The Paris Agent(102)
Quinn rests her hand over Drusilla’s on the table.
“One of our senior officers was deeply concerned about your relationship,” Helen tells Dad quietly. “He argued that we should move Josie. The Success circuit in Paris was in a state and we all knew she was an excellent agent, so eventually, we agreed to shift her there.”
“Who was that?” Dad asks.
“That was Gerard, Noah. Gerard Turner.”
Dad nods silently. Helen takes a sip from a glass of water on the table.
“We know that the arrests were continuing around her in Paris, but we didn’t know much more than that. There was a degree of panic from those of us at Baker Street, watching that circuit flounder just as the D-Day invasion seemed to be looming. We had high hopes our troops would eventually reach and reclaim Paris and that milestone would bring an important morale boost to the entire continent. Our circuit there needed to be robust and extensive to support the Allied advance. Gerard convinced us the only way forward was for him to go to Paris to sort the circuit out himself.”
“I trained under him,” Dad tells me. “He was a tough instructor, but a good man.”
“Yes, unfortunately that was my assessment of the man too,” Helen mutters. Dad’s eyebrows lift in surprise. “It seemed an excellent arrangement at first. Gerard was sending through regular updates via his wireless operators and the circuit seemed to have stabilized and even expanded since his arrival. Obviously, the D-Day landings were a success and our men began to advance across France, but just as fighting began on the outskirts of Paris, a message came through from Turner. There had been a sudden spate of arrests and dozens of additional agents, including Jocelyn, had been executed. It seemed like tragic timing given the city was liberated days later.”
“Gerard Turner came to my house in 1944 to tell me this.” Drusilla sounds exasperated. “I don’t understand why you’ve dragged me in here today to tell me again.”
“One of our agents found Jocelyn’s name carved into a cell at the SD headquarters in Paris which seemed to corroborate the story Gerard told us about her death. He only stayed in Paris for a few weeks after it was liberated—”
“That’s when I saw him,” Dad interjects. “At the apartment there. He’s the one who told me Josie had died.”
“After that, he came back to London to hold up the fort here and to notify various family members of deaths in the field. He also supervised the administrative staff at Baker Street as they began the cleanup of our offices and files.”
“And through all of this,” Read says quietly, “it’s important to note that Helen was still in France. All of the senior SOE officials were, except Turner.”
“Yes, that’s right. As the occupation collapsed, we had hundreds of agents still missing, scattered all over. Even once we’d spread word far and wide that those agents could safely reveal themselves and find help via an apartment we established in Paris, we still had almost 120 agents unaccounted for. They were mostly men, but there was also a group of women.”
“How could you just lose track of that many people?” I ask.
“I call it ‘the fog of war,’” Harry explains. “Europe was in a state of utter chaos. The SOE had scattered, traumatized agents all over the place, and dreadfully disjointed communications to boot.”
“In late 1944, I began a project to search for these agents,” Helen says. “A handful of missing agents resurfaced from the Paris circuit in the months after liberation and I was shocked to find most of those who’d survived had been in hiding. Some were highly suspicious of Gerard, citing lax security procedures once he arrived back in France, but Freddie Booth and I were both certain that the problem was prolonged and intense stress, not disloyalty. It’s no excuse, but my focus was still elsewhere. Most of our agents, especially the women, were designated ‘Night and Fog’ prisoners, which meant the Germans tried very hard to make them altogether disappear. There were no paper trails to follow, so I had to rely on in-person interviews to track people down. I asked a guard at Pforzheim Prison if they’d imprisoned any of our women there, and to my shock, he distinctly recalled Josie. He said she was at Pforzheim for months after D-Day.”
“That’s not right,” Dad says, after a stunned moment of silence. “Gerard said she was executed in Paris before the landings.”
“I know that’s what he said,” Helen says gently. “But it seems that was never the truth.”
“But why on earth would he lie about something like that?”
“It took me a very long time to figure that out, Noah,” Helen admits. “I kept traveling, interviewing people all across France and Germany, searching for all of those missing agents—and now I’d added Josie to the list of women I needed to find. Every one of them mattered, but I especially wanted to figure out what became of her given the situation was so baffling. For a while, I feared I’d never find her trail again, until a guard told me that a handful of political prisoners were sent to civilian prisons in the rush to keep ahead of the advance of the Allied troops.”
“Jocelyn was accommodated at a civilian prison named Karlsruhe for the last few weeks of her life,” Read says quietly. “She was housed in a cell with an agent named Fleur. Noah, you will remember her from Salon-La-Tour.”