She sighed deeply, seemed to shrug her thin shoulders and spoke inaudibly.
‘The court must be able to hear the prisoner’s plea.’
Again that shrug as if all this was irrelevant.
But now her eyes had found a face to fix on, the pale, drawn features of the man called Christian Valois, and she raised her voice just sufficiently to be heard.
‘Guilty,’ she said wearily. ‘I plead guilty.’
PART ONE
June 1940
Ils ne passeront pas!
Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain,
Verdun 1916
1
The poplar-lined road ran arrow-straight from north to south.
At dawn it was empty. The rising sun barred its white surface with the poplars’ shadows so that it lay like an eloper’s ladder against the ripening walls of corn.
Now a car passed down it fast.
A few minutes later there was another.
Both cars had their roof-racks piled high with luggage.
The sun climbed higher, grew hotter. By ten there was a steady stream of south-bound traffic. By eleven it had slowed to a crawl. And it no longer consisted solely of cars.
There were trucks, vans, buses, taxis; horse-drawn carts and pony-drawn traps; people on foot pushing handcarts, barrows, prams and trolleys; men, women and children and babes in arms; rich and poor, old and young, soldiers in blue, priests in black, ladies in high heels, peasants in sabots; and animals too, dogs and cats and smaller pets nursed by loving owners, cows, geese, goats and hens driven by fearful farmers; here in truth was God’s plenty.
By midday the stream was almost static, setting up a long ribbon of heat-haze which outshimmered the gentler vibration above the ripening corn. Cars broke down under the strain and were quickly pushed into the ditch by those behind. Janine Simonian sat in her tiny Renault, terrified that this would soon be her fate. The engine was coughing like a sick man. She glanced at her two small children and tried to smile reassuringly. Then she returned her gaze to the dark-green truck ahead of her and concentrated on its tailboard, as if by will alone she hoped to create a linkage and be towed along in its wake.
Her lips moved in prayer. She’d done a lot of praying in the past few weeks.
So far it hadn’t worked at all.
There were four of the green trucks, still nose to tail as they had been since they set off from Fresnes Prison that morning.
In the first of them, unbeknown to Janine, sat her cousin, Michel Boucher. It was to his sister, Mireille, living in what seemed like the pastoral safety of the Ain region east of Lyon, that she was fleeing.
Boucher himself wasn’t fleeing anywhere, at least not by choice. And given the choice, he wouldn’t have thought of his sister, whom he hadn’t seen for nearly ten years. Besides, he hated the countryside.
Paris was the only place to be, in or out of gaol. Paris was his family, more than his sister and her peasant husband, certainly more than his cousin and her fearful mother. Bloody shop-keepers, they deserved to be robbed. And bloody warders, they needed some sense kicked into them.
Rattling his handcuffs behind him he said, ‘Hey, Monsieur Chauvet, do we have to have these things on? If them Stukas come, we’re sitting ducks.’
‘Shut up,’ commanded the warder without much conviction.
He was thinking of his family. They were stuck back there in Paris with the Boche at the gate while he was sitting in a truck conveying a gang of evacuated criminals south to safety. Something was wrong somewhere!
‘Know what this lot looks like?’ said another prisoner, a thin bespectacled man called Pajou. ‘A military convoy, that’s what. Just the kind of target them Stukas like. We’d be better off walking.’
‘You think your mates would be able to spot you at a couple of hundred miles an hour, Pajou?’ said the warder viciously. ‘No, my lad, you’ll be getting your Iron Cross posthumously if the bastards come!’
Pajou looked indignant. He’d been a charge hand at a munition factory near Metz. A year before, he had been sentenced to eight years for passing information about production schedules to German Military Intelligence. He had always loudly protested his innocence.
Before he could do so now, Boucher rattled his cuffs again and pleaded, ‘Come on, chief, you know it’s not right. If them Stukas come, it’s like we were staked out for execution.’
The warder, Chauvet, opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Pajou cried, ‘Listen! Look!’
Looking and listening were almost the same thing. Two black spots expanded like ink stains in the clear blue sky in a crescendo of screaming engines; then came the hammering of guns, the blossoming of explosions; and the long straight river of refugees fountained sideways into the poplar-lined ditches as the Stukas ran a blade of burning metal along the narrow road.
Boucher saw bullets ripping into the truck behind as he dived over the side. With no protection from his arms, he fell awkwardly, crashing down on one shoulder and rolling over and over till a poplar trunk soaked up his impetus.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he groaned as he lay there half-stunned. All around were the cries and moans of the terror-stricken and the wounded. How long he lay there he did not know, but it was that other sound, heard only once but now so familiar, that roused him. The Stukas were returning.
Staggering to his feet he plunged deeper into the field which lay beyond the roadside ditch. What crop it held he could not say. He was no countryman to know the difference between corn and barley, wheat and rye. But the sea of green and gold stems gave at least the illusion of protection as the Stukas passed.
Rising again, he found he was looking into Pajou’s pallid face. His spectacles were awry and one lens was cracked but an elastic band behind his head had kept them in place.
‘You all right, Miche?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What now?’
Why the man should offer him the leadership, Boucher did not know. He hardly knew Pajou and didn’t care for what he did know. Robbing the rich was one thing, selling your country another.
But people often deferred to him, probably simply because of his appearance. Over six foot tall, Titian-haired, eagle-nosed, he had the kind of piratical good looks which promised excitement and adventure. Also he was known from his name as Miche the Butcher, and if his easy-going manner made anyone doubt his capacity for violence, his sheer bulk generally inhibited them from testing it.
But Pajou’s question was a good one. What now? Run till they found a friendly blacksmith?
‘Hold on,’ said Boucher.
An image from his mad flight from the road had returned to him.
He retraced his steps to the roadside. Lying in the ditch just as he had remembered was the warder. There was no sign of a bullet wound, but his head was split open. Despite the freedom of his arms, he must have fallen even more awkwardly than Boucher.
The bloody head moved, the eyes opened and registered Boucher, who raised his booted foot threateningly. With a groan, Chauvet closed his eyes and his head fell back.
Squatting down with his back to the body, Boucher undid the man’s belt, then fumbled along it till he came to the chain which held his ring of keys. It slid off easily.
Standing up, he found that Pajou had joined him.
Looking down at the