The Best of Our Spies (32 page)

‘The landings on the beaches of Normandy are our main route into Europe – our only route into Europe. There will be no landings in the Pas de Calais.’

Silence from Quinn, who looked stunned. His head had jerked towards Edgar and stayed in that position, his brow furrowed in confusion.

‘What I am saying, Quinn, is that Normandy is and always has been our main choice for the landings. The Pas de Calais was an attempt to deceive the Germans. It still is. We need them to believe for as long as possible that Normandy is not our primary target and that the main landings will be in the Pas de Calais.’

‘So then everything that I have been working on ...’

‘Everything that you have been working on is a vital part of the deception. I hope that as time goes on you will come to realise that you too have played your part. But, certainly – all the planning that you have been doing has not been for an actual invasion.’

‘But what has it been for then?’

‘I cannot pretend that this is not the difficult part, Quinn. Through you, we have been able to directly mislead the Germans. You have, if you like, been an unwitting but very necessary conduit for passing on incorrect information to them.

‘Your wife was recruited in France before the war as a German spy. We did not pick her up when she came here. We only became aware of her after we arrested another German spy – a Belgian as it happens – in 1941. As you know, at the time, Nathalie was working at St Thomas’s Hospital. By the time we became aware of her, she had already applied for a transfer to a military hospital. We had a choice at that stage. We could arrest her, but there would be little to be gained from that. We had no evidence against her, for a start — just the word of our Belgian friend. Or, we could see what she got up to and to do that, we needed a helping hand. So we facilitated her transfer to a military hospital. She ended up at Calcotte Grange, where she met you.

‘We knew that she had asked to go to a military hospital so she could have direct access to the kind of intelligence that you will pick up in that kind of place. It occurred to us that this gave us a perfect opportunity to enable her to meet someone who had access to top grade intelligence. She was allowed to see your file which told her that you were going to be working on a top secret Naval Intelligence project. Even you were not aware of that at that stage. It was not hard for us to arrange for you and her to get together. She was keen to get to know you, so to speak, and we knew that you would be keen too, though for altogether different reasons.

‘We arranged for you to work in Naval Intelligence. At first the work was reasonably low level and we knew that Nathalie would not be in a position to find out much about what you were doing. But the idea was to be very careful and very gradual about it. We did not want the Germans to get wind that this all may be too good to be true. That has always been one of the risks of this operation. But by the middle of 1943 we were well into planning the invasion of Europe and a crucial part of this was a deception operation that would convince the Germans that the invasion would be somewhere other than where it was going to be, if you get my drift. Quite early on it was decided that Normandy was the preferred location. German defences are just too good in the Pas de Calais. They were expecting us there; everything we were intercepting from them was telling us that. So we simply told them what they thought anyway. If you like, we reinforced it for them.’

Quinn was staring down at the floor as he had been throughout the time that Edgar was talking. He appeared to be shielding his face. He was biting his nails.

‘As you know, we allowed you to take some material home with you. Quite irregular, of course, but it was the best way to ensure that Nathalie was getting the information. Sure enough, she was passing it on back to her Abwehr control in Paris.

‘Naturally I cannot go into any detail, but I can assure you that this was just one part of the deception. There are many other aspects of it. But what was critical was that the Germans were getting — are getting, indeed – a consistent story, whereby the different sources corroborate each other. If they know that Agent A has no connection whatsoever with Agent C, for instance, yet both are saying the same thing – then what they are both saying has added credibility.’

‘If ... if this is true, then why was she sent to France?’

‘The icing on the cake, if you like. To help further convince the Germans. We’ve sent hundreds of agents over, they liaise with the resistance. In her case, she is there to prepare for the invasion in the Pas de Calais. Up until this morning, that is what we have been telling her. What she is being told now is that the main invasion will still be in the Pas de Calais, that what is going on in Normandy is actually a feint. If they believe it, even for a short while, then they’ll keep their forces in the Pas de Calais and delay reinforcing Normandy. Absolutely crucial then that the Germans get that message, hence our sending her over there.’

‘And what happens when it’s all over?’

‘If we get our hands on her then she will face the due process of law.’

Silence for a few minutes as Quinn took it all in, as far as he was able to. As much as he wanted to argue with Edgar, there was something about what he said that made sense, reluctant as he was to admit it. Despite having been with Nathalie for a year and a half, deep down, he felt that he never really knew her. The questions that he constantly asked about her life in France, the answers that told him nothing. The times when she appeared briefly distracted to the extent that she seemed to be a different person, only to snap out of it and return to him with a smile. On the other hand, her affection for him did not feel forced. When he came home she appeared genuinely pleased to see him. She was an enthusiastic lover, he could not recall many occasions when she had rejected his advances and often she had instigated love-making.

‘But you deceived me!’

‘Unfortunately we did. We had to. It was the only way. Your wife has been such an important source for the Germans that we had no alternative.’

‘Why are you telling me all this, Edgar? What if I do something about it?’

Edgar laughed. ‘I’m telling you, Owen, because you insisted, rather had me over a barrel before, didn’t you? Not sure that you’re better off knowing what you do, ignorance being bliss and all that. But what are you going to do, Owen? Go to the police? Tell the newspapers. Come on, old chap. There’s a war on. No one will believe you. We won’t let anyone believe you. They’ll assume you are mad. Anything you say will be denied. It never happened. Not true. Wife working for us, went to France, not heard of again. Happens in war.’

‘But you just said that if you catch her she will go on trial.’

‘I think that what I said was that if we find her, she will face due process.
If
we find her.’

‘And if not?’

‘Then that may be better all round. Look, Quinn. I’ve taken a calculated risk telling you now; you didn’t really leave me with an alternative. But we need you to play ball with us. We are sure that they are still keeping an eye on you and if that is the case, we need you to be doing what they’d be expecting you to do. May have been better for you to carry on drawing your maps, which was the original plan. But you would have found out in a matter of days anyway that there was to be no invasion in the Pas de Calais. Better this way, we can tell you in a controlled manner. We owe it to you. You have every reason for feeling that you have not been treated well.’

‘But she deceived me – you deceived me! What am I to do now?’

The anger was coming now, Edgar thought. Long overdue.

‘You get on with your life. Look, Quinn. No one is pretending that this is nice for you. But look at it from our point of view. We get one shot at D-Day. If it fails, it could be years before we can try again. We have to use every trick at our disposal to ensure that it does not fail. You, I am afraid, are one of the tricks. You’ll get over it. The Navy will look after you, do the decent thing. Just play ball with us for a few more weeks. Come on. Busy day tomorrow. Try to get some sleep.

ooo000ooo

After Edgar left, Quinn demanded a new bottle of whisky, so he could be sure of having a drink that had not been tampered with. A strange calm came over him. Maybe it was the whisky, maybe it was the quiet of the night, maybe he was still in shock. Quite possibly, it was a combination of all three. But most of all, the calm came from a determination to find his wife. Whatever happened and however long it took, he would find her and the brooch was the first step.

One of the men in the lounge was snoring loudly; he could hear the other shuffling around.

He climbed back into bed naked. For the first time since she went away, he rolled over to her side of the bed. Once again, he imagined he could smell her on the pillow case and feel her indentations on the mattress. He woke up frequently during the night and each time he stared at the cameo brooch on the bedside table before drifting back to sleep.

He awoke at four o’clock on her side of the bed and lay there thinking until the first hint of dawn, when he drifted back to sleep again. He thought of his grandfather, the only other person whom he had loved and lost. He remembered that last conversation with him, when his grandfather asked what he wanted to do when he was older and he had replied that he would like to play cricket for England, at which his grandfather laughed. And then he said he would like to marry a beautiful Frenchwoman. That really was what he wished for then. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ had been his grandfather’s reply.

Those words had come back to haunt him now.

ooo000ooo

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

London
7 June 1944

Owen Quinn was woken by the sound of voices coming from his lounge. He had not slept for more than hour at a time that night. It was seven o’clock.

He stayed in bed until there was a knock on the door. It was seven thirty. One of his guards, for want of a better word, came in with a mug of tea.

‘Roger suggests we may need to think about moving in around an hour, sir. No sign of anyone outside, but just in case, before you open the curtains we’d better wait in the hall. Take your time, sir.’

He did take his time. Checking to see if anything thing else had been overlooked, drinking his tea, repacking his case and listening to the news. As far as he could make out, it was good news. More than one hundred and fifty thousand Allied troops had landed in Normandy the previous day, plus something like twelve thousand vehicles. It was the latter figure that impressed him. You could do all the planning in the world, but until you put a tank on a beach, you would not know what was going to happen.

At eight thirty Roger came into the lounge. Quinn was dressed in his uniform, in his armchair and drinking a third mug of tea. By the side of his bed was the bottle of Talisker that Archibald had given him, less than a quarter of the bottle still to be drunk.

‘Good news, Owen. Cognac popped by last night on his bike. Had a quick look up, and back to Clapham. And the even better news this morning is that he is back in the area, so he’s behaving exactly as we were expecting – now we just need to give him the bait: you. Shall I just run through the plans one more time?’

He left the house at a quarter to nine, after Roger had run through the plans. The exodus was carefully choreographed. Roger left at his normal time of ten to nine, though he would make his way via a circuitous route to Owen’s destination. One of Owen’s two guards, whose name he now discovered was Andrew, left the house immediately before him, the other man and the woman just after him. As he locked the door of his flat, the couple were waiting on the landing. ‘We’ll look after the key for you,’ the man said, his hand held out towards Owen. He hesitated before handing over the key.

He paused at the bottom of the steps, looking back once at the house, not certain when he would enter it again and not sure that he wanted to. It was a pleasant day. Just the weather for his trip. Carrying his case and so walking a bit slower than usual, he set off. A few minutes later he entered Victoria Station from Bridge Place.

‘Take your time when you get there, Owen,’ Roger had told him. ‘Give Cognac a chance to catch up with you and get his bearings. Go and buy a paper, look at the departure board – that kind of thing and then go and buy a ticket. First class. Whatever you do, make sure you get on a train that is not just about to leave. Can’t risk him losing you.’

There was little chance of that. The station was a heaving mass of people, far busier than he would have expected. A crowd was gathered under the departures board and small but noisy groups had formed around any member of the station staff who made the mistake of standing still. As he passed one group he overheard the plea from a harassed ticket inspector.

‘If we all shout and push at the same time, we won’t get anywhere today, will we? For the one hundredth time: there are severe delays on most of our services to the south coast. Some of you may have heard the news. It means that we are running far fewer trains. Now madam, if you care to ...’

Quinn walked over to the departures board. It was now five past nine. It was clear that there were delays on all routes, especially those to the south coast. Some services seem to be cancelled altogether. The next train to Dover was scheduled for nine thirty, which would have been ideal but that was showing ‘delayed’. Another harassed-looking ticket inspector walked by, doing his best to avoid any questions. Owen stepped in front of him and asked about trains to Dover. A small crowd joined him round the ticket inspector, people were anxious to find out what was going on. He just hoped that whoever was meant to be following him would catch what was going on.

‘No trains to Dover so far and I doubt if there will be any through trains all day, sir. If you want to try your chances, I would go to Maidstone East and then see what is happening. If you’re lucky, you’ll then get a connection via either Faversham or Ashford. Good luck sir.’