by Gareth Rubin
Painfully slowly, the man descended the ladder. Reece looked for movement, signs of life in the body being carried. There was nothing. The fireman came down step by step and Reece fought to get forward again, but the militia had formed a cordon and he couldn’t risk being arrested.
The fireman stepped back on to the ground. Three or four others immediately encircled him and took his burden from him, laying it – her – down on the scrubby grass. They formed a kneeling barrier that Reece couldn’t see through. Then one stood. Between them Reece caught sight of burnt hair and soot-covered skin. ‘Cover her face,’ said the chief fireman quietly. ‘Give her some dignity.’
‘It’s the girl who lives here,’ said a man standing at the front of the circle. ‘I know them. I live over there.’ He pointed somewhere to the side.
Reece felt himself pulled into the earth. It was as if something had been cut from him to leave a ragged wound.
‘Stay back, friend,’ the fire chief said.
‘Let me see her.’
‘Are you family?’
‘Yes, I am.’ He felt far closer to her than the people to whom he was related.
‘Then you don’t want to see her. Trust me.’
Reece gazed at the fireman. The man was doing his best to prevent meaningless distress, but Reece couldn’t just walk away. ‘I’ve been in the war,’ he said. ‘I know what it looks like.’
For a moment the fire officer wavered, then he nodded. ‘Let him through,’ he told his subordinates. They looked doubtful but stood aside to let Reece view the girl, whose face was now covered by rough hessian cloth, leaving only the dark hair that Reece had let slip through his fingers time and time again. He remembered the sensation now as he stepped forward.
They had always been close to death. He had touched it on the road to Amiens just hours ago when Richard had died in front of them all. Charlotte’s old neighbours had been taken by the Gestapo, she had told him back in England. For sure, some of their cohort at the Finishing School had been taken too, now. But her death seemed impossible.
He stopped in front of her, hearing a distant hum from the crowd. The skin on her arms was filthy with soot but here and there he could see scorch marks.
His fingers gingerly reached for the top of the cloth, and he peeled back the rough fabric to reveal the hair, then the charred skin and finally her open eyes. And he felt a hot blade turn in his stomach. Her face. It was burnt and covered in ash, but it seemed … His jaw fell in confusion.
One of the firemen put his hand on Reece’s wrist, pulling him away. ‘My friend …’
But Reece’s thoughts were rushing. Was her face too wide? The chin too long?
He stared down at the open eyes. They were a watery blue. Charlotte’s were green. He knew them better than he knew his own. These eyes were not hers.
A stranger. The woman below him was the same age as Charlotte but shorter, with more powerful limbs. She must be the daughter of Charlotte’s host.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes. I’ll … be all right.’ His mind was an upheaval of calculations, of grasped-for hope. He was certain it had been Charlotte he saw on the upper floor, but it was a different woman here on the ground.
Was she still up there and in danger? No, she would have been found too. Either she had run or she had been taken against her will, and he had no way of knowing which. She might still be alive. But the scene before him was no accident. He had to slip away. The police and the militia might climb the ladder and spot something in her room – a transmitter set, code books, her gun – and he had already marked himself out as someone who knew her. He also claimed to have left his papers at home.
He picked up his bicycle and turned quickly, only to find his path blocked by the senior militia woman.
‘You were going to show us your papers,’ she said. ‘Where are they?’
‘They’re at my house.’
‘At your house?’ She seemed sceptical. ‘Come over here.’ She led him up the road, away from the crush of bodies. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Marc LeFevre.’ He suppressed his frustration at her petty expression of power.
‘Occupation?’
‘I run a tabac.’ He looked back to where the body lay, once more with a grey cloth over her face. For a moment he doubted himself – had it been Charlotte after all, and he had just wanted so much to think that it was another girl? No, he knew it wasn’t her.
‘Look at me.’ The militia woman was stabbing her finger into his chest. She had small, piggy features. ‘Raise your hands.’ He did as he was told. He tried to work out what he would do when she put her hand into his jacket’s inside pocket and found his blood-crusted papers. He could try to talk his way out, or to run. Running would probably be safer, the chaos around them affording some sort of protection. Her hands went into his jacket’s hip pockets. Nothing there. Then she came to his trouser pockets. She stopped, one hand on each. Her right was pressing on a small metal object in his left pocket: the bullet that had been plucked from his shoulder. He cursed the fact that he had kept it. She looked up at him, then slipped her fingertips into his right pocket and lifted out his wallet. ‘Maybe your papers are in here,’ she said. He watched as her eyes widened at what she found. Two hundred-franc notes. It was probably more than she was paid in a week.
She was corrupt, as corrupt as most of her colleagues, but that hardly meant she wasn’t going to take him in. Indeed, maybe she was calculating that a man with this much money in his wallet would be good for more, held ransom to his family. Or perhaps her mind ran in the other direction: a man with this money had friends – maybe he was a black marketeer already paying off the Germans, and she didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. Reece tried to tell from her face which way she would jump.
And then the notes were quickly stuffed into her own pocket, the wallet thrust into his hands and she walked back to the crowd, whom she began ordering about.
Thankful for a stroke of luck at last, Reece hurried straight to his bike, picked it up from the ground and cycled away at speed, feeling his bones shake over the cobbles and ruts. Every moment, he was sure that he would be called back, but the demand never came. As he reached the corner he risked a glance over his shoulder. And that was the last he saw of the burning house.
He managed to gain two streets before his feet skidded on to the ground, and he stopped to lean against a tree that had been stripped bare by the weather. He was almost able to order his thoughts now.
It had been no accident. Charlotte had disappeared, and that had been someone’s intention. But whose? The Gestapo could be behind it. It could conceivably be part of some plan of theirs to keep her capture secret and to force her to transmit false messages to London. But it was much more likely that they would keep her under observation and try to catch the rest of the circuit when another agent made contact. No, an arrest seemed unlikely.
Equally, it seemed implausible that she was the Germans’ source within Beggar and the fire in which she had nearly perished was all part of their plan. And besides: why let Reece remain free?
No, neither explanation fitted the facts. And as the confusion abated it was replaced by a bolt of anger. He picked up his bike, ready to hurl it against a thin wooden fence with all the force he had. But he had an urgent mission now. He had to retrieve the photographs from Luc’s studio, and only Charlotte knew where they were concealed.
Formerly a simple garden shed behind his house in Montmartre, Luc’s studio was now blacked out and populated with pieces of camera equipment. It was set in a small rear garden, beside which lay an alleyway connecting two quiet streets.
Reece had been there once before, a few months earlier, when Luc had created a number of travel permits for him to visit towns and ports along the Atlantic coast. Luc had enquired why he needed to visit the towns. Reece had brushed him off with an excuse – the truth being that he had been assigned an intelligence mission classified at the highest level. As a former nav
al intelligence officer, it had fallen to him to recce the harbours and beaches of Normandy and Calais, working out where large numbers of troops could best wade or drive ashore with some protection from attack.
The purpose behind the mission was obvious. Indeed, the German high command had been desperately speculating on the location of the landings for years. Hitler himself had declared that the Pas de Calais would be the Allies’ entry point into occupied Europe, but Rommel had pointed to Normandy as the likely jumping-off ground.
If Reece had been in any doubt as to the level at which his information would be considered, it disappeared as soon as he had completed the survey and been picked up in a Lysander that had flown him to an airfield in Hampshire. From there he had been taken in an unmarked government car to a network of bomb-proof tunnels underneath Mayfair. Guards armed with sub-machine guns had saluted as he was led through the austere concrete-block Cabinet War Rooms to a room heavy with acrid cigar smoke.
The Prime Minister, a gaunt American general, a British vice-admiral and Reece’s own SOE Officer Commanding had looked at him gravely and asked him to give a full report of his findings. For two full hours he had calmly told them how many men could file off a transport cruiser on to the quays of occupied France in thirty minutes while the RAF fended off the Luftwaffe FW190s.
All the while he had wanted to take the opportunity to grab them by their jaws and demand the invasion come right then because, soon, there would be nothing left of France or its people worth saving.
He recalled that moment as he rode along the alleyway behind Luc’s house and peered through a high wooden fence. There was no sign of a Gestapo presence. He returned to the street and approached a small patch of dirt and gravel opposite, where old men were playing boules to while away the day. It was a vision of the France he had once loved: genteel, sporting and jovially bickering, rather than the new diet of contempt and poisonous embraces. The men wore balaclavas against the cold. Meanwhile, at the other end of the green, Reece saw three more of their number holding nets under a tree, waiting for pigeons to come down for crumbs they had scattered. Cold and hunger, Reece thought to himself, were going to kill as many Frenchmen as the German machine. He fantasized a plague that would make the Germans vomit up all the food they had stolen.
He bade the old men a good morning and they replied in kind. ‘I’m waiting for a friend who lives there,’ he said, pointing to Luc’s house. ‘You haven’t seen him come out, have you?’ They wouldn’t have, he knew, but they might have seen the Gestapo inside.
‘No one’s come in or out as long as we’ve been here,’ said one man, taking off his balaclava to reveal a face so gaunt he appeared more a talking skull than a man.
‘No, no one,’ said another, a little suspiciously. ‘Who did …’ He stopped, and Reece followed his line of vision to catch sight of a German infantry platoon passing by, singing a battle hymn. ‘They sing louder when they’re nervous. They’re always singing louder these days,’ he announced. ‘They’re sending children now – look at them: seventeen, eighteen. And they know the British are coming soon. You listen to me, the battle’s about to begin.’
‘You said that months ago,’ objected his friend.
‘And now it’s going to happen. You listen to me.’
Reece interrupted. ‘Well, I’ll come back later. The stench of the Boche, right?’
‘Yes, right.’
Reece wheeled his bike away as the men went back to their game. He went to the end of the street and pulled his bike behind a tree and waited. Before long a dirty-faced child, a boy aged eight or nine, walked by, throwing a ball high into the air and catching it. Reece plucked it out of the air and threw it to the child, who chuckled. ‘Hello,’ he said. The boy smiled in reply. ‘How would you like a job? I’m waiting for my friend in the house over there, but I don’t want to leave my bike here. If I give you fifty centimes’ – he pulled a coin from his pocket and flipped it to the boy – ‘can you walk over there and knock on his door?’ The child nodded enthusiastically. ‘Good. But he doesn’t hear very well. So you have to knock for a long time. Try three times. If there’s no answer, he’s not home and you can go off and play. But if anyone else answers, we’re playing a game and you have to pretend you’re looking for your friend Pierre and you’ve got the wrong house. You can’t say I sent you. All right?’
‘Yes,’ the boy said.
‘Off you go.’
The boy went to the house. Reece straddled his bike in case he had to leave at speed. The child clacked the knocker loudly enough for Reece to hear and waited. Then twice more. Reece scanned the upper and lower windows for movement or shadows, but there was nothing. Eventually, the boy gave up, shrugged at Reece and sauntered away, his money earned. Reece wheeled his bike back down the alley to the side of Luc’s house. The fence was shoulder height, though a crumbling bit of low wall at the far end of it would allow him to scramble over. He clambered on to the bricks, but just as he did so a middle-aged woman strode along the alley, dragging a teenage girl whose face was plastered in make-up. The woman glared suspiciously at Reece.
‘Do you know who lives here?’ Reece demanded in angry tones. She shook her head. ‘Black marketeer. Fucking traitor.’ He hopped down. ‘Selling meat coupons. I’ve sent for the Milice. That’ll show him.’
At the name of the militia, the woman hurried away, pulling the girl with her. Reece watched them go and then, after checking around, swung over the fence into the garden.
The garden was dead and bare. Luc’s wooden studio stood at the end of it, raised off the ground by low concrete blocks, and for a minute Reece waited out of sight behind a water butt to watch for any movement. Satisfied he was safe, he went quickly to the shed. The padlock had been torn off and was lying on the ground, the small room presumably having been searched by the Gestapo, along with the rest of the house. Warily, he looked inside. There was a trestle table with steel trays and bottles of fluid that must have been for developing photographs. Slung from the ceiling was a clothes line with pegs to dry the prints and below it stood a heavy-looking wooden chair with carved legs. Pieces of camera littered the table. In the corner was a radio that seemed to have been cobbled together from two or three other machines – the Germans had restricted the sale of radios to prevent the French listening to Radio Londres.
The floor was swept and scrubbed perfectly clean, Reece noted. But when he looked closer he saw that one plank was off centre compared to the others. With the help of his house key he managed to prise up the wooden slat to reveal a cavity hidden below. He felt hope rising as he groped about inside. But as his fingers found only grime and rough wood it became clear that if there had ever been anything here it was gone.
He stood back up. There was the sound of voices in the alley. He worried that the woman he had spoken to had been only feigning fright at the name of the militia and had in fact gone to find them, or the police, herself. But still, if there was any chance the photographs were still here, he had to find them.
He searched swiftly but thoroughly, turning out the drawers, opening up the radio. Nothing. He went outside, checked the house for signs of life, and then scrambled underneath the shed. It was just high enough for his body to fit under and he groped about, but again found nothing but dirt. He dragged himself back out, covered in soil, and returned to the studio. He couldn’t stay long and it looked like he was going to leave empty-handed.
He stared around. And something struck him: the heavy chair was too big for the room. Wouldn’t a high stool be more practical for developing? He knelt to examine it. Nothing special. He turned it upside down and it was then that he noticed the very bottom of one of the thick legs was greasy. He looked closer and saw, a centimetre from the end, a narrow score encircling the leg. The line, which looked like a cut from a saw, had been deliberately covered with dirty grease. He pulled hard at the tip of the leg. Slowly, he worked it away until it jerked free. He tossed it aside, peered into the leg and found he was lo
oking at a long, thin metal canister. He pulled it out, the excitement of triumph building, unscrewed the cap and shook out the contents. As he had expected, there were seven or eight false travel passes and identity cards all rolled up.
What there was no sign of was what Reece was risking his life for: a film or prints of the document Beggar had stolen from the SS officer. And with a flash of anger, he guessed what that meant: someone else had found them first. He checked the rest of the chair and all the other furniture for hidden cavities, but he was sure that there were no others. And Luc’s shouted words – ‘Charlotte knows my hiding place’ – had strongly suggested all contraband was hidden together. No, the photographs must have been taken.
Precisely who the thief had been would decide the future of the circuit.
The Gestapo surely wouldn’t have left the remaining fake documents; they would have taken them to trace the putative owners. So whoever it was, they knew the circuit’s secrets but weren’t part of the Gestapo machine.
Charlotte.
And now her disappearance began to make sense. It had been to mask her theft of the pictures.
Reece wiped his sleeve across his face then threw the empty canister across the room. It bounced off the radio in the corner with a ring. Someone had informed on the op designed to free Luc. Someone who wouldn’t have risked being in the middle of the firefight. When he had seen her above him through the smoke he had denied it, wanting it to be different, but he could hardly deny it now.
He started to pace forcefully up and down the room to think. But if she were working for the Germans – either voluntarily or under duress – why was there no Gestapo officer lying in wait for him? If she had wanted him caught, there would have been an ambush squad of them waiting at the house.
And one other fact militated against her being a traitor: the Panzerspähwagen that had ended their hopes of freeing Luc from the prison van had arrived late to the battle. That strongly suggested that the Germans had found out about the raid only at the last minute. Charlotte, however, had known before the rest of the circuit and could have warned the Gestapo in good time.