Code Name Verity(100)

La Cadette collected the drawings. It turns out anyone can go digging in the Ormaie Town Hall archives, it’s like – Nazi contempt for the Occupied country taken to extremes – as though they welcome the locals to come and ransack their own heritage so no one else need bother. You get searched when you enter the building of course, but not on the way out, and they didn’t even look at Amélie’s ID – she said she was working on a project for school, easy peasy. She was supposed to say she was verifying a boundary of the Thibaut farm, but when she saw how easy it would be to get in and out, she made up a simpler story on the spot. She is so sharp.

It took her 20 minutes during her school dinner break, and she left the pages for me to collect so she wouldn’t get caught carrying them around.

It was probably a mistake to tell her to leave them in Engel’s cachette. I think of it as mine, but it’s Engel’s. Also, I think we are supposed to avoid using cafés. I wish I’d been trained for this. It didn’t matter in the end, but oh how my stomach turned over when I walked in and found Engel sitting at the table.

I started to walk past to another table, smiling my stupid plastic smile – makes me feel like a zombie this week – but she beckoned abruptly.

‘Salut, K?the.’ She patted the chair next to hers. When I sat down she stubbed out her cigarette and lit another two and gave me one. Somehow it was the most heart-stopping thing I have ever done, touching my own lips with this cigarette that had touched Anna Engel’s lips a second earlier. I feel like – I know her so intimately, after reading Julie’s confession. She must feel the same way about me, though I don’t suppose I scare her as much.

‘Et ton amie, ?a va?’ she asked casually – How’s your friend?

I looked away, swallowed, couldn’t maintain the plastic smile. Took a drag on the cigarette and choked, haven’t smoked for a while and never those French fags. After a minute or so she figured out that what I wasn’t saying was not a happy ending.

She swore softly in French, a single violent word of disappointment. Then paused and asked, ‘Elle est morte?’

I nodded. Yes, she’s dead.

‘Viens,’ Engel said, scraping back her chair. ‘Allons. Viens marcher avec moi, j’ai des choses à te dire.’

If she had been about to cart me off to prison I don’t think I could have refused – Come for a walk, I’ve got things to tell you? No choice.

I stood up again in Engel’s cloud of smoke – hadn’t even ordered anything, just as well as it always panics me to have to speak French to strangers. Engel patted the thick wad of paper folded next to her ashtray, reminding me. I picked it up and shoved it in my jacket pocket along with K?the’s ID.

It was mid-afternoon, streets not too busy, and Engel clicked into English almost right away – popping back into French only when we passed anybody. It’s dead weird talking to her in English, she sounds like a Yank. Her accent is American and she’s pretty fluent. Suppose Penn did tell me she’d been to university in Chicago.

We came round the corner of the back lane and into the Place des Hirondelles, the town hall square, full of armoured vehicles and bored-looking sentries.

‘I’ve got most of an hour,’ Engel said. ‘My dinner break. Not here though.’

I nodded and followed. She kept talking the whole time – we must have looked dead casual, a couple of chums having a walk and a smoke together. She doesn’t wear a uniform – she’s just an employee, she doesn’t even have a rank. We walked across the cobbles in front of the town hall.

‘She was crossing the street, right here, and she looked the wrong way.’ Engel blew out a fierce cloud of smoke. ‘What a stupid place to make a mistake like that, right in the middle of La Place des Hirondelles! There is always someone watching here – the town hall on one side and the Gestapo on the other.’

‘It was the Thibauts’ van, wasn’t it?’ I said miserably. ‘The van that nearly hit her.’ A French van full of French chickens, that’s what she’d said, in the first few pages she wrote.

‘I don’t know. The van was gone by the time I got here. I’m sure that driver didn’t want to get tangled up in an arrest. All Ormaie looks the other way when there’s a beating in the Place des Hirondelles – another Jew dragged out of hiding, or some idiot throwing manure at the office windows.’

She glanced up at the offending windows – no dead bodies hanging there this week, thank goodness.