Princess Elizabeth's Spy

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  In the back of the van, Lilibet lay with her hands and feet bound. She’d seen the lights from the front window and felt the van slow and then stop. She’d seen Audrey pass Poulter his gun. She heard Poulter’s side of the conversation with the officer, for they had to be police officers. She’d also heard the door open and saw them both getting out of the van. She’d been afraid, too afraid to think, but now that was passing. She was still afraid, of course, but she was starting to get angry, too. How dare they! And Audrey! Cook’s husband’s cousin! They thought they were helping a poor French girl get out of occupied France, when the whole time she was plotting against them. Lilibet felt not only angry but betrayed.

  After seeing them shoot the Coldstream Guard, Lilibet had no doubts about what they were capable of. She had to warn the officers. But how?

  “Help!” she wanted to call, but no one would hear her.

  In the dim light, she rolled over on her back and started yelling “Help!” with all of her might.

  Before the officers could react to the banging from the back of the van, they were dead.

  While Poulter grabbed the men and dragged them, one by one, to the side of the road, Audrey went to the back of the van and opened up the rear doors.

  “You little bitch,” she hissed at Lilibet, then slapped her hard across the face. “Thanks to you, they’re dead.”

  Lilibet recoiled at the pain but wouldn’t allow herself to cry. She’d bitten her lip and tasted blood. They were dead? She was responsible for their deaths? Poulter had pulled the trigger, but if she’d only kept still …

  “Don’t even think of pulling a stunt like that again! Unless you’d like to change this little scenario from kidnapping to murder. I, for one, would be more than happy to oblige.” Then she slammed the doors shut.

  In the darkness, the Princess realized she had to behave, that she couldn’t risk any more deaths of innocent civilians. She would have to see this through, on her own. She blinked away tears and set her mouth. She would wait for an opportunity and then use it. Yes, that was what she would do. They wouldn’t get away with this.

  As Audrey climbed back into the front passenger seat of the van, shaking out her hand, still burning from the slap, Poulter consulted the map. “We’re not far now.”

  Finally, Audrey, Poulter, and Lilibet reached Mossley by Sea. The tiny white cottage appeared in light from the dim headlamps. And Audrey was relieved to see a man standing in the drive with a kerosene lantern, directing them in.

  The man was Gregory Strathcliffe.

  Gregory, holding the lantern as well as his nearly empty flask, led them inside the cottage. The interior was cold, with just a few plain furnishings. He took off his hat and unbuttoned his mackintosh. David was lying, passed out again, on the stained sofa. Audrey was behind the Princess Elizabeth, whose feet had been untied to walk, although her wrists were bound. Every few moments, she prodded the Princess in the small of her back.

  “Christopher Boothby, you already know Mademoiselle Audrey Moreau and Mr. George Poulter.” Gregory gestured grandly, as though they were at sherry hour. “And, of course, Her Royal Highness, the Princess Elizabeth.” He gave a sardonic bow. He pointed to David’s still form. “David Greene.” He walked to the window and peeked out. “The BBC’s been airing reports about a shoot-out at Windsor Castle. I don’t suppose that has anything to do with you two?”

  “What’re the reports saying?” Poulter asked.

  “Nothing about the attempt on the King. Just that you killed one guard and wounded another. Oh, yes, gave your names, your descriptions—everything. Mounted a nationwide search. By dawn, the entire country will be out in force to look for you.”

  “Well, then it’s a good thing we’ll be in France,” Audrey said.

  Gregory, swaying slightly under the influence of all the alcohol, took down a radio from the cupboard. He placed it on the wooden kitchen table and switched it on. Static hissed from it. He took out his pocket watch and checked it again.

  “It’s almost two,” he said. “The U-boat should be waiting just off the coast. We’ll let them know we’re here and then set out. They’re going to be ten miles due east of Mossley and wait for us until six a.m. If we don’t make it, they’ll head back out to sea and try again in three days.”

  “We’ll make it,” Poulter said, as Gregory sat down and began keying Morse code into the radio, alerting the U-boat that they were on their way.

  “How are we going to meet the sub?” Audrey asked. “All the ships and boats have been confiscated since Dunkirk.”

  “We have a small fishing skiff hidden in the barn,” Boothby answered. “We’ll use that to meet the submarine.”

  “In this weather?” Poulter said. “Don’t you think that’s a bit dangerous?”

  Gregory narrowed his eyes. His escape from the RAF, from Britain, from all of his problems, was in his reach—he wasn’t about to let the chance slip away. “Do we have another option?”

  Beeston Regis was a village just in Norfolk, near the coast of the North Sea. Roman in origin, it was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Besetune. Now, it was just a small village like so many others. The ruins of St. Mary’s Priory drew a few tourists before the war, but other than that, it was quiet, with one main street, boasting one bank, one grocery, one pharmacy, one barber shop, and one beauty parlor.

  Mary Manley, a young slim girl of just eighteen, was making her way from the house she shared with her mother, father, and five sisters just outside of town, up the hill to Beeston Bump. She was going to work, as a radio operator at the Y-station. Beeston Bump was one of the many Y-stations in a network of Signals Intelligence collection sites. These stations collected material to be passed to the War Office’s Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley.

  It was a damp, dark evening and the higher she climbed, the stronger the icy wind blew. It smelled of salt water and seaweed. Cold and wet, Mary was grateful to reach the concrete bunker and go inside. Once past the entrance, she took off her coat, hat, and heavy wool mittens and put them in her cubby. She flashed her badge to the guard on duty, Lenny Doyle, even though they had known each other since they had been toddlers and he’d stuck chewing gum in her long, honey-colored hair and she’d had to get it cut out. She hated him from then on and got in the habit of avoiding him. But now they worked together. He scrutinized her photograph on her card.

  “Come on, Lenny,” she said, “it’s the same as yesterday and the same as the day before that. And it’ll be the same tomorrow.”

  “Just doing my job, Mary. Just doing my job.” He handed it back to her.

  “Yes, I feel so much safer with you here.”

  She marched into the radio room, the rubber soles of her shoes squeaking on the concrete, and slid into her seat between two other women before Mr. Leaper could notice she was late.

  It was dim in the room, and damp, the smell of wet concrete pronounced. In front of her, the dials of her RCA AR-77 communications receiver glowed. She slipped on her heavy black headphones and listened.

  Her job was to eavesdrop on Morse code that German senders were tapping out throughout Europe. She turned her receiver to “her” band of frequencies and listened in.

  The German Morse code senders were fast, especially the professionals at BdU, the Kriegsmarine headquarters. However, they each had their own fist. They could recognize them as easily as seeing a familiar face across a room.

  This evening, however, Mary heard an unfamiliar fist.

  Instead of the typical burst of fast-paced typing, this transmission was slow, with awkward pauses, indicating uncertainty and unfamiliarity with the transmitter.

  Still, she recorded the transmission on an oscillograph, creating a radio “fingerprint,” called a Tina, and then transcribed the Morse code that had been sent.

  After the tentative sender had finished, there was a rapid-fire burst of code as response from whoever received it. He was a radio operator on one of the Nazi U-boats, one that w
as very close to the coast.

  They went back and forth a few times, the amateur and the Nazi, and then the channel went ominously silent.

  Mary felt the hairs on the back of her neck raise. She went to the oscillograph and collected the printout. Usually she just put it in a metal basket to be collected at the end of her shift, bundled up with the rest of the communiqués, and sent on by motorcycle courier to Bletchley Park.

  Still …

  She got down a Morse code book from a shelf and began to decode.

  “Miss Manley!” called Martin Leaper from across the room. He was a narrow middle-aged man with a narrow pencil mustache, and the station’s overseer. The memo Frain had dispatched to all the Y-stations by motorcycle courier was lying on his desk, unread.

  Mary didn’t look up from her translating. “Sir,” she said, “you’re going to want to look at this.”

  “Yes, Miss Manley?” he said, pursing his lips and walking over.

  “Sir, someone here, in England, just signaled to a U-boat.”

  “What?”

  “It could be a spy!” she ventured. “A spy signaling a U-boat for a pickup!”

  “Control yourself, Miss Manley,” Mr. Leaper admonished, shaking his head as he took the papers away from her. “I’m afraid you’ve seen far too many movies.”

  In the cottage, Audrey finished tying Princess Elizabeth to a ladder-back chair. She took some moldy hard bread from the cupboard and stuffed it in the Princess’s mouth, securing it tightly with a tea towel around her head. If it were up to her, she would have killed the Princess—for keeping her alive was a bigger risk. Still, she was following the orders of Commandant Hess. And from what Commandant Graf had told her, one didn’t question Hess’s orders.

  Lilibet kept very still, but her blue eyes glittered with defiance as Audrey went about her work. “I want you to be a good little girl,” Audrey said as she gave the knot at the back of Elizabeth’s head a final tightening. “Or I’ll kill you myself.” She smiled and came over to face Lilibet, her breath smelling sweet, like violet chewing gum. “And I know how to make it look like an accident.”

  You just wait, Lilibet thought. This isn’t over yet, you know.

  In the control room of U-246, First Officer Horst Riesch approached Captain Vogt. “Sir, our friends in Britain have given us word. They’re ready,” Horst said.

  “Good, good,” said Vogt. “What’s the weather?”

  “Clear now, sir, but the wind’s picking up, seventy kilometers per hour.”

  “Christ,” Vogt said, rubbing his stubble-covered chin—water was too precious in a submarine to waste on shaving. “They’re probably coming in a dinghy, for all we know. Still, can’t be helped. I’ll set a course for the rendezvous point and have the men prepare to surface. You organize a reception party. Also, Horst told me they’ll have two prisoners with them.”

  “Yes, Herr Vogt,” Riesch said, saluting. Then he issued a long string of commands to the crew. Moments later, U-246, like the mythical kraken, was making its way through the black waters of the North Sea, up to the rendezvous point, ten miles off the coast of Mossley.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  A fierce wind was blowing as Gregory, Poulter, and Boothby went to the barn to uncover the small boat they’d hidden away, a twenty-foot gasoline engine–powered fish tug, with a V bottom. The three men strained and grunted as they pushed it over the rocks and grasses until they reached the stone-strewn beach.

  Gregory looked out over the rough sea. “Not the best night for a sail, eh, lads?”

  “It’s that or hide out for another three days, for another pickup,” Boothby said. “I’d rather take my chances on the water.”

  “No, it’s now or never,” Gregory said, staggering slightly in the wind. “I’ll stay here with the boat. You two go back and help Audrey with the prisoners.”

  Maggie and Hugh pulled up to Mossley by Sea’s two piers, with only a few fishing boats rocking wildly in the black water. The local police were there. Maggie got out of the car, heading into the stiff wind. Hugh grabbed the flashlight and gun from the glove compartment, slipping the gun in the back of his waistband under his coat, then followed her.

  “These look like locals,” Hugh shouted into the wind. “So, where’s the cavalry?”

  “I’m sure they’re coming,” Maggie shouted back. But she was worried. She thought that by now the Army would have soldiers assembled, Navy ships offshore, RAF planes overhead. Where were they?

  As a police officer in a sou’wester waved them over, Hugh took out his MI-5 identification card. “Agents Thompson and Hope here,” he shouted, his words nearly blown away by the wind. “What have you got?”

  “We’re on it, sir. If they’re here, we’ll find ’em.” He looked at them, still in their light clothing. “Why don’t you go back to the station, have a nice cup o’ tea? Me and my boys’ll take care of things here.” He walked off to confer with his men.

  Hugh and Maggie looked at each other in the darkness. They were not reassured. “There are police all over—they won’t get these boats,” Hugh said, scanning the dock.

  Maggie was thinking. Gregory and his crew were too smart to try to use a boat from the dock. “But what if they’re not using a boat from here? It’s possible they have their own, hidden away. They could carry it down to the shore and then launch from there.”

  “In this weather?” Hugh asked. “Couldn’t be a very large boat, then.”

  “They might not have any other option. And they just might be desperate enough to try it. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

  “So we have two choices. Wait at the station, or—”

  Maggie was already off, leaning into the wind as she made her way to the beach.

  “—or we look for them ourselves,” Hugh finished. “Right, then. Off we go.”

  They picked their way over stones and pebbles on the shore in the semidarkness. The white-tipped waves were crashing in, creating a low roar. The light from Hugh’s flashlight was ineffective against the crushing darkness. Only a waning moon overhead provided any useful light.

  “There!” Maggie shouted, over the din of the waves. She pointed to a small shack on the beach.

  The shack was made of planks and covered in tar paper. The edges of the door were illuminated. Maggie and Hugh approached cautiously. He held the gun as Maggie rapped at the door. There was no answer. She pushed at the door. It swung open easily.

  The stench hit them first—the overwhelming odor of stale smoke, sweat, and alcohol. The room was bare, except for a bulb and an old, stained mattress in the corner. On the mattress, a man was lying on his back, snoring loudly, a ratty wool blanket pulled over his legs and a half-empty bottle of gin clutched to his chest.

  Trying not to inhale through her nose, Maggie went over to him. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, kneeling down and giving him a firm shake. “Sir?”

  “Wha—?” he said, opening his eyes. He was unshaven and unkempt, with thinning gray hair and a weather-beaten face. His plaid flannel shirt had yellow stains under the arms.

  “We’re looking for some people, sir,” Hugh began. “Not from around here. They might be in a cottage or shack close to the beach? Have you seen anyone?”

  “Go ’way. Wanna sleep.”

  “Sir!” Maggie said. Which was not at all the word she wanted to use.

  No response.

  No, no, no—we’ve come too far to be stymied by a drunk. She wanted to slap him, but instead grabbed the gin bottle from his lax hands. “I will take this gin and pour it all over the floor if you don’t answer our questions.”

  “Bitch!” he slurred, trying to reach for the bottle with dirty hands with broken fingernails.

  Maggie tipped the bottle and let a few drops of liquid trickle out. She had to admit that while it was technically illegal to dispose of his property, it was probably the fastest way to get him to talk. It was also grimly satisfying.

  “Al’ righ’,” he said, propping hi
mself up on his elbows. “Give i’ back!”

  “Not until you tell us what you know.” Maggie held on to the bottle and kept it out of reach.

  “There’s a girl. Pretty,” he slurred. “Pretty. French. Pretty French girl.”

  Maggie started. “Audrey?” she said to Hugh, who nodded.

  “Where?” Hugh said. “Where have you seen her?”

  “Pretty girl,” he repeated. He tried to sit up and then dropped back down. “Comes to the cottage sometimes.”

  “What cottage?” Maggie asked. “Where is it?”

  “Downna beach,” he said, pointing, then turning back over. “Givver a kiss for me.…” he managed before beginning to snore again.

  Maggie set the bottle down as she and Hugh looked at each other. It could be any French girl. Or it could be Audrey. “Come on,” she said at the door, bracing to run through cold wind again. “Let’s go ‘downna beach’!”

  A new shift had just started at the Submarine Tracking Room. “Sir,” a young officer said to Donald Kirk, sitting behind his desk in his office. Kirk was looking over various memos. One was an alert, issued from the War Office, saying a man and a woman, plus a kidnapped girl, were on the run and might be trying to leave the country by boat. The next was a memo from Beeston Regis Y-station, saying that they had intercepted a radio communiqué between a location somewhere near shore and a Nazi U-boat. Martin Leaper, head of the Y-station, said that the transmission on the British side came from somewhere near Grimsby. The man had no idea what he’d stumbled on.

  The two memos in hand, he rose, and with the help of his silver-tipped cane, made his way to the main room and the North Atlantic map table. The junior officers were repositioning various pushpins to reflect recent movement.

  Kirk stared down at U-246. It hadn’t seemed to have moved much. He jabbed the point of his cane at it. “U-two-forty-six!” he called to the heavyset middle-aged man moving the pins.