by Mara Timon
‘Cast off!’ I ordered, the sound of gunfire and Alex’s footfalls ringing in my ears. ‘Now!’
The old man released the lines as Alex landed on top of me, slamming me into the wood and shielding me from the Germans’ bullets. The skiff bucked once or twice before it turned and caught the tide.
Sea spray kissed my face, and Alex’s body was a comforting weight. My eyes were still trained on the old man. He was short and squat, with a face lined by years in the sea and sun. Armand was right; he sported the longest eyebrows I’d ever seen. They were like a thing alive, an anemone or some other such creature.
On the pier, the grey-haired man stood at the edge, still firing even as we moved out of their range. He pointed to the harbour master’s hut and one of his men ran to it.
One man and one woman: fugitives. Assassins. They saw me pull the gun on the old man; they would think I’d shanghaied the boat and give chase.
‘Alex,’ I said, ‘get off me – I can’t see.’
He remained silent and heavy on my back.
‘Damn it, Alex!’
I pushed back with my good shoulder, and he obligingly rolled on to his back. The man who stood outside the hut argued with the harbour master as we shot forward – one small fishing boat amongst many.
Victory surged through me.
‘We made it, Alex,’ I breathed. ‘You’ll be back in Blighty for the weekend.’
He remained silent. One arm was lightly draped across his chest, and his hazel eyes were closed, his face relaxed. I hoped he hadn’t hit his head again. It seemed like ages, but it had only been a few days since his plane was shot down. I shook him.
‘Wake up, you oaf. Alex, we made it!’
My hand froze on his chest; it was damp, far more so than our last sprint would warrant. I raised it, horrified to find it covered in blood. With the coppery stench came a rising panic.
‘Alex?’
He didn’t reply. He didn’t move.
‘Alex?’ Oh God, no. Oh God, Ohgodohgodohgodohgod. ‘Alex! Open your eyes, you Scottish bastard! Don’t you dare leave me!’
I fumbled for the buttons on his tunic, ripping them from the cloth. The pings of metal on wood was lost in the rush of the sea; the denial roaring in my mind.
His shirt was stained crimson but his face was serene in the evening’s light. The boat bucked against a wave and I looked up at the old man. Saw the pity in his eyes.
I stretched out alongside Alex, resting my head for the last time on his chest.
‘My name . . .’ The words were soft, forced through the lump in my throat. Important, even though he couldn’t hear them any more. ‘My name is Elisabeth.’
My tears mingled with Alex Sinclair’s blood as the skiff shot out of the harbour and headed south.
To Spain. Where we would be free.
Chapter Eight
T
he fisherman sewed Alex into an old sail, his eyebrows as protesting as my soul as the second man I loved, or could have loved, slipped beneath the surface.
He’s not Philip.
I knew that, of course. My husband’s ship had been torpedoed years ago, but the memories, the emotions were as fresh as if they were yesterday. We must have landed near Bilbao at night, or at midday. It didn’t matter; I remembered little of the journey. Blocked out the walk to the city and the train to Madrid. Clad in the fisherman’s clean shirt, I looked like a street tramp, but at least I wasn’t detained.
The walk from the station to the embassy was measured by the pain of blistered feet, and an aching soul.
Of my interview with the Consul-General at the embassy, I remembered a bit more. He sat across a sea of mahogany from me, a tall man, powerful – with the aura of a doer rather than a pencil-pusher.
‘My name is Elisabeth de Mornay, code name Cécile. Special Operations Executive in London.’
‘What can I do for you, Miss de Mornay?’
His fingers twirled a gold pen in circles on his desk. Mine couldn’t have been the first interview of this type he’d had to endure.
I didn’t bother to correct him. ‘I need to get back to London.’
‘Why?’
‘My cover was blown,’ I explained. ‘I need to debrief with my CO.’
‘And who might that be?’
He had to know who Buck was, but I played along.
‘Major Maurice Buckmaster. Chief of F Section.’
The C-G considered his response as an ormolu clock on the mantle tracked the time.
‘Why should I believe you?’
He stood up and poured himself a brandy. It was rude of him not to offer me one, but now was not the time to lecture him on manners.
‘You shouldn’t.’
He raised his eyebrows, sipped his drink and waited for me to continue.
‘Contact Baker Street. Buck will vouch for me.’
Outside the window, palm trees swayed in the hazy light as people bustled along the streets, preoccupied with their normal day-to-day lives. Did they know what was happening? Did they care?
I was sick of war, sick of death. Would anyone blame me for walking out of the door and disappearing into the throng? There were worse things than sitting out the rest of the war in obscurity, and I’d done my part. Transmitted twice a week to London for six months before leaving Paris. I was exhausted, mentally and physically.
The war could go hang.
The C-G poured two fingers of Carlos Primero into another glass and handed it to me.
‘I’d be a fool not to.’
The correct response was: ‘And you’re no fool, sir’ but I was too tired to play the game.
‘May I ask what you were doing in France?’
‘You can ask.’
‘But you won’t tell?’
‘No.’
He smiled wryly, and sipped his brandy. ‘You got out alone?’
Hazel eyes and Viking cheeks; Alex’s shade stood at my side.
‘No, not exactly.’
‘Where are they now? Exactly?’
‘At the bottom of the Atlantic.’ There was no pleasure in watching him cringe. ‘Not by my hand,’ I added, although he didn’t ask.
‘I’ll need names, of course.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Alex had family, and they deserved to know that he had died a hero. ‘Squadron Leader Alexander Charles Sinclair, of 105 Squadron, was shot down near Vouvray with his navigator Tim Fielding. Fielding died in the crash and I was escorting Sinclair out of France. We’d almost made it.’
The C-G pushed my glass closer to me.
‘I have a feeling there’s a story there.’
‘There’s always a story. Just not always a happy ending. He tried to save a woman who was beaten to death by the Nazis. He was shot and I wasn’t. Because he shielded my body with his own.’
The C-G’s mouth twitched. ‘You loved him?’
The truth was bitter, and this time it demanded a voice. He deserved at least that much.
‘I only knew him for a few days. With more time? Maybe. I liked him, and I respected him, and that’s a good start. But he was my responsibility, at least while he was with me, and I let him down.’
‘How so?’
‘I couldn’t save him.’
‘I rather think he made his own decision, Miss de Mornay. There wasn’t much you could do the moment he confronted the Nazis.’ He looked away and drained his glass. ‘Where are you staying?’
‘I’ve taken a hotel room in the city,’ I lied.
‘Where?’
‘Close enough that I can be here by 10 a.m. That should give you enough time to contact Baker Street and decide what to do with me.’
‘You know I can’t let you go.’
I moved back to the window.
‘You’ll stay here, a guest of Dona Araceli Ortega.’
‘Guest?’
‘She has a town house nearby and will see to you until your Major Buckmaster tells us what to do with you.’
The C-G
opened the door and talked in soft tones to a porter. The man was stout and swarthy, bowing to me before ushering me out. He called for a car and driver. Closed the door for me and stood back as I was driven away.
‘The Hotel Orfila, please.’
It was the hotel I’d stayed at five years and a lifetime ago. On my honeymoon. I wasn’t sure why I said it; the C-G wouldn’t risk letting me disappear.
The driver smiled in the rear-view mirror, showing kind eyes and yellow teeth. He ignored my directions, driving to a private house, four storeys high, in a fashionable part of town.
‘Safe,’ he said, as if such a place still existed on Earth, and opened the door for me.
I stayed in Dona Araceli’s house for two days. Elegant women and smartly dressed men bustled in and out, asking questions, offering sympathy and Spanish brandy. They spoke to me in kind tones, and of me in hushed whispers.
Finally, a man came to the house with thin hair slicked back over his head and the smell of someone who ate too much garlic. He presented a small valise to me with a flourish.
‘What is it?’ I asked, without any real interest in the answer.
‘Clothing. Beautiful things.’ He flashed his teeth in what could almost pass for a smile.
‘Why?’
‘For you,’ he said, confusion clouding his expression. ‘What pretty woman does not like such things?’
After waiting around in Dona Araceli’s cast-offs while the ruddy C-G decided what to do with me, I was in no mood to contemplate what this meant. I retraced my steps into the parlour. He followed me, and pushed the case into my hands.
‘Please, señora. It is a gift.’
‘Gifts rarely come without a price.’
In the end, I acquiesced. He waited outside my bedroom door as I changed into a new dress. I glanced out of the window. Would they give chase if I climbed down the trellis and slipped from their grasp? Pity I couldn’t be bothered. But wherever they were taking me, I wasn’t about to go unarmed. My guns had been taken into ‘safekeeping’, but I still had Alex’s little dagger. Whether they believed my story that I wanted to personally return it to Alex’s family, or whether they thought it was harmless enough, leaving the sgian dubh in my custody was considered a safe compromise.
I secured it to my thigh using a silk scarf, clipping the ends to minimise any bulk and leaving them where they fell. Let the C-G and bloody Dona Araceli wonder about that. I closed the door behind me and brushed past the man in the hallway.
‘How beautiful you are, señora,’ he said.
His eyes lingered on me as he reached for the case and escorted me to a limousine with diplomatic tags and darkened windows. He stored the valise in the boot and slid into the passenger seat beside the chauffeur.
Instead of driving east to the city and the consulate, we drove west. There was a plan afoot, but for the life of me, I couldn’t muster the energy to care.
*
The heat increased my lethargy. Hazy sunshine burned off by midday, turning the sky a shade of blue that hurt my eyes. I prayed for rain and an end to the cloud that had insulated me since Alex’s death.
The men had stopped trying to make conversation, leaving me to stare out the windows of the limousine at the passing countryside, arid and red.
On the fourth day we reached a checkpoint. It was bigger than the ones we’d passed, and I roused from my stupor as we stopped at the barricade. The C-G’s man, still sitting beside the chauffeur, handed over three sets of papers.
One of the men riffled through our documents, holding each up to the light and comparing our faces to the photographs. He leant around the chauffeur to have a closer look at me. I stared back, uninterested.
Finally, he grunted and returned the papers.
‘Welcome to Portugal,’ he said.
As if that should mean something special.
Part 2
Lisbon, June 1943
Chapter Nine
W
e passed through three towns connected by long stretches of barren before pulling to the side of the road. A dusty motor car with a Portuguese licence disc was already parked there. Heat emanated from it, surrounding it in a wavering halo, and a short round man with slicked back hair leant against the bonnet, smoking and fanning himself with a newspaper. He tossed the paper into the passenger seat.
‘Good trip?’ he said, exhaling a cloud of bitter smoke.
The C-G’s man shook his hand while the other transferred my case to the other vehicle. He opened the door for me.
‘End of the line, beautiful.’
It should have sounded ominous and I should have been terrified. Being driven across a border and handed over to a man who looked like a tuskless boar wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but if they wanted to kill me, they would have done that back in Spain. Whatever the plan was, they wanted me alive for it so I allowed the man to help me to my feet.
‘Do you have another one?’ I asked the boar.
He looked at me stupidly.
‘May I have a cigarette?’ I clarified.
His grin revealed yellow teeth and the remnants of his lunch, but he reached into his jacket and handed me a battered pack. I allowed the nicotine a few moments to reach my head before I sighed.
‘Now what?’
The short man inclined his head as the second of my two erstwhile chaperons closed the door and disappeared down the road.
‘Now my turn to drive you.’
He wouldn’t say where or why; just grinned. I sighed and leant back. It didn’t really matter.
*
The taxi stank of garlic and unwashed male. An icon of Jesus and a photograph of António de Oliviera Salazar, the prime minister, looked beatifically down from the sun visor. The driver produced a flask and unscrewed it.
‘You want?’
‘No, thank you.’
The driver hummed tunelessly to himself as small towns and villages flitted by. Brown grass was punctuated with dark green trees and houses painted in pale shades of cream and yellow, pink and peach, with red tiled roofs. After the greys of London and Paris, the colours were blinding. I tried to watch where we were going, in case I needed to find my way back, but we moved fast, frequently changing direction, vehicles and drivers. Whoever had summoned me, wanted me there without tail or trail. And they appeared not to care if I was armed: my Luger and PPK had been returned, hidden in the false bottom of my valise. The latter was now stashed in my bag. Just in case.
The sun was setting as we skirted the capital city and entered a town called Estoril. I caught glimpses of the ocean with its faint salty tang, like the tears shed for a gruff Scotsman.
The driver stopped halfway down the hill in front of a high stone wall.
‘Your home,’ he explained.
‘Oh.’ I brushed aside a tear under the pretext of a yawn. ‘What do I owe you?’
It was a silly thing to say; this wasn’t a black cab, and I hadn’t sanctioned this trip.
‘Is taken care of,’ he said, although he made the motions as if I’d just passed him a note. Instead of change, he pressed a pair of keys into my palm. ‘For the doors,’ he explained.
‘Fine. And who do I need to thank?’
He seemed to think this amusing.
‘You thank me for driving.’
He cleared his throat and hurried around the car to open the door for me. He took my case to the gate, watching while I unlocked it and admired the cottage. As much as I appreciated the high wall, I was delighted by what lay behind it. Two jacaranda trees guarded the front door and purple bougainvillea crept up cream-hued walls. A large blue and white tile of a mermaid basked next to the door.
The driver set down the case and tipped his hat. His voice was low as he warned, ‘Be careful. Bufos watching.’
The term was unfamiliar. I was fluent in French and German and passable with Spanish and Italian. Portuguese, on the other hand, was a mystery.
‘Buffoons?’
His eyes were sad
as he shook his head.
‘Watchers. Informers. Everyone is bufo in Lisboa.’
He pronounced it Lishboa, making even the name of the city seem evil. He tipped his hat again and drove off.
I closed the gate and, hidden between the stone wall and the jacaranda, slipped my hand around the PPK. Just because the house was dark didn’t mean it was empty. I toed off my shoes to prevent them from making noise on the tiled floor and eased the door closed.
The dining room lay to the right of the foyer, with a long mahogany table, eight chairs on either side and a silver candelabra stationed in the middle, the candles unlit. The room smelled of beeswax and fresh flowers. Behind it, the kitchen was just visible, with a small wood table and clean countertops. There were no unwanted guests in the pantry, just a plethora of consumables. More than I had seen in years.
I returned to the hallway, isolating each sense and allowing it to expand until I was able to detect a faint hint of cigar smoke and expensive cologne. Whoever it was was foolish. Gun firmly in hand, I followed the trail down the hallway to a parlour.
The curtains had been drawn against the evening air and the eyes of the bufos, but the red glow of the cigar gave away the man’s position – a dark silhouette sitting in an armchair. My hand was steady as I aimed the gun at the centre of his chest. I counted out half a dozen heartbeats before speaking.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’
‘Do put that away.’ He consulted his watch, although the room was too dark to read the time. ‘You’re late.’
English, and with an accent that spoke of privilege. That could have been faked, but there was something about it that scratched at the back of my memory. I tightened my grip on the pistol and opted to play along.
‘For what?’
He ignored the question.
‘You were supposed to be here an hour ago,’ he drawled.
If I had problems seeing his face, he was equally disadvantaged.
‘Blame the driver.’
He stood up and took a step towards me.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lisbet, put that away. If you couldn’t shoot me five years ago, you’re not going to do it now.’
