‘Oh God.’ Persey put her head in her hands. ‘What an awful,awful mess.’ There was nothing for it now. There was no hope for Lise. This was just the start. Lise had to remain hidden with Doctor Durand. But for how long? It could be months. It could, heaven forbid, be years.
Chapter 20
2016
The museum was cold and so was Lucy now as she stared at the letter on the wall.
‘This can’t be right,’ Lucy repeated.
‘Who would do this?’ Will asked.
The letter was dated November 1943 and only contained a few lines.
There is a Jewish girl still in hiding on this island. The woman hiding her is called Persephone Le Roy. She lives at Deux Tourelles. Search her room.
It was written in a clumsy attempt to disguise the handwriting, bold capital letters in a scratchy hand. It was, of course, anonymous.
‘We’re closing in a few minutes,’ a kind voice said from beside them.
Lucy dragged her eyes from the letter and stared at the man. ‘Right,’ she said blankly. ‘Of course.’
They turned, reluctantly, away from the letter accusing Persephone.
Lucy blinked into the light after having spent the afternooninside a quiet, near-windowless space. Neither she nor Will spoke as they moved towards their cars.
They met back at Deux Tourelles and Lucy pulled a bottle of wine from the dwindling supplies in the fridge while Will strolled out to take a look in the garden. He shook his head in dismay at the state of the vegetable patch.
‘Want me to do something about this for you?’ he offered.
‘No, it’s fine,’ she said as she led him to the wrought-iron garden bench. ‘I quite fancy tackling it myself actually.’
He nodded and they drank in silence, neither quite able to voice their thoughts about the letter.
‘What do you think the repercussions were?’ Will asked eventually.
‘I don’t know,’ Lucy said. ‘But I can’t imagine it was good. I keep thinking about that concentration camp notice.’
Will sipped his wine and then said, ‘Did the Nazis follow up on all letters sent to them? There were hundreds on that wall. Did they have the time? Did they trust all these uncorroborated, an-onymous letters and raid houses, follow people? The Germans had an Occupation to run. Did they really, honestly investigate every petty squabble laid out on paper like that?’
Lucy shrugged and sipped her wine. ‘I hope not. I saw something about an archive online that lists people from the Channel Islands who were imprisoned during the war. Hang on.’ She ran into the house and grabbed the history book she’d bought from the bookshop and flicked through until she found the name of the archive attributed in the back.
Will looked, pulled out his phone, keyed the information into a web browser and they both waited.
‘So what does this website do?’ Will asked as it loaded.
‘It’s resistance archives,’ Lucy said, reading the information in the book. ‘Papers collected by one man after the war, documenting resistance and those who were punished as a direct result.’
‘Punished?’ he asked with a shudder.
‘Imprisoned, mainly,’ Lucy said.
He typed ‘Persephone Le Roy’ in the search bar and they both waited, Lucy craning eagerly at the phone in Will’s hands so that she was almost in his lap.
‘Nothing,’ Will said a moment later. ‘No results.’
‘How can there be no results? How can there be nothing at all?’ Lucy cried.
‘That’s good though? Isn’t it?’ Will asked. ‘If someone grassed her up, and she’s not listed as having been imprisoned, then maybe the Nazis didn’t follow up on it, maybe they didn’t hunt her down.’
