The Winter Agent Read online

  ‘Warm the cockles, won’t it?’ said the young man.

  ‘Hope so.’

  The tea was set down. ‘Fancy a bit to eat? The Welsh rarebit’s good today.’

  ‘Is it? All right, well, I’ll have that.’

  ‘Right you are.’ The man behind the counter went into the kitchen to put a bit of cheese on toast under the grill. ‘Seen anything good at the flicks?’ he called out.

  ‘Oh, I don’t go to the pictures very much.’

  ‘No?’ The young man came back out, wiping his hands on a soggy grey towel. ‘Couldn’t do without them meself. Only way I get to dream.’ They both chuckled. ‘Well, I’ll let you get back to your newspaper, sir.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The German agent Parade continued reading the newspaper sports pages. Truth be told, he didn’t care about football in Germany, Britain or indeed any nation in the world. But it was his cover identity’s legend that he had grown up in Bristol, where he had supported the local team, the Rovers. The Wartime League was of even less interest to him than that which had operated before hostilities began – containing, as it now did, a series of cobbled-together sides that sometimes played, sometimes abandoned the match with minutes to spare – but it had to be followed.

  He placed the folded newspaper on the café table and looked around at the clientele. Mostly old or feeble. The young man brought him the cheese on toast and Parade gratefully shifted his attention. He had spent many evenings over the past couple of years sitting in this café, killing time.

  Another young man – perhaps in his mid-twenties – strode into the café with a huge grin on his face. He was big and broad and wearing the uniform and insignia of a sapper, Parade noted.

  ‘Stone me!’ exclaimed the boy behind the counter, rushing out to embrace him. ‘It’s me brother Phil,’ he announced to the three people drinking their tea. ‘You on leave or what?’

  ‘Got a couple of days, ain’t I?’ replied Phil happily. ‘Just a couple. Mum’s not home, so I come straight’ere.’

  ‘Don’t mind, do you, mister?’ asked the younger of the two, taking a seat at Parade’s table. ‘Not for a hero.’

  ‘Oh, stop that. Just doing my bit.’

  ‘No,’ Parade insisted. ‘You’re all heroes.’

  ‘You off for the big one soon, then?’ the younger brother asked.

  ‘Yeah, looks like it. Not supposed to talk, though. Secret’n that. Just training right now.’ He leaned in, smirking. ‘But between you an’ me: beach training. You know.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  Parade watched as the two brothers caught up and thought to himself about the young man in a sapper’s uniform. Beach training. Yes, I know. Will your life be one of those on my account this time next week? I have nothing against you, but it’s the simple cost of warfare. Millions have died, millions more will die – innocent and guilty all falling together. Why should I care more about you going to your grave than any of those others? Others I have never known and will never know.

  He listened to their chat about where Phil had been and what he had seen. Then, when the time had been killed, he bade cheerio and walked for precisely four minutes to a suburban street nearby. He approached the doorway of house number eighteen, where the render was cracking into spider’s webs. He was about to enter when a policeman on a bicycle halted beside him.

  ‘May I stop you for a moment, sir?’ the officer enquired.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘May I see your identity card?’

  ‘All right.’ He took it from his pocket and showed it to the constable.

  ‘Thank you.’ The officer handed back the card. ‘May I ask if this is your house?’

  ‘No, I’m visiting. My brother’s widow lives here.’

  ‘I see,’ the policeman said, stroking his chin.

  ‘What do you see?’ He contrived to sound peeved rather than worried by the policeman’s interest.

  ‘Well, sir, it’s just, she sounds – her accent isn’t English, is it?’

  ‘No, she’s Dutch.’ Parade changed his voice to sound relieved – he now comprehended the policeman’s concern. ‘Not German. The Dutch are on our side.’

  ‘Well, yes, sir. But it’s as well to keep an eye out, you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your brother’s widow, you say?’

  ‘He died in 1940. He flew Hurricanes.’

  The policeman looked at his feet. He was in his fifties or sixties, Parade saw, and skinny from the years of food on coupons. ‘I’m sorry for asking, sir. We all owe him a debt.’

  Parade felt he had drawn a better card. ‘Yes, Constable.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Well, you’ll appreciate that I have to keep an eye out.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Have a good evening, sir.’ He nodded politely and left.

  ‘Good evening.’

  Parade paused for a few seconds and let himself into the house. A youngish woman was waiting for him in the kitchen, sitting at the table, spooning the dregs of a thin vegetable soup into her mouth. She had a slovenly air, as if she never saw other people and had lost all interest in maintaining herself. She glanced at her visitor and cut a slice of bread from a loaf, using it to wipe the inside of the bowl to get the last of her meal. She wiped her lips on the back of her hand and scraped her wooden chair back across the bare floorboards. ‘All right, I’m ready,’ she said in German.

  ‘Good, let’s get on with it,’ Parade replied in English. It annoyed him when she spoke German to deliberately flout security protocols, but he knew she did it to rile him so he never reacted.

  He hung his hat and coat on the rack and trod softly up the stairs behind her. At the top there was a ladder up into the attic and they hauled themselves up, their feet unsteady on the steel rungs.

  The loft had been partly turned into another bedroom, but the job had been left unfinished. There was plywood flooring but no carpet or rug, and the walls had no plaster, only the timbers and bricks that kept out the wind and the rain.

  The woman opened a suitcase stowed in the eaves, lifted out a wireless transmitter and placed it on a cleanly brushed table. It came in three grey metal boxes connected by thick wires. She arranged them neatly and placed the Morse key in the correct position for efficient use.

  As he took his place on a packing case to encipher a message, Parade shivered. It was one of the coldest nights he had lived through and being inside barely helped. The wind blew through so many cracks in the bricks he might as well have been outdoors – at least there he would have been walking around, instead of slumped over a table for an hour with a sheet of paper, a pencil and a code book. He rubbed his stiff, freezing limbs and shoved his hands into his armpits so his fingers would warm a little. He had to do it every minute or two for the full hour he spent enciphering the words because they kept seizing up with the chill.

  Eventually, he had a run of letters broken into groups of five to transmit. The woman took the slip of paper and turned on her set. Nothing happened. He worried, for a moment, that he had wasted those hours trekking through the dark to this godforsaken house and hunched over the table. It would be another hour at least to get home. All for nothing.

  ‘Check the connections,’ he said.

  ‘I know what to do,’ she muttered in reply. Her accent really was Dutch, as the neighbours believed. Parade had been informed that the SD had recruited her while she was training to teach the violin in Rotterdam. She had, however, never been married, let alone to Parade’s non-existent brother.

  She checked the connections. If the batteries were flat, they would have to spend another two hours sitting in the semi-dark while she charged them downstairs then brought the set back up to send the message. He thought hard about leaving it for the night and returning in the morning.

  She removed the batteries and cleaned all the connections with a handkerchief. Finally, she put the headphones back over her ears and switched on again.

 
For a moment, there was nothing. Then the sound of static through the earpieces told them that the equipment had sparked into life.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Parade muttered.

  She tapped out the code to establish that someone in Germany was listening. They were. She pressed the Morse key back into service, transmitting her safe code to say that it was her and that she wasn’t transmitting under duress. The code was accepted and returned with a reply code. Satisfied, she began to transmit. Plans for large rehearsal for beach landing Hemsall Sands Dorset 16–20 Feb. 40000 British 12000 Canadian troops. Will approach from Portsmouth in 9 tank landing ships. Escort 2 corvettes 2 motor torpedo boats. Will include live fire exercise. Suggest E-boat interception 0700 16 Feb. Confirm. Now know that Maxime organizer of SOE network Paris recently briefed Churchill. Subject of briefing unknown. Ends.

  She removed the headphones. ‘This man Maxime …’ she said.

  ‘You’ve done your part. That’s enough.’

  Yes, the message would be enough to put the Gestapo, Abwehr and SD on full alert. A man who had recently briefed Churchill would be the most hunted agent in Europe, Parade mused. He would be lucky to last a week in the open.

  How to carry out surveillance

  Position of watchers. The distance between the watchers and the quarry should vary according to the circumstances. It is often better to use the other side of the road. With a team of watchers it is useful to change position occasionally (e.g. when turning corner).

  Sturmbannführer Klaussmann clambered into his sleek motor car to find that even the leather was freezing. Schmidt took the front passenger seat. ‘It should only take ten minutes,’ he informed his superior.

  ‘Take your time,’ Klaussmann replied, settling in. Schmidt had recently been transferred to Paris. It was his first posting outside Germany and only his second overall. And Klaussmann felt that Schmidt showed promise – he was bright – but he had the perennial problem of young men: they were always trying to run ahead, certain they knew better than the generations who had come before them. Still, it was in the nature of young men to be reckless, and incumbent on those of the older generation to instruct them in the necessity of everything-in-its-place, he reminded himself. He also felt a degree of paternalistic pride in moulding Schmidt to be a good officer. There was only so much that the Gestapo training academy could teach; the rest had to be learned on the job. ‘Make it a smooth journey.’

  He had much to consider on the way. He had now been sent two messages informing him of the actions of the spy network. The first had identified Luc Carte, allowing Klaussmann to arrest him at the bar in Montmartre. The second had warned of the raid on the prison transport to free him. Carte would therefore be the key to taking the network.

  He looked through the polished window at the posters that his men had put up around the town: decrees about curfew times, about gatherings of more than three men. He pondered what he would have done if French tanks had rolled into Berlin and parked in front of the Brandenburg Gate. If that absurd self-appointed ‘general’ de Gaulle had started writing German laws. Would he, Klaussmann, have joined a hit-and-run brotherhood set on driving out the French? He didn’t think so. Cutting telephone wires and breaking locomotive engines seemed tawdry, really. He had no great desire to die on the field of battle like a Wagnerian hero, but at least it wouldn’t feel trivial. Sneaking around in the night, firing from tree cover, too frightened to show one’s face. Yes, that was about the size of the French. Terrorism was their level. And they couldn’t even do that without the British pulling their strings.

  The car moved through the centre of the city before turning north into the narrow streets of Montmartre. They stopped in a pleasant winding street and, if you just stood and looked along it in the crisp wintry light, you could believe it was twenty years earlier. ‘You know, we’re the ones preserving this,’ Klaussmann said as he stepped out of the car and swept his hand across the scene. ‘This history. The twentieth century is a battle between National Socialism and Communism. We want to preserve what is good – it’s the Reds who want to knock it all down. It’s all they know.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He hoped Schmidt really did understand. The Reich wasn’t perfect, but it was necessary. Warfare was a noble construct prosecuted in dirty circumstances, and it was down to the Gestapo to clean away the dregs. That was something that had to be done once in every generation, he believed. He recalled chaotic times in the previous decade: hungry dogs tearing rubbish apart, grown men and women walking in their wake to search for food. Humans no better than animals. A breakdown not just of society but of natural and racial order. That couldn’t happen again. No, it couldn’t happen. And so he and his brethren would hunt down all those who might bring it about.

  They walked to the house where Luc Carte had lived. Some old men were playing boules on a patch of grass beside it, but they studiously ignored the Germans’ presence. The house had been searched two days earlier, the night they had arrested Carte, but nothing of note had been found. Klaussmann, however, wanted to look for himself.

  ‘Good. Let’s go in.’

  Once inside, he and Schmidt spent two hours checking for anything that would lead to the spy network. And yet, by the end of it, they had nothing to show for their time but pained backs and dusty knees. Frustrated, Klaussmann went into the rear garden – a small kitchen garden now devoid of fruit and berries – and stared at the house. A dead garden, a dead end. A waste of time.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He looked around for the wheedling voice. A small child – a girl with curling fair hair underneath a bright orange woollen hat – was peeping over the fence to the side of a tatty shed with covered-up windows. The older children were wary of the German uniforms, but the youngest had grown up with them and seemed to regard the big men in grey as part of the landscape.

  ‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ Klaussmann replied.

  ‘Mr Carte?’

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘He isn’t here,’ she said brightly, happy to help an adult with her knowledge.

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘He’s my friend.’

  A woman’s voice called out, worried. ‘Françoise!’ Klaussmann saw a thin woman in her thirties emerge from the girl’s house. ‘Come in.’

  The girl ignored her. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Come into the house, darling,’ the woman called, walking cautiously towards the girl. ‘It’s too cold to be out.’

  ‘Go to your mother,’ Klaussmann said.

  ‘He said I’m his best friend.’ The girl started walking towards her mother. ‘He has other friends, but they’re not the same.’ She reached her mother’s outstretched arms.

  ‘Wait,’ Klaussmann said sharply. The girl looked back. The woman tried to gather her up and lift her away. ‘I said, wait.’

  ‘Sir, she’s only six,’ the woman pleaded.

  ‘Tell me about his other friends,’ Klaussmann instructed the girl, ignoring her mother. ‘Mr Carte. His other friends?’

  ‘Ummm.’ She looked skywards, as if the answer were written in the clouds.

  ‘When do they come?’ he gently nudged her along. ‘What time of day?’

  ‘Sir!’ the woman said.

  ‘Be quiet,’ he replied, lightly, so that the girl wouldn’t take fright. ‘Do they come when it’s dark?’

  The girl thought it over and nodded. ‘Sometimes. Usually when it’s the day.’

  ‘The day? That’s nice. I like it when it’s the day. Do you? You can play in the garden.’

  She grinned and nodded more vigorously. Her mother looked distressed, but Klaussmann’s eye told her to hold her tongue. ‘Do you know any of the friends who used to come to Mr Carte’s house?’ She shook her head. ‘Did any of them ever say their name?’

  She thought hard. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, well. He was lucky to have you as his friend.’ He looked back to the house. They might as well leave and try
something else.

  ‘But I saw one once.’

  He stopped. ‘Who?’

  ‘One of the men.’

  ‘When?’ Although he felt the thrill of urgency, he kept it out of his voice.

  ‘Grandpapa took me for a walk once in the Tuileries Gardens and we went to see Napoleon’s tomb and went into a tabac, and I saw one of Mr Carte’s friends in there. He worked there.’ The girl’s mother winced involuntarily. The girl noticed and looked confused. ‘Mama?’

  ‘Give me your hands,’ Klaussmann said. He stretched his arms up as if he were reaching for the sky. The girl copied him and he took hold of her wrists. She giggled as he lifted her up and over the fence so that she could no longer see her mother. He knelt down to her. ‘Did you like that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she chuckled.

  ‘Good. Now, can you remember the name of the tabac you saw the man in?’

  ‘Ummmm. No.’

  ‘Can you remember the street it was on?’ She shook her head. ‘Oh, that’s a pity. Because I like that man and want to meet him.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Can you remember where it was?’

  She shrugged. Then her expression brightened. ‘There was a man like you in there.’

  ‘A man like me? Wearing clothes like these?’ He pulled at his uniform.

  ‘Yes. He was carrying lots of them.’

  ‘Lots of them, you say. I see. Aren’t you a clever girl?’

  A few minutes later Klaussmann climbed back into the car. Schmidt was waiting for him. ‘There’s a tabac, somewhere between the Tuileries and the tomb of Napoleon, where some of our officers get their uniforms cleaned. Find out where it is.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He pondered for a moment. ‘Schmidt, you’re a father.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Tell me.’ He turned to his subordinate. ‘The girl back there. Say the mother knew something but refused to speak, would you have done whatever it took to the girl to get the woman to speak?’ Schmidt thought for a moment and nodded slowly. ‘Good.’