by Manda Scott
‘I’m sorry.’ The girl pulls a face. ‘Elodie got me the job. Or maybe Gramps leaned on Clinton who leaned on Elodie. I hate the stink of nepotism, but it’s the way the world works and I genuinely do want to be a director. It doesn’t feel good, though. I don’t crow about it.’
Her French is faultless. Her English is mid-Atlantic, not tied to any particular geographic location. Now that the family is all together, it’s easy to see the resemblance. Martha is a younger, blonder, considerably more symmetrical version of her father.
She leans over and kisses JJ Crotteau on the brow. ‘I need to get back. Clinton’ll be going crazy.’
Picaut says, ‘I won’t stay long. You all knew Sophie Destivelle, obviously, although I’m assuming that if you knew her original name, you’d have told me by now. We have an address for her in Orléans, but she hasn’t been there recently. I wonder if any of you has an alternative. In Saint-Cybard, maybe?’
The men both look at Martha, who shakes her head. ‘I gave you everything we have. If there’s more, only Elodie has it. We met Sophie at the Hôtel Cinqfeuilles in Saint-Cybard. It was the Gestapo centre in the war and Sophie wanted us to film there.’
‘You actually met her? You, personally?’
‘I was the researcher for this segment. We met twice ahead of the shoot and then the third time, Elodie filmed her. That was last week.’
‘Just Elodie?’
‘That was the deal: it was to be completely private – no live feed. We set up the camera and the lights and left them to it. There are not many directors who could manage that, but Elodie knows how to handle the kit. They were alone the entire afternoon.’
There’s something in the way she says this. Is it pride? Envy? Both? ‘Can we see the footage?’ asks Picaut.
‘Elodie has it. We filmed the day before she went to the US. She went in a hurry when she got the news that her godfather was dying and took everything with her. It’s all on her laptop.’
‘Then we’ll wait until she’s here. Someone’s gone to pick her up now.’ Picaut pulls out one of her new business cards and lays it on the table. ‘If any of you has any thoughts, please let me know. I can see myself out.’
Departing, she catches a scent of lavender in the hallway, but cannot see its source.
12.35
Of the three old warriors, bound by bonds stronger than blood, Picaut has one left to see.
René Vivier, the last and potentially most difficult – at least for her – lives alone in a single-storey, mid-terrace, south-facing cottage north of the cathedral and west of the railway line. The exterior is white pebble-dash, gone slightly to seed, with decorative red-and-white brickwork in fans around the windows.
He doesn’t answer her first two knocks, and Picaut is beginning to consider the wisdom of a kick to the door, when stockinged feet shuffle on wood and a key turns in a lock.
A chain chimes, then two bolts, and a second key. The door opens to the width of her hand, edge-on. She sees the barrel of a gun.
‘You?’ René shoves the door shut, which is not entirely unexpected. Picaut leans her shoulder against it and keeps it open by perhaps half a centimetre and speaks through the gap. ‘Sophie Destivelle was shot twice in the chest and once in the head sometime early this morning.’ She doesn’t mention the cut throat and the missing tongue.
After a while, he says, ‘It wasn’t me.’
‘Because you lost the fingers of your gun hand in your teens. I know. So do you think you can shoot them now if they come for you, whoever they are?’
She may have pushed too far, or in the wrong direction. For a long half-minute she thinks this, before she feels the door give and manages to shift her weight onto her back foot before it swings wide open.
René stands before her, short, wiry, angry, his hair stained with a lifetime’s nicotine. He keeps his arms folded across his chest, his ruined hand on the outside. The fingers of his right hand were crushed, one joint at a time, to make him betray his Maquis comrades. He didn’t talk. He got away and fought on. He is not as famous as Daniel and Lisette Fayette, heroes of the battle of Saint-Cybard, but even so, two separate villages in the Jura mountains now have residential streets named after him.
His eyes are small and bright and hard. He lays the gun down on the side table and takes a step away. ‘Was anything else done to her?’
That’s an interesting question. Picaut says, ‘Would you care to tell me what else might have been done?’
‘Not if it makes me a suspect.’
‘Not only is your hand damaged, but, forgive me, you’re also too short. You’d have had to stand on a box to make the shots at the angle they were fired. So no, you’re not a suspect, but I am interested in what you think might have been done to Sophie Destivelle.’
‘I think she will have had her throat slashed and her tongue cut out.’ He smiles, tightly, at Picaut’s reaction. ‘It’s what she did in the war. She cut the throats of traitors and ripped out their tongues. You are looking for someone who knows that.’
‘And has reason to do the same to her in return. Do you know of anyone who might feel as if she had betrayed them?’
He tugs thoughtfully on his ear. ‘You’d better come in.’
She follows him down a narrow hallway to a small kitchen and adjoining day room that are neither as pathologically tidy as Pierre Fayette’s, nor as family-chaotic as JJ’s.
René, it seems, is just untidy. Newspapers litter a sideboard. Old coffee cups line up by the sink, waiting for time to wash them. His last meal was a goulash of sorts, which bubbled over onto the surface of the cooker. She smells lavender again amongst the warm burnt-toast smell of a tumble dryer, and the layers of coffee and cigarette smoke, and, yes, a music box stands open on the mantelpiece. This one in a rich red colour; mahogany, perhaps, or cedar, with the inlaid script almost sulphur yellow on the top.
René sees her looking. ‘Patrick made them: Patrick Sutherland, Patron of the Saint-Cybard Resistance. He carved us one each, those of us who survived.’
‘Pierre Fayette has one.’
‘He inherited Daniel’s. Sophie’s will be somewhere. Elodie has Céline’s. She got everything of hers when she was twenty-one. You’ll take coffee?’
She can’t refuse, although his coffee looks like tar and she is already near the toxic level. Passing her a mug, he says, ‘How is Laurence?’
‘Sad. English. We didn’t discuss mutilation, which may have been an oversight. When did you last see Sophie Destivelle?’
He tilts his head back and blows smoke at the ceiling. ‘I spoke to her by phone five days ago. She called from a mobile and no, I don’t have the number; although if you search my phone records, I’m sure it will be there. She was in America. That’s all I know.’
She could say, We won’t search your phone records, but they would both know it for a lie. Instead, she asks, ‘What did she call about?’
‘Paul Rey was dying. She wanted to know if I had any messages for him.’
‘Did you?’
‘Only to keep me a warm seat by the fire.’ At the sharpness of her look, his grin fades. ‘I’m sorry. But we were bad men, Captain. Heaven will not have a place for us.’
‘Paul Rey’s dead now, did you know?’
His nod might also be a shrug.
‘You don’t seem sad.’
It is definitely a shrug. He holds up his ruined hand. ‘I should have died when this was done. Every day that passes since then has been a gift. I live each to the full and will have no regrets when the last one has passed.’
‘You were courageous.’
‘I was young and very stupid.’
‘You kept silent while men with a terrifying reputation smashed your fingers. That counts as unbelievably brave to me.’
‘Of course it does, you were not there. But I know the truth, which is that I was more afraid of betraying my Patron than I was of the Boche.’ He makes a circle in the air with his cigarette so that the glowing l
oop hangs for a moment amidst the smoke. ‘Some people will inhabit a much deeper pit of hell than us.’
It would be good to think so. ‘Who do you think would want to kill Sophie Destivelle?’
He looks at her, narrowly. ‘Are you sure that’s the right question?’
‘What would the right question be?’
‘You have seen this photograph?’ Like Pierre and Laurence, he has on his mantel the print of a Maquis war band leaping a wall. He waves at it. ‘Look at us. What do you see?’
‘Maquisards at war?’ He stares at her. She looks again, more closely, at the faces, at the guns, at the shine of their eyes. ‘I see young people who hate their enemy and love their own strength and the power of their weapons.’
He lifts his eyes to the skies and back with exaggerated patience. ‘You are not a film maker. Elodie saw it straight away. Where are they looking, Captain Picaut? What is their target?’
From either end she studies them: Laurence, Paul Rey, Daniel, René, Sophie and— ‘All of them are looking to the left, except Sophie. She’s looking over to the right.’
He nods. ‘And what is there, Captain?’
‘How should I know? What was there?’
‘I don’t know. I have never known. The rest of us had eyes only for the church door where Maximilian Kramme was stepping out with his new bride. I did not look to my right. I had no idea that anyone had done so until I saw this photograph a couple of months ago when a copy was sent to each of us. I have wondered every day since then. What is she looking at? Or who?’
‘Who sent you the picture?’
‘That’s the question, isn’t it? I’d bet on Paul Rey, but he never acknowledged it, and we can’t ask him any more. I am told Elodie Duval went to America to get the original ciné film from which this still frame was taken. If you can locate that film, you will learn more about our late friend Madame Destivelle.’
Something in his voice makes her ask, ‘Did you love her?’
He laughs, and it becomes a rattling smoker’s cough. When he can breathe again, he says, ‘You have seen her in old age, and she is beautiful, no? In her youth, she was like a magical being, strong and fragile at once: dangerous and beautiful, with a core of such vulnerability that every man who saw her promised himself in his heart that he would give his life to save her from harm. So yes, from the moment she first fell from the sky, I loved her. We all did.’ He traces the nub of a ruined finger round the door locks. ‘This may have blinded us to aspects of her character that were … not what they seemed on the surface.’
‘Pierre Fayette said there was a betrayal and Sophie was involved. Was she a traitor? Is that why she died the way she did?’
‘I hope not.’ The deep lines about his mouth deepen further. His eyes grow sad. ‘She was something she should not have been, that much I can tell you. But she hated the Boche, that also is true. I never saw anyone so desperate to kill them.’
April, 1944: Allied bombers target Budapest and Bucharest ahead of the advancing Soviet Army.
SOE, F-Section: Maurice Southgate, aka Hector of the Stationer network, arrested in Paris. Believed alive.
Hélène Lymond, aka Astraea of the Troubadour network, arrested in Saint-Cybard. Presumed dead.
Sophie Destivelle, aka Keres, dropped as replacement together with supplies as per request.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
RAF TANGMERE, WEST SUSSEX
8 April 1944
LATER, SHE REMEMBERS the floodlights, the liminal quality of the light on the plane’s fuselage, the damp shimmers on the tarmac where the afternoon’s rain has not yet cleared.
At the time, she is bound up in the unreality of it. She hangs on to the press of the dense, cold air and the taste of coffee, thick at the back of her throat. These things are real. England is not. She is in France, she must think only of France.
I am Sophie Destivelle. This is my truth.
My contact is François Duval, a Belgian doctor. I am his nurse, come from Paris. The good doctor wrote the advert and passed it to the mayor of Saint-Cybard, Raymond Vivier, who sent it to his cousin, Victor, who works for the Milice, who passed it to his neighbour, Madame Aubrais, who showed it to me. I have just completed my training. Here are my certificates …
‘Kramme will know this is fake.’ She said this at the first briefing after the night of her undoing.
‘Of course.’ Laurence Vaughan-Thomas is her case officer. She doesn’t like him, but she can’t imagine it being anyone else. ‘But it is a very good fake and he will want to accept it. He’s hardly going to have you arrested, is he? You’ll be his greatest achievement.’
‘Do they exist, Raymond Vivier, Madame Aubrais, the others?’
‘Of course. They have no idea that what they were doing was anything other than their civic duty, so Kramme can break their every bone, and still they won’t be able to tell him anything.’
‘But if he does …’
‘He won’t. No case officer would want to risk alerting the enemy to any hint of duplicity on your part. So actually, I rather think these four people are amongst the safest in France just now.’
Nobody else is safe, though. Not Sophie, certainly not her contact – the doctor François Duval, who is also Patron of the Saint-Cybard Maquis. He is other things, too, as yet undiscovered. She does not know Laurence Vaughan-Thomas intimately, but she knows him well enough to read fear on his face, in his eyes, in the too-careful use of language. Three times already he has told her that the one person who matters above all others is the Patron.
‘At all costs, you must protect the Patron of the Saint-Cybard Maquis.’
So perhaps I shall. Or—
A figure waits at the tail of the Stirling. This newcomer is taller than Vaughan-Thomas, bulkier, dressed well for the cold. His hair is a white hedge, growing out at unkempt angles. He offers his hand in the way of the English officer class who are not used to shaking hands with civilians.
‘Mademoiselle Destivelle. I’m sorry we haven’t met before, but I have heard much of your progress, and all of it good. Laurence has, I am sure, let you know that we three are the only ones who know who and what you are. Nothing is written down, no conversations have taken place where there was any risk of our being overheard. We shall not betray you. You have my word on that. We count on you not to betray yourself.’
Is she supposed to be grateful? She stares past him into the night. She is beyond fear. She tells herself this: beyond it. The officer has come for a reason; men like him never make journeys like this just to shake hands.
She adjusts her scarf, and waits. He smiles a little, blows on his hands, and says, ‘We have an agent somewhere in the region of Saint-Cybard, with the code name Icarus. There may come a time when he requires our aid and you may be the only person on the spot. If that call comes, it has absolute priority. If you have Hitler himself in your sights and that call comes, you leave the kill and you give whatever help you can to Icarus. Is that clear?’
She nods. A silence arises, which she must fill. She says, ‘Icarus. Whatever help he needs, if I wish to retain your good will, I am to give it.’
The Brigadier smiles, showing yellowing teeth. ‘Splendid. I’m told it’s not wise to offer luck. And you will not need it. You will need strength of mind and sharpness of wit. I wish you both of these, Wild Card. A great deal rides on you.’
Wild Card. This is the first time she has heard the name spoken aloud. It does strange things to her head and her heart, like a tuning fork finding its note. She smiles at him, and his eyes widen a little in surprise, or surmise; she can’t tell which, then he touches his brow in a half-salute and is gone into the cold night.
She was expecting more. Rumours run rife of the parting gifts of gold, of the weight of them. You can tell how much you are valued by how much they spend. A name costs nothing.
The pilot beckons. The moon waits for no one. She has mounted two steps when a hand catches her arm.
She sees him clearly, t
he sharpness of his cheekbones, the steel of his eyes, the way they sparkle in the strange, cold light. He wears a hat that hides his Boche-blond hair.
‘Captain Vaughan-Thomas.’
‘Sophie.’ He lets go of her arm. He still wears his gloves. ‘Wait a moment.’ He is wearing a heavy overcoat against the cold. He undoes the top three buttons, fishes in his inner pocket and passes her something solidly warm; a make-up compact, in gold. ‘For you.’
The weight is all she could have asked for. ‘A necessary part of my cover?’
His smile is as dry as she remembers, but sad now, at the edges. ‘That doesn’t stop it being useful. Or any less heartfelt.’
She is turning away, made clumsy by the parachute suit. He says. ‘Troubadour’s patron—?’
‘Is the Belgian doctor. I must not give his name to the Boche. I heard you the first time you said it and every time since.’ She wants to know why he matters so much, but she cannot ask and even if she did, nobody could tell her.
He chews on his lip. Even now, he is deciding what he can say. At last: ‘He can be prickly. And a stickler for protocol. He also thinks … that is, he will not want to put a woman at risk. It is part of who he is. You will have to prove yourself worthy, but once you have done so, he will give his life for you, and more.’
He does not give a name. It may be that she is never allowed to know it, only that, in her opinion, this one man matters more to Laurence Vaughan-Thomas than does winning the war.
She says, ‘I shall protect him. I give you my word.’ She offers him her hand, and he shakes it, as if she were a man. In many ways, it is the most encouraging thing he has ever done for her.
Climbing the ladder is the hardest part: her parachute harness holds her in a half-crouch and stepping up is virtually impossible. Nonetheless, at the top, she turns to look back into England, and he is still there, looking up at her. He has taken his hat off. His hair is silver in the light. He tilts his head back, salutes her. ‘Merde, alors!’
It is the first French of the night. She salutes and turns away before the light can shine in her eyes.
