and used fake ration coupons to buy bread. Eugene had told her of a black-market butcher down a grotty alleyway, but there was no sign of him. An old woman in a shawl said the butcher was dead, then sold her four eggs out of her shopping basket before vanishing over a bombsite.
‘So you’re a laundress?’ a Kriegsmarine2 guard asked, studying Rosie’s false papers as she tried to leave town. ‘A laundress with dirt under her nails.’
Rosie baulked – her hands were filthy, but a laundress would usually have clean hands and skin blanched by hot water and laundry soap. It was details like this that cost agents their lives.
‘My day off,’ Rosie said uneasily. ‘I was digging in my mother’s garden this morning.’
Luckily the guard was young and Rosie was pretty. Lustful thoughts overwhelmed any chance of him making a link between the girl before him and the female parachutist he’d been told to look out for.
‘I’ll be at the Underground Club from seven tonight,’ the guard said. ‘I’ll buy you a drink if you come and find me.’
He wasn’t bad looking and Rosie giggled as he handed her documents back. ‘Maybe I’ll take you up on that.’
The guard looked pleased with himself as Rosie strolled across the main bridge out of town.
*
Lorient Gestapo was having a quiet week – mainly because they’d just wiped out the local resistance. Word about Thorwald hosing Edith down spread through headquarters and once it became clear that Edith was too weak to fight back the bored investigators had a good deal of fun slapping her around and choking her.
Edith expected more torment when Thorwald opened her door first thing Saturday morning. Instead he gave her milk to drink, before tossing her a tatty linen dress and unmatched wooden clogs.
‘Gonna miss you, Edith,’ Thorwald said. ‘It’s been fun having you around.’
Edith flinched as Thorwald threw a fake jab at her gut.
‘Just kidding.’
But the kick behind the knees was real and Edith’s body slapped the stone floor.
‘Boot slipped,’ Thorwald teased. As Edith moaned in pain, her tormentor’s laughter turned to a bark, ‘Now get that dress on before you really piss me off.’
After swapping the filthy vest for the dress and sliding her feet into the clogs, Edith limped blindly into the light outside her cell and needed the banister to support herself as she headed upstairs.
Her legs were feeble as her feet clacked across a marble-floored lobby, full of talking and women at typewriters. Some of them turned to stare: scarcely believing this scrawny teen had caused so much trouble.
Despite her pain, Edith was determined to walk unaided. As she stepped into the villa’s courtyard and took her first outdoor breath in ten days, Thorwald signed her into the custody of the guard who’d been in the interrogation room before she killed Huber. Their ride was the rear compartment of a stately old Renault, with tasselled curtains at the windows.
‘Drive on,’ the guard ordered.
Edith knew they were taking her to die, but felt oddly calm. She’d known they’d execute her from the moment she’d attacked Huber. After five days of torment she just wanted it over with.
As the car rattled over cobbles she wondered if her destination was a firing squad at the town prison, or a more public demise on the gallows outside the train station. She marginally preferred the idea of hanging, imagining a last glimpse at some old friends and shouting something heroic that they’d all remember her by.
But Edith knew this was a fantasy. The Gestapo didn’t have the manpower to deal with large crowds, so they performed hangings at dawn and left the bodies on display for the busy Saturday market.
The car ride gave Edith’s eyes their first chance to adjust to daylight since the night she’d been arrested. It was a clear morning, hinting at a summer she never expected to see. She’d felt her wounds in the dark, but seeing her damaged arms and legs made her queasy and her dress was already stained with liquids oozing from her cuts.
The town had been bombed overnight. Edith hadn’t heard anything, so it had probably been a diversionary raid designed to pull German night fighters away from a bigger attack somewhere along the coast.
Despite the raid’s small scale, the driver had to take a kilometre-and-a-half diversion to avoid a street blocked with rubble, and they had to squeeze past fire crews dousing a smouldering roof.
‘You’d better step on it,’ the guard told the driver, in German.
‘What am I