Code Name Verity(66)

Miss E. has managed to scrounge some ice for my water. It will have melted by the time we get around to scouring out the filthiest mouth in France, but it was a nice thought.

—

Now we are back in the air again, suspended over the fields and rivers north of Ormaie and under a serene but not-quite-full moon at its splendid silver height, in a plane that can’t be landed. The wireless operator flashes the correct signal to the ground and barely a minute later the flare path appears. It is perfectly familiar, three flickering points of light forming an upside-down L, just like the makeshift runway Maddie made her efficient practice landings on 4 hours ago in England.

Maddie circled once over the field. She didn’t know how long the flare path would stay lit and didn’t want to waste the light. She began to descend in the oblong flight pattern she’d used earlier. Over her shoulder, through the opening in the bulkhead, her friend watched the faintly illuminated dial on the instrument panel that showed the altitude – they weren’t losing much height.

‘Can’t do it,’ Maddie gasped, and the Lysander floated rapidly upward like a helium balloon. She hadn’t even added power. ‘I just can’t do it! Remember what I told you about the first Lysander I ever landed, how the handwheel for adjusting the tailplane was broken, and the ground crew thought I wouldn’t be strong enough to hold the control column forward without trimming it? Only I was able to set it neutral before I got in. Well, it’s not neutral now, it’s stuck in the climb – for the last hour it’s taken every ounce of strength I have to stop us climbing – and I’m just not strong enough to hold it far enough forward that we can land. I keep dropping power and it doesn’t make any difference. If I turn the engine off and try to dump the dratted thing down in a dead stall I think it’ll still try to climb. And then it’ll fall into a spin and kill us. If I could stall it, that is. It’s impossible to stall a Lizzie.’

Queenie didn’t answer.

‘Going round,’ Maddie grunted. ‘Going to have another go anyway, try a shallower descent. Still have quite a lot of fuel, don’t really want to crash and go up in flames.’

They’d soared up to two and a half thousand feet in the time it took Maddie to explain all this. She flexed her wrists and wrestled the control column forward again. ‘Bother. Drat. Double drat.’ (‘Double drat’ is the most fearsome oath Maddie ever swears.)

She was getting tired. She didn’t manage to descend as far as she had the first time, and overshot the field. She turned back steeply, lost no height and swore again as the airframe shuddered, automatic flaps clattering alarmingly as the plane tried to decide what speed it was flying.

‘Perhaps not impossible to stall!’ Maddie gasped. ‘Jolly well don’t want to stall at five hundred feet or we’re dead. Let me think . . .’

Queenie let her think, watching the altimeter. They were gaining height again.

‘Climbing on purpose now,’ Maddie said grimly. ‘I’ll take you up to 3000 feet. Don’t want to go higher or I’ll never get back down. You’ll be able to jump safely.’

—

That horrid trio of guards has just come to fetch me somewhere – Engel chatting with them in annoyed tones just beyond my range of hearing, outside the door. They did not appear to be gloved, so perhaps they are not here to administer the phenol. Please God. Oh why am I so coarse and thoughtless. Whatever it is now, I dread not being able to finish almost more than I dre



I have fifteen minutes.

The battered French girl and I were taken together down through the cellars and out to a little stone courtyard that must once have been the hotel’s laundry. She proud & limping, her pretty bare feet hideous with open wounds and her white face swollen with bruising, ignoring me. We were tied to each other, wrist to wrist. In that small stone space open to the sky they have erected a guillotine. It is the usual way a woman spy is executed in Berlin.

We had to wait while they prepared this and that – threw open a gate to the lower lane to shock & entertain passers-by, hoisted the blade & ropes in place, etc. I don’t know how the mechanics of it work. It had been used recently, blood still on the blade. We stood tied together mutely, and I thought, They will make me watch. They will kill her first and make me watch. Then they will kill me.

I knew she knew it too, but of course she would not look at me or speak to me, though the backs of our hands were touching.

5 minutes.