There had been no need to worry about the wireless set. It was hidden. It was well hidden. There had been no need for the Germans to suspect they had one. And now she’d been so stupid.
‘Nowhere. I don’t have one. We handed it in.’
He looked at her. His voice was cold, hard, deadly. ‘Tell me where it is.’
Inside the pantry. It was inside the pantry, hidden far back, sofar out of sight that you had to move all the tins and jars in order to find it and even then it was in a recessed area of the wall. But she would be damned if she gave it to him. It was her lifeline to the outside world, her only way to hear the latest music, to feed her soul with pure joy.
‘If you don’t tell me where it is, I will destroy everything in this house looking for it,’ he warned.
‘We don’t have one,’ Dido insisted.
‘You are lying,’ he said simply. ‘You have a beautiful piano in the sitting room. I will start with that.’
‘No,’ she shouted. ‘Not the piano. It was my mother’s. Don’t touch it. I thought you were looking for a person,’ Dido wailed.
‘I was. Now I am looking for a wireless. And I will work my way through this house inch by inch until I find it. I will destroy your room to find it. I will destroy your sister’s. I will turn over every stick of furniture, I will pull up all the carpets, all the floorboards until I find it. By the time I have finished with this house, it will be a shell. Unless you give it to me.’
Dido closed her eyes, unknowing how to accept this new horror. She couldn’t let them find Persephone’s notes, regardless as to whether they could read them. What would happen to Persey? She couldn’t let them find them.
‘And so we begin,’ he said, adjusting his hat and setting off to search the house.
‘No, stop,’ she called to them. She had to save Persey. ‘Stop. I’ll give you the wireless.’
Chapter 39
2016
At the graves, Lucy pulled out her phone and opened her web browser. The empty search bar waited for an instruction she wasn’t ready to give.
‘There’s too much that still doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘There’s more – I can feel it. Dido went somewhere. The vicar said it. I want to know where she went. And why. And when …’
Will leant forward.
The search bar taunted her, waiting for an instruction she wasn’t ready to give.
‘We could ask the vicar tomorrow,’ Will suggested.
‘I can’t wait until tomorrow,’ Lucy said.
‘What is it you want to know?’ he prompted.
She made a noise from the back of her throat. ‘Ugh, I don’t know.’ She put her phone on the grass. It held all the answers. She just didn’t know what the question was.
‘You do know,’ Will said. ‘You just don’t want to admit it.’
She wanted to make a cheap joke about not realising he was a therapist as well as a photographer. But instead, she said, ‘Just because Dido was here at the end doesn’t mean she was here all along. We never thought to search for her. The quiet sister. The one who didn’t intrigue me. The one who lived here her wholelife. The one who never married, never had children, the one who left Clara and I her house.’
Lucy knew now exactly what she was looking for. She opened the resistance archive online. The one they’d used to search for Persephone. She typed Dido Le Roy into the search bar on the website and waited. One result. A wave of cold and dread filled her. Over seventy years since it all happened and Lucy felt that if she didn’t click that link … what she suspected wouldn’t be true. That she could avoid finding out.
‘I overlooked her. I cheated her out of her history.’ Lucy took a deep breath, looked at the one single result that would tell her what had happened to the younger Le Roy sister in the middle of the Occupation. She hesitated and then when she could hesitate no longer, clicked on the result and waited for the page to open.
There she was, Dido Le Roy, arrested for illegal possession of a wireless in November 1943. Punishment: deportation and imprisonment to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
They were silent, Lucy put her hand over her mouth although she didn’t realise she’d done it until it came time for her to speak. Lucy couldn’t imagine that fate. She sighed. ‘Of course she went to a concentration camp.’
It took Will a few seconds to answer. ‘Why, of course?’ he said, standing up next to her. He thrust his hands in his pockets and looked out across the churchyard, the late spring flowers in bloom, the breeze ruffling the trees that lined the grounds. ‘She never said,’ he whispered before exhaling deeply.
‘Because of the poster,’ Lucy said to his back. ‘The poster asking victims of imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps to come forward to seek compensation. I thought it must have referred to Persephone. All this time, in the back of my mind I’ve been assuming it was Persephone who went. But it was Dido.’
