The Postcard (25 page)

The training kicked in and she lined up her feet dangling out of the opening, waiting for the green light when she must slide out into the abyss. There was no time to panic as she shot out into
the night. The terror of the yawning space eased when she felt the jerk of the harness as the parachute unfurled above her head. Below she could see the faint flickering lights of the reception
party. So far so good. For a few seconds, all she could feel was the euphoria of floating like a balloon in the air, relieved to be alive. It was a perfect landing, the best she’d ever done
out of her five jumps. Then she saw the faces of her allies before they turned their flickering torches onto her face.

‘Come,’ said a rough voice. ‘The flags are flying high.’ He’d given her the right password and she responded with her own phrase.

‘You have the codes for us?’ The man’s face was half hidden.

‘Give me a chance to catch my breath,’ she whispered, taking off her helmet to reveal her tousled blond hair.

‘A woman?’ she heard them mutter in surprise. ‘What next. They must be desperate.’ The men laughed.

‘Our leader won’t like this,’ said a middle-aged man with a moustache.

‘Tough. I can do my job as well as any man. Who notices a woman on a street?’ She was boasting, annoyed that they were not taking her seriously. They muttered amongst themselves out
of earshot. Trust her to land among a rough-looking lot of bigoted men. She had orders to stay put with them for twenty-four hours before breaking away to make her rendezvous.

‘Where are you heading?’ said the man with the moustache.

‘That’s my business,’ she replied. No one should ask such a question.

‘We can’t pass you on unless we have the address and password. Those were our instructions from London,’ he said, pointing her to an old farmhouse. ‘Come and get warm. We
have to check that you are going to a safe place. There’ve been many arrests. Brussels is a dangerous place. Let me check it out first. The name?’

‘A café close to the Grand Place. It is supposed to be safe.’ It was good they were taking these precautions for her, she thought.

‘And the name of your contact? I can check if he is still free,’ the man insisted.

‘The less you know the better for you. That’s what I was told,’ Callie snapped, suddenly feeling tired, hungry and dying for a pee. No one was offering her even a glass of
acorn coffee.

‘Let’s see what’s in your bag. I need to see your identity papers. I hope they’re better than the first lot they sent.’ He examined them with a sneer. ‘This
print is poor and the stamp too faint. You won’t get far with these. We’ll have to get you better ones. You’ll stay here until it is safe to travel but you mustn’t be seen.
The farmer’s wife might be jealous.’

Callie was too tired to protest. It was raining and the men pointed to a barn door. One of them pushed a blanket over her head to keep her dry. ‘Don’t want that fine raincoat soaked.
Go ahead. It’ll be safe to cross the yard.’

She walked ahead, grateful for the warmth of the covering until she felt someone shove her. ‘Hurry up.’ Her hand out went instinctively and she felt someone twisting it behind her
back and grabbing the other. ‘Stop fooling around!’ she snapped. ‘Just because I’m female . . . What the hell . . .! It’s been a long night, boys.’ It was then
that she saw a figure step out of the shadows, and she froze. It was a soldier in German uniform.

‘Don’t worry about him; he’s a tame one in borrowed uniform.’ They opened the barn door, not letting go of Callie’s hands. Now she felt sick with fear. This
wasn’t right. None of it felt right. Waiting for her inside the barn was a man in a leather coat and trilby. The sight of him brought a terrible realization that she had fallen straight into
a trap, dropped into enemy hands like a gift from on high. At least she’d not given them her contact’s name or the codes rolled in her cigarette lighter. But they already knew her
destination and she felt sick that she’d betrayed it so trustingly.

They tied her hands behind her back, snatching her handbag containing her cash and her lighter and her compact. They bundled her into a van and drove through the night. No one said a word to
her. She wanted to spit at them for being traitors to their country but she must now protect herself and her cover. All those months of training down the pan because somewhere someone was feeding
false information to HQ, deceiving the wireless operators. How many other agents had fallen for the same tricks? All she felt was a burning rage. What they wanted now from her was the next contact,
but they’d not get that. She didn’t know him or her, thank God. You can’t tell what you don’t know, but how long would it take them to find this out for themselves?

They kept her awake for four nights and days in a room as awful as the one in Beaulieu where she’d practised for her mission. Questions merged into more questions and threats. They knew
about Special Ops training houses, how the networks linked and where the wireless operators worked. They knew her codename, Meerkat, but that was all.

‘I have no names to give you. If you know our methods then you will know I don’t know them. I have nothing else to say. I can give you nothing more.’ She tried to stand firm
but also remembered to look helpless and uncertain hoping, despite what she had been told, perhaps to play on her interrogator’s sympathies.

‘Who persuaded you into this foolish enterprise? How can the British stoop so low as to use their women for such missions?’ The interrogator, who wore an Abwehr uniform, searched her
face.

‘My boyfriend was killed in the war. I fight for his country and my own.’

‘You will have to do better than that, Charlotte. Your cover is convincing, your papers are adequate. Where is your radio set?’

She managed to smile: so they didn’t know her mission. ‘I have no wireless. I have poor fingers. You can see. I know nothing about such a set.’ She held out her bruised
hands.

‘We have sent a message to London to tell them you have arrived safely. Your future is in our hands. You can work with us or against us. It is your choice. Take us to your rendezvous and
then you will be spared. Co-operate and you’ll not be sent away to a place no decent woman of rank would ever survive. We want the codes.’

‘What codes?’

‘The ones you said you had on landing.’

‘I have no codes. Your men made me feel small so I boasted. They said women were no good.’ She was thinking fast, trying to remember what she had actually said to them.

‘You will take us to your contact.’ His voice was hardening.

‘I told you, I have no contact. I was told to wait further instructions. You have my codename. That is all I have.’ She feared the worst now.

‘Take her away and let her rot for a few weeks. She might be more amenable when she’s sat alone in a cell.’ The man waved her away. She hoped at least she’d convinced him
she was a novice courier and not very competent, just a minnow in the pond and not a wireless operator who they could add to their collection of stooges or shoot on sight.

That night, she sat in the dark damp fusty cell working through everything she’d said and withheld. The networks were ruined and there was nothing she could do to warn HQ. She had achieved
nothing but a few weeks’ respite before they started on her again.

Next time, they stripped her, took away her good clothes and left her half naked, but she’d given them some half-truths, stayed true to her training. By a stroke of luck, they’d
given her back her bag, emptied of cash and the compact, but the cheap cigarette lighter in which her paper was hidden remained inside unexamined. She would ditch it as soon as she found a safe
opportunity.

Callie wondered how long they would feed her and keep her here, and if she gave them nothing more, what next? Would London realize she’d been betrayed and arrested? She knew she must keep
fit and exercise even on the cell’s stone floor, doing a routine of stretches the instructor had taught her. How long did she have before they sent her to a place where she’d never see
daylight and freedom again?

The postcards kept coming but there was something not quite right about them, Phoebe decided. They weren’t real, just a few lines of, ‘I am well and missing you
all. Kisses from Mummy.’ Every time she wrote to Primrose to ask her if she’d heard from Caroline there was never a satisfactory answer. ‘She’s doing splendid work with her
team.’ It didn’t take a genius to work out she was somewhere in France now that D-Day had dawned and Jerry was on the run. Once France was liberated she’d come home at long
last.

Caroline had not seen her son for over a year and he no longer asked about her at bedtimes or kissed her photo with any enthusiasm. I might not have been the world’s best mother myself,
Phoebe thought, but this absence is ridiculous. She was watching Desmond playing snap with Jessie. They’d managed to keep her at Dalradnor even though she was now engaged to Bob Kane and
planning a life in Australia. Bob called in when he could and played football with Desmond and Jacques. ‘This boy needs a man about the house,’ he laughed ruffling the little
boy’s mop of dark curls. ‘He’s turning into a Sheila with all you women at his beck and call.’

Desmond was enrolled at the village school and got plenty of stern teaching from Miss Armour-Brown, but the more pliable females of his home were soon to be reduced in number. A long overdue Red
Cross postcard arrived for Madame from her husband: not the usual twenty-five words this time, but real news. There were plans for their repatriation back to Guernsey as soon as it was safe. This
sent the Laplanche family into a flurry of sewing and buying presents to take back.

That left only Jessie and the boy living in with Phoebe, and if Jessie upped sticks, just the two of them. Sometimes in the silence of the night, Phoebe wondered if Caroline was ever coming back
to them. It was time she made more enquiries at the address she had been given in London. It was time for some honest answers.

Her ENSA engagements continued, but she found them tiring. Sometimes she fell asleep between acts and there was no spring in her step on stage. Her agent kept trying for new character parts at
the film studios but there was always some crisis in Dalradnor to attend to: the coke boiler breaking down, the cart needing attention. The strain of keeping everyone clothed, fed and warm through
a devilishly cold winter was taking its toll on her. Old Dr McClusky said her blood pressure was too high and she must rest more. Sir Lionel had died and Verity moved south, leaving Phoebe feeling
more isolated. They had little in common except the link to Arthur and Caroline, but they exchanged cards at Christmas, this, Phoebe’s only link with Arthur’s family now.

It was hard going back to London to face all the ruins. The mansion apartments were still as she’d left them, but picked over by looters and now with weeds growing through the rubble.
There was no one who really mattered to her in town. Billy had found somewhere near Brighton to live.

Phoebe wrote to the Ministry demanding more information, but all she got in return were assurances that Caroline was doing important work and would contact her as soon as she was free to do so.
She felt she was being fobbed off yet again, and the uneasy feeling that Caroline was not as safe as they made out wouldn’t leave her. When will we ever see you again? she cried, but there
was no one to answer her.

St-Gilles Prison stood like a fortress on the outskirts of Brussels, a grey forbidding place. Few sounds from outside penetrated its thick walls: the occasional muffled hum of
night bombers and the horns of prison traffic through the gates. Callie felt the gloom of incarceration closing round her, the endless monotony of routine with day following dragging day as she
watched the summer shaft of strong light beam through the high window on the cell wall gradually turning into the thin glimmer of winter as the days shortened.

She marked off the days of the week with scratches on the stone floor. Nine months she’d been left to rot, and after those first intense bursts of questioning when she’d stuck
rigidly to her story and given nothing more away, they’d shut her up in solitary confinement. There had been a brief interlude of company when they had introduced a pretty prisoner with a
sympathetic ear, imprisoned for black marketeering – or so she said. All smiles and sympathy, she was trying to ferret out information – a set-up if ever there was one – and when
Callie refused to discuss anything with her the prisoner disappeared as quickly as she had arrived. A change of company had its comforts – another voice, another story – but now she was
left to moulder over her coming fate.

Every sound became familiar: the changing of the guard, the morning slop-out, the spy hole in the door opening as a torch beamed in on her face as the shadows fell. The food was basic: hard
bread, thin soup, slops, and never enough to drink to slake her constant thirst. She felt her body weakening.

If only she had a photograph of someone she cared for to stare at, instead of bare walls. She invented stories about the old couple standing under an apple tree in her cover photo.

Surely, if the Gestapo were going to dispose of her, they would have done so already. Were they playing a cat-and-mouse game? She had no useful information to give them now. She tried tapping
messages in Morse code on the heating pipe that ran around the wall, but so far had had no response. There were whispers that the Allies were on the march and it wouldn’t be long to
Liberation, but she didn’t believe them. Hope was dangerous. She must prepare for the worst. In the exercise yard she gleaned what she could about other political prisoners as they paced feet
behind each other, watched by guards if they drew too close. All she heard was that many men had been sent to the Tir National to be shot. She thought of Edith Cavell, a heroine every schoolgirl
knew. Her last days were spent in this very prison and Callie took courage from the story of her bravery in her final moments.

Getting from one day to the next without falling into that ever gaping pit of despair was what mattered most. It was hard to live with fear and hunger gnawing in her gut. She heard sobs and
screams in the night but so far no one had tortured her, though the threat hung over her like a silent menace, as did the fear of going insane in this isolation.