Brighton Belle Read Online Free

that he’d
bought this flat for her and he was planning to divorce his wife and live there that autumn when his girls went up to Oxford. He had twin girls, you see, and he loved them very much.
    ‘It’s 1949 and after all we’ve been through, why shouldn’t we have each other?’ he’d said. ‘It’s only making it happen gently. I can see the
lawyer when the girls have left for college. I’ll arrange everything. But, Belle, will you have me? A divorced man more than ten years older than you?’
    Mirabelle had been so happy she’d run around the flat half-naked, scattering pillows in her wake, whooping for joy. ‘Yes, I’ll have you! Yes! Yes!’
    They had shared a gin and tonic in celebration and made love on the floor.
    Two months later poor Jack was buried in the Church of the Sacred Heart by a wife he scarcely spoke to any more, who had no idea that after what Jack had seen and done during the war the idea of
a God or a church was beyond him.
    It had been a long day. Seeing Sandor had brought it all back – memories that she had pushed down now surfaced in a flood. Mirabelle removed her shoes, poured herself a glass of whisky and
sniffed it. She took a sip and then, with shaking hands, she sank down on the pale blue sofa and finally let the tears stream down her cheeks.

3
    HA HU HI: I am going to Paris (radio code used by double agent Eddie Chapman)
    I t was colder today. The spring weather was always unpredictable. Mirabelle stared out of the office window. Two men dressed for a dance were
heading home after a long night at the Palais. Their laughter floated up as they sheltered out of the drizzle to light their cigarettes. Pulling her brown cashmere cardigan around her slim frame,
Mirabelle closed the window. She hadn’t slept well. She put the notes she had taken about Romana Laszlo’s debt on Big Ben’s desk. Then she wondered whether to throw out the dying
geranium and be done with it. The mail sat unopened. Clicking back into work mode, as if she had taken a painkiller, Mirabelle slit open the first envelope with the small dagger she kept on her
desk. She removed the cheque. She’d go to the bank later. Then, as she picked up the second envelope, the phone rang.
    ‘McGuigan & McGuigan Debt Recovery.’
    ‘Is that you, Mirabelle?’ The priest’s voice was distinctive.
    ‘Hello, Sandor.’ Her heart sank.
    ‘I have something for you,’ Sandor said.
    ‘My boss is going to deal with this one,’ Mirabelle replied crisply, ‘but I take it she’s turned up, then?’
    ‘Romana Laszlo? Hmmm, yes.’ There was an awkward pause and then Sandor sighed. ‘She is dead.’
    ‘Dead?’
    ‘Both she and the baby. She was in labour and there were complications. It was late last night. I’m sorry.’
    Mirabelle felt her fingers tingle. She felt inexplicably responsible. ‘That’s dreadful,’ she said quietly. ‘Poor girl.’
    ‘She died with only her doctor in attendance so she did not receive the last rites. I will officiate at the funeral tomorrow. She has a sister coming from London and they want it to be
quick. Often this is the case and I understand she was widowed recently so there is no husband to mourn her or the baby. Mirabelle, there is something troubling me. Something strange. I talked to
her friend, the doctor. She was staying with him, and I said I also am Hungarian and where was she from, Romana? And he told me Izsak.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I know Izsak. I know every Catholic family in the area. I probably know every non-Catholic family, too. It’s a small place and I ministered there – it was my first job when I
came from the seminary. Four little villages and Izsak one of them. Two years I lived there and I never heard of anyone with a daughter called Romana. This girl was twenty-two, this Romana –
she would have been twenty-three next month. Before the war, if she came from a family in Izsak she would have been the age of a schoolgirl. I should know her. But I