The Best of Our Spies (34 page)

It was a quarter past ten by the time he arrived at the bedsit in Clapham. He would encode his message and keep it as brief as possible, though there was plenty to tell Berlin tonight.

He sank onto the narrow bed, with its greasy candlewick bedspread and a gentle tilt towards the wall. Not the kind of place he could bring anyone back to. He would have to find another place soon anyway. He fought sleep.

He knew he was good, quite possibly the best, which was why he had survived so long. From the little that he could gather, he was one of the few German agents still active in Britain. Maybe now that the woman was in France, he was the only one still around, though he did suspect that she possibly had a radio-man somewhere out there and of course whoever had made the phone calls the day before. He had been careful today, he always was. But in his heart, he knew that they would catch him sooner or later. A policeman would be lucky or he would make a mistake. He had been so exhausted on the journey back that he did not like to think what would have happened if he had been stopped by the police in Deal or Ramsgate or if some officious train guard had decided to be difficult.

And all for what? Germany was going to lose the war. Even allowing for the Allied propaganda, the evening paper made it clear that the invasion of Normandy seemed to be a success so far.

What would happen then?

Where would he go?

Would someone in the Abwehr turn him in during an interrogation?

And had it been worth it?

For the first few years, of course it had been. He’d been a believer then. But now it was just a matter of survival. Maybe it was now time to put himself first. To contemplate retirement. He hauled the transmitter from under the bed. Ask me if it has been worth it when they lead me from the condemned cell. Ask me if it has been worth it when they slip the noose round my neck. Ask me then.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Pas de Calais
5–7 June 1944

Just before ten thirty on the night of 5 June, Geraldine and Jean left the house on the edge of the village where they had been listening to the BBC broadcast. The curfew was well underway, so they left their bikes in the house and returned to Jean’s cottage via the covered bridle path at the rear of the house. It brought them out into a country lane which they had to cross before entering the churchyard through the back gate. The graveyard was wrapped protectively around the church, the moonlight picking out some of the inscriptions on the gravestones. They crossed the graveyard, past the bleak memorial with the large cross on top of it, with the names of the twenty-five villagers who had fallen in the Great War picked out in metal characters. In her less composed moments, she imagined them pointing accusingly at her. The memorial had even started to appear in her dreams. The stone angels that adorned the gravestones had developed a habit of flying into her dreams, quick to arrive, reluctant to leave like the worst type of guest. She could barely sleep at night for the noise they made on the windowpane. When she entered the churchyard these days she looked down all the time, doing her best to avoiding the accusing looks. When she was very young, her father would take her to the cemetery where his parents were buried. ‘The people here,’ he would say, pointing at the statues and the graves, ‘they are the only ones who know
everything
that is going on.’ It had taken her nearly twenty five years to come to believe it.

The peacocks in the chateau grounds could be heard in the distance as they entered the Impasse de l’Église and Jean’s cottage.

The curtains in the front room were drawn tight and they sat around the table in darkness, apart from a band of pale light coming in through the half-open door that led to the kitchen. Jean poured two glasses of wine.

‘What do we do now, Geraldine?’

When she had first met Jean, she had seen him as little more than a boy, deferring to her, seeking her approval and enjoying having a woman in the house. At other times, he was a man, strong and fast, and when they were out in the fields or woods at night, there was no one she would rather have with her. He never panicked and displayed a rare courage. She could never anticipate whether the Jean she was speaking to would be Jean the boy or Jean the man. The previous week she had got up in the middle of the night to fetch a glass of water and caught sight of Jean in his room, towelling himself down. What had unnerved her that night was not the sight of Jean, but the memories seeing him like that evoked of Owen. She lay in bed that night, not knowing what she would not give up for the chance to have him there with her for just one, unsettled night. By the time dawn pricked through the thin curtains, she wished she had spent the night with the stone angels.

Now he was Jean the boy, relying on her to know what to do.

‘You heard the message tonight. Plan Green, the railways. Tomorrow we will need to contact London, so we will have to use the transmitter. Then we will know when we are to begin the sabotage. They will also give us more information. We need to sleep, Jean, the invasion could be starting very soon. It could even be underway now.’

Neither of them slept well that night. Few people in the Pas de Calais did either. The Allied planes overhead were incessant. The sounds of bombs exploding in the direction of Boulogne and further to the north was deafening. At one stage Jean knocked on her door and asked whether they should be doing anything.

‘Like what, Jean?’

‘Maybe we should take to the hills, if the Allies are coming in tonight, they will need help.’

‘We stay here; try to sleep.’

He hesitated in the doorway. For one tense moment she wondered whether he was going to come in. She could not possibly risk that happening.

Pierre stopped by the house early the next morning. There were rumours that the Allied invasion had started, but much further west, perhaps in Normandy. The priest had told him that some villagers had reported seeing British paratroopers. No doubt there were other reports that General de Gaulle was already marching down the Champs Élysees. Was the tricolour flying over the Hôtel de Ville in Boulogne?

‘We will meet again this evening. By then we will know if anything has happened. Until then, we go about our lives normally. I go to school, Jean, to the farm. Geraldine, you go to the factory.’

There were more roadblocks than usual on the road into Boulogne and in the town itself. Each roadblock had had at least one extra soldier on duty. One soldier who examined her card in the last roadblock before the factory looked no more than eighteen. His helmet was a size too big, but what was most noticeable was that his hands were shaking as he examined the identity card, holding it upside down at first. Geraldine gave him a smile when he returned it and he looked as if he was about to burst into tears of gratitude.

She could see plumes of smoke rising from the port area in the distance and she cycled past one block that had been reduced to rubble overnight. But if the invasion had begun, it was not in this area. Apart from the normal sounds of the town, there was none of the noise and activity she would have expected with an invasion. But the coded messages on the BBC had been very clear. The invasion should have begun by now.

The cacophony of noise in the factory made it difficult to talk. It also made it difficult to be overheard, which was always an advantage in her passing conversations with Françoise.

‘Have you heard anything?’

‘Just the same rumours that everyone has heard. Philippe says there has been a broadcast on the BBC that the invasion has begun, but no one has heard anything or seen anything.’

An hour later Françoise brushed past, pushing her slightly against the bench. Geraldine did not look up, carried on assembling a plug and when she had finished went to the toilet. Françoise was washing her hands, they huddled closer together. Françoise turned up the tap to help muffle her voice.

‘One of the drivers has just returned from Calais. He says that German radio has announced a big Allied invasion in Normandy – on the beaches. They say that their forces are defending successfully.’

‘They would do.’

‘Surely, they wouldn’t report something if it hadn’t happened. I thought that the invasion was supposed to be in this region?’

‘I thought so too. It still could be. This could be an attempt to trick the Germans – to get them to move their forces away from this region.’

‘We will see tonight.’

At lunchtime Geraldine went out, telling Françoise she was going to ride into town to buy some bread and to see if she could find out any information. A block past the factory she stopped and dismounted and knelt down by the side of the road to tie her shoelaces. An open top lorry full of troops drove past. She was used to them calling out to her, but this lorry drove by in silence, the troops all looking sternly ahead. Secure that no one was watching, she felt under the saddle and sure enough, a note had been secreted there. Lange had been in touch, she was not surprised. She glanced at it and hurried off to his meeting point.

She passed a bakery and noticed a smaller than usual queue and stopped to buy the bread, thankful that she had remembered her coupon.

The church of St Nicholas was halfway between the Hôtel de Ville and the post office. Barely one building around the church remained intact. Women were hunched in the rubble, picking through it as if it was harvest time, not knowing quite what they were looking for. There would have been a time when you could have seen the church from far off, but the top half of the steeple had disappeared during an RAF raid in May. Miraculously, all the stained glass windows had somehow remained intact and the church still functioned, shrugging off the damage as an expected inconvenience.

Although he varied his meeting places like the experienced Abwehr man he was, this was Georg Lange’s preferred rendezvous. He liked the mixture of noise and silence and the contrast between the damage which shocked people and the magnificence of the architecture which left them in awe. People came to the church to pray, or to seek shelter, or just to sit for a few minutes. Some came to meet friends. Many, no doubt, liked to believe that its sanctity gave them a temporary immunity from the war, even if they knew that was fanciful.

Being lunchtime, the church was busy, but not packed – more people would be at the Notre Dame in the centre of the town. Lange was on a pew at the front of the church, to the side. He had taken care that no one was sitting around him and was on the seat closest to the aisle, apparently deep in prayer. Few people would feel able to disturb him and ask to be let through. Geraldine positioned herself in the row behind him, just to his left.

She crossed herself and was seemingly lost in prayer too. Lange leaned back in his seat, taking care to look around. There was no one anywhere near them.

‘You have heard the news? The Allies have landed in Normandy. They are on the beaches, many of them have broken through. Tens of thousands of them. This is not Dieppe.’

‘Is this the main invasion then?’

Lange turned round, looking directly into her eyes with a faintest hint of a very brief smile.

‘That is what I was hoping you would tell us.’ He turned back to face the altar, where an elderly and overweight priest with a dirty cassock was hobbling with the aid of a stick that threatened to snap at any moment. He picked up a candle holder and disappeared behind a curtain, releasing a shower of dust as he did so.

‘The information you have been giving us was very clear – that the main invasion will be in this region. It is probable that this is still the case and that the invasion of Normandy is just a diversion, but we need more hard information. I cannot tell you what it is like today. Some generals want to move troops from here to Normandy now, others think it is a trap. The Führer is convinced that the main Allied forces will still land in the Pas de Calais. One minute they want me back in Paris, the next I am to remain here. You are very important to our intelligence, I hope you realise that. What are your instructions?’

‘One of the coded messages last night was for our group. We are Plan Green, which means we have to sabotage the railway system. Heaven knows, we checked out the likely spots often enough. But we have to contact London tonight, we should get more detailed instructions then. We are going to the woodman’s hut in the forest. Can you arrange for the patrols to keep away from there?’

‘That is so difficult. I have not been able to tell anyone the real reason why I am here. The Gestapo just think that I am here for general intelligence duties, but they suspect. They know that I am running an agent, they aren’t complete fools. You know what those boys are like. They have no subtlety. They would just arrest the whole cell. They would ruin the operation. Lieutenant General Heim is the garrison commander here. I know him well enough, we’ve dined together a couple of times, we have mutual friends in Frankfurt. He has some idea as to why I am here. I will talk to him this afternoon and suggest he put extra patrols on the shoreline tonight. That ought to draw people away from inland patrols, but it would be too risky to ask for much more than that. You’re just going to need to be very careful. And Magpie ...?’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t want you blowing up railway lines, you understand?’

‘I understand, but our orders are to attack the railway lines. How is it going to look if we don’t do it? I am the one who has had the training. If we don’t carry out the attacks, the group will get suspicious.’

‘I know. You will have to be clever. But if the Gestapo finds out that one of my agents is blowing up a railway line, that will give them all the excuse they need. As it is, they would love to meet you. In any case, we can’t risk damaging the railways. We need them to transport troops and equipment. It is the best way to move tanks. We must not shoot ourselves in the foot. I will see you the same time tomorrow. Notre Dame.’ Lange had stood up now. As he walked past her he tapped her baguette and smiled.

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