Madeleine's War (41 page)

We kept looking up.

“After you'd gone, I stopped in the pub in Southwater, the Black Prince. There was a soldier there who knew everything about movies. He was telling his friends that Leni Riefenstahl was nearly the star of
The Blue Angel
, but that Marlene Dietrich got the role instead. Did you know that?”

“Of course I did, silly.”

“And I read the other day, in a Paris paper, that she is now filming Hitler's favourite opera. I forget what it's called but apparently it has
hundreds
of extras.”

“She has had a better war than I have.”

“She doesn't have a Philippa.”

She squeezed my arm.

“Why didn't you tell me you were pregnant?”

“You know why. You'd have stopped me going. And…if, by some miracle, you'd allowed me to go, and I had been killed, you'd have grieved twice over. I would have killed your child. I didn't want that. That's why I talked about babies so much. I wasn't feeling well and I worried that you might put two and two together. But if I talked about having babies in the future—that day we went by the unexploded bomb, for example—I thought I might put you off the scent.”

An intake of breath. “And before you ask, I thought that, when my tummy began to show, it would be the perfect cover. No one would imagine a pregnant woman being sent as an agent.”

“And…when the nine months were up?”

“I'd cross that bridge when I came to it. A baby might be even better camouflage.”

I said nothing for a long moment.

“Did they confiscate the acorn I gave you?”

“They confiscated everything.”

As she spoke, the moonlight cast the tiniest of shadows along the cleft in her chin.

“I still have the cigarette case you gave me.”

“I wonder where Erich is now. What happened to him?”

I shook my head. “I don't know.”

“I thought…if I gave you his case, you might look for him, give it back, find out how he was. Was what he did so bad?”

“I thought so, at the time.”

“And now?”

“I was given special duties, Madeleine. Things I can't tell you about. I couldn't go looking for Erich. I'm sorry.”

“And the others—Ivan, Katrine?”

“Both captured. Both executed. I'm sorry about that too. The circuits they joined had been penetrated by the Gestapo—they walked into a trap. That would have happened to you, too, if you had contacted your circuit. You would have been dead by now. For weeks, I thought you
were
dead.”

I leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “That day, by the Thames, by the Savoy, I gave you the most difficult assignment. You made the most of it, and you are still alive.”

“I feel a long way from the Savoy,” she said. “I don't think I could dance right now, but I would like to taste an American cocktail.”

“They have wonderful names, some of them—old-fashioned, sidecar, screwdriver, white lady. That's you in the moonlight—a white lady.”

She smiled. “I like that. But perhaps it's as close as I'll come, now.”

I again thought of that day, months before, on the Embankment, when I had told Madeleine where she was being dropped.

“Was it what you expected—being in the field, I mean? Being an SC2 agent—did it live up to its billing?”

She hesitated and pulled her coat more closely to her.

“No.” She tightened her belt. “You were right—the nerves get to you, everything is so uncertain. I was good in the field, I think, but no, I didn't enjoy it as I thought I would. I was silly ever to think that. A silly girl.”

“How was it you got caught?”

She gave a short laugh. “It's embarrassing.”

I said nothing but looked at the shadows.

“I was in a café, sitting outside in Nallies, about ten miles from La Rochelle. It was a convenient crossroads to watch traffic going either to La Rochelle harbour or to the beaches at Fôret de Longeville. One of the other customers had a West Highland terrier, just like Zola. Its owner let him—or her—wander in and out of the tables. I bent down and stroked it, and spoke to it—just a few words. I said ‘You look just like Zola'—that's all,
but I said it in English
. Exactly what you told us to beware of in Ardlossan, but what I was always doing.”

She coughed and laughed at the same time.

“I didn't think anyone had heard me but obviously some collaborator must have. They must have. They followed me, found out where I was living, watched me for a day or so. Found out where I was hiding my transmitter, then reported me. It was my own fault I was caught.” She breathed out and coughed. “No one else's.”

“It was an understandable mistake.”

“You are being kind. I don't need that sort of kindness. It was a mistake I shouldn't have made. I would never have been promoted to SC1.”

A cloud passed over the moon. For a moment all was shadow. Then the moon came out again.

I squeezed her arm. “There never was any SC1, Madeleine. It was a trick. We thought that if people in SC2
thought
there was an SC1, they would try harder, in the hope of being promoted. That's why we called it SC2. It might also have confused the enemy.”

She nodded, smiled, and again feebly squeezed my arm. “How many more tricks did you devise that I don't know about?”

“You were top of your class at Ardlossan, Madeleine. If anyone qualified for SC1, it would have been you.”

She shook her head. “It was my one weakness that trapped me in the end.”

I bit my lip. Her habit of breaking out of French and into English had been one of the things that had initially made me think she might be a German agent. Should I tell her that?

No.

She was too weak to know that I had ever doubted her.

I was ashamed of having doubted her myself.

“Madeleine, I have to ask you one thing. When you saw Philippe again, when he arrived at that hospital in La Rochelle, after you thought he was dead, what went through your mind, what did you think?”

She paused but squeezed my arm.

“Do you doubt my love for you?”

Doubt. There it was again.

“I went to see your mother in Blakeney—”

“Yes, she told me.”

“She had a photo of you and Philippe on her mantelshelf…She said…she said Philippe was your first love, that a first love is like no other…”

“Mothers don't know everything, even if they think they do. When Philippe came for me, in La Rochelle, I couldn't believe it. Of course, I couldn't—I was amazed. Well…it was wonderful in its way, and it brought back all that we had been through. But…all that…it was
past
, it was
over
. I looked at him and he was the same Philippe, the same wonderful man, but…
but
…I had your child inside me, there was so much
more
between
us
, Matt, dear Matt, between you and me. Ardlossan, the sands, the standing stones, the bicycle rides, black-market whisky, London,
all the lovemaking and conversations and training. You
formed
me. Right from that first meeting at The Farm, you were hard on me but fairly, for a good reason. You treated me as an adult, as an equal.”

She looked up at the moon, then back to me.

“When I knew Philippe, he was a
boy
. Yes, we were innocent and in love, as my mother says, but we didn't know any better. Now I do. There's so much
more
to being an adult than to being a child.”

It was my turn to squeeze her.

“I was worried…You know, that photograph of Philippe on your mother's mantelshelf…it was very prominent.”

“Why believe my mother rather than me? Why can't men trust their women?”

“Did you always trust me?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did?”

“Do.”

My gaze swept the garden. Lots of detail lost in the pale light. “Tell me…the interrogation…how bad was it?”

She didn't say anything for a moment.

“I wasn't tortured. Not with pain, anyway.” She looked up at me. “You were right, half right.”

She breathed out. “I was humiliated.”

She squeezed my arm. “Don't ask how. It was more than being stripped naked—much more. That's the point. It humiliates me to remember it, and to tell you—anyone—would be to revisit it. Just imagine the worst humiliation you could suffer, and that's what happened.”

I didn't know what to say.

Then I whispered, “Did it work?”

She laughed. “Not as well as pain might have done. I kept thinking of The Farm, of you and those other men ogling my body, and I imagined that what the Germans were doing to me was a test. So yes, Colonel Hammond, your training helped me—a little bit anyway.”

She took my hand and kissed it. “Even when I was…when I was completely degraded, when I was reduced to being an animal, a wild beast, I clung on.”

And I had thought she was a German agent.

She laughed. “I remembered spitting at your people in Scotland so I tried that too. It helped a little.”

She kissed my hand again. “I think I was in line for a more physical session when Philippe and his people intervened.”

We had reached a bench.

I turned and looked down at her. “Let's sit here.”

We sat down.

The moon was shining brilliantly again.

Her face was so very pale in the moonlight.

She didn't say anything but shortly afterwards she started to shiver.

I took off my jacket and put it round her.

“Shall we go in? Let's go and see Philippa sleeping.”

Would I ever be able to be with my daughter without thinking of what I had done to Perrault?

Madeleine stood up. She squeezed my arm. What strength she had was waning.

She looked up. Her neck as white as moonlight allowed.

“Is this the last full moon I shall ever see, do you think?”

“Don't say that, Madeleine. Don't say that.”

MADELEINE DIED
three days after I arrived at St. Hilaire, from liver failure brought on by typhus. Although she was a Protestant, she was buried there.

I don't know whether this account will ever be published: the Official Secrets Act forbids it for the moment. But I hope one day it will be deposited, perhaps, in the archive of the Imperial War Museum, in London, where Philippa at least might be given the chance to read it. I'd like her to know what happened.

FOR THE RECORD,
I killed François Perrault on Tuesday, 24 October 1944. In the wider scheme of things—the Churchillian scheme of things—how useful was my action? As the world now knows, the German-British Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, began passing information about the atom bomb to the Swiss-American Soviet agent Harry Gold at the end of 1945. So, arguably, I delayed the start of the Cold War arms race, which began in earnest in 1947, by twelve or thirteen months. Was it worth killing a good man for that?

No one ever found out that it was I who killed Perrault. The Paris police never quite believed Justine's idea and continued to maintain that it was an
épuration
that had gone too far: there were just too many similar incidents occurring all over France at the time. Monique Brèger's account was eventually published, including her role in helping SC2—and she received the Croix de Guerre. The DSO that I received in the 1946 honours
list simply said “For services in France during World War II,” so less than nothing was published about Madeleine's heroism.

I never saw Justine again, and with good reason. The rogue agent within SC2 turned out to be—as you may have guessed—none other than Roland Kemp. Ulrich Kolbe had been correct in that Roland was neither solely a British SC2 agent nor a Gestapo agent—he was in fact a Soviet mole, playing each side off against the other.

The evidence against him was there, in a way. His circuit was one of two not compromised by the Gestapo. Like Monique Brèger, he knew that if his circuit had been the only one not infiltrated, it would have looked suspicious. So he didn't drop all of our people in the soup. Should I have registered that Roland had a shiny new lighter, and put that together with Monique's story that Kolbe had been given an English model which he hid away after she noticed it? I suppose I should have done—but I didn't.

And it was he, you will remember, who introduced Justine to me. Roland and François Perrault had instructed her to get to know me, and yes, to sleep with me, to pretend she loved me, all in the hope that eventually we would be married, and she would move to London as the wife of someone high up in British intelligence—the classic “sleeper,” in fact. Gilles, her boyfriend in Nancy, didn't exist. She invented him so she could turn up later, after their “fight,” and worm her way into my bed, to advance our relationship. When we were interviewing Kolbe, she had reacted with horror when she thought he was about to reveal the names of the double agents. Had he done so, the whole set of events would have blown up in her face. All the tears she shed in the restaurant where we had our last lunch were for Perrault, not for me.

Justine had never loved me, and Perrault wasn't quite so blameless as I thought. He wasn't aware of Madeleine's links to me, or to Philippe, when he had included her name on his intelligence lists as a captured SC2 agent. That was just as well. But he had been willing to use me in the communist cause, and that meant I didn't feel
quite
so badly about what I had done to him.

We found out all this only after Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to Russia last year, and certain documents were discovered in what they left behind. Roland had been recruited, like all the other Cambridge spies, at university before the war. He's now in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight.

Kolbe had said there were two enemy agents in SC2, but that was probably
mischief on his part, to make us waste time looking for someone who wasn't there, a trick much as the one I had devised about SC1 and SC2. There was no mention of a second spy in the Burgess and Maclean papers. Kolbe's trick certainly worked on me. On the strength of it, I doubted Madeleine for weeks.

Hilary got the knighthood he always wanted, but he didn't have much time to enjoy it. The headache he had complained about when I called him from Paris turned out to be not just a headache but the early warnings of the brain tumour that killed him in 1947. He left me a pair of his brogues in his will—dead men's shoes.

After the war I was promoted and transferred to a new outfit, but since that organization I became part of still exists, unlike SC2, I can't give its name.

I fell into the habit of taking Philippa (never Pippa) to see her grandmother in Blakeney, and it was on one of those occasions that I met Elizabeth, when we shared a taxi from King's Lynn in the rain. She is a headmistress at a school in Sussex, a few miles from the Southwater meadow from where Madeleine flew to France on the night of the last full moon before the invasion.

Elizabeth's job comes with a house and so we divide our time between my flat in Hamilton Place and her house in Sussex. Philippa, who is eight now, has just started at Elizabeth's school, where she is shaping up to be no less of a tomboy than her mother. She has her mother's unruly Botticelli hair and as I said, the same whisky-brown eyes.

Whisky is still my vice, more than ever.

All four of us (I'm not forgetting Zola) walk in that Southwater meadow from time to time. Elizabeth understands, and both Philippa and Zola—who are the best of friends—love it.

But not at night. Never by moonlight.

London, 1952