Code Name Verity(77)

But the real reason she won’t tell them K?the Habicht’s name is because she knows that if I landed safely it is the only identity I have.

The photographer works ‘for the enemy’ too. Proper British airmen flying over the European Continent carry a couple of photographs in their emergency kit, just in case they’re shot down and need fake ID. But my photographs are being taken by an official Gestapo-employed French photographer! One of his other jobs is developing enlarged pictures of my crash – he brought some of the prints to show us. Impossible to describe the dual thrill and dread in watching him undo the string fastener of his cardboard folder, then slide free the glossy paper – paper destined for the desk of the Gestapo captain in Ormaie. Like feeling the buffet of the first shadow fingers of cool air touch your wings, as the storm cloud you’ve been trying to outrun begins to catch up with you. This is how close I am to the Ormaie Gestapo – the photographer could hand me over with the pictures.

He warned me in English, ‘Not nice to look at.’

The most disturbing thing was knowing it was meant to be me. That terrible charred corpse was wearing my clothes, bone and leather fused into the shattered cockpit in my place. ATA wings still tracing a pale outline on the sunken wreck of the breastbone. There was a blown-up detail of the ghostly wings, just the wings – you couldn’t tell it was an ATA crest in particular.

I didn’t like it. Why focus on the pilot’s badge – just . . . Why?

‘What is this for?’ I asked. I could just about manage the French. ‘What will they do with these photographs?’

‘There is an English airman being held in Ormaie,’ the photographer explained. ‘They want to show him these pictures, ask him questions about them.’

They shot down a British bomber this week. In decent weather we get swarms of Allied aircraft flying over every night, and some in daylight too. Think we’ve stopped bombing Italy since the Allied invasion last month, but now Italy’s declared war on Germany, things are really hotting up. We’re too far from Ormaie to hear the sirens unless the wind is in the right direction. But you can see the sky flashing when the gunners on the ground fire at the passing planes.

That was me holding tight to the close-up print of my burnt wings, trying to figure it out. It’s the least horrific of the pictures of the fake pilot, but it’s the one that disturbed me the most. Finally I looked up at Paul.

‘What’s a captured lad from a bomber crew going to know about a wrecked reconnaissance aircraft?’

He shrugged. ‘You tell me. You’re the pilot.’

The sheet of glossy paper shook in my hand.

I stopped that straight away. Fly the plane, Maddie.

‘You think their captured English airman might be Verity?’

Paul shrugged again. ‘She’s not an airman.’

‘Nor English,’ I added.

‘But she’s probably carrying your English pilot’s licence and National Registration card,’ Paul pointed out quietly. ‘There aren’t any photographs on your British ID, right? You’re a civilian. So even if they know your name they won’t know what you look like. Tell me, Kittyhawk, how convincing do you think these pictures are? Would you recognise yourself? Would anyone else?’

That melted corpse was hardly even recognisable as a human being. But those ATA wings . . . Oh, I don’t want Julie to see these pictures and be told she’s looking at me.

Because she knows the plane. There’s no denying it’s the same plane – the markings are still visible, R 3892. I just – can’t think about this, Julie in prison, being made to look at these pictures.

I said to Paul, ‘Ask the photographer how long he can stall before he has to turn these in.’

The photographer understood me without needing a translation.

‘I wait,’ he said. ‘The Gestapo captain will wait. The pictures were not good when I made them, perhaps, not clear enough, and need to be made over again. It will take a long time. The Englishman must tell the captain of other things. He will not see the pictures of the pilot yet. We can give them these others to begin –’

He pulled more glossy sheets from the folder and held one out to me. It was the inside of the rear cockpit, loaded with the ashy remains of ‘onze radios’ – eleven ‘wireless sets.’

I gasped with laughter. Beastly of me, I know, but it is a BRILLIANT photograph – totally convincing. It is the best thing I have seen in the last two weeks. If they have got Julie and they show her that picture, it will be a gift. She will make up an operator and a destination for every single one of those phoney radios, and the frequencies and code sets to go with it. She will lead them blind.