operators and turned them against us,’ Eugene explained. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time the Nazis have pulled that stunt.’
‘So where to now?’ Rosie asked, backing up as Eugene took his turn drinking from the tap.
‘We’ll get to a safe house with a radio before morning.’
‘Could it have been compromised?’
Eugene shook his head. ‘This is my personal safe house. Nobody knows about it. We’ll wash, eat and rest. Then we’ll start investigating. You’ll have to transmit a message home explaining what’s happened. Get them to re-check all transmissions coming out of Lorient in the last seven weeks and look for anything suspicious.’
*
Edith came to as a pair of strange guards dragged her down concrete stairs. She couldn’t have been out for long because the corridors of the Roman villa were in uproar. She couldn’t understand German, but angry sounds the same in any language.
‘Is shit-head dead?’ Edith asked, as her head rolled sideways.
Neither guard answered, but one of them gripped her arm extra tight. It hurt, but it was good to know that she’d pissed the Germans off. She wanted to hum something patriotic to see if she could really set them off, but her head was thudding and her jaw felt like a block of wood.
A cell door clanked. The space was bare concrete, except for a shit-crusted bucket. The guards threw Edith at a puddled floor.
Puddle of what? Edith thought, as pain ignited in every welt and burn.
‘You’ll hang for killing him,’ one of the guards shouted, as the cell door banged, plunging Edith into complete blackness.
Pain and anger gave Edith a shot of energy.
‘You’d have hung me anyway,’ she shouted back. ‘At least I took one of you bastards with me.’
Edith tried to get comfortable as the guards’ footsteps faded out, but she was sore in a hundred places and the floor was hard. She put her back against the wall, tucked her knees up to her chin and stretched the oversized vest over her legs to try and stay warm.
She didn’t want to give the Germans the satisfaction of hearing her sob, but from this dark spot, the only thing she could see was her own death.
CHAPTER FOUR
After invading in summer 1940, the Nazis forced hundreds of thousands of French peasants to abandon countryside in newly declared military zones running the length of the Atlantic coast. Three years on, buildings were disintegrating, swathes of farmland had returned to nature, and the Nazis had inadvertently created a perfect hiding place for their enemies.
All well-run resistance groups arranged safe houses, where you could hide out, or pick up essentials before going on the run. Eugene had made his personal bolthole in a deserted two-room farmhand’s cottage. It sat on a hillock six kilometres from the centre of Lorient, with good visibility in all directions and two kilometres from the nearest major road.
Besides the equipment they’d arrived with, Rosie and Eugene could draw on a radio transmitter, weapons and tinned food stashed in the surrounding fields.
Eugene had impressed his superiors in the two years since he’d taken control of the Lorient resistance group, and he’d impressed Rosie in the two days since their disastrous parachute drop. A lot of young men would have panicked and raged, but Eugene handled troubles with the calm air of an elderly chap solving The Times crossword.
For the first twenty-four hours, they’d laid low, staying in the dirt-floored cottage, except for a trip outside to dig up tinned food and retrieve a radio transmitter hidden in the roof of a nearby barn.
Rosie had transmitted a short message in encrypted Morse code, explaining what had happened on arrival, and asking for a review of all messages received from the Lorient resistance circuit over the past few weeks.
On the second morning – a Tuesday – Eugene set off before sunrise. The centre of town was too risky, but he’d made a mental list of people he knew in the suburbs and surrounding villages.
Some were active members of his resistance unit, but most were relatives of members, or sympathisers: people who’d turned a blind eye, or given some small assistance during a past operation.
Rosie stayed back at the house, waiting to pick up a radio transmission. She felt uncomfortable being alone, with no certainty about when – or even if – Eugene would return. After breakfasting on apples and pears picked from trees near the back door, she tried reading Eugene’s battered copy of The Communist Manifesto.
There were two schools of thought on what would happen if