World War II Thriller Collection (61 page)

“Intentionally?”

“Not willingly. I'll tell you something. Before the war, when I was involved in politics, people would sometimes say to me, ‘How can you be a socialist, with an accent like that?' I explained that I was flogged in school for dropping my aitches. That silenced one or two smug bastards.”

Percy stopped the car on a tree-lined street. Paul looked out and saw a fantasy castle, with battlements and turrets and a high tower. “This is a jail?”

Percy made a gesture of helplessness. “Victorian architecture.”

Flick was waiting at the entrance. She wore her FANY uniform: a four-pocket tunic, a divided skirt, and a little cap with a turned-up brim. The leather belt that was tightly cinched around her small waist emphasized her diminutive figure, and her fair curls spilled out from under the cap. For a moment she took Paul's breath away. “She's such a pretty girl,” he said.

“She's married,” Percy remarked crisply.

I'm being warned off, Paul thought with amusement. “To whom?”

Percy hesitated, then said, “You need to know this, I think. Michel is in the French Resistance. He's the leader of the Bollinger circuit.”

“Ah. Thanks.” Paul got out of the car and Percy drove on.

He wondered if Flick would be angry that he and Percy had turned up so few prospects from the files. He had met her only twice, and on both occasions she had yelled at him. However, she seemed cheerful, and when he told her about Maude, she said, “So we have three team members, including me. That means we're halfway there, and it's only two pip emma.”

Paul nodded. That was one way of looking at it. He was worried, but there was nothing to be gained by saying so.

The entrance to Holloway was a medieval lodge with arrowslit windows. “Why didn't they go the whole way and build a portcullis and a drawbridge?” said Paul. They passed through the lodge into a courtyard, where a few women in dark dresses were cultivating vegetables. Every patch of waste ground in London was planted with vegetables.

The prison loomed up in front of them. The entrance was guarded by stone monsters, massive winged griffins holding keys and shackles in their claws. The main gatehouse was flanked by four-story buildings, each story represented by a long row of narrow, pointed windows. “What a place!” said Paul.

“This is where the suffragettes went on hunger strike,” Flick told him. “Percy's wife was force-fed in here.”

“My God.”

They went in. The air smelled of strong bleach, as if the authorities hoped that disinfectant would kill the bacteria of crime. Paul and Flick were shown to the office of Miss Lindleigh, a barrel-shaped assistant governor with a hard, fat face. “I don't know why you wish to see Romain,” she said. With a note of resentment she added, “Apparently I'm not to be told.”

A scornful look came over Flick's face, and Paul could see that she was about to say something derisory, so he hastily intervened. “I apologize for the secrecy,” he said with his most charming smile. “We're just following orders.”

“I suppose we all have to do that,” said Miss Lindleigh, somewhat mollified. “Anyway, I must warn you that Romain is a violent prisoner.”

“I understand she's a killer.”

“Yes. She should be hanged, but the courts are too soft nowadays.”

“They sure are,” said Paul, although he did not really think so.

“She was in here originally for drunkenness; then she killed another prisoner in a fight in the exercise yard, so now she's awaiting trial for murder.”

“A tough customer,” Flick said with interest.

“Yes, Major. She may seem reasonable at first, but don't be fooled. She's easily riled and loses her temper faster than you can say knife.”

“And deadly when she does,” Paul said.

“You've got the picture.”

“We're short of time,” Flick said impatiently. “I'd like to see her now.”

Paul added hastily, “If that's convenient to you, Miss Lindleigh.”

“Very well.” The assistant governor led them out. The hard floors and bare walls made the place echo like a cathedral, and there was a constant background accompaniment of distant shouts, slamming doors, and the clang of boots on iron catwalks. They went via narrow corridors and steep stairs to an interview room.

Ruby Romain was already there. She had nut-brown skin, straight dark hair, and fierce black eyes. However, she was not the traditional gypsy beauty: her nose was hooked and her chin curved up, giving her the look of a gnome.

Miss Lindleigh left them with a warder in the next room watching through a glazed door. Flick, Paul, and the prisoner sat around a cheap table with a dirty ashtray on it. Paul had brought a pack of Lucky Strikes. He put them on the table and said in French, “Help yourself.” Ruby took two, putting one in her mouth and the other behind her ear.

Paul asked a few routine questions to break the ice. She replied clearly and politely but with a strong accent. “My parents are traveling folk,” she said. “When I was a girl, we went around France with a funfair. My father had a rifle range and my mother sold hot pancakes with chocolate sauce.”

“How did you come to England?”

“When I was fourteen, I fell in love with an English
sailor I met in Calais. His name was Freddy. We got married—I lied about my age, of course—and came to London. He was killed two years ago, his ship was sunk by a U-boat in the Atlantic.” She shivered. “A cold grave. Poor Freddy.”

Flick was not interested in the family history. “Tell us why you're in here,” she said.

“I got myself a little brazier and sold pancakes in the street. But the police kept harassing me. One night, I'd had some cognac—a weakness of mine, I admit—and anyway, I got into a dispute.” She switched to cockney-accented English. “The copper told me to fuck off out of it, and I gave him a mouthful of abuse. He shoved me and I knocked him down.”

Paul looked at her with a touch of amusement. She was no more than average height, and wiry, but she had big hands and muscular legs. He could imagine her flattening a London policeman.

Flick asked, “What happened next?”

“His two mates came around the corner, and I was a bit slow to leave, on account of the brandy, so they gave me a kicking and took me down the nick.” Seeing Paul's frown of incomprehension, she added: “The police station, that is. Anyway, the first copper was ashamed to do me for assault, didn't want to admit he'd been floored by a girl, so I got fourteen days for drunk and disorderly.”

“And then you got into another fight.”

She gave Flick an appraising look. “I don't know if I can explain to someone of your sort what it's like in here. Half the girls are mad, and they've all got weapons. You can file the edge of a spoon to make a blade, or sharpen the end of a bit of wire for a stiletto, or twist threads together for a garotte. And the warders never intervene in a fight between convicts. They like to watch us tear each other apart. That's why so many of the inmates have scars.”

Paul was shocked. He had never had contact with people in jail. The picture painted by Ruby was
horrifying. Perhaps she was exaggerating, but she seemed quietly sincere. She did not appear to care whether she was believed or not but recited the facts in the dry, unhurried manner of someone who is not greatly interested but has nothing better to do.

Flick said, “What happened with the woman you killed?”

“She stole something of mine.”

“What?”

“A cake of soap.”

My God, thought Paul. She killed her for a piece of soap.

Flick said, “What did you do?”

“I took it back.”

“And then?”

“She went for me. She had a chair leg that she'd made into a club with a bit of plumber's lead fixed to the business end. She hit me over the head with it. I thought she was going to kill me. But I had a knife. I'd found a long, pointed sliver of glass, like a shard from a broken window pane, and I wrapped the broad end in a length of worn-out bicycle tire for a handle. I stuck it in her throat. So she didn't get to hit me a second time.”

Flick suppressed a shudder and said, “It sounds like self-defense.”

“No. You've got to prove you couldn't possibly have run away. And I'd premeditated the murder by making a knife out of a piece of glass.”

Paul stood up. “Wait here with the guard for a moment, please,” he said to Ruby. “We'll just step outside.”

Ruby smiled at him, and for the first time she looked not quite pretty but pleasant. “You're so polite,” she said appreciatively.

In the corridor, Paul said, “What a dreadful story!”

“Remember, everyone in here says they're innocent,” Flick said guardedly.

“All the same, I think she might be more sinned against than sinning.”

“I doubt it. I think she's a killer.”

“So we reject her.”

“On the contrary,” said Flick. “She's exactly what I want.”

They went back into the room. Flick said to Ruby, “If you could get out of here, would you be willing to do dangerous war work?”

She responded with another question. “Would we be going to France?”

Flick raised her eyebrows. “What leads you to ask that?”

“You spoke French to me at the start. I assume you were checking if I speak the language.”

“Well, I can't tell you much about the job.”

“I bet it involves sabotage behind enemy lines.”

Paul was startled: Ruby was very quick on the uptake.

Seeing his surprise, Ruby went on, “Look, at first I thought you might want me to do a bit of translation for you, but there's nothing dangerous about that. So we must be going to France. And what would the British Army do there except blow up bridges and railway lines?”

Paul said nothing, but he was impressed by her powers of deduction.

Ruby frowned. “What I can't figure out is why it's an all-woman team.”

Flick's eyes widened. “What makes you think that?”

“If you could use men, why would you be talking to me? You must be desperate. It can't be that easy to get a murderess out of jail, even for vital war work. So what's special about me? I'm tough, but there must be hundreds of tough men who speak perfect French and would be gung-ho for a bit of cloak-and-dagger stuff. The only reason for picking me rather than one of them is that I'm female. Perhaps women are less likely to be questioned by the Gestapo . . . is that it?”

“I can't say,” Flick said.

“Well, if you want me, I'll do it. Can I have another one of those cigarettes?”

“Sure,” said Paul.

Flick said, “You do understand that the job is dangerous.”

“Yeah,” said Ruby, lighting a Lucky Strike. “But not as dangerous as being in this fucking prison.”

. . . .

THEY RETURNED TO
the assistant governor's office after leaving Ruby. “I need your help, Miss Lindleigh,” Paul said, once again flattering her. “Tell me what you would need in order to be able to release Ruby Romain.”

“Release her! But she's a murderer! Why would she be released?”

“I'm afraid I can't tell you. But I can assure you that if you knew where she was going, you wouldn't think she'd had a lucky escape—quite the contrary.”

“I see,” she said, not entirely mollified.

“I must have her out of here tonight,” Paul went on. “But I don't want to put you in any kind of awkward position. That's why I need to know exactly what authorization you require.” What he really wanted was to make sure she would have no excuse to be obstructive.

“I can't release her under any circumstances,” said Miss Lindleigh. “She has been remanded here by a magistrate's court, so only the court can free her.”

Paul was patient. “And what do you think that would require?”

“She would have to be taken, in police custody, before a magistrate. The public prosecutor, or his representative, would have to tell the magistrate that all charges against Romain had been dropped. Then the magistrate would be obliged to say she was free to go.”

Paul frowned, looking ahead for snags. “She would have to sign her army joining-up papers before seeing the magistrate, so that she would be under military discipline as soon as the court released her . . . otherwise she might just walk away.”

Miss Lindleigh was still incredulous. “Why would they drop the charges?”

“This prosecutor is a government official?”

“Yes.”

“Then it won't be a problem.” Paul stood up. “I will be back here later this evening, with a magistrate, someone from the prosecutor's department, and an army driver to take Ruby to . . . her next port of call. Can you foresee any snags?”