One Shot Kill (2 page)

Two torch beams lit her up, casting shadows across her body in the shape of fence posts. She unbuckled the chute and scrambled forwards, ready to gather up the billowing chute before the next gust of wind caught it. She could see the other chutes landing nearby and then she heard a shout – in German.

Heart in mouth, Rosie rolled on to her bum and got her first proper look at the men behind the torches. Her eyes had adjusted to the gloom and it was hard staring into the torch beams, but the curved outline of two German army helmets was unmistakeable.

Notes

1
 
U-Boat – German submarines were usually called U-Boats. The term is an abbreviation of the German word Unterseeboot, meaning submarine.

Lorient Gestapo headquarters was situated in a Roman-style villa, commandeered from one of the town’s wealthiest residents. Obersturmfuhrer Huber sat at a desk in a sparsely furnished interrogation room. A second desk was meant for a typist to take notes, but it was one in the morning and nobody was available.

Huber was chubby, dressed in a grey civilian suit with a fancy pocket watch hung off a gold chain. He studied his nails uninterestedly as a uniformed guard dragged a girl into the room. She was around fourteen years old, extremely thin and dressed in grubby knickers and a blood-stained man’s vest that almost reached her knees. Her eyes were badly swollen and she had dozens of burns and bruises.

‘Still defiant?’ Huber asked, watching the girl struggle as the guard forced her into a chair. ‘Edith Mercier, we’ve not had the pleasure of meeting before.’

Edith looked up, as the guard lurked behind, ready to strike. She’d not been in this interrogation room before, but they all had the same dim ceiling bulb and tang of bleach.

‘Communist bitch spat in my face,’ the guard explained. ‘Earned herself a slap for her trouble.’

‘Oh, Edith! Spitting isn’t nice,’ Huber said, smiling slightly. ‘I just need you to answer some questions. Once that’s done you can clean up. I’ll find you something to eat and better sleeping arrangements.’

Edith’s eyes were black marbles as she stared right through him.

‘Where does the stubborn attitude get you?’ Huber asked. ‘You’re just a girl. You’re facing no serious punishment, but unless you wish to suffer more than you have already, you simply
must
give full details of the resistance scum you’ve become mixed up with.’

Edith kept silent as Huber signalled the guard with a raised eyebrow. She felt a hand clap the back of her skull as the guard thrust forwards and banged her forehead against the desk.

‘Again,’ Huber said.

Edith was dazed as the guard slammed her a second time. She twisted, slipping off the chair and stumbling sideways, but the guard pulled the skinny girl back into the chair and clamped a hand around a neck barely wider than his wrist.

‘Where is Alois Clement?’ Huber shouted, as Edith choked. ‘When did you last see him?’

Edith gasped when the guard let go, but gave no answer. As punishment the guard snatched her wrist and twisted it agonisingly behind her back.

‘This is all
so
unnecessary,’ Huber said, as he shook his head gently. ‘So, so unnecessary.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ Edith shouted, when the pain became too much. ‘I’ve never heard of anyone named Clement.’

Huber pulled a notebook out of his pocket and spun it across the desktop. ‘You were carrying this with you when you were arrested.’

‘Never seen it in my life,’ Edith snarled.

‘We’ve confirmed it’s your writing. I know it’s a coded list of names. I know you worked as a messenger for Eugene Bernard and witnesses tell me you regularly visited Alois Clement at the fishing port.

‘Your witnesses are lying,’ Edith shouted. ‘You can’t trust traitors.’

Huber leaned forwards. ‘You’ll tell me everything you know, or I’ll make this the longest night of your life.’

‘You’re not even original,’ Edith laughed. ‘My last interrogator used that exact line. He got
nothing
from me and neither will you.’

‘Who are you trying to save?’ Huber asked. ‘I’ve been in this room with many of your friends, Edith. They’re happy to spill the beans, so why endanger your life by protecting them?’

Edith snorted. ‘If you already know so much, why are you up in the middle of the night asking me questions? Why aren’t you at home in bed, with your teddy?’

Huber was a professional interrogator, but didn’t completely succeed in hiding his irritation. Edith knew she’d scored a small victory.

In Huber’s experience the majority of people broke quickly under torture, often within minutes. About one third had the will power to hold out for a day or two, usually in order to allow a colleague or loved one to escape capture. Less than one suspect in fifty could endure pain as Edith had done.

‘You were not a blood relative of Madame Brigitte Mercier?’ Huber asked, picking a gentler tone as he signalled for the guard to back off. ‘She was your guardian, yes?’

Edith had been through enough interrogations to know that her tormentor had changed tack to try winning her confidence. This bought her recovery time, so she always played along whilst being careful not to lose concentration and say something of value.

‘I never knew my parents,’ Edith explained. ‘Madame Mercier adopted me when I was a toddler.’

‘You worked for her?’

‘I looked after her stables and ran errands for the girls who worked in her brothels.’

Huber nodded, trying to show some empathy. ‘Sounds as if she was more like a boss than a mother. Having no
real
family must have been tough for you.’

‘She treated me better than a state orphanage would have done,’ Edith answered. ‘At least until one of your goons snuffed her out in one of these torture chambers.’

‘Madame Mercier’s death was not intentional,’ Huber said. ‘She suffered a heart failure while under routine interrogation.’

‘Bad news for you,’ Edith said. ‘She knew more than anyone.’

Huber bristled. He’d have liked to watch the guard bounce Edith off a couple of walls, but decided to have one last attempt at making an emotional connection.

‘You lived at the stable, with Madame Mercier’s horses?’

Edith was annoyed by the inference that Madame Mercier hadn’t cared about her. ‘And I suppose I’ll do fine now I’ve got the Gestapo looking out for me?’

Huber rubbed his eye and took a moment to think up a response. ‘Where are the horses now?’

This was something Edith didn’t like to think about. She resented the fact that Huber had found a weak spot and failed to hide the lump in her throat.

‘A little bird told me that it was an horrific moment for you,’ Huber said, as Edith wondered who’d been talking about her. ‘Your beloved horses burned to death, following a
British
bombing raid. You must have been devastated.’

Edith had run the stable for years and the death of the horses in a firestorm after a bombing raid had affected her more than anything, including Madame Mercier’s death.

Huber looked at the guard, speaking gently as a tear left a salty track down Edith’s cheek. ‘Fetch her some hot coffee, and a bowl of hot water for her to wash with.’

The guard seemed surprised. ‘Are you sure, sir? She might try something. She bit Thorwald’s wrist so deeply that you could see the tendons.’

‘Thorwald is a moron,’ Huber said, as he shot to his feet. ‘She’s a little girl and I don’t appreciate you questioning my orders.’

‘As you wish, sir,’ the guard said stiffly, before clicking boot heels and leaving the room.

Huber moved around the desk. Edith was horribly bruised and winced as Huber rested a hand on her shoulder.

‘I can make things more comfortable for you, Edith,’ Huber said. ‘I just need something to work with.’

Edith glanced at Huber, then awkwardly at the notebook resting on the table.

‘Everything in the book is written in a simple code that Eugene taught me,’ Edith explained, as she reached out for the notebook. ‘Can I show you?’

Huber was delighted. Younger investigators like Thorwald thought he was past it, but while they failed he’d cracked Edith in no time at all. Mentioning the burned horses had been pure genius.

Edith opened the notebook. ‘This column is names. There are addresses, dates. The places where we met, and details of how much money I paid them.’

Huber nodded. ‘Are all of the agents paid?’

‘Yes,’ Edith said. ‘Eugene said it’s important to put everyone in the circuit on a professional footing. Agents receive money, plus chocolate, coffee, and other treats when they get dropped by parachute. It’s never a lot of money, but he says it shows them that the British and Americans appreciate the risks they’re taking.’

This information wasn’t news, but Huber felt it was too early to push hard and risk losing Edith’s confidence.

‘I’ll need a pen to show you how the decoding grid works,’ Edith said meekly. ‘Once you have that, you’ll be able to understand all the entries in my book.’

Huber slid a fountain pen from inside his jacket and unscrewed the cap. Edith’s hand trembled, as she wrote three tiny rows of four letters.

‘I’m sorry it’s so messy. Thorwald bent back my fingers,’ Edith explained.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Huber said, as he leaned closer to the page and squinted at the minuscule letters

V I V E

L A F R

A N C E

Vive la France – meaning long live France – was a popular resistance slogan. As Huber realised Edith had been stringing him along, she thrust violently upwards, spearing the Gestapo officer’s neck with the pen nib.

Edith had never received formal espionage training, but Eugene gave everyone who worked for his resistance group as much knowledge as he could, and one lesson that stuck in Edith’s head was the one about going for the jugular vein if you ever get a good shot at someone’s neck.

As Edith tore out the pen, a fountain of blood spurted half a metre from Huber’s neck. He tried to scream, but the hot liquid was already flooding the German’s lungs and he gurgled as he staggered backwards and collapsed over the typist’s desk.

The Gestapo compound was well guarded, but it seemed a shame not to at least try escaping. Her bare foot skidded in Huber’s blood as she headed for the door. She grabbed the door handle, but the guard was on the other side, about to enter with a coffee and a bowl of water.

Edith gave the metal bowl a shove, knocking the guard back and showering him with hot water. She made a couple of steps but the guard was too fast and too strong.

‘Security,’ he shouted.

Edith tried stabbing the guard, but he easily twisted the bloody fountain pen out of her hand, bent her fingers back painfully then smashed her head first into the hallway wall.

As Edith slumped to the floor unconscious, two uniformed men rounded the top of the staircase, while the guard stepped into the interrogation room and was staggered by the sight of Huber splayed over the typewriter and drenched in his own blood.

‘Is he dead?’ someone asked from behind.

‘Look at him, you idiot,’ the guard shouted. ‘What do you think?’

One of the Germans shouted at Rosie in heavily-accented French. ‘Stay down,’ he ordered. ‘Raise your hands
slowly
into the air.’

But in darkness, with fifteen metres and a fence between herself and the enemy, Rosie had no plans for a meek surrender. She unbuckled the equipment pack strapped to her thigh before ripping a small pistol from her boot and taking two wild shots into the torch beams.

‘Eugene?’ Rosie shouted, her boots churning soft earth as she started to run.

Rosie’s shots hadn’t hit anything, but they’d had the intended effect of making the two Germans wary of climbing the fence and coming after her. The moonlight lit billowing silk from the other parachutes, and gave her a clue where to find Eugene.

‘Rosie, get down,’ Eugene shouted.

It was good to hear Eugene’s voice, but Rosie couldn’t see where it was coming from as she scrambled up a slight hill.

‘Get down,’ Eugene repeated.

As Rosie hit the dirt, Eugene lit up a nearby copse of trees with the muzzle blast from a small machine gun.

‘Get here, now,’ Eugene shouted.

‘What’s going on?’ Rosie gasped, as Eugene shoved her back against a thick tree trunk.

‘They must have known we were coming,’ Eugene said. ‘I know this area well and I think we’ve come down a few hundred metres off target. If we hadn’t, we’d have been surrounded.’

Rosie felt queasy, realising that she’d have landed at the German’s feet but for her last-second tug on the steering rope.

‘Are you fit?’ Eugene asked.

‘Leg bashed a fence, but it’s not much,’ Rosie said.

‘The machine gun blast will make ’em wary, but we’ve got to move before they try and encircle us. They’ll have seen five parachutes, so hopefully they’ll think there’s more than two of us.’

Eugene kept low as he led Rosie downhill. Besides the machine gun slung around his neck, he’d strapped on a large backpack that had been dropped on one of the equipment chutes. There were plenty of torch beams and Germans shouting orders behind them, but as Eugene predicted they showed no appetite for a head-on charge into a potential machine gun ambush.

The pair kept up running pace for twenty-five minutes over five kilometres of countryside. They finally stopped behind a brick stable to catch breath and drink from a standpipe.

‘Can you carry on?’ Eugene asked.

‘Just sweaty,’ Rosie gasped, as she splashed her face and sucked water from the palm of her hand. For the first time in her life she was grateful for the fitness she’d earned on gruelling training runs.

‘I’ve not heard any sign of Germans, but if they had sniffer dogs at the landing site they might still track us,’ Eugene said.

‘What do you think happened?’ Rosie asked. ‘How could they have been waiting for us?’

Eugene shrugged. ‘If we’re lucky, a local patrol stumbled into our drop zone and arrested a couple of members of our reception team. But for all we know the Gestapo have penetrated and destroyed my entire organisation while I’ve been away.’