The Seven Letters Read online

Chapter Two

  The train had screeched to a sliding halt, its wheels locked. A long trail of sparks sprayed into the inky blackness of the darkened fields. It was a starless night and the binoculars were useless. It wasn’t supposed to stop! It should have gone up; it should have gone up; it had all gone wrong. The words raced through Claudette’s head. She could feel her heart hammering in her chest as she searched the darkness for a sign of Yves. He had been only feet away from her when the train skirted the slope of the hill and drew parallel with their position.

  An arc of torchlight swept the bank behind her and instinctively she threw her body flat against the ridge. Her lips brushed the cold blades of grass on the bank. There were men’s voices shouting and, in the distance, a dog barked. As she rolled over, her hair tugged on a bramble and the pain made her flinch but she suppressed any noise. There was another sweep of light, illuminating the twisted briars and wild grasses in front of her. Claudette ducked lower, pressing her cheek down into the damp earth.

  A hand grasped her ankle, hard. A man’s hand. ‘Keep down – move – now.’

  She was on her back and, half sliding and scrabbling for a foothold, she slithered down to the lower part of the bank. At the bottom Yves pushed her forward and they ran headlong through the cover of pine trees and down the needle-strewn path to the firebreak.

  ‘You go that way, use the stream. Get to the safe-house and I’ll draw them away.’ His voice was barely a whisper and one look at his face, even in the darkness, showed clearly that he was scared. Yves was never scared.

  Claudette followed the line of the firebreak and then over the gate where she cut across the field of cows, breaking the herd into startled bucking shadows. She slid on cow shit, but that at least was good, it would disguise her scent. On the far side of the field she waded down the length of the brook, picking her way over the loose stones and cursing as her ankles buckled beneath her. The ice-cold water filled her shoes. She could feel the soles ridging up inside them.

  There were sirens, more dogs barking, shouts that were clearly audible then drifted off again into the distance: ‘Holen sie die Hunde. Schnell! Hier entlang!’ Stumbling up the muddy driveway, she reached halfway and scrambled through the wire fence with the ragged hole cut for the purpose. She bent the wire away from her but her coat still caught on it; she heard it tear. When eventually she had made it through, she turned back, pulling the two halves roughly together. The wire was cold in her shaking fingers. She was finding it difficult to catch her breath as she scaled the incline, but she made it to the back of the house and under cover of the dense laurel bushes, she clicked on her flashlight. She opened the cellar door taking hold of the rope attached to the underside. Jumping from the ledge she pulled the rope so that it slammed the door shut above her, then she slotted the heavy wooden bar into the metal struts to secure it. Dark and damp, the cellar had a heavy loamy smell. She shone the torch into the far corner at a stack of logs. Moving four or five to the back of the trapdoor she pulled it up and slid inside. The logs shifted as she pulled the trapdoor down and hopefully covered it, if only a little, enough.

  Claudette shone the torch around the small, musty space. In front of her were a thermos flask and a tin box. She knew it would have some fruit in it and maybe some biscuits. In a small alcove to her right there was a pot covered with a muslin cloth, her toilet. Only four feet by four, the space was tiny and not deep enough to stand up in. She pulled her arms around her knees as a shiver of cold ran through her. Her wet feet began to needle. There was silence, a deep pervading stillness and no sound of the dogs. Yves had drawn them away. She let go the deep breath that she had held onto since the moment the train had stopped. Only then, when she was totally sure she was hidden, did Claudette Bourvil let herself cry.

  Chapter Three

  Harriet was walking towards me accompanied by a policewoman. Her face was drained of colour and her eyes swollen and sore. She grasped my arm so hard I thought her nails would tear through the skin.

  ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I knew it, it’s all my fault, Connie.’ She was shaking her head. ‘I should have been up earlier this morning.’ She was holding a balled up tissue in her hand. ‘I might have heard the door, I cannot believe I overslept.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not your fault Hat,’ I tried to sound reassuring. ‘When did you last see him?’ She looked bewildered, as if it were the hardest question in the world.

  ‘Last night, he went to bed early with a tummy ache. Oh my God, what have I done? If only I’d woken up earlier.’ She was holding my fingers in a white-knuckle clasp, her whole body quaking.

  As I clung to her I could feel her fading, becoming smaller in my arms. The policewoman caught my eye and I understood the message.

  ‘Come back with me, Hat, the police will want to talk to us both. We’ll go to my house. You shouldn’t be alone.’ She nodded miserably.

  ‘I’ll drive you up there if you like,’ Matt offered. The policewoman nodded in agreement and told us she would follow behind.

  My cottage felt cold and unwelcoming when I let us in. Hat pushed open the lounge door and slumped down heavily onto the sofa, hands over her face. Matt stood at the threshold of my front door, uncertain of what to do.

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’ I asked.

  ‘I won’t, but thank you, I’d better get off to my shoot.’

  I knew I must have looked a sight. I had black Panda eyes and my cheeks felt swollen with tears. ‘Thank you so much for looking after me, I would have gone to pieces if you hadn’t been there.’

  ‘It’s no problem, I’m glad I could help. It’s all so sad. I hope it…I mean…please tell Hat I wish her well through what’s to come. And you.’

  I gave him a hug, an involuntary one that signified the enormity of what we had shared, something entirely dreadful. Then I passed him the silver blanket that I had folded back into a small square even though it was crinkled and would never be used again.

  As I closed the front door my mobile rang. It was my boss, Will. He was very angry: ‘Connie, where in God’s name are you?’

  ‘Will, I’m sorry there’s been an –’

  ‘Do you realise how important today is? Jesus, we have this one chance!’ Will had always lived on his nerves, but the recession was making things ten times harder. I could imagine him pacing up and down on the mock teak floor of his office. ‘They are here in twenty minutes and I have no revisions to show them.’

  ‘There’s been an accident Will,’ I told him flatly, not paying any interest to anything he was saying, I was thinking only of Hat.

  ‘Well, it better be serious, I can tell you, if I find –’

  ‘A friend of mine has – has been killed…by a train. All the trains are at a standstill. I’m sorry, I won’t be in for the rest of the week.’

  ‘Is this a relative?’

  I hesitated. How dare he? Freddy was as close as a relative to me, and what did that matter anyway? Where was the man’s compassion? Then it struck me that he had none, no empathy, never had.

  ‘You need to email me the designs now, send whatever you’ve got!’ he barked. ‘And thanks for ringing me to let me know what was happening, by the way. This account might not seem much to you but right now it’s our bread and butter.’

  I hit the red button without responding to him. He was an arse. I picked up my laptop bag and then dropped it again. He could wait, put the meeting back, Hat was more important.

  ‘I don’t believe it, Connie, I just cannot believe it.’ She was leaning on the arm of the sofa, another tissue rolled into a small white cone in her hand. My cat, Mr. C, rubbed himself against her legs trying to attract her attention, but she was ignoring him. I sat down next to her, reaching for his long stripy back. ‘All those times I’ve talked to him,’ she sobbed, ‘everything I did, all those experts I made him see. If only he would have talked
to me, not bottled it up inside for all those years.’

  ‘You did your best, Hat, no one could say any different.’ It was true she had been selfless. I pulled a fresh tissue from the box at my side and she dabbed her eyes with it. Her shoulders were shaking. This was not the Harriet James I knew, because my Harriet never needed help or advice. She handled everything her way, with uncompromising humour and good spirits, but Freddy in his latest bout of dejection, finally, was her breaking point. Not the trouble he caused her, the episodes, the threats, the long silences, but the sudden and absolute finality of his death.

  Chapter Four

  ‘We have a weak link, a threat.’ Yves was looking at them, regarding each face one by one. When his eyes fell on Claudette it was not because she was a suspect, she knew that, but because she was new and lacked confidence.

  The tack room was inside a barn at the back of another safe house in the hamlet of Cassel, fifty minutes by train from Paris. A single gas lamp lit up the dark space, giving a ghostly edge to the faces around it. There was a smell of leather and linseed oil. Outside, rain was sheeting down and steam was rising from woollen jumpers and jackets. Pascal Canet threw down his cigarette stub and stood up.

  ‘It’s not me,’ he said grimly. ‘I have too much of a grudge against the bastards, so no one can label me a traitor, right?’

  ‘No one is saying that,’ sighed Yves. Canet was the one he could rely on without question.

  ‘The man protests too much.’ Vincent Gabin, the student doctor, sneered from the corner where he was leaning against a pile of dirty canvas rugs. He was the one who had come close to capture recently, he was wary of everyone. Canet threw him a dark look, there was no love lost between them.

  Yves held up his hand. ‘The someone doesn’t have to be one of us. It could be one of our links, the safe-house in Fréon we no longer use or Stéphen Lhuy’s widow, she’s terrified after what happened to him. Whoever it is, it’s a major problem for us. The train last week should have gone up. Instead they had information and they disabled the device. It’s handed them a major advantage, even more than ever.’

  ‘And more ammunition for retribution killings,’ added Gabin. ‘How many more this time, eh?’

  ‘We’ll need to deploy away from here and hit them when and where they least expect it. We need to go further, into the city.’

  ‘But it is heaving with them. It’s mad. You are making it countless times more dangerous.’ Maurice Joubert said as he drew deeply on a roll up. It smelt sweet.

  ‘I’m certain it’s not one of us, the person who’s doing this doesn’t know us by name. It’s in the line. If he knew who we are we’d all be dead by now.’ The men nodded in agreement.

  ‘We will change everything, every aspect of what we do and recruit new people if needs be, I have two men in mind in Paris.’ As he spoke Yves looked weary.

  ‘We need women now,’ Joubert was looking at Claudette. ‘They move with more ease in the city, especially if they have children in tow.’ Claudette realised the space in the conversation was hers to fill.

  ‘I can suggest some names in this area,’ she said at length. ‘But I don’t know anyone in Paris.’

  ‘We’ll set up a new line. I’m telling no more than three of you the details,’ said Yves. ‘And if that backfires I’ll kill the traitor myself, with my bare hands.’ Claudette looked from face to face, only Joubert failed to respond. Canet and Gabin grunted in agreement, but Joubert was staring straight at her, his eyes under heavy black brows dark against his white, pock-marked skin.

  ‘Me too,’ he said grimly, his eyes set fiercely on Claudette. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Ignore Joubert,’ Yves told her the following week. They were sitting at a table in the back room of the Café J. Philipe. It was early and the café was closed, the normal chatter replaced by the muted sounds of life out in the street. Yves had made them both a coffee, it was not the real thing of course, it was an acrid tasting toasted barley mixed with chicory. He apologised as he placed it in front of her. Even this mediocre mix was becoming scarce, along with just about everything else. ‘He’s angry. If I told you his story, and what they did to him in the last war, your heart would bleed.’ He absentmindedly rubbed his hand back and forth across his forehead. ‘But that’s the thing, I can’t tell you, you can’t know anything.’

  He was businesslike, being efficient. Claudette listened, watching him with her usual fascination. Yves was earnest and possessed of a belief that nothing was going to stop him until France was free. She knew that he carried out all this, the fighting and this secret business, in spite of himself, because at heart he had always been a gentle soul. She’d known him right through school, from the first day when he smiled as she stood lost and bewildered. Since that day he had always looked out for her and not only her, either. He was the first to pull apart a fight, calm arguments down, listen to both sides of the story. She and Yves had been the two most promising pupils but neither of them could afford to go further, even if they had been able to try for a scholarship. Before the war, times had already been hard and they both needed to earn money for their families and so they had left school as early as possible to work in their family trades.

  Since she was thirteen Claudette’s father had been too ill to work and she and her mother took in endless piles of sewing and darning. Yves was two years older, almost twenty-four and to her far wiser, more worldly. He had an independent spirit, due, in no small part, to losing both parents in a road accident when he was nine. His mother’s sister had brought him up, she and her huge bear of a husband. No one ever mentioned his parents and she had watched the steely expression on his face when the schoolteacher talked about their fathers. Yves would write about his uncle instead. He was still hurting.

  ‘The thing is,’ he was speaking slowly, his fingers resting on the rim of the coffee bowl, ‘it’s got to be you, I can see no other way.’ She was used to his round about approach, the way he never gave her a directive. Sometimes he would mull things over, his jaw flexing and relaxing as he ran new ideas through his head. Whatever the decision, even though she had guessed the nature of it, she would give him time to explain and hear him out.

  This time there was something about the hesitation on his lips and she realised he was struggling to say the words.

  ‘What are you talking about, Yves?’ she leaned forward, eyes probing his face for an answer. ‘Just tell me.’ There was a small knot of apprehension tightening inside her.

  ‘We must get to the heart of it, to the decision makers, find out what they will do next, instead of being purely reactive.’ As he spoke he kept his eyes fixed firmly on the bowl in front of him. Her heart sank a little and she felt the apprehension turning into a sense of foreboding. ‘We need someone in Paris.’ At first she thought he was about to discuss it all with her because she had become, for want of a better word, his confidante. He had always involved her in his plans and schemes, it was something she knew bonded them, made them essential to each other but, instead, he took a deep breath and said, ‘I think you could do it.’

  ‘Me! Not me, surely, what could I do to help?’

  He looked at her from under the strands of dark hair that fell across his eyes and immediately it seemed he had regretted asking her. She was suddenly aware of how tired and careworn he looked. Fine red thread veins dulled the whites of his eyes and beneath them were dark circles, but the eyebrows knotted together above them left no trace of doubt, he was serious.

  ‘I can’t go to Paris,’ she told him. She could feel her heart quicken, her voice was unnatural, fearful. ‘I’ve never even been there.’

  ‘It’s just a town, just like Vacily, but a big one.’ He half smiled and for a few seconds the brightness of his youth appeared, but it was fleeting.

  ‘I don’t have the clothes, the accent, the style, I can’t carry off being a Parisian woman. I sew for t
hem occasionally, that’s all, it’s the closest I’ve ever been, you need to think of someone else.’

  Yves stood up and walked over to the heavy velvet curtain he’d drawn between them and the front of the café. He pulled it back a little and scanned the street for anyone who might be in the vicinity before sitting back down.

  ‘Jean will be back soon to open up and I’ve promised I’ll be gone by then. You will be fully briefed, you won’t need accents or fancy clothes or whatever. You will be a girl up from the country who has found work in the city. A maid, or something of that nature. The final pieces are being put into place and you will have the full picture the next time we meet.’

  ‘Will I have contacts?’

  ‘Of course, yes,’

  ‘A place to live?’

  ‘Yes, with your work.’

  ‘What is the work?’

  He refused to be drawn further. ‘Claudette, you don’t need to worry, I will be there with you.’

  ‘In Paris?’

  ‘Of course in Paris, what did you think I meant, in spirit or something?’

  She felt a blessed sense of relief run through her and she allowed herself a small, imperceptible sigh. He would be there. It would be all right if he was there. It could so easily have been Joubert or the ghastly Pascal Canet who, for some reason, Yves seemed to hero worship.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, I will be in the city working somewhere. It’s not yet confirmed.’ Her shoulders relaxed, with him in Paris she would feel capable of doing anything.

  ‘And Giselle?’

  ‘What of her?’

  ‘Will you leave her here?’

  ‘Of course, I can’t risk her safety.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Claudette looked down at her hands. A quiver of disappointment ran through her, something he must never be allowed to see. Giselle’s baby was due at Easter. Naturally he would protect his wife at all costs, and their little boy, Louis.