I remember that there had been the usually insufferable cold and damp, even a thin layer of newfallen snow, but that the ashes of my mother’s farmhouse still smouldered and there was the stench of burning cloth and rubber.
Blood matted the jet-black hair where the bullet had entered. Schiller stood looking at her. The wind tugged at the collar of his greatcoat and made the tops of his ears red beneath the cap with its death’s-head.
‘There was a wireless set and you knew of it,’ he finally said.
‘I didn’t! How could I have?’
He hit me then. Still weak and dizzy, I fell to the ground, where he kicked me. Doubled up in pain, I tried to think what was best to do. They’d use Jean-Guy and Marie to make me talk. They wouldn’t hesitate.
A shot rang out, and I saw the gun in his hand leap. Another spurted up the earth beside me, and as I lay waiting for the final one, Dupuis stepped between us. ‘Of course, she’ll talk, Herr Obersturmführer, but only if her mother receives a decent burial.’
‘I’ve nothing to say. I don’t know anything.’
In anger, Schiller fired at me again, Dupuis losing all colour. ‘Obersturmführer …’ he began.
‘Answers! I will have answers!’ shrilled that SS. Four others of those stood around with machine pistols. Dupuis let go of me and stepped back as Schiller pressed the muzzle of that gun of his to my forehead and said, ‘The cowards smashed their wireless and left her to face the consequences. You will tell me where they are and the names of all of their contacts, and you will tell me the locations of the artwork.’
Me, I didn’t know how long mother had been lying here, a day or two at most. Tommy and the others could be anywhere, but I’d have to tell him something, otherwise he’d have the children brought before me. ‘There’s a hut in the forest, at a place we call the Three Gables. I’ll show it to you.’
They stopped off at the barracks in Fontainebleau to get more men. I think then that the feeling of being very much the hunted now, rather than the hunters, had begun to come over them. I do know that they moved through the forest stealthily and that I was forced to wait under guard in one of the cars. Dupuis even lit a cigarette and passed it to me but said, ‘You know that wasn’t a tumour de Verville removed. It was a child.’
Two of the others had been left to guard us. There were some cars behind, and then a couple of lorries. ‘You can think what you will, Inspector, but I know what it was and so does the German doctor who examined me before the operation.’
That one had been perfunctory, a taking of my pulse, a signing of the necessary papers. Me, I think he must have been on his way to Maxim’s when André caught up with him in the corridors.
‘The lieutenant will pry everything out of you, madame.’
Me, I kept listening for the sound of gunfire and hoping Tommy and Nicki and the others were nowhere near. The shackles hurt, and every time I lifted the cigarette to my lips, that length of chain made a rattle. ‘Listen, you, I have to pee and would prefer not to in the car.’
He unlocked the handcuffs and the door. ‘Try to make a run for it, and you won’t get far.’
The cigarette pauses and I blink. I know it’s Dupuis and that he’s finally caught up with me, the past having become the present, for he has just said exactly the same thing, though now he adds, ‘Lift your hands slowly.’
‘Where’s Schiller?’
‘In the house.’
‘Is Jules with him?’
‘If still alive.’
Crouching, he teases the Schmeisser from me. ‘Now the Luger, eh? Easy … Yes, yes, that’s it.’
Having committed the unpardonable of living in the past so intensely, I had forgotten the present. ‘There’s a knife in my left coat pocket.’
With the gun pressing against the nape of my neck, he frisks me, and finds the wire cutters. ‘Where’s the knife?’ he asks.
My hands are well above me and it’s so like it was back then, I have to say, ‘I don’t know. It must have fallen out.’
Again, I’m frisked, but now his breath comes quickly, and I ask myself, How many times have I smelled those peppermint-flavoured anise bonbons on that breath of his, that face pressed close to mine?
‘So we’ll take a little detour,’ he says, ‘and you’ll tell me what we would like very much to know.’
Snatching up the Schmeisser, he tells me to head for that old stone tower, but me, I haven’t told you how it came to be that I spent more than nine months with Tommy and the maquis of the Auvergne. We blew up a lot of things, caused trouble in widespread places, even infiltrated back into Paris to link up with Michèle and the others.
As at my final capture in the late autumn of 1943, there’s still so much to say yet no time now to say it, for the Forest of Fontainebleau, that hunting ground of kings, opens out below us and I’m reminded of my daughter and son, of the fighter planes we once saw, of Jules and me, and then of Tommy and me.
For me, the tower and the edge of this cliff are to be both the beginning and end, yet I’m not unhappy. To fail in life is nothing; to learn to live with it everything, and I’ve felt again the loves I once knew, have heard again the voices of my children and my friends.
Dupuis mentions the clinic and asks how I managed to get there.
‘The British liberated Bergen-Belsen on the 15th of April. From there, I went first into a military hospital near Bremen, but there was trouble with my chest, so when I asked to be sent to Switzerland, to a clinic, they took it upon themselves to do all they could for me.’
‘The Médaille de la Résistance was awarded posthumously.’
‘Was it? Ah, bon, but you see, I had no wish to let people know I was alive. I wanted to be dead, Inspector.’
‘But they had the numbers that are tattooed on your arm? Surely, those would have given them your name?’
‘Quite obviously they couldn’t have had it on their lists. So many people died at Bergen-Belsen, sixteen thousand in one month. Me, I should have died, too, and probably that was all the Free French really knew. In any case, it was no gift to have been spared. On the contrary, it was and is to my everlasting shame. They killed my friends. Michèle … I saw them chop off her head.’
‘So, the cave, madame. Where is it?’
‘Not far, but you’ll need me to point it out.’
Dupuis shakes his head but doesn’t smile. ‘I’ll give you a few minutes while the sun is still with us, then I’ll kill you simply because I must.’
‘And Schiller, what of him?’
‘After I’m done with you, I’ll kill him and the others.’
What others, I wonder, except for my husband? ‘Could I have another cigarette?’
He tosses me the packet, but it sails over the edge of the cliff as if by accident, so I feel for my blouse pockets and tell him, ‘Maybe I have some others.’
That knife … it was in my sleeve, and when I raised my hands, it slid down under the blouse to end up next to the scar, trapped against skirt and belt. ‘Ah, bon, Inspector, there’s a packet in the left pocket of my blouse.’
‘Give me one.’
‘I must unbutton my coat first. Is that okay?’
‘Hurry then, the sun is almost gone.’
As I slip my hand under the sweater, I pluck open the blouse. ‘The entrance to the cave, Inspector, it’s not easy to find. We tumbled a lot of rocks down in front of it. Sixty million francs worth of stuff are hidden there. Old francs, you understand. Probably a lot more. Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Cranach … lots of those. Some lovely paintings by Gauguin and Renoir, boxes and boxes of collectors’ gold coins. Other ones, too.’
He reaches out with the match to light my cigarette, and I lean towards it, knowing that he’s forgotten what the sun on the horizon can do to the vision. Drawing in, I feint suddenly to the left, ramming that knife into him with a quick upthrust to the guts while seizing the gun in his hand.