Cold Harbour (9 page)

“Major Osbourne, I should tell you, has had personal experience of such a situation,” Munro said. “He knows what he’s taking about.” She sat there staring at him, throat dry. “As I’ve said, we would put you in by Lysander,” he told her gently. “No parachute training necessary. No time. We have only three days to prepare you.”

“That’s ridiculous.” She could feel a rising panic. “I can’t play Anne-Marie. It’s been four years. You know more about her than I do.”

“She was your twin sister,” he said remorselessly. “Same face, same voice. None of those things have changed. We can handle the rest. Her hairstyle, her taste in clothes, make-up, perfume. We’ll show you photographs, tell you how she handled herself at the Château. We
will
make it work.”

“But it wouldn’t be enough, can’t you see?” Genevieve said. “Except for a few familiar faces, it would be a house of strangers. New servants since I was last there, plus the Germans. I wouldn’t know who was who.” Suddenly, the nonsense of the whole business made her laugh. “I’d need a still small voice whispering in my ear every step of the way, and that isn’t possible.”

“Isn’t it?” He opened a drawer, took out a cigar and clipped the end carefully with a penknife. “Your aunt had a chauffeur. A man called Dissard.”

“René Dissard,” she said. “Of course. He’s served the family all his life.”

“He worked with Anne-Marie. He was her right hand. He’s in the next room now.”

She stared at him in astonishment. “René? Here? But I don’t understand.”

“He was supposed to drive your sister to St. Maurice, then accompany her to Paris by train. In reality, he was to go to ground with the local Resistance unit in that area while she was flown out to wait for her return. When they radioed the news of what had happened, we sent in another plane to pick him up on the following night.”

“May I see him?”

“Of course.”

Craig Osbourne opened the far door and she stood up and crossed to join him. It was a small study lined with books, blackout curtains drawn. There were a couple of armchairs on either side of a gas fire and not much else—except René Dissard.

He stood up slowly, the same old René, totally unchanged, one of the eternal figures from childhood that always seemed to have been there. Small, broad-shouldered under the cord jacket, iron-grey hair and beard, the scar on the right cheek disappearing under the black patch, evidence of the wound that had cost him an eye as a young soldier at Verdun.

“René? Is it you?”

He recoiled, for a moment the same fear there that she had seen in her father’s, as if the dead walked, but he recovered quickly.

“Mademoiselle Genevieve. It is so wonderful to see you.”

His hands were shaking and she held them tight. “My aunt is well?”

“As may be expected in the circumstances.” He shrugged. “The Boche. You must understand that things are very different at the Château these days.” He hesitated. “This is very terrible, this thing which has taken place.”

It was as if something clicked inside her head, a reality to things now, because of him. “You know what they want me to do, René?”

“Oui, Mamselle.”

“You think I should do it?”

“It would complete what she started,” he said gravely. “There would be less sense of waste.”

She nodded, turned, brushed past Craig Osbourne and went back into the other room.

“All right?” Munro said.

And then a sudden revulsion hit her. It wasn’t that she was afraid; simply that something in her protested totally at being manipulated in this way.

“No, it damn well isn’t,” she said. “I’ve already got a job, thank you very much, Brigadier. I’m in the business of saving lives when I can.”

“Strangely enough, so are we, but if that’s how you feel.” He shrugged and turned to Osbourne. “You’d better take her to Hampstead and get this whole thing wrapped up.”

She said, “Hampstead? What nonsense are you trying to pull now?”

He looked up, a mild surprise on his face. “Your sister’s personal effects. There are a few in our possession which will be handed over to you. A document or two to sign, just for the records, and you can forget this whole sorry business. Naturally, the Official Secrets Act will apply in full to all or any part of the conversation we’ve had here this evening.”

He opened a file, picked up a pen as if dismissing her. She turned, thoroughly angry now, walked past Osbourne and went out.

THE HOUSE IN
Hampstead was a late Georgian affair in a couple of acres of ground with high walls and a metal gate which was opened by a man in a peaked cap and some sort of blue uniform. A board on the gate said Rosedene Nursing
Home. She couldn’t see much of the garden because of the dark. When Craig led the way up the steps to the front door, he carried a flashlight in his hand. He pulled on an old-fashioned bell chain and they waited.

She heard footsteps approaching. There was the rattle of a chain, the sound of a bolt being withdrawn. The door opened, to reveal a young, fair-haired man in a white dust coat. He stood back and Craig led the way inside without a word.

The hall was dimly lit with cream-painted walls and a floor of polished wood blocks. There was a strangely antiseptic smell that reminded her of a hospital ward. The young man bolted and chained the door carefully behind them and when he turned to speak, his voice was as colourless as his appearance.

“Herr Doktor Baum will be with you in a moment. If you’ll come this way, please.”

He opened a door at the end of the hall, let them pass in and closed it again without a word. It was like a dentist’s waiting room, shabby chairs, a few magazines, and was rather cold in spite of the electric fire. There was something different about Craig Osbourne now, she could sense that, a restlessness, an air of tension as he lit a cigarette and moved across to the blackout curtains which were slightly open. He pulled them together.

“Herr Baum,” she said. “German, I presume?”

“No—Austrian.”

The door opened. The man who entered was small, balding and wore a white doctor’s jacket, a stethoscope around his neck. His clothes hung on him as if he had lost weight.

“Hello, Baum,” Craig Osbourne said. “This is Miss Trevaunce.”

The eyes were small and anxious and suddenly, there was the same touch of fear that she had seen with René and her father. He moistened dry lips and his smile, obviously intended to put her at her ease, succeeded only in being quite ghastly.

“Fräulein.” He bowed and when he took her hand, his palm was damp.

“I’ve got a phone call to make,” Craig said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

The door closed behind him. There was a long silence. Baum was sweating profusely now and took out a handkerchief to mop his brow.

“Major Osbourne tells me that you have some things for me that belonged to my sister.”

“Yes—that is so.” His smile was more ghastly than ever. “And when he returns . . .” His voice trailed away and then he tried again. “Can I get you anything? A glass of sherry, perhaps?” He was already at the cupboard in the corner, and turned with a bottle in one hand, a glass in the other. “Not of the best, I’m afraid. Like so many other things these days.”

There was a photo on the mantelpiece in a black frame of a young girl of sixteen or seventeen, gently smiling. She had a kind of ethereal beauty.

Genevieve said instinctively, “Your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Still at school, I suppose?”

“No, Miss Trevaunce. She is dead.” The sad, quiet voice seemed to echo in here ears and the room really was cold now. “It was the Gestapo—Vienna in 1939. You see, Miss Trevaunce, I am an Austrian Jew. One of the luckier ones who got away.”

“And now?”

“I do what I can against her murderers.”

The voice was so gentle and yet the pain in those eyes was terrible to see.
We are all victims
. She’d read that somewhere and remembered the young Luftwaffe fighter pilot they’d carried into Casualty at Bart’s one day, badly burned and shot to pieces. His face was unmarked, the hair very fair. He’d looked exactly like a sixth-former she’d fallen in love with when she was sixteen and still at school. Just a nice ordinary boy who kept smiling in spite of the pain and held her hand, still smiling as he died.

The door opened and Craig came in. “Okay, that’s taken care of. You’d better get started. I’ll wait for you here.”

“I don’t understand.” Baum looked extremely agitated. “I thought you were going to handle this.”

There was a weary contempt on Craig’s face. He put up a hand as if to cut off any further conversation. “Okay, Baum, okay.”

He opened the door and stood to one side, waiting for her.

“Look, what game are you playing with me now?” she demanded.

“Something I think you should see.”

“What?”

“This way,” he said gravely. “Just follow me.”

He went out and, in spite of herself, she went after him.

HE OPENED A
door at the end of the hall and they descended a dark stairway. There was a long corridor at the bottom, brick walls painted white, doors on either side. Where the corridor turned a corner, she could see a man sitting on a chair reading a book. He was perhaps fifty, heavily built with a broken nose and grey hair and wore a long white dust coat like the young man who’d admitted them
earlier. A rhythmic banging started and as they reached the end of the corridor it increased to quite unbearable proportions. The man on the chair glanced up briefly, then returned to his book.

“He’s quite deaf,” Craig said. “He needs to be.”

He stopped at a metal door. The banging had ceased and it was very quiet. He moved a small panel, glanced in, then stood to one side. He didn’t say a word and she moved forward as if hypnotised.

She had never smelled anything as foul as that room as she peered in through the bars. There was a ceiling light, but not a very good one. She could barely make out the outlines of a small bed with no blankets, an enamel slop bucket beside it and not much else. And then a movement, just out of sight, caught her eye.

There was someone in a rag of clothing crouched in the far corner. Impossible to tell whether it was male or female. It made a moaning sound and clawed at the wall. She could not have moved then if she had wanted to, caught by the horror of it. As if becoming aware that something was watching, it raised its face slowly and she gazed in terror upon her own face, twisted, broken, as if seen in one of those distorting mirrors in a penny arcade.

She couldn’t even scream, fear cold inside her. They seemed to stare at each other for ever, that ruin of a face and Genevieve and then there were fingers reaching out through the bars, hooking into claws. She could not move to save herself, feet nailed to the floor. It was Craig who pulled her back, slamming the panel shut, cutting off the high-pitched animal scream.

She struck him then, back-handed with all her strength across the face. Once—twice, and then his hands were on her like iron, holding her still.

“It’s all right,” he said calmly. “We’ll go now.”

The man in the chair looked up, smiled and nodded. The banging behind had reached the level of frenzy, and as they went along the corridor it was only Craig Osbourne’s strong arm that kept her from falling.

THEY GAVE HER
brandy and she sat beside the electric fire, shaking like a leaf, hanging on to the glass for dear life while Baum lurked anxiously in the background.

“She left her car at the station as arranged,” Craig said. “René went off to make contact with the local Resistance cell. Your sister changed her clothes, then started across country to the pick-up point on foot.”

“What happened?” Genevieve whispered.

“She was stopped by an SS patrol looking for partisans. Her papers, false, of course, seemed perfectly in order. To them she was just a good-looking village girl. They dragged her into the nearest barn.”

“How many?”

“Does it matter? René and a couple of his Resistance friends found what was left of her wandering the countryside afterwards. That’s what the Lysander brought back two days ago.”

“You lied,” Genevieve said. “All of you—even René.”

“To spare you, if we could, but you left us no choice, did you?”

“Can nothing be done? Does she really have to stay in that filthy place?”

It was Baum who answered. “No—she is at the moment on a course of drugs which should gradually reduce her extreme violence, but it will be at least two weeks before these can take their full effect. Then, of course, we will
make arrangements for her to be transferred to a suitable establishment.”

“Is there any hope?”

He mopped sweat from his brow again, then rubbed his hands on the damp handkerchief, his agitation clearly visible. “Fräulein—please. What do you want me to say?”

She took a deep breath. “My father must know nothing about this—you understand me? It would kill him.”

“Of course,” Craig nodded. “He has his story. No need to change it now.”

She started down into the glass. “I never really had any choice from the beginning, did I, and you knew that.”

“Yes,” he said gravely.

“Right, then.” She swallowed the brandy which burned the back of her throat, placed the glass down carefully. “What happens now?”

“Back to Munro, I’m afraid.”

“Then let’s get on with it,” and she turned and led the way out.

CARTER’S FACE WAS
grave as he led the way into the sitting room of the flat at Haston Place. Munro, still behind the desk, stood up and came round to her.

“So, now you know everything?”

“Yes.” She didn’t bother to sit down.

“I’m sorry, my dear.”

“Save it, Brigadier.” She put up a hand. “I don’t like you and I don’t like the way you operate. What happens now?”

“We keep the ground floor flat for guests. You can stay there overnight.” He nodded to Craig. “You can stay with Jack in the basement.”

“And tomorrow?” Genevieve enquired.

“We’ll fly you down to Cold Harbour from Croydon. It’s in Cornwall. Only takes an hour by Lysander. We have a house there, Grancester Abbey. It’s the sort of place used to prepare people in our line of work. Major Osbourne and I will accompany you.” He turned to Carter. “You hold the fort, Jack.”