One Shot Kill (3 page)

‘Why didn’t the Germans spread out over a wider area?’ Rosie asked. ‘They didn’t seem well organised.’

‘Probably a lot of Germans in one place, because they overestimated the accuracy of our parachute landings. Or one of my people could have given a slightly inaccurate location under torture, giving us a fighting chance of getting away.’

‘But we’ve been getting regular radio transmissions from your people,’ Rosie pointed out.

‘They could have captured my wireless operators and turned them against us,’ Eugene explained. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time the Nazis have pulled that stunt.’

‘So where to now?’ Rosie asked, backing up as Eugene took his turn drinking from the tap.

‘We’ll get to a safe house with a radio before morning.’

‘Could it have been compromised?’

Eugene shook his head. ‘This is my personal safe house. Nobody knows about it. We’ll wash, eat and rest. Then we’ll start investigating. You’ll have to transmit a message home explaining what’s happened. Get them to re-check all transmissions coming out of Lorient in the last seven weeks and look for anything suspicious.’

*

Edith came to as a pair of strange guards dragged her down concrete stairs. She couldn’t have been out for long because the corridors of the Roman villa were in uproar. She couldn’t understand German, but angry sounds the same in any language.

‘Is shit-head dead?’ Edith asked, as her head rolled sideways.

Neither guard answered, but one of them gripped her arm extra tight. It hurt, but it was good to know that she’d pissed the Germans off. She wanted to hum something patriotic to see if she could really set them off, but her head was thudding and her jaw felt like a block of wood.

A cell door clanked. The space was bare concrete, except for a shit-crusted bucket. The guards threw Edith at a puddled floor.

Puddle of what?
Edith thought, as pain ignited in every welt and burn.

‘You’ll hang for killing him,’ one of the guards shouted, as the cell door banged, plunging Edith into complete blackness.

Pain and anger gave Edith a shot of energy.

‘You’d have hung me anyway,’ she shouted back. ‘At least I took one of you bastards with me.’

Edith tried to get comfortable as the guards’ footsteps faded out, but she was sore in a hundred places and the floor was hard. She put her back against the wall, tucked her knees up to her chin and stretched the oversized vest over her legs to try and stay warm.

She didn’t want to give the Germans the satisfaction of hearing her sob, but from this dark spot, the only thing she could see was her own death.

After invading in summer 1940, the Nazis forced hundreds of thousands of French peasants to abandon countryside in newly declared military zones running the length of the Atlantic coast. Three years on, buildings were disintegrating, swathes of farmland had returned to nature, and the Nazis had inadvertently created a perfect hiding place for their enemies.

All well-run resistance groups arranged safe houses, where you could hide out, or pick up essentials before going on the run. Eugene had made his personal bolthole in a deserted two-room farmhand’s cottage. It sat on a hillock six kilometres from the centre of Lorient, with good visibility in all directions and two kilometres from the nearest major road.

Besides the equipment they’d arrived with, Rosie and Eugene could draw on a radio transmitter, weapons and tinned food stashed in the surrounding fields.

Eugene had impressed his superiors in the two years since he’d taken control of the Lorient resistance group, and he’d impressed Rosie in the two days since their disastrous parachute drop. A lot of young men would have panicked and raged, but Eugene handled troubles with the calm air of an elderly chap solving
The Times
crossword.

For the first twenty-four hours, they’d laid low, staying in the dirt-floored cottage, except for a trip outside to dig up tinned food and retrieve a radio transmitter hidden in the roof of a nearby barn.

Rosie had transmitted a short message in encrypted Morse code, explaining what had happened on arrival, and asking for a review of all messages received from the Lorient resistance circuit over the past few weeks.

On the second morning – a Tuesday – Eugene set off before sunrise. The centre of town was too risky, but he’d made a mental list of people he knew in the suburbs and surrounding villages.

Some were active members of his resistance unit, but most were relatives of members, or sympathisers: people who’d turned a blind eye, or given some small assistance during a past operation.

Rosie stayed back at the house, waiting to pick up a radio transmission. She felt uncomfortable being alone, with no certainty about when – or even if – Eugene would return. After breakfasting on apples and pears picked from trees near the back door, she tried reading Eugene’s battered copy of
The Communist Manifesto
.

There were two schools of thought on what would happen if the Allies won the war. Communists like Eugene believed a workers’ revolution would sweep Europe. Others like Captain Henderson said the communists were idiots, who should visit Russia as he’d done and see what living under communism was really like.

Rosie was undecided, but
The Communist Manifesto
did little to help make up her mind. The text was dense and with so much on her mind her eyes skimmed words that failed to penetrate her brain.

When it got to 11 a.m., Rosie began setting up the aerial for her radio set. Like all radio operators she had a personal sked, with fixed times to send encrypted messages, and others when she had to listen to a certain frequency and pick up orders and responses to questions.

This system was secure, but meant that getting a reply to a question took two days, or even longer if storms or German jamming disrupted the signal.

By the time Rosie had stretched the wire aeriel across the field behind the cottage and given the valves in the battery-powered set a few minutes to warm up, it was time to receive.

Just as you can recognise a person’s handwriting, people transmitting in Morse code have their own distinctive signature, known as a
fist
. Rosie recognised the fist of Joyce Slater as she sat on the dirt floor by the back door, with the radio set alongside, pencil and paper in her lap and a cumbersome headset over her ears.

Joyce was Espionage Research Unit B’s wheelchair-bound radio operator and something of an expert in code breaking and puzzle solving. The previous evening, Rosie had received a brief message, stating that there was nothing obviously wrong with the transmissions received from Lorient over the past seven weeks, but that a specialist was doing more detailed analysis. The fact that Joyce was the specialist cheered Rosie, because nobody would do a more thorough job.

The transmission lasted four minutes. The signal deteriorated a couple of times, meaning Rosie missed a few characters, but you never got them all. After pulling in the aeriel, and switching the set off to conserve the battery, Rosie hurried towards a table and began using a printed silk square, known as a one-time-pad, to decode the message.

The news was bad. Every radio operator in occupied territory slipped three-letter security check codes into their messages. According to Joyce’s analysis, Eugene’s chief radio operator had missed out her security checks on three occasions, beginning on 9 May. This should have been recognised as a sign that a radio operator might have fallen into enemy hands, but apparently it had been treated as a simple omission.

From 12 May onwards, the messages from Lorient all contained the correct security check, but Joyce now believed that someone was trying to impersonate the fist of the original operator, because there was a sudden tendency to elongate the last dot or dash in each letter, which resulted in certain letters getting mixed up.

Joyce’s conclusion was that the Lorient circuit’s chief radio operator had been arrested on or around 9 May. When forced to send false information by her German captors, she’d tried giving a warning by missing her security checks. From 12 May onwards, the original operator had been replaced by a German radio operator who was trying to imitate her style.

*

It was late afternoon when Eugene returned. Joyce’s report only confirmed what he’d learned on the street.

‘Everyone’s terrified,’ Eugene told Rosie, as he sat on a battered chair, with an intense scowl and a drumming foot. ‘The few people I found barely spoke to me. In the end I had to turn nasty to get any information at all.

‘Nobody knows how it went down, but the Gestapo must have had someone working inside my organisation for a long time, because they picked everyone up in a single swoop. Madame Mercier died under torture last Friday. They picked up the girls who worked in the laundry, my engineers in the U-boat yards, a few messengers, both wireless operators and people living at the last two houses they transmitted from. As far as I can tell, Alois Clement is the only person who escaped arrest.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Rosie said, as she approached Eugene. ‘Would you like some wine? It’ll help you calm down.’

Rosie passed over an enamel mug and Eugene downed it in three quick glugs.

‘They’ve executed more than a dozen. A couple were shot, but most were hung at the gallows outside Lorient station and left on show.’

Tears welled in Eugene’s eyes as Rosie put an arm around his back.

‘I recruited most of them,’ Eugene said. ‘One woman spat in my face. Told me her daughter was tortured and raped before they hung her. She blamed me for leading her into it.’

‘You know you’re not to blame,’ Rosie said. ‘She’s upset.’

Eugene wrung his hands and sobbed. ‘It’ll be worth it when the workers’ revolution comes,’ he said, though his retreat into communist propaganda sounded unconvincing.

‘Can we try and rebuild the group?’ Rosie asked.

‘Maybe someone can, but not me. They’ll have my description, maybe even a surveillance photograph. They’ve arrested so many people that it would be like starting from scratch. Probably harder, because everyone’s so scared.’

‘Have you got any idea who the informant was?’

‘Does it even matter?’ Eugene asked. ‘It’s not the first resistance group to collapse. I doubt it’ll be the last.’

‘We’ll have to leave then,’ Rosie said. ‘Sooner the better. We’ll go to Paris, make contact with the Ghost circuit and they’ll find us another task or a route home.’

Eugene made a kind of hissing sound, and Rosie backed up thinking that he’d found her remark insensitive.

‘I still have one friend,’ Eugene said. ‘A German inside Gestapo Headquarters. Because of her position I never told anyone else about her.’

Rosie looked curious. ‘How did you get to know her?’

‘I met her when I was working in one of Madame Mercier’s bars. She’s in her forties. Husband crashed his plane over Poland, two sons killed on the Eastern Front, so she’s no fan of the Nazis.’

‘Did you have an affair with her?’

Eugene laughed. ‘I’m half her age. She’s just a lonely soul who needed someone to talk to.’

‘And she knows you’re with the resistance?’

‘For the first few months that I knew her she thought I was a barman and I just picked up random gossip from her. When her second son died, it was clear how much she hated the war and I gradually opened her up to the possibility of helping the resistance. At first I worried that she might be manipulating me, but the information she’s fed us has been far too valuable to be part of any ruse.’

‘But she did nothing about the arrests?’

‘If it had crossed her desk, I’m sure she would have found a way to tip one of my people off,’ Eugene said. ‘When I met her today she told me something else. Do you remember Edith Mercier, from when you were here two years back?’

‘Vaguely,’ Rosie said, giving a slight nod. ‘Skinny bag of bones, lived in Madame Mercier’s stable block?’

Eugene nodded. ‘Apparently the Gestapo got what they wanted out of everyone. The ones they didn’t hang in public have already been sent to camps in Poland or Germany. But Edith not only fought off two days of torture without saying a word, but apparently managed to take one of the Gestapo’s senior investigators out with a fountain pen through the jugular.’

Rosie smiled a little. ‘Good for her.’

‘Not really,’ Eugene said. ‘Apparently they’re putting on a show this Saturday. They’re going to hang her in front of the station, along with the mothers of two young lads who worked for me inside the submarine base.’

The thought of execution brought a tightness to Rosie’s throat. ‘Were the mothers involved with the resistance?’ she asked.

‘Not unless you count cooking their sons’ dinners. But it’s a powerful deterrent. People baulk when they know that their loved ones’ necks are on the line as well as their own.’

‘So is there anything we can do?’ Rosie asked. ‘There’s only two of us. We can’t take on the entire Gestapo.’

‘The mothers are being held at a prison in town, I don’t think there’s anything I’ll be able to do for them. But my lady friend has promised to try getting some information on Edith.’

‘So we might be able to help her?’ Rosie asked uneasily.

Eugene looked uncertain. ‘There’s an outside chance, but it won’t be easy.’

The blackness took away all sense of time. Edith wasn’t sure whether to expect further interrogation or execution, but for two days the only attention she got was an occasional set of eyes peering through the slot in the door. When her thirst grew, she sucked beads of condensation off the cell wall and grew tempted by the urine sloshing in the filthy bucket.

When the door swung into the cell, light blinded eyes accustomed to pitch dark.

‘Up against the back wall,’ a female orderly shouted.

After biting one interrogator and killing another, Edith was regarded as dangerous, despite barely having the strength to stand. The orderly set down a tray of hard biscuits and potato peel and kicked it through the door.

‘Can you get me a drink?’ Edith begged.