World War II Thriller Collection (62 page)

Miss Lindleigh shook her head. “I follow orders, Major, just as you do.”

“Good.”

They took their leave. When they got outside, Paul stopped and looked back. “I've never been to a prison before,” he said. “I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't something out of a fairy tale.”

He was making an inconsequential remark about the building, but Flick looked sour. “Several women have been hanged here,” she said. “Not much of a fairy tale.”

He wondered why she was grumpy. “I guess you identify with the prisoners,” he said. Suddenly he realized why. “It's because you might end up in a jail in France.”

She looked taken aback. “I think you're right,” she said. “I didn't know why I hated that place so much, but that's it.”

She might be hanged, too, he realized, but he kept that thought to himself.

They walked away, heading for the nearest Tube station. Flick was thoughtful. “You're very perceptive,” she said. “You understood how to keep Miss Lindleigh on our side. I would have made an enemy of her.”

“No point in that.”

“Exactly. And you turned Ruby from a tigress into a pussycat.”

“I wouldn't want a woman like that to dislike me.”

Flick laughed. “Then you told me something that I hadn't figured out about myself.”

Paul was pleased that he had impressed her, but he was already looking ahead to the next problem. “By midnight, we should have half a team at the training center in Hampshire.”

“We call it the Finishing School,” Flick said. “Yes: Diana Colefield, Maude Valentine, and Ruby Romain.”

Paul nodded grimly. “An undisciplined aristocrat, a pretty flirt who can't tell fantasy from reality, and a murdering gypsy with a short temper.” When he thought of the possibility that Flick could be hanged by the Gestapo, he felt as worried as Percy about the caliber of the recruits.

“Beggars can't be choosers,” Flick said cheerfully. Her sour mood had vanished.

“But we still don't have an explosives expert or a telephone engineer.”

Flick glanced at her wrist. “It's still only four pip emma. And maybe the RAF has taught Denise Bowyer how to blow up a telephone exchange.”

Paul grinned. Flick's optimism was irresistible.

They reached the station and caught a train. They could not talk about the mission because there were other passengers within earshot. Paul said, “I learned a little about Percy this morning. We drove through the neighborhood where he was brought up.”

“He's adopted the manners and even the accent of the British upper class, but don't be fooled. Under that old tweed jacket beats the heart of a real street brawler.”

“He told me he was flogged at school for speaking with a low-class accent.”

“He was a scholarship boy. They generally have a hard time in swanky British schools. I know, I was a scholarship girl.”

“Did you have to change your accent?”

“No. I grew up in an earl's household. I always spoke like this.”

Paul guessed that was why Flick and Percy got on so well: they were both lower-class people who had climbed the social ladder. Unlike Americans, the British thought there was nothing wrong with class prejudice. Yet they were shocked at Southerners who told them Negroes were inferior. “I think Percy's very fond of you,” Paul said.

“I love him like a father.”

The sentiment seemed genuine, Paul thought, but she was also firmly setting him straight about her relationship with Percy.

Flick had arranged to meet Percy back at Orchard Court. When they arrived, there was a car outside the building. Paul recognized the driver, one of Monty's entourage. “Sir, there's someone in the car waiting for you,” the man said.

The back door opened and out stepped Paul's younger sister, Caroline. He grinned with delight. “Well, I'll be damned!” he said. She stepped into his arms and he hugged her. “What are you doing in London?”

“I can't say, but I have a couple of hours off, and I persuaded Monty's office to lend me a car to come and see you. Want to buy me a drink?”

“I don't have a minute to spare,” he said. “Not even for you. But you can drive me to Whitehall. I have to find a man called a public prosecutor.”

“Then I'll take you there, and we'll catch up in the car.”

“Of course,” he said. “Let's go!”

FLICK TURNED AT
the building door and saw a pretty girl wearing the uniform of an American lieutenant step out of the car and throw her arms around Paul. She noted the delighted smile on his face and the force of his hug. This was obviously his wife, girlfriend, or fiancée, probably making an unexpected visit to London. She must be with the U.S. forces in Britain, preparing for the invasion. Paul jumped into her car.

Flick went into Orchard Court, feeling a little sad. Paul had a girl, they were nuts about one another, and they had been granted a surprise meeting. Flick wished Michel could show up just like that, out of the blue. But he was lying wounded on a couch in Reims with a shameless nineteen-year-old beauty nursing him.

Percy was already back from Hendon. She found him making tea. “How was your RAF girl?” she asked.

“Lady Denise Bowyer—she's on her way to the Finishing School,” he said.

“Wonderful! Now we have four!”

“But I'm worried. She's a braggart. She boasted about the work she's doing in the Air Force, told me all sorts of details she should have kept quiet about. You'll have to see what you think of her in training.”

“I don't suppose she knows anything about telephone exchanges.”

“Not a thing. Nor explosives. Tea?”

“Please.”

He handed her a cup and sat behind the cheap old desk. “Where's Paul?”

“Gone to find the public prosecutor. He's hoping to get Ruby Romain out of jail this evening.”

Percy gave her a quizzical glance. “Do you like him?”

“More than I did initially.”

“Me too.”

Flick smiled. “He charmed the socks off the old battleax running the prison.”

“How was Ruby Romain?”

“Terrifying. She slit the throat of another inmate in a quarrel over a bar of soap.”

“Jesus.” Percy shook his head in incredulity. “What the hell kind of a team are we putting together, Flick?”

“Dangerous. Which is what it's supposed to be. That's not the problem. Besides, the way things are going, we may have the luxury of eliminating the least satisfactory one or two during training. My worry is that we don't have the experts we need. There's no point taking a team of tough girls into France, then destroying the wrong cables.”

Percy drained his teacup and began to fill his pipe. “I know a woman explosives expert who speaks French.”

Flick was surprised. “But this is great! Why didn't you say so before?”

“When I first thought of her, I dismissed her out of hand. She's not at all suitable. But I hadn't realized how desperate we'd be.”

“How is she unsuitable?”

“She's about forty. SOE rarely uses anyone so old, especially on a parachute mission.” He struck a match.

Age was not going to be an obstacle at this stage, Flick thought. Excited, she said, “Will she volunteer?”

“I should think there's a good chance, especially if I ask her.”

“You're friends.”

He nodded.

“How did she become an explosives expert?”

Percy looked embarrassed. Still holding the burning match, he said, “She's a safebreaker. I met her years ago, when I was doing political work in the East End.” The match burned down, and he struck another.

“Percy, I had no idea your past was so raffish. Where is she now?”

Percy looked at his watch. “It's six o'clock. At this time of the evening, she'll be in the private bar of the Mucky Duck.”

“A pub.”

“Yes.”

“Then get that damn pipe alight and let's go there now.”

In the car, Flick said, “How do you know she's a safebreaker?”

Percy shrugged. “Everyone knows.”

“Everyone? Even the police?”

“Yes. In the East End, police and villains grow up together, go to the same schools, live in the same streets. They all know one another.”

“But if they know who the criminals are, why don't they put them in jail? I suppose they can't prove anything.”

“This is the way it works,” Percy said. “When they need a conviction, they arrest someone who is in that line of business. If it's a burglary, they arrest a burglar. It doesn't matter whether he was responsible for that particular crime, because they can always manufacture a case: suborn witnesses, counterfeit confessions, manufacture forensic evidence. Of course, they sometimes make mistakes, and jail innocent people, and they often use the system to pay off personal grudges, and so on; but nothing in life is perfect, is it?”

“So you're saying the whole rigmarole of courts and juries is a farce?”

“A highly successful, long-running farce that provides lucrative employment for otherwise useless citizens who act the parts of detectives, solicitors, barristers, and judges.”

“Has your friend the safebreaker been to jail?”

“No. You can escape prosecution if you're willing to pay hefty bribes,
and
you're careful to cultivate warm friendships with detectives. Let's say you live in the
same street as Detective-Inspector Callahan's dear old mum. You drop in once a week, ask her if she needs any shopping done, look at photos of her grandchildren . . . makes it hard for D.I. Callahan to put you in jail.”

Flick thought of the story Ruby had told a few hours ago. For some people, life in London was almost as bad as being under the Gestapo. Could things really be so different from what she had imagined? “I can't tell if you're serious,” she said to Percy. “I don't know what to believe.”

“Oh, I'm serious,” he said with a smile. “But I don't expect you to believe me.”

They were in Stepney, not far from the docks. The bomb damage here was the worst Flick had seen. Whole streets were flattened. Percy turned into a narrow cul-de-sac and parked outside a pub.

“Mucky Duck” was a humorous sobriquet: the pub was called The White Swan. The private bar was not private, but was so called to distinguish it from the public bar, where there was sawdust on the floor and the beer was a penny a pint cheaper. Flick found herself thinking about explaining these idiosyncrasies to Paul. He would be amused.

Geraldine Knight sat on a stool at the end of the bar, looking as if she might own the place. She had vivid blonde hair and heavy makeup, expertly applied. Her plump figure had the apparent firmness that could only have come from a corset. The cigarette burning in the ashtray bore a ring of bright lipstick around the end. It was hard to imagine anyone who looked less like a secret agent, Flick thought despondently.

“Percy Thwaite, as I live and breathe!” the woman said. She sounded like a Cockney who had been to elocution lessons. “What are you doing slumming around here, you bloody old communist?” She was obviously delighted to see him.

“Hello, Jelly, meet my friend Flick,” Percy said.

“Pleased to know you, I'm sure,” she said, shaking Flick's hand.

“Jelly?” Flick inquired.

“No one knows where I got that nickname.”

“Oh,” said Flick. “Jelly Knight, gelignite.”

Jelly ignored that. “I'll have a gin-and-It, Percy, while you're buying.”

Flick spoke to her in French. “Do you live in this part of London?”

“Since I was ten,” she replied, speaking French with a North American accent. “I was born in Quebec.”

That was not so good, Flick thought. Germans might not notice the accent, but the French certainly would. Jelly would have to pose as a Canadian-born French citizen. It was a perfectly plausible history, but just unusual enough to attract curiosity. Damn. “But you consider yourself British.”

“English, not British,” said Jelly with arch indignation. She switched back to the English language. “I'm Church of England, I vote Conservative, and I dislike foreigners, heathens, and republicans.” With a glance at Percy, she added, “Present company excepted, of course.”

Percy said, “You ought to live in Yorkshire, on a hill farm, someplace where they haven't seen a foreigner since the Vikings came. I don't know how you can bear to live in London, surrounded by Russian Bolsheviks, German Jews, Irish Catholics, and nonconformist Welshmen building little chapels all over the place like moles disfiguring the lawn.”

“London's not what it was, Perce.”