Madeleine's War Read online

  She yawned. “Don’t worry,” she said, blushing. “I’m not bored—really I’m not. It’s just…you know, all that stuff, being underwater…”

  “I know, I know. But we must get through this tonight. You’ll see why.” I gave her a small reassuring smile.

  “So. This something you’re being invited to join…our main work is to drop agents, money, ammunition, and equipment—weapons—behind enemy lines, to support sabotage work, and to prepare for a general uprising in France when the invasion comes. The invasion will be soon now, though no one knows exactly when or where. Certainly not me.”

  Outside there was a rustle of wind that shook the window frames.

  “Once we had decided that you were suitable, or at least not unsuitable, we needed to test you, twice. The first test was relatively straightforward—a parachute drop. Many people—perhaps most people—are pretty hesitant about jumping out of an aircraft high in the sky, especially at night, so it makes sense for us not to waste time and money training people who will then balk at being dropped by a Lysander or a Hudson. You were sent to Manchester, therefore, to make two drops, the first without equipment, the second with equipment. You did well.”

  She nodded and a smile shaped her lips. “Don’t sound so surprised. We women are not totally pointless.” She let the last two letters stay on her tongue for a shade longer than necessary.

  “I thought you were tired?”

  “Not up here,” she said, tapping her forehead. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  “Maybe I should have let them shoot you.”

  “Why did you let them undress me? The whole thing was frightening enough without that. Did you or the others just want a peek?”

  “The Gestapo’s favourite interrogation techniques always include humiliation. We had to reproduce that as best we could. I have found stripping people is very effective. Now, shall we get back to the interview?”

  She waved her empty glass.

  I refilled both and leaned forward again.

  “The second test involved the deception you’ve just been through. So far, we have found that the chances of one of our agents surviving six months in the field—I’m talking about ninety-odd men, and two score women, in the organisation you are being asked to join—is about fifty-fifty. In other words, there is a high chance of your being captured. If you are captured, because you will be in plain clothes you will be classified as a spy—just as we played it in our little deception—and you can, under the rules of war, be legally executed. Before that, though, you will be interrogated and very possibly tortured, even though you are a woman.”

  For a moment her gaze turned inward.

  “Our policy therefore is to train our agents to last out after capture for forty-eight hours, during which time everyone they know in their Resistance circuit disappears and hides or destroys incriminating evidence. This protects others who have not yet been caught. We give people several weeks of training in this unit I’m inviting you to join, but the hardest thing by far is to prepare people for interrogation and torture. If people know that interrogation is part of the training experience, they know it isn’t real, they know they are not going to be hurt like the enemy will hurt them. There is always something phony about mock interrogations.”

  She gave a small nod of her head.

  “You will probably have worked out what comes next. You were told that, having done two daylight drops in Manchester, we needed to see you in more realistic conditions—a long, cramped airplane journey, at night, like flying into France, with an equipment bag tied to your leg. What you didn’t know is that you were deliberately dropped away from where you thought you would be landing and, as a result, you were ‘captured’ by the local military police. I say ‘captured’ in quotation marks, but the military police were genuine. You were told that you were being dropped near but not actually in a restricted area, and then you found out you were not where you were supposed to be.”

  She stared at me. Her eyes flickered in the firelight.

  “In other words, so far as you were concerned, the situation was real. Very real. The aircraft from Manchester had flown north from Edinburgh over the North Sea and approached the coast from there. It was perfectly plausible for the local military police to mistake you for a German agent being dropped into a restricted zone, to gather intelligence or carry out sabotage.”

  I leaned forward and warmed my hands at the fire. “So…your interrogation felt real, the water torture was real, you were stripped naked—a real humiliation, as you have conceded—and, for a while at least, you really were confused, bewildered, and worried that you were going to be shot.” I sat back. “Did you notice the blood on the ground in front of the wall, where you were standing?”

  She shivered. “Are you kidding? It was cold and sticky and it smelled.”

  “Cow’s blood,” I said. “Not what you were meant to think. A realistic touch, yes?”

  “Di-a-bolical. And, I have to admit, brilliant.” She shivered again and sank more whisky. Her skin was becoming a little flushed.

  “Anyway, from our point of view, the deception worked. We saw how you behaved in a real, terrifying ordeal.”

  She held her whisky glass against her cheek. “I was frightened, yes, but I was angry too. Life doesn’t happen like that, so I kept telling myself—except that, in a war, who is to say? All the usual rules are…no more. I kept telling myself that too. But it was all so unfair, it was all happening so quickly and before my war effort had begun. Then I got really bewildered when the man with the birthmark on his face pulled back his sleeve to look at his watch. I could have sworn it was a Graf Zeppelin. Did that mean he was a German in a British uniform, and a spy himself? On top of all that, I had nothing to tell them.”

  “No. You had nothing to give away. That is the most unusual part, from our point of view. We know now, from experience, with our own agents in the field, and German agents captured here in Britain, that the moment of capture itself is the critical time, the real trauma. That how people respond when they are first apprehended—a hand on the shoulder, a gun pointed at you, a door to a room forced open—is what counts. That moment, and the time immediately following it, is crucial…It tells us almost all we need to know about an agent. Who will crumble and give away secrets immediately, and who will hang on for forty-eight hours. Most people crumble immediately—not all, but most. And, as I say, we need people who can hold out for forty-eight hours.”

  I raised my glass to her. “You passed with flying colours. The fact that you spotted a German wristwatch in those circumstances is very impressive.”

  She set the empty whisky glass down on the table between us.

  “May I take it then that I am being invited to join this something?”

  I nodded.

  “And what, exactly, is this club? What’s it called?”

  “You can’t know that until you’ve agreed to join and signed the Official Secrets Act. But I can tell you that you’ll be given the nominal rank of captain.”

  “And you are…?”

  “I’m a colonel, but we are informal—relaxed—about rank in the special services. We don’t go in for stripes and badges on our arms. With us it’s cunning that counts.”

  She warmed her hands at the fire. “And if I refuse?”

  “You’ll be sent back to FANY. We’ll put it about that there’s something odd about you, something fishy, that you failed the test you’ve just passed. You won’t get any more war work, I can assure you of that.”

  She leaned forward, pressed her lips together.

  “But you’ve been through all the tests. We haven’t read anybody wrong yet. I’d offer a hundred to one that you won’t say no.”

  “Fifty-fifty,” she said softly. “Those are the odds of survival?”

  I nodded. “And of being captured.”

  “You survived.”

  “Most of me. I lost a lung.”

  “How exactly?”

  “Not tonight
. It’s getting on for three o’clock. Over another whisky, perhaps. It’s time for your answer. I need an answer now. If it’s no, you’ll be sent away from here while it’s still dark, in a closed van. You will never know, exactly, where this place is and you won’t be able to find it—or us—again.

  “In the field—if you decide to go—you’ll have to get used to making swift decisions. In France it will always be late, usually somewhere remote, and there’ll be no fire and probably no alcohol, but you’ll always have to make up your mind in a flash. If you can’t give me an answer this instant, you are no use to me.”

  She sat upright in her chair.

  “I wish the odds were better. But how else will I ever find out how you lost your lung?”

  · 3 ·

  THERE WERE SIX OF US in the rail yard. Red brick buildings huddled off to one side, their slate roofs glistening in the drizzle. A disused mine lay at the end of the rails, its entrance overgrown with weeds and barred by rusting sheets of corrugated iron. This had been a busy acreage when the mine was open, and the one line that led away to civilization, and the rest of the rail network, beyond the low heather-covered mountains in the distance, split here into five or six subsidiary dead-end sidings. Old freight wagons had been shunted on to these branches and forgotten.

  Weeds straggled between the ballast and the sleepers but the rails themselves were shiny steel rods. Invermore Siding had a new lease of life, at least for now. It was a secret part of the war effort.

  I stood in front of a flatbed truck. Beside me stood my assistant, Duncan Kennaway. He was small, with fair hair, a deeply cleft chin, and a ruddy complexion that matched the weave of his tweeds. The four recruits—Ivan Wilde, Erich Langres, Katrine Howard, and Madeleine—were wrapped up against the weather—it was icy as well as drizzling—but I had their full attention.

  “I repeat what I told you yesterday. Now that we have got to the practical part of the course, we operate totally in French. We all talk French, you all talk French, to me, to each other, to the support staff. You don’t stop talking French until I tell you. Is that clear?”

  I looked at the others one by one.

  “Oui, monsieur,” said someone.

  “Bon. Now,” I went on in French, pointing to the flatbed, “you’ve probably never seen a rail wagon like this one.” I turned and nodded. Across the dirty orange superstructure was stencilled CAMIONS.

  “Not in Scotland, anyway. That’s because it’s French. It came here with the boat train and was trapped in the UK at the time war broke out. Now it’s helping the war effort.”

  The cold wind gusted again. Loch Kishon wasn’t far away and there was little in the way of hills between the rail yard and Loch Hourn, the easternmost reach, hereabouts, of the Atlantic Ocean.

  I raised the tin I was holding. “This is today’s lesson. This tin looks like a perfectly ordinary tin of motor oil, the kind you would put in your Morris or your Wolseley any day of the week. If you could afford a Morris or a Wolseley. But, as perhaps you are learning to expect by now, here at SC2 things are not always quite as they seem to be.”

  Madeleine and the others had been at Ardlossan Manse nearly two weeks now. After she had agreed to join the “club,” and signed the Official Secrets Act, we had both grabbed a few hours’ sleep. Early the following morning, we had transferred from The Farm to the headquarters building on the opposite coast of the Highlands. There she had joined the other recruits, who had arrived the day before, having been tested—and selected—earlier.

  Ardlossan was ideal for its purposes. Nairn, where The Farm was, was on the east coast of Scotland, a location suited to the deception we had to create if recruits were to feel their interrogations as “real.” If enemy agents were ever flown in from Germany, they would reach Scotland over the North Sea, not the Western Isles. But the western coast of Scotland was much more remote than the east coast. Ardlossan was as remote as only the west coast could be.

  Had it been a person, Ardlossan Manse would have been red-headed and taciturn, like the stereotypical Scot. Three miles south of Ardnave, on McIntyre, one of the bleaker—if more beautiful—of Scotland’s western peninsulas, there was a milky redness veined into the manse’s stone façade. Its windows and doors were too small for the building’s overall dimensions, giving it a forbidding look, closed in on itself against the weather, and the world.

  In front of the manse a lawn ran down gently to a line of umbrella pines. Beyond them the rocks began, and beyond the rocks, depending on the tide, was half a mile or a mile and a half of sand, as white as a full moon and carved into huge snaky fingers by the grey-green inlets of Loch Hourn—when the waters were rising on Kyleakin they did so almost at walking pace. A mile offshore was Kiloran Bight, once part of the mainland, but now an uninhabited island—save for kittiwakes and gulls—and unremittingly barren, windswept. No trees, just gorse where the sparse shelter allowed. In the channel between the island and the mainland could be glimpsed occasional seals, their pelts pitch-black and shiny as oil, with heads like frogmen. In the night their barks punctuated your sleep and made you ask yourself if a submarine had just surfaced. The sound of the sea was always with us, a backdrop collapsing at intervals in a soft shshshing.

  Ardlossan’s strong point was its location, out of sight of any roads, at the end of a long drive and surrounded by bleak, bare hills and the sea. Its weak point was everything else—no heating in any of the rooms, except the great rooms which had fireplaces, too few bathrooms (that were, in any case, so far from the boilers that the hot water arrived tepid and brownish), leaks in the roof here and there, windows that rattled in the wind, and freezing flagstone floors in the halls downstairs, making the house as emotionally cold as it was physically. Obviously, the War Office, or whoever owned the damned place, had got it on the cheap.

  It was, as I explained to the recruits, the training establishment for SC2, Special Command Two, the specialist sabotage outfit created by Churchill at the beginning of the war to operate behind enemy lines. I was second in command of the French section of SC2, but because of my time in France, I was in charge at Ardlossan. My commanding officer remained at our headquarters in London. At Ardlossan, it was my job to teach the recruits “security”—how to survive in Nazi-occupied France, how to operate communications equipment, how to live off the land if needed, how to avoid standing out, how to spot when they were being followed, and how to lose the people tailing them when they were. How to survive—and resist—interrogation. Beyond that, my job was to instill in them initiative, self-reliance, cunning—and more cunning. I also taught a selection of sabotage techniques.

  “Now,” I said, moving to one side as Duncan eased out of the way. “Bend down here, near the axle. You need to see exactly how this works.”

  We all sank to our knees. In the damp it was dirty but there it was.

  I pointed to the wheel of the wagon. “Look inside the wheel. You will see what I can best describe as a circular box, like a collar around the axle. See?”

  They all craned forward.

  “Can you see it?”

  One by one they nodded.

  I leaned forward again, stretched one arm through the spokes of the wheel, and passed my hand around the metal collar. “Somewhere here…there is a spigot, a sort of tap. Ah, I’ve found it. Major Kennaway, the tin, please.”

  Duncan passed me a tin, in effect a small bucket.

  “I’m going to open the spigot and then you’ll see the axle oil pour out, into the can.” I took a small hammer from my pocket and tapped the spigot. After a few taps it swiveled, and oil began to drain into the bucket.

  I fixed the recruits with a stare. “You need the bucket because you don’t want the oil to pour on to the ground. That would give the game away that the axle has been tampered with. Carry the oil away with you to a place where the Nazis will never stumble across it.” I sat back on my heels. “Now we wait for all the oil to drain into the bucket. It should take no more than two or three min
utes. Then we close the spigot.”

  I waited until the flow of oil slowed, then became intermittent, then just drops, then stopped.

  Duncan took the bucket away as I tapped the spigot closed with the hammer.

  I reached forward again. “Now, I need to find the depression where the oil is put in.” My fingers scratched around the collar. “Ah, here it is. All of you: feel here…Feel the depression where my hand is now.”

  One by one they reached forward and put their hands through the wheel to the collar.

  “Can you feel it?” I asked.

  Again, they nodded, one by one.

  “Now I need some pliers to twist off the cap. Major?”

  Duncan handed them to me.

  The cap was fitted tight but, eventually, I managed to undo it.

  “Now, with the cap open and the spigot closed, I pour the ‘oil’—‘oil’ in quotation marks—from this tin into the axle box.”

  They all watched. Soft rain pressed against my cheek as I poured in all of the contents of the tin.

  Finally, I tightened the cap and stood up. Everyone else did the same.

  I turned and waved across the yard. Straightaway, the small shunting locomotive started to trundle towards us, stopping when it reached the wagon. The driver got down, came round the back of the locomotive, and began fixing the wagon to the coupling.

  “Okay,” I said, “everyone on to the wagon. We’re going for a short ride.”

  Duncan led the way, pulling the recruits on to the flatbed one at a time. The driver returned to his cabin.

  He looked back at me, I waved again, and he eased the engine forward, with the wagon behind.

  In the drizzle it was hardly a pleasant ride, especially as we picked up speed.

  “Where are we going?” said Katrine Howard. She was tall and thin, with untidy hair. She had worked as a property manager at a theatre in Paris and knew all about wigs. That might come in handy one day.