cops,’ he explained, as he grabbed a grubby shirt off the floor. ‘Two nights ago. And the bastards stole my whole night’s coal.’
‘Sorry to hear that,’ Rosie said, then she began to explain about the bunker in the woods and how she needed to get close to it and take photographs. For security, she didn’t mention Dr Blanc’s role or the notebook. She just said that her boss in the resistance had asked her to get information.
By this time Justin had woken up enough for some of his cockiness to return. He scratched his chin with black fingernails before speaking.
‘What’s in it for me?’
Rosie smiled. ‘It’s for France. You said you hated the Boche when you met me on the train the other night.’
Justin shrugged. ‘I don’t much like ’em. If the Brits and Yanks sweep into town tomorrow, what difference will it make to me?’
‘Didn’t you say your dad was a prisoner? You’d be better off with him at home, wouldn’t you?’
Justin shrugged. ‘He’s a drunk.’
Rosie realised concepts like freedom and patriotism didn’t mean much to a ten-year-old who spent his life picking up coal scraps to earn enough money to keep his family from going hungry. But Rosie had money and resistance leaders like Eugene and Maxine paid people for their work.
‘How much do you earn selling coal on a good night? Whatever it is, I’ll pay you the same whenever you work for me. And I can get you some treats. I bought chocolate with me from Paris.’
Justin raised one eyebrow. ‘I’ll cop another beating if I’m caught on the train. What will I get if I’m caught helping the resistance? And what will they do to my mum and the girls?’
Rosie saw Justin’s point, but decided not to offer more. It was good to put things on a professional basis and reward people who helped the resistance, but offering large sums of money encouraged greed and led to suspicious behaviour when they spent it.
‘If it’s just about money, I can’t trust you,’ Rosie said, pretending that she wasn’t bothered either way. ‘I can tell you’ve got a good heart. You could have earned a fortune turning me and Edith in, but you did the right thing and sent for Dr Blanc.’
Justin went quiet, and stared at his filthy toes poking from the end of his blanket.
‘You can’t tell my mum because she’ll whip me. And the girls tend to speak without thinking, so keep them out of this too.’
‘OK,’ Rosie said, still not sure what Justin was offering.
‘I know a lot of kids who hunt in the forest, but what you really need are people who you can trust not to go running to the Germans, right?’
Rosie nodded. Justin was smarter than any ten-year-old ought to be.
‘There’s two guys about your age who spend a lot of time in the forest – Didier and Jean,’ Justin explained. ‘They’re from Rennes, but they went on the run when they got called up for labour service. They’re proper rough. I was scared the first couple of times I met them, but I trade my coal for their meat and they’ve never tried to rip me off.’
First Joseph, then the men in the apartment below in Paris, and now these two – Rosie was starting to feel that every young man in France was hiding out to avoid compulsory labour service in Germany.
‘Sounds ideal,’ Rosie said. ‘I’ll pay whatever you would have earned by selling coal. Is that a deal?’
Justin nodded. ‘Those boys move around, so we may have a job tracking them down. But they usually come into town once every couple of nights, selling hares or rabbits to the butcher’s shop near Dr Blanc’s surgery.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Rosie was in a rural area, with clumps of cottages sprawled out over family smallholdings. The local centre was a cluster of businesses where three dirt tracks joined the cobbled route into Rennes. This strip had no official name, but everyone called it the junction.
Along with Dr Blanc’s surgery and the butcher’s shop, the junction had a grocer, a bakery, a farm supply store and a blacksmith. A church with sprawling graveyard stood on higher ground a couple of hundred metres further along.
Locals walked or came by cart, while a vehicle from the German garrison passed through once or twice per day. It was the type of place where everyone knew each other and would gossip over anything unusual, so Rosie and Justin kept look out from an overgrown section of the