Read Chapter 12: The Assistant's Confession

The churchyard gate complained on its hinge. Elise eased it shut behind her and pressed herself into the shadow of the yew tree, the letter from Jersey folded against her ribs. The path ran between headstones worn smooth by two centuries of weather, and beyond it, the lane that led to Le Gallez's cottage.

She didn't wait long.

He came shuffling along the lane with his shoulders hunched, a cloth bag clutched to his chest like a shield. His spectacles caught the last of the failing light, throwing back two small moons. When he reached the gate, Elise stepped out.

"Good evening, Le Gallez."

He startled violently, the bag swinging. "Miss Martin—you gave me a fright. What are you doing out at this hour? The curfew—"

"You know why I'm here."

His mouth opened and closed. In the dim light he looked older than his thirty-odd years, thinner, as though something had been hollowing him out from the inside. "I don't—"

"Don't." Elise took a step closer. "I saw you at the van Leer house. I saw you take the letter. The blue-black ink on it was from Falla's pen—but Falla didn't write it, did he? You did."

Le Gallez's face went the color of candle wax. He looked past her, toward the lane, as if expecting someone to step out of the dark. No one did.

"I have a letter from Jersey," Elise said. "Same mark. Same hand. It's been traveling through the post for weeks, watching for a man named André. You know who that is."

"I don't know anything about—"

"You marked his old address, didn't you? The Germans have been intercepting anything sent there. You set the trap."

He sagged against the gate post, the bag slipping from his fingers. For a moment Elise thought he might run. But instead he pulled off his spectacles and pressed the heel of his palm to one eye. When he spoke, his voice had gone ragged.

"You think I wanted this? You think I chose it?"

"Then explain it."

He looked at her then, and she saw the thing she'd been hunting in his face—not malice, but fear. Deep, animal fear, worn into him over months like water cutting stone.

"There's a man." He swallowed. "I don't know his name. I never got his name. He came to me in the spring—April, early April. Before the worst of it. Before the arrests started."

"What did he want?"

"He knew things." Le Gallez's voice dropped to a whisper. "Things about my brother. Henri. He was taken to the camp in France—the one on the mainland, you know the one I mean. They said he died of pneumonia, but there were letters. Letters he wasn't supposed to have written."

Elise felt the cold creep through her coat. "He had the letters?"

"He had *copies*. He showed me my brother's writing, his words—things Henri would never have said unless he was starving or desperate or—" Le Gallez broke off, pressing a hand to his mouth.

"Go on."

"He said if I did what he asked, the letters would never reach anyone who mattered. If I didn't—" He shook his head. "You know what they do to families here. You've seen it. We all have."

"What did he ask you to do?"

"Mark the letters. Certain ones, he'd tell me which. A dot in blue-black ink, here—" he touched the lower corner of an invisible envelope—"small enough that you'd need a glass to see it. They'd go through the regular sort, and a man in the German post office would pull them aside. I never knew which ones until he told me. I just—I did what he said."

"Who chose the letters?"

"He did. The man." Le Gallez's gaze went distant. "He knew things about the post—the routes, the subs, who was writing to whom. He told me once that he'd been watching the system longer than most of us had worked in it. But that was before he frightened me. After that, he didn't talk much."

"Do you know what was in them?"

"No. I was never meant to know. I was just the mark." He laughed, short and bitter. "The hand, he called it. Said I had a steady hand for a coward."

The phrase lingered in the air between them. *The hand.* Elise thought of the description Jan had given, the fragment of overheard talk in the safe house: *a scarred man, German, maybe high up.* The man who masterminded it all—the arrest lists, the surveillance, the careful threading of suspicion through the community—had never touched a single letter himself.

"Describe him," Elise said.

"I only saw him twice. The first time in Falla's office—I came back for my coat and he was there, going through the files. I thought he was a German inspector, the way he held himself. But he spoke English with an island accent. He told me that was the point."

"Was he German?"

"I don't know. He looked—" Le Gallez frowned, searching for the word—"ordinary. That's what frightened me most. He could have been anyone. But his hands." He held up his own, spreading the fingers. "His right hand. There was a scar across the knuckles, like a burn that never healed properly. White against the skin."

Elise nodded slowly. The description matched what Jan had heard: a scarred man, a German, perhaps—but perhaps not German at all. Perhaps someone who had been on the island longer than the occupation.

"The households," she said. "The ones you marked. All of them."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he crouched, dragged the cloth bag open, and pulled out a folded sheet of paper, creased and dirty from handling. He thrust it at her.

"That's every address I marked in the last four months. Every letter I touched, every family that came under watch. I don't know why he chose them. I don't know what they did." His voice cracked. "But maybe you can figure it out. Maybe you can do something with it."

Elise unfolded the paper. Columns of addresses in cramped pencil, more than forty. She scanned them quickly—St. Peter Port mostly, but some outlying farms, a few in the parishes beyond. She recognized three of the names.

André's address was there, crossed out and re-added beneath, as if someone had instructed him to re-mark it.

"This is everything?"

"Everything I have." He stood, brushing dust from his knees. His hands were shaking. "If they find out I gave you this—"

"They won't."

"You don't know that." He looked at her, and something in his face softened with grim resignation. "You've been watching the wrong people, Miss Martin. All of you. The man you're looking for doesn't exist in the way you think he does."

"What do you mean?"

But he was already moving, slipping through the gate and down the lane, his footsteps quiet as a cat's. He didn't look back. He left his bag behind, and his glasses, and the only life he'd built under occupation.

Elise stood in the dark churchyard, the list pressed between her fingers, and understood that she had just made a man disappear. Gone to ground, she guessed—off the island, or into a hiding place the way André had. She would not see Le Gallez again.

She looked down at the paper again. Under the addresses, in the same cramped pencil, was a single line she hadn't noticed:

*Ask the doctor about the water.*