The Swiss Spy (44 page)

‘You look so much like our daughter,’ he said,
patting her affectionately on the wrist. ‘You have the same slim figure, the
same beautiful long, dark hair, the same dark eyes. When my wife and I saw you
for the first time yesterday – we both remarked on that!’

‘Where does your daughter live?’

The old man said nothing, but his eyes moistened as
he held his hand over hers. The old man was kind, but there was something about
him that unsettled her. As she lay down on the cold earth, a familiar yet
unwelcome companion descended upon her. The memory. The old man, she realised,
reminded her of her father. He too worked on the railways. The same dark eyes
that couldn’t hide the suffering. The same awkwardness. The reason she was here
now.

She’d tried so hard to forget her father, but now
the dark memories were stirred, she knew she would be troubled for the rest of
the night.

She slept in short, unsatisfactory bursts as she
always did when her father came back to her. At one stage she woke with a
start, aware she must have cried out in her sleep. She looked around and
noticed the old man’s eyes, glinting in the moonlight, staring at her. When she
awoke in the morning she felt stiff and cold. As the group moved off, she fell
in with the old man and his wife, but the kindness of the previous night had
gone and he ignored her.

***

‘Come
closer.’

It was later that afternoon and the group had paused
at the edge of the forest, through which they had been walking all day. The old
man who was calling out to her was now slumped at the base of the tree and had
aged ten years in the past ten minutes. His legs were twisted under him and his
skin was as grey as the bark he was resting against. His wife knelt by his
side, anxiously gripping his right arm with both hands. He held his other arm
out towards her, fingers urgently beckoning her to him.

‘Come here,’ he called out. His voice was rasping
and angry. The rest of the group were moving off, leaving just her and Sylvie
with the old man and his wife.

She looked down the forest path, where the rest of
the group was now disappearing beyond the sunbeams. They knew there was nothing
they could do for the man and were anxious to try and reach the town before
nightfall. She could just make out Marcel, his short walking stick waving high
above his head to encourage them along.

‘Leave him,’ Marcel had said. ‘I warned everyone not
to drink from the ponds. This water can be like a poison. He took the risk. We
must move on.’

She hesitated. If she lost contact with the group
she could be stranded in the forest, but she had made the mistake of stopping
to help when the man collapsed and it would seem odd if she abandoned him now.

She knelt by his side. Around the tree was a carpet
of bracken; green, brown and silver. His lips were turning blue and spittle
flecked with blood was dribbling down the sides of his mouth. His eyes were
heavily bloodshot and his breathing was painfully slow. He didn’t have long to
go. She recognised the signs. She would soon be able to rejoin the group.

‘Closer.’ His voice was now little more than a harsh
whisper. With a shaking hand he pulled her head towards his. His breath was hot
and smelled foul.

‘I heard you last night,’ he said. She pulled back,
a puzzled look on her face.

He nodded, pulling her back towards him, glancing at
his wife as he did so, checking she could not hear. ‘I heard you cry out,’ he
whispered. ‘I heard what you said.’

He waited to regain his breath, his whole body
heaving as he did so. His reddened eyes blazed with fury.

‘This victory will be your greatest defeat.’

***

Later
that afternoon she realised how soon you become inured to the sights and the
smells of war. They had a tendency to creep up on you, allowing time for the
mind to prepare itself for what it was about to experience. But not the sounds.
The sounds of war may be no more shocking, but they had a tendency to arrive
without warning, imposing themselves in the most brutal manner. You were never
prepared for them.

So it was on that dusty afternoon at the end of May,
where the Picardy countryside had begun to give hints of a nearby but unseen
sea, and where a small group of French civilians desperately trying to flee the
war found they had walked right into it.

It took a few seconds for her and most of the others
in the column to realise that the cracking sound a hundred yards or so ahead of
them had been a gunshot. Maybe it was the shock of the strange metallic noise
that seemed to echo in every direction, more likely was the fact it was the
first time most of them had ever heard a gun. In a split second, she
reassembled in her mind what she had just seen and heard. Moments earlier, the tall
figure of Marcel had been remonstrating with the German officer. She could
barely make out what he was saying, although she did hear the word ‘civilians’
more than once, as he pointed in their direction with his walking stick. Then
there was the cracking noise and now Marcel was on the ground, the dusty,
light-grey surface of the road turning a dark colour beneath him.

A wave of fear rolled through the small group that
had been held up beyond the makeshift German checkpoint where the shooting had
taken place.
I know the area
, Marcel had told them.
I can handle the
Germans
.

Apart from the woman with four children and three
elderly couples, the group was mainly women on their own. All fools, she
thought. All allowing themselves to be herded like cattle. All part of the
reason why France had become what it was.

She knew she had made a terrible mistake. She could
have headed in any direction, other than east. That would have been suicide.
When she looked at where she had ended up now, she may as well have gone east.
She realised now, of course, south would have been best. Due west would have
been safe, too; not as safe as the south, but better. But to have come north
was a disaster.

It wasn’t as if she had been following the crowds.
Half of France had been on the move and each person seemed to be heading in a
different direction. She had made up her mind when she left home that she would
head north and it wasn’t in her nature to change her mind. She had tried it a
few weeks ago and this was why she was in so much trouble now. It was crazy
though. When she was a girl on the way to the coast for the only happy family
holiday she could remember, they had passed through Abbeville. It had been an
idyllic day, no more than a few hours respite on a long journey, but for some
reason this was where she had decided to head.

The German officer walked over to where Marcel lay
on the ground, the pistol still in his hand. With his boot he rolled the body
over onto its back then nodded to two of his men. They picked a leg each and
dragged the corpse to the ditch by the side of the road. A long red smear
appeared where his body had been. The officer inspected his boot and wiped it
clean on the grass.

One of the soldiers came over to the group and spoke
to them slowly in French. They were to come forward one by one. They were to
show their identity cards to the officer who had shot the man and, after they
had been searched, they would be allowed to carry on into the town.

The light had not started to fade yet and beyond the
checkpoint she could see the outskirts of the town quite clearly. Plumes of
dark smoke hung over it, all remarkably straight and narrow, as if the town lay
beneath a forest of pine trees.

She couldn’t risk the checkpoint. Not with this
identity card. The first Germans they had encountered had not paid much
attention to people’s identities. They’d been more intent on finding what loot
they could lay their hands on. This checkpoint seemed to be more thorough. She
had known she would have to find another identity and assumed she would get the
opportunity in the town. She had not counted on coming across the Germans so
early, no-one had. The last news she had heard was that they had not yet
reached Calais. That is what Marcel had told them and now his feet were sticking
out of the ditch in front of them, his blood now turning black on the surface
of the road.

She edged towards the rear of the column, looking
around her as she did so. She spotted her opportunity. The soldiers were
distracted by dealing with the mother and her four children, all of whom were
crying. No-one was watching the group. She leaned over to Sylvie, who was still
clutching her wrist, and whispered that she was going to the toilet in the
field. She would be back in a minute. The little girl’s eyes filled with tears.
Reluctantly, she reached in her pocket and took out the bar of chocolate. It
was the last of the bars that had once filled her coat pockets and it was all
she had left to eat. She pressed it into Sylvie’s palm, noticing it was soft
and had begun to melt.

‘If you’re a good girl and keep very quiet, you can
have all of this!’ She was trying hard to sound as gentle as possible. She
looked around. No-one was looking at her. Towards the front of the column she
saw the smartly dressed lady in her mid-thirties who’d told her she was a
lawyer from Paris, heading for the family home in Normandy.

‘You see that nice lady there? The one with the
smart brown coat? She’ll look after you. But don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.’

Still crouching down, she edged towards the ditch
then through a narrow gap in the hedge. The corn was high in the field and not
far away, as if expertly painted onto the landscape, was a large wood that
seemed to taper as it spread towards the town. She waited for a moment. She was
certain the Germans had not counted how many there were in their group, so
hopefully they’d not realise one person had crept away. If they did come and
look for her now, she was near enough to the hedge to be able to persuade them
she was just relieving herself.

It looked as if she had landed in an Impressionist
painting: the golden yellow of the corn, the blue of the sky unbroken by cloud
and ahead the dark green of the wood. A timely breeze had picked up and the
corn was swaying slowly. It would disguise her moving through it. If she could
make it to the wood she would have a good chance of reaching the town under the
cover of the trees and the fading light.

***

BERLIN: DAY
ZERO – GREGORY LEE

Berlin,
1947. The first stirrings of the Cold War begin as the liberating armies of the
West and the Soviet Union lock horns over territory and resources amid the
ashes of the Third Reich. Into this edgy world of ruined buildings and
shattered lives arrives Mitchell Delaney, an American newspaper reporter with
an agenda that has nothing to do with ideology. To reclaim the love he lost at
the outbreak of war and find the truth behind a series of murders, he must
negotiate the checkpoints and twitchy military presence of a city in the
collective throes of paranoia – not to mention a sinister menace from the past
that creeps ever closer. A taut, tense thriller from Gregory Lee, the
bestselling author of
The Nero Decree
,
Berlin: Day Zero
is a very
human tale of survival and resourcefulness in the shadow of a fast-closing Iron
Curtain. It's also a chilling portrait of a seminal moment in time, the
repercussions of which we still feel today.

To
buy the UK version of
Berlin: Day Zero
, click
here
.

To
buy the US version of
Berlin: Day Zero
, click
here
.

LONDON 1945: LIFE IN THE DEBRIS OF WAR –
MAUREEN WALLER

Seventy years has passed since
London celebrated the end of World War Two. But 1945 wasn’t all about
flag-waving on the Mall and Churchill’s V for Victory; in the months before the
ceasefire, the city had been peppered with German rockets and nearly brought to
its knees by death, destruction, food shortages and homelessness. Yet through
it all, the city coped with the horrors, and Londoners kept calm and carried
on.

London
1945
is their story. In
this fascinating history of one of the capital’s most momentous years, Maureen
Waller looks at how ordinary people from all over London coped with crisis; and
she pays tribute to their spirit, courage and resilience. In a city where
receiving an egg a month was a luxury and families were divided for years at a
time, often never to come together again, it was the little pleasures that
sustained morale:
It’s That Man
Again
on the wireless, Hollywood movies, black-market oranges,
American GIs…

And if
Londoners thought the end of hostilities would improve their lot, they were in
for a shock. Demobbed soldiers returned to a city of bombed-out houses, mass
unemployment, continued rationing, not to mention a newly-independent female
population changed beyond recognition.

A colourful
and very human history of a changing city,
London
1945
reveals how, in the bomb-shattered streets of the capital, the
foundations of our modern society were laid.

To buy the UK version of
London
1945: Life in the Debris of War
, click
here
.

To buy the US version of
London
1945: Life in the Debris of War
, click
here
.