‘I don’t believe a word.’ He was lounging back in his chair, his feet on the desk. He continued to stare at her as he lit a cigarette. ‘Do you know how much we pay for information about the resistance?’

She shook her head.

‘It depends on the quality of the information, of course, but for a British agent we pay up to one hundred thousand francs. We paid a bit less for you. We know you landed by Lysander near Chaumont around three weeks ago and made your way to Auxerre before arriving here a week ago. You’re helping to run the British circuit operating in the area. The British, I can assure you, don’t send over thieves, however good their French is.’

She was sure the Captain was the only person who knew all that information, so she decided to tell them about him, embellishing considerably to imply he couldn’t be trusted by anyone. She even went off at a tangent about how he had been a bank robber in Lyons – she had no idea where that came from, but she hoped it sounded plausible: Lyons was after all a centre of resistance activity. She described the stuffy attic near Dijon-Ville station and told them she’d been trained at a country house near a town called Harpenden in Hertfordshire, going to great lengths to describe it, right down to a damp basement and an extensive herb garden. The house had been used by the SOE and closed the previous month after a security breach, and she’d been advised to tell them about it so she knew she was on safe ground. As for the radio operator, she wasn’t sure what to say. It wouldn’t be credible to deny his existence, so she told them he was Belgian, from Liège, she understood, and she had no idea how to contact him because he was always the one to find her. He had bad hygiene, she added, and a poor sense of humour.

From that point on it was a series of horrendous events, one after another. The Ferret laughed and told her he didn’t believe a word and announced he’d now lost patience with her, at which point he himself removed the rest of her clothing, which was humiliating enough, but then the cell filled with a dozen or so men who’d clearly been invited in to have a look, and they laughed and leered at her, a couple of them pawing her as if she were at a livestock market.

When they left, it was just her and the Ferret. He said she had one last opportunity to tell him the truth, and she did try to, but she found herself unable to speak, such was her state of shock. Her lips moved, but no words came out of them. She would have told him anything he wanted to know; she’d even have betrayed Nicholas. If only she’d had the words.

What happened next was too dreadful to recount, but when it was over, she lay on the cell floor in a pool of blood and tried to speak, anxious to tell him everything in case he was minded to start again: Major Lean, the man called Stephens, the woodsman’s cottage near Montbard, Hervé, otherwise known as Kenneth, the village of Fauverney. She couldn’t take any more.