Restless (11 page)

In her turn she asked Morris how long he had known Romer. 'Oh, a good few years now,' he said and she knew from the tone of his voice that it would not only be wrong to ask for a more precise answer but that it would also be suspicious. Morris called her 'Eve' and the thought came to her suddenly that perhaps 'Morris Devereux' was no more his real name than 'Eve Dalton' was hers. She glanced over at him as they motored towards the coast and saw his fine features lit from below by the dashboard lights and felt, not for the first time, a dull pang of regret: how this curious job they were doing – regardless of how they were working towards the same end – consistently managed to leave them essentially divided and solitary.

Morris dropped her at her flat; she said good-night and climbed the stairs to her landing. There she saw Sylvia's blue square of card protruding just beyond the doorjamb. She slipped her key into the lock and was just about to turn it when it was opened from the inside. Romer stood there, smiling at her somewhat frostily, she thought, and at the same time she noticed Sylvia standing in the hall behind him, making vague panic gestures that Eva couldn't quite decipher.

'You've been a while,' he said. 'Didn't you take the car?'

'Yes, we did,' Eva said, moving through to their small sitting-room. 'It was raining on the way back. I thought you were meant to be in London.'

'I was. And what I learned there has brought me immediately back. Air travel, wonderful invention.' He moved to the window where he had left his bag.

'He's been here two hours,' Sylvia whispered, making a gruesome face, as Romer crouched down and rummaged in his grip and then belted it closed. He stood up.

'Pack an overnight bag,' he said. 'You and I are going to Holland.'

Prenslo was a nondescript small village on the frontier between Holland and Germany. Eva and Romer had found the journey there surprisingly tiring and taxing. They took a train from Ostend to Brussels, where they changed and caught another train to The Hague. At the main station in The Hague a man from the British Embassy was waiting with a car. Romer then drove them east towards the German border, except that he lost his way twice when he had to leave the main road to head crosscountry for Prenslo, and they spent half an hour or so doubling back before they found their way. They arrived in Prenslo at 4.00 a.m. to discover that the hotel that Romer had booked – the Hotel Willems – was locked shut and completely dark with no one prepared to respond to their bell-ringing, their shouts or peremptory knocking. So they sat in their car in the car-park until seven when a sleepy lad in a dressing gown unlocked the hotel's front door and they were finally, grumpily, admitted.

Eva had spoken little during the journey to Prenslo, deliberately, and Romer had seemed more than usually self-absorbed and taciturn. She felt there was something about Romer's attitude that irked her – as if she was being indulged, spoilt, that she should feel unusually privileged to be on this mysterious night journey with the 'boss' – and so she behaved dutifully and uncomplainingly. But the three-hour wait in the Hotel Willems's car-park and their enforced proximity had made Romer more relaxed and he had told her in more detail what they were doing in Prenslo.

On his brief trip to London Romer had learned that there was an SIS mission due to take place the next day in Prenslo. A senior German general in the Wehrmacht high command wanted to sound out the British position and response in the event of an army-led coup against Hitler. Apparently there was no question of deposing Hitler – he would maintain his role as chancellor – but he would be under the absolute control of the mutinous generals. After several preliminary encounters – to check security, to verify details – a unit of the British Secret Service based in The Hague had set up this first meeting with the general himself in a cafe at Prenslo. Prenslo was chosen because of the ease with which the general and his collaborators could slip to and fro across the border unremarked. The cafe in question was a hundred yards from the frontier.

Eva listened to all this attentively, with about three dozen questions clustering in her head. She knew she probably shouldn't air them but she didn't really care: she was both tired and mystified.

'Why do you need me for this?' she asked.

'Because my face is known to the SIS men. One of them is Head of Station in Holland – I've met him half a dozen times.' Romer stretched, his elbow bumping Eva's shoulder. 'Sorry – you'll be my eyes and ears, Eva. I need to know exactly what's going on.' He smiled tiredly, having to explain. 'It would look very odd to this fellow if he spotted me poking around.'

Another question had to be asked: 'But why are we poking around? Aren't we all "Secret Intelligence Service" people, at the end of the day?' She found the whole thing faintly ridiculous, obviously the result of some inter-departmental squabble – all of which meant she was wasting her time sitting in a car in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

Romer suggested they take a turn around the car-park, stretch their legs – they did so. Romer lit a cigarette, not offering her one, and they walked in silence a full circuit before returning to their car.

'We are not really SIS, to be precise,' he said. 'My team – AAS – is officially part of GC amp;GS.' He explained. 'The Government Code and Cipher School. GC ampersand GS. We have a… a somewhat different role to play.'

'Though we're all on the same side.'

'Are you trying to be clever?'

They sat in silence for a while before he spoke again. 'You've seen the stories we've been putting out through the Agence about disaffection in the upper ranks of the German army.'

Eva said yes: she remembered items about the threatened resignation of this or that high-ranking officer; denials that this or that high-ranking officer was being posted to a provincial command and so on.

Romer continued: 'I think this Prenslo encounter is all as a result of our stories from the Agence. It's only right that I should see what happens. I should have been informed from the outset.' In a gesture of his irritation he flicked away his cigarette into the bushes – a bit foolhardily, Eva thought, then remembered that at this time of the year the bushes would be damp and incombustible. He was angry, Eva realised, somebody was going to steal his credit.

'Does SIS know we're here in Prenslo?'

'I very much assume and hope not.'

'I don't understand.'

'Good.'

Once the sleepy lad had shown them to their rooms Eva was called into Romer's. He was on the top floor and had a good view down Prenslo's only significant street. Romer handed her a pair of binoculars and pointed out the key details in the panorama: there was the German border crossing with its striped black and white barrier; there was the railway line; there, a hundred yards back, was the Dutch custom-house, occupied only in summer months. Opposite was the cafe, the Cafe Backus, a large two-storey modern building with two petrol pumps and a glassed-in veranda with distinctive striped awnings – chocolate brown and orange – to cast shade. A new hedge and some tethered saplings had been planted around the gravelled forecourt; behind the cafe was a larger unpaved car-park, with swings and a see-saw at one side, and beyond it a pinewood into which the railway line ran and disappeared. The Cafe Backus effectively marked the end of Prenslo before Germany began. The rest of the village stretched back from it – houses and shops, a post office, a small town hall with a large clock and, of course, the Hotel Willems.

'I want you to go to the cafe and order breakfast,' Romer said. 'Speak French, if you have to speak English make it very accented and broken. Ask if you can get a room for the night, or something. Get a sense of the place, dither, poke around – say you'll be back for lunch. Have a look and report back to me in an hour or so.'

Eva had felt tired as she had scanned Prenslo through Romer's binoculars – she'd had a busy twenty-four hours, after all – but now, as she walked down Prenslo's main street towards the Cafe Backus, she suddenly felt her body taut and alive with adrenalin. She looked casually about her, noting the people out on the street, a lorry loaded with milk churns passing by, a file of schoolchildren in forest-green uniforms. She pushed open the door of the Cafe Backus.

She ordered her breakfast – coffee, two boiled eggs, bread and ham – and ate it alone in the large ground-floor dining-room that gave on to the glassed-in veranda. A young girl served her, who spoke no French. Eva could hear a clatter of plates and conversation from the kitchen. Then two young men came out of a double door to one side and stepped out on to the forecourt. They were young but one was bald and the other had very cropped hair in a military style. They were wearing suits and ties. They hung around the petrol pumps for a while, staring up the road at the custom post's barrier. Then they re-entered, glancing incuriously at Eva, who was having her coffee-cup refilled by the waitress. The double doors swung closed behind them.

Eva asked to see a room but was told that the rooms were only let in the summer. She asked where the lavatory was and, deliberately mishearing the directions, pushed through the double doors. There was a large conference room behind with tables ranged in a square. The bald man was all sharp angles, elbows and knees jutting, sitting on a chair looking at something on the sole of his shoe; the other man was practising a tennis serve with an invisible racquet. They looked slowly round and she backed out. The waitress pointed Eva in the right direction and she walked quickly down the corridor she should have taken to the lavatory.

There, she unlatched, shoved and wrenched open the small frosted-glass window to reveal a view of the unpaved car-park, the swings and the see-saw and the pinewoods beyond. She closed the window, leaving it unlatched.

She went back to the Hotel Willems and told Romer about the two men and the conference room. I couldn't tell their nationality, she said, I didn't hear them speaking – perhaps German or Dutch, certainly not English. While she had been away Romer had made some telephone calls: the meeting with the general was due to take place at.2.30 that afternoon. There would also be a Dutch intelligence officer with the two British agents – his name was Lt. Joos; he was expecting Eva to make contact with him. Romer gave her a slip of paper with the double passwords written on it, then he took it back from her and tore it up.

'Why should I make contact with Lt. Joos?'

'So he knows you're on his side.'

'Will it be dangerous?'

'You'll have been in the cafe some hours before him. You'll be able to tell him anything suspicious you might have seen. He's coming to this rendezvous cold – they're very happy to think you'll have been there.'

'Right.'

'He might not even ask you anything. They seem very relaxed about the whole show. But just watch, watch everything very closely, and then come back and tell me every detail.' Romer yawned. 'I'm going to get some sleep now, if you don't mind.'

Eva tried to doze herself but her brain was working too energetically. She felt, also, a strange excitement in her: this was new, more to the point this was real – Dutch and British agents, a conspiracy with a German general – it was a far cry from losing shadows in Princes Street.

At one o'clock she retraced her steps up Prenslo's main road to the Cafe Backus, where she ordered lunch. Three other elderly couples were already installed in the veranda area, their meals well under way. Eva sat in the back, across from the double doors and ordered a full menu though she wasn't in the least hungry. There was more bustle about the cafe: cars were stopping for petrol and in the reflection of the window Eva could see the black and white barrier of the frontier rising and falling as cars and lorries passed to and fro. There was no sign of the two young men but when she went to the lavatory she noticed a black Mercedes-Benz now parked behind the cafe by the swings and the see-saw.

Then, just after she had ordered her dessert, a tall young man with receding hair in a tightly waisted dark suit came into the cafe and, after talking to the
maître d',
went through the double doors into the meeting room. She wondered if this was Lt. Joos; he had not even glanced at her as he walked by.

A few moments later two other men arrived; the British agents, Eva guessed at once. One was portly, in a blazer; the other was dapper with a small moustache and wearing a tweed suit. Now Joos came out of the room and spoke with the two men: some consternation and irritation was evident and there was much looking at watches. Joos went back into the meeting room and emerged with the bald young man, a short conversation ensued and the two British accompanied him back through the double doors to the meeting room. Joos hovered outside like a major-domo or a doorman at a night-club.

By now only one couple was left on the veranda finishing their meal, the wife spooning out the coffee grounds and sugar from the base of her coffee cup, the husband smoking a small cigar with all the histrionic relish of a large one. Eva approached Joos with an unlit cigarette and said, in English as programmed, 'Do you smoke, may I trouble you for a light?' Joos replied, as programmed, 'Indeed I do smoke.' Then he duly lit her cigarette with his lighter. He was quite a handsome man, lean with a fine straight nose, his good looks spoilt by a cast in his left eye: it seemed to be looking over the top of her head. Then Eva asked him: 'Do you know where I can buy any French cigarettes?' Joos thought for a bit and then said, ' Amsterdam?' Eva smiled, shrugged and went back to her table. She paid her bill as quickly as possible and went to the ladies' lavatory. She opened the window to its full extent, climbed on the lavatory and squeezed out. Her heel caught on the latch and she dropped to the ground awkwardly. Standing up and dusting herself down, she saw two cars speed through the border crossing from the German side and heard them pull up at the front, with much spraying gravel, outside the cafe. She moved round to catch sight of them and was in time to see half a dozen men run inside.