to separate rooms inside the prison. With support, Vivi had managed to stand and then she’d been half-carried by guards into a room where the door was shut firmly behind her. A female guard escorted Claire down a long corridor. She’d hobbled, trying to use only the outer edges of her feet where the pain was just about bearable. Then the guard had made her stand, while she herself sat behind a desk and filled in a pile of paperwork with Claire’s details. And finally, without a word, she’d led Claire here, to this darkened cell, in the solitary confinement wing of the prison.
Sitting on her bed in the cramped darkness which filled her nostrils with the stench of mildew and urine, it was some minutes before Claire registered the tapping noise. It seemed to be coming from the wall behind her. At first, she thought it might be rats or mice. Then, as she listened, she realised there was a more regular rhythm to it. Perhaps it was air trapped in the pipes concealed beneath the brickwork, she thought. But the noise persisted.
She raised her head from her hands, to listen more carefully. And then she realised that someone was tapping out a pattern, repeating it over and over again. Three quick taps, and then a fourth with a longer pause, then two more quick taps. And then the same pattern was repeated for a second time, followed by a silence for a few moments before the whole sequence began again. The tapping was muffled by the brick wall, but the repetition was distinct. It had to be a code, spelling something out.
She tapped back on the wall, copying the pattern. The code came back immediately from the next-door cell, repeated more quickly this time. And then she realised that she recognised the first part of it. She’d heard it at the beginning of the radio broadcast that her father and brother had tuned into that evening when they were waiting for the coded BBC message to tell them that the operation was to go ahead to get Fréd to safety. The first four notes of the Beethoven symphony: V for Victory. It was Morse code! And there was another letter added in between. Two quick dots . . .
She tapped the pattern back again, more fluently this time: the letter ‘V’, then two quick taps, then the letter ‘V’ again and two more quick taps. There was a flurry of answering knocks, like a round of applause.
It was Vivi! She was there, on the other side of the wall. They were still together, side by side. She wasn’t alone.
And now that Claire knew that, somehow the cold and the darkness of her prison cell wasn’t so unbearable after all.
Mireille had grown accustomed to the ringing of the doorbell late in the evening, shortly before the hours of the curfew, and to slipping down to open the door and receive the next escapee from the hands of the latest passeuse to be recruited by the network. Sometimes there was a single ‘guest’, other times there might be a couple of people making their perilous journey out of France, grateful to spend a night in the apartment under the roof of 12 Rue Cardinale where they were concealed by a young woman with a mass of dark curls, whose warm brown eyes held a look of sadness in their depths even when she smiled. But one night she opened the door to find Monsieur Leroux standing there.
She pulled him inside and shut the door quickly. ‘You have news?’ she asked.
‘There is news, yes. They have left the prison.’
She gasped. ‘Where are they? Can I see them?’
His hazel eyes were clouded with sorrow. ‘They’ve been taken on one of the transports. To a camp in Germany. That’s all we know. We have lost them now, I’m afraid.’
‘No!’ The word was wrenched from Mireille, her pain making it sound shrill in the darkening hallway.
He put an arm around her and hugged her as she cried out for her friends, raging against the cruelty of the world in which they’d all found themselves.
At last she grew quiet, regaining control. ‘What do we do now?’ she asked.
‘Now?’ he repeated. His voice was soft at first, but as he continued speaking the words grew stronger and more resolute. ‘Now we keep doing what we’ve been doing. And we do it every single day for as long as we can. Because that’s what they would want