The House of Flowers Read online

  ‘My parents live in Lancashire, sir. Little spot called Whitewell. Do you know the Trough of Bowland, sir? One of the loveliest places in England, I say.’

  ‘I’ve fished there many times, Miss Budge. Couldn’t agree with you more. So – thank you for your time,’ Harvey said, rising. ‘You’ve been most helpful.’

  ‘I don’t see how, sir. With respect.’

  ‘By answering so very truthfully, Miss Budge. And economically.’ Harvey sighed, tapping his files into order on the desk. ‘I can’t tell you how long-winded some people can be. You can always tell the people who aren’t quite telling the truth, because they do go on so. So thank you again – for your economy, and accuracy.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Miss Budge got up to open the door for her interviewer.

  ‘I see you had a dog when you were in Germany,’ Harvey said, stopping in the open doorway. ‘You had to leave him behind, did you?’

  It was the only time in the entire interview Harvey actually saw Miss Budge left speechless. She blinked her eyes hard, a frown clouding her brow as if she was searching for exactly the right words to say, hurt in her eyes.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she finally replied after clearing her throat nervously. ‘I’m afraid I did. It was something I regretted very much, but there was no alternative.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Harvey agreed, noting the pain still visible in her eyes. ‘How could there be? Again, my thanks – and perhaps one day soon you’ll be able to get yourself another little dog. When this wretched war is over.’

  ‘Absolutely, sir,’ Miss Budge replied, her composure restored. ‘Peace can’t come a day too soon.’

  * * *

  After a cup of insipid tea taken in his private office, Harvey considered his next move. There were four names he needed to look at, two of them being Eugene Hackett and Jack Ward himself, who even though already marked down by Harvey as an AS (Above Suspicion) Harvey knew still had to be included in the investigation for it to be said that he had done a thorough job. Besides, Harvey had actually noted a couple of blips in the Colonel’s record that merited further investigation, particularly since one of those blips linked him directly to one of the two other names on his list.

  Harvey cleared his desk and prepared to enter what he hoped might be the last phase of his enquiry.

  To Scott – and to Lily too – it seemed there was only one way their task could have gone so terribly wrong. They had been betrayed.

  How they had escaped with their lives neither of them knew; nor did they understand, as they lay in silence in the dark at the very top of a remote hay barn in the middle of what Scott described as France nowhere, how they were still at liberty. It had been such a simple operation, or so it had seemed. They were to collect the latest drop from home. Two debutante agents had been sent to take their places, and a safe return to England organised for Lily and Scott. They were to escort them to their safe house, introduce them to the team of Resistance fighters with whom Scott and Lily were now heavily involved, and help them plan the next campaign of sabotage against the enemy stationed in Valognes, southeast of Cherbourg, in the Manche. The team with which Scott and Lily were associated was regarded as one of the crack Resistance units operating in the northwestern sector of France, where they had fought a long and on the whole highly successful campaign against the Germans with the loss of only three members of the twenty-strong group.

  Fortunately, given the circumstances of the war and the knowledge of what happened to those who fell into the hands of the Gestapo, all three had been killed in a running gunfight with the enemy, the rest of the group happily escaping with only minimal damage. Furthermore, they had shaken off their pursuers with predictable ease since this was their country, disappearing into the vast countryside without leaving a trace, disbanding as was their habit whenever they ran into difficulties, and taking flight to various bolt-holes in Calvados, Orne or even a couple of them as far south as Maine-et-Loire.

  But this time, with this new drop, things went badly wrong from the very outset. First of all, at the very last minute the location was changed. After frantic messaging back and forth to HQ it was discovered that this information was false and had obviously been fed to them by a double agent. The drop was postponed for a week until a new and safe location could be organised. In fact it took less than a week, and four days later ten of the team were in position round the perimeter of a field in the middle of a large stretch of farmland fifteen miles inland from Coutances, awaiting the arrival of what Scott had dubbed the new bugs.

  The plane bringing them over arrived three minutes late, dropping two parachuted people and four parachuted sets of fresh supplies right on target.

  The two agents were shot when they were still a good twenty feet in the air, their dead bullet-riddled bodies crashing to the ground, to be covered by their slowly collapsing parachutes. At the same time as the sudden burst of lethal gunfire the whole dropping area was set alight by flares and hand-held floodlights, the latter being used to search the field and its immediate environs in slow sweeping movements. Once the lights had temporarily passed him by Scott had been able to see that they were surrounded on all four sides by Germans who outnumbered them, Scott roughly guessed, by ten to one at the very least. Not only that, but the Germans had crept up from behind them, unheard and unseen, having obviously successfully removed the sentries the Resistance group had posted against such a contingency, thus cutting them off it would seem from any line of retreat.

  ‘The ditch!’ Lily whispered at Scott, who was preparing to fight what he considered was very definitely going to be his last fight. ‘We might be able to make it back through the ditch!’

  Lily had remembered the long, filthy, stinking, but deep irrigation ditch that they had used on their way to take up their waiting positions hidden in the high banks and hedgerows that surrounded the field. Where it ran to she had no idea, other than that it ran away from the field and the heart of the farmland. It was deep enough to hide a person at full height, and if they managed to stay concealed there was an outside chance that they could make their escape that way, always provided the enemy was ignorant of its existence and its disposition.

  ‘How many of us can we alert?’ Scott had to shout back to her now, so cacophonous was the sudden outbreak of rifle fire. ‘Can we all get out that way?’

  Lily had no idea – all she knew was that there were six of them on that side of the field and if she could pass the message on to her nearest companion, who was a good fifty feet away, he might be able to get word to his closest colleague. That was not only the best she could hope; it was all. She said nothing of course to Scott, whom she left to concentrate on his self-defence while she scrambled under heavy fire along the bank until she could shout to Yves who was fighting next to her. There was no time to wait for any reply or signal since the line of fire was becoming more and more concentrated on the area where she was, as well as getting uncomfortably nearer. Instead Lily somersaulted three or four times along the bottom of the bank, before crawling as fast as she could for the next few feet and finally standing up and running to where she could still see Scott, up on one knee and firing as fast as he could with his rifle at the ever closing enemy.

  The next moment she had bundled him into the ditch with her, both of them flattening themselves in the mud and filth at the very bottom. Seconds later another body crashed down, half on top of Scott and burying him even more deeply in the mud.

  The three fighters lay as still as they could until they heard the gunfire receding, then stopping, only to start up again as other targets were suddenly spotted. When it was clear that the enemy’s attention was engaged elsewhere, Scott, Lily and Yves began to crawl through the mud and debris, away from the sound of the ambush, until they were a good quarter of a mile away. Then they risked standing up in order to hasten the last part of their flight and ran as fast as they could along the deep cutting, their heads still well out of sight, until so distant had an
y noise of the hand-fight become that they felt it safe to stop and assess their situation.

  They found themselves at what was obviously the end of a track, a lane that was terminated by the deep ditch that continued to run away into the darkness on either side. Yves pulled out his pocket compass and peered at it in the moonlight, the luminous figures giving him a position he then checked by the stars in the clear night sky above them.

  ‘I would say we are very well placed,’ he remarked. ‘We have come in the opposite direction to the nearest town, so we are facing due south. What we must now do is split up and find somewhere to lie low until those that are left of us can regroup – God willing – back at base.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Scott disagreed. ‘I don’t think we should return to base – in case they have taken any of us alive.’

  ‘No one will talk!’ Yves protested. ‘But no one!’

  ‘Just in case, my good friend. We cannot rely altogether on the undoubted courage of our colleagues. All the Gestapo have to do is find a way to make you talk – and they do. Not necessarily by torture, but by the involvement of innocents. We know that, Yves. We have seen it too often.’

  Yves thought, then nodded. Just as Scott said, battle-scarred as they all were now, they had indeed seen and heard of things that they had never imagined they would witness. Just the threat of the execution of six totally innocent civilians, often women and children, would be enough to make any of their colleagues reveal the location of a base that they hoped and believed would now be both empty and deserted. No one could be blamed even if the place whose location they betrayed was still in use. Pain could be tolerated. The death of innocent women and children was an altogether harder thing to take. So they reasoned, while in all three hearts lay the heavy dread that in fact they might actually be the only survivors.

  Before they parted, Yves promised to let them know, via one of the safe third parties their group used as messengers, what had happened to his cousin Rolande, who had been among the ill-fated reception committee at the landing field.

  ‘If anyone comes through this it’ll be Rolande,’ Lily assured him. ‘And even if he doesn’t, you can bet the German army’s going to be short of an awful lot of its soldiers.’

  Yves grinned, kissed Lily a fond farewell and embraced Scott.

  ‘Whatever happens,’ he said before he disappeared into the night, ‘when peace comes we shall meet in Paris and get fiercely drunk, my friends! Au revoir!’

  * * *

  Lily and Scott thought long and hard about whether or not they should separate, finally deciding that the best plan would be to wait and see. They knew how intense the search for them would be, since their group had been hunted hard and endlessly ever since the Germans discovered how much damage they were doing. There was a big price on all their heads, and while they knew they were in a fiercely loyal part of France, they also knew that as in any country there were always informers and rats, people who would sell their birthright to the enemy for a guarantee of their own safety. So they knew it was useless just to hide up. They had to keep low but keep moving, always not one but half a dozen steps ahead of their pursuers, who were experienced hunters dressed in civilian clothes and often driving French cars, but always when seen on the move unmistakably German – and not only German but Gestapo.

  So throughout December Scott and Lily stayed together but kept on the move. They were protected whenever possible by members of the Underground, put up at great risk to their courageous hosts, although they always made sure they moved in under cover of dark and out again before sunup, criss-crossing the country until finally they found themselves exhausted and all but at their wits’ ends. What finally brought them to their senses was the first sight of a poster bearing both their more than recognisable images. Not just one, but suddenly a whole plethora of posters stuck it seemed everywhere they went. Most of them were torn down as soon as they were posted, or so badly defaced that subsequent identification of Scott and Lily would have been miraculous. Not that the Gestapo would mind, as Scott pointed out when first they saw the posters. The idea was to let Scott and Lily know that the Gestapo knew what they looked like, which perhaps might be enough to disconcert them and throw them off balance. A secondary aim was to spread the word a lot more widely that there was good money to be claimed for their betrayal.

  ‘Time to split,’ Scott decided some time into January when they were huddled under rough blankets in an old abandoned hen house of a farm on the outskirts of a tiny village ten miles east of Ernée in the Mayenne district. Scott had already dyed his blond hair black as well as growing an equally blackened moustache, while Lily had cut her hair so short that she looked like a boy. But they both knew that however good their immediate disguises the time had passed for them to stay together on the run. As it was they felt they had taken unnecessary risks by staying together, jeopardising each other’s safety as well as the possible security of their Resistance colleagues by making it easier for themselves to be identified and picked up. The plan was that they would make their separate ways up to Isigny on the Calvados coast, where Rolande and Yves had originally set up their group’s first base. The house had been unoccupied by anyone known to belong to the Underground since the group had decanted itself to carry out its sabotages on the Cherbourg peninsula, but had always been kept ready for any member who became detached from his colleagues, or needed safe housing. How Scott and Lily got there would be entirely up to their own inventiveness and resourcefulness.

  ‘But to make it more fun,’ Scott suggested, ‘how about a little side bet? As to who gets there first.’

  ‘Great idea,’ Lily said, trying to stop her teeth from chattering. ‘What’s the pot?’

  ‘Fifty quid to first runner home.’

  ‘Fifty quid?’ Lily laughed. ‘I ain’t got fifty quid, Captain Stuffy! Tell you what I could do, though – if by any chance I lose.’

  She looked at him by the light of a candle stub in an old food tin and then softly whispered in his ear.

  Scott smiled and raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d better make sure you win then,’ he whispered back. ‘Hadn’t I?’

  Eugene failed to make it home in time for Christmas, as Kate expected. He failed to make it home through January either, being moved from Burleigh Hospital up to Bristol where they were pioneering new treatments for broken backs and necks. After further treatment there he was finally allowed to return to Eden Park at the beginning of February, coinciding with the failure of the Allies to win the second battle of Monte Cassino.

  ‘I don’t know what to make of it,’ Eugene growled at Kate from over the top of the latest neck brace they had fitted him with a week before he had finally left hospital. ‘When I left Italy we were winning the damned war hand over fist. Now we’re stuck at the bottom of some blessed monastery fighting for our lives.’

  ‘It’ll be OK, Eugene,’ Kate comforted him, settling him into his chair by the window of his flat so that he could look out over the stable yard, only to be met with one of Eugene’s blackest looks.

  ‘You think I want to sit here?’ he demanded. ‘And watch Micky riding my fellow out every day? And wish I was up in the saddle again? No thank you, Katie – I’m not sitting stuck in front of a damn window like some old war relic! I’ll sit by the fire and read, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I thought you said you still found reading difficult? Holding the book up in front of your face for ages—’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that, will you! Now hand me over Portrait of the Artist, there’s a good girl. And that bottle of whisky too, while you’re at it.’

  ‘You’re not meant to drink. At least I didn’t think you were – because of the medicines they’ve put you on.’

  ‘Jesus, woman! You’ll be telling me what to think next! I’m allowed one drink, of course. So pass over the damn’ bottle and a glass and take your scolding elsewhere.’

  ‘One drink.’

  ‘I said one drink, didn’t I?’ Eugene retor
ted, settling himself in his repositioned chair. ‘And that’s all I’ll be having. One drink.’

  ‘At a time,’ Kate smiled. ‘Knowing you.’

  For a second Eugene regarded her without a smile. Then, unable to resist, he clicked his tongue, rolled his eyes heavenwards and held out a hand.

  ‘Come here,’ he commanded. ‘Sit on me knee but mind me blessed neck.’

  ‘I will not sit on your knee because I’m far too concerned about your blessed neck, Eugene, thanks all the same. I shall put a kiss on my finger, put my finger to your lips, then I shall sit here like the obedient little two-shoes you want me to be, and watch you having your one drink.’

  ‘You can read to me if you’d rather,’ Eugene growled. ‘Because you’re damn’ well right about it being tiring holding the book up. So unless you’ve something better to do—’

  ‘I have nothing better to do for at least a couple of hours,’ Kate replied, opening the book at the appointed place. ‘Then I have to go out.’

  ‘What do you mean, you have to go out?’

  ‘Sit down, Eugene, will you? Sit down!’ Kate gave a great big sigh and gently eased Eugene back down in his chair. ‘It’s not the end of the world if I go out, you know. When you were in hospital you didn’t know what I was up to and you didn’t mind.’

  ‘That’s all you know, precious.’

  ‘You couldn’t mind because you didn’t know because I wasn’t up to anything. But I did go out – not with anyone, I just went out. For drinks with my friends, for walks with Poppy and George, to go and have tea with my mother sometimes – but occasionally I do admit I did walk out with a member of the opposite sex.’

  ‘I suppose you think this is funny, do you?’

  ‘Mind you,’ Kate continued, ‘I’m not quite sure you’d think of him as a member of the opposite sex. I made friends with Captain Constable.’

  ‘Oh you did, did you?’ Eugene frowned.

  There was a pause as he mulled over the idea.