Mr Campion's War

by Mike Ripley

  She scanned the faces watching her, appealing for understanding. ‘I did not tell her about the bank accounts in Africa that Nathan had been forced to set up, nor about his involvement with the gangsters of the Panier. I said that after the first round-ups of Jews in 1942, we had decided to escape from Pau, over the Pyrenees and into Spain, where she was born and where I met and later married Reuben.’

  She looked at Campion and, for the first time, her gaze fell away. ‘I am sorry, Mister Albert, but I did not tell her fully of your part in our escape, valiant though it was.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Mr Campion. ‘I failed to get Nathan to you in Madrid and I was unable to tell you the circumstances personally. I am sure you were very angry with me.’

  ‘Yes, I was angry – and vengeful. I never told Prisca that she would not have been born if you had not helped me over the mountains but, worse, I told her that we had fled from Pau pursued by a German officer of the SS called Haberland and that Nathan had been killed during our escape. She convinced herself that Haberland had killed Nathan, and I did not correct her perfect hatred of him.’

  ‘She may have hated the name Haberland,’ said Campion, ‘but she had never seen Robert before, had she? So how did she connect the two?’

  ‘I told you, it was my fault. When I saw the German tonight, I recognized him even after all these years, and I said “Haberland” out loud before I could stop myself. I did not think Prisca would do anything or even remember the name.’

  ‘But you, Astrid, you knew that Robert, or “Haberland” as I introduced him to you in your apartment in Pau, helped your escape. He did not kill Nathan: you know who did.’

  ‘Yes, they told me I was a widow when I reached Madrid,’ the woman said with sharp venom, ‘and that you had sent a report saying that his body had been taken to Cauterets and he had been buried there as a Christian.’

  ‘I am sorry I could not see you in person …’ Campion faltered. ‘But I was delayed. I have regretted that ever since, though it is far from the only thing I regret from those years.’

  ‘Then help Prisca now.’

  ‘I will try, Astrid, I will try, but it is up to Charles here.’

  ‘Let me call in a WPC and we’ll take a statement,’ said Luke professionally. ‘I’m assuming Prisca is not a flight risk.’

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ said Campion, ‘and she would have to be driving a tank to get past Lugg guarding the front door.’

  ‘Then leave things to me and you get back to your guests.’

  ‘Do you know, Charles, I’m not in a party mood any more.’

  But parties, once started, have a habit of carrying on to the bitter end, and Mr Campion’s birthday jag was no exception, even though there was no presentation of medals or long speeches of honorification, and much of the vulgar action which could have prompted juicy gossip took place off-stage. A subdued Prisca Vidal, accompanied by her sobbing mother, had been escorted from the hotel by a uniformed constable and a female PC via the kitchens and a rear exit. The majority of the partygoers, now dancing to or complaining about the increased volume of the disco’s output, failed to notice their going.

  The Campions did the rounds of the non-gyrating guests, exchanging pleasantries and receiving thanks and congratulations in profusion. Mr Campion stressed at every encounter that for a seventy-year-old, beauty sleep was needed, and though his bedtime would soon beckon, music and refreshments would continue unabated.

  Only when it was time for the hosts to slip away to their suite did they find themselves in a secluded corner with Rupert and Perdita.

  ‘You go to bed, Pops,’ said Rupert. ‘I’ll make sure they all get home safely and Lugg will make sure nobody steals the silver.’

  ‘Thank you, my boy. I’m sorry we had to skip over the medal presentation. I like a good presentation, especially when I’m getting the medal. Oh, and also the cutting of the cake. We never did that; and I really do like cake.’

  Amanda patted her husband’s arm, which was curled around her waist. ‘We can have cake tomorrow,’ she cooed, ‘and have it all to ourselves, and I’m sure they’ll put your medal in the post.’

  ‘I’m just sorry I never got to hear the end of your war story,’ said Perdita.

  ‘Is your wife actually fluttering her eyelashes at me, Rupert? I think you should have been stricter when she was a puppy.’ Campion beamed as his son blushed. ‘But don’t worry, one should never refuse a friendly audience, as you two thespians know very well.

  ‘Truth is there’s not much more to tell. After I found Nathan dead in that hut and realized that I had failed him, I was pretty useless. I let Robert take command and he got me down to Pont d’Espagne where the cars were. I was too exhausted to face going back up the pilgrim’s trail again and Reuben and Astrid would have been long gone even if I had tried.

  ‘Robert found me a bath, a bed and some clean clothes, and then passed me on to the Abwehr office in Perpignan. The Abwehr were a bit like Boots the chemist: they had branches everywhere. From Perpignan they arranged passage for me on a merchant ship steaming to Barcelona. I think Robert had told them I was a double agent being planted to infiltrate the Iberian Section of MI6, which is exactly where I reported when I arrived. By then, Lunel’s ledgers had been acted upon and the bank accounts frozen, and Astrid and Reuben Vidal had left Madrid – Astrid to have her baby in peace out in the country and Reuben back on pilgrim duty in the mountains, though he clearly kept a fond eye on Astrid.’

  ‘At almost exactly the same time I was struggling alone, without any guardian angel, to produce you,’ Amanda told Rupert, reaching out to ruffle his hair.

  ‘And what about Magnus Asher?’ Perdita asked.

  ‘I told Charles you had a natural copper’s inquisitiveness,’ said Campion. ‘But a character like Asher is not worth worrying about. He was not mourned.’

  ‘But what happened to him?’

  ‘I told you, Robert and Erik had taken him into custody and he was dealt with. Now I really must go to bed.’

  Perdita looped her arms around her father-in-law and kissed him on the cheek. ‘It must have been awful for you, that horrible journey up and down the mountain only to find Nathan dead. No wonder it affected you. Everyone says you had changed when you came back from the war.’

  Mr Campion returned the kiss and he and Amanda took their leave.

  In the lift going up to their suite, Mr Campion caught sight of himself in the mirror fixed above the elevator buttons.

  ‘No, it wasn’t that,’ he said.

  But he said it to himself.

  By retiring when they did, the Campions missed the sight (though Lugg did not) of Commander Charles Luke of New Scotland Yard tripping the light fantastic with Madame Corinne Thibus on a crowded and rather humid dance floor to music which neither recognized, though both admitted the beat was infectious.

  When it became clear that the energetic disc jockey did not require time to reload but was able to slip from one thumping anthem into another without pause, Luke signalled that they should find something to drink out of line of fire of the speakers.

  Once in an area which offered both alcohol and relative quiet, Luke asked the Frenchwoman if she could clear up something that was bothering him.

  ‘In France,’ smiled Corinne Thibus, ‘that would be a prelude to an offer of dinner and seduction, but here in England and you being a policeman, I suspect not.’

  The policeman, relieved that Lugg was well out of earshot, albeit edging his way nearer around the edge of the room, as if supervising a high-school dance, decided that small talk – even if he were any good at it – would be wasted on Madame Thibus.

  ‘I understand you are a lawyer,’ he said.

  ‘You understand correctly.’

  ‘And you specialize in prosecuting war criminals.’

  ‘I do.’

  Luke took a deep breath and plunged in.

  ‘Did you ever investigate Robert von Ringer?’

  ‘
Is this professional curiosity, Commander?’

  ‘You could call it that, though in English we’d say it’s me being nosey.’

  ‘That sounds honest, so I will satisfy your curiosity and the answer is yes, I did investigate Ringer, just as I did hundreds of Germans who occupied France during the war, but no crimes were ever laid at his door.’

  ‘And the investigation was thorough?’

  Corinne Thibus sniffed haughtily. ‘Very. I am very thorough, especially when it came to suspects who were based in Marseilles. Remember, I was there during the war, as was Albert, and there were plenty of collaborators and criminals in Marseilles.’

  ‘People like Magnus Asher?’

  ‘Exactly. He should have been investigated by you people at Scotland Yard or MI5 or whatever you call it, as he was a murderer, a traitor and a war profiteer of the first order.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  Her eyes lit up with surprise. ‘Did not M’sieur Campion tell you?’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Peccavi

  Near the Pont d’Espagne, Hautes-Pyrénées. November 1942

  ‘Are you sure you have him secure?’ I asked Robert as I stumbled and fell against him for the hundredth time.

  ‘We did not have to capture him – he seemed delighted to see us and keen to offer us his services. I think that officially makes him a traitor to your country.’

  They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but the prospect of vengeance was a delightfully warming apéritif. The prospect of confronting Magnus Asher after the helpless despair of watching him ride away from the scene of Nathan Lunel’s murder was the thing which had warmed my blood and pumped life back into screaming leg and thigh muscles.

  Even so, I could not have attempted that descent down to the Pont d’Espagne as darkness began to fall without Robert’s solid shoulder to lean on. I lost count of the number of times I might have fallen flat on my face or walked into a tree. Even more frightening was the prospect of tripping over a rock or my own leaden feet and rolling down a slope into one of the torrential streams which tumbled towards the bridge where they met in a picturesque cascade. In this area of France those streams were named as Gaves, from an old Gascon word, though quite why that sprang into my befuddled mind at that time was beyond me.

  I decided I was hallucinating and reality was slipping from my grasp, when I saw lights ahead of us, flickering and flashing through the dark pillars of trees, and I must have croaked a warning to Robert, who was breathing heavily as he struggled to keep his feet and me upright at the same time.

  ‘Erik,’ he said, as if that explained everything, but my misty brain needed more detail. ‘Erik has turned the lights of the cars on.’

  As we got nearer, I could make out an amphitheatre of yellow light provided by the headlights of two vehicles, the Citroën I had abandoned on the edge of the bridge and the Mercedes my German rescuers had arrived in.

  Robert called out in German to announce our arrival and Erik responded smartly, probably clicking his heels as he did so, shouting that everything, as was only to be expected, was in order.

  I released my hold on Robert, determined to confront what lay ahead on my own two feet, as we stepped into the pool of light.

  Magnus Asher was in the centre of that artificial amphitheatre, sitting cross-legged against his motorcycle, balanced on its footstand. He wore his leather riding gear – boots, three-quarter-length coat and helmet with goggles attached – but I no longer saw him as a dark hobgoblin. If anything, I saw him as a defeated gladiator on the arena floor, his victorious opponent, Erik, standing over him pointing a pistol at his head, as if waiting for the decisive thumb signal from his emperor.

  Asher himself did not seem unduly worried by his predicament, at least not until I moved closer and recognition dawned.

  ‘Where’s the bitch Jewess?’ he snarled up at me.

  ‘Safely away from you, you evil bastard.’ I spat the words and felt Robert tense beside me. I also realized that my right hand had automatically gone to the pistol in my jacket pocket.

  Whatever reaction I had expected from a man at such a disadvantage, it was not the one I got.

  Asher’s face relaxed and he smiled. It was the most terrible grin I had ever seen, and a very bad strategic move on Asher’s part.

  ‘Well, she can’t hurt me now, can she? Shame you went to so much trouble to get her out of the Panier. You and that bloody girl caused a lot of aggravation. If Pirani gets his hands on her, he’ll gut her for putting a bullet in his leg. And none of it was really worth it, was it, Mr Canadian Diplomat or whoever you are?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ I said. ‘You don’t appear to be in the most advantageous of positions just at the moment.’

  Again the smile. ‘Have you not met my new lords and masters? The Germans are in charge of Vichy now and there are many in the Gestapo and the SS who know how helpful I can be to them.’

  ‘Naturally you have offered your many talents to their service.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said with a sickly smoothness, ‘to these officers here.’

  ‘The first ones you ran into after killing Nathan Lunel. That shows an enthusiasm which would be commendable were we not talking high treason.’

  Asher snorted in derision at the suggestion, but his overconfident expression began to melt away as Robert began to speak, in English, as if reading from a court charge sheet.

  ‘Treason … desertion from the British army … collaboration with the enemy … black-market profiteering … gangsterism … corruption of government officials, even if they were Vichy … currency manipulation … conspiracy … kidnapping … and, of course, murder.’

  I joined in the indictment. ‘At least three counts: Nathan Lunel, Pastor Sandy Nevin and Madame Henneuse. Does that last name mean nothing to you? She was the Lunels’ housekeeper in Pau. She died. You beat her to death. She was an innocent civilian and defenceless, just as were Lunel and Sandy Nevin. You picked your victims carefully; none of them could fight back. It’s a pity you didn’t pick your new friends as carefully.’

  Now he showed fear, as his eyes flicked to Erik, towering over him, and then Robert, who was unsnapping the flap of the holster on his belt. When Asher looked back to me, he found a third pistol pointed at him.

  Erik could not have followed much as we had spoken in English, but he was a good soldier and took his lead from his officer, and did not pause or flinch when Robert switched to German and gave him his orders.

  ‘Get this piece of shit on his feet, we’re taking him into the trees. Push the bike off the road and turn the cars around; leave the engines running.’

  ‘Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann!’ snapped Erik, as if he had been straining on the leash, and he unceremoniously hauled Asher to his feet.

  ‘Walk.’ Robert swiped his pistol in front of Asher’s twitching face and indicated the direction we had come from.

  For the second time I followed the pilgrim’s trail, but this time only as far as the treeline, at which point Asher spun round, his hands up in mock surrender.

  ‘Wait! I have money.’

  ‘Not any more,’ I said, and I think that struck home harder than the fate he must have realized he faced.

  ‘Keep going,’ Robert ordered, and Asher entered the trees.

  From behind us, we heard a car start up, and the light silhouetting us swirled away as Erik moved one of the cars, but there was still enough to illuminate the trudging figure of Magnus Asher.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Robert. ‘Turn around.’

  He levelled his pistol at Asher. The distance between them was little more than ten feet.

  I stepped forward to be next to Robert and slipped the safety catch off my Walther.

  Robert looked at me out of the corner of his eye and spoke softly. ‘I will do this, Albert.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Together.’

  Our weapons barked as one.

  I was shaking as we walked back to th
e stone bridge where, below in the dark, we could hear the rushing of water even over the sound of the idling engines of the car.

  ‘At any other time and in any other place, what we just did would be called murder.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Robert, ‘but war changes things.’

  About the Book

  The idea for the basic plot involving banks, money, Vichy France and North Africa in 1942 came from that thriller-writer supreme, Len Deighton, over lunch in a Japanese restaurant just off Regent Street in June 2014. When I decided, in 2017, to adapt it for a Campion story, to partly explain Mr Campion’s ‘hush-hush’ wartime work, Len graciously ‘gave’ me the plot, though I have no doubt he would have made a better job of it than I have.

  I am immensely grateful to Marcel Berlins for sharing his family history and experiences of life in Marseille (NB: not Marseilles!) in 1942.

  This is fiction, but the character of Sandy Nevin was inspired by the heroism of the Reverend Donald Caskie (1902–83), known as ‘The Tartan Pimpernel’, at the real Seamen’s Mission in Marseille, who survived capture by Vichy, Italian and German security services – and a Gestapo death sentence – to return after the war to his beloved Scotland.

  Students of the period may also be reminded of the wartime career of the traitor Harold Cole, who evaded capture for the last time when he was shot dead by French detectives in Paris in January 1946.

  The MI6 officer Campion meets in Spain, Kenneth Benton (1909–99), really did serve in the Iberia section of British intelligence’s Madrid office in 1942, and his immediate boss was indeed Kim Philby. After a thirty-year career in MI6, Benton retired and began a new career as a thriller writer. He served as chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association 1974–75, succeeding Dick Francis.

  The expression Mr Campion uses in chapter four describing MI5 as ‘a sort of jumped-up gendarmerie’ is stolen from the novel A Captive in the Land by James Aldridge, published in 1962 by Hamish Hamilton, the dust jacket of which was designed by a certain P. Youngman Carter, Margery Allingham’s husband.