague about where they were staying, explaining their plans would have to change now. They were allowed to go on their way. He hoped that Monsieur Gunn and his fiancée would enjoy the rest of their stay. It was a short walk back to the railway station.
‘Great cover story,’ Sylvia began.
Gunn seemed not to hear her; he was deep in thought. She tried again:
‘Look, there’s the train, that’s good timing.’
By four o’clock, they had found their way to the Tea Caddy, which stood opposite Notre Dame and Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, the oldest church in Paris, Gunn told Sylvia. He had come out of his reverie, thank goodness. It was hard to reach him when he went into one of those. ‘Thought after the day we’ve had, a decent cup of tea would be just the thing. None of that gnats’ piss.’