Over and Out

by Michael Gilbert

  Fleming was normally a man who concealed his feelings behind his old Etonian mask. Until he spoke, Luke had not realised how worried he was.

  ‘We’ll do our best,’ he said.

  And later, to Tom Braham, ‘It’s all very well talking about doing our best, but where the devil are we going to start?’

  ‘I suppose we’d better start at the beginning.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Start with the men coming back off leave.’

  ‘What a splendid idea,’ said Luke. ‘Movement control say they’re dealing with between two and three thousand every week. So what do you suggest we do? Search every one of them to find out if he’s carrying a large sum in French francs? And what the hell are you grinning about?’

  ‘I was just visualizing the scene at the disembarkation point. You can bet that the cash would be hidden in any number of ingenious ways. It would need a strip search to make sure of finding it. Two thousand bolshy soldiers with their trousers round their ankles—’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Luke. ‘Let’s have your next bright idea.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got that code message—’

  ‘Always supposing it was a code message and not just a doodle. Did you put it to Hickory Dickory Dock?’

  ‘I put it to him. And I got an answer. Would you care to read it?’

  Luke managed, with some difficulty, to make out the words scrawled on the back of a GS message pad.

  If you had, as being in Intelligence you certainly ought to have, the least idea of deciphering procedures you would not have sent me a transcript, scribbled out, I presume by you, on the figures in question. If I am to give you any help at all I must have the original message, or, if that is not available, then a good, black and white photograph. To which you might add an enlargement, say a four or Jive times magnification. I might then be able to suggest a line for you to follow.

  Luke said, ‘Can’t you visualise our dear little mouse with a mortarboard on his head, wagging his finger at the dull boys at the back of the class? So what did you do?’

  ‘My first idea was to tell him to take a running jump at himself. Wiser counsels prevailed. Since this is at the moment our only line, it would be self-defeating to abandon it. I got our photographic people to make the copies he wanted and sent them off. No reply as yet.’

  ‘I’m beginning to think we’d better rope in the chaplains’ department.’

  ‘You may be right. Faith is said to move mountains.’

  Whether or not it was the result of organised prayer, a day or two later a very slight break in the surrounding darkness did open. It was a report from a gendarme who had been on a routine patrol in the market. He had been shown a dirty and dishevelled piece of clothing. From the six large brass buttons on the front and the four flap pockets it was evidently a British soldier’s tunic. Thread marks on the right arm suggested that the single stripe of a lance-corporal might have been detached from it.

  The garment had been taken in charge by the gendarme, who had handed it over to the CMPs. When it reached Luke, his thoughts turned to Lance-Corporal Mungeam.

  ‘When you saw Mungeam,’ said Tom Braham, who was with him when the jacket arrived, ‘how was he dressed?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Luke, ‘and I’m damned if I can remember. I only saw him for a split second, and my mind was very much on other things.’

  ‘Understandably,’ said Braham. ‘But now you have leisure to reflect on it, so cast your mind back. It may be important.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be prepared to swear to it in a court of law, but I think he was dressed in peasant’s clothes. A baggy pair of trousers and a smock.’

  ‘So, the people who took charge of him stripped him of his uniform and dressed him as a peasant. Subsequently they removed the lance-corporal’s stripe and the Royal East Anglican flash from his jacket and tried to make a few francs by selling it. Come, now we’re getting somewhere.’

  ‘We shall be if the stall-keeper can identify the person who sold it to her. I’ll have a word with her.’

  Which he did, on the following day, with mixed results.

  Madame Jolliet greeted him amiably and did not seem to be worried by his approach. After his first few questions a number of her friends had formed a cordon round her and were listening with undisguised interest to the exchanges.

  ‘There are people in this market,’ announced Madame Jolliet, ‘who would dirty their hands by trading in stolen goods, but I am not of their number.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said the chorus. ‘She is a woman of unspotted reputation. Not like some we could name.’

  It had been unfortunate, explained madame, that she had not been there when the jacket had been offered to them. It was her grandson who had been left, for a moment, in charge of the stall. He was a good boy, but only recently out of school. He could not be expected to know the character of all the women who approached him.

  ‘Naturally not,’ said the chorus. ‘A young boy! Imagine it!’

  ‘I observed her myself,’ said the leader of the chorus. ‘An associate of Tante Marie, was it not?’

  ‘Tante Marie,’ said the rest, and shuddered in unison.

  ‘So who is Tante Marie?’ said Luke. ‘And why do you all distrust her?’

  Madame Jolliet took the question to herself. Suppressing any chorus work with an imperious wave of her hand, she said, ‘You must agree that I have often mentioned my distrust of that woman. I have done so openly. I am not ashamed of having spoken. But if the gentleman is in search of further details, I can only suggest that it would be more proper if he applied to the authorities.’

  This suggestion was badly received by madame’s supporters, who saw that they would be deprived of their fun, but well received by Luke, who felt that he would get the information he required in a somewhat more discreet and private discussion. So, after thanking madame warmly for her help, he headed for the Gendarmerie Nationale at Ypres to have a word with his old ally, Commissaire Bernardin. Ever since it had been discovered that he spoke better French than the commissaire spoke English, their discussion had been lengthy and helpful.

  The report which he now presented provoked open amusement.

  ‘You have plucked a famous wild flower,’ said Bernardin with a lopsided smile.

  ‘Tante Marie?’

  ‘The same. A byword in the market square. Indeed, beyond the market since she is, to the best of our knowledge and belief, the head and inspiration of the Sisters of Care and Sympathy.’

  ‘A body of churchwomen?’

  This produced a further and a broader smile.

  ‘That is the name they call themselves, but I can assure you that their care is for their own pockets, and their sympathy is for themselves. They are a sisterhood of prostitutes and petty thieves. A further point for you to consider. Women such as these usually have protectors. And it seems that they are under the control of an organisation of Dutch and Belgian thugs.’

  ‘I don’t understand that,’ said Luke. ‘These prostitutes operate in France—yes? Then how can they be controlled by Dutch and Belgian thugs?’

  Commissaire Bernardin said nothing for a moment and Luke, looking at his shrewd and equable face, thought he had rarely met a man with both feet more firmly planted on the ground.

  Finally he said, speaking with some reluctance, ‘When the Germans swept across Belgium some very unpleasant characters went underground. One lot in particular who called themselves “Der Zirkel”, or The Ring. In peacetime their business was importing drugs and exporting diamonds. When the Germans took over, such enterprises went into abeyance. They therefore decided—a logical decision—to work for the Germans. And they had something to offer them, too. The Germans were short of many raw materials—rubber and copper in particular—and there were plenty of neutral producers only too anxious to sell to them. The trouble was the British Navy who would only allow properly documented ships and cargoes to pass. Having competent
forgers on their staff—and more than one of the port officials on their payroll—Der Zirkel were well placed to ease this traffic through. By giving the Germans this useful and whole-hearted co-operation their chief, one Rudi Naroch, has become a great man—a man of power—with his own private army of thugs. A small number of them—around half a dozen, we think—have infiltrated this country by the inshore route and have based themselves between Hoogstade and the coast. A stretch of country once prosperous, now a wilderness with dozens of empty factories and deserted farms. An ideal base for their purpose. From it they can control and benefit from their own operations and those of the Sisters of Care and Sympathy.’

  Luke said, ‘I am afraid that what you have told me—though interesting—really means that this jacket may have come into the possession of any one of a large number of prostitutes.’

  ‘It has not advanced your enquiries. I am sorry. Then let me give you a further piece of information. When, from time to time we bring in one of the sisterhood for questioning, she is, of course, searched. And on more than one occasion she has been found to be in possession of drugs. Before the war this would not have been surprising. There was a constant and unstoppable inflow of drugs into France, as into all European countries—heroin, cocaine, cannabis in all its forms, brought in by couriers, poor people, used by the drug gangs. The war has had one beneficial result at least, it has practically stamped out the drug trade. Few people other than service personnel now pass our ports. An unaccredited civilian is a rarity, certain to excite suspicion and careful search. So where can these wretched women have found the drug they yearned for? Who was their supplier? What was their source?’

  ‘And the drug was?’

  ‘In every case it was morphine.’

  ‘A most effective anodyne,’ agreed Luke. ‘As I know myself. So effective that we, like other armies, not only issue it in bulk to hospitals and dressing stations, but distribute it in small packets, in powder form, to tanks and armoured cars. Which makes it available to the light-fingered gentry who think more of their own pockets than the relief it provides for their own friends.’

  ‘If by that you mean that British soldiers are pilfering the morphine and selling it to the sisterhood you are wide of the mark. In most cases there is sufficient of the original packaging remaining to demonstrate that the morphine comes from German Army sources.’

  It was at this point that the true significance of what the commissaire was telling him dawned on Luke. As a fisherman, without even feeling a tug on his line can tell by instinct that there are fish in the water, so he knew that this information was vital to his own investigations.

  He said, speaking slowly as he ordered his thoughts, ‘What you have told me demonstrates, does it not, that there must be a regular link between the Germans and the sisterhood?’

  ‘You find the idea interesting?’

  ‘I do indeed. In fact it might answer one of the main questions that have been puzzling us: how the Germans can pinpoint those particular soldiers they hope to suborn. You follow me?’

  ‘I was ahead of you. I visualised a soldier, war weary and frightened, in the arms of a prostitute. Is it not inevitable that he will pour out his hopes and fears to her? He may already have been toying with the idea of desertion. She encourages him. When she sees that he has made up his mind, his name goes straight back to German Intelligence—’

  Later, Luke passed on these ideas to Braham, whose legally trained mind he had come to use as a filter, able to separate the true from the factitious, the probable from the possible.

  Braham said, ‘I understand about the Sisters of Care and Sympathy—what a splendid name, by the way—and I am not surprised at the existence and character of their protectors. In my experience, Belgium does sometimes seem to produce a more unpleasant type of obscene and humourless bully than any other country in the world. But one thing does surprise me: if the authorities, on this side of the line, know of their existence, why do they not suppress them? You would surely imagine that they would do so.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Luke. ‘They have many preoccupations and problems, and less than their pre-war force available to cope with them. But I have sufficient confidence in Bernardin to be certain that if he knew precisely where both ends of this snake were lying—its tail somewhere in the suburbs of Arras or, maybe, Béthune or Saint-Omer, its head in the wasteland round Hoogstade and Furnes—then they would stamp on it, and break its back.’

  ‘So all we have to do,’ said Braham, ‘is to give them that information. Then, if these Belgian-Dutch thugs are the mainspring of the operation—both locating the victims through the sisterhood and helping to spirit them away—smash them and we shall have done our job.’

  ‘That’s all,’ said Luke. And, thinking of Colonel Fleming, he added, ‘The sooner the better.’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Seems to me,’ said Joe Narrabone, ‘that you could do with some help. Real help, I mean, from some thoughtful, intelligent type, who could put you on the right track. Someone like me, for instance.’

  ‘If that’s what you think,’ said Luke coldly, ‘I notice it didn’t induce you to hurry back. From what the surgeon told me, you were free to leave hospital a week ago.’

  ‘Five days.’

  ‘All right, five days. So what was holding you up?’

  ‘What was holding me up,’ said Joe, ‘was the thought that after all I’d gone through, the pain and the anguish, I was due a few days’ leave.’

  ‘All you’d gone through was to be fitted with a new leg in place of the one you messed up.’

  ‘I broke it, didn’t I? Climbing through a window.’

  ‘Climbing through a girl’s bedroom window, I was told. But that’s not the point. What I want to hear more about is all this pain and anguish.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘The surgeon told me, time taken, ten minutes. No bother.’

  ‘It was a slick piece of work,’ agreed Joe. ‘But you’ve got to think of the mental side. The trammer. All that guff. Mind you, it was worth it.

  The new leg’s a beauty. An aluminium multi-joint is what they call it. Twice as light as the old one and twice as supple. I could play you at squash, give you three points a game and beat you.’

  ‘We’ve no time to waste over games of squash, we’ve got work to do. And precious little time to do it in.’

  ‘So Tom told me. I had a beer or two with him when I got in last night. He didn’t seem very happy about the way things were going. As far as I could see, you’ve covered a lot of ground and got back to the place you started from. Of course, you didn’t have me to inspire you.’

  ‘It’s not inspiration that’s needed, it’s perspiration. If you’ve been talking to Tom you’ll know what I mean. Somehow we’ve got to get alongside the members of this tarts’ trade union and find out exactly how the game’s worked.’

  ‘Get alongside them?’ said Joe thoughtfully. He considered an outrageous amendment, but abandoned it as he realised how worried Luke was. He said, ‘If I’m going to make a splash with these chicks, I’m going to need some cash.’

  ‘The colonel won’t grudge you a pound or two, I can assure you of that. I told him you were cream and apple pie to members of the other sex. I said they queued up to get into bed with you.’

  It had always intrigued Luke that the loss of a leg seemed to have made Joe irresistibly attractive to the female libido.

  ‘As long as he doesn’t expect miracles,’ said Joe. ‘Not at once. You mustn’t overwork a willing horse. Best, actually, if I can pick up a girl who isn’t in the gang. Probably hurt at being left out. Then I tell her, what a shame it is she should be given the cold shoulder by girls who are her inferiors in every way. Get her really angry, and she’ll be happy to give us the low-down on her more favoured sisters.’

  ‘I leave the tactics to you,’ said Luke. ‘With every confidence.’

  A day or two later, Commissaire Bernardin came across to Montreuil to talk
to Luke. This was in accordance with the protocol established between them, since the matter which had now arisen concerned the British end of their common problem. He brought with him a circular letter which had been sent to the heads of the different branches of the Police Judiciaire concerned.

  ‘It has come to us,’ said Bernardin, ‘because it was known that we were troubled by the possibility that money which originated from different pacifist organisations in your country might be reaching France, and being used to assist deserters from your forces.’

  ‘Coming here in the pockets of soldiers returning from leave?’

  ‘Such was the assumption. Your police have, I understand, been watching these pacifists carefully, for some time.’

  ‘We weren’t much troubled by them in the early years of the war,’ said Luke sadly. ‘They were unpopular, granted, but no one doubted the genuine nature of their beliefs, or their courage. After all, over seven thousand of them volunteered for non-combatant service, and a number of them were killed driving ambulances under fire.’

  ‘You are talking of pacifism before it was corrupted.’

  ‘As you think it has been?’

  ‘Pacifism today has been developed into a superlative propaganda weapon, spawning bodies like SOBH in your country and Action Contre Guerre in ours. Its message is a simple one. It is directed to the families. Do they want Johnnie and Sammy and Jean and Pierre to be butchered, or do they want them back home, so that life can go on as it did before the war? The answer is only too predictable. And people like Trench and his followers are becoming a considerable power in politics.’

  ‘Entitled to interfere in the running of the war?’

  ‘Entitled to voice their opinions, and pursue their own courses, as long as they only use money provided by their own supporters. But not—emphatically not—if they are funded by German money. Any right-minded citizen will draw the line at that.’