by Manda Scott
‘Good luck sorting that one out.’ Ducat laughs, dryly. ‘Who’s next?’
She shrugs. ‘Two old Maquisards are still on the loose. They’ll be dead if our killer finds them before we do, unless one of them is our killer. Either way, we have to find Elodie Duval before anyone else does.’
‘And perhaps find a motive?’
‘That would be good. All of this goes back to their war. I just don’t understand exactly how.’
‘But you will.’ He smiles again. Twice in one day. ‘Keep me in the loop.’
She watches his tail lights go: red patches, reflected in kaleidoscope patterns on the road.
From behind her, Rollo says, ‘And that, too, could have gone worse.’
‘I liked it better when it did. There’s something wrong with him when he’s not angry.’
‘Time enough.’ He leans against the wall beside her. ‘In the meantime, I’ve been pulling in some favours. According to people who know these things, Sophie Destivelle worked under the direct command of one JJ Crotteau, recently deceased. But she also did work on the side for the CIA and MI6, in which context she was run by Paul Rey and Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, respectively. Nobody really liked this blurring of boundaries, but they were old school, tight as a gnat’s arse – I am quoting directly – and they were very, very good. Between the three of them, they pulled off several high-profile and extremely unattributable assassinations.’
‘Extremely unattributable? Is that even a thing?’
He grins. ‘It gets better. Laurence Vaughan-Thomas was amongst the luminaries of the British SIS until well into the eighties. His full title is Sir Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, sixth Viscount Sarnforth, DFC, VC. He tried to turn down the VC but they wouldn’t let him. I couldn’t find out what it was for. Either way, his kindly old buffer image is well honed, but it’s a front. His sort never really retires.’
‘Does anyone think he shot Sophie?’
‘Absolutely not, under any circumstances – unless it was some kind of mercy killing and nobody has mentioned anything about her having terminal cancer. So no, they don’t. Nobody is suggesting their relationship was sexual, but that notwithstanding, they were as close as two people can get.’
‘What about Paul Rey? It looked to me as if she and he were pretty close.’
‘They were, and that definitely was sexual. Paul Rey was a Jedburgh in Laurence’s team that jumped to join the Maquis de Morez after D-Day. Again, they were pretty close. After the war, Rey and a few others started the CIA. He kept the Europe desk while his new colleagues spent the rest of their professional lives trying to recreate the summer of forty-four in countries where the government was anything other than neoliberal free-market screw-the-people-for-everything-they’ve-got-and-give-it-to-the-multinationals. Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan: all over the world, they kept dropping money and weapons from the sky and joining up with the local resistance against whatever regime the US wanted to get rid of.’
‘Look how well that worked out.’
‘Exactly. And someone in that early group was responsible for running Max Kramme.’
‘What?’
‘Kramme had agents inside the French Communist party and behind what became the Iron Curtain at a time when the British and Americans had nobody at all. Even before the war was over, he remade himself as a Western intelligence asset. MI6 and the CIA ran him jointly until fifty-seven, after which, he dropped off the map.’
‘This doesn’t get any better, does it? Can you keep on top of things here? I have a book to find that might give us some answers.’
The oldest book in Elodie Duval’s office is a first edition of Stevie Smith poetry, Not Waving but Drowning. Picaut can find nothing relevant inside it, although clearly that doesn’t necessarily mean there is nothing to find. She takes it with her as she leaves.
On the other side of the city, amidst the charming chaos in Elodie’s apartment, the oldest book she can find is an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica published in 1939. The cover is chestnut and gold, the weight pleasingly solid. When she opens it, the first few pages are unremarkable, but the edges of the rest do not move as they should and, opened fully, it is a child’s toy: a book made into a box, with the pages glued fast and the centre hollowed out to provide a resting place for two age-ambered cuttings from the London Times.
Lifted out and laid on her table they are:
1 – A wedding notice for Mademoiselle Sophie Destivelle and Monsieur François Duval, from 10 May 1945.
2 – An obituary for Brigadier Sir Jeremy Isambard Vaughan-Thomas, fifth Viscount Sarnforth, who died on 20 February 1957.
1946: Gehlen Organization established by agents of the United States Office of Strategic Services. Named for Reinhard Gehlen, head of German Intelligence on the Eastern Front, it employs many former Nazi officials with a remit to continue the clandestine war against the USSR.
1947: The OSS becomes the Central Intelligence Agency. Intelligence from eastern Europe sourced largely from Gehlen.
March 1957: Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands sign the Treaty of Rome, giving rise to the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
HAMPSHIRE
25 February 1957
THE DAY OF Brigadier Sir Jeremy Isambard Vaughan-Thomas’s funeral starts cold, and then mellows to a surprising, unseasonal warmth, wrong-footing family and mourners alike, so that the suits at the graveside are wool, not linen, and women in winter hats and gloves glow lightly through the formal reception afterwards on the lawns at Ridgemount.
The old house has never seen such a concentration of gold braid and empty language. I’m so sorry. Thank you. He was a wonderful man. Yes, thank you, we’ll all miss him terribly. Such a loss to the nation. Thank you, Prime Minister. Uncle Jeremy would be honoured to know you thought so highly of him. Archbishop, so kind of you to come. An inspiration? Was he? And my father? Yes, I’m sure. Together again. Resting in peace. That’s so kind. Why, yes, since the death of my cousin Christopher, I would appear to be heir to both. I’ll do my best to honour their heritage. I’m sure he did. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Laurence spots Céline at a distance. In his mind and hers, she ceased to be Theodora on the day Fabien died and she became Patron of the Maquis de Morez. The rest of the family has never quite caught up.
‘Shall we escape?’ He taps her elbow. Coolly resilient as ever, ravishing in pewter-grey linen with a single band in her hair as a hat, she, alone, was not fooled by the weather. He steers her past the Duke of Plymouth, smiling broadly. So kind. Thank you. Yes, deeply.
She asks, ‘Where are we going?’
‘To a place where we can drop the terrible rictus grins. You look as if your cheeks are aching. Certainly mine are. Come on. I have something to show you.’ He leads her inside, up the stone steps and the big, cascading staircase in the entrance hall, with the spikes on the bannisters to stop the family’s generation of youth from sliding down them. As a child, he never wanted to slide down them. Now he has an urge to rip out every spike and try it, just to see if he can.
He runs. It’s that kind of day. Up two flights and he’s onto the landing on the third floor that was his uncle’s domain. On the top step, he hits a wall of memories, but he has been here before. Céline, who hasn’t, stops at the top stair. He says, ‘Come on. He wanted us here.’
‘On the landing? Really?’
‘Beyond the landing. The snug.’
She laughs. ‘Now I know you’re making this up.’
‘I’m not and I can prove it. Come on.’ It is a central tenet of family mythology that nobody but the Brigadier is allowed inside the snug at Ridgemount. In childhood, it was a magical place, the repository of all things hidden, and even now, to enter is to feel the kind of light-headed terror he has only otherwise known just before a parachute jump.
It is his now, and all around it, but even so, coming here feels
as if he has stepped into a no-man’s-land of otherness. The room itself is both ordinary and astonishing. It smells of tobacco. The curtains have suffered at some point from an excess of moths. The fat, sagging, endlessly comfortable armchair is easily as old as the house, the leather cracked and dry and worn here and there so that strands of horse hair poke through.
Nevertheless, in the order and placement of the minutiae of living, there’s a balance between control and the clutter of a busy mind. Here are files and folders in alphabetical order, a globe marked with pins, a larger map of Europe the same, and books … everywhere books, read, half-read and unread, not one of them fiction, all engaged with the working of the world.
A Remington desk is the room’s focal point, set away from the windows to avoid the dual risks of distraction and spies. It has the feel of much action though it is empty today, but for a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a thickly stuffed manila folder.
Céline is more comfortable here than he was when he first came. She scans the room once, then settles in the armchair as if it were her own. She says, ‘It’s not just Ridgemount you’ve inherited. You’re the heir apparent, aren’t you? I thought the old boy would see sense in the end.’
‘I didn’t want it. I still don’t.’
‘No, but we don’t often get what we want.’
‘You’ll get a place of your own in time, if you don’t upset C too much.’
‘Larry, I don’t want that any more than you want this. I’m not a desk man. Not even a desk woman. Especially not that. I’m happy in the field for as long as they let me stay there.’ She lights up a cigarette, stares out of the window. ‘What kind of a bombshell has he left us?’
‘The unstable kind. Tell me what you thought of Sophie Destivelle when you were with her in the mountains?’
‘We’re going that far back?’ She drags on the cigarette. ‘She was dangerous. She was mixed up and ambivalent about all kinds of things, but she was devoted to Patrick. She was, I think, consumed with guilt at his having been captured. I assume she still is, particularly after the debacle of Kramme’s escape.’
‘Suppose she had nothing of which to feel guilty?’
‘I don’t follow. You’re telling me she wasn’t Kramme’s agent?’
‘I am telling you she wasn’t only Kramme’s agent. She was ours, too. What she did, she did because we told her to. Specifically, she did what the Brigadier told her to.’
‘I know, she told me that, but even so, Kramme captured Patrick and someone gave him the information that let him do so. By accident or design, I think Sophie Destivelle led Kramme to the Patron. More importantly, she thinks so, too. Why else give herself over to a living death in the mountains if she’s not waking every morning to the guilt of what she’s done?’
‘Feeling guilty doesn’t make her culpable. Think about this: when you rescued Patrick, Kramme knew you were coming in time to get away – true?’
‘True. The Milice said he’d had a message.’
‘Who sent that message? For the past thirteen years, I have struggled to see how Sophie could have done so unless you let her near the radio alone. Did you?’
‘No. I rigged it so I thought I’d know if she’d been, but as we know, tradecraft is never wholly reliable and she has always been good.’ Another long drag on the cigarette, another string of smoke. Céline continues, ‘The alternative answer has always been that our esteemed uncle knew that Kramme was Icarus and saved his life twice: first when we went for Patrick and then again at the wedding. Have you proof that he did? Because if you do, I might just dig up his body and parade it naked through the streets.’
Laurence laughs aloud for the first time in days. ‘But then we’d become the focus of attention, and as my father always said, attention is an agent’s death.’
‘But have you proof? Did the Brigadier know from the beginning that Icarus and Kramme were the same person?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ve been through his files, I’ve read every page, every cipher sent and received. There is nothing to suggest he knew before the debacle at the wedding.’
She eyes him, sideways. ‘How did you manage to search his files when the Firm’s entire records department went up in a blaze in forty-six?’
Now it is Laurence’s turn to look out of the window. ‘It was forty-five, and you’ll be surprised to learn that a substantial portion of the Brigadier’s records survived.’
Celine’s cigarette smokes, unheeded. ‘Not forty-six?’
‘That’s when word got out. Trust me, the fire started on the twenty-sixth of December 1945. Eleven thirty-two p.m., to be precise.’
She stares at him, slack jawed. And then she laughs. And laughs. And laughs. Winding down: ‘Christ, Larry. What did he offer you?’
He has held this for so long, but if he can’t tell Céline, who can he tell? He says, ‘Who was it destroyed the Firm in forty-five?’
‘The SIS. MI6. For whom we both now work.’
‘Yes, but who in particular?’
‘Claude Dansey? But he died of a heart attack in forty-seven and … Ah.’ Across her face, a cascade of feeling, none of it quite given life. ‘Everyone dies of a heart attack in the end, I suppose.’
‘I imagine that’s the case, yes.’
‘And there were a lot of people whose involvement with the Firm was not designed for public consumption. People who would owe Uncle Jeremy useful favours if their records were no longer at risk of being read.’
‘That is definitely the case.’
‘Strewth.’ She grinds her cigarette to a thumb’s-width stub and then stands, smoothing her sleeves. For a moment he thinks she is going to walk out, but what she actually does is to walk round the desk and press a kiss to his brow. The feel of her lips lasts a long time, well past the moment when she sits down again in the chair opposite the desk. She smiles at him. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Their smiles are balanced, united in a secret sin. Laurence relights his pipe. ‘So,’ he says, ‘back to the point. Two things strike me. The first is that Sophie categorically did not have access to Kramme on the night you went to rescue Patrick. She could not have warned him. True?’
‘True.’
‘Second: after she and her colleagues joined you, Kramme did not send the Luftwaffe to flatten the mountain. He must have known you were there, and after the invasion struck, pretty much every other Maquis in France was being bombed to oblivion. They had either to move camps, or keep their fires to a minimum. You alone were untouched.’
‘I thought it was down to Sophie, that Kramme was protecting her.’
‘I did, too. But I’ve been thinking a lot about Kramme and a number of things seem clear, starting with the fact that his pride was as monstrously overblown as his arrogance. He hated being made a fool of. Look what he did to Patrick when he found out the man he had called a friend had betrayed him. In Sophie’s case, she had value to him as long as she could tell him the date of the invasion and the name of the man who ran the Resistance in Saint-Cybard. Once he had captured Patrick, and the invasion had happened, both of these were redundant. She lost her value on the night of June the sixth, even if she could have contacted him, even if she might have wanted to contact him, which I really don’t think she did. You didn’t see her when Kramme got away. She was doing her absolute utmost to kill him.’
This is a delicate point: Céline still weeps for Fabien. She smokes a while, then: ‘So you’re saying Kramme wasn’t protecting her?’
‘Quite the opposite. Bombing her to oblivion would have salved his pride, I think, but he didn’t try, that’s the point. He left her untouched.’
‘Yes, I understand. Why?’
‘I don’t know, but Kramme thinks long term. As far back as forty-one, he was laying the groundwork for Icarus in case the war did not go Hitler’s way, building his networks of agents behind their lines and in the communist parties of Europe as a reason for our side to keep him alive. He made co
ntact through the Paul Mignon radio long before it was obvious to us that Hitler was going to lose. What does this tell us?’
‘He planned a long, long way ahead.’ Céline bites the edge of one nail. ‘You think he had someone else in the Maquis.’
‘Exactly so. Hold that thought, while you listen to this.’
Laurence presses the button on the tape recorder. Downstairs, someone brays a laugh. The noise knifes in over the thready hiss of the tape heads engaging. And then his Uncle Jeremy is there, urbane as ever, alive, hearty:
‘… that you fail to understand the situation as it stands. We are bankrupt. This war destroyed our empire more successfully than your Führer could have hoped. The Cousins appear to be printing their own money in ways that do not lead to paralysing inflation, which may be contrary to all the laws of nature, but the result is that they have unlimited funds and are using them to promote their own ends. Additionally, those in power on both sides of the pond feel they will only stay that way if they have a great enough enemy to ensure that our respective populations feel continually under threat, and the Soviets are the most convenient bogey man. You, by happy chance, have a functioning network of agents in the east, which is worth its own weight in promises. QED, you now belong to our friends across the water.’
There is a gap, the sound of a match on paper, the suck and sigh of a cigarette, newly lit. And then a second voice, with soft, rounded vowels.
‘Let us be clear. The French desire my death and have asked for it at ministerial level on a number of occasions, as have the Poles and the Latvians, not to mention a number of your countrymen, most notably your nephew. But all that notwithstanding, you have sold me to the Americans?’