Mr Campion's War Read online

  A Selection of Previous Titles by Mike Ripley

  Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion

  MR CAMPION’S FAREWELL *

  MR CAMPION’S FOX *

  MR CAMPION’S FAULT *

  MR CAMPION’S ABDICATION *

  The Fitzroy Maclean Angel series

  LIGHTS, CAMERA, ANGEL

  ANGEL UNDERGROUND

  ANGEL ON THE INSIDE

  ANGEL IN THE HOUSE

  ANGEL’S SHARE

  ANGELS UNAWARE

  Other titles

  DOUBLE TAKE

  BOUDICA AND THE LOST ROMAN

  THE LEGEND OF HEREWARD *

  Non-fiction

  SURVIVING A STROKE

  KISS KISS, BANG BANG

  * available from Severn House

  MR CAMPION’S WAR

  Mike Ripley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  This eBook edition first published in 2018 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2018 by Mike Ripley.

  The right of Mike Ripley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8809-9 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-950-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0161-4 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  For

  Marcel Berlins – merci beaucoup

  For three years he had been at large on two warring continents employed on a mission for the Government so secret that he had never found out quite what it was …

  Coroner’s Pidgin (1945) by Margery Allingham

  ‘I did a lot of work before the war for a detective like – amateur mind, a gentleman – in fact I’d be doin’ it now but that he took ’imself orf to the army and one of those ’ush-’ush jobs.’

  Black Out (1995) by John Lawton

  Author’s Note

  At the risk of irritating the population of France even further, I have used the pre-war spelling of Mentone (as did Margery Allingham) rather than the current Menton, and the curiously English spelling of Marseilles rather than Marseille.

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Previous Titles by Mike Ripley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Birthday Boy

  Chapter 2: Many Happy Reorientations

  Chapter 3: The Unsurprising Surprise Party

  Chapter 4: The Man from the Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company

  Chapter 5: Second Bureau

  Chapter 6: Table Talk

  Chapter 7: Hush-Hush

  Chapter 8: Unsafe Houses

  Chapter 9: Entremets

  Chapter 10: Bouillabaisse

  Chapter 11: Flotsam, Possibly Jetsam

  Chapter 12: For Want of a Sharp Knife

  Chapter 13: The Devil’s Banker

  Chapter 14: Free French Connections

  Chapter 15: After Eight

  Chapter 16: Commando Raid

  Chapter 17: Saying Cheese

  Chapter 18: A Place You Do Not Want to Go

  Chapter 19: The Scar Outlives the Wound

  Chapter 20: Menu Pèlerin

  Chapter 21: Message for Emil

  Chapter 22: The Way of St James

  Chapter 23: A Perfect Hatred

  Chapter 24: Peccavi

  About the Book

  Sources

  Prologue

  Hôtel Beauregard, Mentone, Alpes-Maritime, Zone of Italian Occupation. February 1942

  M. Étienne Fleurey had been a person of some importance in the self-contained world of the Hôtel Beauregard: the master of all he surveyed; an emperor who knew every bottle, knife, fork, towel, napkin, cocktail stick and fruit bowl in his empire and their exact strategic disposition at any given time. That, however, was before the war. Now he was little more than a flunky performing tasks which would have previously been delegated, with great and serious ceremony at a morning roll call, to a phalanx of smartly laundered busboys, housemaids, bellhops and waiters.

  The defeat of France by the Germans in the north had given Signor Mussolini the chance to extend his greedy fingers in the south, to clutch at Savoy and Nice, and for a thankfully brief period in June 1940, Mentone had been in the front line of the fighting. The Beauregard had been fortunate. It had not suffered from the shells and mortar bombs which had destroyed the Hôtel Rives D’Azur and the nearby Majestic Bar; indeed, calamities such as those would, in peacetime, have been seen as good for business. But if the war had reduced the local competition, the price paid had been a concomitant reduction in both staffing levels and clientele.

  Staff at the Beauregard, as with many hotels along the Riviera, had always been drawn from the bubbling cosmopolitan stew-pot of French, Italian and North African stock. The coming of war had seen the younger French employees, following patriotic impulses of one sort or another, decamp for ‘Vichy’ – the unoccupied southern half of France, which nodded allegiance to the German invaders but had, so far, avoided giving them house-room – whereas those of Italian stock had forsaken the Beauregard’s kitchens and wine cellar to proudly serve Il Duce, and those of North African origin had scampered to Marseilles, seeking a passage to Algiers or Tunis in the mistaken belief that the war would not cross the Mediterranean.

  The war had left M. Fleurey with few reliable staff, a host of additional tasks and duties to perform personally and, most depressing of all, a much-reduced clientele in terms of both quantity and quality. M. Fleurey longed passionately for the days when the hotel’s lobby and cocktail bar bubbled with the refined chatter of young English voices, always polite if occasionally too loud, for the English had discovered Mentone and taken it and the Beauregard to their hearts. Up until that fateful late summer of 1939, the young English lords and ladies (as M. Fleurey referred to them with pre-revolutionary deference) had arrived in convoys of open-topped touring automobiles, each with more equipment, it seemed, than the invading Italian Alpine Corps troops who replaced them the following season.

  Now all M. Fleurey had to remind him of those golden days was a Lost Property cupboard stuffed with forgotten tennis racquets, discarded woollen swimwear, parasols, two bags of golf clubs, a picnic hamper, a wind-up gramophone and a dozen records, numerous garishly jacketed novels by an author called Francis Beeding (whose publisher insisted the reader would ‘
Sit up all night’ with), two ukuleles with broken strings, a guitar with no strings at all, a trombone slide but no trombone, and at least five leather rugby balls – the latter being explained by the determination of visiting English males to play the game in the town where the Reverend William Webb Ellis was buried.

  But that was not quite all, for M. Fleurey, a dedicated Anglophile, had also retained a series of photographs of his most distinguished English visitors – the ones who had always been polite, returned for several years running and whose accounts were always settled promptly, with generous gratuities. M. Fleurey had a gallery of such framed photographs hanging on the wall of the mahogany-lined sanctum which he called his office, the one place of peace and privacy he had managed to retain while the rest of the hotel was, in the main, given over to the Italian army and naval officers and their mistresses, many of whom, Fleurey was ashamed to admit, spoke in the Mentonasc dialect.

  That night, however, he had three legitimate guests, which is to say paying customers who were not likely to require any of the more delicate, and unadvertised, services usually provided by the housekeeping staff in the dead of night.

  They had arrived late in the evening, on the last train from Genoa, and had been urged towards the Beauregard by the Italian military policeman on duty at the station, who would no doubt be calling on Fleurey in the morning for his ‘commission’. They were an unlikely trio, dressed in civilian clothes of good quality but in need of cleaning and pressing, and gave the impression that they had been reluctant travelling companions, for they regarded each other uneasily and seemed anything but relaxed in each other’s company.

  Their papers were spectacularly in order: two Frenchmen and one German, all with addresses in Marseilles. The younger of the Frenchmen – a tall, strongly built man of hard muscle and unblinking eyes, who spoke with a thick Corsican accent – demanded a double room with twin beds and specified that only one room key was required. His older companion, a smaller, balding man in his mid-forties, avoided eye contact with anything except his own dusty shoes and spoke not a word. He was, Fleurey guessed, an ‘Israelite’ – a French Jew – and oddly seemed warier of his Corsican companion than he was of the German, who spoke good French and courteously asked if the hotel kitchen could find them something to eat.

  Fleurey himself prepared and served them a dinner of fish soup and what his English guests in happier days would have insisted on calling ‘cold cuts’ (Étienne was fond of most things Anglais but did draw the line at their culinary skills), and took some relief in the knowledge that, not being Italian, his guests would not complain about the quality of the wine he provided.

  As they ate, Fleurey observed them through a peephole in his office; on his side a discreet sliding frame in the wood panelling, on the lounge side an unremarkable small round window high enough up the wall to be, it seemed, redundant.

  The curious hotel manager, who was now also concierge, cook, waiter and sommelier, did not find his new vocation as a spy particularly rewarding, for he could see but not hear. Not that the three travellers seemed remotely interested in engaging in energetic debate or even polite conversation, although it did appear that the German, who had registered under the name Dr Haberland, was the only one making any attempt at conviviality.

  Their sparse dinner devoured, the two Frenchmen, with the Corsican thug taking the lead, stood up abruptly and left the German at the table. M. Fleurey slid back the cover of his peephole and attended to his duties, collecting plates and glasses and apologizing to the remaining guest for not being able to offer coffee. The German, Dr Haberland, gave a suitably Gallic shrug of his broad shoulders, told Fleurey not to distress himself, and then concentrated on smoking a small, pungent black cheroot.

  M. Fleurey paused on his way to the kitchen to make sure – for old habits die hard – that the two Frenchmen were climbing the stairs to their bedroom and requiring nothing further. The thought struck him that the young Corsican one was escorting rather than accompanying the older one up the stairs, but he put it out of his mind and made a perfunctory assault on the washing up.

  If his German guest did not require his attention, then he too would retire for the night, but on his return to the lounge he found it empty and the door to his office ajar. Biting back his outrage at such an invasion of his sanctum, remembering of course that the Germans had recently proved themselves expert invaders, he approached his office door. His straining ears picked up a stream of guttural German and then the loud click of a telephone receiver being replaced.

  ‘May I be of assistance, m’sieur?’ he announced from the doorway.

  The German turned to face him, blissfully unconcerned at being discovered.

  ‘Forgive me, M’sieur Fleurey, for appropriating your telephone,’ said Dr Haberland. ‘I was making my transport arrangements for the morning. There will be a car coming at eight o’clock to take me to Marseilles.’

  ‘Your journey has been … disrupted, I suspect,’ said Fleurey, examining the face of the soft-spoken interloper in detail for the first time since his arrival.

  ‘You could say that,’ said the German with a resigned smile. ‘Our ship was warned of the presence of enemy submarines and so we were diverted to Genoa under the protection of the gallant Italian air force. Consequently, we had to impose on your hospitality for a night.’

  ‘It is no imposition, I assure you. It is a pleasure to have guests who are not in uniform.’

  Instinctively the small Frenchman bit his tongue. These days one had to be careful what one said and to whom, but the word ‘uniform’ had escaped from his brain because the tall, athletic man before him would surely be as comfortable in a uniform as he was in his crumpled linen suit. With his clean facial features and his sharp blue eyes, he exuded the self-confidence often automatically thought of as arrogance among Germans. There was no doubt he would be considered a handsome man by the female of the species, and there was every indication that he was well aware of the fact. The only blemish that Fleurey could see – and he was a man who saw many every morning in the shaving mirror – was a livid purple scar some four centimetres long which snaked down the left side of his nose from the bridge almost to his upper lip.

  ‘These must be difficult times for you, m’sieur,’ said Dr Haberland, with a slight deferential nod, ‘and not as life was before the uniforms came.’

  The German pointed a finger along the line of framed photographs on the office wall, each one showing a group of happy faces smiling from bar, from beach, from harbour wall, outside St Michel Archange, inside the Jardin Serre de la Madone, or from around a well-stocked table into a camera.

  ‘They were happy days,’ Fleurey said wistfully.

  ‘Your visitors were mostly English?’ the German asked, but there was no threat in his question. Not yet, at least.

  ‘Many of them, yes. It is fair to say we were popular with the young English. Some would come every year and we got to know them quite well.’

  Dr Haberland’s tracking finger paused, indicating one photograph in particular which showed four men in blazers, flannels and white, open-necked shirts, strolling on the beach, their arms looped over each other’s shoulders, their legs outstretched as if in a chorus line. They were middle-aged men, not boys, but they all had youthful, almost innocently foolish expressions as they grinned – no, the word they had taught Fleurey was ‘gurned’, though he had no idea what it meant – into the lens.

  ‘Were those four regular visitors?’ asked the German conversationally.

  ‘They had stayed here before,’ said Fleurey, ‘individually, that is, but I believe they were friends in England and perhaps two or three times they had holidays here together, or with their wives or girlfriends. They were all very pleasant gentlemen.’

  ‘Have you thought that these pleasant gentlemen will all now be wearing uniforms?’

  Fleurey shrugged his shoulders and opened the palms of his hands. ‘I had not considered that, m’sieur. It is something I fin
d difficult to comprehend.’

  The German’s finger closed in on the photograph like a slow-moving arrow, indicating one of the four happy faces shown, the tallest and thinnest of the group, with a shock of unkempt fair hair and large, round-framed spectacles.

  ‘He for one’ – said Dr Haberland with certainty – ‘will certainly be serving his king and country in some capacity by now, take my word for it.’

  Étienne Fleurey knew that for reasons he could not explain he should be worried and that mental alarm bells should be ringing, but instead he was consumed with curiosity.

  ‘Do you, perhaps, know that gentleman?’ he asked, determined to keep any trepidation out of his voice.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the German, and his hand moved, index finger still extended, until it was pointing at the scar wriggling down his face. ‘He gave me this.’

  ONE

  Birthday Boy

  The Dorchester Hotel, London. 20 May 1970

  It was said by almost all who knew him that the war had changed Mr Albert Campion.

  It was as if the air of exuberant gayness he had worn in the 1930s, rather like a loud and vulgar waistcoat, had been exchanged, after 1945, for a more sober, sombre frame of mind, grey and austere enough to fit perfectly with the changing times. Mr Campion’s supporters always maintained that this was the necessary psychological camouflage for a man who had made a career of not being noticed emerging into a new world.

  Of the guests, mostly distinguished, who gathered at the Dorchester Hotel to celebrate his seventieth birthday, there were some who had seen the transformation at first hand, some who had suspected that a change in his character had taken place due to his embarking on both marriage and fatherhood in wartime, and there were those blissfully too young to have known Mr Campion before the war, or indeed the war itself.

  Knowing that on such an august occasion his guests would demand a speech from him (much as an angry village mob made demands, though without the pitchforks and torches), Mr Campion had taken the precaution of making a few notes. Confident that at least some of his audience would appreciate his nod towards Horace’s famous Ab ovo usque ad mala dictum, he intended that his personal life-menu from egg to apple would sweep gloriously from being a child of the Victorian era to a New Elizabethan pensioner. Along the way he would note numerous cultural and social milestones. The Wright brothers for one, or rather two, must certainly be mentioned, having started the craze of men flying which had culminated, last year, with man making a firm boot-print on the moon. The BBC, Campion was sure, was bound to be accepted sooner or later as a cultural institution, despite its diversification into television, a popular drug which really ought to be available only on prescription, and he really must make a point of thanking Al Jolson for inventing talking pictures, Mr Disney for the gift of Technicolor and the Duke of Ellington for providing the soundtrack.