She knew the voice. She knew the owner had a silver hand. Aimee placed a finger to the boy’s lips and listened as Sergeant Grimm tuned the radio with whistles and whines. She peered over the open trapdoor to the loft.

‘Now get out,’ the sergeant said to the man who had set up the radio. When the soldier had gone Grimm said, ‘Hello? Benedict? Come in, Benedict.’

‘I am here, friend,’ a voice crackled from the speaker.

‘Speak in German, Benedict,’ the traitor said. ‘Last time we spoke in English that girl was listening. This is her farm. She may be around.’

Then Grimm began to speak quickly and Aimee couldn’t understand a word. She heard a wheezing from the boy in the straw. He was trying hard to hold his breath – his pale eyes bulged. At last he could hold it no longer and he coughed.

The stream of words from below stopped.

The two children in the hayloft heard army boots slowly climb the ladder to their hiding place. First a silver hand appeared in the opening. Then the head of Sergeant Grimm, and then a pistol, pointing at them.

‘What have we here?’ he asked.

24 August 1918: Bray

‘This is Robert... the farm hand.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘The Germans used this place as a hospital and left the sickness behind. Robert came into the barn and he caught their flu. I’m nursing him,’ Aimee told the man with the silver hand.

Sergeant Grimm shuddered. ‘We’ll have to swill it out with disinfectant before we take it over for the Canadians,’ he said.

‘You’re too late to save yourself,’ Aimee said. ‘You were down in the barn for long enough to catch it. I’ve seen men dead in three days.’

The sergeant’s eyes seemed to glow in the gloom and they were the colour of poison. ‘You make a habit of putting your snotty French nose into my calls, don’t you?’

Aimee glared back at him. ‘You are a traitor,’ she said fiercely. ‘And you tried to throw me out of a balloon to silence me.’

He shrugged. ‘But you can’t prove any treason. You can’t prove I was going to throw you out of the basket. And you don’t know what I was saying to my friend just now because we spoke in German.’

Aimee nodded. ‘I don’t understand German,’ she agreed. That could save her life.

But Marius had fallen back on to his bed as he felt weak and the fever returned. ‘You’re not dead, girl,’ Silver Hand told her. ‘The disease can’t be that bad.’

‘The people who’ve had flu before – a mild sickness – don’t get the deadly flu. I’m safe.’ She looked at him with a little joy. ‘You’re not.’

He began to climb back down the ladder. Marius groaned and cried, ‘Mutter. Ich möchte meine mutter.’