The Milliner's Secret (60 page)

Back in the salon, he drew her down beside him on the sofa. ‘A few days ago, your husband was part of a gang that blew up a railway tunnel near Auxerre – you know where that is?’

‘A morning’s journey south of here.’

‘On the main Paris to Lyon line.’

She waited for the ‘and’.

‘A train was caught inside. Over a hundred troops died, and many civilians. Some of the troops were injured soldiers being evacuated to Germany.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She took a breath. ‘For the civilians. Your soldiers had it coming.’

He flashed anger. ‘You believe that? Seventeen-year-old boys, dying under a fall of rock, their flesh burned black in the inferno? Had it coming?’

‘Blame your bloody Führer.’

He expelled a breath. ‘Coralie, no child in any corner of this earth is born to such a death.’

Tell that to the men who took Amélie and her child. ‘Is Ramon in trouble?’

‘He was seen with other saboteurs and he caught a bullet.’ Injured? Dying? Dietrich didn’t know or care. ‘The Gestapo will sell their souls to catch him. If you’re found with him, or near him, I can’t help you.’ He forced her to look at him. ‘If I see him, even with you, I will turn him in.’

‘Revenge, because of what I wrote in that letter? I didn’t mean it.’

‘Because he set explosives regardless of consequence. That is not war.’

‘Warning heard and understood.’

‘Why do I doubt that?’ He laid his forehead against hers. ‘Will you come to my flat?’

‘Not if your barmy wife is there.’

‘Hiltrud is in a secure hospital.’

As Coralie locked up, it came to her mind that Georges still had a key. Maybe she should call in a locksmith. But Dietrich was leaning against the outside wall looking haggard. Chances were, if Georges was planning to come back and strip the place, he’d choose tomorrow, Sunday, when the streets were empty. And she would be waiting for him.

They took the lift up to Dietrich’s flat. In the bathroom, she helped him undress, flinching at the scars on his leg. He’d been lucky. A hair’s breadth deeper . . . ‘I thought you and she had patched things up.’

He shook his head. ‘When I was in Germany last, Hiltrud wanted me with her but it was not to whisper words of love. Rather, to void her soul of the cancerous hatred she feels for me. Hiltrud blames me for the loss of our children.’

‘Both children?’

‘Our daughter lives, but her choice of work has taken her from us. Hiltrud told her doctors that I had made our son a girl, and our girl a man.’

‘Will they let her out?’

‘Not until I allow it.’ He reached over and turned off the bath taps. ‘I wish this were big enough for two.’

‘I tried joining you in the bath once, and remember what happened? Get yourself washed so I can have some of that hot water.’ She perched on the cast-iron rim.

He asked her, ‘Why did you leave me? That parting shot . . . To teach me a lesson?’

‘No, because I was scared. Before I met you, the worst thing in my life was my dad’s temper. Now the worst thing is the Gestapo. Every word is dangerous, every friendship. Even putting feathers on hats brings the buggers through the door! I was frightened for myself and for you.’ She frowned down at him, submerged in soapy water. ‘Did your mother have you circumcised?’

He gave a shout of laughter. ‘What made you think suddenly of that?’ More gravely, he said, ‘It certainly wasn’t my father, the Graf’s, choice. But Coralie, didn’t we agree, here in this flat, to face every danger together?’

In bed, she caressed him to hardness, to show him that his damaged body still excited her. His wounds were tender still, the nerve-endings still knitting even after so many months, and he joked that it was like two people dancing either side of a barbed-wire fence. But their climax was deep and in step and she told him not to withdraw. She wanted to prove that she trusted him and wanted to shape the rest of her life around him. She could think of only one way to do that.

CHAPTER 36

SUNDAY, 28 MAY 1944

The Lancaster crew had no idea of it, but their bombs had just scored the last deadly hit of the war on industrial Schweinfurt. Ron Phipps, the pilot and a veteran of many tours, asked the navigator for a home course and was given a track south of Frankfurt. It would take them over Luxembourg and onward over France. The navigator advised crossing the sea off Brittany where coastal defences were lighter.

Phipps agreed. ‘We’re flying too low to risk the Normandy guns.’

They’d been on three engines since being hit by flak on the approach to Schweinfurt and, at just twelve thousand feet, were in danger from a direct strike from the ground. Or from attack by enemy night fighters, as a brilliant moon would be making a silhouette of them against the darkness. The maimed Lancaster bucked and tilted as if maddened by the loss of an engine.

For the crew, it was like being on a fishing boat in heavy seas. The navigator saw the wireless operator clamp his hand to his mouth.

Thirty churning minutes later, the pilot’s intercom clicked on again.

‘Location, Irish?’

Always ‘Irish’ to his fellows, for all he kept telling them he was a Londoner, the navigator answered, ‘We’ve just clipped the corner off Luxembourg. We should be over the Moselle river – French side. Keep a course south-south-west and presently, we’ll see the Yonne, then the Seine.’

‘Roger, understood. Sorry to roll you about, boys. Everyone in one piece?’

One by one, the other six members of the crew switched on their microphones and answered positive.

Irish put his hand into his flying jacket and touched his good luck charm – a scrap of gold braid that had come from a girl’s evening gown in Paris, four-and-a-half years ago. Alone in the skies, separated from their squadron and escort, they might just slip home unnoticed. He hoped so. He so wanted to live, to experience civilian life as the mature man that five years of bombing ops had made him.

As they progressed over France, the wireless operator reported a lessening of jamming signals, and was at last able to give Irish some bearings. Wing Commander Phipps was expressing his satisfaction at this when, from the ground far below, came a burst of coloured flares. Anti-aircraft fire from defences on the river Yonne. A second later, the plane shuddered. Flame swept over the Perspex turret and a horrible guttering sound suggested a shell had struck one of the remaining engines.

The Lancaster dropped sickeningly, levelling out after a minute or so. Irish checked his maps and called feverishly for new bearings. If his reckoning was right, they’d shortly be over the Fontainebleau forest. Squeezing crabwise up the fuselage, he stared out through the cockpit cupola at the landscape. He saw the confluence of two rivers, strands of shining ribbon under the moon, and beyond, the dark mass of trees.

He was just back in his seat when the intercom clicked on.

It was Phipps. ‘We’re losing height fast and I predict an unscheduled encounter with Mother Earth. Prepare to bail, chaps. Any ideas, Irish?’

‘Avoid the forest, a correction starboard.’

Phipps wished them all good luck. ‘First to the mess bar buys the drinks, the last pays for them.’

What seemed like three breaths later, Irish was falling through the smoke into pitch black. An ice-cold rush knocked the senses out of him and he experienced intense terror, curtailed by a ripping sound, a violent jerk and the glorious flowering of his parachute. For a while, he felt utterly still, but, as the scattered lights below grew larger, he gained a sense of descent. He offered thanks to Our Lady, adding a plea for the other boys to have got out safely. ‘And the Wingco, of course,’ as Phipps was not a boy and would wrestle with his plane to the last moment.

The Lancaster’s death spiral lit up the landscape, showing the two rivers and the thin snake of a brook. Seconds later, a massive explosion announced the loss of another British bomber.

From a second-floor room in Le Cloȋtre sanatorium, a woman watched the distant hillside turn into a raging inferno. The roar of distressed engines had brought her from her bed, and she’d witnessed the impact. She tried to open her window, but it was locked. Pressing her cheek to the glass, she saw figures running across the lawn towards the flames. What did they plan to do? Beat them out with their hands?

This was her moment, her chance. She found her stockings, shoes and underclothes. They had taken her dress, but a cardigan was folded over the end of her bed. She buttoned that over her nightdress. From the bedside cabinet, she removed one small item. The nurses had wanted to throw it away until she told them that it was a bead from a rosary. Clearly, none of them had ever set eyes on a cyanide death-pill before. She dropped it into a wash bag. Looping the bag’s drawstrings around her wrist, she left her room. If anybody challenged her, she would say she was going to the lavatory.

A night nurse always sat at a station to mark the comings and goings from the rooms along the corridor. Luck! The station was empty. A cup of tepid coffee and a dish of cherries on stalks suggested the explosion had come as the nurse enjoyed a midnight snack.

Hiltrud pushed cherries into the pockets of her cardigan. On the ground floor the doors stood open, admitting an eerie orange glow and the odour of burning fuel. One of the nurses had left her cape over a chair, and a shoulder bag, which jingled with coins and keys. Hiltrud hung the bag over her own shoulder and threw the cape over the top. She left Le Cloître like a shadow.

On still nights, she’d heard trains passing in the distance. If she kept walking, she would sooner or later come to a railway station.

As dawn broke over the Île de France, Irish woke and attuned himself to the noises around him. He’d had a lucky drop. The chute had caught in the outer branches of a tree, breaking his fall. He’d cut himself loose, dropped five or six feet, then been able to free the parachute and bury it. He dug into his escape pack and found Horlicks tablets, shoved three into his mouth, got up and stretched. A peachy sunrise gave him his bearings and within minutes he found the brook he’d seen from above.

His compass told him it was flowing north-east. Chances were, it would meet the Seine, or one of its tributaries. The silk maps in his escape kit said the next town of size was indeed Fontaine¬bleau, on the river Aube.