The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

‘That’s the shrine. And that photo of Grandpa is a much better likeness of Francis than that passport photo you’ve got. It was uncanny, how closely they resembled each other.’
    But what caught Bruno’s eye were the two empty slots in the display of guns, one shaped like a handgun and the other like a small machine pistol, with the velvet backdrop unfaded where they had been.
    ‘I wonder where they’ve gone,’ said Brian. ‘That was where the Sten gun used to be. And the other one was a Browning nine-millimetre. I’ll be sorry if we can’t find those.’
    ‘Are these in working order?’ Bruno asked.
    ‘They still work and he cleaned them regularly. We used to do a bit of hunting with the rifles. I used the Lee Enfield but Francis always used the French Lebel. We also tried some target shooting with the Browning that’s missing.’
    ‘If I were you, I’d not repeat that to anyone else, least of all to any policeman,’ said Bruno. ‘As far as they know, you never fired any of these and your brother told you they were harmless. Otherwise this could get very complicated for you. Now, what can you tell me about this shrine and your grandpa?’
    Their mother had been French, Fullerton began, and so had their grandmother, a young woman from this part of the Corrèze whom their grandpa had met and made pregnant during the war. He’d returned after the war to marry her. Grandpa, known in the family as Sergeant Freddy, had been a wireless operator with the Special Operations Executive, SOE, the British agency established to build and train resistance movements across the Nazi-occupied Continent.
    That was Sergeant Freddy in the large photo, and
Grandmère
Marie beside him. The medals included Grandpa’s Distinguished Conduct Medal, the oak leaf for his mention in dispatches, and a series of the usual campaign awards. He had been dropped into France in March 1944, to operate the wireless communications that brought in the
parachutages
, the air drops of arms and equipment from Britain that went to the Resistance. The radio in the shrine was a genuine British mode B Mark II, a device as crude as it was weak, with a signal atbest of only twenty watts and requiring at least twenty metres of aerial. Constantly on the move to evade the German radio direction finder vans, the wireless operators suffered a terrifying attrition rate. If they tried to transmit from towns, the Germans turned off the electricity in every substation until the radio died. Then they surrounded the street. If they tried to transmit from the countryside, they needed an accumulator, heavy, cumbersome and not easy to charge.
    Sergeant Freddy was smart. He developed a system to charge an accumulator with parts from an old bicycle and never transmitted from the same place twice. He managed to evade the Germans until the final liberation of the region in August 1944. But in June of that year many Resistance groups rose prematurely, believing that the D-Day landings heralded imminent victory. They were slaughtered by German regular units. In Tulle, the nearest large town to the farmhouse, a hundred and twenty of them were hanged in a single day. A hundred and fifty more were sent to Dachau, where most of them died. Sergeant Freddy was also lucky, and the FFI flag was for the Maquis du Limousin unit that had helped him get away from Tulle.
    The guns were all genuine from the period and some of the individual weapons had been used by the Resistance. Francis had bought them over the years, from collectors, from estate sales and auctions of family heirlooms. The Sten gun and the German Schmeisser had been obtained from what Brian described as ‘very unsavoury sources’, which Bruno assumed to mean criminals.
    ‘That banknote’s a new one on me. I never saw that before,’ Brian added, leaning forward to study it more closely. ‘Would it be from the Neuvic train robbery?’
    ‘I think almost certainly, yes. Any idea how your brother might have got hold of it?’
    ‘No, but I’m not surprised. Francis was fascinated by that incident and read everything he could get his hands on, went round interviewing people. It was all an accident, maybe more of a coincidence, the nearest town to here being also called Neuvic. That set him off. He spent a lot of time on it, going to the Public Records Office. I know he was trying to find out if Grandpa had been involved. He’d got hold of some account that confirmed Sergeant Freddy had arranged some of