‘I think so. I said before it could become too risky and that time has come. I’ll have a message sent to England and get in touch with the cell you’re heading to next. We’ll do what we can to get you new papers for when you meet the next courier.’ Marcel paused and glanced at Dieter’s body. ‘I’ll see if the driver has a tarpaulin to wrap him in. Say your goodbyes quickly.’
Marcel picked up Henri’s case and began assisting him to walk the rest of the way to the truck.
‘It has to be this way,’ Sylvie whispered.
Felix gathered her in his arms. ‘I know it’s the only course of action. It isn’t safe for you here any longer. Maybe not for any of us, but for you especially. Living without you will be painful, but knowing you were dead would be beyond endurance.’
Sylvie sobbed. She pressed her cheek against Felix’s chest and held him tight. He buried his face in her hair. ‘Dieter asked me if there was anyone else. I told him there wasn’t. I lied. There is you, Felix. I love you. I don’t want to leave you. It’s too soon to say goodbye.’
‘Any time would be too soon.’ He held her tightly, arms encasing her as if he intended never to let her go. ‘Sylvie. Je t’aime.’
Marcel coughed discreetly behind them. He was back and holding a piece of sacking.
‘The best I can do. Let’s get him in the truck.’
Together the three of them carried Dieter to the truck and laid him on the sacking. Henri covered him with another piece. There was nothing left to do. Sylvie and Felix faced each other. It was crucial to get away, but she couldn’t bear to leave. She couldn’t move. Not towards him, not away from him.
‘Come with me,’ Sylvie said.
‘No.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘I belong here where I can keep working to free France. The war will end one day, and there will be a reckoning. I intend to play my part in it.’
She pulled him down into a kiss, lips burning against his. Passion and heartbreak and love melding into one head-spinning moment. She pressed herself against him, trying to memorise the feel of his body, the scent of his skin, the taste of his kiss.
Felix released her. Tears glinted in his eyes, turning them into gleaming orbs of blackness. ‘If you love me as truly as I love you, then leave now. Live.’
‘Live too,’ she whispered.
‘I’m sorry it ended like this,’ Marcel said, as Sylvie climbed inside. ‘Safe travels.’
Sylvie’s last sight as Marcel closed the doors was of Felix standing in the moonlight, one hand raised in farewell.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Sylvie huddled down in the back of the lorry amid piles of bricks, covered in a tarpaulin and barely able to breathe. She leaned against Henri, and they held hands. She couldn’t look at Dieter. They were driven out of the city and were presumably taking farm tracks and small roads from the jolting of the vehicle. At some point, she must have fallen asleep because the next thing she knew was when the back doors were opened and sunlight streamed onto her face. The driver gave her a crooked smile.
‘We’ll deal with that now.’ He sneered in Dieter’s direction. ‘Strip him. There must be nothing on the body to identify it.’
Sylvie reached for Dieter’s hand protectively. It was cold and stiff. She climbed out of the truck and looked around. They were in a wooded valley where the river was wide and slow. Sylvie and the driver carried Dieter, now clad in just his underwear, to the water while Henri waited at the truck.
‘It will sink deep and the fish will dine well,’ the driver said. ‘No one will find it.’
‘He, not it,’ Sylvie corrected. Her voice cracked and tears filled her eyes. ‘He was a person. His name was Dieter, and he had a mother and father who loved him. He liked to dance and eat sweet cakes.’
The driver spat on the ground. ‘What is this? A eulogy? Why does he deserve that when so many French men and women lie unmarked?’
Sylvie lifted her eyes to his. ‘Because if we can’t recognise our enemy as people too, how will we ever stop fighting them?’
The driver looked unimpressed. ‘Back in the truck. There’s a mill in the village. I’m to leave you there. I’ll dispose of the uniform, but I’m keeping his boots.’
Sylvie blinked her tears away. She climbed back into the truck, taking one final look at the river. It soothed her slightly to think of Dieter spending eternity in such a beautiful place. The driver was right. How many in this war would be so fortunate as to have their resting place known and remembered?
From the mill, they were taken onwards in the back of a truck loaded with sacks of flour and left at the gates of an imposing chateau. From there, they were driven in the back seat of an immaculately polished Citroën Traction Avant driven through the afternoon by an aristocratic elderly woman with a severe face and a Bible on the passenger seat. Henri was in obvious pain, and Sylvie thanked her foresight for sewing the sleeping tablets into her bag lining. She dug them out and while he lapsed in and out of consciousness, she could grieve in private as towns and villages passed by unnoticed.
Poor tragic Dieter, whose parents would grow old thinking their son had been so stupid to be taken in by a French dancer and abandon everything to run away with her. She couldn’t think about Felix or the grief would be too strong to contain quietly.
They spent the night in the village of Carrouges, deep in the forests of Normandy, and the following morning they exchanged their clothes for fresh ones, not that anyone would have seen what they had left Nantes in. Sylvie hesitated over her red silk scarf. She should get rid of it, but it was the only keepsake she had taken from the club. She rolled it small and put it at the bottom of her bag. They were given new papers, and now Sylvie and Henri were Monsieur and Madame Villiers, with a travel permit to visit Sylvie’s sister in Falaise who had recently given birth.
‘Marcel has done his work well,’ Sylvie said. ‘They’ve changed the route because we’re nowhere near Angoulême.’
Henri folded his papers, taking care to make them look more dog-eared than the one that had caused notice in Nantes.
‘Do you think your plan has worked?’
Sylvie couldn’t answer. Even trying to name the people she had left behind brought tears to her eyes.
After a long day of travelling, they were dropped at a church on the outskirts of Bayeux. A woman who introduced herself as Anne led them down into the crypt beneath the church.
‘I’m afraid plans have changed. We had hoped to get you across La Manche, but that won’t be possible. We’ve had word from Britain not to try to move you at the moment. You’ll be safe here.’
‘Do you know why?’ Sylvie asked. She recalled the night drops of weapons. There had been rumours of something big, and this might be it.
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything.’
‘I notice she didn’t say whether or not she knew what was happening,’ Henri commented drily once Anne had left them.
‘Whatever it is, I hope it is worth it,’ Sylvie muttered. ‘I hope everything has been worth it.’
For five nights, Sylvie and Henri hid in the crypt, cut off from the world, the darkness eased only by a single torch. The solid walls surrounding them muffled most sound, but on the second day, the silence was broken by a thunderous roar followed by what could only be an explosion. Henri had been dozing; the final painkiller doing its job, but he woke with a start.
‘Something is happening. An air raid, I think,’ Sylvie whispered.
‘Our side or theirs?’
Sylvie could only shrug. She and Henri held hands, their fearful expressions made into masks by the dim shadows, and listened for anything that could give them a clue, but there was nothing. Sylvie took the cross from around her neck and pocketed it. To wear the symbol in this house of God was a blasphemy when she could not even summon the faith to pray that her friends were safe and that the sacred ground she and Henri were on would survive whatever was happening outside.
On the fifth day, the priest came into the crypt and
took them both by the hands, his face radiant. ‘You may come out now, my children.’
They followed him up the stairs and stepped into a twilight that seemed impossibly harsh. The square outside the church was filled with soldiers, mingling with the townspeople. Children ran around, playing chase. Sylvie was so shocked at the sight that it took her a moment to realise Henri was pulling her sleeve and laughing.
‘These are our boys, Sylvie,’ he shouted. He turned and kissed her full on the mouth. ‘There are the British!’
‘Americans, too,’ said a man voice from behind them. Sylvie turned to see a young man strolling towards them. He had dark skin and a neatly trimmed black moustache. He was the first black person Sylvie had seen since arriving in France. If ever there was a symbol that something had changed, the handsome sergeant holding out his packet of cigarettes was it.
‘So you’re English. The padre tells me you’ve been working undercover.’
‘I’m no’ English – I’m Scottish and proud of it,’ Henri said, holding a hand out to the sergeant. His accent has changed into something almost impenetrable to Sylvie’s ears. The second surprise in as many minutes. ‘Angus McLeish, at your service.’
‘Sergeant Aaron Evers at yours.’
Sylvie shook Evers’s hand.
‘Sylvia Crichton.’
Her voice felt tight in her throat. She wasn’t ready to be that woman yet. Perhaps she never would be.
‘What happened?’ she asked Sergeant Evers.
‘Operation Overlord is what happened,’ he said. ‘We invaded by the beaches. Thousands of us. Your boy Winston once said we’d fight them there, and did we ever! Bayeux is the first town to be liberated, but we’re here now and we aren’t leaving until Hitler is on the run.’ He gestured for them to follow, and they fell in beside him. ‘I guess you will want to be heading home as soon as you can. Let me take you to some of yours and they can help you out.’
Evers passed them on to a sergeant major who professed incredulity that Sylvie and Henri had been working and living in France undercover for so long. He, in turn, handed them over to a weary-looking doctor in a hospital tent. Henri – or Angus, as Sylvie would have to remind herself to call him – was taken off to have his injured knee treated. He was warned that his injury was not a priority, and as Sylvie stared at the fifty or more beds all occupied with men, she couldn’t help but agree that in comparison, he had got off lightly.
‘Strap the wee bastard up so I can stand upright on my own and that’ll do me for now,’ Angus said. He limped off, talking nineteen to the dozen with an orderly, leaving Sylvie alone with the doctor.
‘I’m afraid we can’t send you back to England now, Miss Crichton. Operation Overlord is just the beginning,’ the doctor explained. ‘If you’ve got any experience of nursing, we’ll be very glad of your help. More units will be crossing the Channel, but another pair of hands will be welcome.’
‘I’m FANY trained,’ Sylvie answered. ‘I’ll do anything I can to help.’
The doctor shook her by the hand. ‘Good to hear it. I’ll get an orderly to take you to headquarters and see about finding you a uniform.’
For three weeks, Sylvie worked in the field hospital, tending the wounded as Angelique had done when she met Dennis. She spent long days and hard nights with aching feet and a sore back, bandaging, stitching, soothing and watching the men pull through and be moved to recovery wards or slip away. The work was exhausting and often distressing when the screams of men in pain filled the tents, but Sylvie felt as if something had come full circle. Her mother had been a nurse and a dancer, and now Sylvie was fulfilling the same role, though how Angelique had found time for romance was beyond Sylvie’s comprehension. So many bodies passed through her care that she didn’t have time to learn their names, barely had time to catch a breath, let alone have anything more than the briefest of exchanges. The cots seemed to stretch for miles, with an ever-regenerating stream of patients.
Whenever she was granted ten minutes of peace, she snatched time to visit Angus. His skills as a wireless operator had quickly found him in demand, and he spent his days relaying messages back and forth to England, his leg propped up on a stool.
‘Have you heard anything about Nantes?’ she asked as they sat together drinking cocoa one evening in a corner of the makeshift mess. The thunderous explosions and screams of battle had ceased for the time being. It was the same question she asked every time they met.
‘Nothing, I’m afraid,’ he replied. ‘The message that you were travelling with me was the last contact anyone had with the cell. I’m sorry, Sylvia. I know you want to hear something from Marcel, but no news is good news, as they say.’
Sylvie didn’t answer. Not if the reason there was no news was because anyone who could give news was lying broken and tortured in a Gestapo cell, accused of murdering a German. Of course, Felix could not have left with her, but not knowing his fate, or that of Marcel, Monsieur Julien and the girls at the Mirabelle, would haunt her for the rest of her life. She leaned against Angus, and he put his arm around her.
‘Dinna worry, lass. Our lads are moving further across France by the day.’
His words were intended to comfort her, and she tried to let them and not think of the awful rumours of departing Germans torching houses and hanging civilians as final acts of aggression.
‘I hear that, in some places, the German army are fighting back, but in others they’ve abandoned towns at the first hint of us approaching. The French are taking up arms and fighting back, whether they’re in the Resistance or not. I spent so many hours hauling boxes of weapons through the countryside in the dark for Tomas to distribute, I only hope there will be enough.’ She sighed. ‘I only hope I did enough and my time there wasn’t wasted.’
So much hoping. But hoping wasn’t enough to win a war.
‘Nothing you did was wasted effort, lass. There are some brave men and women in that city, ready to take their country back, and it surely won’t be long before it’s liberated.’
Sylvie kissed Angus’s cheek, helped him to his feet and passed him the pair of crutches he used. She had grown quite fond of him in the time they had spent together.
‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘My unit is heading off with the mobile hospital in the morning. We’ve done our turn at the back, and now we’re heading to the frontline for a stint treating the first casualties. I’m not sure if I’ll be back this way for some time.’
She smoothed down her khaki skirt and adjusted her jacket sleeves. Wearing a uniform again felt constricting but had become normal. The time she had worn gauzy dresses with feathers and sequins felt like a dream that she had obstinately clung on to after she had woken. Only the red silk scarf that she kept tucked in her pillow was proof that she had been there at all. Sometimes, she dreamed of trying to race the army down through France to make her way back to Nantes but that would be suicidal. Besides, without knowing what she would find there, it was a futile gesture.
‘It’s probably too much to hope I’ll end up in Nantes at some point.’
Angus smiled. ‘You never know, but don’t you want to get home to England? As soon as I get the chance, I’m away back to Stirling so see my wife and bairns.’
He kissed her on the cheek again.
‘It was good to meet you, Sylvia. Look me up if you ever come up to Scotland.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was late August before Sylvie returned to England on a ship filled with convalescing soldiers. Someone must have passed on the information because she was identified on arrival and told to attend the Baker Street office. Two days later, her FANY uniform neatly laundered and her hair freshly done, Sylvie presented a written report to the secretary, then sat on a chair in the corridor while it was taken and read, drinking a cup of tea. Some things were worth returning to England for.
After a short while, an efficient young man appeared at her side.
‘Major Swift will see you now.’
Uncle Max was sitting behind his desk and greeted her with a smile. ‘It’s good to see you, Sylvia. You may not have heard because you were travelling, but Nantes was liberated yesterday.’
Sylvie filled with elation. Nantes was free. She closed her eyes and tried to picture the mairie devoid of swastikas, the chateau without sentries on the battlements, Mirabelle without a sea of German uniforms in the audience. Had Nikki and the Valters been captured or killed? Was Dieter’s death only brought forward by a matter of weeks, or would he have been spared to return home? She could go mad thinking of possibilities.
‘What have you heard from Marcel? Has he sent many skeds since I left?’
‘That’s classified, Sylvia.’
‘Please. Things happened on the night I left. I have to find out.’
Max looked hesitant then said, ‘After the brief sked telling us you and McLeish were coming home, we heard nothing for weeks. Three weeks ago, communications started again but only a brief reply to a sked to confirm the local résistants would be able to meet an arms drop. With all the excitement over D-Day, the policy became essential communications only, but our troops are still spreading across France. I’m sure Marcel will be complimentary about your performance in the fullness of time.’
It hadn’t been praise she was hoping to hear, but whether her friends were safe. Librarian was still in operation in some form, which gave her hope. She would have to cling on to that until she heard otherwise. She would have to believe Felix was alive.
Max straightened the papers on his desk. Sylvie’s report was topmost. ‘Now, you have a week’s leave. You can stay in London and we’ll put you up in a hotel, or you can return to Scarborough and report back afterwards. We’ve found you a role here that will use your language skills. You’ll be listening to the reports coming in from France and translating them into English. You’ll be working across the road from our office here.’
The Secret Agent Page 30