End of Spies, Alex Gerlis [important of reading books txt] 📗

advised to tell them about it so she knew she was on safe ground. As for the radio operator, she wasn’t sure what to say. It wouldn’t be credible to deny his existence, so she told them he was Belgian, from Liège, she understood, and she had no idea how to contact him because he was always the one to find her. He had bad hygiene, she added, and a poor sense of humour.

From that point on it was a series of horrendous events, one after another. The Ferret laughed and told her he didn’t believe a word and announced he’d now lost patience with her, at which point he himself removed the rest of her clothing, which was humiliating enough, but then the cell filled with a dozen or so men who’d clearly been invited in to have a look, and they laughed and leered at her, a couple of them pawing her as if she were at a livestock market.

When they left, it was just her and the Ferret. He said she had one last opportunity to tell him the truth, and she did try to, but she found herself unable to speak, such was her state of shock. Her lips moved, but no words came out of them. She would have told him anything he wanted to know; she’d even have betrayed Nicholas. If only she’d had the words.

What happened next was too dreadful to recount, but when it was over, she lay on the cell floor in a pool of blood and tried to speak, anxious to tell him everything in case he was minded to start again: Major Lean, the man called Stephens, the woodsman’s cottage near Montbard, Hervé, otherwise known as Kenneth, the village of Fauverney. She couldn’t take any more.

She must have drifted into unconsciousness, and was woken by shouting in the corridor. It was in German, and by the sounds of it someone was telling her interrogator off. Soon after that, she heard two gendarmes speaking. He had a real go at le furet, told him it wasn’t his job to kill prisoners!

A doctor came to see her that night and said she needed to be in hospital. She was taken on a stretcher to Dijon prison on rue d’Auxonne, where there was a rudimentary infirmary. She was aware of little for the next day or so, but when she came round, an orderly told her she was lucky to be alive.

Le furet has such a terrible reputation… Apparently you told him nothing and he got even angrier than usual. Take this medicine and pretend to be unconscious. With some luck they’ll take you to Fort d’Hauteville.

‘What’s that?’

It’s a prison just outside the city and they have a proper hospital there. After that they’ll take you to one of their camps… not nice places, but at least you’ll be away from le furet.

The orderly returned the next day, whispering urgently as he cleaned the floor around her bed.

They’ve arrested so many résistants… now they’re looking for the rest. They found an Englishman down in Fauverne… Apparently he managed to get a message out and destroy his transmitter and then burn all his code pads before killing himself. So brave…

The following night, she woke with a start: in the gloom she made out a man in a large coat standing silently at the foot of her bed, arms folded. She asked in French who was there, and when a nurse turned a light on, she saw it was the Ferret.

‘No one,’ he hissed, ‘gets the better of me.’ He snapped his fingers and two orderlies appeared with a stretcher, which she was bundled onto. Pain seared through her body and she felt the bleeding start again. She was carried into the prison yard, where a warder stopped them. From his uniform he looked quite senior.

‘Not here, sir, please not inside the prison.’

‘Who says?’

‘There’ll have to be an inquiry.’ He was wringing his hands.

‘Very well.’ The Ferret snapped at the orderlies: ‘Take her outside and put her on the pavement.’

Her main regret was not having written to Nicholas. She’d thought about that in the hospital, but was too weak, and also worried what would happen to him if they found the letter. It was agony when the orderlies dumped the stretcher on the pavement before hurrying away. She watched as the Ferret removed a revolver with a long barrel from his coat and pointed it at her. It was a strange way to end one’s life, she thought, lying on a wet pavement in a foreign country hoping the man who was about to kill would hurry up.

An annoyance, as her mother would have said.

Un dérangement.

Chapter 2

Nazi-Occupied Netherlands, May 1944

Het ongeluk was how the work of the Dutch section of the SOE was described around Baker Street.

Het ongeluk – the disaster.

In fact by late 1943, some senior officers in the Special Operations Executive were of the view that to describe N Section as a disaster was a serious understatement. It was less a disaster, more like a catastrophe.

De catastrophe.

And they had good reason for forming this opinion. Over an eighteen-month period, the SOE network in the Netherlands had been so thoroughly penetrated that every agent parachuted into the country – more than fifty of them – had been captured. By late 1943, operations there had been suspended.

It took the SOE until the spring of 1944 to work out the extent to which its activities in the Netherlands had been compromised. They realised that the Germans had discovered all the British codes and ciphers, and that N Section radio operators in London had inexplicably failed to pick up a series of secret security checks in the radio transmissions of captured agents.

But by April 1944, the SOE was satisfied that matters had been rectified and they could once again resume operations in the Netherlands. They were still wary, though, so much so that SOE headquarters decided to send in an agent of which N