by Thomas Wood
If that was the case, I began to have the ludicrous thought over who would run the butchers, and who would collect the inevitable deliveries for the coming days, if there was no one in the shop to put them in the cold room.
I pulled my mind into check and began to think about the serious implications that Monsieur Blume’s death would have on me and my situation. Joseph had been the only one to have known that I was in that butcher’s shop. There was no way, at that time of the morning and in such a short space of time that he would have been able to tell someone else in the resistance, who then went to the Germans. It simply had to be Joseph.
In my mind, I had all the evidence that I needed to be able to prosecute him as my intended target. But I knew that he would be in hiding now, at least from me anyway, and to be able to bring him down I would need to lay some kind of trap.
It would need to be a trap that excited him, one that lured him in, offering a prize so sought after by a man such as him that he simply wouldn’t have been able to resist what was on the table. It hadn’t taken me too long to come up with something, but hours of mulling it over and straightening things out had convinced me that this was the best chance that I had of nabbing my traitor.
It would be an incredibly risky move, so audacious that it almost seemed like it would be impossible to pull off, which was good, as it meant that hopefully Joseph would think that he would never fall into the trap. There was a fair chance however that it could end up killing far more people than it could ever potentially save, but that was a risk that I was fully prepared to take, regardless of who it killed. My conscience would be clear, it would be Joseph who would be to blame, he would have their lives on his mind for the rest of his life.
The only issue with the plan that I had however, was that it wasn’t a one-man job. There was going to be several angles of attack which meant that my one-man band, that I deemed to be so successful, was going to have to quickly adapt into the duo that would hopefully make this a success. In short, I needed someone who would help.
It was my helper, my partner, that I found myself still waiting for as darkness descended over the river, the newspaper boy packing up a while before to avoid the inevitable chill of the night.
I moved from one bench, that was exposed to the elements as a misty rain began to fall, to another, that was tucked under one of the archways of the red brick bridge that spanned the width of the river, where bicycles and people had made their way across all afternoon.
It wasn’t for another couple of hours that I started to get nervous, especially as the blackout was in full force and I was in a perfect darkness, the only noise that accompanied me was the sound of the river, gently hitting the sides of the bank from time to time.
My head swayed from left to right, like a tennis umpire officiating over the longest continuous rally known to man, looking for any signs of movement, friendly and un-friendly, in the hope that before too long I would be out of there.
It was then that I began to make out a low rumbling, one that bounced off the walls as it sped through the archways further down the waterway. There was nowhere that I could reasonably go to hide, save for taking a dip in the freezing water, so I prepared myself to meet with whoever, whatever, was heading in my direction.
As the noise came closer, I realised that the rumble was that of a bicycle tyre, haring its way closer and closer to my ears, avoiding the puddles and holes that littered the path. As I imagined the pair of legs pumping faster and faster, trying to get to, or away, from someone, I wrapped my hand around the grip of the pistol that was hiding under my spread-out newspaper.
The weight of it felt good in my hand, comforting me to a degree, but also reminding me of how tired I was, as I struggled to raise it much further than an inch without having a burning sensation in my arm.
The noise grew even louder as I moved my finger over to the trigger, and my eyes began straining to see a figure as it charged towards me on a bicycle.
A silhouette, out of the mist, slowly came into being, growing larger by the second as his pace carried him towards me. He must have seen a strange figure in the darkness too, as I saw him leaning into the basket at the front, presumably going to pull a weapon from within its depths.
I beat him to it, throwing the paper off my lap, simultaneously pulling the top slide back and bringing the pistol up to around head height.
The bike skidded to a halt, before sliding around in the dampness, sending its occupant skidding to the ground as it did so. My arm trembled slightly under the weight of the pistol, especially with the concerted effort that I was exerting to simply try and keep the thing steady.
I looked at the pathetic figure lying on the ground, trapped under the weight of the bicycle, a few fruit and vegetables that had spilled from his basket still rolling around trying to find a decent resting spot. As I lowered the pistol, I began to make out his smile, which I found was returned by me, as I began to chuckle, trying my hardest to suppress bursting out into fits of laughter.
I tucked the pistol back into my trousers and folded up my newspaper, before picking up an apple and taking a loud, satisfying bite.
“Still need a bit of practice, do you?” I said mockingly, as I offered out a sweaty palm to him, helping him to his feet. He carried on laughing himself, wincing slightly as he realised that he had in fact done himself some sort of injury. “It’s good to see you, Jameson,” I said as we pulled each other into a quick embrace and a slap on the back each.
“It’s these French bicycles, they’re definitely different to the British ones.”
“Must be the left-hand drive that’s throwing you off, eh Robert?”
I got another decent sized snort from him, as he began to brush himself off and check himself over.
“All okay?”
“Yeah, just smacked my knee into the concrete. You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” he smirked.
“Didn’t want you to think that life away from that desk of yours was all plain sailing, that’s all.”
“It’s good to see you still in once piece, Alfie. Right then, where do we go from here?”
I began to guide him southwards, down the river as he left his bicycle propped up against the bench, waiting for some lucky French child to find it and claim it for themselves. He made sure that the basket of fruit was tucked away in my haversack though, he wanted some sustenance for our journey.
“Pleasant trip?” I queried quietly as we briskly paced our way further southwards. We were going to stick to the banks of the river as best we could, as it ran right the way towards the little village of Chautillion, which was, until recently, home to Blume’s butchers.
“Yes, thank you. I absolutely love being soaked to the skin and spending hours with those specimens that populate our Royal Navy.” He was mocking them, but also himself, as he so frequently did, acknowledging his privileged upbringing and playing to the stereotype of separating himself from the lower classes.
“But then I spent a fabulous couple of days with my great uncle and aunt, they own a chateau not too far from the coast. Well, they owned it, until the Germans came and requisitioned it. They’re in one of the servant’s outhouses now,” he said, snootily. “It was rather a relief to get out of there.”
I began to laugh at him before trying to piece together some words. “You’re a right toff, you know that? You’re in for a bit of a shock, I can tell you.”
“It was all rather odd, you know I’ve spent the last three days sleeping in a house where, not three hundred yards away, senior German commanders were also sleeping. I reckon I could have shortened the war if I’d gone in and blown it up!”
“Keep your voice down,” I said, double checking that we had no one following us.
“It’s all very different from how it was before the war. Still, it was good to see my extended family again. What’s left of them anyway.”
I went to ask him what he had meant by his last remark but refrained. I didn’t particularly want hi
m becoming animated and excitable as he told me of his family’s history, right up until the German invasion of France eighteen months before. I figured that some of them must have lost their lives in the valiant resistance that had tried to hold out for so long.
As he continued to warble on about how he had loved France as a child, I began to feel bad that I was going to be using him as my bait. He would be my lost soldier, the one that I would dangle in front of Joseph to try and draw him out into the open.
He was nervously still rabbiting on about his family, and how some of them had emigrated after the Great War, which had led to frequent family holidays to the northern coastline of France. It was a comfort to have someone alongside me once again, someone that I knew that I could trust. It was that quality of loyalty and faithfulness that I desired more than anything right now, especially as I was trying to hunt down a man as devilish and treacherous as Joseph.
There hadn’t been too many people left that I thought I could trust, with Jimmy slowly ruling himself out of the running and so I had to go for the man that had seemed like he wanted the same thing as me. To see the traitor eliminated.
Within the suffocating walls of Floor 424, Robert Jameson seemed to be my only friend. He was the only one that I thought I could trust anyway.
11
“What do you make of this whole thing, Robert?” I asked, as we began to settle down in the doorway of the church, excitably looking forward to the prospect of a few hours of sleep before I’d have to take my turn on watch for the rest of the night.
“How do you mean?”
“You know. Jimmy. Geranium. Baudouin. What do you make of it all?”
He shuffled around a little bit, pulling his wool coat, that he had taken from his great uncle, tighter around his shoulders as a defence against the cold.
“Well…I don’t know really. Jimmy was always so coy about it. I do think there is a few things that are a bit iffy with it though.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it’s odd isn’t it? Our prime suspect here just so happens to be one of Jimmy’s best friends from years gone by, and there isn’t a shred of evidence left behind about Jimmy’s involvement with Geranium. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Yeah…I know what you mean. We’ll get to the bottom of it, I’m sure,” I said, pulling my own coat up and over my body a little bit more, as I curled myself up on the wooden bench that protruded from the stone walls of the church. This was a comparative luxury to the bench that I had slept on the night before and wished that I had been in a position to sleep in there last night.
As I put my head down on the hard, wooden surface that would be my pillow for the night, Jameson began to speak again, this time not facing me, but speaking to the gravestones and bodies that were buried in this corner of the graveyard.
“There’s one other thing. I didn’t feel secure telling you in London.”
I sat up, intrigued with what was about to come tumbling from his mouth, as he carefully inspected the pistol that would be helping in our efforts to keep us safe overnight.
“I think that Standartenführer Schröder was wrong. Or, at least, the information that was being fed to him was wrong. He reckoned that the traitor was a British soldier, right? But the communications that we’ve managed to intercept between them suggests that he is a French national. Not a Brit.”
“What makes you think that?”
“He talks about his past, about places that he’s seen in France before and places that he’s lived. There is no suggestion whatsoever that he’s a British citizen.”
“Why didn’t Jimmy mention any of this when I brought it up?”
“I don’t know…” he said, finally turning around to acknowledge me. “That’s the thing about Jimmy, sometimes he has no reason not to tell you something, but it doesn’t mean he will say it.”
“He’ll get someone killed if he carries on like that,” I remarked, harking back to the last time that I was in France and he hadn’t been completely truthful in what he knew about Joseph Baudouin’s past.
“Oh, he has. Plenty of times,” retorted Jameson, “none of them live on his conscience though. He’s inhuman like that.”
I had nothing to respond with, so opted to simply rest my head back down on my wooden pillow, while he turned to face the graveyard once again. I thought about what he had said, about how Jimmy seemed to have no conscience or guilt on his heart. It made me wonder whether his whole relationship with me had been fabricated, and that he intended me to die at some point in the near future. It angered me to think of him like that, not caring about my life, or anyone else’s, but I was slowly interrupted by the exhaustion that was beginning to cloud my mind better than a thick fog ever could.
When morning came I noticed that Jameson was nervous and couldn’t really blame him. What I was asking him to do was so far out of his comfort zone, that I half expected him to flat out refuse but, to his credit, he accepted my proposal. I thought at the time that deep down, he had a point to prove, if not to everyone else, to himself, to show that he was far braver and more capable than everyone seemed to give him credit for.
His family name had practically bought him a commission and, as soon as war had broken out, he was handed a promotion and shipped off to intelligence, as far away as was possible from the impending frontline. It was more out of a desperation from his family, I deduced, that he wasn’t actively involved in the action, not out of a cowardice on his own part, which I had thought when I had first met him.
All in all, Captain Robert Jameson was an incredibly brave man, he just never seemed to get the break that he needed to prove it. But he was now.
“Right, tell me your story once more. Every detail. They will ask for it.”
“I am Colonel Daniel Reader, adjutant to Major General Harold Alexander. During the evacuation we formed a rear-guard to help the others escape the beaches. At the end of the evacuation I went into hiding, helping to coordinate others for an escape, along with local collaborators. Two weeks ago, I received word that the Germans knew that I was living with the local farmer and were about to arrest me. I am here now so that I can get back to Britain.”
He seemed pleased that he had received a triple promotion in one hit, rising from the rank of Captain to Colonel, quite literally overnight. I was sure that his family would be incredibly proud. He played the part exceptionally well, he had the connections back at home and the upbringing to make it seem reasonable, and he had the air of a senior commander as soon as he walked into a room. I just hoped that he wasn’t going to crack at all.
“And?”
“And, I am to drop into conversation that I attended the Royal Naval College with Simon Bowes-Lyon.”
“Who is?”
“He is the nephew of the current queen, Alfie.” He spoke to me indignantly, as if he was pointing out the obvious, but it fitted his new role as a Colonel perfectly. If he was able to drop that slight snippet into the conversation, then there was a chance that, because of his potential connections and propaganda value, Joseph himself would appear, to take the reins in handing him over to the Germans.
That was the hope anyway, but it all hinged on how well Robert was able to play the part when he left.
As he padded off down the stone pathway that led away from the church, I hoped that he bumped into the right people, who would help him, rather than those that would simply point him straight into the direction of the Germans.
He had to go in completely cold turkey, he could have no perceivable prior knowledge about who would help him and who wouldn’t; he was a soldier on the run after all, they didn’t know who to trust in a brand-new village. This bit was all down to luck.
I watched him walk away from the church like a proud parent, but quickly began to buck my ideas up and pack my stuff away ready to move myself. I had my own meeting to take care of.
It hadn’t taken me too long to make my way to the house that I had come to know so well, and I sta
red at its front door with my head to one side, trying to prevent the tears from rolling down my cheeks as I looked at it.
I wondered if I was doing the right thing for myself and whether it would actually be doing anyone any good, if they were to see the man who had led to the death of one of their family members.
It had been at the beginning of the year when I had first met Louis, instantly taking to him and realising that, although he was a quiet and unconfident man, he held the strings to many of the people in the resistance, purely because of his connections to the local commander, Joseph Baudouin.
I was saddened at the thought that he was no longer there, killed in the enfilade of fire that had erupted as he had tried to secure my getaway. The only thing that I was able to take comfort in was that he knew that it was going to happen, and he knew that if I got away, I had promised to take care of his family one day and bring them to England with me.
But nevertheless, even if I went in and told his widow that now, I presumed that it was far too early for her to be near me, let alone helping me. Consequently, I wandered up and down the road a number of times, before I finally plucked up enough courage to knock on the door, and face my fears.
I needed to do this, if not for myself, then for Jameson, who had just willingly gone to try and contact a known traitor to try and lure him into a trap. The least that I could do would be to face a dressing down from a woman, while I tried to see if she had any other contacts that her late husband could trust.
I realised how the tired mind can play cruel tricks on you as soon as the door was opened up to me. Louis stood there, an inquisitive look on his face, as he poked his head around, before he risked opening up his whole body to the potential bullets that could have been waiting for him on the other side.
