Code Name Verity(101)

‘She put up a hell of a fight, your friend,’ Engel said. ‘She bit a policeman. They got me to come and chloroform her, to knock her out, you know? There were four officers holding her down when I came running across the square with the chloroform, and she was still struggling. She tried to bite me too. When the fumes finally overwhelmed her it was like watching a light go out –’

‘– I know. I know.’

We were out of the square now. We turned to look at each other at exactly the same moment. Her eyes are amazing.

‘We’ve turned this place into a real shit-hole,’ she said. ‘There were roses in that square when I was first sent here. Now it’s nothing but mud and trucks. I think of her every single time I cross those cobbles, three times a day. I hate it.’ She looked away. ‘Come on. We can walk along the riverfront for about half a kilometre. Have you been?’

‘No.’

‘It’s still pretty.’

She lit another cigarette. It was her third in about five minutes. Can’t imagine how she manages to afford them all or even where she gets them – women are no longer allowed to buy cigarettes in Ormaie.

‘I’ve chloroformed people before, it’s something they expect of me, part of my job – I’m a chemist, I studied pharmaceuticals in America. But I’ve never despised myself so much as I did that day – she was so small and –’

She stumbled over her words and I had to bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from crying.

‘– So fierce, so beautiful, it was like breaking a hawk’s wings, stopping up a clear spring with bricks – digging up roses to make a space to park your tank. Pointless and ugly. She was just – blazing with life and defiance one moment, then the next moment nothing but a senseless shell lying on her face in the gutter – ’

‘– I KNOW,’ I whispered.

She glanced over at me curiously, frowning, sweeping my face with her sharp, pale eyes.

‘Do you so?’

‘She was my best friend,’ I said through my teeth.

Anna Engel nodded. ‘Ja, I know. Ach, you must hate me.’

‘No. No, I’m sorry. Tell me. Please.’

‘Here’s the river,’ Anna said, and we crossed another street. There was a railing all along the riverbank and we stood leaning against it. Once there were elm trees lining both sides of the Poitou here – nothing but stumps now because over the last three years they’ve all been cut down for firewood. But she was right – the row of historic houses on the opposite bank is still pretty.

Anna took a deep breath and spoke again.

‘When she passed out I turned her over so I could check to see if she was armed, and she was clutching her balled-up silk scarf in her fist. She must have been clinging to it all through the battle, and when she lost consciousness her fingers went lax. I wasn’t supposed to search her properly, that’s someone else’s job, but I wondered what she’d been protecting so doggedly in her closed fist – a suicide tablet, maybe – and I lifted the scarf out of her open hand –’

She held her own palm out against the railing, demonstrating.

‘On her palm there was a smear of ink. On the scarf was the perfectly reversed imprint of an Ormaie Town Hall archive reference number. She’d written the number on her palm and tried to rub it out with the scarf when she was caught.

‘I spat on the scarf – as though in contempt of her, you understand? – and wadded it into a ball which I pressed back into her hand. But I rubbed the damp silk hard against her palm to blot the numbers out and closed her limp fingers round it, and all anyone ever found there was an ink-stained wad of cloth and no one ever asked her about it because she’d been filling out forms in the ration office just before she’d been caught, under the pretence of an errand for some made-up, elderly grandmother, and her fingers were covered with ink anyway.’

A flight of hopeful pigeons settled on the pavement around our feet. I am always so amazed at the way they flare and touch down – never a bounce or a prang, no one teaches them, they do it instinctively. Flying rats, but how beautifully they touch down.

‘How did you know what she wanted the number for?’ I asked at last.

‘She told me,’ Anna said.

‘No.’

‘She told me. At the end, after she’d finished. She was writing nonsense. I took hold of her pen to stop her, and she let go without a fight. She was tired. We’d worn her down. She looked up at me without hope – there’d be no more excuses now, no more reprieves. Ferber’s orders are all supposed to be cloaked in secrecy, but we both knew what he’d tell von Linden to do with her. Where they’d send her.’