Chapter Seven
Mathilde spent the next couple of days locked in a small, bare cell with a bucket in the corner.
She was grateful now that Pierre hadn’t involved her in his illicit activities because she had nothing to tell her interrogators, though they seemed reluctant to accept her silence.
Every so often, André or one of his colleagues would take her out and beat her up for having made a fool out of them.
She expected no less and it wasn’t as though she cared; physical pain somehow lessened the agony she felt inside.
On her third morning, she heard a key turning in the lock and her cell door opening, and looked up to find a guard summoning her with a jerk of his head.
She was escorted to another bare cell in the basement, empty except for a single stool and lit only by a naked light bulb in the centre of the room.
The guard gestured towards the stool and left her to wait, imagining what might follow.
At last the door was unlocked and a man entered whom she hadn’t seen before: tall and wiry, with a jaw like a nutcracker and a look of distaste at the very sight of her.
He was wearing a dark suit with a white shirt that gaped at the neck, and holding a slender cane, and she knew he was German before he opened his mouth.
Something about his bearing, perhaps: the swagger and thinly veiled menace.
‘So, Madame Duval,’ he began. ‘We see your true colours at last. Let’s go over your story again from the beginning. It’s about time you started telling us the truth, don’t you think?’
He prowled back and forth, tapping the cane against his thigh as he fired off the usual questions she’d already answered.
Occasionally he cracked the stick across her shoulders or back – not hard enough to knock her off the stool but painful enough nonetheless.
With each blow, she despised him more. She could take a beating, and resorting to violence only made him seem weaker.
Breathing hard, he put his mouth close to her ear and spoke softly.
‘We know your history, Madame Duval: stirring up trouble in Paris and now up to your old tricks here in Provence. Well, not for much longer. I’m working with Vichy to root out resistance in this region, and it’s not a mission I intend to fail.
’ He straightened and walked on, twirling the cane.
‘Apparently you are cut from the same cloth as your husband.’
‘My husband?’ Mathilde was instantly alert. ‘What makes you mention him?’
‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ the policeman replied. ‘Because of the circumstances of his death, of course.’
‘His death?’ The question burst out before Mathilde could bite it back.
The German looked at her in mock surprise. ‘You must know he was killed? My colleagues here hadn’t realised but I assumed your friends in the network would have told you by now. Well, I’m sorry to be the bearer of such sad news.’
Mathilde swayed a little on the stool. ‘I don’t believe you.’
He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Your husband is Jacques Duval, the proprietor of a bookshop in Paris?’
She nodded.
‘There was some trouble in the square – a Jew resisting arrest, I believe – and he unwisely intervened.’ He took a piece of paper from his breast pocket, folded around a small photograph.
‘Let me check the report. Yes, a disturbance in the Place Dorée and one male casualty. There’s a photograph, too, in case you need proof. ’ He passed it to her.
And there it was: the image of a young man, dark-haired, lying on cobblestones with his head thrown back in a pool of blood.
Mathilde gasped, a shock wave running through her body.
She’d seen this picture before: flashing into her mind as Jacques held her in the darkness the night before they parted.
Somehow, she had been given a foretaste of his death.
Abruptly, her interrogator kicked the stool out from under her so that she sprawled on the floor, then he dragged her upright by her hair – for such a thin man, he was surprisingly strong – and slammed her against the wall, holding her by the throat.
‘You have been caught acting against the Reich,’ he hissed, a fleck of spittle landing on her cheek. ‘Your husband is dead so there’s no one to protect you. Give us the names of everyone involved in this plot or you’ll end up in prison for the rest of your days. Either that or the firing squad.’
She looked him in the face and laughed. ‘Do you think I care?’
The worst had happened; he could do with her as he pleased.
Jacques was dead – she knew in her bones this was true – and she’d sent Renée into the occupied zone on a suicide mission to find him.
How could she have been so stupid? She could only hope Renée would have had the sense to look elsewhere for help.
The next day, she was taken out of her cell and bundled into a police van for the short drive to a prison on the other side of the Palais des Papes, near the riverbank.
A series of iron gates clanged shut behind her as she was marched down the main corridor, her guards’ footsteps grating on the stone floor and a distant, despairing howl sending fear into her soul.
She could be locked up here for years and nobody would know or care.
Her parents were long dead, Jacques and Pierre had been killed, and Renée was a fugitive; only Monsieur Piquemal might wonder what had happened to her, but he’d assume she’d stolen his motorcycle and even if he was inclined to make enquiries, he wouldn’t get very far.
She’d been declared an enemy of the Third Reich and as such, she no longer existed.
In a filthy locker room, its walls chipped and peeling, a woman in uniform barked at her to undress: an agonising process, since her frock was stuck to her back with dried blood.
Losing patience, the guard tore it away, causing her wounds to open again.
Mathilde bit her lip as tears came to her eyes but she didn’t let them fall.
Her hair was shorn to the nape of her neck as she stood there, falling in drifts around her bare feet, and then she was given a skirt and shirt of rough hessian and a pair of wooden-soled clogs at least two sizes too big.
I am a different person now, she thought absently, feeling the air on her neck, and must find new ways of getting through this life.
The guard yanked her arm, escorting her up a staircase and along an open metal walkway that clanged as she stumbled along in her huge shoes, with doors opening off it on each side.
One of these doors was unlocked and she was thrust inside.
Three women regarded her with a variety of expressions.
An older woman lay on the bottom bed of one of the two bunks, propped on one elbow, with thin grey hair framing a lined face.
She seemed indifferent to the new arrival, whereas the girl who stood beside her, scratching her back against the bunk frame like an itchy dog, looked at Mathilde with outright hostility.
She was tall and long-limbed, with a square jaw and hooded eyes.
A third woman sat on the floor, combing her dark shoulder-length hair with her fingers, and she seemed the most sympathetic of the trio.
‘Welcome to Sainte-Anne, otherwise known as paradise,’ she said, and actually smiled. ‘Who are you?’
‘Marie,’ Mathilde replied. ‘Marie Garnier.’
Her middle and maiden names. If she could get back to the girl she’d once been, before marriage to Jacques had softened her, maybe she would survive.
Little by little, Mathilde learned more about her cellmates.
The older woman was Jewish, a widow who’d become destitute after her husband died and been arrested for stealing food from a market stall.
She was the quietest of the three, although her snores at night kept them all awake.
The angry girl had been imprisoned for her political views: she was a Communist, denounced by her neighbour and found to have a shelf of banned books when her apartment was searched.
And the smiling woman was a prostitute, arrested for persistent soliciting at an army barracks.
This was a common occurrence, apparently, and she expected to be released in a few weeks, though none of the three had any definite idea how long their sentences would last.
Privately, Mathilde gave them nicknames: the widow was Babushka, though she was childless so not actually a granny, the Communist became Rosa Luxemburg and the prostitute Mary Magdalene.
When they were taken for ablutions the next morning, Mary washed Mathilde’s back so tenderly, she could have been her mother.
The days passed with little to vary the monotony.
They were woken each morning by guards rattling a stick along the bars of each cell, and took turns to use the bucket that served as a toilet.
At midday, they were given a slice of dry bread and a bowl of watery soup in which chunks of fatty gristle floated, and the same meal was repeated in the evening.
At some point in the afternoon, all the women filed down the metal staircase and out into a bare yard to take half an hour of exercise, lifting their heads to the small square of blue sky above and filling their lungs with whatever fresh air they could snatch in an effort to dispel the stench of prison.
Sometimes they heard shouts from the men’s wing, and once even a snatch of song, but prison guards were the only men they ever saw.
Talking was strictly forbidden but Mathilde could look: she stared into the face of each woman she passed, trying to read her story.
Were other people resisting the Vichy regime, and might their numbers grow until one day they could even defeat it?
Hope was dangerous but she had nothing else to cling on to.
From time to time, she was taken out of the cell and subjected to an interrogation, usually punctuated by her head being thrust into a bucket of water and held down until she was on the point of drowning.
There was little point in these torture sessions; the guards had given up trying to extract any useful information from her and were just amusing themselves.
And these men and women were French! The Nazis had given them the authority to act in the worst way possible and now, humiliated by defeat, they were taking revenge however they could.
Mathilde hated them to the depths of her being.
One man in particular seemed to revel in his brutality.
She called him the Viper because of his bald head, skinny neck and hooded eyes, and she learned to dread the sound of his dragging footsteps approaching down the corridor.
He walked with a limp and was always in a foul temper; the only time he ever smiled was at the sight of other people in pain.
One morning, they heard a young woman screaming as she was locked in the cell next to theirs, and her wailing and rattling of the cell bars didn’t stop all day and most of the night.
Eventually, Mary Magdalene found out the cause of her distress: she had gone out to buy food, leaving her three-month-old baby locked in the apartment, and been arrested on suspicion of shoplifting.
Her husband was working far from home and nobody knew the child was there.
She shouted her story over and over again but none of the guards took any notice; except for the Viper, who would stand outside her cell with his arms folded and smirk.
The next time he took Mathilde away for questioning, she spat in his face – and so he raped her.
This isn’t happening to me, she told herself, her eyes averted from his loathsome, shiny skull as he laboured, grunting with exertion.
There is a part of me he can’t touch because I keep it locked away; this act means nothing.
And yet she must have been affected on some deep level because the other women realised something significant had happened as soon as she was delivered back to the cell.
Mary Magdalene helped her to lie down in the upper bunk and Rosa Luxemburg squeezed her hand, which meant a lot as Rosa didn’t like touching people.
(She approved of Mathilde now, having discovered she was Pierre Bouchon’s cousin; his name was known throughout the Communist party, apparently.) Even Babushka, who took little interest in what went on, gave her a dirty crust of bread she’d been hoarding for days.
Mathilde turned her face away from their kindness.