The English Agent

by Clare Harvey

  Edie fell to the floor. She reached out into the rushing darkness through the open door to catch Gerhardt’s hand, grabbing his wrist, heaving him into the cab. The Lysander finally lifted free as Gerhardt struggled inside. Their bodies tangled together, and they held each other tight as the plane angled up. A bullet shot through, cracking the glass. They ducked as more shots came. The pilot swore and the plane shot up at an even steeper angle, wheels kissing the treetops as they rose.

  Edie looked through the open hatch as the ground sank away below. The pilot banked, the sinking moon slipped sideways. She could see the earth, lit up by the single beam from the car headlight, with the strewn handful of uniformed men looking upwards. The ploughed field was cross-hatched with the imprint of the plane’s wheels and there, she could just glimpse, Gerhardt’s discarded SD coat in the mud, and next to it – what was that? – a tiny silver dot: Miss Akins’ powder compact, which must have fallen out when she stumbled in the mud.

  The wind was roaring past the open hatch. Edie pulled away from Gerhardt, caught the door handle, and heaved it to, shutting out the angry night. Eventually the sound of shots died away. She leant forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘De rien.’

  ‘Can I ask you a favour? When we land in Tempsford, would you be able just to give us a moment together, before you call in the military police?’ she said. Of course Gerhardt would have to go to prison in England – what other option was there? – but maybe this French pilot could be persuaded to let them have a few minutes of privacy to say their goodbyes first.

  ‘I’m not sure if the Swiss military has a police force,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I have an appointment with my bank in Zurich,’ he said, nodding at the leather satchel that lay next to him on the seat. She could see banknotes spilling from the top. ‘But I think a trip to Switzerland might suit us all, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes!’ she said, sinking back into Gerhardt’s embrace. Switzerland – glorious, neutral Switzerland – just a few flying hours to the east.

  Outside the plane’s cracked window the horizon was a gilded line. They were running into the dawn, the darkness at their back a tailwind, driving them onwards. She was still holding Gerhardt’s hand, his palm against hers, as the pilot lifted the little aircraft higher still, and France fell away like a bad dream. ‘Adieu,’ she said aloud, as they headed for a distant constellation of fading stars. ‘Adieu, Yvette.’

  Vera

  The car was waiting in the usual place to take her back to London. Noticing Vera approach, the driver got out and opened the door. The weather was closing in now, a nondescript blanket of drizzle that blanked out the moon. Vera nodded her thanks to the driver as she got into the back seat. The engine was already running and the car pulled off, wheels skidding slightly on the damp gravel as the driver put her foot down. Vera was lurched to the side, and tutted. Then she took out her cigarettes and offered one to the driver, who said, ‘No thank you, ma’am.’ That was new, thought Vera, the ‘ma’am’, and no more silly chit-chat, either. Everything had changed since she got her WAAF uniform. A speck of ash fell on her skirt, and she brushed it off, feeling the damp wool beneath her fingertips and remembering the feel of it from another uniform, another time. When she’d last seen Dick he’d been in uniform. She could still remember the feel of his lips, soft and urgent against hers. She inhaled again, swilling the smoke around in her mouth. His breath had tasted of good cigars and single malt, she remembered. She shook her head and exhaled. That book was closed now. Closed off like so many others. The car jolted along the farm track. Vera looked out of the window but there was only a grey nothingness outside. She hoped the flight had outrun the weather front. That new agent wouldn’t be able to get any sleep if there was too much turbulence, and she’d need to be rested, keep her wits about her on arrival.

  ‘How did she seem to you?’ Vera said, leaning forward to address the driver, who was changing down a gear as they approached the junction.

  ‘The agent? Oh she was lovely,’ said the driver. Yes, Vera thought, she was lovely: curly chestnut hair and a broad grin – the whole of F-Section had fallen in love with her. But she hadn’t meant that. What Vera meant, but couldn’t let herself say out loud, was, ‘Do you think that girl really knows what she’s let herself in for?’ Vera thought back to the moments before the plane took off, after she’d checked through the agent’s clothes, made her empty her pockets of anything incriminatingly British – they’d found an old bus ticket – and given the final pep talk. It’s not too late to back out, she’d said, as she always did. Remember that you are a volunteer, and if you don’t think you can hack it, we can send another agent in your place. But the girl said she was fine, she was quite sure, wanted to do her bit. They always said that, Vera thought, inhaling and listening to the swish-scrape of the windscreen wipers. Why did they always have to say that? She’d given the girl a silver powder compact, just like the one she’d given Yvette. Before hauling herself into the fuselage, the girl had turned and waved. ‘Au revoir,’ she called, hand fluttering. ‘Au revoir, Miss Atkins.’ And Vera lifted her hand in salute. ‘Adieu,’ she called back, as the plane’s engines coughed into life. ‘Adieu, dear girl.’

  Epilogue

  1947: Wuppertal, Germany

  ‘They tell me your trial is scheduled for tomorrow. It would appear I caught you just in time.’ The man looked up as she spoke. The cell door slammed shut behind her. Vera heard the key in the lock and the guard’s shuffling feet in the corridor. The man stood, chair legs scraping on the flagstones. He held out a hand, which Vera ignored. ‘I am the intelligence officer from the French Section of—’

  ‘Miss Atkins, what a pleasure. I have heard so much about you.’

  Still the proffered hand.

  ‘I am not here for pleasantries, Herr Kieffer.’ She glanced from his hopeful face up to where a square window was cut into the wall, shedding a meagre wedge of daylight into the bare room. The air was stone-chill and smelled of a mixture of disinfectant and old urine from the chamber pot by the door. Friedrich would have ended up somewhere like this, she supposed, had he not been executed for his part in the assassination attempt on Hitler, back in 1944. She sighed and checked her watch. ‘We don’t have much time. I merely require some information from you.’ It had been many years since she’d spoken German; her mother tongue felt like a mouthful of pebbles.

  ‘Of course. There is nothing that I haven’t already shared with my lawyer, I can assure you, but please take a seat, if you would like to talk.’ He gestured to the solitary chair.

  ‘I would rather stand, thank you.’ She faced him across the small room: chair and small table on one side, bed on the other, and the yellow-white light from the high-up window. Her hand drifted up to one of the pearl earrings she wore these days, creamy and smooth as the moon. ‘I just want to know what happened to Yvette, in the end.’

  She watched his face carefully as he answered, checking for a tell-tale flicker of expression crossing the brow, or an unbidden finger tapping the side of the nose, but there was nothing. ‘Yvette?’ He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t recall anyone of that name.’

  ‘A convenient lapse of memory.’

  ‘Not at all. I remember other women agents who passed through avenue Foch: Madeleine, Paulette, Simone . . .’ He gestured to suggest a list. ‘I recall twelve or more – should I list them all? Would you like to write them down?’

  Vera said no. She had all their names written in red on the first page of her notebook, underneath the heading Missing Presumed Dead. She’d always thought that such a terrible verdict, no comfort for the families at all. But the names were ticked off now, dates and places of death, along with certain details of what the Nazis had inflicted on them – all except one:

  Edith Lightwater: codename Yvette Colbert – call sign Cat.

  ‘Some were easier to turn than others. But most we
re useful to us,’ Kieffer continued. ‘Remarkable that the women often held out longer than the men, don’t you think? But they all gave way in the end.’

  ‘Gave way?’

  ‘You are not suggesting I did any of your agents any harm? They were treated properly when they were with us. They were well fed: we even managed to procure English tea and cigarettes for them.’

  Vera thought of Henri Dericourt. She didn’t doubt there was English tea and cigarettes at 84 avenue Foch. ‘And then, afterwards, once they ceased to be of use?’

  ‘When they had outlived their utility, they were sent to a prison in Karlsruhe. The commandant was a personal friend, and he assured me—’

  ‘At Karlsruhe the women were sent on to the camps to be tortured, raped, and tossed into the ovens to burn,’ Vera interrupted.

  ‘No. No, but Fritz said . . .’ Shock mangled his tidy features and he slumped down onto the bed, with his head in his hands.

  Vera sighed. ‘Herr Kieffer, if one of us is going to cry, it is going to be me. Please stop this pantomime immediately, and look at this.’ She held out a photograph and placed it in his hand. ‘This is the agent we called Yvette Colbert. She was the first female wireless operative we sent over. Her call sign was “Cat”, which you would know very well because your Dr Goetz ran a Funkspiel with her. Look closely. You do remember her, don’t you?’ He stared down at the gloss-grey rectangle in his hand. ‘There are no records of her in Karlsruhe. What happened to her, Kieffer? What happened to Yvette Colbert?’

  ‘If I tell you, will it affect the outcome of the trial?’

  ‘I am not a lawyer; I cannot say. But your trial starts in the morning, does it not? And I shall be dining with the prosecution team this evening.’ She wasn’t lying. Let him make of it what he wanted. ‘Now look again at this photograph and see if it jogs your memory.’

  He turned his face up towards her, and he looked tired, tired and older than his forty-seven years. ‘Yes, of course I remember her,’ he said. ‘She was the first. But we kept no records of her time with us. She was erased from the files.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because she escaped.’

  Vera exhaled in a sudden rush, not realising she’d been holding her breath. ‘You destroyed the evidence of her because the Funkspiel was a failure and the agent escaped, and it would have been an embarrassment to have such a blot on your counterintelligence copy book?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Kieffer said. ‘It’s true that as time went on we were under pressure to get the agents in, and turn them. Berlin always thought that the French networks were the most dangerous – the Führer took a personal interest – but in those early days mishaps were tolerated. However, when Yvette escaped we were directed to “lose” the information about her, which is why, when you asked, I denied knowing her – I suppose I was still obeying orders.’ He broke eye contact with her, and his head dropped.

  ‘It was hushed up,’ Vera said, looking down at the hunched man on the prison cot. ‘But why?’

  ‘It was because of one of our interpreters. He escaped with her – he was very well connected, related to von der Schulenburg. You might know of him: Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg?’

  ‘Yes, he was known to us,’ Vera said, giving nothing away. Kieffer held out the photograph and Vera took it from him without touching his fingers. ‘What happened to Yvette and the interpreter?’

  ‘They got away in a small plane with Dericourt. Boemelburg was confident he had him in his pocket, called him his “super ace”, but I never trusted him. I always knew he’d let us down, one way or another. Afterwards, the message came from Berlin that there was to be no kind of investigation or anything of that sort, and I can only think the boy’s uncle intervened, to save the scandal. There were other agents, other opportunities – we were very busy, for a while. The incident with “Yvette” was just brushed under the carpet and forgotten about.’

  Vera took out her cigarette case and flipped it open. She pushed Yvette’s photograph back underneath the serried ranks of Sobranies, where she’d been keeping it. So Dericourt had done what he said. She hadn’t believed him – he always told people what they wanted to hear – until now. She held out the open cigarette case to Kieffer. ‘Would you like one?’

  He looked up, and smiled, and for a moment he looked his real age – looked like the handsome charmer he must have been, lording it over the Sicherheitsdienst in Paris. ‘It’s been a while since I had one of these.’ His smile faded. Vera clicked her lighter and lit their cigarettes. Close up his skin had a yellowish tinge, and stubble was starting to break through.

  She should have been feeling happy, Vera thought, straightening up and swilling the smoke around her mouth. She should have been feeling a kind of joyous relief that she had finally achieved what she set out to do. She had come all the way out here to Germany, at considerable personal expense – funding the trip from Dick’s legacy – to find out precisely what had happened to all the women agents who had been in her charge, and been marked down as still missing at the end of the war. She had a leather-bound notebook in which she’d made notes over the past few weeks, detailing for parents, children, husbands and fiancés what had happened to their loved ones, and hoping the information – however awful – would at least help them close a book on the past.

  The others were all dead, but Yvette had escaped. And Vera realised, with a jolt, that what she felt wasn’t happiness on Yvette’s behalf, it was the acid-sting of jealousy: the girl ran off with her lover, leaving her past behind her. What Vera wouldn’t give to pull off that little stunt. She exhaled, hating herself.

  Kieffer tapped ash onto the stone floor. Vera cleared her throat. ‘I think I have what I need. I shall leave you now.’

  He looked up through the haze of smoke. ‘You don’t need me to sign a deposition for the lawyers?’

  ‘That will not be necessary.’ She walked the three steps to the cell door and knocked to be let out. ‘Don’t trouble yourself to get up.’ Out of the corner of her eye she saw that he already had. He was moving towards her. His cigarette was in his left hand, and he held out his right to shake hands goodbye, in the German way. She slid out of the door and nodded at the guard to slam it shut. Her footfalls echoed down the long corridor as she strode towards the exit, not looking back.

  Outside the June heat burst onto her skin. The streets were a mess of rubble and late blossom, the clouds toppling like falling masonry in the darkening sky. Vera ground the remains of her cigarette into the dirt with the tip of her brogue. She paused at the top of the prison steps by the waiting gallows, the noose twitching in one of those sudden scuds of air that presages a rainstorm. Distant lightning flashed like a sword from a scabbard. A warm gust dislodged a lock of hair from her WAAF cap. And as she reached up to push it back, she noticed that her cheek was wet with tears.

  Author’s Note

  Although The English Agent is entirely fictional, certain real-life characters provided a catalyst for the story:

  Romanian-born Vera Atkins was an agent handler for SOE’s F-Section during the war. Anyone who has read Sarah Helm’s excellent biography ‘A Life in Secrets – the story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE’ will know how much I am indebted to her.

  French pilot Henri Dericourt flew agents into Occupied France for the SOE. Robert Marshall’s ‘All the King’s Men’ provided invaluable information on Dericourt’s wartime exploits.

  Other instances where a real-life namesake was used as a stepping-off point for the creation of a fictitious character include: Maurice Buckmaster (F-Section head), Hans Kieffer (SD chief), Richard Ketton-Cremer (RAF pilot and heir of Felbrigg Hall), Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenberg (German Ambassador to Romania and Russia), Charles Fraser-Smith (inventor of ‘Q-gadgets’ for SOE), Josef Stork (Kieffer’s chauffeur), Dr Josef Goetz (SD’s radio game mastermind), Karl Boemelburg (Kieffer’s predecessor), and Jeannot Dericourt (Henri’s wife).

  Many of the settings in
The English Agent are actual wartime locations:

  In London, SOE’s Headquarters were at Norgeby House in Baker Street. Meetings with agents took place at Orchard Court on Portman Square. Sabotage equipment was developed and stored in the Natural History Museum (where there is now a commemorative plaque honouring the agents and their contribution to the war). Vera Atkins shared an apartment with her mother at Nell Gwyn House on Sloane Avenue. The Dorchester Hotel was reputedly bomb-proof due to its robust construction and was therefore popular for wartime visitors, if they could afford it (Allied Forces Supreme Commander Dwight D Eisenhower had a first-floor suite).

  In Paris, the SD’s Headquarters were at 84 avenue Foch, and the so-called ‘house prison’ was in place des Etats Unis.

  If you’re interested in discovering more of the books and DVDs that helped inspire The English Agent, a comprehensive list can be found on my website: http://clareharvey.net

  Acknowledgements

  A huge thank you to those who offered advice, support and encouragement, but especially to my mum, Anne Harvey, who knows far more about bridge than I do!

  Clare Harvey’s debut novel, The Gunner Girl, won the 2016 Joan Hessayon Award. Her follow-on novel, The English Agent, was inspired by the bravery of the women agents from the Secret Operatives Executive (SOE) in wartime France. Clare lives in Nottingham with her family. To find out more, get in touch on Twitter @ClareHarveyauth, Facebook: clareharvey13 and at her website:www.clareharvey.net

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Clare Harvey 2016

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.