Citadel by Kate Mosse Page B

don’t understand why she made such a fuss.’
    ‘Max is Jewish, Sandrine. Don’t be so naïve.’
    ‘Yes, but he’s French. He’s got all the right papers, hasn’t he? He’ll be all right.’
    ‘No one is “all right”, as you put it,’ Marianne said. ‘If he’d stayed in Paris, he’d have been arrested by now.’
    ‘But Maréchal Pétain is protecting Jews in the zone libre , that’s what it said in the paper.’
    Marianne gave a sharp laugh. ‘Every week the situation gets worse, can’t you see? And because Lucie goes about with him, she has to be careful too. She gets spat at in the street; someone painted foul comments on her front door.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Sandrine, the fight going out of her. ‘I didn’t know.’ She paused. ‘Is that why she’s worried about her father coming back?’
    ‘Lucie said that?’
    ‘Not in so many words.’
    ‘Monsieur Ménard is a brute, an unpleasant man at the best of times,’ said Marianne. ‘Unkind to his wife. To Lucie too. Belonged to a right-wing veterans’ organisation for years, long before the war. In the LVF now.’ She stopped. ‘I’m just saying we have to be careful. You have to be careful. You put people at risk otherwise, even if you don’t mean to.’
    Sandrine felt a shiver go down her spine. On the surface, Carcassonne and its people looked the same, but her perception was shifting, changing, slipping. Suddenly, it was no longer quite the town she loved.
    ‘I thought I was doing the right thing,’ she said, now thoroughly miserable.
    ‘I know, darling,’ sighed Marianne, the heat going out of her voice. ‘But you don’t see what’s under your nose half the time.’
    ‘How can I?’ she protested. ‘You never tell me anything. Besides, you’re hardly ever home these days.’
    ‘That’s not fair, I . . .’
    Sandrine stared at her, but whatever her sister might have been about to say, she’d thought better of it.
    ‘What?’
    Marianne shook her head. ‘Nothing.’
    They walked a little further in silence for a moment, then Sandrine pushed her hand into her pocket and pulled out the notes she’d written in the police station.
    ‘Here,’ she said.
    ‘What’s this?’ Marianne asked.
    ‘It’s what happened,’ she said. ‘I was intending to give it to the police, but . . . well, I didn’t get the chance. Anyway, you might as well read it.’
    The sisters sat down on a bench beneath the plane trees lining the boulevard Maréchal Pétain. Sandrine watched as her sister turned the pages, but the expression on her face gave nothing away. When she had finished, Marianne leant back against the metal struts of the bench.
    ‘At least do you see why I thought I should report what happened?’ Sandrine said.
    ‘To tell you the truth, darling, I don’t know what to think.’ Marianne tapped the papers in her lap. ‘How much of this did you tell the policeman you talked to?’
    ‘Not much. I simply said I’d pulled a man out of the river and that I thought someone had hit me. When I came to, there was no one there, so I made my way to the police station.’
    ‘Did he believe you?’
    Sandrine frowned. ‘I don’t know.’
    Marianne paused. ‘You didn’t say anything about the . . . nature of the man’s injuries?’
    She shook her head. ‘The thought of nobody knowing what had happened to him, after what he’d suffered, it didn’t seem right,’ she said quietly. ‘I wasn’t trying to cause trouble.’
    At last, Marianne reached out and took her hand. ‘No. It must have been dreadful. Horrible for you.’
    Sandrine was furious to feel tears pricking in her eyes. ‘You do believe me then,’ she said. ‘You don’t think I’m making it up.’
    Marianne shook her head. ‘Even if you did bang your head, I can’t see you could invent all that.’
    ‘What do you think happened?’
    Her sister thought for a moment. ‘Probably that the man, whoever he was, was being held nearby. Somehow he got away and made it down to