The Milliner's Secret (63 page)

Both men were asleep, Donal sprawled in an armchair, Ramon face down on the sofa. ‘Wake up!’ Gasping for breath because she had cycled away like a schoolboy caught stealing apples, she shook Donal. She got a mumble back, so she put her hands inside his shirt, feeling for the cold outline of his gun. Plucking it free, she put it into her coat pocket. Then she pinched him.

Donal woke.

He reached up, drew her face down and kissed her. His chin and upper lip were rough but his lips were soft. ‘Cora,’ he said, between kisses, ‘I have to tell you what they found buried in your father’s workshop.’

Not that, not now. ‘Shut up and get up. We have seconds to get out.’

CHAPTER 38

They supported Ramon between them like a drunk. His face gleamed with sweat. They were lumbering across rue de Leningrad when they heard the grind of car engines, getting louder. The blasting of horns suggested drivers ploughing across place de l’Europe.

‘Moscow,’ she panted. ‘Run!’ They dragged Ramon round the corner into rue de Moscow seconds before tyres screeched to a halt at impasse de Cordoba. They heard the slam of doors, then the crash of a metal bar against wood.

‘It won’t take them long to see the place is empty,’ Donal said. ‘Where now?’

Yes – where? Coralie couldn’t think of a single safe haven. ‘Let’s just go. We need to lose ourselves.’

They took the Métro at rue de Liège and spent maybe two hours just riding the lines. She could not take them home, or to La Passerinette. Or to Teddy’s, because Dietrich might look for her there, and Dietrich would turn Ramon in. What about Bonnet, at rue Valdonne? Ramon vetoed it, groggy with fever. ‘He drinks – never trust a drunk.’

‘What about one of your many women?’ she asked, quite seriously.

‘Never trust a woman.’

She gritted her teeth. Félix Peyron? Only she didn’t know where he lodged. Solange Antonin, who lived in luxury on rue Cambon? Maybe, but what if Solange was entertaining one of her beaux? Una’s friends at the American Hospital had all been interned. The butcher on Mouffetard . . . her contact at avenue Foch . . . too dangerous. They might be under surveillance. Why didn’t I make more friends?

And then she thought, I know exactly who to go to.

They alighted at Odéon, south of the river and a stone’s throw north of rue de Vaugirard. Leaving Donal supporting Ramon, she went into a bar, paying double-price for the owner’s leftover bread. Donal had shared his emergency provisions with Ramon on the train, and that was all they’d eaten today.

Fortunately, she’d had the presence of mind to shove the tin of ham she’d bought earlier into her pocket. Everything else was with her bicycle, thrown down in impasse de Cordoba. Probably by now being shared among the Gestapo.

Unbuttoning her coat because she was hot, and because the tin of ham made her look as though she had some kind of growth on her hip, she led the way down rue de l’Odéon, passing the bookshop where Dietrich had bought her A Farewell to Arms. A brief glance showed her a window full of Nazi propaganda.

‘Whose flat are we’re going to?’ Donal asked.

‘The owner taught me French and German some years ago.’

‘You do speak German, then?’

‘Yes, and so does the King of England.’

Clutching bread to her chest, Coralie rang Louise Deveau’s bell, willing her to come down quickly. They made an odd trio. Donal, taller than an average Frenchman, wearing peculiar boots and mismatched clothes. Ramon, weak as a stick of boiled rhubarb. She heard footsteps and bolts being drawn back. Marshalling her apologies for calling on Mademoiselle Deveau in contravention of rules, she stepped inside. Donal followed with Ramon.

The door slammed shut. It was not Mademoiselle Deveau, irritated and reserved. It was a man who put a pistol to the side of her head, saying, ‘One terrorist, one evader, one résistante. Up the stairs, please, the men first.’

He had turned off the stairwell light, wanting the advantage of darkness. ‘Walk slowly, raise your hands. I have seven shots.’ He didn’t want to fire his Walther PP until he was looking Ramon Cazaubon in the eye.

Inevitably, it was Coralie who objected. ‘I don’t know how you found me, Dietrich, but I’m not raising my hands because I’m not dropping this bread. I paid a fortune for it. Donal doesn’t speak French, by the way, and he can’t raise his hands, else Ramon will fall down.’

‘Donal,’ Dietrich continued in English, ‘take Cazaubon through the open door at the top of the stairs. If you try anything, I will shoot Mademoiselle de Lirac.’

‘No, he won’t.’ Coralie sounded perfectly confident. But she gave a start when he moved the muzzle of the pistol to the hollow where her skull met her spine.

‘Believe me, I will. Now walk ahead of me.’

The concierge had let Dietrich into the apartment earlier, explaining in the loud voice of the very deaf, ‘Mademoiselle Deveau went away suddenly, after New Year. I keep the place clean, but . . . ’ Unlived-in places always had a particular smell, and five months’ unopened post added a twist of ambiguity. Was Louise Deveau dead or alive?

No sign of Coralie either, but she would come. After all, who else did she know in Paris?

Dismissing the concierge, Dietrich had settled down to wait.

Now he propelled Coralie into the middle of the living room. ‘Stay right here.’ Pistol levelled, he watched a tall, dark-haired man help a scruffy, black-haired one to the sofa. He recognised Cazaubon, though the man was rougher and thinner than on their last meeting. From the way he fell back against the cushions, he must be suffering the effects of his injury. Was that the bulge of a gun under his jacket?

Coralie looked shocked, as well she might. The Englishman was anxious – bewildered, even. Dietrich returned his gaze. Yes, he answered silently. You are seeing a German uniform, a silver breast eagle, a Pour le Mérite. You are not hallucinating. ‘Both of you, put your hands up.’

Lifting his hands to shoulder height, the young man asked, ‘Luftwaffe, sir?’

‘Not actively. This time round, I occupy a different role. You?’

‘Warrant Officer Flynn, Royal Air Force.’

‘Thank you for being honest.’ Dietrich nodded at Flynn’s boots, which looked as though they’d been pasted with bird muck. ‘A pretence of being a deaf-mute farm labourer would have been insulting to both of us.’ Coralie was still clutching her hunks of bread. ‘I said, hands up.’

She made no move to obey. ‘What d’you think I’m going to do, Dietrich? Cartwheel over and strangle you?’

It was the Englishman who answered. ‘You know him? This is your German? Dear God, Cora, which side are you on?’

Cora. Dietrich hadn’t imagined that his emotions could darken deeper, but the idea of burying a bullet in that muscular young chest was suddenly tempting. ‘Get back against the wall, both of you,’ he barked. After a shared glance, Coralie and the Englishman backed away until they stood in front of one of Louise Deveau’s china cabinets. Like twins. Flynn . . . Hadn’t she mentioned the name before? A memory slid into place. Sheila Flynn. ‘You grew up in the same street.’

‘Spot on,’ Coralie answered. ‘We used to trespass on the railway and sneak into the cinema together. Dietrich—’

He hushed her. Two children growing up together, he could tolerate. But the bastard Cazaubon . . . Going to the sofa, he put his pistol barrel against the man’s temple, saying in French, ‘I am going to execute you for murder, Cazaubon.’

‘Go to Hell.’

Coralie dropped her bread and came towards them. Her headscarf had slipped backwards, holding her curls in a lopsided snood. Her coat hung open and Dietrich recognised the dress beneath. Pink, cherry print, low-necked. She’d worn it the day he had interrogated her at the Lutetia. Had she guessed, in that spartan room, how he’d been fighting the desire to take her in his arms, to take off her hat and bury his fingers in her hair?

He heard her say, ‘Ramon fights for his country. You did it. Donal does it. Even I have a go sometimes. It’s war.’

He saw blood on her throat where her choker should have been. Tears in her eyes. He forced himself to look through them. ‘Bombing the tunnel at Auxerre was indiscriminate killing.’ From the corner of his eye, he saw the Englishman lowering his arms, slipping a hand under his clothing. The RAF issued air crew with side-arms, just as the Luftwaffe did. Not so much for hand-to-hand fighting, but so an airman could put a bullet in his own head if he was trapped in a burning fuselage. That this Englishman had hung on to his suggested an intention to challenge the odds. Dietrich fired a warning bullet into the arm of the sofa, making Cazaubon duck and Coralie shriek.

‘Hands on shoulders, Warrant Officer! You, too, Coralie.’

She folded hers across her chest. ‘It’s beneath you to kill out of malice.’

‘Why? I am as human and flawed as the next man.’ Had she any concept of the hours he had just lived through? He had woken to find her gone and had presumed she was at La Passerinette. He’d decided to take the Métro to the Louvre and walk the rest of the way because it was such a lovely day. On rue Royale, he’d passed a huddle of pressmen holding up the traffic. Some were talking to a policeman, and one was photographing what seemed to be blood on the road. A familiar-coloured hatbox. A tag-end of conversation had made his blood run cold.

‘. . . hit by a bus, blonde, well-dressed and tall. No name yet.’

He had run to La Passerinette, which was locked. Nobody had answered his flat-handed beating at the door, and the despair that had attended the death of his son had flooded back.

Somehow, he’d got himself back to rue de Vaugirard where an orderly informed him that the matron at Le Cloȋtre had telephoned. Could he call back urgently? He’d learned his wife was missing. A plane had crashed nearby, a bomber, and everybody had run out to see if there were survivors. Unfortunately, somebody had neglected to lock the doors. Would he motor down to Fontainebleau at once?

‘No, Madame, I will not. If you had adhered to your duty, my wife could not have walked out. Send out a search party, alert the local police. It is unlikely she has gone far.’

He was going to search Paris until he found Coralie, alive or dead. He was preparing to leave again when the telephone rang. This time, it was the commissariat of police for the Madeleine quarter, requesting he go to the mortuary on quai de la Rapée to identify a body.

That trip, the longest of his life. The surge of joy when he found himself looking down not at Coralie, but at a blue-white Hiltrud had expressed itself in ‘Gott sei dank’ followed by deep shame.

Returning home, he’d been in time to pick up a call from Le Cloȋtre, informing him of the shocking news that his wife’s body had been found. ‘Paris police have just called us. They identified her by a bag belonging to one of the clinic nurses—’

‘Hanging around her neck. They dragged her from the Seine. I have just identified her body and you are two hours late calling me with this news.’

‘Believe me, Generalmajor, the police only just informed us.’

‘Then how did they get my number, if you didn’t give it to them? Do not lie, Madame. Do not attempt to shift blame. Were you a member of an army unit, you would be court-martialled.’