British Bulldog

by Sara Sheridan

  The sky was a blank canvas, the light failing as Mirabelle walked decisively past the newsstand outside the station. The Evening Standard’s headline was scrawled across the news-board: H-bomb Men Seek Safety Plan. She cut across the park towards St James’s and slipped along the alleyway that led to Duke’s Hotel. The doorman fussed ahead of her as Mirabelle swept into the hall, checking with a fleeting glance the shelf behind the receptionist’s chair. The key to the back room was missing. That meant in all likelihood he was here.

  ‘Eddie Brandon?’ she ventured.

  The receptionist shook her head. ‘We don’t have a guest of that name,’ she said.

  ‘Never mind.’ Mirabelle didn’t want to waste time on silly games. ‘I’ll just wait in the bar.’

  Mirabelle wasn’t entirely sure how Eddie would receive her. There shouldn’t be any hard feelings, but still … She drew herself up. At least he had given her a gift the last time they parted – a set of SOE lock picks, which she had put to good use several times since. None the less, it felt slightly awkward to be here. Mirabelle wasn’t even entirely sure that Brandon was still stationed in the back room behind the bar. Either way, she reasoned, if he was in London he’d probably still be coming in for cocktails on his way to the park of an evening.

  An Italian waiter snapped to attention as she walked in. The man’s aftershave was enough to leave her reeling.

  ‘Madam.’ He gestured towards a table with a flourish.

  Mirabelle declined the invitation to sit down. ‘I’m looking for Eddie Brandon.’

  ‘Mr Eddie!’ The waiter looked her up and down. It was unusual for a woman to be asking after Mr Brandon.

  ‘I wondered if he might be here. It being time for a drink after work.’ Mirabelle checked her watch.

  The waiter’s expression was that of a naughty child caught in the act of eating sweets before dinner. ‘Madam will have a cocktail today, I think? A whisky sour, perhaps?’

  He had guessed correctly. A good waiter is practically psychic, she recalled her father saying once. Mirabelle recalled the days when, famously, Italian nosiness had obstructed the escape of detainees. Perhaps here it was being put to good use. Duke’s famously served the best cocktails in London.

  ‘And Mr Brandon usually has something with vodka, I expect,’ she said.

  Eddie had picked up a good deal while working with Britain’s erstwhile allies – the Russians. Covert operations had their advantages sometimes. Vodka was an unusual commodity in Britain after the war, but not if you were engaged in certain negotiations. Mieux Hitler que Stalin, many French citizens had thought when their country surrendered. Eddie always said it should be the other way round. ‘Fur, vodka and icons,’ he would reply when asked for an explanation.

  ‘Come.’ The waiter motioned Mirabelle in the direction of the back room, past an elaborate arrangement of fir boughs festooned with blue ribbons. So, she thought, he is still working here. I suppose somebody had to be.

  The room hadn’t changed much. The padded door was heavy, the walls were painted dark green and the air was thick with the smell of tobacco. Mirabelle took in a portrait of the new queen hanging on the wall and the stack of books on the chiffonier – some, she noticed, written in Cyrillic, as Eddie Brandon, two years older than the last time she’d seen him, sprang to his feet. He laid his slim cigar in a Fabergé ashtray and covered the papers strewn on his desk.

  ‘Mirabelle!’ he said, a worried look crossing his smooth features.

  The last time they’d run into each other it had ended up costing the department a fortune.

  Mirabelle smiled. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not here to snoop on whatever you’re working on.’

  ‘Of course you’re here to snoop.’ Eddie beamed. ‘It’s good to see you. Drink?’

  Mirabelle nodded. The waiter disappeared. There was no need to order.

  ‘Dreadful weather,’ Eddie went on. ‘It’s been a deadly winter.’

  Mirabelle removed her coat. She wasn’t going to be diverted into talking about how cold it was outside. ‘I came to see you because the most extraordinary thing has landed on my desk and I have got rather swept up by it.’

  ‘So, you’re on a mission? You know, Mirabelle, if you ever wanted to get back into the game there are bundles of opportunities. Particularly at present. Things are hotting up in the chilly eastern bloc. We’re desperate for women. Plenty of girls volunteered to stand up to the Nazis but fewer seem interested in the Reds. And the fascinating thing is that I reckon Stalin might be worse than, you know, Hitler. I mean in terms of …’ Eddie drew his finger across his throat to make his point. ‘Millions upon millions,’ he whispered. ‘Really. And some of the experiments they’ve been running would put Josef Mengele to shame. Blasphemy I know, but if you could read the reports, that’s the reality of it. To say nothing of their atomic weapons programme. The Commies are shockingly close to Hitler’s vision in some ways. You’d be doing a great deal of good, you know. We’re desperate to get information out. We’re trying everything.’

  ‘I only work privately now.’ Mirabelle sank into the seat on the other side of the desk. ‘But this isn’t even that. It’s personal, I suppose. Tell me, did you ever run into Bulldog Bradley?’

  Eddie took a sip of an alarming-looking blue drink stationed at his elbow. ‘It’s a damned shame. I’m going to his funeral next Monday – somewhere ghastly up north. He lived in Northumberland, you know. Terrible, terrible news.’

  ‘Quite. His wife is beside herself.’

  ‘He has a daughter as well, I recall. It’s a tragedy, really. Surviving the war and going down to cancer of all things. And so young.’

  The waiter arrived with a generous whisky sour balanced on a tray. He left it at Mirabelle’s elbow with a small plate of nuts that both she and Eddie ignored. Eddie motioned for a refill as the man left.

  ‘I’m glad you knew Bradley,’ Mirabelle said. ‘That’s helpful. Tell me, do you recall how he got out of France in 1942?’

  Eddie looked over his shoulder. Careless talk no longer cost lives – at least not careless talk about the war – but old habits died hard. ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  Mirabelle waited. When Eddie remained silent, she said, ‘I’m particularly interested in Bradley’s escape partner, Flight Lieutenant Philip Caine.’

  ‘Why?’ Eddie habitually answered a question with another question. He who dared might win but he who could get the other person to talk most was best placed.

  ‘I was mentioned in Bradley’s will.’

  Eddie’s eyes gleamed. He was quick to draw the obvious conclusion, and in fact, he took considerable delight in it.

  ‘Nothing of that nature, Eddie. For heaven’s sake.’ Mirabelle was aware she sounded hopelessly prim.

  ‘Haven’t you found yourself a fancy man yet, Miss Bevan? There must be somebody.’

  Mirabelle’s mind flashed back to the evening before. Was Alan McGregor her fancy man? Truthfully she’d enjoyed the kiss without having the kind of connection to the superintendent to which Eddie was referring. That, however, was beside the point.

  ‘Bradley asked me to find Caine, or at least find out what happened to him. Did you know him too?’

  ‘Yes,’ Eddie admitted again.

  Mirabelle sipped her cocktail. This was proving an uphill struggle.

  ‘What do you know about him, Eddie?’

  ‘Caine? He was a career flier. His father was in the service. He was a tall chap, as I recall – good-looking. He didn’t come out of France with Bulldog.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  Eddie scratched his chin. ‘Not exactly. And it’d be Official Secrets anyway.’

  Mirabelle crossed her legs. ‘So, Caine stayed on for a reason. And,’ she patched the information together, ‘he spoke German and French. That’s probably part of it.’

  ‘He was stationed in France for the rest of the war. He was up to something, but I’ve no idea what, and I don’t know what happened to him afterward
s. I can’t tell you more than that. I don’t cover France nearly so much these days. It’s not my bag.’

  ‘Bradley went to bring Caine home in 1944 – after the Germans surrendered Paris. Jack Duggan appears to have gone with him. But Caine didn’t make his transport.’

  Eddie shrugged his shoulders. As far as Mirabelle was aware Brandon didn’t know about her relationship with Jack. No one in London had. But then, she was beginning to realise she didn’t know as much about her lover’s activities as she thought she did – during wartime and otherwise.

  ‘It struck me as unusual,’ she said. ‘Jack going.’

  There was an unwritten rule about high-level personnel risking missions into enemy territory and Paris had been on the cusp of freedom, but only just. Britain didn’t want its finest captured, their rank discovered and information tortured out of them. During the war several officers – real military types – had gone anyway and been shot down; she’d heard of one chap who had simply doctored his uniform and pretended to be his younger cousin. He’d lasted out the war in a POW camp, great chunks of classified information kept safe by his false identity, though he admitted that he had lost considerable sleep over what would happen should his cousin be captured too.

  ‘Jack liked Paris,’ Eddie said. ‘I went with him after the war once and he trailed me around the place trying to buy something from Dior for his wife. He kept saying how French women were the most beautiful in the world. We almost missed our table at Maxim’s over a silk blouse.’

  Mirabelle froze. Jack had bought her a Dior blouse – a red one. She didn’t know it had come from Paris. In fact, she’d assumed he’d picked it up at Harrods. This emerging secret life of Jack’s was unsettling. She had always considered herself Jack Duggan’s greatest secret. Now it appeared there might be competition.

  ‘Is there someone I could speak to over there?’ she asked as the waiter arrived with Eddie’s cocktail.

  Eddie picked up his glass and took an eager sip. ‘Curaçao,’ he said, smacking his lips. ‘The thing is, people want to forget the war, Mirabelle. In France they’ve done that more successfully than here. We’re still paying our debts; we can’t quite shake it off. It’ll be decades. It’s different on the continent. The French and even the Germans are better at letting it go. You should see how the Japanese are set. You wouldn’t believe it. If I were you I wouldn’t go digging up all this old guff. What’s the point?’

  ‘Bradley asked me to, so I won’t be taking your advice, I’m afraid. He had something on his mind when he died and he wanted me to look into it. I intend to track it down, whatever it is. I understand you don’t think it’s a good idea, but if you wanted to give me some pointers, it would save me time.’

  Eddie relit his cigar. ‘I don’t know how Churchill manages those huge stogies,’ he said.

  Mirabelle didn’t take her eyes off him.

  ‘All right.’ He gave way. ‘If you must. Though I advise against it.’

  ‘Noted.’

  Eddie sighed. ‘Near the church at Saint-Eustache there’s a street called rue du Jour. Like soupe du jour, you know?’

  ‘Near the market at Les Halles?’

  ‘That’s the ticket. Look for a woman there – she’s notorious. Christine. I heard she set up shop somewhere in the vicinity. I don’t know more than that. She was a collaborator.’

  ‘A Nazi collaborator?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why she’s notorious.’

  ‘But she was really one of ours?’

  Eddie nodded. ‘We offered to take her out of France after the war but she insisted on staying in Paris. They shaved her head and beat her about a bit. I think it took her a long time to find work and so forth. We owned up to her, of course, but it had gone too far by then and there was a lot of talk about people who had buttered up both sides. She’d probably come quite close to that. It was a tightrope, I expect. Resistance fighters were our bravest – far more so than our own chaps. Fellows like Bradley who got out risked being incarcerated again – that was the size of it. The resisters who helped escapees were shot.’

  ‘And there were women?’

  ‘It was the women who were left behind. Often they ran the lines – in charge of the whole damn thing. Admirable, really.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Mirabelle finished her drink. ‘I’d best get going.’

  ‘Say hello to the sous chef at Maxim’s.’ Eddie winked.

  ‘All the nice boys like a sailor.’

  Eddie saluted. He had started in the Royal Navy, after all.

  Chapter 12

  Memories keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

  It was dark by the time the train reached Dover. Mirabelle settled in the bar for the crossing. As a child she’d visited her grandmother in Paris. The old lady lived in a grand apartment near Parc Monceau where Mirabelle’s mother had been brought up. Mirabelle’s early memories of the city were the scattered recollections of a child no more than eight years of age. Paris had meant hot milk and bread with jam for breakfast and walking the old lady’s poodle in the park. To a child’s eye, the capital was no more than an exotic mixture of beautiful displays in the windows of the city’s meticulous florists and bistros where waiters fussed over Grandma and called her ‘Madame’. Long after the old lady died, in Mirabelle’s student days, the city became synonymous with all-night parties fuelled by champagne and intrigue that kept everyone up to watch the sunrise over the rooftops as they walked home along the Seine.

  And now, all these years later, she was going back. What would Paris mean to her now? Feeling abstemious she sipped a tomato juice as the motion rocked her from side to side. She found herself daydreaming of golden leaves falling on the park’s winding paths as her grandmother’s little black dog rushed through them, and, years later, of dancing in a boîte – a cramped nightclub that as far as she could recall was somewhere near Pigalle. A jolt woke her unexpectedly and she stretched her stiff limbs, self-consciously realising that she had fallen asleep. Her mouth was dry. The ice in her glass had long since melted and become a thin layer of watery red on the surface of her drink. The barman, perched on a high stool reading a paperback with a garish flash of orange on the cover, looked up.

  ‘Can I fetch you something, madam? A cup of tea?’

  In the old days she’d have been ‘miss’ and he’d have offered her a cocktail. Mirabelle checked her watch.

  ‘Coffee would be nice, if you have it.’

  The barman disappeared into the galley to the rear and Mirabelle could hear him fiddling with a proper coffee maker. Insipid coffee would be unacceptable on a journey to Paris, she thought. Of course it would.

  When it came, the coffee revived her, and as she drank she turned her mind to Bulldog Bradley and Philip Caine once more. She had told Mrs Bradley she was declining the major’s bequest, and indeed had fully intended to pursue the matter no further, but the knowledge that Jack was somehow involved had changed her mind. The difference was, her search for the truth would no longer be on the major’s account; it was on her own.

  It seemed the men had come to terms over Lady Caroline. At least, they had done so by 1944. Or had Bulldog come to find Caine because he wanted to apologise to his old friend? And what had Jack been doing there? Quite apart from being a family friend of the Bradleys, he must have had an official function to perform in this story. Had Caine worked under him? But if so, why didn’t the flight lieutenant want to come home? As a pilot with a stint in covert operations, he’d have been a hero back in London.

  As the train rattled into Paris, the suburbs were shrouded in low cloud. Further along the line the streetlights revealed glossy pavements, wet between showers as the train plunged into the last tunnels before the Gare du Nord. As the passengers disembarked, the platform was deserted apart from two or three porters who were hastily engaged by those with trunks and piles of suitcases to transport to their hotels. Mirabelle picked up her own case and joined the straggle of travellers emerging into the city’s sacred e
arly morning silence. Outside, the papers were being delivered to the newsstand, and a portly woman smoking a cigarette struggled with a sandwich board that declared a security treaty was required for Europe. Molotov insiste, the headline said. Molotov demands it. The tall buildings loomed over the street, dark-windowed and forbidding. Still, it wasn’t as cold as London. A small rank of taxis was quickly depleted and a trail of prospective fares snaked along the railings to wait for more.

  Mirabelle turned her back on them. She crossed the main road, then turned eastwards down a side street. Her footsteps echoed on the early morning air. She didn’t know Paris as well as she knew London but at least the city was familiar. She and her Oxford friends had usually shared a suite at the George V all those years ago, but on one occasion the hotel had been full and someone had mentioned a little boarding house near the station. ‘It’ll be rather fun,’ the chap had said. ‘It’s small, so we can take the whole place over. And there’s a piano.’ The other students hadn’t liked it. The glittering crop of Oxford talent judged itself by its surroundings and preferred its accommodation the grander the better. But the truth was Mirabelle had liked the little lodging house more than its glossy upmarket cousin. Now she turned a corner and her nostrils were assaulted by the smell of baking. A tiny boulangerie with a red door and gold writing on the window had its lamps lit. It was still closed, but Mirabelle rapped on the glass and bought two croissants over the doorstep with money she’d changed at Dover.

  The hotel came into view round the next corner. In the darkness the building looked just as she’d last seen it – the windows overlooking the street were masked by dark shutters and the sills were lined with window boxes sporting trailing plants. A sign hung over the door: Hôtel Rambeau. Inside, the lights were off and the front door, encrusted in dusty green gloss, stood locked for the night. Mirabelle put her case down on the pavement and perched on top of it, withdrawing one of the croissants from the brown paper bag and taking a bite. The pastry melted in her mouth: there was nothing in the world like French butter. The flavour took her back to her Parc Monceau days. A rag and bone man drove his cart across the top of the street, the horse’s hooves clattering on the cobbles. Mirabelle licked her fingers and rubbed the chalk customs mark off her case. There shouldn’t be too long to wait. At half past six, when the light snapped on above her, she stood up and rang the bell. At length a window opened on the first floor and a vaguely familiar face peered out.