Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  She rearranged some books on the low wooden table between us. She looked straight at me. Her gaze was steady. “Go on.”

  “Madeleine was scheduled to make contact with a local Resistance circuit in a certain part of France. At least—she was if she felt that circuit was safe. Some of our circuits, as you may have read, were penetrated by the Germans.

  “If she did contact the circuit and made a mistake…if she judged the circuit hadn’t been penetrated when in fact it had…then most likely she would have been captured. However, if she decided the circuit wasn’t safe, then she had two choices. She could either remain in France, until the Germans eventually started to withdraw, then join the Resistance in a rebellion, or she could make contact with one of the ratlines—the escape routes—and eventually be ferried safely home. Moving along a ratline can take anything up to three or four months depending on the exact route and the German presence in the areas which the lines pass through. And that’s provided she didn’t get injured, or ill. Once you are in a ratline there is no communication, because communication is a weak point and we need the ratlines very badly.”

  She nodded. “It’s been close to three months now since D-Day. And didn’t I read that the Germans have begun their withdrawal?”

  “Yes, but we haven’t given up hope. And Madeleine is not the only one who hasn’t been in touch—thirteen others are missing.” I didn’t intend to mention that all our agents were equipped with suicide pills.

  She closed her eyes again, and then opened them. I still couldn’t read her mood. She must be anxious but…maybe she could sit on her feelings.

  “What is it you want from me?”

  “I want you to tell me about Madeleine and her time in France. What were her habits? In the chaos of invasion, what might she have done, where might she have gone? If she was injured, how would she have reacted? If you were me, and had to go looking for her, where would you look, where would you start?”

  She leaned forward, crushed out the remains of her cigarette in the ashtray, and stood up.

  “I think this calls for a drink, yes? Whisky suit you?”

  I nodded. “Perfect.”

  “I’ll put Wellington in the garden. Then we can concentrate.”

  She picked up the dog and went through into another room. I heard a door open and close as she let the spaniel outside. Then there was the sound of a tap running. Did she find comfort in action? She came back with a tray, a cut-glass decanter of whisky, two glasses, and a jug of water.

  She sat down again and poured the whiskies.

  “Water?”

  “Yes, please. About half and half.”

  We raised our glasses to one another and for a moment enjoyed what the whisky had to offer.

  “I can think of two things, Colonel Hammond; two places she might go, if she got the chance. One is the Convent of St. Hilaire in the northern part of the Limoges region. Madeleine was never going to be a nun, but she went to school there, and she loved it and made some good friends. Some of them will have become nuns, and Madeleine would know she would receive sanctuary there and they would hide her if it were necessary. She mentioned it to me.”

  She sipped her whisky and a thought struck her. “How did she move around? Did she have a car?”

  I shook my head. “A bicycle.”

  “And where was she dropped—I take it she was parachuted in?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I am not allowed to tell you where.”

  She just looked at me, tapping her teeth with her whisky glass.

  “Le Gâvre,” I whispered. “Now forget it, please.”

  Ever so slightly, she smiled. “That’s not so far from St. Hilaire. Bicyclable in a day or two, I should say.”

  “You said two things.”

  She nodded.

  “Did she tell you about her marriage?”

  “To Philippe, you mean? Yes, she did. I found it a weird story—I couldn’t quite believe it, but I understand he was killed, carrying out Resistance work.”

  “Yes, he was. It was tragic but I am sure Madeleine, happy as she might be with you, might want to visit his family home, his grave even—if there is one.”

  She pulled at the sleeves of her shirt.

  “Madeleine was eighteen when she fell in love with Philippe. It was her first time and she was eighteen. You’re never…In my experience one is never quite in love again like you are the first time, in your teenage years, when you are so innocent. Madeleine has what you might call ‘unfinished business’ over Philippe, so she may well have risked a lot to go and wind it up.”

  “She had the rest of her life to wind it up.”

  Mrs. Dirac shrugged. “Yes, of course. But that’s not how people think, is it? She was there, or near there. That’s all it would have taken. Believe me, I know my daughter.”

  I let a long silence go by, sipping my whisky. I wasn’t sure I bought all of what Mrs. Dirac said. The Madeleine I knew was anything but sentimental, and from what she’d told me, her affair and marriage to Philippe had damped down as quickly as it had caught fire.

  But I couldn’t afford to ignore her advice. I couldn’t remember exactly where Madeleine had met Philippe—I mean the town from where they explored the caves and where they got married. But I did remember it was on the west side of France, south from Le Gâvre and St. Nazaire. I suppose she might just have thought it worthwhile to return to that part of her past, as her mother said. It was something to bear in mind.

  I drained my whisky glass and looked at my watch. It wasn’t yet five thirty.

  “If I walk round to the taxi office, how likely am I to get someone to take me to King’s Lynn?”

  She pressed her lips together. “I can’t say, but it’s a short walk to the office. What time is your train?”

  “The last one’s at seven thirteen.”

  “You should do it easily, but if you can’t get a taxi you can stay here if you wish.”

  “Thank you. But I took the precaution of booking a room at the pub. I couldn’t be certain when you would be home.”

  She nodded. “Well, let’s walk to the taxi office together. They know me so they might put themselves out when they wouldn’t for a stranger. It was Jeannie Slater from the taxi firm who rang Madeleine to say I was ill on the day we were supposed to have lunch.”

  As it happened, there was no problem getting a taxi, and I made the train at King’s Lynn easily enough.

  As I was preparing to leave Mrs. Dirac’s front room, I admired the photographs on her mantelpiece.

  “Was Madeleine a tomboy? She looks like one.”

  “Oh yes. She could run faster than most boys her age, she was quite a clever fighter, and she was even admitted to a boys’ gang.” She smiled. “That was unheard of where we lived.”

  I buttoned up my coat. I could tell from the noise whistling down the chimney that the wind was as strong as ever. “And she gets on famously with dogs, too.” I told Mrs. D. about the love affair between Madeleine and Zola.

  “That’s my daughter,” she said as I finished. “She had a dog of her own after we moved here from France, but it drowned when it got swept out to sea in a storm.”

  “And who’s that?” I said as nonchalantly as I could, nodding at the photo on the mantelpiece.

  “Philippe, of course.”

  When I said nothing, she went on, “I didn’t really know him, their relationship was so short, but he was my son-in-law and a French Resistance hero. And he nearly gave me a grandchild.”

  I looked at her sharply. “Nearly?”

  She nodded. “Didn’t Madeleine tell you? When she came home from France with me, after our few days in Louzac, and after their secret marriage, she was pregnant—”

  “What!”

  “Yes. And when her dog was swept overboard, she jumped in, to try to save it. But she couldn’t…and on top of everything, in the exertion she lost the baby.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Then I did. “She t
old me about Rolfe, her German shepherd who howled at the moon. That was in Louzac, right?”

  She nodded. “He had to be put down. But we got another when we came here.”

  Again, I didn’t know what to say. This was all news to me.

  “I’m not sure I should have told you,” Mrs. Dirac said. “She never talked about it herself. When Philippe was smuggled to England in 1940 they spent a day or so together in Dover—”

  “Yes, she told me that.”

  Mrs. Dirac took her house keys from off the mantelpiece. “She explained to Philippe what had happened and they tried hard, while he was in Dover, to make a baby all over again. But that time it didn’t work. She knew Philippe might get killed and she wanted…she wanted something of his to live on, should that happen. When we heard that he had been killed…it was devastating.”

  I was standing by the piano. I picked up the top sheet of music and opened it. As I did so, a photograph fell out and landed on the floor. I stooped and picked it up. I showed it to Mrs. Dirac.

  “That’s Madeleine and me in Berlin,” she said, taking the photo from me.

  “When was that?”

  “Nineteen thirty-six, I think.” She pointed to the sheet music. “That is her favourite Schubert song. Madeleine has a good singing voice and at school she won a prize, a holiday to a place that enabled you to expand your interest in your winning subject. She chose Berlin, to hear some Schubert sung professionally. I went with her, paying for myself, of course.”

  I replaced the sheet music on the piano.

  “Madeleine speaks German?”

  “No! Not really. She had to learn the German words of the Schubert songs, so she could sing them with the appropriate feeling, but that was all. She can’t speak proper German.”

  Mrs. Dirac walked past me, opened the front door, and turned back. “We were talking about Philippe’s death. I told her that the grief would pass and that she would meet someone else and that when she did she mustn’t be always comparing him to Philippe. I hope she doesn’t do that with you.”

  “I…I’ve never been aware of it. We seemed to have—we do have—a straightforward, clean relationship.” I smiled. “And as I say, she seems to love my dog as much as I do. The three of us were—are—content.”

  “Then find her, Colonel Hammond. Find her, and give me the grandchild I never had.”

  —

  I EASILY GOT THE TRAIN. The 7:13 from King’s Lynn was very crowded and got into King’s Cross rather late. I flopped into bed with a drink and that day’s newspapers, as was now my routine. Zola was in bed alongside me. I still valued his warmth and the other signs of life that he brought with him—the sound of his panting, his doggy smell, the mild thud of his tail when he wagged it. He now accepted his place on the bed as his natural right. This would be my last night with him, for a while at least.

  Of course, the whole Blakeney encounter had been turning over in my mind. Most of all, of course, I didn’t know what to make of the fact that Madeleine had never mentioned her pregnancy. Or her interest in Schubert lieder. Was that odd? Or was I being too—what was the word?—inquisitive? paranoid? She had never mentioned her trip to Berlin either—was that odd?

  I don’t know what I would have made of these thoughts and ruminations had a small item in that day’s newspaper not caught my eye. It was a short report on page 6 of The Times to the effect that the day before a man had been arrested on suspicion of being a German spy, in Cromer.

  I read that article twice, three times. A man had been arrested in Cromer, on suspicion of being a German spy, because, when asked the way to Sheringham, the very next village, by an off-duty RAF pilot, on leave from a nearby base, he had appeared nonplussed. Since the exclusion zone had been in force for months or even years by then, and only locals and accredited military personnel were allowed in Cromer, for a local not to know where Sheringham was…It was unthinkable. The police were called, and it was found that his identification papers were fake.

  And, of course, that was the day before Mrs. Dirac had been in Cromer.

  According to what she had told me, she had been fitting someone’s curtains, but…that could just have been flimflam. Armed with the new information that Mrs. Dirac and Madeleine had been in Berlin in 1936, and that Madeleine had kept quiet about her taste for Schubert, on top of which Mrs. Dirac hadn’t seemed especially anxious about the fate of her daughter, was this a…a new possibility? Was a new understanding of Madeleine coming into view? Had Mrs. Dirac been in Cromer to…to do what exactly? To see what she could find out about the arrested man? To report back to…to whom? If she had been in Cromer to make a rendezvous, would she have told me that’s where she had been?

  I didn’t want to follow that line of thought, but I knew I had no choice. The thoughts wouldn’t go away all by themselves.

  I checked in the other papers. Yes, they all had the same story, about the arrest of a German spy in Cromer, though with no more details.

  But there could be no doubt about the fact of the arrest and its reason.

  To see more clearly I put out the light. I reached over to the bedside table and gripped what was left of my whisky. It was going to be a long night.

  I searched my memory. For a few moments my mind was vague, blank, but then I suddenly started to piece together what might, at some point, become a picture.

  I recalled that, at Ardlossan, when we had discussed using poetry as the basis of our fall-back codes, Madeleine had mentioned using Goethe. Was that odd, or too obvious if she was a…not what she seemed?

  Then there was the fact that she kept lapsing into English, rather than keeping to French as recruits were meant to do. Did that mean anything? Was it a sign that language was her weak point?

  Was I making sense?

  Zola scratched himself, vigorously. I scolded him and he stopped.

  Had Madeleine shown an unusual interest in the German Schwimmweste we had happened across on the beach at Ardlossan? I had thought nothing of it at the time; her curiosity seemed only normal, but was it? Had it worried her unduly, that her fate might be much the same? Had it made her realise how exposed she was?

  I heard an all-night bus pull away from the stop on the corner of Lisson Grove.

  Madeleine had asked me many times about the date and place of the invasion. Was that natural curiosity, or something more? I hadn’t, until now, felt that she had been unduly inquisitive, but then, if she was more than she seemed, she would be trained in dissimulation. I could read little into her behaviour on that score.

  Or from her inquiries into SC2, what it was, whether there was an SC1. She had asked more questions than any of the other recruits, but that might only mean the rest were not unduly curious. She had shown more interest than any of the others but…I could conclude nothing concrete from her behaviour.

  There was the fact that she was Protestant, not Catholic. I wasn’t too clued up on my French history, but there was, I knew, a Protestant tradition in France—the Huguenots—so it was entirely possible she was exactly what she said she was.

  I swallowed some whisky.

  On the other hand, if there was more to her than I knew, if she had stronger German links than she had let on, she might find it safer to keep to the faith she was raised in than to pretend to be Catholic.

  I listened to the night. It was becoming a habit.

  She didn’t drive, or so she said. Could I read anything into that? Her mother had asked how she moved around France. Did that imply Madeleine could drive?

  Early on she had said that, sooner or later, she got on everybody’s wrong side. In the land of paranoia into which I was sinking, even that could be made to seem suspicious.

  She had impersonated Hitler, or rather Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler, when we had been inspecting German officers’ uniforms, and she had spoken German—but a very rudimentary nonsense German that we all understood. She had given Katrine and Ivan a French translation of a German classic. It had been a French translation, y
es, but she had known that—what was his name?—Friedrich Schiller—was a respected playwright. Was there anything in that?

  Was there anything in her obsession with the Riefenstahl woman? Would a real German spy admit to such an obsession? Or was it bluff and double bluff?

  Was there anything in the fact that her mother had cancelled lunch in London? Did they not want me to see them together, just in case I…what?

  Were they a team? That’s what the Cromer business suggested, if it suggested anything. A mother-and-daughter team—if they were mother and daughter, of course. The lack of physical resemblance between them didn’t confirm anything, but it didn’t support their story either. The photos on the mantelpiece could have been a deliberate decoy.

  Where was I going with all this?

  Then there was, of course, Madeleine’s last message. Was it genuine? Had she really been cut off in mid-transmission, and been forced to escape? Or was that more dissimulation, a clever gambit to cover her tracks as she went back to her masters in Paris or Berlin?

  I drank more whisky.

  How had her mother behaved when I told her that her daughter was missing? She had been distraught, sort of, but had she been very upset?

  I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think so.

  So what did she know?

  And Madeleine hadn’t told her “mother” about me…Was that because I meant so little to her, was just one part of her plan, her trap, her deception? Is that why she had given me Erich’s cigarette case—because it meant nothing to her?

  I didn’t know what to think.

  Then there was Philippe. Had he ever existed, or was he just a concoction of Madeleine and her mother, to root them artificially in a specific part of France, and to add to their credibility?

  The whisky was finished. The darkness was deep. It had begun to rain—the swish of car tyres on the surface of St. John’s Wood Road told me as much, as did the spattering sound on the windows. I found that vaguely comforting, as I always did when it rained at night. I don’t know why.

  What I did know—and I am not proud of saying this—was that I had to avoid making up my mind, at least for the time being.