Scorched Earth - Robert Muchamore Page 0,2
duties such as emptying latrines, burying bodies and working as servants to senior officers.
CHAPTER TWO
Edith Mercier looked uncomfortable as she lugged a wicker basket along Beauvais’ Rue Desgroux. The rain had stopped, but the slim fifteen-year-old trod cautiously because the cobbles were still damp. She’d passed a postman and a few folks heading to work, but this municipal district would stay quiet for another hour.
Allied bombs had demolished shops and houses behind the Rue Desgroux and opened deep cracks in the façade of the town’s main administrative office. Behind stacked sandbags and a side wall braced with wooden props, staff inside the offices continued with duties, ranging from civil weddings to issuing bicycle licences.
The upper floor was used by the city’s German administrators, so the building warranted a rain-soaked swastika pennant and a single German guard out front. Edith quickly glanced at this guard before taking a long step and deliberately losing her balance. Her basket spilled, sending onions bobbling in all directions, and she howled to make sure that her ‘accident’ wasn’t missed.
She’d hoped the guard would rush to her aid. But the young soldier had arranged sandbags into a kind of lounger and had the air of someone who’d only get up if a bomb went off, or a senior officer threatened a court martial for lying down on the job.
Edith steamed. She’d practised realistic falls back in the woods and the slippery cobbles should have made her stunt believable.
‘Oh, my back,’ she moaned. ‘Can you give me a hand?’
Edith’s summer dress was getting soaked and the young German still wasn’t taking the bait. She righted the basket and started crawling around, picking up the onions. She went for the onions nearest the sandbag wall and growled at the guard.
‘What a gentleman you are!’
The guard raised one eyebrow sarcastically as he rested a small book in his lap. He was handsome, no older than twenty. Edith found this odd because the German army sent young men to fight, and left older ones playing night watchmen in small French towns. But as the man leaned out of shadow, his horribly scarred cheek emerged, followed by a knotted sleeve where his left arm ended in a stump.
The German gave a sly smile, then spoke slow but accurate French. ‘What if mademoiselle is a resistance spy sent to distract me?’ he asked. ‘What if one of your onions explodes when I pick it up?’
‘Do I look like someone with explosive onions?’ Edith replied, hands on hips as she scowled over the sandbags.
‘How should I know what a spy looks like?’
It didn’t matter how Edith distracted the German and, while he hadn’t offered to help, a night alone on guard duty had bored him enough to crave conversation.
‘What happened to your arm?’ Edith asked.
‘The war happened,’ he said grumpily.
‘Could have worked that one out,’ Edith said. ‘Don’t you like talking about it?’
‘Saw plenty come off worse,’ the guard said. ‘And I can’t hold a rifle, so I can’t go anywhere there’s bullets flying.’
As he said this, the guard finally stepped out from behind the sandbags. He kicked an onion backwards with his heel, let it roll up the front of his other boot and skilfully flipped it into the air. A clumsy one-handed catch spoiled the stunt, but it still made Edith smile.
‘You play football?’ she asked.
‘I was apprenticed to a factory team, before I ran off to join the army.’
‘You volunteered?’ Edith asked.
The German shrugged and gestured towards his stump. ‘Not my greatest decision, but they would have conscripted me within a year anyway.’
*
As the guard focused on his trick with the onion, CHERUB agent PT Bivott shot out of a doorway 20 metres away. The eighteen-year-old had dark, slicked back hair and a frame that had bulked up in the two years since he’d stopped growing taller.
PT was trailed by a middle-aged teacher named Jean Leclerc. The pair kept low as they ran 10 metres over cobbles, then cut down four stone steps into a passageway where the administrative building adjoined a disused fire station.
After doing their best not to crunch rubble and broken glass, they came to a peeling blue door at the end. Their key was a handmade copy and it took rattling and hand strength to turn, but Edith was still speaking to the one-armed German as they ducked to safety through the low entrance and breathed mildew and rodent piss in the admin building’s basement.
Flipping the light switch did nothing, but Jean had a battery-powered torch