The Sea Garden (27 page)

 

I
n Paris, more than four hundred people linked to the Prosper network built up by SOE had been killed—and leads to Xavier abounded, though the information was often contradictory.

One overcast afternoon, in a private room above a nondescript café close to the Gare du Nord, Miss Acton and Iris interviewed a former resistant from the Swagman circuit based in Tours. He was an elderly gentleman, a watchmaker by trade who often had business in Paris. His white hair, round cheeks, and veined nose gave him a harmless, avuncular look. He had last seen Rose in the summer of 1943, shortly after she arrived in France; he had known Xavier too.

“Descours appeared just at the time when the secret air operations were beginning in 1942. The landing grounds in France, chosen by Resistance members who were not pilots, were most unsatisfactory. But Descours had been a private pilot, and he knew what was required. He said he would arrange it, and he did. He was impressive.

“There had always been rumours that he had certain links to the Gestapo. But we looked at his record in France. All we saw was that the fellow did more good than harm. More than a hundred agents transported with no losses. Yes, he was . . . what you call, a chancer, but at that stage we took a line of pragmatism. To operate successfully, it was part of the thin line one walked.

“But he was quite an operator.”

The watchmaker lit his pipe.

“Some people didn't like him. They wondered if he could be trusted.”

“Why was that?” asked Miss Acton evenly.

“The Gestapo in Paris knew too much. There must have been a double agent somewhere. Someone who knew exactly when and where the agents were meeting.”

“Do you have any theories about who that was?”

“Personally, no.”

“But some people were suspicious that it might be Descours?”

The old man spread his neat, steady hands. “Circumstantially, it could have looked that way. They asked themselves how aircraft could fly secretly over an occupied country without incident—how was it that there were so few shot down? They deduced that it was because the Germans knew all along and allowed the planes to land.”

“Suppose that was the case,” said Iris. “If they had stopped to think properly, they would have seen that any contact with the German authorities was a necessary evil. Perhaps the Germans were the ones being used.”

“That's true. We all knew about a high-ranking German officer here who smuggled gold back to Germany every leave. He had it welded behind his teeth by a French dentist. The dentist had had no choice but to give him this gold service treatment, but he was no collaborator. The German thought so highly of him that he was often invited to dine at the officers' mess, where he was privy to all kinds of information, which he naturally passed on to our network.”

Iris nodded, heart pounding. Xavier had told her that very story. “Where did this gold come from?” she asked, remembering her lover's disgust at the presumed source, the molten remains of jewellery stolen from Jewish deportees.

“Better not to ask,” said the watchmaker. “But then, perhaps there was a bigger game.”

“What do you mean?”

“Only that. There were rumours that Xavier Descours was seen at the avenue Foch, and he was no prisoner of the Gestapo. On the contrary, he was on very good terms with the SS man there, Kieffer.”

 

O
nce a person had a first twinge of suspicion, there could be no recovery of complete trust. When Iris thought back to the times she'd spent with Xavier, and examined what happened in the light of what she knew to be true, she was forced to admit that there was plenty of cause for suspicion. The more she found out, the harder it was to see the man she thought she knew; he was as evasive in absence as he had been ruthless in action.

But then she remembered his self-reliance and energy, his ability to withstand pressure. The secretive nature of all that they did. His underlying sadness too: the way he would not speak of his family; the tightly closed emotions whenever he spoke of home, wherever that was.

Iris always thought Xavier loved the danger every bit as much as he loved her. He was an egocentric, a marauder, a diehard. Perhaps that was exactly what had attracted her.

“Qui s'excuse, s'accuse,”
he once told her. Whoever makes excuses accuses himself.

And also: “People say the most disagreeable things about me.”

Back in London, they were thanked for their efforts and advised to confine themselves to “welfare work.” The head of the Security Directorate had asked for the F Section files, a handover that Miss Acton staunchly resisted. Time was running out to find what they needed.

“Rules will have to be broken,” Miss Acton decreed.

The rules had been broken in the first place to get the SOE agents, especially the women, to France. The women were issued with First Aid Nursing Yeomanry suits as a cover story while in Britain, but they had none of the internationally agreed protection conferred by a uniform; in France they wore civilian clothes, which meant they were spies and likely to be executed if caught.

It was a fight every step of the way. It took six months before the security directorate sanctioned the names of SOE agents being published in prisoner-of-war casualty lists. While they waited for any news, they worked their way through the thousands upon thousands of pages of testimony that was spilling out of commissions in Germany and territories that had been under Nazi control.

Unspoken was the mutual agreement between Miss Acton and Iris that they would not countenance these agents remaining in limbo with “Missing Presumed Dead” stamped on their files; they would uncover their fates, no matter how terrible. Meanwhile, they parcelled personal effects that had been brought back from the cottage at Tangmere and sent them back to the families of the agents with a brief note: “Unfortunately we are still without further news.” Knowing that the Baker Street office was likely to be closed at any time, they gave out the address of the Special Forces Club, with a polite request that all inquiries should be made through F Section and no other agency, so as not to complicate matters.

Iris worked on the files, checking and cross-referencing in the sitting room of the house she still shared with Nancy, as Suzanne slept or watched her from the rug on the floor. A telephone was installed (negotiated by Mavis Acton to facilitate the suggested welfare work) that enabled their investigations to continue.

Among the last letters forwarded to 64 Baker Street was one from “Fabienne Descours” asking if the SOE had any news of her husband, using his code name so there could be no misunderstanding. Iris knew then, in her bones, that he was not coming back.

 

O
ver the months, pieces of the picture began to fit together. Iris was physically sick the first time she read part of a concentration camp file: there had been nothing to prepare her.

The British were finally allowed to interrogate the French collaborators who had worked in these death camps, testimonies taken before the collaborators were executed. Some of them recalled agents by description, men and women of British and many other nationalities, including French. The trail led to other camps where the staff who had given useful witness statements, and might have been able to provide further clues, had already been executed, confessions unheard.

By the summer of 1945 there was additional pressure on the search. Relations were deteriorating fast between the Allies and the Russians, and if they wanted access to camps in the east, there was little time to waste.

The public was not even supposed to know that women had been sent into occupied Europe as spies. Even after the war, when so many were telling their astonishing stories publicly for the first time, as many others were seeking to cover their traces. The father of Violette Szabo, the SOE agent executed at Ravensbrück and later to receive a posthumous George Cross for her heroism behind the lines, was making waves as the War Office dithered about admitting what was considered an unpalatable truth.

 

Q
uietly, it came to be generally accepted that anyone in Europe who had not returned home by August 1945 was not coming back.

Never one to give up, Mavis Acton travelled to Germany in January 1946 with a list of fifty-two SOE agents who were still missing, twelve of whom were women.

In London, Iris read the newspapers avidly. Miss Acton telephoned with descriptions of the destruction in Berlin: the jagged walls of bombed buildings, the dust and desolation. Long queues snaked from water pumps in rubble-strewn streets. And the quietness. Defeat manifested as a heavy, silent state of shock.

From Berlin, Miss Acton travelled to Bad Oeynhausen, headquarters of the British zone, having been promoted to the rank of squadron officer both to facilitate access to the documents she needed to see and, more importantly, to interview key German personnel awaiting trial for war crimes. In particular she wanted to speak to the camp
Kommandants
of Sachenhausen and Ravensbrück, where she knew several of her “girls” had been transported.

She compiled a roller index of card files, of names and places where they were last seen alive.

“Colette and Francine were in Dachau by November 1943, executed two months later,” she said, businesslike. “However, not all our girls were sent over the German border. There was another camp, in the Alsace, tucked into the Vosges mountains: Natzweiler. A small camp. Not many people knew about it. That was how it was supposed to be. It was for resistants, spies, and political dissidents, where they were to vanish without trace.
‘Nacht und Nebel,'
they called it, Night and Fog, into which prisoners would disappear. Very few records, no hard evidence of who lived or died there.

“There are reports that at least one British woman was taken there. Two Frenchwomen and one Englishwoman arrived at the camp in June 1944.”

Iris braced herself.

“According to the evidence I've seen, that woman was Rose. We can't be absolutely certain. We are reliant on witness testimony and description, some from surviving prisoners.”

“What points to Rose?”

“The description fits—height and build, hair, all correspond. A fellow prisoner saw her arrive. He particularly remembered her calm bearing, was astonished by it, in fact. The most important account comes from a German who worked at the camp”—Miss Acton hesitated uncharacteristically—“as a stoker in the newly built crematorium. He has stated that these three women were given injections, gassed, and then burned. There were no remains.”

“But Rose went south with Xavier . . . how did she end up in Alsace?”

“The women were held first in a prison in Karlsruhe. They could have been sent there from anywhere in France. One of the Frenchwomen left a message scratched on an enamel cup there, of their three names and the date they were moved out. Two names mean nothing to us, but the third was Rosa Williams. Rose's real name—”

“—was Rita Williams.”

Iris took the news like a blow to the chest. She should have acted more decisively on her instincts when the agents' wireless messages came in with their embedded warnings. She should have made Tyndale take her seriously. As it was, the story was growing that the British had known exactly what was going on but decided to play the game themselves, though it involved the sacrifice of their own people. As a face-saving story, it was not convincing in the slightest, thought Iris.

But it seemed Miss Acton had not discounted the possibility of truth in the watchmaker's reference to a bigger game. As far as she was concerned now, Xavier Descours was a traitor, a double agent embroiled with the SS in Paris.

Could that have been the case? He had been recruited in France, and so had never passed through the F Section training and vetting. His cover story was that he worked closely with the Vichy government, and by extension, the Germans, providing electronics equipment, at least in the beginning. Was that a blind to his true loyalty? After most of the members of his circuit were betrayed, he insisted on going back to find out what had happened and to alert other cells to the disaster—or was he returning to betray more himself?

He had still not been traced.

 

T
he office in Baker Street closed. Iris continued to work from home and to speak on the telephone with Mavis Acton. Over tea at Fortnum and Mason, Miss Acton's preferred venue to meet face-to-face, Iris tried one last time.

“If Xavier was in contact with the Gestapo, you could say that he was playing them for all he was worth—far from betraying his circuit when he disappeared, leaving Thérèse at Châteaudun, he was trying to protect her. Don't forget he organised the escape for her and Rose.”

“In the end, he was not one of ours,” said Miss Acton.

“But we were all in it together, weren't we?”

“That's a rather
romantic
view of things, wouldn't you say?”

There was no doubting her meaning. She closed the subject, with an imperious wave to the waiter.

Mavis Acton was now convinced of Xavier's guilt, and there was no persuading her otherwise. In the long weeks afterwards Iris felt as if she might have been used—it was just possible Miss Acton had been keeping an eye on her all the time they had been working together, waiting to see whether she was still in contact with Xavier.

But no contact was ever made, and somehow Iris had to live with the ambiguity of their intimacy and promises, and the knowledge that he and she had been complicit in at least one betrayal—that of his wife.

 

O
n the strength of a fine reference from Miss Acton—she was always fair, which made her conclusions about Xavier that much harder to take—Iris secured a part-time secretarial job at the Home Office. Her minuscule salary went almost entirely into the pot at Chester Row, where the top two storeys of the bomb-damaged house had become available.