Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  Sunlight dappled the leaves. He had made a near-perfect life for himself.

  Tension crackled. Its source, Danny understood, was Matthew Bentinick. They sat at an outside table, and the pipe was lit.

  It had not mattered to Danny, inside the sealed compound at Gough, that matters were kept from him. Some saw it as an insult to their integrity – as if trust was withheld. It was obvious to him that confidentiality existed between Bentinick and the Czech policeman. In the unit there had been demarcation lines between teams. The names of agents were not shared, and biographies were not gossiped over in the bar: the talk spread only when a man was found in a ditch and a country lane was sealed.

  Bentinick’s coffee was cold, and the biscuit in the saucer uneaten. He stared out at the fast traffic on the riverside road, the bridges and the castle on the hill. There was no small-talk, but there never had been with him. Danny had drunk his coffee. The Czech had bought mineral water and was sipping it.

  Bentinick’s face was screwed up and the lines at his mouth were deep, as were those on his forehead. He didn’t blink. A hand came up and the thin white fingers drove through his hair. All those years before, in the operations room and in the building that doubled as canteen and bar, in good times and bad, Danny had not seen stress build in the man who had commanded him – and still did. Standards were adhered to – had been then, were now: the shirt was clean, the chin close shaven, the tie centrally knotted and the shoes polished. Emotion, not hidden this time, gripped the man. The quiet between them was broken.

  The cold coffee was drained, the mark of a man to whom waste was abhorrent. Danny could not guess at the demons – he had had his own, had struggled in confronting them.

  The lines on the face cleared, as if Bentinick had wiped them away. He said, bright, brusque, ‘Karol, time for you to do back-up. Get behind Miss Gabrielle. We’ll be fine. But my friend is short of some history and maybe needs another cup of coffee. Thank you, Karol.’

  The Czech stood, bobbed his head and was gone. Danny Curnow recognised qualities that he had once had, which the policeman had shown: there for a moment, on the pavement and his back to them, then gone. Seen but not noticed, merging and lost. It was a skill few possessed. Danny appreciated the art-form, respected the man, and had no idea why they had spent most of the night tramping pavements in the cold and visiting sites of barbarism. He wondered why they had skipped the Church of St Cyril and St Methodius, and whether Matthew Bentinick had manipulated it.

  He had much to learn. He bought more coffee. The pipe smoke billowed.

  Dusty parked the bus. He’d rung Caen before they’d left and spoken to Lisette, said that he would be back on Saturday, in the early evening, but still didn’t know when Danny might appear. Dusty worried for him. There would have been an accumulation of guilt, well hidden at the start but later rearing. He could remember each of the losses, and Danny had seemed not to care. Life had gone on in Gough, in their inner compound. Joseph, from Armagh City, needing to better himself, had been a big one. The idiot had wanted to be a businessman and required capital to buy a shop window. Maybe the limit of his ambition had been to join the Chamber of Commerce, if they’d admitted Taigs. He’d wanted to be an estate agent. Few Catholics in Armagh City could buy and sell, but they could rent. He’d been set up in business. Nice enough guy, pretty wife and three wee kids he adored. He liked, he’d told Danny, to get up in the morning when half the street was still in bed, put on a laundered shirt, knot his tie, and go to open the agency door. Property was always brilliant. He had empty houses that the active-service units could use for briefings and as hideaways. A familiar story, a well-travelled road. Nothing too serious, but lives would have been saved and killing weapons put under surveillance. He was a cheerful man and wore his worries, apparently, easily. Used to bring the kids to meetings: the handlers and back-up people started to take sweets for them. Great kids. But he was a useless businessman and the FRU had to decide whether it was worth pumping in more cash. There’d have been a meeting about it and a balance sheet would have been on the table. Income: the intelligence they gained from him. Outgoings: what he cost. He would be cut adrift. The decision was taken and Danny Curnow had not objected.

  What would happen to him? Well, the agency would close, leaving a trail of debts, and he’d have to start again. There was a scheduled meeting that evening, in the back of a pub off the road between Aughnacloy and Ballygawley. The team had stocked up with sweets for the kids, and Danny would have been the bad-news messenger – but the tout hadn’t showed. He didn’t show for a week. When he did, he was in a ditch, no shoes or socks, trussed like a Christmas bird, his teeth out, body covered with bruises. His life had been ended by a single shot, .38 calibre. As Captain Bentinick had remarked, ‘I think we’ll find he just had bad luck.’

  Too right. Volunteers had used a house. They’d had a coffee grinder that reduced fertiliser nitrates, for explosives, from granules to powder. It had blown a fuse and burned out the wall plug. One had been a fairly competent electrician. He had unscrewed the plug and found the hidden microphone. Bad luck. The kids had been at the funeral, close to their mother; not many others had turned out. The local TV always featured touts’ funerals. That night everyone in the ops room had watched the news. Captain Bentinick and Vagabond had put on a class act of stiff upper lip, pretending to be unmoved. Three great wee kids.

  Dusty waited for the tour party.

  Too many men had been on the beach at Dunkirk and were now in the cemeteries. The guides liked the cattle byre at Wormout. It was Danny Curnow’s place. He’d have been off to the side, listening carefully but not intervening. A simple story, and the guides would get it right because of the ample documentation. The group would have been cheerful, with initial alliances forming, when the coach left Dunkirk. Then they’d be hit. They’d be gathered together in a close group, then told that sixty British soldiers, overwhelmed on the perimeter line defending the beach evacuation, had been taken into the square, lined up, had faced a machine-gun on a tripod and been mown down. It would get worse and nerves were shredded. The fighting was brutal: a British officer threatened other officers with death – he’d shoot them – if they broke. He was as good as his word. The order on that sector was ‘Tell your men, with their backs to the wall, that the division stands firm.’ The integrity of the beaches and dunes was maintained long enough for the evacuation to take place. They would take a country road out of Wormout for a mile, then a turning to the left up a lane, and go on foot along a track to a place named La Plaine au Bois and a hut – in good repair because, as a monument, it needed to survive. The hut was open at one end but had no windows. It was fifteen feet square.

  Around a hundred men, mostly from the Warwickshire Regiment, had been herded in there by their captors: their resistance had become hopeless through exhaustion and lack of medical treatment for the wounded. Also, they had run out of ammunition. They were shot, five at a time, then grenades were thrown at them. A private, Bert Evans, only nineteen, survived and lay for a few minutes hidden by bodies. He and a captain, Lynn-Allen, crawled out and tried to get to the cover of trees down a hedgerow. They were spotted and fired on. The officer died – but, extraordinarily, Evans lived. He was found by French farmers and taken to a civilian hospital, then to a POW camp.

  The troops who carried out the killings were from the Liebstandarte SS, and their commanding officer was Captain Wilhelm Mohnke. It wasn’t until 1945 that Private Evans was able to tell the story of the butchery, after his release from the camp. At the end of the fighting Mohnke was a general, and spent ten years as a prisoner in the Soviet Union, then came back to Hamburg. He was never prosecuted: a wall of silence in the SS unit protected him. He lived for sixty-one years after those men had died in the little hut.

  Everyone would be quiet, shocked, upset. It would seem impossible for an act of such barbarity to have taken place in a scene so tranquil. They would go back to the minibus, numbed. It was a good place, on a Tue
sday morning, for Danny Curnow.

  He walked. It was a wide street, the best sort. She was a hundred yards behind him on the far pavement. It was the sort of street that Gaby Davies’s instructors used for recruit training. She did not have to be close to her agent but could observe him. Years ago, at Essex, she had been a historian, with an American bias, but at school she had loved modern European history. She was following Ralph Exton on his way to his meeting with the girl. She had the little compact camera in her bag and a fag in her fingers. There had been a teacher at school who had done the Second World War with them – she remembered a Churchill quote: Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But, it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Appropriate. Her agent was walking across the city to rendezvous with the opposition’s paymaster and bag-carrier. The building blocks were in position, and in two or three days, it would climax. She allowed a little excitement to well. For Christ’s sake, why did they do it, if not for the buzz? What were they there for, on the floors of Thames House? Not Crown and country, or Keeping Our Streets Safe. It was about the raw pleasure of seeing a mission move on from the end of the beginning.

  He walked briskly, with a good stride.

  He showed no nerves, looked around him only when crossing a road. She hadn’t said she would tail him and he might or might not have assumed she would. She thought he had been through fire. There had been a trace of a quaver in his voice when he’d relayed the story of the drill but he’d stayed calm and she thought him almost a hero. His fingers had been shaking when they’d pushed the book of photos, the rogues’ gallery, at him, but there had been no histrionics when he had picked out Malachy Riordan, then Brennie Murphy: ‘A bad bastard, that one.’ She thought she managed him well.

  The sunlight was on him.

  His wife was a total cow. He deserved better. There was a big hotel ahead. His daughter was another cow. Gaby Davies reckoned Ralph Exton deserved not grief but a medal.

  She should have known more about the Russian end but he’d done well for them and was worth the investment. Was she being followed? Did they do counter-surveillance? Riordan wouldn’t hit town until the evening, but did they have other people? She’d done all the checks – doorways, shops, bus and tram timetables near the Pankrác prison – and would have sworn that neither she nor the agent was being watched.

  It would be a feather in her cap when she went back to Thames House and the mission was put to bed.

  Matthew Bentinick stood up, put a tip on the table and covered it with a saucer against the wind. He walked to the kerb. ‘Come on.’

  Danny followed him.

  He waved down a taxi. Danny watched. The driver was given a destination and his face warmed. Then Bentinick asked how to get there by metro and bus. The driver gave a clipped answer and sped away.

  ‘Before you ask, it’s to complete your education, more history. Have we time to go by bus and train? Today, yes. Not tomorrow.’

  Bentinick led.

  Chapter 8

  ‘This is it.’

  ‘The French have one of their own, Mr Bentinick, another village that was destroyed. Is it going to be important?’

  ‘If not, I wouldn’t have brought you here, Danny.’

  The sunshine warmed them. The light fell on a sloping green expanse broken by a few trees, some ornamental shrubs and distant statues. High above, a buzzard wheeled and called. There were small groups of tourists, mourners or the curious. A few held guidebooks and most had cameras. The grass was mown as it would have been on the fairway of any above-average golf course. Danny Curnow knew of similar places close to his home in Caen. Other than the buzzard’s call, the only sounds were from Vaclav Havel airport, the thrust of engines as aircraft powered up. Behind them were a café, a museum and the toilets. They stood on the grass, and Danny understood that Matthew Bentinick would not be hurried. It was where a troubled man might come, sit on the grass or on a bench, be with ghosts and find calm. There was a man-made lake to the right that would have been a reservoir for the village, which had been gone for seventy-two years. There would have been carp in it for Christmas dinners. Danny had known army people who couldn’t see a stretch of water around any of the Irish towns where they worked without imagining what bait would best attract a leviathan. He had never fished. A river ran through Tavistock, had torrents and dark pools – it was said there were salmon in it. Here, a pretty lake, with swans and ducks, was flanked with reeds. An overflow stream cut across the grass at the lowest point. It would have divided the centre of the village. He tried to imagine how life would have been there on 27 May 1942 when the attack had been made on Heydrich. A traditional village in good agricultural country, transport would have been by cart and bicycle. The focus of local life would have been the church, with the school close behind; the community would have consisted of labourers, small farmers and one principal family.

  There were places in France that were no different. They straggled along the north coast and had been the location of extreme gallantry and barbarity. He had chosen to live among those sites, and the people who wanted to share the history. The fumes from Bentinick’s pipe wafted to him.

  In front of him, down the slope and up the far bank, some of the visitors had brought small children. Two little girls wore floral dresses and their hair in ponytails. Danny wondered if they had a blood link to Lidice, or whether they were just filling an hour before resuming a journey to the airport.

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘On which day?’

  ‘How was it, Mr Bentinick, on the day the sky fell on them?’

  He took his time, seeming to savour the moment. His fingers were on the pipe, where the stem joined the bowl. Danny thought that everything Bentinick did was a choreographed performance. A foot was raised, a leg bent, the pipe was rapped against the heel of the shoe, ash spilling from it. The fingers worked in a tobacco pouch, then pressed the threads into the bowl. A match was lit and smoke was carried away on the wind.

  ‘Am I boring you, Danny?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The church was dedicated to St Martin, founded in 1352. The shell survived from the Middle Ages. There was a village hall and a mayor. The main farmer was called Horak. His family owned land, large buildings and a house. The priest would have wielded the greatest influence on that community, Father Josef Stemberka. Lidice was home to five hundred villagers. For many hours after the event they would not have known of the grenade thrown at Heydrich’s car, perhaps not until the end of the day when people came home from the fields, or collected the children from the school, and the radio might have been switched on. Why should they have feared for their lives? They had cause, but it was tenuous.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘A farmer’s son had fled years earlier to England. He enlisted in the RAF. It was known he flew with the enemy, and payback time had arrived. They had not, at that time, found the men hiding in Prague. The village was surrounded by troops and sealed off. They took a list of the inhabitants from the mayor’s house. That night the men were separated from the women and children and taken to the church of St Martin. They would sleep there. Come on, Danny. She can do without us at the moment. We’ll be in place when we need to be.’

  They went down the hill towards the Horak farm, and the statue of grieving innocents, and to where the foundations of the church were.

  He was behind the young woman. To Karol Pilar, her tradecraft was poor.

  If she had been on any squad of detectives he had been training to the standards required for the surveillance of organised-crime gangs, he would have failed her. She was insufficiently aware of what was behind and around her, concentrating merely on staying in touch with her target. He would have sent her back to her unit. He smiled as he remembered the cake his wife had made that day for her mother’s birthday.

  The four police officers – a sergeant and three constables – had been briefed by their lieutenant on what was expected of them. They had been into the ca
nteen for sausage, bread and cheese, and had drunk some bitter coffee. That southern corner of Poland was dank and wet but the radio said the sun was shining below Jelenia Gora and across the frontier. It was September when autumn rushed in so they were well wrapped up because they would be out of their heated cars. Wrocław was their base, and their barracks was in Podwale, on a fine, tree-lined avenue, but the fresh wind was stripping off the leaves. They took two cars and drove out of the yard into traffic. When they reached the main road they would set up the block. They had drawn weapons from the armoury: it was usual in such circumstances, and with the intelligence provided from Warsaw, to have handguns, light automatic machine pistols, CS gas and a ‘stinger’ of chain and spikes to be thrown across the road if a vehicle attempted to break through the checks. They would put on the bulletproof vests, now standard issue for such work, when they reached the designated point. They were experienced men, all with long years in the police, and possessed the wry gallows humour typical of their profession. Some days were interesting and others were dull. Some stood out and others were instantly forgettable. None had any idea how that afternoon would shape. They smoked, and in each car there was grumbling about the failure of government to raise the rates for overtime pay. Then more important matters rose to the surface: the coming weekend’s home game against Lublin, and whether S´la˛sk Wrocław, going well at the start of the season in the Ekstraklasa, their top-ranked league, would win or drop points; there was doubt about the fitness of the principal striker. They took the road from the city towards Jelenia Gora, and were aware that they were part of a major operation in which ultimate control rested with the national police headquarters. Each man trusted his colleagues, and would depend on them if the business became difficult.