The Girl from the Island by Lorna Cook

Author:Lorna Cook [Cook, Lorna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-02-05T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

1940

Tensions were running high at Deux Tourelles since the announcement that the Nazis knew spies had landed on Guernsey. There was no hiding the announcement in the newspaper. The whole island was talking about it and so in the end they had been forced to tell Mrs Grant, who had cried uncontrollably. The orders had struck fear into all inside the house.

In accordance with German military law and in agreement with the Hague Convention the penalties provided for are the following:

• Espionage – Death penalty.

• High treason – Death penalty or penal servitude for life.

• Assistance to espionage – Penal servitude: up to fifteen years.

Jack had three days to give himself up or the hunt would begin and punishments would be enforced. Jack would be executed, and for assisting him, Persey, Dido and Mrs Grant faced imprisonment for a very long time. How old would Persey be in fifteen years? Forty. And Dido thirty-nine years old when they were released. If they survived. Mrs Grant … would she survive?

They watched Jack with alarm over the following two days as his state of mind disintegrated. He spent the majority of meals staring blankly at his plate, not hearing anyone who spoke to him, and every time a German staff car pulled up he stared wide-eyed at the doorway of whatever room he was in, expecting to be grabbed, arrested, interrogated. But each time it was only Stefan returning to the house.

Persey, Dido and Mrs Grant had decided not to give Jack up. Doing so was their duty, and they had no idea if they could trust the Nazis to keep their word that Jack would be treated as a POW and interned somewhere safe for the duration of the war if he handed himself in before the deadline, or whether he would be taken and shot as a spy. But whether he gave himself up would have to be his decision.

‘You can’t trust a Nazi to keep their word,’ Jack had spat, fear in his eyes. ‘I wish I’d never come back now. I could have been back in England, sitting tight now the British Expeditionary Force has been turfed out of France. I could have been safe and I wouldn’t have put you in this position.’ He opened his cigarette case and, finding it empty, threw it onto the kitchen floor.

Persey wanted to tell him he was safe here, but it would have been such an incredible lie that she simply couldn’t bring herself to say anything soothing at all. What would happen to her and Dido when the Germans realised the spy they were looking for was Jack and that they had harboured him all this time? Perhaps she could say they had no idea? Would any of them believe that? And what kind of interrogation tactics would they use on her, on Mrs Grant, on Dido? The thought of the secret police or the Gestapo torturing Dido made Persey feel sick and she ran out the back door and bent over, waiting for bile that never came.

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