Code Name Verity (10 page)

‘It could.' Queenie was sober now. ‘Unless you were doing them a favour by killing them. Then you'd let them down if you
didn't
. If you couldn't make yourself. My great-uncle had horrible cancers in his throat and he'd been to America twice to have the tumours taken out and they kept coming back, and finally he asked his wife to kill him, and she did. She wasn't charged with anything – it was recorded as a shooting accident, believe it or not, but she was my grandmother's sister and we all know the truth.'

‘How
horrible
,' Maddie said with feeling. ‘How terrible for her! But – yes. You'd have to live with that selfishness, afterwards, if you couldn't make yourself do it. Yes, I'm dead afraid of that.'

The farmer's wife came in again then, with a patch and a bucket to fill with water so they could find the puncture, and Maddie quickly pulled down the blackout curtains over her bright and vulnerable soul and went off to sort out the tyre. Queenie stayed in the kitchen, thoughtfully lapping up the last drops of warm cream with a tin spoon.

Half an hour later, as they walked the bicycles back down the muddy farm lane and out to the road, Queenie commented, ‘God help us if the invading Germans turn up with Scottish accents. I got her to draw me a map. I think I can find the pub now.'

‘Here's your hairpin back,' Maddie said. She held out the thin sliver of steel. ‘You'll want to get rid of the evidence next time you sabotage someone else's tyres.'

Queenie let out a peal of her giddy, infectious laughter. ‘
Caught!
I stuck it in too far and couldn't have got it back without you noticing. Don't be cross! It's a
game
.'

‘You're too good,' Maddie said sharply.

‘You got a hot meal out of it, didn't you? Come on, pub'll be open again by the time we get there, and we won't be able to stay long – I'm back on duty at eleven and I want a nap. But you deserve a whisky first. My treat.'

‘I'm sure that's not what Nazi spies drink.'

‘This one does.'

It was still raining as they coasted along the steep lane that wound down the cliffside to St Catherine's Bay. The road was slick and they went cautiously, standing on their brakes. There were a couple of miserable, wet soldiers manning the gun emplacements there, who waved and shouted as the girls on their bicycles came barrelling past, brakes screeching with the steepness of the descent. The Green Man was open. Sitting in its bow window were RAF Maidsend's gaunt and weary squadron leader and a myopic, well-turned-out civilian in a tweed suit. Everyone else was clustered round the bar.

Queenie walked purposefully to the cheerful coal fire and knelt, rubbing her hands together.

Squadron Leader Creighton rapped out a greeting that couldn't be ignored. ‘What chance! Come and join us, ladies.' He stood up and gave a little ceremonious bow, offering chairs. Queenie, comfortable with and indeed accustomed to such attention from superior officers, stood up and let her coat be taken. Maddie hung back.

‘This rather small and sodden young person,' said the squadron leader to the civilian, ‘is the heroine I was telling you about – the German speaker. This other is Assistant Section Officer Brodatt, who took the call and guided the aircraft in. Join us, ladies, join us!'

‘Assistant Section Officer Brodatt is a pilot,' Queenie said.

‘A pilot!'

‘Not at the moment,' said Maddie, blushing and writhing with embarrassment. ‘I'd like to join the ATA, the Air Transport Auxiliary, when they let more women in. I have a civilian licence. My instructor joined in January this year.'

‘How extraordinary!' said the short-sighted gentleman. He peered at Maddie through lenses half an inch thick. He was older than the squadron leader, old enough that he might've been refused if he'd tried to join up. Queenie shook hands with him and said gravely, ‘You must be my contact.'

His eyebrows disappeared into his hairline. ‘Must I?'

Maddie said furiously, ‘Pay no attention to her, she's loopy. She's been playing daft games all morning –'

They all sat down.

‘Her suggestion,' said Queenie. ‘The daft games.'

‘It
was
my suggestion, but only because she's so utterly
rubbish
at finding her way anywhere. I told her to pretend to be a –'

‘“
Careless talk costs lives
,”' Queenie interrupted.

‘– spy.' Maddie omitted any damning adjectives. ‘She was supposed to have been dropped by parachute and had to find her way to this pub.'

‘Not just any game,' exclaimed the gentleman in the tweed suit and thick spectacles. ‘Not just
any
game, but the Great Game! Have you read
Kim
? Are you fond of Kipling?'

‘I don't know, you naughty man, I've never kippled,' Queenie responded tartly. The civilian let out a chortle of delight. Queenie said demurely, ‘Of course Kipling, of course
Kim
, when I was little. I prefer Orwell now.'

‘Been to university?'

They established that Queenie and the gentleman's wife had been at the same college, albeit nearly 20 years apart, and traded literary quotations in German. They were obviously cut from the same well-read, well-bred, lunatic cloth.

‘What's your poison?' the civilian with a penchant for Kipling asked Queenie genially. ‘The water of life? Do I detect a Scottish burr? Any other languages besides German?'

‘Only coffee just now as I'm on duty later, aye you do, et oui, je suis courante en français aussi. My grandmother and my nanny are from Ormaie, near Poitiers. And I can do a fair parody of Aberdeen Doric and tinkers' cant, but the natives aren't fooled.'

‘The Doric and tinkers' cant!' The poor fellow laughed so hard he had to take off his glasses and give them a wipe with a spotted silk handkerchief. He put them back on and peered at Queenie this time. The lenses made his blue-green irises seem so large they were startling. ‘And – how
did
you manage to find your way here today, enemy agent mine?'

‘It's Maddie's story,' said the enemy agent generously. ‘And I owe her a whisky.'

So Maddie told, to an appreciative audience, how she had played Watson to her friend's giddy Sherlock Holmes – of the sabotaged tyre at the entrance to the well-stocked farm, and the assumptions about the dogs and the food and the flowers there. ‘And,' Maddie finished with a triumphant flourish, ‘the farm woman drew her a
map
.'

The so-called enemy agent glanced up at Maddie sharply. Squadron Leader Creighton held out his hand, palm up, a demand.

‘I've burned it,' Queenie said in a low voice. ‘I popped it in the fire when we first came in. I won't tell you which farm, so don't ask.'

‘I shouldn't have to go to much trouble to deduce it myself,' said the short-sighted civilian, ‘based on your friend's description.'

‘I am an officer.' Her voice was still dead quiet. ‘I gave the woman a royal ticking off after she'd done it, and I doubt she'll need another warning. But I never lied to her either, and she might have been more suspicious in the first place if I had. It would be inappropriate to punish anyone – apart from me of course.'

‘I wouldn't dream of it. I am agog at your initiative.'

The man glanced at the silent Creighton. ‘I do believe your earlier suggestion is spot on,' he said, and rather randomly quoted what Maddie reckoned was probably a line from Kipling.

‘Only once in a thousand years is a horse born so well fitted for the game as this our colt.'

‘Bear in mind,' said Creighton soberly, holding the other man's magnified eyes with his own over the top of his steepled fingers, ‘these two work well together.'

clk/sd & w/op

Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God.

I never knew his name. Creighton introduced him by an alias the man sometimes uses. At my interview he jokingly identified himself by a number because that's what the British Empire spies do in
Kim
(though
we
don't; we are told in training that numbers are too dangerous).

I liked him – don't get me wrong – beautiful eyes behind the dreadful specs, and very lithe and powerful beneath the scholarly tweed. It was
wonderful
flirting with him, all that razor-edge literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in
Much Ado About Nothing
. A battle of wit, and a test too. But he
was
playing God. I noticed, I knew it and I didn't care. It was such a thrill to be one of the archangels, the avengers, the chosen few.

Von Linden is about the same age as the intelligence officer who recruited me. Has von Linden an educated wife too? (He wears a ring.) Might von Linden's wife have been at university with my German tutor?

The sheer stark raving incredible madness of such a very ordinary possibility makes me want to put my head down on this cold table and sob.

Everything is
all so wron
g.

I have no more paper.

Ormaie 16.XI.43 JB-S

Oh Maddie.

I am lost. I have lost the thread. I was indulging myself in details as if they were wool blankets or alcohol, escaping wholly back into the fire-and-water-filled early days of our friendship. We made a
sensational
team.

I was so sure she'd landed safely.

It has been four days since I last wrote anything and there is a simple reason why: no paper. When they did not come to get me the first day I suspected, and spent the whole morning sleeping – just like a holiday. The blanket has changed my life. By the end of the second day I was getting very hungry and a bit tired of sitting in absolute pitch-dark. Then those pictures. They'd already shown me the destroyed rear cabin of Maddie's Lysander, but these were new – enlargements from the pilot's cockpit.

Oh Maddie

Maddie

That was the last peaceful moment of my holiday. Also, they have been questioning that French girl again. I was lying with my nose pressed to the crack underneath the door – I'd been crying, and it is the only place I get any light – and recognised her feet as they dragged her by (she has rather pretty feet, and she is always barefoot).

I would not have slept well after those pictures anyway, but have I said before that my room is attached to the suite they use for interviews, etc.? You would have to be stone deaf to sleep through it even in a feather bed.

The following morning a trio of soldiers clapped me in chains –
chains!
– and hauled me to a sub-basement where I was sure I was going to be dissected. No, it turned out to be the kitchen – literally the
kitchen
of this desecrated hotel, which is where they cook up our delicious grey cabbage soup. (They do not bake bread here – when we get bread it is stale ends cast off from somewhere else.) Apparently the charwoman who scrubbed the pots, swept the floors of sawdust and spread down less mouldy sawdust in its place, hauled wood and coal, emptied all the prisoners' waste buckets and slopped them out, peeled potatoes for the Gestapo officers' soup (I like to imagine she did these last two jobs without washing her hands in between) – etc. – has been sacked. More accurately she has been arrested and sent to prison – not this one, obviously – because she stole a couple of cabbages. Anyway yesterday and the day before they needed someone else to do all these challenging tasks while they found another drudge to replace her.

Who better suited for such work than an idle Special Operations Flight Officer? The chains were meant as a reminder that I am a prisoner, not an employee. Chiefly a reminder to the cook and his underlings, I think, but the cook was such a foul and filthy beast he would not have noticed if I'd been in drag as the Führer himself, so long as he could fondle my breasts.

And –
I let him do it
. For food, you might suppose, but no! (Although the old goat
did
very generously let me feast on the scraps when they'd finished peeling the tatties. I did not have to peel anything myself as they wisely would not give me a knife.) No, just like my soul, I sold my body for
paper
.

The basement of the Château de Bordeaux is a warren of strangeness. Rather spooky. There are a few rooms (those with freezers and gas ovens) that they probably use for horrible experiments, but mostly
these cellars are empty because they are not secure
and are generally just too damn dark for productive activity. All the hotel's catering equipment is still down there – huge coffee urns, copper pans the size of bathtubs, milk cans (empty), empty wine bottles and jam pots stacked everywhere, even a row of dust-covered, greasy blue aprons still hanging in a passageway.
There are a number of service lifts, dumb waiters for hauling trays upstairs in addition to the great big one for loading crates and things from the main street,
and it was in exploring one of the small ones (with an eye to escaping up it if I could squeeze into it) that I discovered the paper – stacks and stacks of unused recipe cards, shoved in the dumb waiter to get them out of the way.

I thought about Sara Crewe in
A Little Princess
, pretending she is a prisoner in the Bastille to make her work as a scullery maid more bearable. And you know . . . I just couldn't do it. What is the point in pretending I am in the Bastille? I have spent the past two days in
chains
, underground, slaving for a monster. Ariadne in the maze of the Minotaur? (I wish I'd thought of that earlier.) But I was too busy slaving to pretend much of anything anyway.

So – I got to take the recipe cards away with me in exchange for being groped, and managed to limit the assault by suggesting I was von Linden's personal Bit of Tartan Fluff and that the Hauptsturmführer would not like it if the cook defiled me.