Those in Peril

by Margaret Mayhew

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Cigarette?’

  He lit one and put it between his lips. Smythson had got the boat under way again and he stayed beside the pilot. The smell of burned flesh was sickening. He sought for words of comfort and cheer and while he did so, the boy spoke, croaking through the charred lips, as though he felt a need for polite English conversation.

  ‘Been a lovely summer, hasn’t it?’

  Ten

  ‘Fifi’s getting really fat.’

  ‘Do you think so, Esme? I hope we’re not overfeeding her.’

  ‘I’ll give her a bit less, shall I?’

  Barbara watched the child putting the fish scraps into Fifi’s dish and setting it down for the cat. This was a new Esme. She still had the sulks and sullens but, in between, the improvement was remarkable. There were smiles now as well as the frowns, especially when talking about her father.

  ‘Dad said Mum’s gone away on a holiday and not to worry if I don’t hear from her. She hasn’t been very well, he said, and she needed a rest. Besides, she ought to be away from the bombs. Dad promised he’ll come and see me again on his next leave. Dad said he’d take me home as soon as the war’s over. Dad said he’s going to write to me whenever he can. Dad said I must write to him and tell him everything I’m doing. Dad said the war’ll be over soon.’ And so on.

  Fifi was gulping down the fish, crouched low in the way that cats eat. She did look rather fat. The sides of her stomach were sticking out quite noticeably.

  The phone rang and Barbara went to answer it. Alan Powell said, ‘Monsieur Duval should be back from London sometime later today. I thought I should let you know.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m afraid I made rather a ridiculous fuss over the file.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You were perfectly entitled to be upset.’

  ‘I talked to Rear Admiral Foster about it. He told me the Navy even has files on the ships’ cats.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ There was a smile in his voice.

  ‘Yes. He says it’s all to do with being shipshape.’

  ‘Well, he’s probably quite right.’

  ‘Anyway, thank you for letting me know about Monsieur Duval.’

  She went upstairs to check on the room. It was clean and aired, ready for his return. Clean sheets, clean towels – everything as welcoming as she could make it.

  He came back in the early evening when she was in the kitchen cooking. She heard a car stop outside, the front door open, footsteps across the hall, a soft knock on the kitchen door . . . and turned to see him standing in the doorway, carrying some kind of old canvas bag.

  ‘Good evening, madame.’

  She managed to speak normally and formally, as a landlady should. ‘Good evening, Monsieur Duval. How nice to see you again.’

  Mrs Lamprey said much the same thing to him at dinner, her body inclined coquettishly in his direction. ‘Bonsoir, monsieur. Quel plaisir de vous revoir!’

  ‘Merci, madame.’

  She waved her chiffon scarf. ‘C’était très triste sans vous.’

  He bowed in acknowledgement of her great sadness without him. As Barbara set a dish of vegetables on his table, he exchanged glances with her.

  ‘J’espère que les bombes allemandes à Londres ne vous ont pas derangé.’

  ‘No. Fortunately the German bombs did not disturb me, madame.’

  Before long Mrs Lamprey was leaning the Frenchman’s way again.

  ‘Monsieur Duval . . .’

  ‘Oui, madame?’

  ‘Connaissez-vous où je peux trouver le parfum français qui s’appelle L’Heure Bleue? Ma bouteille est vide.’

  Barbara saw that he was having some trouble keeping a straight face. Before he could answer, though, Miss Tindall said unexpectedly, ‘It should be savez-vous, Mrs Lamprey. The verb connaître means to be acquainted with, not to know about something.’ She had gone pink in the face. ‘Isn’t that so, Monsieur Duval? You have two different verbs in French.’

  ‘Indeed, that is so, Mademoiselle Tindall. It can be very confusing.’

  Mrs Lamprey was looking much put out. ‘I’m sure Monsieur Duval understood perfectly well what I meant, Miss Tindall.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, madame. And I am sorry to hear that your bottle is empty. But I regret that I do not know where you could buy that particular perfume. Perhaps in London . . .’

  ‘Harrods have run out. So has Liberty’s. It’s the war, of course. What a pity I didn’t ask you to have a search for me while you were there. I’m sure you could have found some.’

  ‘I should certainly have done my best.’

  ‘Perhaps the next time? La prochaine fois?’

  ‘Perhaps, madame.’

  After dinner, he knocked again on the kitchen door, carrying his linen jacket over his arm. ‘Excuse me, madame, but would it be possible to borrow the thing for clothes . . .’ he made an ironing movement with his arm. ‘This coat is very bad – even for me.’

  ‘I’ll do it for you, if you like. It’s easier really.’

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She took the jacket, which looked as though he’d slept in it. ‘I’ll bring it up when I’ve finished.’

  He thanked her and went away. When she had finished the clearing up she took out the ironing board and switched on the iron, using a piece of damp cloth to press out the creases in the linen. Something crackled in one of the pockets and she felt inside to remove it. It was nothing important – just a bill from a restaurant. A French restaurant called Le Petit Coin which he must have gone to in London. Except that the address printed below the name wasn’t in London. It was in Paris. In Montmartre. And the bill was dated in September while he had been away. She studied it for a moment. Ragoût de mouton . . . vin ordinaire . . . cognac . . . She found herself thinking, absurdly, how much better good old mutton stew sounded in French and, very likely, tasted. While he was supposed to have been in London, liaising with the Free French, Monsieur Duval had been in Paris. But how could he have been? France was in German hands. You couldn’t get in, or out. Not by normal means. How, then, had he gone there? By boat, landing secretly, at night, on some lonely beach? And what for? Did Alan Powell know that he had been there, or had he, too, believed him to be in London? Was Louis Duval working, not for the Free French at all, but for the Germans? France, after all, was no longer an ally; she had become, in real and practical terms, an enemy.

  She finished the pressing, replaced the bill in the pocket and took the jacket up to Monsieur Duval’s room. When she knocked on the door he opened it at once.

  ‘Thank you so much, madame.’

  She could see that he had been lying on the bed – there was a deep dent on the pillow where his head had rested. Of course he was tired. He had been in France. Of course his clothes were so badly creased – from some long and furtive boat journey.

  ‘It was no trouble.’ She couldn’t look at him. ‘Goodnight.’

  As she went away down the corridor, she heard him call after her, but she pretended that she hadn’t heard.

  ‘Lieutenant Commander Powell? Lieutenant Reeves here. I’m calling with a message from Mrs Hillyard for you.’

  ‘Yes?’ Was he imagining it, or was there an undercurrent of amusement coming down the wire?

  ‘She rang me to ask for your number, but naturally I couldn’t give it to her, so I said I’d pass on a message.’

  No, he hadn’t imagined it. He said curtly, ‘Which was?’

  ‘Would you ring her as soon as possible. Something rather urgent, she said.’

  The evacuee child answered the phone at Bellevue, sounding surprisingly polite, and he waited while she went away to fetch Barbara. Then he heard her heels tapping on the tiled floor of the hall and her voice.

  He said, ‘This is Alan here, Barbara. I got your message from Lieutenant Reeves.’

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Alan, but I wondered if we might meet sometime soon. There
’s something I’d like to discuss with you.’

  She sounded strained. Upset, but in a different way from before. ‘Yes, of course.’ He cursed the busy day ahead of him. ‘I’m afraid I can’t get away until this evening. Could we make it sometime after seven?’

  ‘Eight would be better, if that’s all right with you. I’ll have been able to serve dinner by then, and Esme will be safely in bed.’

  ‘I’ll come and pick you up in the car.’

  ‘Don’t ring at the door. I’ll wait for you outside – just down the road.’

  He put the receiver down, wondering what on earth had happened.

  A good deal of the day was taken up with going over Duval’s report of his month in France. Duval came to the HQ, looking in considerably better shape than when he had arrived back at dawn on the previous day. They went through it all again – the names and cover names, the places and the dates. The information given, the implications, the likely accuracy. During his time in France, Duval had succeeded in establishing a small but significant network of French men and women across Brittany. A base to build on. And much of the information, when duly sifted, would be extremely useful. The Frenchman had also set up some contacts in Paris that promised well. The lack of any sign of an imminent invasion of England was encouraging, to say the least, though the intense U-boat activity was anything but so. Powell perceived the threat of the U-boats as far more frightening and deadly than any of Hitler’s wild invasion threats. With their new and easy access to the North Atlantic, they would make it a killing ground. British merchant shipping would be forced to avoid the English south coast and take much longer routes to north-western ports.

  ‘If I am to continue this work, then I should return soon,’ Duval said. ‘When can it be arranged?’

  ‘I’ll let you know.’ Whether Duval went back, or not, was up to London. The various Intelligence groups worked in mysterious ways – some jealously independent, some co-operating willingly with each other, while General de Gaulle’s Deuxième Bureau lay somewhere uneasily in the middle. And a new agency had recently come into being with an entirely different brief, from Churchill himself – not the secret collection of secret intelligence, but sabotage and acts of terrorism designed to weaken the enemy from within. All very well, in Powell’s view, but the repercussions and reprisals could be devastating on other British agents being sent to operate in France, let alone the ordinary French civilians.

  Duval continued. ‘If we had radio transmitters, then there would be no need for me to go to and fro like this.’

  ‘Unfortunately, there are none available. There are always the carrier pigeons, of course.’

  ‘My God, those pigeons! They’re a liability. A positive danger, in my opinion. Difficult to conceal, hard to handle, and the Germans can shoot them out of the skies and find the messages they carry.’

  ‘They’re all we’ve got at the moment.’

  Duval shrugged. ‘I’d sooner do without.’ He lit another of his cigarettes. ‘Tell me, do you have any news of that young RAF pilot we picked up?’

  ‘He’s been taken to hospital in Plymouth, that’s all I know. They’ll probably move him on to a special unit.’

  ‘He was very badly burned.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ He had overseen the ambulance transport of the pilot and been shocked by his condition. ‘He was very lucky you happened to pass near enough and saw him. A chance in a million.’

  Duval said thoughtfully, ‘You know, Lieutenant Commander, until we picked up that boy I had been thinking only of my own country – only of France. I admit this frankly to you. But now, I find that I am also thinking of what this country – your country – is doing. The sacrifices it is making and will have to continue to make. The young pilot made me aware of that.’

  At ten minutes to eight, Powell drove up the hill towards Bellevue and parked the car a short way down the road, as she had asked. He was early, as usual, and it was five past eight before she appeared, walking quickly towards him. He got out of the car.

  ‘Have you been waiting?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry. Mrs Lamprey kept me talking.’

  He opened the passenger door of the car for her and then got in himself, thumbing the ignition. ‘Would you like to go for a drink? One of the pubs?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, could you just drive – somewhere where we can talk.’

  He drove out of Kingswear, towards Brixham and Berry Head. There was a narrow lane, he knew, that led up onto the cliff tops overlooking the Channel where the old fortifications still stood from an earlier invasion threat – from Napoleon. He parked and turned off the engine. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Tell me what’s happened.’

  ‘It’s about Monsieur Duval.’ She stared ahead through the windscreen. ‘I know that when he was supposed to be in London, he was actually in Paris.’

  ‘I see. Did he tell you that?’

  ‘No, I found out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I pressed a jacket for him – the one that he’d been wearing when he was away. There was a bill in the pocket – from a restaurant in Paris, with the date on.’

  Very careless of Duval. But then he’d never been properly trained. He was an amateur in the unforgiving and lethal world of espionage. Powell said, ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Quite sure. I looked at it closely. All the details.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘I put it back in the same pocket, before I returned the jacket.’

  ‘Did you say anything to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or to anybody else? Mrs Lamprey, for example?’

  ‘Her? heavens, no.’ Her face turned towards him. ‘What I want to know, Alan, is did you know he was there? Or did you believe him to be in London, working for the Free French – like he told me?’

  He debated what to say to her. ‘I’m afraid I can’t answer that, Barbara. I can’t tell you anything. All I can say is that there’s nothing for you to worry about.’

  ‘Nothing to worry about! He’s been over in occupied France. What was he doing there? Spying? For whom?’

  ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about,’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes, there is. I can’t trust him now. He’s living in my house, and I don’t know what sort of a man he is or who he’s working for. He might be spying for the Germans, for all I know – a double agent, or whatever they call them. A traitor. I have to know, Alan. Don’t you see?’

  He saw very well. She’s in love with him, he thought bitterly. That’s why she’s so upset, and why she wants to know. It matters very much to her. He sat in silence for a moment. It would be easy to make her mistrust Duval; to think ill of him. So easy.

  ‘Alan? Please tell me.’

  He said quietly, ‘He’s not a double agent, Barbara, or a traitor. You have my word on that. He’s working for us. He’s a man you can trust absolutely. And a brave man.’

  She gave a deep sigh of relief. ‘I suppose that’s all you’ll tell me?’

  ‘Yes, it’s all I can say.’ He took his eyes away from her face. ‘Shall I take you back now? Or would you like to stop somewhere for a drink?’

  ‘Thank you. That would be nice.’

  He drove down to a pub in Brixham – a cheerful sort of place and a definite improvement on the grim hotel in Torquay. They sat in a corner of the crowded lounge bar and he bought her a gin and orange and a pink gin for himself.

  ‘I wanted to ask you before, Alan,’ she said, as he set her drink down on the table, ‘but there were all those old ladies eavesdropping on us. Do you have any other life – outside the Navy, I mean? Are you married?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not married. I never have been. And I’m afraid I don’t have a very interesting life, apart from the Navy. I have a sister, a brother-in-law and a nephew, some cousins, various old friends. I have a flat in London and I keep a small sailing boat in Essex – but that’s about it. I went to Osborne at eleven, then on to Dartmouth . . .
it’s always been the Navy.’

  ‘How did you get your medal?’

  He glanced down at the DSO ribbon. ‘In the First World War.’

  ‘How, not when?’

  ‘Putting out a fire after we’d been hit by a shell from a German cruiser.’

  ‘Were you wounded?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She persisted. ‘Badly?’

  ‘Pretty badly. I nearly lost my left arm and I was in hospital for a very long time – all kinds of problems and complications, and so on. By the time I was fit again, life and the Navy had moved on. I rather lost my place in the queue. I ended up in command of a desk. Not quite what I’d originally hoped for.’ He prayed to God that he didn’t sound pathetic or bitter.

  She was silent, then she said, ‘I can see how very much the Navy has meant to you. It’s been your whole life, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it has.’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what work you’re doing now, Alan, but if it’s important, and I’m sure it is, it might help to make up for what happened to you.’

  He summoned a smile, more hopelessly in love with her than ever. ‘We’ll see.’

  The house was dark and silent. She stopped for a moment outside to check the blackout at the front windows before she let herself in. The hall light had been left on and, as she went towards the stairs, she heard a sound from the direction of the sitting room and expected Mrs Lamprey to emerge, demanding to know where she had been.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for your return, madame,’ Monsieur Duval’s voice said behind her. ‘Please tell me what is the matter? Why you don’t speak to me, or look at me. Not since last night.’

  She turned to face him. ‘Nothing’s the matter.’

  ‘I have not imagined it. Tell me, please.’

  She hesitated, then said, ‘There was a bill in the pocket of your jacket – I found it when I was ironing. It was from a restaurant in Paris, with the date on it, so I knew you must have been in France – when you were supposed to be in London.’

  ‘And so? What did you think?’

  ‘I thought you might be a traitor, spying for the Germans.’