Code Name Verity (38 page)

‘Sorry – sorry!' I gasped. ‘Je suis désolée –'
Unbelievable
, I am still trying to speak French to people.

‘Not quite out of the trenches yet, are we?' he remarked softly. With light fingertips against my back he guided me to one of the chairs. ‘Tea, Silvey,' he directed, and Sergeant Silvey quietly served up and let himself out.

Balliol's glasses were lying on the desk. He put them on and perched against the edge of the desk holding his teacup in its saucer, and his hands were so steady I had to put my own cup on the floor – couldn't have bone china rattling in my lap while he stood there pinning me down with those huge magnified eyes. Crikey – Julie quite fancied him. Can't imagine why. He scares me to
death
.

‘What are you afraid of, Maddie?' he asked quietly. None of this ‘Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart' nonsense.

I am not going to say it again. There is no one else I need say it to. This was the last time –

‘I killed Julie. Verity, I mean. I shot her myself.'

He put his own cup down on the desk with a clatter and stared at me.
‘I beg your pardon?'

‘I'm afraid of being tried for murder.'

I looked away from him, at the drain in the floor. This was the place where the German spy tried to strangle Eva Seiler. I shivered, actually shivered, when I realised that. I have never seen such hideous bruises in my entire life, not before or since. Julie
was
tortured in this room.

When I looked back at Balliol he was still leaning against the desk, his shoulders slumped, spectacles pushed back on his head, pinching his nose between his fingers as though he had a migraine.

‘I'm afraid of hanging,' I added miserably.

‘
Great Scott
, girl,' he snapped, and jammed the specs back down over his eyes. ‘You'll have to tell me what happened. I confess you have – startled me, but as I'm not wearing my judge's wig at the moment, let's have it.'

‘They were transporting her in a bus full of prisoners to one of their concentration camps and we tried to stop it –'

He interrupted plaintively, ‘Must it be the murder first? Go back a bit.' He peered at me with an anxious frown. ‘Mea culpa, forgive me. Unfortunate choice of words. You didn't say it
was
murder, did you? Only you're worried others might see it that way . . . Possibly a mistake, or an accident. Well, out with it, my child. Start from the beginning, when you landed in France.'

I told him everything – well, almost everything. There is one thing I didn't tell him about, and that is this big stack of paper I have been humping around in my flight bag – everything Julie's written, everything I've written, all her scraps of hotel stationery and sheet music and my Pilot's Notes and Etienne's exercise book – I didn't tell him there's a written record.

I'm amazed at what a smooth liar I've become. Or, not a liar exactly – I didn't lie to him. The story I gave him isn't like a pullover full of holes, dropped stitches that will easily unravel when you start to poke at them. More like – slip one, knit one, pass slipped stitch over. Between Penn and Engel there was enough information that I didn't need to mention I'd got Julie's written confession up in my bedroom. Because I'm jolly well not turning it over to some filing clerk in London. It is
mine
.

And my own notes – well, I need them so I can make a proper report for the Accident Committee.

It
did
take a long time, the telling. Sgt Silvey brought us another pot of tea and then another. At the end Balliol assured me quietly, ‘You won't hang.'

‘But I'm responsible.'

‘No more than I.' He looked away. ‘Tortured and sent off to be used as a lab specimen – dear God. That lovely, clever girl. I may as well – I am
wretched
. No, you'll not hang.'

He drew a long, shaking breath. ‘“Killed in action” was what the first wire told us, and “killed in action” the verdict shall remain,' he said firmly. ‘She
was
killed in action by this account, and given the number of people who died under fire that night I don't think we need give out details of who shot whom. Your story shall not leave this building. You've not told anyone here what happened, have you?'

‘I told her brother,' I said. ‘And anyway you bug this room. People listen through the shutters to the kitchen. It'll have to come out.'

He gazed at me thoughtfully, shaking his head.

‘Is there anything about us you
don't
know, Kittyhawk? We'll keep your secrets and you keep ours. “Careless talk costs lives.”'

It really does in France. It's not as funny as it sounds.

‘Look, Maddie, let's break for half an hour – I'm afraid there are a beastly lot of details I'm meant to grill you about which we've not even touched on yet, and I feel I've rather lost my composure.'

He pulled out a spotted silk handkerchief, turned aside again and wiped his nose. When he faced me once more he gave me a hand to raise me to my feet. ‘Also, I think you need a nap.'

What did Julie say about me – I am trained to react positively to orders from people in authority. I went back to my room and fell soundly asleep for 20 minutes, and dreamed Julie was teaching me to foxtrot in the kitchen at Craig Castle. Of course she did teach me to foxtrot, though it was at one of the Maidsend hops and not in the kitchen at Craig Castle, but the dream was
so real
that when I woke up I couldn't at first figure out where I was. And then it was like being kicked in the head with desolation all over again.

Except now instead of ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris' I have got ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me' stuck playing in my mind over and over, which is what the band was playing when we were dancing at Maidsend. I don't mind at all, as I am
so sick
of ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris'. If I ever hear either tune being played in some public place I am sure I will immediately start to howl.

So then Balliol and I had another session and it got a bit more technical, me having to remember names and numbers I didn't know I knew – code names for every single Resistance agent I'd been introduced to, Balliol tallying them against notes in a little calfskin notebook of his own, and the location of any arms or supplies or cachettes I knew about. There was a moment where I was bent over with my elbows on my knees, and I was pulling at my hair until the roots hurt, trying to come up with accurate map coordinates for the Thibauts' barn and the rose woman's garage. It dawned on me I'd been sitting there tearing my hair like that for the past twenty minutes, and suddenly I got mad.

I raised my head with a jerk and asked furiously, ‘
Why?
Why do you
care
whether I can come up with the coordinates out of my head? I can
make up coordinates
the way Julie made up code! Give me a map and I'll point it out, you don't
need
me to do this! What do you
really
want, you bloody Machiavellian BASTARD?'

He was silent for a minute.

‘I've been asked to test you a bit,' he confessed at last. ‘Turn up the heat, see how you respond. I'm not honestly sure what to do with you. The Air Ministry wants to take away your licence and the Special Operations Executive wants to recommend you for a George Medal. They'd like you to stay with them.'

NOT IN A MILLION YEARS.

But, but. My success as an unofficial agent for the SOE will cancel out my flight to France as an unofficial pilot for the RAF. I won't get a medal, and I jolly well don't want or deserve one, but I won't lose my licence either – I mean, you could say I've already lost it myself, but they'll reissue it. They won't take it away. They won't even take away my job.
Oh
– now this really is good reason to blub, tears of relief. They will let me fly again. I will have to go up before the Accident Committee, but that will just be about the actual accident – as if I were one of the Moon Squadron itself, pranging my own plane. I won't be charged with anything else.

And the Air Transport Auxiliary will be ferrying planes to France, come the invasion. Not long now – spring. I will go back. I know I will go back.

I am exhausted. Except for my nap and a couple of hours after we landed I haven't slept since Sunday night, and it's Tuesday evening now. One more thing though before bed –

Balliol has given me a copy of a message they have just received and decoded from the Damask W/T operator.

REPORT HEAVY ALLIED BOMBARDMENT OVERHEAD ORMAIE NIGHT OF SAT 11 DEC AM SUN 12 DEC SUCCESSFUL OP DESTROYING CDB AKA GESTAPO REGIONAL HQ NO KNOWN ARRESTS ALL WELL SVP PASS MSG TO KITTYHAWK SAY ISOLDES FATHER IS FOUND SHOT THROUGH HEAD BELIEVED SUICIDE

‘Who is Isolde's father?' Balliol asked when he gave it to me.

‘The Gestapo officer who – who questioned Verity. And sentenced her.'

‘Suicide,' Balliol said softly. ‘Another wretched man.'

‘Another wretched girl,' I corrected.

—

Those ripples in the pond again – it just doesn't stop in one place. All those lives that have touched mine so briefly – most of them I don't even know their real names, like Julie's great-aunt and the driver of the Rosalie. And some of them I don't know anything other than their names, like Benjamin Zylberberg, the Jewish doctor, and Esther Lévi, whose flute music Julie was given to write on. And some of them I met briefly and liked and won't ever see again, like the vicar's son who flew Spitfires and Anna Engel and the Jamaican gunner.

And then there is Isolde von Linden, at school in Switzerland, who doesn't know yet that her father has just shot himself.

—

Isolde still in the realm of the sun, in the shimmering daylight still, Isolde –

I have still got the matchbook that her father gave Amélie.

—

I've had a bath and borrowed a pair of pyjamas from the pretty First Aid Nursing Yeomanry driver who never says anything. Goodness knows what she thinks of me. I am not locked in or guarded any more. Someone is going to fly me back to Manchester tomorrow. Tonight – tonight I will sleep in this room one more time, in this bed where Julie cried herself to sleep in my arms eight months ago.

I'm going to keep her grey silk scarf. But I want Jamie to take this notebook, and my Pilot's Notes, and Julie's confession, and give them all to Esmé Beaufort-Stuart because it is only right that Julie's lady mother should be told. If she wants to know, I think it is her right to know. Absolutely
Every Last Detail
.

I am back in England. I can go back to work. I haven't got the words to say how stunned and grateful I am that I have been allowed to keep my licence.

But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France – a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will always be unflyable, stuck in the climb.

Lady Beaufort-Stuart

Craig Castle

Castle Craig

Aberdeenshire

26 Dec. 1943

My darling Maddie,

Jamie has delivered your ‘letters' – both yours and Julie's, and I have read them. They will stay here, and be safe – the Official Secrets Act is of little consequence in a house which absorbs secrets like damp. A few more recipe cards and prescription forms tossed in amongst the teeming contents of our two libraries will surely go unnoticed.

I want to tell you what Jamie said to me as he gave me these pages:

‘Maddie did the right thing.'

I say so too.

Please come to see me, Maddie darling, as soon as they let you. The wee lads are all distraught with the news and you will do them good. Perhaps they will do you good as well. They are my only consolation at the moment and I have been fearfully busy trying to make it a ‘happy' Christmas for them. Ross and Jock have now lost both parents in the bombing so perhaps I shall keep them when the war is over.

I should like to ‘keep' you too, if you will let me – I mean, in my heart and as my only daughter's best friend. It would be like losing two daughters if you were to leave us now.

Please come back soon. The window is always open.

Fly safely.

  Yr. loving,

Esmé

P.S. Thank you for the Eterpen. It is most extraordinary – Not a single word of this letter has blotted. No one will ever know how many tears I shed whilst writing it!

I do mean fly safely. And I do mean come back.

Author's Debriefing

As someone has already said, ‘My reports are so rubbish.' I am legally bound to write this Afterword, as I am legally bound to ensure this book is not in breach of the Official Secrets Acts. This is meant to be a Historical Note and it
pains
me to admit that
Code Name Verity
is fiction – that Julia Beaufort-Stuart and Maddie Brodatt are not actually real people, merely products of my adventure-obsessed brain.

But I'll try. This book started off rather simply as a portrait of an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot. Being a woman and a pilot myself, I wanted to explore the possibilities that would have been open to me during the Second World War. I'd already written a war story about a girl pilot (‘Something Worth Doing' in
Firebirds Soaring
, edited by Sharyn November), but now I wanted to write something longer and more accurately detailed and, above all, more plausible.

I started with research, hoping to get plot ideas, and read
The Forgotten Pilots
by Lettice Curtis. This is the definitive history of the Air Transport Auxiliary, and it's written by a woman, so it felt right and natural for my ATA pilot to be a girl. But the ATA story careened out of control when (by accident, while making dinner) I stumbled on the framework for
Code Name Verity
and added in a Special Operations Executive agent. More reading ensued – OK, I could have a pilot AND a spy and they'd both be girls. And it would still be plausible. Because there
were
women doing these jobs. There weren't many of them. But they were real. They worked and suffered and fought just as hard as any man. Many of them died.