Shadows In Paris (Seagrove & Raven #2)

Chapter 29

CHAPTER 29

T he loud clang of the door resounded around the small cell. People were crammed in, leaning against the walls, fear etched on their faces in the dim light. Lizzie scanned the group, trying to understand what her connection was to the others. She didn’t see where they’d taken her in the van, but they hadn’t driven for long, so it can’t have been far. They’d hustled them into a tall building, and then shuffled them down some stone steps into this cell.

Francois must have broken under interrogation and now they were rounding up the Resistance members one by one. It was one explanation for the way she’d been hauled away so suddenly. Lizzie’s mind was jumbled with thoughts of Francois, Hannah, Phillipe, and the rest of the network. None of the people she recognised were here, so she held onto a slither of hope that they didn’t have the others. Yet.

Hannah could have been arrested at German High Command as she had feared. Perhaps they had been watching them since the failed mission and only lulled them into a false sense of security by not searching the farmhouse.

If it were an SOE operation, the agent would follow the suspect and see where they led them. The Wehrmacht wouldn’t be trained in espionage, but the Gestapo would know how to draw out agents, so perhaps that’s what this was. But she had only seen soldiers so far, and it didn’t seem like a Gestapo arrest.

Lizzie checked her watch. It was still only mid-morning. She had the whole day to get out of there and make it to the pickup tonight. Some people were talking to each other in low voices, and Lizzie leaned closer to listen. The conversation seemed innocuous enough, and after about ten minutes of concentrated listening, she had heard nothing to make her any the wiser why they had all been detained.

‘Do you know why they brought you in?’ Lizzie asked a middle-aged smartly dressed woman who sat on a bench in the cell's corner.

‘No, I do not know. I was on the way to visit my daughter-in-law and grandchild, and they swooped in and shoved me into their truck.’

Lizzie asked some more of the detainees as discreetly as she could about what they had been doing when they were stopped. None of them sounded like they were up to anything suspicious. But then, if they asked Lizzie what she had been doing, she wouldn’t seem suspicious either. If they were agents or spies, it was their job to blend in, just like it was hers.

Studying the group surreptitiously, she couldn’t figure out what was going on. If these people were enemies of the Nazi state, they were a ramshackle lot. Some clutched onto their shopping bags, guarding their precious rations, whilst others looked terrified and barely moved.

Time trickled like treacle, and a wave of exhaustion hit Lizzie, and she slumped down to sit on the cold ground. No one showed any signs of being dangerous, and many of the detainees had dozed off on the floor or on the benches. She couldn’t risk falling asleep in case someone went for her papers or money, but she would rest a little. No one had come in to question them yet, and she knew no more now than when they arrived. Lizzie fought sleep, struggling to keep her eyes open. She played mental games to stay awake, like Jack had taught her.

‘There will be times when your body is beyond exhaustion and your spirit is so weary, you are desperate for sleep, but you must learn to stay awake to defend yourself.’

Lizzie ran through their wireless codes to keep her mind alert, but it was a battle to stop her eyelids from drooping. How she longed to burrow into her soft mattress in her bedroom in the Regent’s Park house. Her mother beckoned her to join the family for tea in the drawing room, and Lizzie tasted delicious crunchy toast, and her mouth watered. Her head jerked up, and she realised she had nodded off despite her best efforts. It had been a long night with little sleep. Lizzie stood and walked around the cell, avoiding sleeping bodies strewn about.

After a while, a gruff male voice called out, ‘You, mademoiselle. Sit down and stop making us all dizzy.’

Lizzie looked at the old man and apologised. ‘I am trying to stay awake in case they release us soon.’

The man snorted. ‘You are optimistic. So, you think these Nazi pigs are going to take pity on us and just let us go like that, do you?’

Lizzie approached the man, hoping to learn more about why they were here. ‘Why did they detain you?’ she asked.

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘The bastards don’t need an excuse. They run France now, God help us. Makes me wonder what we fought for in the last war.’

Lizzie thought of her mother again, and a wave of homesickness gripped her until she felt like crying. Was this how she was going to end up? Rotting in a Nazi jail, or worse? Her hand moved to her neck and her fingers touched the pendant Jack had given her. If all else failed, she would use the cyanide pill.

Hours passed, and eventually the door opened, and a soldier entered carrying a bucket. He threw some bread rolls at the prisoners, who did their best to catch them, but most rolled across the dusty floor as people scrambled to get them. Lizzie’s stomach rumbled, and she reached to claim a roll too, but they had all gone. She looked at the soldier. ‘We need more,’ she said. ‘There aren’t enough to go round.’

He spat on the floor and threw a few more up in the air. Some of the detainees were old and frail, and Lizzie didn’t want to take one before they got theirs. The soldier delighted in his power to eke them out, and he taunted her by throwing more onto the floor. Lizzie reached for one and rubbed it on her coat to dust off the dirt. ‘When do we get out of here?’ she asked him, thinking she had nothing to lose. ‘You have no reason to hold us. We are French citizens going about our business. We’ve done nothing wrong.’

Lizzie heard a woman gasp nearby.

‘There’ll be someone down to question you shortly,’ growled the soldier, who turned and left the room.

‘I would kill for some water,’ Lizzie heard someone say over the other side of the room.

Several more hours passed, and it was late afternoon by the time two soldiers entered and questioned them. The questions seemed routine, and Lizzie was even more puzzled about why they had been hauled into the truck and locked up in this cell.

By the time they turned to Lizzie, she knew what to expect.

‘What are you doing in Paris?’

Lizzie repeated her cover story, and one soldier yawned and rubbed his eyes. She saw this as a minor victory and decided she would up the yawn factor and bore them to tears.

‘What does your sister do?’ the other one continued.

‘She is recuperating, which is why I am staying with her.’

Another yawn.

Lizzie didn’t mention that her cover story sister worked at German High Command. If Hannah was being interrogated because of Francois, she wouldn’t crack easily, and Lizzie figured even if they were subjecting her to unspeakable horrors, it would take a while before she spilled any details, if she did at all.

Lizzie breathed in and out steadily. The chances were, they knew nothing. Their questions were still mundane, and she guessed they had no clue who she was.

Follow your gut, Lizzie. Jack’s voice rang loudly in her head.

Her gut said they knew nothing, so she continued to be slightly insolent and very dull with her answers. They asked her a few more questions, and then the yawning one shrugged and barked something at the other. They moved to the next target, and Lizzie released a ragged sigh. The interrogation, if you could call it that, appeared to be over.

More time passed slowly, and the prisoners waited. A few fell asleep and even snored, whilst others cowered against the wall, obviously frightened of what their fate had in store for them.

Lizzie’s mouth was dry, her head banged, and she was parched. They’d given them nothing to drink since their arrival that morning. She felt lightheaded and was panicking. It didn’t look like they were going to release them anytime soon, which meant she would miss the pickup Jack had arranged for that night. She would also miss the scheduled meeting with Hannah. That was if her cover wasn’t blown, and Hannah showed up.

‘Merde,’ Lizzie muttered .

Everything had gone wrong since they shot poor Francois. She hadn’t been in contact with Philippe because it was too dangerous, but she took comfort that he wasn’t locked in this room with her. There was still a chance the others hadn’t been arrested, and she was the only one in custody.

When her watch crawled to 6 p.m. it was getting too late to make the meeting. Lizzie needed Hannah to show her to the pickup spot.

What would Hannah do when Lizzie didn’t turn up?

Lizzie mulled this over but didn’t come up with much. She thought Hannah would search for her in the area, and then go home and wait there. What else could she do? Just as Lizzie resigned herself to the thought that she was in there for the night, the heavy door clicked open again and light from the hallway streamed in.

The soldiers entered again and grabbed two detainees, who struggled a bit as they dragged them out of the cell. Lizzie’s heart rammed against her chest as she stood there in the shadows, wondering what they would do with her.

‘You can go,’ barked one soldier, casting his eyes around the exhausted-looking group.

Some of them quickly scrambled to their feet, but most of them stared at the soldiers, their eyes glazed, not quite believing they were free to go. Lizzie could see some of them were scared this was a trap, and they were about to fall right into it if they stood to leave.

Lizzie’s senses screamed at her to get out of there whilst she could, so she walked towards the soldiers. ‘Thank you, gentleman. My sister will be worried, and I need to find her. Which is the quickest way out?’

It was as though she opened the floodgates, and the others streamed after her, nudging and pushing to get out of the miserable dark cell.

The soldiers led the way and soon the raggle-taggle group spilled out onto the pavement, hardly believing their luck. Lizzie wondered what they would do to the two they had removed from the cell. Then she moved away, walking fast, before the soldiers changed their minds. She could still make the meeting with Hannah if she ran and went back for her bicycle afterwards.

Once out of sight of the soldiers, Lizzie broke into a run and moved as fast as she could, until she reached the spot near the Seine, where they were supposed to meet around 6.30 p.m. She flopped down, gasping on the nearby bench, desperate for water, but that would have to wait. She had made it just in the nick of time. Minutes ticked by, which turned into an hour, but there was still no sign of Hannah. As she waited, her jubilant elation at being free again withered like a deflating balloon.

Had the worst happened, and the Gestapo had Hannah?