The Paris Agent(31)
“All I ask in return is that you come back at some point in the future to undertake a comprehensive interview. We’ll leave the students and your daughter out of this one—it will just be me and you, and if you don’t want it recorded, I’ll simply take some notes. I have a lot of questions about that day, Noah.” He drops his voice and adds quietly, “I’ve long wondered about ‘Marcel’ and the things he got up to in France.”
Dad, apparently, can’t leave the room fast enough. He’s on his feet, walking past me toward the door, almost before the professor has finished talking. I scramble to follow him, but as I reach for the door, Professor Read calls.
“Theo.” His tone is grim. I glance back just in time to see Theo wince. “Stay back please, son.”
Dad charges out of Read’s office, but I hesitate in the doorway, watching something unpleasant passing between Theo and Read. But I’ve been dismissed and I’m worried about Dad, so I jog lightly to catch up with him. Mrs. White is on the phone, but I wave to her and whisper my thanks as I pass, then I’m right onto the stairs, chasing Dad toward the building exit. He’s still powering ahead, his footsteps heavy and his shoulders locked.
“Dad,” I call. He turns back to look at me but his expression is twisted with frustration or pain or…guilt? “Dad, are you okay?”
“I just need a moment,” he says abruptly, and he’s already turning toward the carpark. I start to follow him, but I can’t escape the feeling that we got Theo in trouble somehow, and I want to make sure he’s okay too.
“I just need to speak with Theo,” I blurt. “I’ll catch up.”
“Good.” Dad raises his hand in acknowledgment without turning around. “I’ll see you at the car.” But after a few steps he turns back to me. His expression is carefully neutral as he adds, “Thank him for me, please, Charlotte.”
“I will,” I call.
I am completely, hopelessly confused. What on earth just happened?
I return to the park bench beneath the tree and watch the man with the lawn mower finish his job—but the minute the engine switches off, sounds of distant shouting echo down from upstairs in the history building. My gut twists uncomfortably as I look up and locate Professor Read’s open window and those gauze curtains waving in the breeze. I can’t make out any of the words, but Read sounds furious.
When Theo finally comes down the front steps a few minutes later, he looks even more frazzled than he did when we arrived. His footsteps slow as he approaches me.
“Well, that was odd,” I offer uncertainly. He forces a smile.
“Indeed. I suppose it would all seem very odd.”
“I hope we didn’t get you into trouble.”
Theo sighs and takes a seat beside me.
“Charlotte, the miserable truth is that I am more than capable of doing that all on my own. Is your father okay?”
“He seems so upset. I don’t understand why the professor was laboring the point about how and where the agents were traveling that day. What difference does it even make in the scheme of things?”
“Ah. I suppose I can at least shed some light on that for you. Years ago, I sat in on an interview with an American POW who met Fleur on a prison transport a few months before she died. He told us that she was arrested after traveling in a car through Salon-La-Tour. At the time, Read assumed that the American had the details mixed up because car travel was banned in that part of France after D-day in an effort by the Germans to slow the resistance down, and it seemed so unlikely that three agents would ignore that. Read was probably trying make sense of that now that he finally has access to someone who was there.”
“Oh,” I said. I look at him curiously. “But…how did you know Fleur hurt her ankle?”
“Lucky guess.” Theo shrugs, looking away, but he’s not a great liar and he looks guilty as hell.
“Right…”
“It’s clear your dad just wants to talk to Remy so maybe once he has some closure there, he’ll be ready to talk to Harry some more.”
“It’s very difficult for me to imagine my father working as some kind of covert agent twenty-odd years ago,” I confess. “Until a few weeks ago, I thought he was an army mechanic and I assumed he’d been based here in Britain the whole time. I found that hard enough to imagine, let alone him driving illicit vehicles through occupied France.”
“It took me two years to complete my Master’s with Professor Read,” Theo says. “For much of that time it was my job to interview men like your father. You do a job like that for long enough and you come to realize that whoever someone is during war years, there is no guarantee that they will be the same in peacetime. Some of these men and women were completely broken by their experiences, but others came back from the war and drew a line under it…declared themselves entirely new people. Maybe at first they were trying to pretend they’d never seen and done the horrific things they had to do to survive, but sometimes they live the lie so long and so well they really do become someone different. You can’t blame your dad for doing what he had to in moving on from the war, especially given his memory was disrupted in that accident too. And you really shouldn’t blame yourself for struggling to picture him as whoever he was before.”
“Thank you,” I say softly. “And you? Are you okay?”