THE FIRST DAY:
SUNDAY, 28 MAY 1944

ONE

One minute before the explosion, the square at Sainte-Cécile was at peace. The evening was warm, and a layer of still air covered the town like a blanket. The church bell tolled a lazy beat, calling worshippers to the service with little enthusiasm. To Felicity Clairet it sounded like a countdown.

The square was dominated by the seventeenth-century chateau. A small version of Versailles, it had a grand projecting front entrance, and wings on both sides that turned right angles and tailed off rearwards. There was a basement and two main floors topped by a tall roof with arched dormer windows.

Felicity, who was always called Flick, loved France. She enjoyed its graceful buildings, its mild weather, its leisurely lunches, its cultured people. She liked French paintings, French literature, and stylish French clothes. Visitors often found the French people unfriendly, but Flick had been speaking the language since she was six years old, and no one could tell she was a foreigner.

It angered her that the France she loved no longer existed. There was not enough food for leisurely lunches, the paintings had all been stolen by the Nazis, and only the whores had pretty clothes. Like most women, Flick was wearing a shapeless dress whose colours had long ago been washed to dullness. Her heart’s desire was that the real France would come back. It might return soon, if she and people like her did what they were supposed to.

She might not live to see it – indeed, she might not survive the next few minutes. She was no fatalist; she wanted to live. There were a hundred things she planned to do after the war: finish her doctorate, have a baby, see New York, own a sports car, drink champagne on the beach at Cannes. But if she were about to die, she was glad to be spending her last few moments in a sunlit square, looking at a beautiful old house, with the lilting sounds of the French language soft in her ears.

The chateau had been built as a home for the local aristocracy, but the last Comte de Sainte-Cécile had lost his head on the guillotine in 1793. The ornamental gardens had long ago been turned into vineyards, for this was wine country, the heart of the Champagne district. The building now housed an important telephone exchange, sited here because the government minister responsible had been born in Sainte-Cécile.

When the Germans came they enlarged the exchange to provide connections between the French system and the new cable route to Germany. They also sited a Gestapo regional headquarters in the building, with offices on the upper floors and cells in the basement.

Four weeks ago the chateau had been bombed by the Allies. Such precision bombing was new. The heavy four-engined Lancasters and Flying Fortresses that roared high over Europe every night were inaccurate – they sometimes missed an entire city – but the latest generation of fighter-bombers, the Lightnings and Thunderbolts, could sneak in by day and hit a small target, a bridge or a railway station. Much of the west wing of the chateau was now a heap of irregular seventeenth-century red bricks and square white stones.

But the air raid had failed. Repairs were made quickly, and the phone service had been disrupted only as long as it took the Germans to instal replacement switchboards. All the automatic telephone equipment and the vital amplifiers for the long-distance lines were in the basement, which had escaped serious damage.

That was why Flick was here.

The chateau was on the north side of the square, surrounded by a high wall of stone pillars and iron railings, guarded by uniformed sentries. To the east was a small medieval church, its ancient wooden doors wide open to the summer air and the arriving congregation. Opposite the church, on the west side of the square, was the town hall, run by an ultraconservative mayor who had few disagreements with the occupying Nazi rulers. The south side was a row of shops and a bar called Café des Sports. Flick sat outside the bar, waiting for the church bell to stop. On the table in front of her was a glass of the local white wine, thin and light. She had not drunk any.

She was a British officer with the rank of major. Officially, she belonged to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the all-female service that was inevitably called the FANYs. But that was a cover story. In fact she worked for a secret organization, the Special Operations Executive, responsible for sabotage behind enemy lines. At twenty-eight, she was one of the most senior agents. This was not the first time she had felt herself close to death. She had learned to live with the threat, and manage her fear, but all the same she felt the touch of a cold hand on her heart when she looked at the steel helmets and powerful rifles of the chateau guards.

Three years ago, her greatest ambition had been to become a professor of French literature in a British university, teaching students to enjoy the vigour of Hugo, the wit of Flaubert, the passion of Zola. She had been working in the War Office, translating French documents, when she had been summoned to a mysterious interview in a hotel room and asked if she were willing to do something dangerous.

She had said yes without thinking much. There was a war on, and all the boys she had been at Oxford with were risking their lives every day, so why shouldn’t she do the same? Two days after Christmas 1941 she had started her SOE training.

Six months later she was a courier, carrying messages from SOE headquarters, at 64 Baker Street in London, to Resistance groups in occupied France, in the days when wireless sets were scarce and trained operators even fewer. She would parachute in, move around with her false identity papers, contact the Resistance, give them their orders, and note their replies, complaints, and requests for guns and ammunition. For the return journey she would rendezvous with a pick-up plane, usually a three-seater Westland Lysander, small enough to land on six hundred yards of grass.

From courier work she had graduated to organizing sabotage. Most SOE agents were officers, the theory being that their ‘men’ were the local Resistance. In practice, the Resistance were not under army discipline, and an agent had to win their co-operation by being tough, knowledgeable and authoritative.

The work was dangerous. Six men and three women had finished the training course with Flick, and she was the only one still operating two years later. Two were known to be dead: one shot by the Milice, the hated French security police, and the second killed when his parachute failed to open. The other six had been captured, interrogated and tortured, and had then disappeared into prison camps in Germany. Flick had survived because she was ruthless, she had quick reactions, and she was careful about security to the point of paranoia.

Beside her sat her husband, Michel, leader of the Resistance circuit codenamed Bollinger, which was based in the cathedral city of Reims, ten miles away. Although about to risk his life, Michel was sitting back in his chair, his right ankle resting on his left knee, holding a tall glass of pale, watery wartime beer. His careless grin had won her heart when she was a student at the Sorbonne, writing a thesis on Molière’s ethics which she had abandoned on the outbreak of war. He had been a dishevelled young philosophy lecturer with a legion of adoring students.

He was still the sexiest man she had ever met. He was tall, and he dressed with careless elegance in rumpled suits and faded blue shirts. His hair was always a little too long. He had a come-to-bed voice and an intense blue-eyed gaze that made a girl feel she was the only woman in the world.

This mission had given Flick a welcome chance to spend a few days with her husband, but it had not been a happy time. They had not quarrelled, exactly, but Michel’s affection had seemed half-hearted, as if he were going through the motions; and she had felt hurt. Her instinct told her he was interested in someone else. He was only thirty-five, and his unkempt charm still worked on young women. It did not help that since their wedding they had been apart more than together, because of the war. And there were plenty of willing French girls, she thought sourly, in the Resistance and out of it.

She still loved him. Not in the same way: she no longer worshipped him as she had on their honeymoon, no longer yearned to devote her life to making him happy. The morning mists of romantic love had lifted, and in the clear daylight of married life she could see that he was vain, self-absorbed, and unreliable. But when he chose to focus his attention on her he could still make her feel unique and beautiful and cherished.

His charm worked on men, too, and he was a great leader, courageous and charismatic. He and Flick had figured out the battle plan together. They would attack the chateau in two places, dividing the defenders, then regroup inside to form a single force that would penetrate the basement, find the main equipment room, and blow it up.

They had a floor plan of the building supplied by Antoinette Dupert, supervisor of the group of local women who cleaned the chateau every evening. She was also Michel’s aunt. The cleaners started work at seven o’clock, the same time as vespers, and Flick could see some of them now, presenting their special passes to the guard at the wrought-iron gate. Antoinette’s sketch showed the entrance to the basement, but no further details, for it was a restricted area, open to Germans only, and cleaned by soldiers.

Michel’s attack plan was based on reports from MI6, the British intelligence service, which said the chateau was guarded by a Waffen SS detachment working in three shifts each of twelve men. The Gestapo personnel in the building were not fighting troops, and most would not even be armed. The Bollinger circuit had been able to muster fifteen fighters for the attack, and they were now deployed, either among the worshippers in the church, or posing as Sunday idlers around the square, concealing their weapons under their clothing or in satchels and duffel bags. If MI6 was right, the Resistance would outnumber the guards.

But a worry nagged at Flick’s brain and made her heart heavy with apprehension. When she had told Antoinette of MI6’s estimate, Antoinette had frowned and said: ‘It seems to me there are more.’ Antoinette was no fool – she had been secretary to Joseph Laperrière, the head of a champagne house, until the occupation reduced his profits and his wife became his secretary – and she could be right.

Michel had been unable to resolve the contradiction between the MI6 estimate and Antoinette’s guess. He lived in Reims, and neither he nor any of his group was familiar with Sainte-Cécile. There had been no time for further reconnaissance. If the Resistance was outnumbered, Flick thought with dread, they were not likely to prevail against disciplined German troops.

She looked around the square, picking out the people she knew, apparently innocent strollers who were in fact waiting to kill or be killed. Outside the haberdashery, studying a bolt of dull green cloth in the window, stood Geneviève, a tall girl of twenty with a Sten gun under her light summer coat. The Sten was a submachine-gun much favoured by the Resistance because it could be broken into three parts and carried in a small bag. Geneviève might well be the girl Michel had his eye on, but all the same Flick felt a shudder of horror at the thought that she might be mown down by gunfire in a few seconds’ time. Crossing the cobbled square, heading for the church, was Bertrand, even younger at seventeen, a blond boy with an eager face and a .45 calibre Colt automatic hidden in a folded newspaper under his arm. The Allies had dropped thousands of Colts by parachute. Flick had at first forbidden Bertrand from the team because of his age, but he had pleaded to be included, and she had needed every available man, so she had given in. She hoped his youthful bravado would survive once the shooting started. Loitering in the church porch, apparently finishing his cigarette before going in, was Albert, whose wife had given birth to their first child this morning, a girl. Albert had an extra reason to stay alive today. He carried a cloth bag that looked full of potatoes, but they were No. 36 Mark I Mills hand grenades.

The scene in the square looked normal but for one element. Beside the church was parked an enormous, powerful sports car. It was a French-built Hispano-Suiza type 68-bis, with a V12 aero-engine, one of the fastest cars in the world. It had a tall, arrogant-looking silver radiator topped by the flying-stork mascot, and it was painted sky blue.

It had arrived half an hour ago. The driver, a handsome man of about forty, was wearing an elegant civilian suit, but he had to be a German officer – no one else would have the nerve to flaunt such a car. His companion, a tall, striking redhead in a green silk dress and high-heeled suede shoes, was too perfectly chic to be anything but French. The man had set up a camera on a tripod and was taking photographs of the chateau. The woman wore a defiant look, as if she knew that the shabby townspeople who stared at her on their way to church were calling her whore in their minds.

A few minutes ago, the man had scared Flick by asking her to take a photograph of himself and his lady friend against the background of the chateau. He had spoken courteously, with an engaging smile, and only the trace of a German accent. The distraction at a crucial moment was absolutely maddening, but Flick had felt it might have caused trouble to refuse, especially as she was pretending to be a local resident who had nothing better to do than lounge around at a pavement café. So she had responded as most French people would have in the circumstances: she had put on an expression of cold indifference and complied with the German’s request.

It had been a farcically frightening moment: the British secret agent standing behind the camera; the German officer and his tart smiling at her, and the church bell tolling the seconds until the explosion. Then the officer had thanked her and offered to buy her a drink. She had refused very firmly: no French girl could drink with a German unless she were prepared to be called a whore. He had nodded understandingly, and she had returned to her husband.

The officer was obviously off-duty, and did not appear to be armed, so he presented no danger, but all the same he bothered Flick. She puzzled over this feeling in the last few seconds of calm, and finally realized that she did not really believe he was a tourist. There was a watchful alertness in his manner that was not appropriate for soaking up the beauty of old architecture. His woman might be exactly what she seemed, but he was something else.

Before Flick could figure out what, the bell ceased to toll.

Michel drained his glass then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Flick and Michel stood up. Trying to look casual, they strolled to the café entrance and stood in the doorway, inconspicuously taking cover.

TWO

Dieter Franck had noticed the girl at the café table the moment he drove into the square. He always noticed beautiful women. This one struck him as a tiny bundle of sex appeal. She was a pale blonde with light green eyes, and she probably had German blood – it was not unusual here in the north-east of France, so close to the border. Her small, slim body was wrapped in a dress like a sack, but she had added a bright yellow scarf of cheap cotton, with a flair for style that he thought enchantingly French. When he spoke to her, he had observed the initial flash of fear usual in a French person on being approached by one of the German occupiers; but then, immediately afterwards, he had seen on her pretty face a look of ill-concealed defiance that had piqued his interest.

She was with an attractive man who was not very interested in her – probably her husband. Dieter had asked her to take a photo only because he wanted to talk to her. He had a wife and two pretty children in Cologne, and he shared his Paris apartment with Stéphanie, but that would not stop him making a play for another girl. Beautiful women were like the gorgeous French impressionist paintings he collected: having one did not stop you wanting another.

French women were the most beautiful in the world. But everything French was beautiful: their bridges, their boulevards, their furniture, even their china tableware. Dieter loved Paris nightclubs, champagne, foie gras, and warm baguettes. He enjoyed buying shirts and ties at Charvet, the legendary chemisier opposite the Ritz hotel. He could happily have lived in Paris for ever.

He did not know where he had acquired such tastes. His father was a professor of music – the one art form of which the Germans, not the French, were the undisputed masters. But to Dieter, the dry academic life his father led seemed unbearably dull, and he had horrified his parents by becoming a policeman, one of the first university graduates in Germany so to do. By 1939 he was head of the criminal intelligence department of the Cologne police. In May 1940, when General Heinz Guderian’s panzer tanks crossed the river Meuse at Sedan and swept triumphantly through France to the English Channel in a week, Dieter impulsively applied for a commission in the army. Because of his police experience, he was given an intelligence posting immediately. He spoke fluent French and adequate English, so he was put to work interrogating captured prisoners. He had a talent for the work, and it gave him profound satisfaction to extract information that could help his side win battles. In north Africa his results had been noticed by Rommel himself.

He was always willing to use torture when necessary, but he liked to persuade people by subtler means. That was how he had got Stéphanie. Poised, sensual and shrewd, she had been the owner of a Paris boutique selling ladies’ hats that were devastatingly chic and obscenely expensive. But she had a Jewish grandmother. She had lost the boutique and spent six months in a French prison, and she had been on her way to a camp in Germany when Dieter rescued her.

He could have raped her. She had certainly expected that. No one would have raised a protest, let alone punished him. But instead he had fed her, given her new clothes, installed her in the spare bedroom in his apartment, and treated her with gentle affection until one evening, after a dinner of foie de veau and a bottle of La Tache, he had seduced her deliciously on the couch in front of a blazing coal fire.

Today, though, she was part of his camouflage. He was working with Rommel again. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’, was now Commander of Army Group B, defending northern France. German intelligence expected an Allied invasion this summer. Rommel did not have enough men to guard the hundreds of miles of vulnerable coastline, so he had adopted a daring strategy of flexible response: his battalions were miles inland, ready to be swiftly deployed wherever needed.

The British knew this – they had intelligence, too. Their counterplan was to slow Rommel’s response by disrupting his communications. Night and day, British and American bombers pounded roads and railways, bridges and tunnels, stations and marshalling yards. And the Resistance blew up power stations and factories, derailed trains, cut telephone lines, and sent teenage girls to pour grit into the oil reservoirs of trucks and tanks.

Dieter’s brief was to identify key communications targets and assess the ability of the Resistance to attack them. In the last few months, from his base in Paris, he had ranged all over northern France, barking at sleepy sentries and putting the fear of God into lazy captains, tightening up security at railway signal boxes, train sheds, vehicle parks, and airfield control towers. Today he was paying a surprise visit to a telephone exchange of enormous strategic importance. Through this building passed all telephone traffic from the High Command in Berlin to German forces in northern France. That included teleprinter messages, the means by which most orders were sent nowadays. If the exchange were destroyed, German communications would be crippled.

The Allies obviously knew that, and had tried to bomb the place, with limited success. It was the perfect candidate for a Resistance attack. Yet security was infuriatingly lax, by Dieter’s standards. That was probably due to the influence of the Gestapo, who had a post in the same building. The Geheime Staatspolizei was the state security service, and men were often promoted by reason of loyalty to Hitler and enthusiasm for Fascism rather than because of their brains or ability. Dieter had been here for half an hour, taking photographs, his anger mounting as the men responsible for guarding the place continued to ignore him.

However, as the church bell stopped ringing, a Gestapo officer in major’s uniform came strutting through the tall iron gates of the chateau and headed straight for Dieter. In bad French he shouted: ‘Give me that camera!’

Dieter turned away, pretending not to hear.

‘It is forbidden to take photographs of the chateau, imbecile!’ the man yelled. ‘Can’t you see this is a military installation?’

Dieter turned to him and replied quietly in German: ‘You took a damn long time to notice me.’

The man was taken aback. People in civilian clothing were usually frightened of the Gestapo. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said less aggressively.

Dieter checked his watch. ‘I’ve been here for thirty-two minutes. I could have taken a dozen photographs and driven away long ago. Are you in charge of security?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Major Dieter Franck, from Field Marshal Rommel’s personal staff.’

‘Franck!’ said the man. ‘I remember you.’

Dieter looked harder at him. ‘My God,’ he said as recognition dawned. ‘Willi Weber.’

‘Sturmbannfuehrer Weber, at your service.’ Like most senior Gestapo men, Weber held an SS rank, which he felt was more prestigious than his ordinary police rank.

‘Well, I’m damned,’ Dieter said. No wonder security was slack.

Weber and Dieter had been young policemen together in Cologne in the twenties. Dieter had been a high flyer, Weber a failure. Weber resented Dieter’s success and attributed it to his privileged background. (Dieter’s background was not extraordinarily privileged, but it seemed so to Weber, the son of a stevedore.)

In the end, Weber had been fired. The details began to come back to Dieter: there had been a road accident, a crowd had gathered, Weber had panicked and fired his weapon, and a rubber-necking bystander had been killed.

Dieter had not seen the man for fifteen years, but he could guess the course of Weber’s career: he had joined the Nazi party, become a volunteer organizer, applied for a job with the Gestapo citing his police training, and risen swiftly in that community of embittered second-raters.

Weber said: ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Checking your security, on behalf of the Field Marshal.’

Weber bristled. ‘Our security is good.’

‘Good enough for a sausage factory. Look around you.’ Dieter waved a hand, indicating the town square. ‘What if these people belonged to the Resistance? They could pick off your guards in a few seconds.’ He pointed to a tall girl wearing a light summer coat over her dress. ‘What if she had a gun under her coat? What if . . .’

He stopped.

This was not just a fantasy he was weaving to illustrate a point, he realized. His unconscious mind had seen the people in the square deploying in battle formation. The tiny blonde and her husband had taken cover in the bar. The two men in the church doorway had moved behind pillars. The tall girl in the summer coat, who had been staring into a shop window until a moment ago, was now standing in the shadow of Dieter’s car. As Dieter looked her coat flapped open, and to his astonishment he saw that his imagination had been prophetic: under the coat she had a submachine-gun with a skeleton-frame butt, exactly the type favoured by the Resistance. ‘My God!’ he said.

He reached inside his suit jacket, and remembered he was not carrying a gun.

Where was Stéphanie? He looked around, momentarily shocked into a state close to panic, but she was standing behind him, waiting patiently for him to finish his conversation with Weber. ‘Get down!’ he yelled.

Then there was a bang.

THREE

Flick was in the doorway of the Cafe des Sports, behind Michel, standing on tiptoe to look over his shoulder. She was alert, her heart pounding, her muscles tensed for action; but in her brain the blood flowed like ice water, and she watched and calculated with cool detachment.

There were eight guards in sight: two at the gate checking passes, two just inside the gate, two patrolling the grounds behind the iron railings, and two at the top of the short flight of steps leading to the chateau’s grand doorway. But Michel’s main force would bypass the gate.

The long north side of the church building formed part of the wall surrounding the chateau’s grounds. The north transept jutted a few feet into the car park that had once been part of the ornamental garden. In the days of the ancien régime, the Comte had had his own personal entrance to the church, a little door in the transept wall. The doorway had been boarded up and plastered over more than a hundred years ago, and had remained that way until today.

An hour ago, a retired quarryman called Gaston had entered the empty church and carefully placed four half-pound sticks of yellow plastic explosive at the foot of the blocked doorway. He had inserted detonators, connected them together so that they would all go off at the same instant, and added a five-second fuse ignited by a thumb plunger. Then he had smeared everything with ash from his kitchen fire to make it inconspicuous, and moved an old wooden bench in front of the doorway for additional concealment. Satisfied with his handiwork, he had knelt down to pray.

When the church bell had stopped ringing a few seconds ago, Gaston had got up from his pew, walked a few paces from the nave into the transept, depressed the plunger, and ducked quickly back around the corner. The blast must have shaken centuries of dust from the gothic arches. But the transept was not occupied during services, so no one would have been injured.

After the boom of the explosion, there was a long moment of silence in the square. Everyone froze: the guards at the chateau gate, the sentries patrolling the fence, the Gestapo major, and the well-dressed German with the glamorous mistress. Flick, taut with apprehension, looked across the square and through the iron railings into the grounds. In the car park was a relic of the seventeenth-century garden, a stone fountain with three mossy cherubs sporting where jets of water had once flowed. Around the dry marble bowl were parked a truck, an armoured car, a Mercedes sedan painted the grey-green of the German army, and two black Citroëns of the ‘Traction Avant’ type favoured by the Gestapo in France. A soldier was filling the tank of one of the Citroëns, using a petrol pump that stood incongruously in front of a tall chateau window. For a few seconds, nothing moved. Flick waited, holding her breath.

Among the congregation in the church were ten armed men. The priest, who was not a sympathizer and therefore had had no warning, must have been pleased that so many people had shown up for the evening service, which was not normally very popular. He might have wondered why some of them wore topcoats, despite the warm weather; but after four years of austerity lots of people wore odd clothes, and a man might wear a raincoat to church because he had no jacket. By now, Flick hoped, the priest understood it all. At this moment the ten would be leaping from their seats, pulling out their guns, and rushing through the brand-new hole in the wall.

At last they came into view around the end of the church. Flick’s heart leaped with pride and fear when she saw them, a motley army in old caps and worn-out shoes, running across the car park towards the grand entrance of the chateau, feet pounding the dusty soil, clutching their assorted weapons – pistols, revolvers, rifles and one submachine-gun. They had not yet begun firing them, for they were trying to get as close as possible to the building before the shooting started.

Michel saw them at the same time. He made a noise between a grunt and a sigh, and Flick knew he felt the same mixture of pride at their bravery and fear for their lives. Now was the moment to distract the guards. Michel raised his rifle, a Lee-Enfield No. 4 Mark I, the kind the Resistance called a Canadian rifle, because many of them were made in Canada. He drew a bead, took up the slack of the two-stage trigger, then fired. He worked the bolt action with a practised movement so that the weapon was immediately ready to be fired again.

The crash of the rifle ended the moment of shocked silence in the square. At the gate, one of the guards cried out and fell, and Flick felt a savage moment of satisfaction: there was one less man to shoot at her comrades. Michel’s shot was the signal for everyone else to open fire. In the church porch, young Bertrand squeezed off two shots that sounded like firecrackers. He was too far from the guards for accuracy with a pistol, and he did not hit anyone. Beside him, Albert pulled the ring of a grenade and hurled it high over the railing, to land inside the grounds, where it exploded in the vineyard, uselessly scattering vegetation in the air. Flick wanted to yell angrily at them: ‘Don’t fire for the sake of the noise, you’ll just reveal your position!’ But only the best and most highly trained troops could exercise restraint once the shooting started. From behind the parked sports car, Geneviève opened up, and the deafening rattle of her Sten gun filled Flick’s ears. Her shooting was more effective, and another guard fell.

At last the Germans began to act. The guards took cover behind the stone pillars, or lay flat, and brought their rifles to bear. The Gestapo major fumbled his pistol out of its holster. The redhead turned and ran, but her sexy shoes slipped on the cobblestones, and she fell. Her man lay on top of her, protecting her with his body, and Flick decided she had been right to suppose he was a soldier, for a civilian would not know that it was safer to lie down than to run.

The sentries opened fire. Almost immediately, Albert was hit. Flick saw him stagger and clutch his throat. A hand grenade he had been about to throw dropped from his grasp. Then a second round hit him, this time in the forehead. He fell like a stone, and Flick thought with sudden grief of the baby girl born this morning who now had no father. Beside Albert, Bertrand saw the turtleshell grenade roll across the age-worn stone step of the church porch. He hurled himself through the doorway as the grenade exploded. Flick waited for him to reappear, but he did not, and she thought with anguished uncertainty that he could be dead, wounded or just stunned.

In the car park, the team from the church stopped running, turned on the remaining six sentries and opened up. The four guards near the gate were caught in a crossfire, between those inside the grounds and those outside in the square, and they were wiped out in seconds, leaving only the two on the chateau steps. Michel’s plan was working, Flick thought with a surge of hope.

But the enemy troops inside the building had now had time to seize their weapons and rush to the doors and windows, and they began to shoot, changing the odds again. Everything depended on how many of them there were.

For a few moments the bullets poured like rain, and Flick stopped counting. Then she realized with dismay that there were many more guns in the chateau than she had expected. Fire seemed to be coming from at least twelve doors and windows. The men from the church, who should by now have been inside the building, retreated to take cover behind the vehicles in the car park. Antoinette had been right, and MI6 wrong, about the number of troops stationed here. Twelve was the MI6 estimate, yet the Resistance had downed six for certain and there were at least fourteen still firing.

Flick cursed passionately. In a fight like this, the Resistance could win only by sudden overwhelming violence. If they did not crush the enemy right away, they were in trouble. As the seconds ticked by, army training and discipline began to tell. In the end, regular troops would always prevail in a drawn-out conflict.

On the upper floor of the chateau, a tall seventeenth-century window was smashed open, and a machine-gun began to fire. Because of its high position, it caused horrible carnage among the Resistance in the car park. Flick was sickened as, one after another, the men there fell and lay bleeding beside the dry fountain, until there were only two or three still shooting.

It was all over, Flick realized in despair. They were outnumbered and they had failed. The sour taste of defeat rose in her throat.

Michel had been shooting at the machine-gun position. ‘We can’t take out that machine-gunner from the ground!’ he said. He looked around the square, his gaze flying to the tops of the buildings, the bell tower of the church and the upper floor of the town hall. ‘If I could get into the mayor’s office I’d have a clear shot.’

‘Wait.’ Flick’s mouth was dry. She could not stop him risking his life, much as she wanted to. But she could improve the odds. She yelled at the top of her voice: ‘Geneviève!’

Geneviève turned to look at her.

‘Cover Michel!’

Geneviève nodded vigorously, then dashed out from behind the sports car, spraying bullets at the chateau windows.

‘Thanks,’ Michel said to Flick. Then he broke cover and sprinted across the square, heading for the town hall.

Geneviève ran on, heading for the church porch. Her fire distracted the men in the chateau, giving Michel a chance of crossing the square unscathed. But then there was a flash on Flick’s left. She glanced that way and saw the Gestapo major, flattened against the wall of the town hall, aiming his pistol at Michel.

It was hard to hit a moving target with a handgun at anything but close range – but the major might be lucky, Flick thought fearfully. She was under orders to observe and report back, and not to join the fighting under any circumstances, but now she thought: To hell with that. In her shoulder bag she carried her personal weapon, a Browning nine-millimetre automatic, which she preferred to the SOE standard Colt because it had thirteen rounds in the clip instead of seven, and because she could load it with the same nine-millimetre Parabellum rounds used in the Sten submachine-gun. She snatched it out of the bag. She released the safety catch, cocked the hammer, extended her arm, and fired two hasty shots at the major.

She missed him, but her bullets chipped fragments of stone from the wall near his face, and he ducked.

Michel ran on.

The major recovered quickly and raised his weapon again.

As Michel approached his destination, he also came closer to the major, shortening the range. Michel fired his rifle in the major’s direction, but the shot went wide, and the major kept his head and fired back. This time, Michel went down, and Flick let out a yell of fear.

Michel hit the ground, tried to get up, and collapsed. Flick calmed herself and thought fast. Michel was still alive. Geneviève had reached the church porch, and her submachine-gun fire continued to draw the attention of the enemy inside the chateau. Flick had a chance of rescuing Michel. It was against her orders, but no orders could make her leave her husband bleeding on the ground. Besides, if she left him there, he would be captured and interrogated. As leader of the Bollinger circuit, Michel knew every name, every address, every code word. His capture would be a catastrophe.

There was no choice.

She shot at the major again. Again she missed, but she pulled the trigger repeatedly, and the steady fire forced the man to retreat along the wall, looking for cover.

She ran out of the bar into the square. From the corner of her eye she saw the owner of the sports car, still protecting his mistress from gunfire by lying on top of her. Flick had forgotten him, she realized with sudden fear. Was he armed? If so he could shoot her easily. But no bullets came.

She reached the supine Michel and went down on one knee. She turned towards the town hall and fired two wild shots to keep the major busy. Then she looked at her husband.

To her relief she saw that his eyes were open and he was breathing. He seemed to be bleeding from his left buttock. Her fear receded a little. ‘You got a bullet in your bum,’ she said in English.

He replied in French: ‘It hurts like hell.’

She turned again to the town hall. The major had retreated twenty yards and crossed the narrow street to a shop doorway. This time Flick took a few seconds to aim carefully. She squeezed off four shots. The shop window exploded in a storm of glass, and the major staggered back and fell to the ground.

Flick spoke to Michel in French. ‘Try to get up,’ she said. He rolled over, groaning in pain, and got to one knee, but he could not move his injured leg. ‘Come on,’ she said harshly. ‘If you stay here, you’ll be killed.’ She grabbed him by the front of his shirt and heaved him upright with a mighty effort. He stood on his good leg, but he could not bear his own weight, and leaned heavily against her. She realized that he was not going to be able to walk, and she groaned in despair.

She glanced over to the side of the town hall. The major was getting up. He had blood on his face, but he did not seem badly injured. She guessed that he had been cut superficially by flying glass, but might still be capable of shooting.

There was only one thing for it: she would have to pick Michel up and carry him to safety.

She bent in front of him, grasped him around the thighs, and eased him on to her shoulder in the classic fireman’s lift. He was tall but thin – most French people were thin, these days. All the same, she thought she would collapse under his weight. She staggered, and felt dizzy for a second, but she stayed upright.

After a moment she took a step forward.

She lumbered across the cobblestones. She thought the major was shooting at her, but she could not be sure as there was so much gunfire from the chateau, from Geneviève, and from the Resistance fighters still alive in the car park. The fear that a bullet might hit her at any second gave her strength, and she broke into a lurching run. She made for the road leading out of the square to the south, the nearest exit. She passed the German lying on top of the redhead, and for a startled moment she met his eye and saw an expression of surprise and wry admiration. Then she crashed into a café table, sending it flying, and she almost fell, but managed to right herself and run on. A bullet hit the window of the bar, and she saw a cobweb of fracture lines maze the glass. A moment later, she was around the corner and out of the major’s line of sight. Alive, she thought gratefully; both of us – for a few more minutes, at least.

Until now she had not thought where to go once she was clear of the battlefield. Two getaway vehicles were waiting a couple of streets away, but she could not carry Michel that far. However, Antoinette Dupert lived on this street, just a few steps farther. Antoinette was not in the Resistance, but she was sympathetic enough to have provided Michel with a plan of the chateau. And Michel was her nephew, so she surely would not turn him away.

Anyway, Flick had no alternative.

Antoinette had a ground-floor apartment in a building with a courtyard. Flick came to the open gateway, a few yards along the street from the square, and staggered under the archway. She pushed open a door and lowered Michel to the tiles.

She hammered on Antoinette’s door, panting with effort. She heard a frightened voice say: ‘What is it?’ Antoinette had been scared by the gunfire and did not want to open the door.

Breathlessly, Flick said: ‘Quickly, quickly!’ She tried to keep her voice low. Some of the neighbours might be Nazi sympathizers.

The door did not open, but Antoinette’s voice came nearer. ‘Who’s there?’

Flick instinctively avoided speaking a name aloud. She replied: ‘Your nephew is wounded.’

The door opened. Antoinette was a straight-backed woman of fifty wearing a cotton dress that had once been chic and was now faded but crisply pressed. She was pale with fear. ‘Michel!’ she said. She knelt beside him. ‘Is it serious?’

‘It hurts, but I’m not dying,’ Michel said through clenched teeth.

‘You poor thing.’ She brushed his hair off his sweaty forehead with a gesture like a caress.

Flick said impatiently: ‘Let’s get him inside.’

She took Michel’s arms and Antoinette lifted him by the knees. He grunted with pain. Together they carried him into the living room and put him down on a faded velvet sofa.

‘Take care of him while I fetch the car,’ Flick said. She ran back into the street.

The gunfire was dying down. She did not have long. She raced along the street and turned two corners.

Outside a closed bakery, two vehicles were parked with their engines running: one a rusty Renault, the other a van with a faded sign on the side that had once read Blanchisserie Bisset – Bisset’s Laundry. The van was borrowed from the father of Bertrand, who was able to get fuel because he washed sheets for hotels used by the Germans. The Renault had been stolen this morning in Chalons, and Michel had changed its licence plates. Flick decided to take the car, leaving the van for any survivors who might get away from the carnage in the chateau grounds.

She spoke briefly to the driver of the van. ‘Wait here for five minutes, then leave.’ She ran to the car, jumped into the passenger seat, and said: ‘Let’s go, quickly!’

At the wheel of the Renault was Gilberte, a nineteen-year-old girl with long dark hair, pretty but stupid. Flick did not know why she was in the Resistance – she was not the usual type. Instead of pulling away, Gilberte said: ‘Where to?’

‘I’ll direct you – for the love of Christ, move!’

Gilberte put the car in gear and drove off.

‘Left, then right,’ Flick said.

In the two minutes of inaction that followed, the full realization of her failure hit her. Most of the Bollinger circuit was wiped out. Albert and others had died. Geneviève, Bertrand and any others who survived would probably be tortured.

And it was all for nothing. The telephone exchange was undamaged, and German communications were intact. Flick felt worthless. She tried to think what she had done wrong. Had it been a mistake to try a frontal attack on a guarded military installation? Not necessarily – the plan might have worked but for the inaccurate intelligence supplied by MI6. However, it would have been safer, she now thought, to get inside the building by some clandestine means. That would have given the Resistance a better chance of getting to the crucial equipment.

Gilberte pulled up at the courtyard entrance. ‘Turn the car around,’ Flick said, and jumped out.

Michel was lying face down on Antoinette’s sofa, trousers pulled down, looking undignified. Antoinette knelt beside him, holding a bloodstained towel, a pair of glasses perched on her nose, peering at his backside. ‘The bleeding has slowed, but the bullet is still in there,’ she said.

On the floor beside the sofa was her handbag. She had emptied the contents on to a small table, presumably while hurriedly searching for her spectacles. Flick’s eye was caught by a sheet of paper, typed on and stamped, with a small photograph of Antoinette pasted to it, the whole thing in a little cardboard folder. It was the pass that permitted her to enter the chateau. In that moment, Flick had the glimmer of an idea.

‘I’ve got a car outside,’ Flick said.

Antoinette continued to study the wound. ‘He shouldn’t be moved.’

‘If he stays here, the Boche will kill him.’ Flick casually picked up Antoinette’s pass. As she did so she asked Michel: ‘How do you feel?’

‘I might be able to walk now,’ he said. ‘The pain is easing.’

Flick slipped the pass into her shoulder bag. Antoinette did not notice. Flick said to her: ‘Help me get him up.’

The two women raised Michel to his feet. Antoinette pulled up his blue canvas trousers and fastened his worn leather belt.

‘Stay inside,’ Flick said to Antoinette. ‘I don’t want anyone to see you with us.’ She had not yet begun to work out her idea, but she already knew it would be blighted if any suspicion were to fall on Antoinette and her cleaners.

Michel put his arm around Flick’s shoulders and leaned heavily on her. She took his weight and he hobbled out of the building into the street. By the time they reached the car, he was white with pain. Gilberte stared through the window at them, looking terrified. Flick hissed at her: ‘Get out and open the fucking door, dimwit!’ Gilberte leaped out of the car and threw open the rear door. With her help, Flick bundled Michel on to the back seat.

The two women jumped in the front. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Flick.

FOUR

Dieter was dismayed and appalled. As the shooting began to peter out, and his heartbeat returned to normal, he started to reflect on what he had seen. He had not thought the Resistance capable of such a well-planned and carefully executed attack. From everything he had learned in the last few months, he believed their raids were normally hit-and-run affairs. But this had been his first sight of them in action. They had been bristling with guns and obviously not short of ammunition – unlike the German army. Worst of all, they had been courageous. Dieter had been impressed by the rifleman who had dashed across the square, by the girl with the Sten gun who had given him covering fire, and most of all by the little blonde who had picked up the wounded rifleman and had carried him – a man six inches taller than she – out of the square to safety. Such people could not fail to be a profound threat to the occupying military force. These were not like the criminals Dieter had dealt with as a policeman in Cologne before the war. Criminals were stupid, lazy, cowardly and brutish. These French Resistance people were fighters.

But their defeat gave him a rare opportunity.

When he was sure the shooting had stopped, he got to his feet and helped Stéphanie up. Her cheeks were flushed and she was breathing hard. She held his hands and looked into his face. ‘You protected me,’ she said. Tears came to her eyes. ‘You made yourself a shield for me.’

He brushed dirt from her hip. He was surprised by his own gallantry. The action had been instinctive. When he thought about it, he was not at all sure he would really be willing to give his life to save Stéphanie. He tried to pass over it lightly. ‘No harm should come to this perfect body,’ he said.

She began to cry.

He took her hand and led her across the square to the gates. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he said. ‘You can sit down for a while.’ They entered the grounds. Dieter saw a hole in the wall of the church. That explained how the main force had got inside.

The Waffen SS troops had come out of the building and were disarming the attackers. Dieter looked keenly at the Resistance fighters. Most were dead, but some were only wounded, and one or two appeared to have surrendered unhurt. There should be several for him to interrogate.

Until now, his work had been defensive. The most he had been able to do was fortify key installations against the Resistance by beefing up security. The occasional prisoner had yielded little information. But having several prisoners, all from one large and evidently well-organized circuit, was a different matter. This might be his chance of going on the attack, he thought eagerly.

He shouted at a sergeant. ‘You – get a doctor for these prisoners. I want to interrogate them. Don’t let any die.’

Although Dieter was not in uniform, the sergeant assumed from his manner that he was a superior officer, and said: ‘Very good, sir.’

Dieter took Stéphanie up the steps and through the stately doorway into the wide hall. It was a breathtaking sight: a pink marble floor, tall windows with elaborate curtains, walls with Etruscan motifs in plaster picked out in dusty shades of pink and green, and a ceiling painted with fading cherubs. Once, Dieter assumed, the room had been filled with gorgeous furniture: pier tables under high mirrors, sideboards encrusted with ormolu, dainty chairs with gilded legs, oil paintings, huge vases, little marble statuettes. All that was gone now, of course. Instead there were rows of switchboards, each with its chair, and a snake’s nest of cables on the floor.

The telephone operators seemed to have fled into the grounds at the rear but, now that the shooting had stopped, a few of them were standing at the glazed doors, still wearing their headsets and breast microphones, wondering if it was safe to come back inside. Dieter sat Stéphanie at one of the switchboards, then beckoned a middle-aged woman telephonist. ‘Madame,’ he said, in a polite but commanding voice. He spoke French. ‘Please bring a cup of hot coffee for this lady.’

The woman came forward, shooting a look of hatred at Stéphanie. ‘Very good, Monsieur.’

‘And some cognac. She’s had a shock.’

‘We have no cognac.’

They had cognac, but she did not want to give it to the mistress of a German. Dieter did not argue the point. ‘Just coffee, then, but be quick, or there will be trouble.’

He patted Stéphanie’s shoulder and left her. He passed through double doors into the east wing. The chateau was laid out as a series of reception rooms, one leading into the next on the Versailles pattern, he found. The rooms were full of switchboards, but these had a more permanent look, the cables bundled into neatly made wooden trunking that disappeared through the floor into the cellar beneath. Dieter guessed the hall looked messy only because it had been brought into service as an emergency measure after the west wing had been bombed. Some of the windows were permanently blacked out, no doubt as an air-raid precaution, but others had heavy curtains drawn open, and Dieter supposed the women did not like to work in permanent night.

At the end of the east wing was a stairwell. Dieter went down. At the foot of the staircase he passed through a steel door. A small desk and a chair stood just inside, and Dieter assumed a guard normally sat there. The man on duty had presumably left his post to join in the fighting. Dieter entered unchallenged, and made a mental note of a security breach.

This was a different environment from that of the grand principal floors. Designed as kitchens, storage, and accommodation for the dozens of staff who would have serviced this house three hundred years ago, it had low ceilings, bare walls, and floors of stone or even, in some rooms, beaten earth. Dieter walked along a broad corridor. Every door was clearly labelled in neat German signwriting, but Dieter looked inside anyway. On his left, at the front of the building, was the complex equipment of a major telephone exchange: a generator, enormous batteries, and rooms full of tangled cables. On his right, towards the back of the house, were the Gestapo’s facilities: a photo lab, a large wireless listening room for eavesdropping on the Resistance, and prison cells with peepholes in the doors. The basement had been bombproofed: all windows were blocked, the walls were sandbagged, and the ceilings had been reinforced with steel girders and poured concrete. Obviously that was to prevent Allied bombers putting the phone system out of action.

At the end of the corridor was a door marked ‘Interrogation Centre’. He went inside. The first room had bare white walls, bright lights and the standard furniture of a simple interview room: a cheap table, hard chairs, and an ashtray. Dieter went through to the next room. Here the lights were less bright and the walls bare brick. There was a bloodstained pillar with hooks for tying people up; an umbrella stand holding a selection of wooden clubs and steel bars; a hospital operating table with a head clamp and straps for the wrists and ankles; an electric-shock machine; and a locked cabinet that probably contained drugs and hypodermic syringes. It was a torture chamber. Dieter had been in many similar, but still they sickened him. He had to remind himself that intelligence gathered in places such as this helped save the lives of decent young German soldiers, so that they could eventually go home to their wives and children instead of dying on battlefields. All the same, the place gave him the creeps.

There was a noise behind him, startling him. He spun around. When he saw what was in the doorway he took a frightened step back. ‘Christ!’ he said. He was looking at a squat figure, its face thrown into shadow by the strong light from the next room. ‘Who are you?’ he said, and he could hear the fear in his own voice.

The figure stepped into the light and turned into a man in the uniform shirt of a Gestapo sergeant. He was short and podgy, with a fleshy face and ash-blond hair cropped so short that he looked bald. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said in a Frankfurt accent.

Dieter recovered his composure. The torture chamber had unnerved him, but he regained his habitual tone of authority and said: ‘I am Major Franck. Your name?’

The sergeant became deferential at once. ‘Becker, sir, at your service.’

‘Get the prisoners down here as soon as possible, Becker,’ said Dieter. ‘Those who can walk should be brought immediately, the others when they have been seen by a doctor.’

‘Very good, Major.’

Becker went away. Dieter returned to the interview room and sat in the hard chair. He wondered how much information he would get out of the prisoners. Their knowledge might be limited to their own town. If his luck was bad, and their security good, each individual might know only a little about what went on in their own circuit. On the other hand, there was no such thing as perfect security. A few individuals inevitably amassed a wide knowledge of their own and other Resistance circuits. His dream was that one circuit might lead him to another in a chain, and he might be able to inflict enormous damage on the Resistance in the weeks remaining before the Allied invasion.

He heard footsteps in the corridor and looked out. The prisoners were being brought in. The first was the woman who had concealed a Sten gun beneath her coat. Dieter was pleased. It was so useful to have a woman among the prisoners. Under interrogation, women could be as tough as men; but often the way to make a man talk was to beat a woman in front of him. This one was tall and sexy, which was all the better. She seemed to be uninjured. Dieter held up a hand to the soldier escorting her, and spoke to the woman in French. ‘What is your name?’ he said in a friendly tone.

She looked at him with haughty eyes. ‘Why should I tell you?’

He shrugged. This level of opposition was easy to overcome. He used an answer that had served him well a hundred times. ‘Your relatives may enquire whether you are in custody. If we know your name, we may tell them.’

‘I am Geneviève Delys.’

‘A beautiful name for a beautiful woman.’ He waved her on.

Next came a man in his sixties, bleeding from a head injury and limping too. Dieter said: ‘You’re a little old for this sort of thing, aren’t you?’

The man looked proud. ‘I set the charges,’ he said defiantly.

‘Name?’

‘Gaston Lefèvre.’

‘Just remember one thing, Gaston,’ Dieter said in a kindly voice. ‘The pain lasts as long as you choose. When you decide to end it, it will stop.’

Fear came into the man’s eyes as he contemplated what faced him.

Dieter nodded, satisfied. ‘Carry on.’

A youngster was next, no more than seventeen, Dieter guessed, a good-looking boy who was absolutely terrified. ‘Name?’

He hesitated, seeming dazed by shock. After thinking, he said: ‘Bertrand Bisset.’

‘Good evening, Bertrand,’ Dieter said pleasantly. ‘Welcome to Hell.’

The boy looked as if he had been slapped.

Dieter pushed him on.

Willi Weber appeared, with Becker pacing behind him like a dangerous dog on a chain. ‘How did you get in here?’ Weber said rudely to Dieter.

‘I walked in,’ Dieter said. ‘Your security stinks.’

‘Ridiculous! You’ve just seen us beat off a major attack!’

‘By a dozen men and some girls!’

‘We defeated them, that’s all that counts.’

‘Think about it, Willi,’ Dieter said reasonably. ‘They were able to assemble close by, quite unnoticed by you, then force their way into the grounds and kill at least six good German soldiers. I suspect the only reason you defeated them was that they had underestimated the numbers against them. And I entered this basement unchallenged because the guard had left his post.’

‘He’s a brave German, he wanted to join the fighting.’

‘God give me strength,’ Dieter said in despair. ‘A soldier in battle doesn’t leave his post to join the fighting, he follows orders!’

‘I don’t need a lecture from you on military discipline.’

Dieter gave up, for now. ‘And I have no desire to give one.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m going to interview the prisoners.’

‘That’s the Gestapo’s job.’

‘Don’t be idiotic. Field Marshal Rommel has asked me, not the Gestapo, to limit the capacity of the Resistance to damage his communications in the event of an invasion. These prisoners can give me priceless information. I intend to question them.’

‘Not while they’re in my custody,’ Weber said stubbornly. ‘I shall interrogate them myself and send the results to the Field Marshal.’

‘The Allies are probably going to invade this summer – isn’t it time to stop fighting turf wars?’

‘It is never time to abandon efficient organization.’

Dieter could have screamed. In desperation, he swallowed his pride and tried for a compromise. ‘Let’s interrogate them together.’

Weber smiled, sensing victory. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘This means I’ll have to go over your head.’

‘If you can.’

‘Of course I can. All you will achieve is a delay.’

‘So you say.’

‘You damned fool,’ Dieter said savagely. ‘God preserve the fatherland from patriots such as you.’ He turned on his heel and stalked out.

FIVE

Gilberte and Flick left the town of Sainte-Cécile behind, heading for the city of Reims on a country back road. Gilberte drove as fast as she could along the narrow lane. Flick’s eyes apprehensively raked the road ahead. It rose and fell over low hills and wound through vineyards as it made its leisurely way from village to village. Their progress was slowed by many crossroads, but the number of junctions made it impossible for the Gestapo to block every route away from Sainte-Cécile. All the same, Flick gnawed her lip, worrying about the chance of being stopped at random by a patrol. She could not explain away a man in the back seat bleeding from a bullet wound.

Thinking ahead, she realized she could not take Michel to his home. After France surrendered in 1940, and Michel was demobilized, he had not returned to his lectureship at the Sorbonne, but had come back to his home town, to be deputy head of a high school, and – his real motive – to organize a Resistance circuit. He had moved into the home of his late parents, a charming town house near the cathedral. But, Flick decided, he could not go there now. It was known to too many people. Although Resistance members often did not know one another’s addresses – for the sake of security, they revealed them only if necessary for a delivery or rendezvous – Michel was leader, and most people knew where he lived.

Back in Sainte-Cécile, some of the team must have been taken alive. Before long they would be under interrogation. Unlike British agents, the French Resistance did not carry suicide pills. The only reliable rule of interrogation was that everybody would talk in the long run. Sometimes the Gestapo ran out of patience, and sometimes they killed their subjects by over-enthusiasm but, if they were careful and determined, they could make the strongest personality betray his or her dearest comrades. No one could bear agony for ever.

So Flick had to treat Michel’s house as known to the enemy. Where could she take him instead?

‘How is he?’ said Gilberte anxiously.

Flick glanced into the back seat. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing normally. He had fallen into a sleep, the best thing for him. She looked at him fondly. He needed someone to take care of him, at least for a day or two. She turned to Gilberte. Young and single, she was probably still with her parents. ‘Where do you live?’ Flick asked her.

‘On the outskirts of town, on the Route de Cernay.’

‘On your own?’

For some reason, Gilberte looked scared. ‘Yes, of course on my own.’

‘A house, an apartment, a bedsitting room?’

‘An apartment, two rooms.’

‘We’ll go there.’

‘No!’

‘Why not? Are you scared?’

She looked injured. ‘No, not scared.’

‘What, then?’

‘I don’t trust the neighbours.’

‘Is there a back entrance?’

Reluctantly, Gilberte said: ‘Yes, an alley that runs along the side of a little factory.’

‘It sounds ideal.’

‘Okay, you’re right, we should go to my place. I just . . . You surprised me, that’s all.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Flick was scheduled to return to London tonight. She was to rendezvous with a plane in a meadow outside the village of Chatelle, five miles north of Reims. She wondered if the plane would make it. Navigating by the stars, it was extraordinarily difficult to find a specific field near a small village. Pilots often went astray – in fact, it was a miracle they ever arrived where they were supposed to. She looked at the weather. A clear sky was darkening to the deep blue of evening. There would be moonlight, provided the weather held.

If not tonight, then tomorrow, she thought, as always.

Her mind went to the comrades she had left behind. Was young Bertrand dead or alive? What about Geneviève? They might be better off dead. Alive, they faced the agony of torture. Flick’s heart seemed to convulse with grief as she thought again that she had led them to defeat. Bertrand had a crush on her, she guessed. He was young enough to feel guilty about secretly loving the wife of his commander. She wished she had ordered him to stay at home. It would have made no difference to the outcome, and he would have remained a bright, likeable youth for a little longer, instead of a corpse, or worse.

No one could succeed every time, and war meant that when leaders failed then people died. It was a hard fact, but still she cast about for consolation. She longed for a way to make sure their suffering was not in vain. Perhaps she could build on their sacrifice and get some kind of victory out of it after all.

She thought about the pass she had stolen from Antoinette, and the possibility of getting into the chateau under cover. A team could enter disguised as civilian employees. She swiftly dismissed the idea of having them pose as telephone operators: it was a skilled job that took time to learn. But anyone could use a broom.

Would the Germans notice if the cleaners were strangers? They probably paid no attention to the women who mopped the floor. What about the French telephonists – would they give the game away? It might be a risk worth taking.

SOE had a remarkable forgery department that could copy any kind of document, sometimes even making their own paper to match the original, in a couple of days. They could soon produce counterfeits of Antoinette’s pass.

Flick suffered a guilty pang at having stolen it. At this moment Antoinette might be looking for it frantically, searching under the couch and in all her pockets, going out into the courtyard with a torch. When she told the Gestapo she had lost it, she would be in trouble. But in the end they would just give her a replacement. And this way she was not guilty of helping the Resistance. If interrogated, she would steadfastly maintain that she had mislaid it, for she believed that to be the truth. Besides, Flick thought grimly, if she had asked permission to borrow the thing, Antoinette might have said no.

Of course, there was one major snag with this plan. All the cleaners were women. The Resistance team that went in disguised as cleaners would have to be all-female.

But then, Flick thought, why not?

They were entering the suburbs of Reims. It was dark when Gilberte pulled up near a low industrial building surrounded by a high wire fence. She killed the engine. Flick spoke sharply to Michel. ‘Wake up! We have to get you indoors.’ He groaned. ‘We must be quick,’ she added. ‘We’re breaking the curfew.’

The two women got him out of the car. Gilberte pointed to the narrow alley that led along the back of the factory. Michel put his arms over their shoulders and they helped him along the alley. Gilberte opened a door in a wall that led to the back yard of a small apartment building. They crossed the yard and went in through a back door.

It was a block of cheap flats with five floors and no lift. Unfortunately, Gilberte’s rooms were on the attic floor. Flick showed her how to make a carrying chair. Crossing their arms, they linked hands under Michel’s thighs and took his weight. He put an arm around the shoulders of each woman to steady himself. That way they carried him up four flights. Luckily, they met no one on the stairs.

They were breathing hard by the time they reached Gilberte’s door. They stood Michel on his feet and he managed to limp inside, where he collapsed into an armchair.

Flick looked around. It was a girl’s place, pretty and neat and clean. More importantly, it was not overlooked. That was the advantage of the top floor: no one could see in. Michel should be safe.

Gilberte fussed about Michel, trying to make him comfortable with cushions, wiping his face gently with a towel, offering him aspirins. She was tender but impractical, as Antoinette had been. Michel had that effect on women, though not on Flick – which was partly why he had fallen for her: he could not resist a challenge. ‘You need a doctor,’ Flick said brusquely. ‘What about Claude Bouler? He used to help us, but last time I spoke to him, he didn’t want to know me. I thought he was going to run away, he was so nervous.’

‘He’s become scared since he got married,’ Michel replied. ‘But he’ll come for me.’

Flick nodded. Lots of people would make exceptions for Michel. ‘Gilberte, go and fetch Dr Bouler.’

‘I’d rather stay with Michel.’

Flick groaned inwardly. Someone like Gilberte was no good for anything but carrying messages, yet she could make difficulties about that. ‘Please do as I ask,’ Flick said firmly. ‘I need time alone with Michel before I return to London.’

‘What about the curfew?’

‘If you’re stopped, say you’re fetching a doctor. It’s an accepted excuse. They may accompany you to Claude’s house to make sure you’re telling the truth. But they won’t come here.’

Gilberte looked troubled, but she pulled on a cardigan and went out.

Flick sat on the arm of Michel’s chair and kissed him. ‘That was a catastrophe,’ she said.

‘I know.’ He grunted with disgust. ‘So much for MI6. There must have been double the number of men they told us.’

‘I’ll never trust those clowns again.’

‘We lost Albert. I’ll have to tell his wife.’

‘I’m going back tonight. I’ll get London to send you another radio operator.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’ll have to find out who else is dead, and who’s alive.’

‘If I can.’ He sighed.

She held his hand. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Foolish. It’s an undignified place for a bullet wound.’

‘But physically?’

‘A little giddy.’

‘You need something to drink. I wonder what she has.’

‘Scotch would be nice.’ Flick’s friends in London had taught Michel to like whisky, before the war.

‘That’s a little strong.’ The kitchen was in a corner of the living room. Flick opened a cupboard. To her surprise, she saw a bottle of Dewar’s White Label. Agents from Britain often brought whisky with them, for their own use or for their comrades-in-arms, but it seemed an unlikely drink for a French girl. There was also an opened bottle of red wine, much more suitable for a wounded man. She poured half a glass and topped it up with water from the tap. Michel drank greedily: loss of blood had made him thirsty. He emptied the glass then leaned back and closed his eyes.

Flick would have liked some of the Scotch, but it seemed unkind to deny it to Michel then drink it herself. Besides, she still needed her wits about her. She would have a drink when she was back on British soil.

She looked around the room. There were a couple of sentimental pictures on the wall, a stack of old fashion magazines, no books. She poked her nose into the bedroom. Michel said sharply: ‘Where are you going?’

‘Just looking around.’

‘Don’t you think it’s a little rude, when she’s not here?’

Flick shrugged. ‘Not really. Anyway, I need the bathroom.’

‘It’s outside. Down the stairs and along the corridor to the end. If I remember rightly.’

She followed his instructions. While she was in the bathroom she realized that something was bothering her, something about Gilberte’s apartment. She thought hard. She never ignored her instincts: they had saved her life more than once. When she returned, she said to Michel: ‘Something’s wrong here. What is it?’

He shrugged, looking uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You seem edgy.’

‘Perhaps it’s because I’ve just been wounded in a gunfight.’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s the apartment.’ It had something to do with Gilberte’s unease, something to do with Michel’s knowing where the bathroom was, something to do with the whisky. She went into the bedroom, exploring. This time Michel did not reprove her. She looked around. On the bedside table stood a photograph of a man with Gilberte’s big eyes and black eyebrows, perhaps her father. There was a doll on the counterpane. In the corner was a washbasin with a mirrored cabinet over. Flick opened the cabinet door. Inside was a man’s razor, bowl and shaving brush. Gilberte was not so innocent: some man stayed overnight often enough to leave his shaving tackle here.

Flick looked more closely. The razor and brush were a set, with polished bone handles. She recognized them. She had given the set to Michel for his thirty-second birthday.

So that was it.

She was so shocked that for a moment she could not move.

She had suspected him of being interested in someone else, but she had not imagined it had gone this far. Yet here was the proof, in front of her eyes.

Shock turned to hurt. How could he cuddle up to another woman when Flick was lying in bed alone in London? She turned and looked at the bed. They had done it right here, in this room. It was unbearable.

Then she became angry. She had been loyal and faithful, she had borne the loneliness – but he had not. He had cheated. She was so furious she felt she would explode.

She strode into the other room and stood in front of him. ‘You bastard,’ she said in English. ‘You lousy rotten bastard.’

Michel replied in the same language. ‘Don’t angry yourself at me.’

He knew that she found his fractured English endearing, but it was not going to work this time. She switched to French. ‘How could you betray me for a nineteen-year-old nitwit?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything, she’s just a pretty girl.’

‘Do you think that makes it better?’ Flick knew she had originally attracted Michel’s attention, back in the days when she was a student and he a lecturer, by challenging him in class – French students were deferential by comparison with their English counterparts, and on top of that Flick was by nature disrespectful of authority. If someone similar had seduced Michel – perhaps Geneviève, a woman who would have been his equal – she could have borne it better. It was more hurtful that he had chosen Gilberte, a girl with nothing on her mind more interesting than nail varnish.

‘I was lonely,’ Michel said pathetically.

‘Spare me the sob story. You weren’t lonely – you were weak, dishonest and faithless.’

‘Flick, my darling, let’s not quarrel. Half our friends have just been killed. You’re going back to England. We could both die soon. Don’t go away angry.’

‘How can I not be angry? I’m leaving you in the arms of your floozie!’

‘She’s not a floozie—’

‘Skip the technicalities. I’m your wife, but you’re sharing her bed.’

Michel moved in his chair and winced with pain, then he fixed Flick with his intense blue eyes. ‘I plead guilty,’ he said. ‘I’m a louse. But I’m a louse who loves you, and I’m just asking you to forgive me, this once, in case I never see you again.’

It was hard to resist. Flick weighed five years of marriage against a fling with a popsie, and gave in. She moved a step towards him. He put his arms around her legs and pressed his face into the worn cotton of her dress. She stroked his hair. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘All right.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I feel awful. You’re the most wonderful woman I ever met, or even heard of. I won’t do it any more, I promise.’

The door opened, and Gilberte came in with Claude. Flick gave a guilty start, and released Michel’s head from her embrace. Then she felt stupid. He was her husband, not Gilberte’s. Why should she feel guilty about hugging him, even in Gilberte’s apartment? She was angry with herself.

Gilberte looked shocked to see her lover embracing his wife here, but she swiftly recovered her composure, and her face assumed a frozen expression of indifference.

Claude, a handsome young doctor, followed her in, looking anxious.

Flick went to Claude and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘We’re truly grateful.’

Claude looked at Michel. ‘How do you feel, old buddy?’

‘I’ve got a bullet in my arse.’

‘Then I’d better take it out.’ He lost his worried air and became briskly professional. Turning to Flick, he said: ‘Put some towels on the bed to soak up the blood, then get his trousers off and lay him face down. I’ll wash my hands.’

Gilberte put old magazines on her bed and towels over the paper while Flick got Michel up and helped him hobble to the bed. As he lay down, she could not help wondering how many other times he had lain here.

Claude inserted a metal instrument into the wound and felt around for the slug. Michel cried out with pain.

‘I’m sorry, old friend,’ Claude said solicitously.

Flick almost took pleasure in the sight of Michel in agony on the bed where he had formerly cried out with guilty pleasure. She hoped he would always remember Gilberte’s bedroom this way.

Michel said: ‘Just get it over with.’

Flick’s vengeful feeling passed quickly, and she felt sorry for Michel. She moved the pillow closer to his face, saying: ‘Bite on this, it will help.’

Michel stuffed the pillow into his mouth.

Claude probed again, and this time got the bullet out. Blood flowed freely for a few seconds, then slowed, and Claude put a dressing on.

‘Keep as still as you can for a few days,’ he advised Michel. That meant Michel would have to stay at Gilberte’s place. However, he would be too sore for sex, Flick thought with grim satisfaction.

‘Thank you, Claude,’ she said.

‘Glad to be able to help.’

‘I have another request.’

Claude looked scared. ‘What?’

‘I’m meeting a plane at a quarter to midnight. I need you to drive me to Chatelle.’

‘Why can’t Gilberte take you, in the car she used to come to my place?’

‘Because of the curfew. But we’ll be safe with you, you’re a doctor.’

‘Why would I have two people with me?’

‘Three. We need Michel to hold a torch.’ There was an unvarying procedure for pick-ups: four Resistance people held flashlights in the shape of a giant letter L, indicating the direction of the wind and where the plane should come down. The small battery-operated torches needed to be directed at the aircraft to make sure the pilot saw them. They could simply be placed in position on the ground, but that was less sure, and if the pilot did not see what he expected he might suspect a trap and decide not to land. It was better to have four people if at all possible.

Claude said: ‘How would I explain you all to the police? A doctor on emergency call doesn’t travel with three people in his car.’

‘We’ll think of some story.’

‘It’s too dangerous!’

‘It will take only a few minutes, at this time of night.’

‘Marie-Jeanne will kill me. She says I have to think of the children.’

‘You don’t have any.’

‘She’s pregnant.’

Flick nodded. That would explain why he had become so jumpy.

Michel rolled over and sat upright. He reached out and grasped Claude’s arm. ‘Claude, I’m begging you, this is really important. Do it for me, will you?’

It was hard to say no to Michel. Claude sighed. ‘When?’

Flick looked at her watch. It was almost eleven. ‘Now.’

Claude looked at Michel. ‘His wound may reopen.’

‘I know,’ Flick said. ‘Let it bleed.’

The village of Chatelle consisted of a few buildings clustered around a crossroads: three farmhouses, a strip of labourers’ cottages, and a bakery that served the surrounding farms and hamlets. Flick stood in a cow pasture a mile from the crossroads, holding in her hand a torch about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

She had been on a week-long course, run by the pilots of 161 Squadron, to train her for the task of guiding an aircraft in. This location fitted the specifications they had given her. The field was almost a kilometre long – a Lysander needed six hundred metres to land and take off. The ground beneath her feet was firm, and there was no slope. A nearby pond was clearly visible from the air in the moonlight, providing a useful landmark for pilots.

Michel and Gilberte stood upwind of Flick in a straight line, also holding torches; and Claude stood a few yards to one side of Gilberte, making a flare path in the shape of an upside-down L to guide the pilot. In remote areas, bonfires could be used instead of electric lights; but here, close to a village, it was too dangerous to leave the tell-tale burn mark on the ground.

The four people formed what the agents called a reception committee. Flick’s were always silent and disciplined, but less well-organized groups sometimes turned the landing into a party, with groups of men shouting jokes and smoking cigarettes, and spectators from nearby villages turning up to watch. This was dangerous. If the pilot suspected that the landing had been betrayed to the Germans, and thought the Gestapo might be lying in wait, he had to react quickly. The instructions to reception committees warned that anyone approaching the plane from the wrong angle was liable to be shot by the pilot. This had never actually happened, but on one occasion a spectator had been run over by a Hudson bomber and killed.

Waiting for the plane was always hell. If it did not arrive, Flick would face another twenty-four hours of unremitting tension and danger before the next opportunity. But an agent never knew whether a plane would show up. This was not because the RAF was unreliable. Rather, as the pilots of 161 Squadron had explained to Flick, the task of navigating a plane by moonlight across hundreds of miles of country was monumentally difficult. The pilot used dead reckoning – calculating his position by direction, speed and elapsed time – and tried to verify the result by landmarks such as rivers, towns, railway lines and forests. The problem with dead reckoning was that it was impossible to make an exact adjustment for the drift caused by wind. And the trouble with landmarks was that one river looked very much like another by moonlight. Getting to roughly the right area was difficult enough, but these pilots had to find an individual field.

If there was cloud hiding the moon it was impossible, and the plane would not even take off.

However, this was a fine night, and Flick was hopeful. Sure enough, a couple of minutes before midnight, she heard the unmistakable sound of a single-engined plane, faint at first then rapidly growing louder, like a burst of applause, and she felt a homegoing thrill. She began to flash her light in the Morse letter X. If she flashed the wrong letter, the pilot would suspect a trap, and go away without landing.

The plane circled once then came down steeply. It touched down on Flick’s right, braked, turned between Michel and Claude, taxied back to Flick, and turned into the wind again, completing a long oval and finishing up ready for take-off.

The aircraft was a Westland Lysander, a small high-winged monoplane, painted matt black. It was flown by a crew of one. It had two seats for passengers, but Flick had known a ‘Lizzie’ to carry four, one on the floor and one on the parcel shelf.

The pilot did not stop the engine. His aim was to remain on the ground no more than a few seconds.

Flick wanted to hug Michel and wish him well, but she also wanted to slap his face and tell him to keep his hands off other women. Perhaps it was just as well that she had no time for either.

With a brief wave, Flick scrambled up the metal ladder, threw open the hatch, and climbed aboard.

The pilot glanced behind, and Flick gave him the thumbs-up. The little plane jerked forward and picked up speed, then rose into the air and climbed steeply.

Flick could see one or two lights in the village: country people were careless about the blackout. When Flick had flown in, perilously late at four in the morning, she had been able to see from the air the red glare of the baker’s oven, and driving through the village she had smelt the new bread, the essence of France.

The plane banked to turn, and Flick saw the moonlit faces of Michel, Gilberte and Claude as three white smears on the black background of the pasture. As the plane levelled and headed for England, she realized with a sudden surge of grief that she might never see them again.