‘They took me to one of Paris’s oldest prisons,’ Alice told me, ‘a place called Fresnes. It was either that or the Cherche-Midi.’
‘I’ve heard of it,’ I told her. ‘They tortured people there.’
‘Yes,’ said Alice, ‘and perhaps I was lucky in that I had so little to reveal. Fortunate – if it can be described as such – in that my questioner, an older man, was clearly experienced in the art of interrogation. I think he had seen enough to know when someone had something to hide, and he had no qualms about showing me that I was a waste of his time. Others who knew more – like Yves, the leader of our cell – they didn’t fare so well.’
‘They let you go?’
She shook her head. ‘No, that wasn’t how it worked. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was essentially a hostage, one of hundreds. We were being held, all of us, as collateral. There was a sort of mathematics to it. A ratio, I think, of about one to fifty. If one Boche life was taken in a Resistance attack, fifty French prisoners would be executed.’