The Girl in the Baker's Van

by Richard Savin

  Schreiber looked up to the ridge. There was just a faint trace of light behind it; enough to silhouette Mathieu and his comrades. He nodded to the pilot, indicating they should load the corpse. ‘I am sorry you will have to sit in the back with it. You did a good job, Becker.’

  The Storch took to the air as nimbly as it had landed and droned away into the blackness of the northern horizon. On the flight back Schreiber took out his notebook and, by the glow of the instruments, wrote his final conclusions to the case. Alpha Six was correct. He noted it down: no secrets had been lost and the man who killed Sicherheitsdienst agent Ludwig Kraus had been apprehended. He was dead but he would have been executed anyway. He doubted he would have confessed to anything – his sort never did. He shut the book, closed his eyes and thought about Gudrun. She would cook him bratwurst.

  *

  After the last shreds of sound from the Storch dwindled to silence Grainger hugged Mathieu and thanked him. He then went over to the young man, who had all the while stood watching the events unfold without speaking or being spoken to. ‘This is Alain Pfeiffer,’ he said to Mathieu, ‘the brother of Evangeline.’

  Mathieu nodded, ‘I guessed that was so.’

  ‘I need one more favour,’ Grainger said, once more grinning. ‘In exchange for all that gold, and there is a lot of it, I could use some help getting down to La Vajol. I need to take Alain to his sister, and I ought to give our American friends the disappointing news about the secrets they won’t be getting.’

  ‘You have a very pretty sister,’ he told Alain as they made their way across the broken track and emerged onto the road to La Vajol.

  ‘Are you in love with her?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Will you marry her?

  Grainger thought for a moment. ‘I would like to.’

  *

  When they reached the first hamlet on the road Mathieu persuaded an elderly couple to give them a bed for the night. Early the following morning he left them and headed back to meet with the others of his group. ‘If I don’t see you again,’ he said, and hugged Grainger, ‘I wish you bon courage.’

  Grainger and Alain reached La Vajol as the sun reached its apogee. In a street close to the centre he found the address that McAndrew had given him. The imposing front door was furnished with a big brass knocker which he lifted and rapped loudly. When the door opened there was McAndrew; he looked shocked to see them standing there. ‘Jesus,’ he said directly to Grainger, ‘we heard you wuz dead. Come in, come in.’ He looked up and down the street, then shut the door. ‘Your guy José delivered the two girls then went back up to find you. He met some folk who said there’d been a shootout. They said you’d been dry-gulched; half a dozen gendarmes had got the drop on you and you’d been killed.’

  ‘Never listen to gossip,’ Grainger quipped glibly as they followed McAndrew down the hallway, ‘it’s almost always wrong.’

  He ushered them into a large, brightly furnished living room, with an ornately tiled floor. Grainger immediately recognised Cigale; a diminutive figure in a cotton print dress, she was standing looking out through a very high glass-panelled door that led onto a courtyard. Hearing someone entering the room, she turned to look and when she saw it was Grainger her face brightened, but the bright look was quickly eclipsed by a sombre shadow as it sank in that the other person was someone she did not recognise. ‘Kasha?’ she asked softly as he reached her. He could see that she already knew and was abandoning the last hope that she had clung to. He shook his head. ‘Sorry, he didn’t make it,’ was all he could think of to say.

  ‘I guessed.’ A tear rolled silently down her cheek and then another. There was nothing he could do and when McAndrew came back and said he should follow him to the library where Major Harper was waiting he was relieved. As they left her there in the living room he heard her break into a deeply wretched sobbing.

  ‘What happened to Mademoiselle Evangeline?’ he asked McAndrew as they walked down a short corridor.

  McAndrew stopped at a dark oak-panelled door, knocked and pushed it open. ‘The major will tell you,’ he said in a low voice; then, saluting, announced, ‘Mister Grainger, sir.’

  Harper stood up. ‘Thank you, sergeant. Please take a seat, sir. Welcome to our little outpost.’ Harper leaned back in his seat. ‘That was a damn fine job you did up there.’

  The words took Grainger by surprise and he shifted slightly on the chair. He wasn’t sure what this man knew and he wondered how he would take the news that there were no secrets to be had. He leaned forward on the desk, his expression a mix of embarrassment and apology. ‘I thought it was a bit of mess actually.’ His voice sounded brittle and the words awkward. ‘Not the sort of outcome we’d hoped for – sorry about that.’

  Harper smiled broadly, displaying a mouthful of perfectly maintained pearly white teeth. ‘I think you’re being modest. Sure, you lost a couple of guys on the way round but that’s the ground rules for the game.’

  Harper’s confident bonhomie only served to make Grainger the more uncomfortable. He would have to break the bad news to this gung-ho American sooner or later, so it might as well be now. ‘Sorry, but I’m not following you, Major. I let the charge in my care get killed and we gained absolutely nothing from it. How can that be good?’

  Harper opened a drawer in the desk and took out a small silver cylinder. He placed it on the desk. ‘What about this? I wouldn’t call it nothing, would you?’ He saw the confusion in Grainger’s eyes and the questioning look on his face. ‘Hey,’ he said, drawing out the word slowly, ‘you don’t know,’ Harper cocked his head to one side and raised his eyebrows. ‘This is the first time you’ve seen it – am I right?’

  Grainger stared at the cylinder. ‘What is it? Where did you get it?’

  ‘The little lady in the room back there; she brought it with her.’

  ‘Cigale?’

  ‘That’s right. She was close to this Polish spy, wasn’t she?’

  ‘They were lovers.’

  ‘Sounds about right. So that’s what he was carrying and I’m guessing when he knew he wasn’t gonna make it he gave it to her.’

  ‘What was in it?’

  ‘Microfilm – can’t tell you more than that, but it’s important. Now,’ he took a folded sheet of paper from another drawer and handed it to Grainger, ‘that’s a request to ship you down to Lisbon, toot sweet, as they like to say.’

  Grainger read the request; it had been signed by Charlie Armitage. ‘When do I go?’

  ‘First thing tomorrow.’

  ‘I was hoping for a little more time. I have some unfinished business to attend to.’

  Harper shook his head. ‘The girl – sorry, I almost forgot.’ He dived back into the draw again. ‘She asked me to give you this.’ He handed Grainger a manila envelope with a note and something heavy inside. He removed the single sheet and read it.

  Richard, mon plus cher amour

  When you have finished fighting your war come back and find me — I will be waiting for you. I could not find a proper token of my love for you so I am leaving you this. It is half of my heart. I have kept the other half and it will be here until you return to claim it. There will never be another love in my life and I long to have you back.

  Tu seras toujours mon amour,

  Evangeline

  At the bottom she had drawn a line of little black cats and underneath each one was a number. I am giving you nine new lives, she had written. ‘Please take care of them.’

  There was still something in the envelope, something with a little weight. He tipped it up and let the object fall into the open palm of his hand. It was one half of the gold Napoleon Kasha had flipped at him in the tower, the one he had picked up and given to her. It had been clipped in two.

  *

  From inside the tram he heard the air raid siren. The driver stopped his vehicle and told everyone to get off. People were scurrying towards the underground entrance, heading for the shelter of the deep platforms b
elow. He thought about joining them but decided instead to make a dash for the office in Baker Street; it was only a couple of blocks away and, besides, he hated being underground. Inside, the staff of the clothing store were filing down into the basement but he carried on to the lift and went to the top floor. In the reception where he had first met her, Gillian the secretary was crouching underneath her desk. It wasn’t a particularly safe place to be but it might save her from injury if the ceiling came down. She stared up at him with a look of mild surprise.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you back.’

  ‘Nine lives,’ he said smiling, ‘I’ve been given nine new lives.’ Passing her by, he went unannounced into the back office where he found Charlie Armitage and G. They were standing at a window watching the bombers dropping their death load along the far side of the embankment.

  ‘Ah, Dicky,’ Armitage beamed, turning away from the window. ‘Good to see you back, well done you put up a decent show, our American friends were delighted – now G has something else which should be right up your street; have a seat and we’ll give you the lowdown.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I hold the view, perversely perhaps, that acknowledgements, like wedding speeches, should be to the point and, mercifully – short. Though they are not part of the story they are there because without all the helpers and there would be no story, or at the very least a much poorer one.

  So to all of those who have helped me with the creation of this story and with the finished book, I offer my profound thanks. I want to say a special thankyou to my editors, Liz and Linda as well as my Beta readers Mal Pardey and David Povilaitis.

  I am also particularly grateful to Authors Ted Bun and James Gault for their honest and constructive feedback in the mid stages of the manuscript, and to Linn Hunter for assistance in choosing the title for the book. In writing something with which is grounded in real history the research is particularly important. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Paul (Po-Po) Pechmarty and Jean Pierre, both of whom lived through World War Two; Po-Po in the Catalan region of Vichy and Jean Pierre in Dunkirk; my conversations with them gave me an invaluable first-hand view of life under the German occupation of their country.

  Thankyou one and all.

  Dear Reader

  I very much hope you have enjoyed your journey through this book. If so, you might also like to read A Right to Bear Arms. In it you will find the origins of the character, Richard Grainger.

  The story takes place in Britain and America; it follows the lives, loves and disappointments of a group of young men and women as they slowly face up to the prospect, and then the reality, of war.

  I have set the scene in an alternative history of World War Two. This is a tale of ‘what if’. In doing this I am asking the reader to put aside what they know of that event and instead indulge in the intriguing exercise of dreaming up what might have been. What could have happened had just one element of that momentous event been different. What if there had been no Churchill urging the country to fight on but instead, a government of appeasement; not capitulating but instead making peace and a treaty with Germany – an event many historians believe came within a whisker of being the reality? This is not a story about war but about people and families and how they deal with life in the face of war.

  Thank you for reading my work. For an author there is no greater reward.

  Richard Savin