The Best of Our Spies (44 page)

‘I really do not think that is going to happen. Certainly not if I have anything to do with it.’

ooo000ooo

Pas de Calais, October 1944

Edgar managed to find Owen Quinn a seat on an RAF flight to Le Touquet in the last week of October. He fixed it up on the Monday afternoon, but did not want Quinn to have too much notice; he certainly did not want him going round broadcasting his trip to anyone who would listen. So he let his man at the Admiralty know on the Tuesday that Quinn would be away for a few days on official business, perhaps a week, certainly no more than that.

He waited until Quinn returned home from the pub at around eight o’clock. He was staying longer there each day now and Edgar was getting concerned. Sooner we get him out there and back here, the better. And then he called. ‘Good news - going to France in the morning. I’ll pick you up. Be waiting outside at seven thirty. Only room for a small case. Get a decent night’s sleep.’

Edgar duly picked him at the appointed time. Quinn cut a forlorn figure, standing alone at the bottom of the steps leading up to the main entrance of the house where his flat was, anxiously studying his watch, a small Navy kitbag resting against his leg.

Within a couple of minutes they were on the main road to Oxford and by nine o’clock they were at RAF Benson in Oxfordshire. Two hundred and seventy-one Squadron were flying de Havilland Dragon Rapides into France and Edgar had called in one or two favours to get him aboard, along with a lot of documents, a crate of whisky which he was concerned that Quinn might think was for him, an army padre and a couple of Canadian Army officers. Edgar looked after such formalities as there were, which seemed to comprise having a chat with a group captain in a Nissen hut.

At quarter to ten they were led out across the tarmac to the plane. Edgar came with him as far as the steps and shook his hand (‘Good luck and bon voyage!’) and by ten o’clock he was airborne.

Owen Quinn left England for his first ever visit to France with the last vestiges of summer hanging uncertainly in the air. When he landed in France an hour later, the winds had a colder edge to them and the sky more grey than blue. The plane landed and taxied back to the small cluster of buildings.

‘Don’t worry, Quinn, you’ll be met at the other end,’ Edgar had told him.

‘By whom?’

‘Don’t worry. They will know who you are. You will be well looked after. It has all been taken care of.’

A light brown Renault was parked between the De Havilland and the buildings. As he climbed down the steps a woman climbed out of the car, struggling to tie a scarf around her head as the wind took hold. As he came past the car she asked him whether he was Owen Quinn and he told her he was. ‘How did you recognise me?’

‘The Navy uniform. My name is Nicole. Glad to meet you.’

Nicole was immaculately dressed and extremely proper. Quinn realised after just a few minutes that she was one of those people who would say as much as she needed to and then no more. Her silences were not to be interpreted as rudeness, it would just be that she had said what she needed to. He suspected that it was a natural trait, reinforced by years of secret work.

‘We will head straight for Boulogne sur Mer. It should take an hour, but it is difficult to judge,’ she said as the car headed north from the airport. ‘The roads are a bit of a mess. There are some good stretches though and apparently this machine can do seventy miles an hour but I’ve not yet managed to get up there yet.’

‘What car is it?’

‘A Renault Primaquatre. Courtesy of a German official in Calais. Apparently he purloined it at the beginning of the war in Paris, so as long as I don’t drive it down there I should be all right.’

Owen was shocked when the car entered Boulogne just after one o’clock. He had not been expecting the extent of the damage that he saw all around him. Groups of German prisoners of war in their grey uniforms were clearing rubble away without much enthusiasm.

Nicole glanced over at him in the passenger seat and smiled. ‘We’re responsible for most of this you know. RAF. Hit the town very hard. Big submarine base in the port. Lots of bombs went astray, as you can see. Canadians had a bit of a battle coming in, but luckily we are being treated as liberators so there is not too much ill feeling.’

The Renault pulled up in front of a small hotel in the town centre, which appeared to be the only undamaged building in its block.

‘You’re booked in here. I’ll give you an hour to check in and get unpacked and then I will meet you in reception.’

By two o’clock they were the only customers in a café near the Notre Dame in the main square, apart from a young Canadian officer talking intently in French to the waitress. When they were finally able to attract her attention they ordered from one of the two dishes remaining on the menu and ate their omelettes in silence. When Nicole had finished, which was some time after Owen, she neatly arranged her cutlery on the plate. She could now start talking.

‘Very well. I do understand that this is a very difficult situation for you. I hope that you will appreciate that it is also a very difficult situation for the people out here, especially those that I will be taking you to meet this afternoon. People here do not know the truth about your wife and it ought to remain that way. As far as they are concerned, she was an SOE agent who came out here and who then disappeared. It is best that they do not know she is your wife. I have told them that you are a British officer who has come to find her. They are suspicious, but then suspicion is endemic at the moment. It is everywhere. Do you speak French?’

‘Some.’

‘Are you familiar with the word
épuration
? No? It means purge, or purification. There is plenty of it going on at the moment. This country was occupied for four years, parts of it still are. The Germans could not have managed such an orderly occupation without a good deal of co-operation from the French population. Most people just got on with their lives, did not want to cause trouble. A few collaborated with the Germans, far more than the French would have you believe. And then a few joined the resistance – but this time far fewer than the French would have you believe. Do you realise that it was almost a year into the occupation before the first German soldier was killed by the resistance? A bit of a myth has grown up around the resistance, I ought to tell you. For most of the occupation,
résistants
were seen as a nuisance by the general population. They just wanted to get on with their lives. Then as the tide of war changed, suddenly everyone is in the resistance. The
résistants
even call them the
Septembrists
, the people who only emerged once the invasion of Normandy began.’

Nicole stood up and left some money on the table and put on her coat. She did not continue talking until they were back in the car. They had to drive slowly. Enough rubble had been cleared to make the roads passable, but in most cases the road was not yet wide enough for two vehicles to pass. As most of the other vehicles were military, the Renault was constantly having to pull in.

On the outskirts of the town she halted in front of a badly damaged building.

‘This is the factory where your wife worked, or at least the remains of it. She assembled electrical parts.’ They paused for a few moments and then drove on. The road became easier outside the town. Quinn noticed that they had entered a village called Hesdin-l’Abbé, where they appeared to be the only car on the road. Just by the church they pulled up outside a row of cottages.

‘And this is where your wife stayed while she was in the area. This house here.’ It was the only one in the row where all the curtains were drawn. ‘She lodged here with another member of the resistance group. They were all based in this village. We are going to meet two of them now. You need to know that while she was here, your wife was known as Geraldine.’

‘Was that her real name?’

‘No, of course not. No one knows her real name. Geraldine was the name we gave her. Geraldine Leclerc. And remember. They do not know the truth about her, whatever they suspect. They wanted to be able to tell you what happened themselves and I agreed to that. We owe it to them.’

The house was larger than some of the others that Quinn had noticed in the village and it was set back from the road, behind a low stone wall and a pretty though slightly unkempt front garden. It was on the outskirts of the village and Owen could see a forest rising in the distance. Nicole signalled for Owen to pause halfway down the path while she went in. A minute later she signalled for him to enter.

A man and a woman in their late thirties or perhaps early forties were sitting around the table in a large kitchen. Neither of them smiled when he entered the room, though the man did point to an empty chair where he should sit. Through the kitchen window, Owen could see an older man in the garden.

‘Françoise, Lucien – this is Lieutenant Commander Quinn from the Royal Navy.’ They both nodded. Owen noticed that the man was sitting in a wheelchair and winced whenever he moved. ‘He has come to France to try to find Geraldine. He may have a few questions for you, but first, please could you tell him what happened?’

Lucien made a hand movement towards his wife. She would speak. Owen noticed that her eyes were red and she was tightly clutching a large white handkerchief, twisting it as she spoke.

‘We were not really an active resistance cell until March or April this year. Pierre had joined the FTP earlier in the war but was not very active. In March they asked him to put together a group in this village. The FTP operates in cells of four people, a leader and three others. So he asked Jean to join him. He was one of his pupils and was a bright boy, very strong and knew the countryside very well. And then he asked us. In fact, he did not want a husband and wife to be in the same group, but he needed us both. Lucien is... was... a
cheminot
, he worked on the railways. I was a supervisor at a factory in Boulogne. Because it was supplying equipment for the German Army I had good security clearance, it was easy for me to get in and out of Boulogne. In any case, this village is not exactly full of people queuing up to join the resistance. Geraldine joined us towards the end of April I think it was. Lucien?’

Her husband nodded.

‘At the end of April then. She landed not far from here and brought a transmitter with her and explosives. I got her a job at the factory and she lodged with Jean in his father’s house. It was only Jean there as his father had been sent to Germany and his mother is dead. It was fine, there were no problems. We would make transmissions to London and Geraldine would get the information that we were to prepare for a landing in this area. We carried out some sabotage on the railways.’

Lucien muttered something. His wife continued.

‘Geraldine had been trained in explosives in England, so she was our expert. Lucien wonders how much of an expert she really was. What would have been our biggest act of sabotage did not happen. It was near here actually. Lucien had information that a German supply train was going to be passing through a wood late at night. If we could have blown it up it would have caused major damage. Because of the position, it would have taken days for them to recover the train and then they would have had to repair the track. Lucien went down with Geraldine to lay the explosives while the rest of us stood guard.’

‘I never saw her make the connection, so I do not know the truth,’ said Lucien. ‘All I know is that afterwards, Pierre was very suspicious. He could just not understand why the charge had failed. But I never checked the connection, that was her job. I was keeping an eye on the track.’ He shifted himself uncomfortably in his wheelchair and continued.

‘But we did carry out some successful sabotage after that. Not very big jobs, we had lost too much of our explosives already on that first attempt, but it was enough to cause a bit of trouble.

‘We carried on through June and July. Transmissions, sabotage. Our main job was to wait until the invasion here and then do what we could to help. But then in the middle of July, Geraldine disappeared.’

‘Do you remember the date?’ asked Owen. He was looking up from the small notebook he had in front of him.

Both Françoise and Lucien laughed bitterly. Françoise’s eyes filled with tears as she carried on speaking.

‘Oh yes, we remember the date. The seventeenth of July. It was a Monday. Monday, the seventeenth of July.’ There was a long and complete silence, apart from the thud of wood being chopped in the garden.

‘I had gone to Samer to see my sister who had just had a baby. My father came with me.’ She nodded towards the older man in the garden. ‘We were about to return when Father Pierre turned up. He is the priest in Samer. The priest from this village, Father Raymonde, had come to see him. The Gestapo were raiding our house and looking for me.’ She broke down into a sob. Lucien continued.

‘I was at the station in Boulogne when they arrested me. The Gestapo. I was taken to their headquarters in the town and thrown into a cell. Jean was already in the cell next to me. He had been badly beaten. I think he must have fought with them. There was blood everywhere. They took it in turns that day and through the night to torture us. Who else was in the group, where was Geraldine, what did we know about her, where is the transmitter, our weapons. They wanted to know everything.

‘Pierre told us that if we ever got caught, hold out for as long as possible – even a few hours will give the others time to get away. Of course I did not know that Pierre was already dead.’

Quinn looked up, raising his eyebrows.

‘Yes, he shot himself when they came to arrest him. And, of course, I had no idea whether Françoise was safe. But I said nothing. Jean, he argued with them the whole time, he fought them. At about six in the morning – that would be the Tuesday – they must have been doing the most terrible things to him. I heard him cry for his mother. He let out this terrible howl and then there was silence and soon after that I saw them carry his body from the cell. I don’t know what they did to him in the end, but it was terrible. I have heard animals caught in traps and this was far worse.