One Shot Kill - Robert Muchamore Page 0,7
an arm around his back.
‘I recruited most of them,’ Eugene said. ‘One woman spat in my face. Told me her daughter was tortured and raped before they hung her. She blamed me for leading her into it.’
‘You know you’re not to blame,’ Rosie said. ‘She’s upset.’
Eugene wrung his hands and sobbed. ‘It’ll be worth it when the workers’ revolution comes,’ he said, though his retreat into communist propaganda sounded unconvincing.
‘Can we try and rebuild the group?’ Rosie asked.
‘Maybe someone can, but not me. They’ll have my description, maybe even a surveillance photograph. They’ve arrested so many people that it would be like starting from scratch. Probably harder, because everyone’s so scared.’
‘Have you got any idea who the informant was?’
‘Does it even matter?’ Eugene asked. ‘It’s not the first resistance group to collapse. I doubt it’ll be the last.’
‘We’ll have to leave then,’ Rosie said. ‘Sooner the better. We’ll go to Paris, make contact with the Ghost circuit and they’ll find us another task or a route home.’
Eugene made a kind of hissing sound, and Rosie backed up thinking that he’d found her remark insensitive.
‘I still have one friend,’ Eugene said. ‘A German inside Gestapo Headquarters. Because of her position I never told anyone else about her.’
Rosie looked curious. ‘How did you get to know her?’
‘I met her when I was working in one of Madame Mercier’s bars. She’s in her forties. Husband crashed his plane over Poland, two sons killed on the Eastern Front, so she’s no fan of the Nazis.’
‘Did you have an affair with her?’
Eugene laughed. ‘I’m half her age. She’s just a lonely soul who needed someone to talk to.’
‘And she knows you’re with the resistance?’
‘For the first few months that I knew her she thought I was a barman and I just picked up random gossip from her. When her second son died, it was clear how much she hated the war and I gradually opened her up to the possibility of helping the resistance. At first I worried that she might be manipulating me, but the information she’s fed us has been far too valuable to be part of any ruse.’
‘But she did nothing about the arrests?’
‘If it had crossed her desk, I’m sure she would have found a way to tip one of my people off,’ Eugene said. ‘When I met her today she told me something else. Do you remember Edith Mercier, from when you were here two years back?’
‘Vaguely,’ Rosie said, giving a slight nod. ‘Skinny bag of bones, lived in Madame Mercier’s stable block?’
Eugene nodded. ‘Apparently the Gestapo got what they wanted out of everyone. The ones they didn’t hang in public have already been sent to camps in Poland or Germany. But Edith not only fought off two days of torture without saying a word, but apparently managed to take one of the Gestapo’s senior investigators out with a fountain pen through the jugular.’
Rosie smiled a little. ‘Good for her.’
‘Not really,’ Eugene said. ‘Apparently they’re putting on a show this Saturday. They’re going to hang her in front of the station, along with the mothers of two young lads who worked for me inside the submarine base.’
The thought of execution brought a tightness to Rosie’s throat. ‘Were the mothers involved with the resistance?’ she asked.
‘Not unless you count cooking their sons’ dinners. But it’s a powerful deterrent. People baulk when they know that their loved ones’ necks are on the line as well as their own.’
‘So is there anything we can do?’ Rosie asked. ‘There’s only two of us. We can’t take on the entire Gestapo.’
‘The mothers are being held at a prison in town, I don’t think there’s anything I’ll be able to do for them. But my lady friend has promised to try getting some information on Edith.’
‘So we might be able to help her?’ Rosie asked uneasily.
Eugene looked uncertain. ‘There’s an outside chance, but it won’t be easy.’
CHAPTER FIVE
The blackness took away all sense of time. Edith wasn’t sure whether to expect further interrogation or execution, but for two days the only attention she got was an occasional set of eyes peering through the slot in the door. When her thirst grew, she sucked beads of condensation off the cell wall and grew tempted by the urine sloshing in the filthy bucket.
When the door swung into the cell, light blinded eyes accustomed to pitch dark.
‘Up against the back wall,’ a female orderly shouted.
After biting one interrogator and killing another, Edith was regarded as dangerous, despite barely having