Early One Morning (17 page)

The switch in tone took him aback. ‘Less tricky? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Just answer me. Cold blood. No warning. No reason. We say—he has to die. You do it.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Your Irish friends did it.’

‘I had no part of that.’

‘Oh, don’t be so naïve. You think you can pick and choose which parts of a struggle like that apply to you? Just because you drove on a few raids where nobody got killed, you don’t think you have any responsibility for anything else that went on?’

Williams nodded. ‘No, I realised that. Which is why I got out. I grew up. Fast.’

He told her what she already knew, about the envelope Slade handed a young man called Grover that was the death warrant for one of his friends. How he was sure there was more to it than the smooth-talking SIS man had suggested and had burned the package without opening it, infuriating both O’Malley and Slade when they discovered what had happened. It was the only way out—his handing over the package would have been in itself a compromised act, an act of betrayal. It was then he realised he was just a boy messing about in things that had taken three hundred years to fester and finesse. All he had wanted was an escape from the suffocating normality of his family. Afterwards, he grabbed the chance to sink into Orpen’s equally claustrophobic world for a few months.

‘So then I had two lots of people hating me. The Irish and the British. My family were still in France and I went back, the prodigal son with his tail between his legs, and my father knew a man who knew a man who knew Orpen …’

‘William Grover became just Williams. And now Grover-Williams. You’re not very original with names, are you?’

‘Maybe not. But you can see I’m none too keen on assassination.’

‘This will be different.’

‘Will it,’ he said flatly.

‘Anyway, that’s for the future. I’m sending you in, three weeks time. Full briefing starts tomorrow. I want you over there and ready.’

‘Ready for what?’

‘As I told you. Whatever we want.’

Williams looked at his watch and Rose grabbed his wrist with a surprisingly firm grip. She angled it so the meagre lights flickered across the diamonds.

‘And you can’t take that. Too damn conspicuous.’

He slipped off the Carrier and handed it over. Rose examined the back and raised an eyebrow.

‘We always meant to get it engraved … you know how it is. I’ll be back for that,’ he added firmly.

Rose slipped it into her clutch bag. ‘Good. Then you’ll know where to find it, won’t you?’

Robert sat on the edge of the terrace at the Auffargis house, pulling petals from a withered rose head, letting them drop on to the gravel, brooding over yet another row with his estranged wife. When all this was over, he would contemplate the dreaded divorce. The arguments and recriminations that would cause didn’t bear thinking about. He envied Williams his simple monogamous outlook, even if it was probably being sorely tested by separation.

It was a cold, sharp day lit by a low, jaundiced sun, but he was enjoying even that feeble warmth on his face. He had spent the day polishing and checking the last Bugatti Atlantic now sitting in the garage-cum-barn out back. It should have been turned in, but the papers Maurice had secured allowed him to keep it on the pretext he would be touring the country impounding all of Ettore’s cars still in France. He despised Maurice’s cosying up to the Germans, but he had to admit, when it came to playing both ends against the middle, Maurice was a master.

He had thrown the rubberised cloth over the Bugatti when the Economic Police Patrol, with a small unit of German troops, had arrived only minutes later. The Sergeant in charge had looked in the barn and moved on. It wasn’t cars they were looking for, but evidence of food hoarding, provisions to steal.

The small figure who appeared at the end of the drive snapped him out of his thoughts. She hesitated at the gates, the bicycle still between her legs, as if unsure of the address. He raised what he hoped was a reassuring hand and she pedalled in, swerving to avoid the pot holes now forming in the untended road surface. No gardeners or handymen or chauffeurs left now. He’d have to get off his arse and do it himself if he wanted a decent approach to the house.

She must have been around seventeen dressed in a rather threadbare overcoat that might have been fashionable five years ago. Her red hair was tied back with a bright purple scarf, and she wore a look of determination on her flushed face as she pulled to a halt, dismounted, and carefully laid the bike against one of the terrace pillars, careful to avoid crushing the wisteria. He could tell she had come from Paris, and city folk only ventured into the countryside for one thing these days.

‘You’re too late,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You’re too late. The Germans were here an hour ago. Took away a sack of potatoes and two chickens. Cleaned me out. I have nothing to give. You could try the farm down that way.’ A pretty girl had some chance of getting something from old Pierre Marchant, one of the farmers who revelled in the shift in the balance of power that meant urban dwellers went cap in hand to their rural cousins, rather than vice versa.

‘I haven’t come for food.’

Robert stood up, a little suspicious. Surely she wasn’t … ‘Coffee?’

‘No thanks. I have to give you this. You are Robert Benoist?’

He nodded and she held out a thin envelope. He ripped it open. It was one of the single sheet letters introduced shortly after the occupation with options to cross out: Dear …, Hope you are well/better/coming here—and so on. He read it three times before the message finally clicked and he felt a grin spread over his face.

‘Are you sure about the coffee?’

‘I have to get back.’

He walked out on to the driveway with her as she collected her bike. ‘Thank you. You’re very brave.’

She flushed a little and smiled shyly. ‘Oh, the Germans never stop us.’ She indicated the note. ‘Not for that kind of thing, anyway. Doesn’t occur to them that women could be up to no good.’

Robert felt a sudden chill, an intense feeling of concern for her, this vulnerable child swimming into unknown depths. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your name.’

‘Beatrice.’

‘Well, Beatrice, long may they continue to believe that. Be careful.’

‘Vive la France.’

Now Robert felt awkward replying after the innocent intensity she invested in the tired old phrase. ‘Yes,
Vive la France
.’

Without a backward glance she was gone, pedalling furiously into the darkening afternoon. He looked at the note again. He’d have to tell Eve. In person.

Robert was aware of the envious and suspicious glances as he drove west, through Dreux and towards Alençon. The roads were mostly empty, with just a few horse-drawn carts, a smattering of cars newly converted to run on compressed coal gas, with a dangerous brazier created in the boot, and, in the larger towns, the velo-taxis, an upmarket version of the rickshaw. But a man driving a car? And a beautiful streamlined car at that? Nazi bigwig, that was the assumption most people made. Or a black marketeer.

He gunned the car, letting the fearsome noise wrap around him. Above sixty kilometres an hour the lack of soundproofing made conversation difficult in the Atlantic, but, with no passenger, he didn’t care. The engine made its own delicious conversation and he let it talk at length on the spookily empty roads.

He was near Alençon when he came across the convoy, a long snake of half-tracks, Mercedes trucks, Kubelwagens and staff cars, plodding along at around forty or forty-five kilometres an hour. The troops in the rear vehicle all turned to look at him, their eyes dark under their coal scuttle helmets. At one time they would have worn field caps, but now that the British were making sporadic strafing sorties across the Channel, they had armoured up.

One of them waved and gave a thumbs-up in admiration of the Bugatti, but the majority of the boys—most were less than half his age—remained stony faced. He wondered where they had been. Russia maybe, where already six inches of snow covered the countryside, slowing down an advance that had once taken Rzhev, Belgograd, Stalino and Taganrog—less than three hundred miles from the Volga—in forty-eight hours? No, Robert thought, according to reports from both the conventional and the newly emerged underground press those units were still pushing for Moscow, hoping to take the city before everything froze solid. Perhaps the look on the prematurely lined faces was the thought that they could be the next to be shipped east.

After five minutes of unrelenting staring from the back of the Mercedes, Robert, cursing the fact that every Bugatti was right-hand drive, decided to risk overtaking. He dropped a gear, pulled out, relieved to find the way ahead clear, and floored the accelerator.

The drab military colours of the vehicles flashed by, and now he just had glimpses of open jaws and scowling faces. He felt himself smile, counting off the metres till he was clear of these gormless barbarians. He was half a dozen trucks away from freedom when the lead staff car swerved out, blocking his side of the road. He automatically glanced at the speedometer even as he stamped on the pedal. He was travelling at over a hundred and the Atlantic’s brakes weren’t its best feature. A tall, spindly hawthorn hedge made it impossible to swerve round this sudden obstruction so he pumped the brakes, once, twice, then full down, feeling the wheels lock, correcting the skittish rear end, bracing himself as the military car came closer and closer, feeling the Bugatti decelerating with agonising slowness, until with a smoking screech and a stench of rubber it stopped centimetres away from the occupants of the staff car, rocking on its suspension. Robert realised he was holding his breath and let out a long thin stream of air.

The tall, elegant Lieutenant who stepped out of the rear seat of the staff car offered a thin smile as he walked over to the driver’s window. Robert rolled it down. ‘A Bugatti,’ the German said admiringly.

‘Well read.’

‘An Atlantic, I believe.’

Robert allowed himself to be a tiny bit impressed. ‘Indeed.’

‘Lovely.’

‘Aren’t they?’

‘Why do you have it?’

Robert handed over the
Ausweiss
that Maurice had provided and then the identity card. ‘Ah. You work for the company. I see.’

Still holding the papers the Lieutenant walked around the machine admiring its low-slung lines. When he returned he bent down. ‘My Colonel would love to see this.’

Robert started his cover story, that he had just picked it up and was taking it to the large warehouse in Dieppe where many of the best cars had been spirited away. ‘I’m afraid it has been requisitioned by—’

The Lieutenant cut him off with a snarl and threw the papers back at him. ‘Fall in, in front of that half-track. Now.’

The German walked over and spoke quickly to the half-track crew. Robert watched as the forward machine gun was manned and swung in his direction. The convoy restarted with a grinding of gears and the low grunt of engines and Robert slotted in between the half-track and a Kubelwagen.

The lumbering column of vehicles swung south, away from where he wanted to go, had to go, heading for Le Mans. Robert could feel the Atlantic juddering unhappily in second and third, gears it simply wasn’t used to hanging around in.

It was ten kilometres before he hit on the solution, another five of tricky driving with one hand before he had managed to sabotage his own car and a further seven before he began flashing his lights and honking his horn. Eventually the vehicle ahead slowed and after they had all rolled to a halt, the Lieutenant strode back into view, clearly irritated.

‘What is it?’

‘How much further?’

‘Another eighty kilometres.’

Robert tapped his fuel gauge. ‘I’m all but empty. I was meant to fill up at Alençon.’

The Lieutenant put his head in suspiciously. He turned the engine on. The needle juddered but didn’t rise. Which was hardly surprising because Robert had disconnected it.

‘Very well. You,’ the Lieutenant pointed to the truck. ‘Put some fuel in this car.’

The Lieutenant went back to his vehicle as the soldiers fetched jerry cans and started to slosh it into the Bugatti’s cavernous tank. Robert waited until the machine gunner slid down for a moment before he rammed the car into reverse and let in the clutch. There was a scream as both soldiers’ legs were crushed against the solid girder-like bumper of the half-track. He spun the wheel, thankful for the tight turning circle Jean had given the Atlantic and accelerated out, deliberately spinning the wheels, leaving a shower of dust. The Lieutenant, leaning against his car, smoking, gasped as the low coupé rocketed by him, holding in his stomach, feeling the metal wings pluck at his trousers.

The first bullet came after Robert within five seconds, but it took time to manoeuvre the bigger half-tracks into a clear line of sight. The convoy was already receding when he saw the muzzle flashes in his mirror, but at that moment he glimpsed the farm track running off to his left and he slid the car into it, hoping the suspension could cope with barreling over ruts at a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour. The track led him to a small lane, the lane to a road heading north, and as darkness fell he switched on the blue-painted black-out headlights and hoped nobody else took a fancy to his car that night.

Arthur Lock checked his watch by the feeble light of the moon and lit the third bonfire in the triangle. He wondered if the plane was coming. This was the third time of asking. On one occasion weather had stopped the drop, on another the plane had simply not appeared. This was the last chance, he felt, tonight or it was time to think again.

He hurried over to the edge of the field to join two of the half-dozen Frenchmen scattered on the edge of this dark wood and stood with them stamping his feet. He gratefully accepted an offer of brandy, rough though it was, and shuddered with pleasure as it scorched its way down into his stomach.

What a game to play. Dropping agents into the dead of night, hoping they don’t break their necks or drown or fall straight into a German patrol. Then expecting them to disappear into the populace and somehow, against all the odds, make a difference. He wouldn’t blame them if they weren’t coming, not one bit.