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You’re free now.’
    She used a filthy expression in reply. She shook her head at him and the ragged hair flew round her face. ‘I’m not telling you! Never!’
    Bradford turned to the other women. ‘Anyone know anything about her?’
    One of the older women took a pace forward. ‘She’s been like this on and off since she came here,’ she said. ‘Her name’s Masson. I think the Gestapo had her first.’
    â€˜Masson …’ he repeated. ‘Masson – I think that name’s on my list. Okay, Sergeant, it’s not nice but we’ve got to do it. Get her out, and we’ll send her back to the base hospital with the other sick.’
    He went back to the office and crossed the fifth name off his list. Terese Masson, Resistance agent. Captured the 20th November 1943. Age eighteen years, hair blonde, eyes brown, height five foot four, no distinguishing marks or scars. Eighteen years old. ‘Jesus God!’ he said out loud. She had been in that hell-hole for ten months. She must have been around nineteen and she looked an old woman. The improvised hospital just outside the camp was bursting with prisoners suffering from every variety of disease. Captain Joe Kaplan was the army psychiatrist in charge of the mental patients and Terese Masson would be under him when she got there. Bradford had tried to comfort her when they got her into the ambulance, but she only moaned and cried, repeating again and again that she would never tell them, never, never … he seemed to hear the cry following him as he went back to the office and the ambulance drove away, its red crosses looming like plague marks on its sides. He hadn’t allowed himself the luxury of personal feelings since he had first driven into Buchenwald; he had done his job with his mind tight closed against sentiment or hate, but the pitiful cry of defiance and the miserable rag-doll body struggling against her rescuers haunted him, like the few statistics on his list. Two days later he drove out to the base hospital and asked to see her.

2
    â€˜You know, Bob, this is a very interesting case.’ Joe Kaplan took off his glasses, polished them on his handkerchief and then put them back on. Bradford knew the mannerism well; he had known Joe since they were students at Harvard together: he had always polished his glasses when he got excited about something. They had become friends and stayed friends, which was unusual, because the Bradfords were moneyed aristocracy and the Kaplans were Jews. The two sections of society seldom mixed socially even in New York, which was pretty liberal by Boston standards.
    â€˜Most neurotic conditions are caused by guilt feelings, you know – but the point about this girl is, she didn’t tell the Germans anything!’
    â€˜I don’t see why you have to wrap it up,’ Bradford said. ‘It seems fairly simple to me; she’s broken down because of what they did to her. For Christ’s sake, what’s so neurotic about that? Wouldn’t you?’
    Kaplan laughed. ‘No, I’d have opened my big mouth the first time one of them said Boo! Don’t get mad at me, Bob. I know you’re very close to this. I’ve tried a simple analysis, drugs and the usual stuff. You must admit I’ve made some progress; you can get the kid into a room with a bath without she has hysterics. But I have established that she’s had some kind of sexual trauma with one of the bastards – no, it wasn’t rape, I checked. She’s a virgin. But something that makes her feel guilty. I said to her once, “You didn’t give them any information, you must remember that. You didn’t tell them anything!” She’d had a shot of pethedine and she was pretty woozy. Without the stuff she wouldn’t talk at all. And she said, “I would have told him . They took me away from him … I wanted to tell him. I wanted to go