The Milliner's Secret (61 page)

Using the sheath knife he always carried with him, he cut the warrant officer’s stripes and the wing from his battledress and the sheepskin tops off his flying boots. When the boots had been issued, he’d complained they were half a size too small, but that had probably stopped them falling off during his drop. He wouldn’t have fancied his chances barefoot.

With profound sorrow, he threw his jacket and flying helmet into a thicket, but couldn’t bring himself to hurl his Enfield service pistol after them. After all, he might run into a troop of Jerries, looking for crash survivors.

Hitching his knapsack over his shoulder, he walked out of the fringes of the wood on to a road full of morning sun. He had become an evader.

He reached the railway station of Fontainebleau-Avon shortly after nine, unchallenged. It was Sunday, little traffic about. But he was proud of himself because he’d walked right past a couple on their way to church, and called out, ‘Bonjour.’

‘Bonjour’ was the limit of his French, and he wouldn’t get to the next stage without help. After standing for some minutes on the station concourse, eyeing up potential assistance, he approached a man leaning against a wall. Dirty, with jet-black hair poking beneath a beret, the dog-end of a cigarette glued to his bottom lip, he cut an unsavoury figure. Getting closer, Irish saw that one of his hands was bound up in a dirty rag. A vagrant? No use. He needed someone capable of buying him a ticket and getting him on to a train. He was about to slink away when he noticed the man’s shoes. They were tan leather with hand-stitched welts, such as professional men wore. Unless they’d been stolen, of course. But by the time he’d thought of that the man had seen him and growled something. Probably, ‘What are you looking at?’

Warrant Officer Donal Flynn held out his hand and said, ‘I’m a British aviator and I need help.’

Hiltrud von Elbing spent the journey to Paris removing cherry stones with a fingernail. A fiddly job, made no easier by the lurching of the train. The messy results she ate, but after a few attempts she had successfully replaced one stone with the cyanide capsule.

A guard shouted something at her. She thrust out her ticket, but he shouted, ‘Identité!’ She produced the card belonging to the nurse whose bag she had taken. The man looked it over, then looked her over. She held her breath.

He was asking her something when a rumpus broke out in the carriage one along. Rudely throwing the card into her lap, he strode away.

A moment later, Hiltrud saw a young man jump from the slowing train. Shots were fired, and everyone in her carriage dropped their heads to their knees. She didn’t. It was far more interesting to watch the police leap on to the tracks. Not so much fun being at a standstill for half an hour afterwards. When you have difficult tasks ahead of you, you do not want delays.

At the barrier, a German policeman looked over her papers and called her ‘Schwester’. She puzzled over it until it struck her that her black, hooded cloak and the hem of the cotton nightdress beneath suggested a nursing nun. Where were the taxis? All she could see were bicycles with funny little cubicles attached behind. Yet people were getting into them.

She approached a driver and said, ‘La Passerinette.’

The driver returned a mystified look. She pointed to her head, and shouted in German, ‘Modistin!’

‘Modiste?’ he queried, and shouted something down the line of drivers. Somebody seemed to understand and a moment later he was asking her, ‘Boulevard de la Madeleine?’

She had absolutely no idea, but nodded nevertheless.

After the bumpiest ride of her life, she found herself in a broad street, as fine as any in Berlin. She dropped coins into the driver’s hand, and watched him count them with his eyes before he pedalled quickly away. Within seconds, she had forgotten about him because there was ‘La Passerinette’ etched on to glass. The shop’s blinds were up but there were no hats on show. Nothing to prove that these were the premises of her husband’s mistress. Considering what she was planning to do, she must be sure.

The door was ajar, and she stepped inside. A man wearing her father’s stiff kind of collar was talking animatedly to a tall, blonde and very lovely girl in a pink dress. They were surrounded by pink and grey hatboxes and Hiltrud had the impression they were arguing over them.

‘Fräulein de Lirac?’

They broke off and gave Hiltrud a curious stare.

The girl said something in French through sensual, painted lips. Assuming she was being asked who she was, Hiltrud pulled herself up to a dignified height and said, ‘I am your lover’s wife.’

The blonde girl took in a shocked breath and colour swept through her cheeks. So. Condemned by her own shame. Hiltrud held out two red cherries hanging from a single stalk. One had a stone, the other . . . Well, she had no actual proof it was a cyanide capsule.

‘Non, merci.’ The girl indicated the door and Hiltrud understood that the shop wasn’t open. But, of course, it was Sunday. She’d heard bells as she came through the barrier at the station. She continued offering the cherries and finally, with an impatient noise, the girl took them.

Hiltrud left, but went no further than the opposite side of the road. After a short wait, she saw the girl leaving the shop, carrying one of the pink and grey hatboxes. Hiltrud followed her to the end of the street, and saw a great building flanked by columns. The girl did not cross the junction, but turned left into another street. At the kerb, she paused and that was when Hiltrud saw her raise her lips to the cherries and bite off first one fruit, then the other.

The girl was halfway across the road when she gave an unearthly cry and doubled over. The hatbox rolled like a drum. Baying like a hound, the girl gripped her throat and fell to her knees. A second later, a black car bearing the flag of the German Reich on its radiator grille ploughed into her.

Hiltrud walked on, ignoring the cries of horror, the running feet. One task complete. She crossed a great square that she recognised. She’d sat here on her first day in Paris, watching eddies of snow falling from a gunmetal sky. She kept walking, remembering the car journey to Dietrich’s flat. They had crossed a river and the driver had said, ‘The Seine, gnädige Dame. A fine river.’

A good enough river, anyway. Shortly after midday, Hiltrud von Elbing stepped off the wharf into cold brown water, completing her second task of the day.

CHAPTER 37

Coralie knew she’d overslept even before she opened the curtains. Georges and Lorienne could have stripped La Passerinette to the floorboards by now, but if they had, they had. She wasn’t going to scramble over to boulevard de la Madeleine in yesterday’s clothes.

It was after midday and Dietrich was still asleep. She’d nip home to rue de Seine, she decided, change, then return and massage his back until he woke. The way to a man’s heart.

In her own flat she washed, put her hair up in a bun and changed her pewter-grey choker for one of pale pink. While the kettle boiled, she opened her wardrobe and surveyed her dresses. Was it mischief that made her reach for the pink dress printed with twin cherries in navy-blue?

The last time she’d worn this . . . Well, she’d see if Dietrich remembered. She put on the tasselled pillbox hat that went so well with it, and reluctantly tied a dark headscarf over it because she intended to cycle to La Passerinette. It was such a gorgeous day.

She cycled as far as the river, then wheeled her bicycle across the pont des Arts and again across place de la Concorde. At the top of rue Royale, she was held up by a police block. People were gathered in the road, watching an ambulance slowly drawing up. She heard somebody say that a young woman had been knocked down and killed by a German driver.

Coralie averted her eyes.

Turning right in front of the imposing Madeleine, she wheeled her bicycle into boulevard de la Madeleine, straining her eyes for the first sight of La Passerinette. The salon door was open! ‘No!’ she raged. ‘No!’

When she stormed in, Georges Blanchard, surrounded by hatboxes, looked momentarily relieved. Then, as he recognised Coralie, his fists went up.

Little did he know how many times she’d seen a big man in that stance. ‘Put them down, Georges. You don’t frighten me. Just know this. If I catch you anywhere near this place again, I will go to the head of the Paris police, the head of the Abwehr, the head of the army and the head of the Gestapo, one after the other, until one of them kicks your backside into jail, and kicks Lorienne’s in after it. Look at my face.’ She tapped a cheek. ‘This is the anger of a betrayed woman. Why did you do it?’

‘She promised to make me her premier if I brought you down. She was meant to come straight back, with a vélo taxi.’

‘Better go and find her then, hadn’t you? How many of my hats are missing?’

‘None.’ Georges hesitated, then admitted, ‘Lorienne took one with her.’

‘I suggest you ask her to drop it back. Now get out.’

Coralie watched him till he’d gone round the corner. Sighing, she closed the door, then opened it again because the shop suddenly felt constrictive. After returning the hatboxes to the workroom, she unpinned her closing-down notice and tore it up.

Seeing her shop threatened again, she’d remembered how passionately she loved her work. Dietrich had advised her well.

Lunch. Why not telephone Dietrich and invite him to meet her here? She was just reaching for the handset when a man’s cough from the salon told her that Dietrich had anticipated her.

Walking through, she began a laughing comment that ended in a gasp. It wasn’t Dietrich. Two rough-looking men filled the doorway.

Had she fainted? Because she was on the floor, looking up at the octopus-arms of her ceiling light. Fingers were tapping her cheek. A man muttered, ‘Wake up.’

She thought, They’re looters. They think there’s money here. One of them was breathing harshly.

Fingers tapped her again. ‘Come on, sweetheart, wake up.’

Sweetheart? English? Not possible. The faces staring down at her simply could not exist together, not on the mortal plane.

‘Ramon?’

‘Oui, chérie.’

‘Donal?’

‘Hello, Cora.’

‘I’m Coralie. What the hell?’

‘We met at a station.’ Hard breaths made spaces between Ramon’s words. It wasn’t her hazy vision that made his face seem grey. It was grey. He’d painted his cheeks with some kind of dirt, and dragged it through his hair. Disguise, she supposed. After all, the Gestapo were after him.

Donal finished the story in English, ‘He got me on the train at Fontainebleau and stayed with me till I had to jump. We met up at the Madeleine. Lovely church. Whoever built it must have seen the Brompton Oratory because—’

Coralie interrupted. ‘Ramon, are you all right?’ To Donal, she said, ‘He’s not well.’

‘Caught a bullet in the finger. It smashed bone and it’s infected. He needs a doctor and we both need a safe house. I think Ramon said there were flats above this shop.’

‘Too dangerous, but I know somewhere else.’ It would have to be impasse de Cordoba.

She let Donal haul her up, then led them into the workroom. Donal looked around, at the boxes, at the designs pinned on the walls, the marotte heads sporting unfinished models. ‘Who makes all this?’