Code Name Verity(28)

‘Only once in a thousand years is a horse born so well fitted for the game as this our colt.’

‘Bear in mind,’ said Creighton soberly, holding the other man’s magnified eyes with his own over the top of his steepled fingers, ‘these two work well together.’

clk/sd & w/op

Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God.

I never knew his name. Creighton introduced him by an alias the man sometimes uses. At my interview he jokingly identified himself by a number because that’s what the British Empire spies do in Kim (though we don’t; we are told in training that numbers are too dangerous).

I liked him – don’t get me wrong – beautiful eyes behind the dreadful specs, and very lithe and powerful beneath the scholarly tweed. It was wonderful flirting with him, all that razor-edge literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test too. But he was playing God. I noticed, I knew it and I didn’t care. It was such a thrill to be one of the archangels, the avengers, the chosen few.

Von Linden is about the same age as the intelligence officer who recruited me. Has von Linden an educated wife too? (He wears a ring.) Might von Linden’s wife have been at university with my German tutor?

The sheer stark raving incredible madness of such a very ordinary possibility makes me want to put my head down on this cold table and sob.

Everything is all so wrong.

I have no more paper.





Ormaie 16.XI.43 JB-S

Oh Maddie.

I am lost. I have lost the thread. I was indulging myself in details as if they were wool blankets or alcohol, escaping wholly back into the fire-and-water-filled early days of our friendship. We made a sensational team.

I was so sure she’d landed safely.

It has been four days since I last wrote anything and there is a simple reason why: no paper. When they did not come to get me the first day I suspected, and spent the whole morning sleeping – just like a holiday. The blanket has changed my life. By the end of the second day I was getting very hungry and a bit tired of sitting in absolute pitch-dark. Then those pictures. They’d already shown me the destroyed rear cabin of Maddie’s Lysander, but these were new – enlargements from the pilot’s cockpit.

Oh Maddie

Maddie

That was the last peaceful moment of my holiday. Also, they have been questioning that French girl again. I was lying with my nose pressed to the crack underneath the door – I’d been crying, and it is the only place I get any light – and recognised her feet as they dragged her by (she has rather pretty feet, and she is always barefoot).

I would not have slept well after those pictures anyway, but have I said before that my room is attached to the suite they use for interviews, etc.? You would have to be stone deaf to sleep through it even in a feather bed.

The following morning a trio of soldiers clapped me in chains – chains! – and hauled me to a sub-basement where I was sure I was going to be dissected. No, it turned out to be the kitchen – literally the kitchen of this desecrated hotel, which is where they cook up our delicious grey cabbage soup. (They do not bake bread here – when we get bread it is stale ends cast off from somewhere else.) Apparently the charwoman who scrubbed the pots, swept the floors of sawdust and spread down less mouldy sawdust in its place, hauled wood and coal, emptied all the prisoners’ waste buckets and slopped them out, peeled potatoes for the Gestapo officers’ soup (I like to imagine she did these last two jobs without washing her hands in between) – etc. – has been sacked. More accurately she has been arrested and sent to prison – not this one, obviously – because she stole a couple of cabbages. Anyway yesterday and the day before they needed someone else to do all these challenging tasks while they found another drudge to replace her.

Who better suited for such work than an idle Special Operations Flight Officer? The chains were meant as a reminder that I am a prisoner, not an employee. Chiefly a reminder to the cook and his underlings, I think, but the cook was such a foul and filthy beast he would not have noticed if I’d been in drag as the Führer himself, so long as he could fondle my breasts.

And – I let him do it. For food, you might suppose, but no! (Although the old goat did very generously let me feast on the scraps when they’d finished peeling the tatties. I did not have to peel anything myself as they wisely would not give me a knife.) No, just like my soul, I sold my body for paper.

The basement of the Chateau de Bordeaux is a warren of strangeness. Rather spooky. There are a few rooms (those with freezers and gas ovens) that they probably use for horrible experiments, but mostly these cellars are empty because they are not secure and are generally just too damn dark for productive activity. All the hotel’s catering equipment is still down there – huge coffee urns, copper pans the size of bathtubs, milk cans (empty), empty wine bottles and jam pots stacked everywhere, even a row of dust-covered, greasy blue aprons still hanging in a passageway. 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, and it was in exploring one of the small ones (with an eye to escaping up it if I could squeeze into it) that I discovered the paper – stacks and stacks of unused recipe cards, shoved in the dumb waiter to get them out of the way.