6
Messages
London, January 1944
They heard nothing at first from Thérèse, but Rose was doing well with her wireless transmissions from Paris. Right from the start she had proved as reliable as they had hoped. In France, the Firm’s focus was moving to the north and the south. The order came from Churchill himself that the arming of the resistance fighters of the Maquis inland from the Mediterranean and the northern resistants behind the beaches of Normandy, in preparation for Allied invasion, was now the priority.
At last a message from Thérèse came through the secure teleprinter link at Baker Street.
Miss Acton handed Iris the deciphered page. “What’s your first thought?”
Iris took the paper. In the large room next door the sound of typewriters rose and fell in rolling waves of metallic clatter. Thérèse had “a doctor’s appointment on Thursday.” It was what they had been waiting to receive, confirmation that Thérèse was in Lyon, awaiting news of her contact.
“It was a ‘dental appointment’ she was supposed to write,” said Miss Acton crossly.
“She’s left out her security checks,” said Iris.
Miss Acton fiddled with her pen, the only form of agitation she allowed herself. Slapdash ways had been creeping in among the agents in France, and a new rule had been introduced: “Adios” or “Salut” to sign off if all was well. If the wireless was being operated under duress, then “Love and Kisses.” And Thérèse had ignored it, giving no sign-off.
“What else?”
Iris stared hard at the message. Apart from the lack of checks, it was all as rehearsed, or almost.
Miss Acton went away and returned with Tyndale.
“Send a message back,” he said tersely. “You have forgotten both checks.”
“But that’s—” Iris didn’t want to say it. How could she criticize the boss for making an elementary mistake? She looked across at Miss Acton, wanting her to be the one to contradict him.
“Silly girl,” said Miss Acton. “I’d hoped for better from her.”
“It’s very bad, this lack of attention to detail,” said Tyndale, petulance creeping into his tone. His eye bags were starting to puff and his complexion redden. “I thought you’d drummed it into them all.”
“But Thérèse is careful, she always has been,” interjected Iris.
Miss Acton bristled. “Not always, if I remember rightly. There were a couple of times when she was in Tours last time that she forgot the exact form of words we’d agreed.”
“With respect, that’s not quite the same as missing the sign-off.”
“Send the message back,” instructed Tyndale. “Get her to reply correctly. She never would concentrate properly.”
“What if she hasn’t forgotten?” asked Iris.
Miss Acton’s pen tapped furiously. “Well, she has forgotten—she gives neither sign-off. She can’t have been caught. She’s been with Xavier Descours, and they haven’t had time to do anything.”
“Please send again with security check. Be more careful,” Iris was told to signal back.
Minutes later the check was produced. “Adios.” After that Thérèse’s messages were scrupulously free from mistakes.
The next time it happened, in a message from Rose, Iris knew without doubt that something was wrong. With the first flawed radio messages it had been only a woman’s instinct, and there was nothing she could say, given Tyndale’s conviction that it was a simple slipup. But in view of Rose’s composure and efficiency, it seemed ever more unlikely that she had transmitted in a slapdash manner.
“The fist is right,” said Miss Acton.
Iris pulled out Rose’s card from a new flip-flop wheel file system she had made of each agent’s individual quirks—the spaces and natural rhythm—while sending Morse code. The “fist” could be read like an electronic fingerprint.
It did seem right.
“But you said yourself that we should at least consider the possibility that the lack of checks was deliberate,” said Iris. “The fist could be right because it is Rose sending the message, but under duress.”
Miss Acton hesitated.
“I know it’s not my place to suggest this, but I think we should send a message back asking something personal,” Iris went on. Tyndale was out of the office, and she felt more comfortable overreaching.
“You may be right.”
But when Tyndale returned, he ignored all reason and unleashed a volley of invective, at least some of which made it across the Channel in his furious reply to Rose.
Acouple of days later a Canadian F Section agent code-named Roland sent a message in French. Tyndale sent a pithy reply: “Why have you changed your language? Do not do this.” Roland began again in English, omitting both his bluff check and true check, again provoking fury at Baker Street.
“We agreed that he was always to transmit in English—how are we to deal with these idiots who won’t take instruction?” raged Tyndale. Miss Acton made sympathetic noises.
Iris remembered Roland from a long afternoon in Orchard Court when they had chattered for hours about the theatre. He was a big country lad from the Québécois mountains who had a talent for mimicry and liked to laugh. She had accompanied him to the Playhouse one evening to see a mindless farce, and then taken him on to meet Rory and Jack, who were in town. The evening had been a grand success, not least due to his introduction to the Bag O’Nails nightclub after Iris had left them to it.
“Tell him the bag is still full of nails,” said Iris.
When there was no personal response, just a thank you, Iris was certain. The Roland she knew would have come back with a witty retort.
“This isn’t right,” she told them. She showed them the notes she had taken at Orchard Court, the quirks of his conversation and his sense of fun. “If everything was all right, he wouldn’t just have said thank you politely.”
“Signalling is dangerous. He’s being sensible, keeping it to the minimum,” said Tyndale. She was trying his patience, it seemed.
Tyndale was determined to believe the agents were all safe because any other outcome was unthinkable. He could not lose face, and Miss Acton supported him, equally unwilling to be proved wrong. Plans continued to be made over the radio. Cheerful messages were received at Christmastime from Thérèse, Rose, Yves, and Roland, as well as from most of the others in France.
One afternoon in the ladies’ cloakroom on the half-landing at Norgeby House, Iris overheard some girls who worked for the Dutch and Belgian sections whispering in a cubicle. They were worried about anomalies in radio messages to D and B Sections too, and they didn’t know what to do about it. They were scared they might lose their jobs, and if that happened, then the background knowledge they had built up would go with them, to no one’s benefit.
“You heard what happened to Penelope, didn’t you?” said one.
Iris strained to hear, holding her breath.
“A transmission came back saying that Anders had broken his skull on landing north of Antwerp, then there were messages about doctors’ reports, and then that he had died of meningitis. Penelope kept asking questions about this. Her brother is a doctor and she asked him, and it all seemed unlikely, very unusual for a landing accident. She was certain that something wasn’t right, but no one in authority would listen. Last week she was sacked for ‘letting sentiment override her duty.’ ”
“But perhaps if we all—”
“Not a chance.”
Iris knew the woman was right.
She was at Waterloo Station, seeing a promising new girl off to Guildford, the night the bomb fell. Air raid sirens had sounded, followed by distant explosions, and then the all-clear. The glass roof of the station was blacked out, lamps shaded, leaving eerie silhouettes of policemen and soldiers; music played over the loudspeakers in a vain attempt to lighten the gloom. Glowing cigarette ends moving towards her. Iris and the new girl watched the clock and the empty platform. Ten minutes after the train�
�s scheduled departure, there was no sign of it. Groups of people scurried past in earnest discussion. Announcements over the concourse loudspeaker cancelled one service after another. Iris mentally logged the way the girl’s composure had quickly slipped in the confusion. That was disappointing.
The train did not arrive. It was pinned down on the track by debris when the bombs targeting Battersea Power Station failed to hit their mark. They exploded with a deafening, earthshaking force. The wail of the sirens was too late; the streets around were filled with a hail of devastation and choking clouds of dust. One hit the mansion block where Iris’s aunt Etty lived. She was pulled out of the rubble alive but badly injured.
In the weeks that followed—her aunt’s fight for life; the ruins and the smoke; the difficulties with the agents in France and intransigence in Baker Street—Iris heard nothing from Xavier. In a further devastating blow, Jack Wallace was lost, presumed dead, after a night sortie from Tempsford.
I have never loved as I have loved you. Now, when she ran the words through her head, as she did countless times every day, her joy was blunted by that invidious past tense. Attuned as she was to every shade of verbal communication, she clung to this interpretation: it was not his love for her that was in question, but the possibility of not returning.
Rose’s wireless messages continued, though. She was doing exceptionally well, keeping information flowing to the network of resistance cells in Paris. Occasionally there were anomalies in her transmissions that might have been caused by atmospheric interference, but in the circumstances that was hardly surprising; she had to try to broadcast at a certain time, no matter what.
Then, during the February moon, at past four o’clock in the morning, a Lysander arrived back at Tangmere with an unofficial extra passenger. It was Thérèse. She was thin and bruised, and spitting with anger as she stumbled through the back door of the Cottage.
“You have no idea, do you? Not the faintest clue about what’s really going on in France!”
Exhausted as she clearly was, Thérèse was running on shot nerves and rage. At Orchard Court, she was debriefed by Colonel Tyndale and Miss Acton. Iris sat in, writing detailed notes.
“When we got to France, the first thing Xavier was told was that his wireless operator in Provence had been betrayed and executed by the Germans. It was all a mess. I was already dependent on him to get me down to Lyon to join up with Charles, but the heat was on there. So Xavier decided to take me with him to the south as his replacement operator. Only we didn’t get that far. I was arrested, taken to Paris, and I tried to warn you, but you ignored all the signs . . . dead as mutton in London.”
“When were you arrested?” asked Tyndale, his tone cold.
“Only a few days after we landed near Châteaudun. Xavier told me to wait for him at a small commercial hotel while he attended to some business in the area.”
“What business—his legitimate business, or liaison with the Resistance?”
“He didn’t say. Does it matter? He didn’t show up at the hotel where he sent me, but the Gestapo did. They took me—made me bring my luggage, including the radio transmitter. The owner of the hotel was shot on the spot as we went out. They pushed me into a car and took me to some kind of SS headquarters in the town. I spent the night in a cell and was driven to Paris the next day.”
“Where in Paris?”
“The avenue Foch. A beautiful building, very luxurious—the Gestapo are enjoying themselves there, I must say. A most charming German officer by the name of Kieffer received me with great politeness,” said Thérèse. Her bitterness was palpable. “He asked after you, Colonel Tyndale, and whether you were pleased with the progress of F Section agents.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! How would any of them know my name and that of the Firm?”
“Oh, they know all right. Kieffer asked me specifically about the wireless messages: Was everyone pleased with their quality?”
Iris’s blood turned to ice. She glanced at Miss Acton and saw her close her eyes, as if to steady herself.
“They know everything about our activities in France. On the wall of his office, lest anyone be in any doubt how much the Gestapo knows, is what looks like a large family tree. It’s us. It shows how everything links up, who knows who, when and where agents arrived. How the branches intersect.”
“Not possible,” said Tyndale, but the bluster was faltering.
“They have a number of our intelligence agents under their thumb just in avenue Foch. There’s not much they don’t know. They offered me a choice: either I could play along and pretend I was still at liberty by sending messages under German control, or I would be tortured and imprisoned. It was all very civilized. The whole Prosper circuit has been dismantled, and a substantial number seem to have been turned by Kieffer! I believe the SS is now in command, via our radio transmitters, of our operations in Lyon.”
Miss Acton lit a cigarette with visibly trembling fingers. Senior Service smoke, harsh and tarry, fogged the room.
“And rather obligingly,” Thérèse went on, “the British kept sending more agents to the agreed landing fields! You do realise they now have Roland—the Canadian—and Yves? And they had Rose, too.”
It was far worse than they could have imagined.
“There was no point in lying to them—they already knew almost everything. It was there on the wall. All any of us could do was appear to cooperate while giving away nothing they didn’t already know.”
Tyndale had deflated in front of them.
“But even so, I tried my best to tell you. What I cannot understand is how you repeatedly ignored my radio warnings! You put the checks in place, and then you seemed to forget they had ever been agreed! What was the point?”
What could they say? That Tyndale had taken the view that she was a silly girl who was sloppy with her checks? That the signs had been ignored because they did not sit well with their high hopes for the operation?
“And you—” She turned on Iris. “You’ve always been so careful—why didn’t you spot what was happening?”
“Well, actually I did—” Iris couldn’t finish. She felt deeply ashamed.
“What, you did realise? Then why in hell’s name—”
Thérèse’s contempt was clear to see. She let fly then, calling her every name under the sun, accusing them and Xavier of betrayal.
“Calm down now. You’ve had a rotten time, but you’re out now,” said Tyndale uncomfortably.
True to form, Miss Acton was the cool head. “What we have to do now is work out exactly what happened, and who has been compromised.”
When it was clear that Thérèse could not or would not add to the Gestapo’s understanding of F Section operations, she was beaten and transferred to the place des Etats-Unis. There she was held in a small room at the top of a building used as a holding pen for captives who might yet be useful to the Gestapo.
“After the avenue Foch it was much more like a prison. The rooms at the top were cell-like, and there were women on either side of me. We were not allowed to see each other, but we communicated by tapping Morse code on the water pipes. One morning, the girl on the right-hand side was replaced by someone whose situation was uncomfortably similar to mine. It was Rose.”
Iris felt sick. She kept her head down over her notepad, intent on taking down every word accurately.
“For two weeks we tapped our messages as we tried to work out what had happened and whether there was any way out. The windows did not have bars, but it was a long way down. Even so, with drainpipes and places where the carved plaster made tiny ledges, we decided it might be possible to climb down into the garden.
“We could both see a gardener in the grounds. He would stare up at us, and we would stare back. That was our first plan, but actually what happened was much simpler. Rose asked if we could take turns walking around the garden, even if only for half an hour, and the guards agreed.
“So that was what we did, very gratefully and humbly over the
course of the next few weeks. When the guard saw that we were no trouble, he didn’t mind when we began to walk together, Rose and I, doubling our exercise time. He started courting one of the maids, and they enjoyed a stroll themselves when she broke for lunch. One day they took themselves off under some trees.
“The gardener stopped us for a word, and then we all strolled along together. He was pushing a wheelbarrow full of leaves. We fell in step beside him. The wall of the garden was overgrown with bushes. Suddenly he pushed us both into these bushes, warning us not to make a sound. We’d no idea what was happening, it was so quick. But behind the foliage, hidden from the garden, was a small wooden door. He kicked it open and pushed us through—along with the barrow. Suddenly we were outside on a quiet street. He reached into the pile of leaves and pulled out a large bag, then told us: ‘Now we walk, fast, but don’t run. Xavier is waiting. If we get separated, go to the Chat Noir on rue de Montreuil in the eleventh.’”
Iris’s heart lurched at the mention of Xavier’s name.
To thick silence in the room, Thérèse went on with the account of her escape. “We made it down one street and then another. With every step I expected someone to shout at us to stop, or to hear the screech of car tyres or gunshots. But there was nothing. When we reached a main street, we slackened our pace and walked along with all the other people on the pavement. I have never felt more grateful for city crowds.”
Xavier was waiting for them at the rear of the Chat Noir café. For a month Thérèse stayed in a safe house, and he organised her return.
“He judged you had had too much of a close shave to carry on?” asked Tyndale. “He gave up on the plan to take you down south?”
Thérèse stared at him with something close to contempt. “I’d had enough. My mission went wrong, right from the start. I couldn’t do it—my nerves were in shreds, I’d have been a liability. In the end, it was best for me to come back and tell you in person what’s going on, as you won’t believe it any other way!”
The Sea Garden Page 24