Code Name Verity(87)

She

Julie was

– BLAST IT. Fly the plane, Maddie.

—

I WILL NOT CRY.

I got to talk to Miss Penn myself. Mitraillette and I met her by a little pond in a posh residential area of Ormaie and sat on a bench winding yarn while we talked, one of us girls on each side of Miss Penn and a canvas bag in her lap full of worn-out woolly socks to be unravelled. She must have looked like our nanny, she’s nearly a foot taller than either of us. She talked and we kept dipping into the bag for more yarn while we listened. Suddenly in the middle of her report, as I reached for another sock, Miss Penn took hold of my hand and held it tight. Just mine, not Mitraillette’s, don’t know how she guessed that I was the one who’d take it hard. A bit of an interrogator herself, now that I think about it – same job as the rest of them, pulling sensational stories out of reluctant sources. They all do it differently, but it’s the same job. And Julie, also an expert, made it easy, volunteering information that Penn didn’t ask for.

‘You feeling brave, Kittyhawk?’ Penn said, holding my hand tightly.

I gave her a sort of grimace of a smile. ‘I suppose.’

‘There’s no nice way to tell you this,’ Penn said, and her crisp, no-nonsense American voice was angry. We waited.

Penn told us quietly, ‘She’s been tortured.’

Couldn’t answer for a minute. Couldn’t do anything.

Probably seemed quite sullen – not surprised really, but Penn was so frank it felt like being hit in the face. Finally I croaked stupidly, ‘Are you sure?’

‘She showed me,’ Penn said. ‘She was pretty clear about it. Adjusted her scarf as soon as we’d shaken hands – gave me a good look. Ugly row of narrow, triangular burns across her throat and collarbone, just beginning to heal, looked like it had been done with a soldering iron. More of the same all along the insides of her wrists. She was very clever about showing me, cool as you please, no drama about it. She’d give her skirt a twitch as she crossed her legs, or let her sleeve ruck back as she took a cigarette, only moving when the captain was looking somewhere else. Ghastly bruises on her legs. But the marks are fading now, must have all been done two or three weeks ago. They’ve eased off on her, don’t know why – she’s made some kind of deal with them, that’s for sure, or she wouldn’t still be here. You’d have thought by now Ormaie would have either got what they wanted out of her or given up.’

‘Made a deal with them!’ I choked.

‘Well, some of us manage to pull it off.’ Miss Penn gently guided my hand back to the bag of socks. Then she confessed, ‘Hard to tell what your friend thinks she’s doing though. She was – she was focused. She didn’t expect to hear her own code name come up in the conversation and it shook her, but she didn’t – you know, she didn’t hint at rescue – I think she’s still dead set on completing her assignment, and has reason to believe she can do it from inside.’ Miss Penn gave me a sideways glance. ‘Do you know what her assignment was?’

‘No,’ I lied.

‘Well,’ Miss Penn said, ‘here’s what she told me. Maybe you can make something of it.’

But I can’t. I don’t know what to do with any of it. It’s like – it must be like palaeontology. Trying to put a dinosaur together based on a few random bones and you don’t even know if they’re all from the same kind of animal.

I’ll write down what Julie’s given us though – perhaps Paul will make sense of it –

1) The building the Gestapo use in Ormaie has got its own generator. Penn was complaining about power cuts, and how annoying it is not to be able to count on electricity when you work in radio, and Julie said, ‘Well, here we make it ourselves.’ How like her to talk as if she’d become one of them. Like the time she took me to see Colonel Blimp and sat there weeping all through the scene where the imprisoned German officers are listening to Mendelssohn.

2) The fuse box is under the grand staircase. Miss Penn didn’t say how our Julie managed to communicate that. Did also mention:

3) It is a known fact that the Nazis have a wireless office across the square from the Gestapo HQ, in the town hall, and according to Julie this must be because there is no regular broadcasting set-up in the Chateau de Bordeaux building – Penn thinks because the walls are too thick for good reception, but I reckon the generator interferes with the reception more than the walls. This information was passed dead casually. SOE call radio work ‘arthritis’, easy peasy. Can just imagine Julie. Studying her nails. ‘Fortunately I don’t suffer from stiff joints. No one does here. How these Nazis would take advantage!’