Code Name Verity (34 page)

None of the rest of us was given a bath or a hot soft-boiled egg, though cold hard-boiled ones were passed around. I think I was sent up to the house as a diversion while they were getting rid of the lad I'd tried to murder that morning and the other chained man. Anyway I never saw them again. I don't know how they got their leg irons off, or where they went, or if they are safe. I hope so. I really do.

Everybody else left in stages over the next two days. Mitraillette says it is actually safer to travel by day than at night if you are a fugitive, since daytime is when people are out and about and there isn't any curfew – don't think I'd realised that, since I am always trying to get on a plane that arrives after midnight at some distant airfield.

She and I and the Rosalie owner were delivered home by the rose lady's chauffeur in her own car – we thought we ought to leave the old Rosalie there for a bit longer in case the Nazis come back to check on the garage again. The bridge still hasn't been fixed and except for the German soldiers we killed, every one of the bodies is still lying there in the rain, with guards posted over them to keep anyone from trying to bury them.
Fifteen people
lying there. I haven't seen it, we couldn't drive that way anyway as the bridge was out. They'll have to clear the road when they get the bridge fixed, but I have a sick and certain feeling they will just pile everybody alongside the road to remind us not to try again. Julie, Oh lovely Julie,

JULIE

I am going to drink this stuff now and try to sleep again, but I should put down that I have a project to work on when I wake up – while Mitraillette and I were gone, a friend of Maman Thibaut's who runs a laundry service dropped off a bag containing clean,
German-made
chemises, labelled ‘Käthe Habicht', and hidden underneath them was a huge pile of paper that I have to go through. I don't know what it is – haven't had the heart to look – but it must be from Engel again. Amélie peeked and discovered that the pages are numbered so she's put them all in order for me, but it's in English and she couldn't read it. It's still hidden in the laundry bag beneath my ‘anonymously' donated new collection of underclothes. I jolly well don't feel like reading anything Engel has sent me any more tonight, but tomorrow is Sunday and there will be croissants with the coffee and I expect it will still be raining.

It is not Engel's writing

It is Julie's

—

I've not finished reading yet. I've scarcely started. It is
hundreds
of pages long, half of it on little bits of card. Maman Thibaut just keeps making me more coffee and the girls are keeping a good watch on the road and the back lane. I can't stop. I don't know if there's any urgency or not – Engel may need the papers back, as there is an official-looking number printed at the end in red ink, and a horrible execution order on Gestapo stationery attached by the evil Nikolaus Ferber. Not an order, I mean, only a recommendation – according to Engel's translation. But I think it was in the process of being carried out when we stopped the bus.

—

I can tell when Julie's been crying. Not just because she says so, but because the writing goes all smeary and the paper crinkles. Her tears, dried on these pages, are mixed up with mine making them wet again. I have cried so hard over this that I am beginning to feel stupid. They
did
show her those blasted pictures. And she
did
give them code – eleven sets of encoding poems, passwords and frequencies. Eleven code sets – eleven dummy code sets, ONE FOR EACH OF OUR DUMMY WIRELESSES, one for each of the ‘onze radios' we planted in the wrecked Lysander. Those pictures were a gift. She could have told them
so much
, she knew SO MUCH, and all she gave them was fake code.

She never even told them my code name – though they must have wondered. She never told them Käthe Habicht's name, which might have given me away. She never told them ANYTHING

Names names names. How does she
do it? Cattercup – Stratfield – SWINLEY??? Newbery College? How does she
do
it? She makes it sound like she is
so cut up
to be giving them this information, and it's all just bumph out of her head. She never told them ANYTHING. I don't think she's given them the right name of any airfield in the whole of Britain, except Maidsend and Buscot, which of course were where she was stationed. They could have easily checked. It's all so close to truth, and so glib – her aircraft identification is rather good, considering what a fuss she makes about it. It makes me think of the first day I met her, giving those directions in German. So cool and crisp, such authority – suddenly she
really was
a radio operator, a German radio operator, she was
so good
at faking it. Or when I told her to be Jamie, how she just suddenly turned into
Jamie
.

This confession of hers is rotten with error – I did my Civil Air Guard training at Barton, not ‘Oakway', and the fog line at so-called Oakway is electric, not gas. It wasn't a Spitfire the first time I flew to Craig Castle of course, it was a BEAUFORT, and she jolly well knew that! Though I have ferried Spitfires to ‘Deeside'. I suppose she truly didn't want to draw attention to any real names. She calls the RAF Maidsend Squadron Leader ‘Creighton' and she knows perfectly well his proper name is Leland North. Creighton is the name of the Colonel in
Kim
. I know because Julie made me read it – partly, I am dead sure, as a warning about how both of us were being fine-tuned for the war machine by that Bloody Machiavellian Intelligence Officer whose real name she also knows perfectly well.

I don't at all remember the story about her grandmother's sister shooting her husband. Of course Julie would have had to fudge a lot of our conversations to keep the flow going, none of them run exactly as I remember. Mostly it's all there and I recognise it, only I don't think she ever told me that story. I have no memory of it at all.

It's eerie and unbearable. It's as though she's trying to tell me what she wanted me to do. But she couldn't have known what was going to happen, or even that I'd read this. She thought I was dead. So it must not have been aimed at me, but then – why tell it?

What's strange about the whole thing is that although it's riddled with nonsense, altogether it's
true
– Julie's told our story, mine and hers, our friendship, so truthfully. It is
us
. We even had the same dream at the same time. How could we have had the same dream at the same time? How can something so wonderful and mysterious be true? But it is.

And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie's written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's
right here
. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but
fighting
. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can't be landed, stuck in the climb – alive, alive, ALIVE.

Cd B = Château de Bordeaux

H d V = Hôtel de Ville [town hall]

O.HdV.A. 1872 B. No. 4 CdB

O = Ormaie? perhaps A/Annals? Archives B/Box/Boîte 1872 - could be year, Archives 1872 box no 4

—

I SEE IT

ORMAIE TOWN HALL ARCHIVES 1872 BOX No. 4 CHATEAU DE BORDEAUX

We have them. WE HAVE GOT THEM.

—

Our prison cells are only hotel bedrooms but we are guarded like royalty. And also, there are dogs.

these cellars are empty because they are not secure

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

—

There's more – I know there's more – Engel's underlined all the instructions in red – red's her colour, Julie said. The pages are numbered and dated in red too. Julie mentioned Engel had to number the pages. They've created it between them, Julia Beaufort-Stuart and Anna Engel, and they've given it to me to use – the code's not in order, doesn't need to be. No wonder she was so determined to finish it –

Ugh, there is SO MUCH PAPER HERE

here it is –

—

there was an air raid and everybody scrambled to the shelters as usual. . . for two hours

‘Cd B' = Château de Bordeaux

as with all the prisoners' rooms my window has been boarded shut