‘No news, Major?’
‘I’m afraid not, Stephens. How long is it now since we last heard from them?’
‘Just over forty-eight hours, sir.’
‘Remind me what the message said again?’
The other man closed his eyes as if trying to recall it. ‘The decoded version, sir, was that the whole circuit had been compromised and they were expecting to be caught any minute. Hervé used the word “thunder” three times in the one message, sir, which means things are about as serious as they can get.’ He shook his head, his eyes still closed.
Neither man said a word. It was just over an hour before midnight and the building was cloaked in silence. Not a sound penetrated from outside. They could have been in the middle of the countryside but for the absence of the calls of wild animals.
‘A message like that doesn’t hold out much hope, does it, Stephens?’
‘I’m afraid it doesn’t, sir.’
‘Does her husband know?’
‘Of course not, Major.’
‘Shouldn’t he be told?’ Even though he was the younger man’s superior officer, Major Lean had recently found himself deferring to him. He’d noticed that as the war went on, older men such as himself – those in their mid-forties and beyond – seemed permanently exhausted. The younger ones like Christopher Stephens seemed to have picked up a second wind from somewhere. Perhaps the course of the war invigorated them. And Stephens was so bright: a double first from Cambridge, Lord knows how many languages, and three missions into occupied France to his name. Lean was convinced Stephens would one day end up as his superior. A commission in a Guards regiment and being distantly related to Churchill’s wife wasn’t doing him any harm either.
‘I don’t see why we should tell him, sir; after all, we don’t know what’s happened yet, do we?’
‘Surely we have a reasonable idea. I knew we shouldn’t have sent a woman.’
Stephens finally opened his eyes and sat up, looking disapprovingly at the major. ‘She’s the best man for the job, sir. If it wasn’t for our female agents, the SOE would struggle to get enough half-decent people to send over. Her French is excellent and she’s as brave as a lion.’
Lean sighed. ‘She’s going to need to be. The thought of what the Germans will be doing to her absolutely terrifies me.’
There were a number of things that bothered Christine Butler, or Thérèse as she was now known. ‘Annoyances’, her mother had called them; dérangements in her native French. Her mother’s life was accompanied by a considerable number of annoyances. Thérèse knew she shouldn’t let these things bother her, because they were proving to be a distraction, and the very last thing a British agent in occupied France needed was a distraction. There was enough to worry about as it was.
The first annoyance was an extremely petty one – it was more of a superstition than anything else. Really it ought to have been the opposite of an annoyance, because it was to do with her journey to France and how well it had gone. They’d left RAF Tangmere in Sussex just before midnight, and it was a perfect flight over the Channel in the Lysander. It hadn’t been nearly as uncomfortable as she’d been warned it would be, the landing in a field near Chaumont had been incident-free, and within half an hour of her climbing down from the plane she was safe in a farmhouse, surrounded by the members of the resistance cell she’d be working with. But from an early age her father had instilled in her an irrational notion that the easier the journey, the more things were likely to go wrong upon arrival. During her three weeks in France, she hadn’t been able to get that out of her mind. Something’s bound to go wrong.
Then there was her radio operator, a man with a Yorkshire accent whose personal hygiene left much to be desired and who she was shocked to find spoke virtually no French, which made his code name of Hervé sound all the more implausible. She had raised this with the Captain, the enigmatic man who ran Tractor circuit, but he’d told her not to worry, and said that in any case, that was why she was there. She was the first to acknowledge that Hervé was a skilful radio operator, quick to encode and decode, fluent in his transmissions and the rest, but he was beginning to get on her nerves. They’d met up near Auxerre, and after a week had been moved south, where they were based in a woodsman’s cottage close to the River Brenne near Montbard. They’d remained there for another week, Thérèse doing her best to carry out London’s orders and bring some sense of order to the resistance in the area, an awkward mix of urban communists and rural Maquis.
Then came the orders to head south again, an abstemious journey through Burgundy to the city of Dijon. Once Hervé had become aware of their destination, he’d expressed the hope that they’d cut the mustard, which Thérèse acknowledged was mildly amusing, but not when he used the reference as an accompaniment to every conversation.
The final annoyance was a far more serious one. Her training as an SOE agent had been rushed through in a month, but they’d said she was an excellent student, and of course her French was fluent. They’d also said she needn’t worry too much because Tractor was a good circuit and most of the resistance cells within it were watertight. That was the word Major Lean had used, ‘most’. She had pointed out that ‘most’ rather undermined the whole business, a chain only being as strong as its weakest link, et cetera, but that condescending man Stephens had told her there was a war on and nowhere was perfect. Once in France, and especially since they’d arrived in Dijon, it was clear that the groups in the circuit were anything
