The Paris Spy (Maggie Hope Mystery #7)(47)

But her job was more important than she ever let on. When she was hired in 1940, she’d been recruited as a secretary to Colonel Harold Gaskell in SOE’s F-Section, charged with running operations in France. She had the ideal qualifications for the support staff position: she spoke fluent English, French, and German, and had a keen knowledge of geography. In her late thirties, unmarried, with no dependents, she’d stated on the official paperwork that she had no political views. She had private means. And she was exacting and tireless in her work.

By 1941, she’d become Colonel Gaskell’s “Girl Friday” and an integral part of F-Section. When the opportunity arose for her to play a larger role in SOE, she grabbed it. In France, as the war went on and more Frenchmen were sent to work for the Reich, it was increasingly perilous for young male agents to travel around the country; they were often arrested and searched, making capture more likely. SOE’s controversial solution, approved by Winston Churchill himself, was to send female agents abroad, despite the fact that women were technically barred from combat by the Geneva Convention.

Lynd was a pragmatist; she believed sending women abroad as agents made sense. Women were as capable as any man, as she well knew. And so she put herself forward to be overseer of F-Section’s female spies, and Colonel Gaskell eventually agreed.

She recruited women to be possible agents, oversaw their training, and pored over their evaluations. If she assessed them as up to the job, she would officially enlist them, only then revealing the clandestine and dangerous nature of what they were being asked to do.

If they agreed to take the job, she gave them their undercover identities. She always accompanied them to the airfield in the south of England when they departed and personally made the final inspections of their disguises—no English cigarettes, all clothing labels French, no incriminating cinema tickets or chocolate wrappers in their pockets.

The women, often much younger, saw her as their leader. And she thought of the agents she oversaw as her “girls.”

Lynd had finished lunch at Fortnum & Mason, where she dined every day unless she was meeting friends at Claridge’s. She returned to 64 Baker Street, an anonymous gray limestone building not far from Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address and Regent’s Park, only one of the many unremarkable SOE offices scattered around London’s Marylebone neighborhood. Because of lack of space in Whitehall, Baker Street and its surrounding area had become home for SOE, and several buildings had been fitted with discreet plaques reading INTER-SERVICES RESEARCH BUREAU. While that was considered off-putting enough for the general public, the staff and those in the know called it the Firm, the Org, or the Racket, and its employees were known as the Baker Street Irregulars, in honor of Sherlock Holmes’s young informants.

The Baker Street offices were shabby and dimly lit, with SOE agents passing through, often swearing poetically in French and smoking stubby Gauloises. The reception room was small, with only one window and a low ceiling. When Lynd arrived, the receptionist, a plain young woman dressed in an ATS uniform, sporting a fat pimple on her chin, said, “This just arrived for you, Miss Lynd. By motorcycle courier from Station 53a.”

Lynd nodded and accepted the large envelope. She made her way down the narrow hall to her tiny office, heels tapping. Inside, she unpinned her hat, then patted her hair into shape in a Venetian mirror she’d brought from home that hung behind the door. The window, with slatted blinds, looked out on a brick wall. The room was shabby but immaculate, with a banged-up metal desk, on which Lynd had a row of flip-flop card indexes, placed next to a silver-framed picture of the King.

Lynd settled herself at her wooden desk chair, opening the envelope and scrutinizing the missives inside. They were decrypts from Station 53a in Grendon Underwood.

Her cool exterior belied the stab of fear she felt. Lynd had the ominous feeling that F-Section’s agent Erica Calvert, known as TRV, was compromised.

When Maggie Hope, who’d worked as a receptionist in the office for a time in January, had alerted her and Colonel Gaskell to the missing security checks, he wasn’t concerned. “Tell Agent Calvert to be more careful next time!” he’d bellowed, putting the spy’s mistake down to stress and exhaustion.

Lynd had done just that. However, as time had gone on and more messages had come to her with the worrying red stamp, she became increasingly concerned about one of her “girls.” Now the latest decrypt read:

CALL SIGN TRV





20 JUNE 1942


AM SAFELY INSTALLED IN PARIS STOP WILL COMMENCE BROADCASTS AS SCHEDULED STOP BAR LORRAINE STILL SECURE OVER



While the message was unexceptional, at the bottom, stamped in red ink, were the words SECURITY CHECK MISSING. Lynd stared.

Again, there was every indication that Agent Calvert had been captured. And now, the message mentioned a specific place, Bar Lorraine. If the Gestapo knew about the café, any and all SOE agents who went there would inevitably be compromised.

She carried the communiqué to Colonel Gaskell’s office.

“What the devil is it now?” he rumbled from behind his paper-stacked desk when she knocked on his closed door. A short, round man with thinning pale hair, Colonel Harold Gaskell had a fleshy, shining face, red with rosacea. Although he’d served in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps as a doctor at the war’s outbreak, he’d been evacuated from Dunkirk in early June 1940 and posted to London. Despite the fact that he was in charge of F-Section, he had no firsthand knowledge of, or training in, guerrilla warfare.