He wouldn’t, he assured her.
“I belonged to a special unit during the war,” she began, explaining calmly. “French-speaking men and women trained for a specific mission during the invasion of France. The Allies were concerned the French would side with the Germans after D-Day and turn on our troops.”
“Why should they?”
“Fear mainly — the Gestapo had rounded up many Frenchmen and sent them to concentration camps. Almost every family had at least one member who’d been arrested and imprisoned and the threat was clear — cooperate or they die. But the French had other reasons.”
“What reasons — surely we were liberating them?”
“That’s true, though some still hadn’t forgiven us for deserting them at Dunkirk and don’t forget we’d destroyed their fleet at Oran — killed thousands of sailors to stop the Vichy Government handing the ships over to the Germans.” Checking to make sure she wasn’t being overheard, she lowered her voice a couple of notches. “And they never liked us very much in the first place.”
“I still don’t understand. What were you expected to do — kill Frenchman before they could kill our people?”
“No — of course not. We were trained to prepare the way for the invading forces — let the French know we were coming as allies to free the country, not turn it into a British colony like the Germans claimed in their propaganda; to warn them to keep away from the coast; persuade them to dig in or hide in the cellars. We were supposed to galvanise the resistance to co-ordinate the blowing up of bridges, derailment of trains, blocking roads, that sort of thing. But the main task was to get behind enemy lines and vector artillery fire onto concentrations of German troops. Once the battle started our people wouldn’t have a clue where the fleeing Jerries were and the danger was we could have wiped out the local population without even scratching the enemy. So you see, it was my job to kill people.”
The first course arrived and the interruption gave Bliss an opportunity to get his thoughts together.
This wasn’t bad, he thought, this wasn’t the admission of some deranged old biddy who had wiped out half the inmates of an old peoples home with arsenic in the soup; this wasn’t a rampaging granny mowing down the queue in the post office because her welfare cheque hadn’t arrived; this wasn’t a mobster in a mask …
“It was wartime — people die. You said so yourself,” he began, offering absolution, but she sliced into a mushroom with such fierce concentration that he backed off and centred on his pate.
“How did you get there?” he tried conversationally after a few minutes.
“Parachute.”
“You parachuted into France?”
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t that dangerous?”
“Yes.”
“Was it during the day or at night?”
“Night.”
“Did you have a reserve?”
“No.”
“Are you going to keep this up all evening? … I said, are you …”
“I heard you, Chief Inspector, but sometimes it’s best to leave old skeletons in the cupboard.”
“That’s exactly what Jonathon said.”
“He was right then.”
Bliss sat back with an admiring smile. “I can’t get over that. You — parachuting out of a plane over enemy territory in the middle of the night.”
“I sometimes wonder if it was a dream myself.”
Bliss took a few moments to finish his pate’ and used the hiatus to study her with deepening respect, realising that if it were anyone but Daphne talking he’d probably not believe a word of what they were saying. But there was something so totally sincere in her manner. “So what happened?” he asked eventually.
Daphne toyed indecisively with the remaining mushroom — shunting it back and forth across her plate.
Then she edged it onto the rim and started working it around.
“Daphne — I said, what happened?”
The mushroom went round and around the plate rim, faster and faster, but there was no way out.
“Daphne?”
She stopped, stabbed the mushroom angrily with her fork and looked straight through him, focusing somewhere far off in the distance — somewhere in the past. “I was cold, wet, miserable and scared to death. My partner … my friend … hit a power line. Electrocuted — dead. He had the maps. I wandered — lost, disorientated, hungry for two or three days — then the guns started.” Her eyes closed as the barrage went off in her mind and she sat silent until the noise had faded.
“A young French woman, my age, was lying by the side of the road covered in blood, screaming,” she said as she re-opened her eyes, but her voice was as distant as her gaze. “She’d been shot or hit by shrapnel.”
Mandy Richards was back, her crimson chest stippled with shreds of green blouse. And her killer — blood and snot dribbling out of his nose — his face more ghastly than the mask that had been pulled off. And now another face had got stirred into the horrific mental morass — the Major’s face, or what was left of it: half a shattered jaw strung up with wire and a few rotten teeth set at crazy angles.
But Daphne was having her own nightmare.
“When I bent down to see if I could help I realised she had a baby, wrapped in a fluffy blue blanket soaked in blood. ‘Take my baby — please take my baby,’ the poor girl was screaming.’ ‘Where to?’ I said. ‘To my mother — Mama — she will take care of him. Please, please take him.’ She paused and stared over Bliss’s shoulder at a blank wall, waiting for the pain to abate — hoping she might wake before the worst. ‘Where is your mother?’ I asked,” — the horror movie refusing to stop in her mind. “And she gave me the name of the town … I couldn’t believe my luck. It was the town where I was supposed to be and it was still behind enemy lines. I was desperate … I had to get there … I still had my job to do. Without me our artillery would just destroy the whole place.”
Burying her head in her hands Daphne tried shutting out the images, then gave up and confronted herself with the facts. “I took her bicycle and put my radio in the wicker carrier, you know the sort that all French bikes have … and … ” she paused again, fighting off the memory, hoping it had never happened — hoping it was only a movie. “And …” she tried again. “And … I wrapped her baby in my shawl … and …” The words wouldn’t come.
Bliss shook off his own demons and helped out. “And the baby …?” he asked.
“I put him in the basket on top of the radio.” There, I’ve said it. Now finish the story. “And I rode away. ‘Good luck,’ she called, ‘Bon chance — Bon chance. Tell my mother I’ll be home in a day or so,’ she cried. ‘I’ll be home as soon as the guns have stopped. Tell her not to worry.’”
She sat silent for a few moments, still staring through the wall as images piled up in her mind and she sorted them in order. “A British soldier tried to stop me at a checkpoint. He was sure I was French. Of course, I looked French — that was all part of the training. We had French instructors — girls our own age who had escaped or been in England at the start of the war. With the French it’s not just the language, it’s the way you stick out your bum and pout; the way you sniff everything; the way you use your hands to talk.
“‘Cor blimey, Miss, you sound as though you’ve just come off Brighton beach,’ he said.
“‘Let me through or I’ll …’” She paused, “Well, you can imagine what I said.
“‘Ere,’ he said, ‘You’re English, ain’t you?’
“‘Of course I’m English you bloody little twerp,’ I said, though I wasn’t quite so polite.
“‘Well I’m blowed,’ he said. ‘But you can’t go through there, Miss. The h’enemy’s up ahead. They’ll mow you down,’ he said.
“‘Get out the way,’ I said, shoving him off.
“‘I’ll shoot,’ he shouted.”
Then she smiled in memory. “‘What’s your name?’ I said. “‘Corporal something-or-other,’ he said.
“‘Right Corporal,’ I said. ‘If you shoot me, I’ll wrap that gun round your bleedin’ head and when I get back home I’ll tell your mother what you did. Now bugger off.’” Bliss’s broad grin ended in a chuckle as she continued.