British Bulldog (12 page)

‘I’m so sorry,’ Mirabelle murmured, genuinely moved. When the girl came home almost everyone she knew must have disappeared.

Catherine stared at Mirabelle through the burgeoning tears. She wondered what had made her say so much. There was something about this older woman. ‘What did you want to ask Christine Moreau? You said you were looking for someone.’

‘Yes. A British pilot. Royal Air Force. Philip Caine.’

Catherine shrugged. ‘The English left before I came back. I don’t recognise the name.’

‘What happened to Christine Moreau’s lover?’

Catherine looked as if she might spit. ‘I don’t know and I don’t want to know. He probably went back to Germany. Von der Grün. It sounds as if he had a castle. That’s what I don’t
understand – the Germans killed millions and most of them are allowed to go back to a normal life. A year or two in prison. Even ten years – what’s that? And we – all of us – our lives will never be normal again.’

‘Why did you come back to Paris?’ Mirabelle wondered out loud. ‘This place must be the most difficult city you could possibly choose if you want to move on.’

Catherine’s eyes sparked. ‘I belong here,’ she said fiercely.

Mirabelle gazed out of the window. Perhaps she might ask herself the same question about Brighton; perhaps her answer would be the same too. ‘Von der Grün,’ she whispered.

She didn’t recall the name of Christine Moreau’s lover. Not from her days in Nuremberg or earlier, when she worked in Jack’s office at the SOE. The girl was right – he sounded aristocratic. A Dutch officer had made her giggle once with his impression of an upper-class German. ‘Not Van Heek,’ he had shrieked like a maniac, playing it up for all he was worth. ‘Von Heek. One little vowel makes a big difference, Fräulein. A whole estate’s worth. The village, my dear lady, and everything within it belongs to me on account of that little o.’

The good thing about the aristocracy – German or English – was that they were easily traced, Mirabelle thought. Perhaps she would be able to track him down. If Christine Moreau wasn’t prepared to talk to her perhaps von der Grün himself would be more accommodating. Her skin prickled – it was a long time since she’d interviewed a Nazi face to face. She tried to shake off the feeling of dread that crept over her. The war was over, after all, and such a conversation would be illuminating. If von der Grün knew about Philip Caine it would mean Christine had been more on the German side than the British when she played her dangerous game. If he did not, she had been a loyal double agent. As she turned towards the door, Mirabelle found herself curious to find out which it was.

‘You’ve been very helpful,’ she said to Catherine. ‘Thank you.’

Chapter 16

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect
.

M
irabelle walked back along rue Rambuteau. Her first stop, she thought, should be the National Library of France.
La Bibliothèque Nationale
. She had almost reached Les Halles when she caught sight of him. The man in the homburg. He was coming out of the market, eating a red apple as he crossed the street – and ahead of her, he couldn’t know she was there. Her curiosity piqued, Mirabelle decided to turn the tables and fall in behind. It was only fair –he’d followed her, after all. She kept carefully out of sight as he crossed the road and headed in the direction of Saint-Eustache. The towers at either end of the church’s grand façade were clearly visible above the lower roofs of the tenements on either side. The man flung his apple core into the gutter as he passed the church. Mirabelle kept her distance. The pavement widened into a little square and the fellow slowed slightly as he lit a cigarette before cutting down the rue du Jour and disappearing inside the café where she had first seen him the day before.

So, she thought, he’s watching Christine Moreau. He must be. She checked her watch. It was still early. There was no sign of life in the dressmaker’s apartment, but then yesterday Christine had been embroidering by the light from the window. Mirabelle had no desire to visit Miss Moreau again, but she was curious about what was going on in this little backstreet. Carefully, she peered into the café from the other side of the
road. The man was chatting to another fellow who was sitting at the table the first had occupied the day before. An empty brandy glass was cleared away efficiently and a coffee laid down. These men knew the place, and the waiter, it seemed, knew their order. It looked as if they had been stationed here for some time.

Mirabelle pulled back. Was the man in the Mackintosh part of a surveillance team? If there was a twenty-four-hour watch on Christine Moreau there had to be a good reason. What on earth was the woman up to? Mirabelle turned and walked on slowly, keeping her face out of the men’s field of vision, then pulled into a doorway as she heard the door of the café click open. Keeping one eye on the pavement, she fumbled in her handbag as if she was looking for a key. The second man emerged into the street, pulling his coat around him. He was taller than the first but cut from the same jib and, Mirabelle noticed, he wore an identical Mackintosh and a homburg – as if it was some kind of uniform. Often you could tell where someone came from by their clothes, but these outfits were as hard to place as the man’s accent in the church the day before. Mirabelle wondered whether they might be American. Were they FBI? Jack had always decried the Americans. Their codes were so simplistic a child could unravel them. During the war the SOE had convinced the Yanks that they should handle that side of things. In fact, they had insisted they handle it. British codemakers stumped the world. The Americans couldn’t keep up. ‘They’re famous but incompetent. FBI. That’s what it bloody stands for,’ Jack had said. But the Yanks took the criticism of their coding abilities well. Everyone had to give them that. ‘They’re so damn well balanced it makes you want to push it to see how far you’d get,’ she remembered some wag quipping at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. The man yesterday had been incompetent. She’d given him the slip as if it was a first day
exercise and he a rookie. She mustn’t get cocky, she told herself. Just because she’d done it once.

It was for this reason that she gave the second man a decent headstart before she set off in his wake. She felt safer following him than the first man – as far as she knew, this one had never seen her. He headed round the corner and Mirabelle kept her distance as she tailed him past the seafood display in the window of
Au Pied de Cochon
and up towards the cafés and restaurants on the main road. He stopped to buy cigarettes from a kiosk, and although she didn’t want to get close enough to hear what he said, she wasn’t too far away to see that when he smiled at the pretty girl behind the counter, his teeth were certainly not American. The Yanks loved dental work. Their smiles were almost identically perfect, but this man’s mouth betrayed a less fastidious approach.

Two blocks along, he turned into a side street and disappeared inside a boarding house. Mirabelle peered through the window as she walked past. A shabby dining room was empty of guests, and beyond it a dimly lit hallway and a staircase were similarly deserted. On the upper floors the shutters were barred. Was there a sitting room to the rear or had the man gone to his room? Mirabelle turned back, stared at the hotel’s bashed brass doorknob and decided to risk going inside.

The door was hung so that it opened and closed with a slight wobble. The hallway was silent apart from the ticking of the clock on the wall behind the reception desk. Sporting her best Parisian accent, Mirabelle called out. No one came so she peered over the high-fronted reception and squinted at the register, trying to make out the names. It only took a few seconds. Yes, there was only one party of two men. She smiled. They were booked in as Les Frères Kakarov and had taken the cheapest rooms on the top floor. So the man’s accent had been Russian. Brothers, indeed. The Mackintosh and homburg were good choices, she reflected. The disguise had rendered both
men practically anonymous – at least she hadn’t been able to guess where they were from. Russians were generally welcome in Paris. Long before the war broke out the city was the centre of the White Russian world as supporters of the Tsar fled the Communists and set up home elsewhere. Tea houses had opened in Passy serving borscht and caviar, and all things Russian had become fashionable for a while. More recently Russia had been an ally during the war, though the French natural sentiment, like the British, was probably to the left of Hitler rather than to the right of Stalin. Still, two Russian men spending some time in the City of Light would be made very welcome. So why were Les Frères Kakarov here? What was Christine Moreau up to?

Mirabelle was still beside the desk when the front door opened behind her and a woman stepped confidently onto the tiled floor of the hallway. She was plump and rosy-cheeked. Her coat was open and she was wearing an olive-green dress trimmed with tatty black lace, which Mirabelle couldn’t help thinking would be more suitable for the evening even if it had seen better days. The woman sniffed and smiled at once. When she spoke her accent was from another part of Paris – somewhere poorer.

‘I’m looking for the Russian. He wanted me at ten o’clock.’

‘Top floor,’ Mirabelle replied helpfully. ‘He just went up.’ She gave the woman a head start and then sneaked upstairs behind her. The stairway was uncarpeted and she tiptoed on the balls of her feet so as not to make a noise. The walls might once have been painted caramel but they had long faded to grey and were unsullied by any attempt to refresh them. The building ran to five storeys and the stairs were steep. Mirabelle’s heart pounded as she held onto the banister. Above her she could hear the girl knocking sharply and the Russian’s door creaking open and then closing. Encouraged, she picked up her pace. The top-floor landing accommodated three bedrooms; the nearest lavatory
was on the floor below. The skylight was caked in old leaves and grit; cupola would have been too grand a name for it. A brick chimney stack bore down from above. Mirabelle put her ear to the first door, then she knelt down to look through the keyhole and was rewarded with a view of the lady in the olive-green dress removing her attire. The Russian had his hands curled round her frame as she wrestled with a zip. She looked as if she was propped against the bed frame, ready at any moment to fall into place. The room was furnished sparsely and the bed not wide enough to share. Unperturbed, the Russian and the woman he had hired piled on top of each other. The springs groaned. Mirabelle smiled slightly. As long as this continued she was safe from interruption.

She turned her attention to the other two rooms on the landing. A preliminary peep through each keyhole revealed that neither appeared to be occupied, but she wanted to be sure. She slipped her hand inside her bag and removed her SOE lock picks – the ones Eddie had given her. The gift had been tongue in cheek but the picks had come in handy several times. Recently she had remarked to Vesta that they were so much more useful than face powder or toffees, items that seemed to take up most of the room in Vesta’s handbag.

The hotel’s locks were cheaply made and presented no problem. The first room had definitely not been occupied for days, if not weeks. A thin layer of dust covered the bedside table and the air smelled faintly of turpentine. When Mirabelle put a hand on the single bed it felt damp. The second room must have been used more recently. There was no dust to speak of on the chest of drawers and the window was open an inch. However, there were no personal possessions – not so much as a used match. The wardrobe was empty, and there was nothing under the bed. If the other Russian was staying here he would appear to be travelling light. Perhaps the Brothers Kakarov shared the room next door, using it in shifts.

She let herself out and crept silently back downstairs. She wasn’t sure this was getting her closer to Philip Caine, but even though Christine Moreau had chased her off she didn’t like to think of any woman being under covert surveillance. Besides, the urge to report back was ingrained. The flow of information was vital. An agent in the field couldn’t tell what might be important back at HQ. She’d have to tell someone at home what was going on.

At the reception desk an old man was now perched on a high stool.
‘Madame?’
he said as Mirabelle descended the last flight. His voice betrayed his absent-mindedness. He didn’t recognise her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a guest.

‘Bonjour,’
Mirabelle replied and walked straight onto the street, looking for a post office. Working from memory, she took a right turn and was shortly rewarded with a fancy set of railings and a blue sign for La Poste. Inside, she headed for the telegraph desk.

‘To London, please,’ she said. ‘Duke’s Hotel, St James’s.’

The young girl behind the desk sat up straight. ‘What name?’

‘Edward Brandon,’ Mirabelle spelled it out.

She paused a moment as the girl took it down. A telegram was a comparatively public way to convey information. Mirabelle bit her lip. She picked up a pencil to write the message.
Miss Moreau serving gin at home but across the road men drinking vodka
. It was the best she could come up with and Eddie would know whom to pass it on to, or at least he’d be able to find out. She hadn’t intended to be a sneak but inexplicably she felt sorry for Christine. No one should remain that hurt for so long, and besides, the Russians weren’t allies any more. Neither of the French nor of the British.

‘Just sign it from MB,’ she said. She hadn’t had a code name and she’d never reported to Eddie anyway. Rather wistfully she thought that the last nickname she had had was when her grandmother called her a little plum.

The girl at the desk silently translated the sentence and looked up, raising her brows a fraction. Mirabelle smiled and laid a note on the counter, and the child relaxed, calculating the cost and dispensing change. People often sent inexplicable messages. It was usually because they were trying to keep the telegram as short as possible. Messages were charged by the letter. As things went this was a long one. Mirabelle popped the coins in her purse.

‘Good.’ The girl tried out her English. ‘It goes now. You have a busy day?’

‘Thank you.’ Mirabelle smiled. ‘I’m going to the library.’