One Shot Kill - Robert Muchamore Page 0,13

Saturday off.’

‘We’ll just be here until dark, Madame,’ Eugene said. ‘We need three horses and I’ll pay whatever you ask. We’ve got a train to catch this evening and after that you’ll never see us again.’

‘Do you have a bath?’ Rosie asked; breathing air tinged with the smell of horse piss, while realising she ought to have removed her sewage-smeared boots before stepping indoors.

‘I’ve a tin bath but no coal. I’ve been chopping wood, but my back is terrible and that Michel is hardly worth the money I pay him.’

Eugene smiled as he showed off his bicep and sensed a chance to win the old girl over.

‘Big strong arms,’ he said. ‘I can chop all the wood you need.’

Madame Lisle was on edge. She couldn’t sit still and over the next couple of hours her mood flitted between sympathy and resentment. She helped Rosie scrub Edith in tepid water, and found some bandage and iodine for her wounds, but she snapped at Eugene and didn’t thank him for chopping wood and helping her feed the horses.

The German visitors were due at eleven and Madame Lisle led them upstairs. The first floor was the home’s single bedroom. Photos of pet dogs and faded rosettes from horse shows were pinned around the dressing table.

While Eugene squatted by a small sash window, Edith lay on the bed as Rosie practised her nursing skills, cleaning the dirt out of wounds and putting in a couple of stitches with sterile thread from her first aid pack.

‘I could shoot him dead from here,’ Eugene said quietly, as he peered down at a horse trotting on the cobbles behind the house.

The grey-haired German in the saddle wore brown riding boots and a dark blue Kriegsmarine admiral’s uniform. He was accompanied by the naval rating who worked as his assistant, while a driver waited in the open-topped Mercedes out front.

Edith hissed with pain as Rosie dabbed dark purple iodine fluid into a deep cigar burn on her shoulder blade.

‘Sorry,’ Rosie said. ‘The wounds down your legs are already badly infected. I need to seal these up to stop it spreading.’

‘I know,’ Edith said, as a tear streaked down her face. ‘I’m trying to keep quiet but it really hurts.’

Eugene watched as the German took the horse on a trot across the cobbles and the surrounding paddock. He was clearly an expert rider and when he jumped off, he gave Madame Lisle an enormous smile.

‘You breed such beautiful animals,’ the admiral told her, as he smiled under his great walrus moustache. ‘The price as agreed, in Reichsmarks. Shall we go indoors to settle up?’

Eugene ducked below the window frame as the German turned back towards the house.

‘Madame seems awfully friendly with the admiral,’ Eugene noted warily.

Rosie dismissed the thought. ‘He’s an officer. He loves horses, of course she likes him.’

‘Madame Lisle’s horses are beautiful,’ Edith said, sounding like she was a little bit out of it. ‘If I ever got rich, they’d be the first thing I’d buy.’

Edith was weak and her whole body ached from being tortured, but after eating, drinking and washing she felt human for the first time in days. And the chance of life, after facing execution, gave her a sense of elation.

‘I don’t think this floor is very thick,’ Eugene said, as he heard Madame Lisle and the officer chatting in the kitchen directly below. ‘Put the iodine down and keep still for a bit. We can’t risk another yelp.’

Downstairs, the admiral began counting out his money.

‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Madame Lisle said. ‘I trust your word as an officer.’

The admiral laughed.

‘When the Gestapo buy horses, I count their money,’ Madame Lisle said. ‘Those thugs practically steal them, the prices they force me to accept.’

‘They’re not gentlemen,’ the admiral said, speaking in stilted but polite French. ‘We’d have none of this trouble with resistance if the French people had been treated correctly. But what do I know? You and I hail from a gentler era.’

Madame Lisle gave a friendly laugh, but as that noise faded Eugene thought he heard the clatter of a diesel engine.

‘Sounds like a truck,’ Eugene whispered.

He crept across the bedroom to hear better, but there was no window overlooking the front of the house.

‘Maybe it’s to take the horse away,’ Rosie suggested.

‘You can’t take a horse in a regular truck,’ Edith said. ‘You’d frighten it to death.’

Rosie’s heart accelerated as Eugene picked up the machine gun resting on top of his backpack and edged towards the door.

‘How can anyone know