Will nodded. ‘Yes. But I don’t want to push you in a direction you’re not happy with. Especially now …’
‘Especially now?’
‘That it’s turned in a bit of a sickening direction. Letters grassing your relation up about hidden Jews. I feel we’ve stumbled into some nasty territory and we might be out of our depth.’
‘We might be, yes.’
‘So what do you want to do?’
‘I don’t want to stop, if that’s what you’re asking?’ Lucy said. After all they’d only just got started and Lucy wanted to find out what had happened to Persephone.
‘OK. Me neither,’ Will said. ‘If you still want the help and the company, I’m happy to oblige.’
‘Great. So what next?’
‘No clue. Is there some kind of local records office we can try?’ Will asked with a shrug.
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Want to go?’
‘Now?’
‘No.’ He laughed. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘OK,’ Lucy said, knowing she really should be painting rooms in prep for the estate agent’s photographer. ‘But what are we looking up?’
‘Christ, I don’t know. What about we look up the history of Deux Tourelles during the war? Do they have files on that kind of thing?’
‘I have no idea,’ Lucy said.
‘And then we can look up Persephone Le Roy,’ Will said. ‘See if there’s some kind of official file on her from the war. If they followed up the letter about the Jewish girl, there must be some kind of note on a Nazi file somewhere. They left records behind when they got kicked off at the end of the war, right? I’ve seen pictures of them lined up, waiting to be packed off to POW camps with only what they could carry when the British liberated the islands. Doubtful they took all their files with them, too? So maybe that will help. Whatever it was they did to her … maybe she just got a bit of a ticking off.’
‘A ticking off?’ Lucy scoffed. ‘From the Gestapo? Not likely.’
Will stretched out his long legs in the last of the evening sun. ‘We’ll find out tomorrow.’
Chapter 21
Summer 1942
The year moved through its seasons. Christmas had been a mute affair, with hardly any presents to gift each other. Stefan had been granted leave and had returned to Berlin to visit his family. On his return – after weeks of Persephone wondering what he was doing and who he was with, whether he was laughing with his family or if they were as mute a household as Deux Tourelles – he’d announced he would be leaving again, this time for longer. Persey’s chest had tightened, thinking she might never see him again, but she couldn’t admit it to herself, let alone out loud. She cared far more than she should and she wished she didn’t.
‘I will still be in the Channel Islands,’ he’d admitted as they’d stood in the garden in the spring of 1941. ‘But not in Guernsey.’
‘For how long?’ she’d asked, pulling her coat around her and standing up from where she’d been weeding the vegetable patch.
‘I do not know. But you will not have another officer here. I have expressed I want this billet on my return. Whenever that may be.’
She nodded, unsure what to make of that. ‘I see. Where are you going?’
He’d sighed, looked away. ‘Alderney.’
‘Alderney?’ she’d asked in confusion. ‘But I thought there wasno one on Alderney. I thought the whole island had been evacuated.’
‘It has.’
‘Then why are you going there? Who requires the services of a translator on Alderney? By all accounts they’ve even brought all the livestock over from the farmland so you can’t even be translating for the cattle.’ It was a poor joke and she’d known it but she couldn’t have helped but be curious.
