the car pulled up in front of eighty-four, Avenue Foch. From the outside, it looked like many other buildings in the elegant sixteenth arrondissement.
‘Courage,’ Claire whispered, leaning as close to Vivi as she dared. ‘I can be strong if you can too.’ She wasn’t sure whether her friend had heard the words and, if she had, whether they’d registered. Vivi still appeared to be deep in shock, or perhaps stunned by a blow to her head. But after a moment Claire felt a reassuring squeeze of her hand in return.
The car door was flung open and Vivi was dragged out. Then two pairs of hands grabbed Claire and she was manhandled into the building. The bag of clothes she’d packed so hastily was wrenched from her grasp and handed to a grey-uniformed woman who disappeared with it.
‘Take them straight to the sixth floor,’ one of the men barked, as he removed his cap and gloves. ‘Let’s see how these dressmakers enjoy a spell in the “kitchen”.’
Just like the apartment in the Rue Cardinale, the attic rooms in this building were cramped and sloping with small windows. But that was where any similarity ended. Boards had been nailed across the window-frames and the room that Claire was led into had nothing in it but a single metal-framed chair beneath a bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling. She heard a door slam shut a little further along the corridor and presumed that Vivi had been bundled into a room similar to this one.
The two men who came to question her were polite at first. ‘Please, mademoiselle, take a seat,’ one said, patting her shoulder as he ushered her towards the chair. ‘We really don’t wish to detain you any longer than is necessary. So if you’ll just answer our questions then we can let you be on your way. Can I get you anything? A glass of water, perhaps?’
She was aware that his apparent kindness was a ploy to get her to drop her guard. She shook her head, clasping her hands together tightly in her lap to prevent her whole body from trembling.
Their opening questions seemed almost inconsequential, the man’s tone pleasantly conversational. How long had she worked for Delavigne Couture? Did she enjoy her work? And how long had her red-headed friend worked there? She refused to speak at all to begin with, shaking her head.
The second man, who had been pacing up and down, turned on his heel abruptly and brought his face close to hers. She could smell the staleness of his breath, and flecks of spit spattered her face as he hissed, ‘You are a very attractive young woman, Claire. It would be a shame to spoil such a pretty face. I suggest you start co-operating now. Tell us what your friend – Vivienne, isn’t it? – was doing with a shortwave radio in her room. You must have known. And maybe you were working with her, hein? Did she give you messages to carry?’
Claire shook her head again, not daring to raise a hand to wipe the drops of spittle from her face. She wondered, briefly, how he knew their names. Someone – Ernst maybe? – must have given them to him.
‘Very well.’ The man straightened up again. She thought he had turned to walk away from her, so when he spun back round and hit her across the face the blow seemed to come out of nowhere. She cried out then in shock and pain, the sound of her own voice seeming alien to her. She needed to stay strong for Vivi, just as she knew Vivi would stay strong for her. And so she spoke then, determined to regain control of her voice.
Her words were low and trembling, but she managed to say, ‘I am Claire Meynardier. Vivienne Giscard is my friend. We are seamstresses in Saint-Germain.’ She would hold on to these three simple truths, she told herself. She would say nothing more.
Like waves washing up on the beach, time seemed to advance and retreat and she lost all track of how many hours might have passed. The minutes when they were questioning her felt interminable. But then the lapses of consciousness could have lasted seconds or days.
The pain ebbed and flowed too, sometimes hard-edged and blinding, sometimes enveloping her in darkness. She was sick with tiredness, but they wouldn’t let her sleep, questioning, coaxing, shouting until her head spun. And yet, each time she spoke it was to repeat the three