by Kurt Magenta
‘Describe him,’ said Lucien.
Goucher looked up. ‘Who?’
‘The man from the British government. Describe him in detail.’
Lucien struggled to stop himself from trembling as Solomon did so. He knew who had killed Chenard – and he thought he knew why.
Now the Austin was following them at a discreet distance. So who was this? Representatives of the ‘British government’? Or friends of Solomon, keeping an eye on him?
Lucien tapped Val on the shoulder and put his right fist where she could see it, then bent his wrist as if twisting the throttle. She got the message and he felt his stomach dip as the bike accelerated.
He took another glance back. Behind them, the Austin had poured on the juice too. Val sensed the danger and gave the bike more throttle. Now they were tearing along; Lucien clung to her, feeling the heat of her body through her serge uniform, the ache of tension in his chest.
They were pulling away from the Austin. The men in the car must have known they were no match for the bike, but they came on anyway. Val hurled the Triumph into a side street, barely slowing as the back tyre skittered and then righted itself. Lucien glanced back, hoping the Austin had overshot – but it had screeched round after them.
Val made another hair-raising turn. Now they were into what taxi drivers called the ‘back-doubles’ – the narrow streets that veined London, providing shortcuts between bigger arteries. As a courier whose job depended on speed, Val must have found them quickly.
The maudite Austin was still there. Lucien’s anxiety mounted into fear. ‘Two people are dead,’ Val had said. Were another two about to be added to the list?
He caught Val’s glance to the left but saw only a pile of rubble; a building sliced in half by a bomb, its remains clogging the entrance to an alley. Still she wrenched the bike across, heading fiercely for dam of fallen brick and masonry. As they ripped towards it he saw what she had seen: a narrow gap, like a runnel between rocks, where the spill had come to rest at the foot of the opposite wall. This was going to be rough!
The hit the rubble with a jolt that threatened to wrench his skull from his spine. The motorbike scrabbled and protested but soldiered on. Then they were over the pile and into the alley, where the Austin could never follow. A second later, they had burst into the open street beyond and were home free, curving back towards the West End without a tail.
He didn’t want to risk the hotel right away. Neither did Val feel like returning to her digs in Fulham. So they compromised with a pub called The Lamb and Flag, secreted at the end of a cobblestoned street near Covent Garden.
The place had just opened for the day, and for once there was a pristine odour of carbolic and varnish above the familiar notes of tobacco and spilled ale. A big Union Jack hung behind the bar. Val ordered a ‘gin and It’ – short for gin and Italian, sweet vermouth contributing the latter – while Lucien preferred straightforward Gordon’s with tonic.
‘What if they saw the registration plate of the bike?’ he asked, once they were seated in a corner.
‘I’ll tamper with the engine. Invent a fault. Then I can take another one from the pool.’
‘Clever. I dragged you into this – now I want you as far away from it as possible.’
‘But what the bloody hell is “this”? Do you believe in these mysterious government people?’
Despite everything, he still noted the arch of her eyebrows, the somewhat boyish set of her jaw, that golden almost-tan from outdoor work.
‘I’m afraid I do.’ He was pleased to see that his hand remained steady as he sipped his drink. ‘Normally there’d be people I could go to.’
‘Why not now?’
‘Because I don’t trust them anymore.’
Finally, he understood what had happened. Perhaps betrayal was always like that. It started slowly, one whisper at a time. But each revelation joined the others, like grains of sand, until finally they choked your soul.
The landlord rang time for the afternoon break.
Val said, ‘Let’s see each other again – soon.’
She kissed his cheek and went to retrieve her bike.
As he walked to the Tube, he felt the reassuring weight of the snub-nosed .38 – generously donated by Solomon Cantello – concealed beneath his jacket.
Back at the newspaper, he had been taught to dislike the single word that dropped to the next line and hung on its own in a blank space. ‘Orphans,’ Grosselin had called them. In his dealings with the Free French and Jasper Maddox, Lucien had always been buried in a bigger story, inserted into events that stretched far beyond his vision.
Now it was time to stand alone. It was time to become an orphan.
Chapter 27
Turncoat
He moved out of his lodgings that night – or rather, at around three in the morning – leaving a short note of apology for Mrs Shaughnessy. He had his duffel bag and his old brown suitcase, a favourite suit folded carefully inside. The jazz disc was still at the bottom; the Simenon novel had long vanished.
He saw nobody as he crossed the rain-slick street. London was blacked out but never entirely dark: the smouldering fires from the raids tainted the sky a sickly tangerine.
He walked for a long time, until genuine daylight finally arrived and it was safe to huddle in a coffee-scented Italian café near Leicester Square.
Just after ten he checked in to a small hotel in Bloomsbury that he’d passed a few times and always liked the look of. It was called The Winchester. Once inside he liked it even more. The lobby resembled a shabby living room, with an oriental rug and bookshelves, a trio of ancient studded Chesterfield armchairs, a low table strewn with old magazines. A dusty parlour palm sat on a stand by the short counter that passed for a reception desk, behind which tasselled keys hung like sleeping bats. The middle-aged woman behind the counter wore too much rouge and asked for cash in advance.
His own room at the top of the building was cramped, but there was the luxury of a claw-footed bath, if not hot water. The pipes groaned and thumped when he turned on the taps, the water arriving in a reluctant sputter.
He stripped to his shorts, washed and shaved as best as he could, then lay on the rose candlewick bedspread to nap. For the rest of the day he would lie low. While part of him craved the relative normality of the Deuxième Bureau, he was still technically on leave. Nobody was looking for him.
The small bright flame of anger – the sense of righteousness that had been driving him all along – was still burning. But now its oxygen came from another source.
Early next morning, he put his plan into action.
A man like Jasper Maddox must surely know when he was being followed, but for five days he showed no sign of it. Lucien had become an effective shadow. He was aware, too, that he was turning Maddox’s own weapons against him.
Lucien had been prepared to use a variety of means, but in the end he needed only two: foot and taxi. He’d tracked Reg down at the green cabbies’ shelter at Victoria Embankment, and they struck a deal over a breakfast of hot buttered toast and strong tea. Lucien was sketchy about the details, but the driver got the message. ‘Very Bulldog Drummond,’ he approved.
Maddox used a chauffeur-driven private car, a Morris 18, and they followed it to a tall building on Broadway three mornings in a row. On the fourth it led them to Wandsworth, where Lucien warned Reg to turn off before they reached the Patriotic School. He was worried that Maddox would wake up to the fact that a black cab with a certain number plate often appeared a few cars behind him.
On the morning of Monday November 11, Lucien struck lucky. Maddox left his car in the usual spot at Broadway but did not enter the building. Instead, he descended into the Tube station nearby. Lucien was out of the cab and in pursuit before Reg could even react.
He was back in Aldercroft territory: head down, use the crowd but keep the t
arget in view, board the train one car behind. They rode to Islington: Old Street Station. After laying a few false trails – easily deciphered by Lucien – Maddox entered St. Luke’s church: a blocky stucco-faced building with a strange obelisk spire. It was classic dead drop territory. Tuck your message into a niche behind a statue, make a quick exit, and someone would soon be along to pick it up.
Lucien waited under the lee of an awning on the corner of Whitecross Street: across the road from the church but concealed by shade and sightlines. Maddox reappeared and Lucien turned to examine the array of pipes in the tobacconist’s window. When the coast was clear he went for a stroll: across the intersection, down the street a little way, back again. The church was barely out of his view all that time.
He was starting his fourth pass when a small man with a homburg hat and a moustache walked into the church. Everything about the man’s gait suggested alertness and caution. Lucien took up his former position. The man emerged barely a moment later and headed for the Tube. Lucien was quite some way behind – but not far enough to lose him.
When the Northern Line took them to Hampstead, Lucien had a tingling sense of déjà vu. A feeling of dread and fate pushed down on him as they continued to the bookshop. He passed it with his head well down when the bell above the door chimed and the man entered.
This was not the inquisitive Special Branch operative the woman had mentioned. This was a messenger of some kind – and the shop was an information clearing house.
Lucien dropped his surveillance for the day. He’d seen everything he needed to know. Now he had to decide what to do about it.
His Master’s Voice had been silenced. The window through which he’d peered covetously at the sleeves of jazz records no longer existed; the store was a bombed-out shell. After meeting its vacant stare from the other side of the street, he sighed and went on his way, having paused long enough to confirm his suspicions.
Persons unknown were on his tail – at least two of them. One taller than the other, standard raincoats and hats. But he wondered if the woman a little way ahead of him in a ginger tweed coat was also part of the team, because that was tradecraft too. Whether they belonged to Maddox or Special Branch – who were presumably still watching the bookshop – he had no idea.
He had spent most of the night in an agony of indecision. Should he confront Maddox? Go to Hayes? Or confess all to Passy and brace himself for the repercussions? The morning had offered no respite. So now he walked and fretted.
A cold drizzle muddied the dust on the pavements but failed to rid the air of the smell of carbonised timber. He continued his march down Oxford Street, where other smart buildings had been hit. The upper windows of Selfridge’s were boarded up. A little further along, John Lewis was a fire-blackened husk, a temple of consumerism reduced to a remnant from a lost civilisation.
He scuttled across Oxford Circus, wondering if he could lose them in the traffic. But of course they were too good for that. He noticed in passing that the enterprising staff at Bourne & Hollingsworth had draped a Union Jack over the store’s bomb-chipped façade. Incredibly, the place was open for business.
He turned into Berners Street, planning to lead them into the maze of Fitzrovia; but the game ended when a black Wolseley shot out from behind him and mounted one front wheel onto the pavement. The rear door swung open like a barrier.
He flinched towards the gun tucked into his waistband, but the idea of a shoot-out in the West End seemed ludicrous.
Arnaud Vauthier appeared in the door, one well-shod foot on the gleaming pavement.
He said in French: ‘It’s us you idiot. Get in.’
Chapter 28
Another Option
Freddie Hayes was sitting in the front of the car, next to the driver. In the recent past, Lucien might have asked a series of impetuous, faintly strident questions. But now he kept his counsel, limiting himself to a simple, ‘Hello, sir.’
Hayes did not turn his head. ‘Cortel.’
Lucien’s back was pushed into the leather upholstery as the car moved off fast, performing a complex series of sharp turns and barrelling up a skinny one-way street until it finally slowed to a more leisurely pace.
‘Happy now Soames?’ Hayes asked the driver, a faint inflection of sarcasm in his voice.
‘I believe we’ve shaken them off, sir.’
The car eased through the London streets, eventually nosing into Westminster, where they passed a rain-shrouded Houses of Parliament, its diffuse silhouette reminding him of Monet’s London paintings. For a moment it looked as though they were heading back to St. Ermin’s Hotel, but the car turned off the broad sweep of Victoria Street into the narrower grey thoroughfares below. The area felt pompous and conservative, a district where the Establishment held sway.
Eventually they stopped outside a grand building whose five-storey façade was an impressive checkerboard of red brick and white stucco, studded with heraldic symbols.
‘This is us,’ said Hayes.
They stepped briefly into the rain and then into an archway below a louring pediment. Hayes pressed a button beside the panelled door, which featured two small barred windows at head height, giving it an unpleasantly dungeon-like air.
They were buzzed through.
‘Heard of Luytens – the architect?’ Hayes asked. ‘One of his places. Bit of a dog’s breakfast if you ask me.’
Hayes nodded at the guard behind the barricade-sized reception desk, ignored the varnished staircase in front of them and turned directly left. Another door, this time with a frosted glass panel in it. And then a room that looked like a cross between an office and a rented flat, with a desk whose green baize surface was echoed by a dark green velvet couch and two deep winged armchairs, a walnut coffee table with fluted legs squatting between them. A Persian carpet in burgundy tones spruced up the herringbone parquet floor.
Lucien did not ask what the place was – by now he was used to their cut-outs and safe-houses, the infrastructure of espionage.
Hayes indicated the couch. ‘Sit.’
Lucien did so, perching on its edge with his hands clasped lightly in his lap. He must have looked penitent. He was trying not to panic, but he felt warm and was almost certain his brow was shiny.
Vauthier and Hayes took the chairs facing him.
Hayes said, ‘I’m sure you must have some inkling as to why you’re here.’
‘I’d prefer not to make any badly informed guesses, sir.’ A hint of his old spirit there – but heavily diluted.
Vauthier said, ‘How loyal are you to Major Maddox?’
Here it was at last. ‘It’s not so much a question of loyalty to Major Maddox, mon Lieutenant. More loyalty to England. And France too, of course.’
Vauthier’s tone dripped with irony. ‘And yet you were spying on us for him.’
‘With respect, that’s not how I saw it. Major Maddox told me the Free French might have been compromised by those who were…sympathetic to the other side. He asked me to help him find out if that was so. Later, of course, we collaborated in a more open fashion.’
Hayes said: ‘You’re being followed. Your former billet was being watched. Quite a lot of trouble to go to for one young Frenchman. You must have some idea what it’s all about.’
Lucien hesitated. He still wasn’t sure who to trust – how much he could tell these people. His reply was careful. ‘I haven’t quite put the pieces together yet, sir. But it seems to have something to do with the death of a friend of mine, Georges Chenard.’
Hayes nodded. ‘Peripherally, at least. I believe I can fill in the rest of the picture. But first, I’m going to show you something.’
Hayes crossed to the desk and picked up the telephone. He dialled a number. ‘Thorn? How soon can your men be ready?’ He listened. ‘All right – wait until I get there.’
He hung up and looked at them both.
>
‘I’m afraid we need to move again. Cortel, I know you must be wondering what the devil’s going on, but sometimes actions speak louder than words.’ He paused. ‘You’re carrying a gun, aren’t you? Not very well concealed, I might add. Cantello give it to you?’
Lucien nodded.
‘Bring it.’
A row of terraced houses in Camden Town. Grey brick with two short steps up to each door. It felt like the suburbs to him, calm and rain-swept in the late morning murk. The Wolseley rolled to a halt behind a dark green Bedford van with the words Hanning Electricals in a gilded arc on the back doors.
Hayes got out and crossed to the front passenger side of the van. After a brief consultation with the person inside, he moved to the rear and slapped his palm twice on the doors. They opened, and four men in British army uniforms spilled out. A man in an overall and cap emerged from the front of the van. Drawing level with the soldiers, he made a series of quick authoritative gestures. He was tall, gaunt and hollow-cheeked: this must be the mysterious Thorn. Lucien never discovered whether the name was genuine or a codename.
Everyone was armed.
‘On y va,’ said Vauthier, beside him. The Frenchman also had a pistol in his fist.
Lucien’s heart began beating triple time. He drew his own gun and followed Vauthier into the drizzle.
Their destination was a few paces down from the van. A black-painted door, thick curtains drawn behind the windows. As they approached he saw that the burliest of the soldiers held a heavy cylinder of metal – roughly the length of a baguette – by handles front and rear. The soldier slammed it into the door next to the lock – crash! – and then once again. Lucien imagined net curtains twitching down the street. What would the neighbours think? On the other hand, what could you expect? There was a war on, after all!
With the third smash the door gave way and the soldiers were through.
Thorn was next. Lucien had expected Hayes to stay out of the action, but not a bit of it: the rotund little man was hot on the heels of the raiding party, an automatic in his hand. Vauthier was close behind him and Lucien took up the rear.
