A/N: This chapter deals implicitly, although not explicitly, with some distressing concepts. I have kept it in line with books marketed as "YA" so hope the rating continues to be appropriate.

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Jen stood motionless, poised as if ready for flight. Foyle reached out a hand and she flinched back from him, perilously close to the mist-shrouded stream.

"Jen," he said again, and then: "Agent Fretin."

She twitched toward him, away again, feet slipping on the grass. Foyle seized her arms before she could fall.

"Tell me about Agent Infirmier," he said, holding her fast.

"He is on the other side of it," Jen said. Her teeth were chattering, although the chill in the air was not that severe.

"The other side of what?" When she didn't answer, he shook her gently. "Look at me. Look at me, Jen."

She raised her head slowly and he waited until he was sure her gaze had focused on his face, before asking: "What happened?"

Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Night and fog."

"I'm sorry?" Foyle said.

Jen pulled away from him, and he released her. Abruptly, she sat down on the grass, ignoring the damp. Foyle sat beside her despite the chill that penetrated his coat.

"Nacht und Nebel," Jen said. "That is what the Germans say. Night and fog."

He understood her to mean something more than the night which was gently drawing around them now, the fog breathing from the ground. "Night and fog. What does that mean, exactly?"

She told him.

After the first few sentences, he knew it had nothing to do with the crime he was here to investigate. After the first few minutes, he knew he did not want to hear.

If she could see that on his face - and he thought she could, from the flick of her gaze past him, from the way she turned, then, and spoke to the mist and the trees - she had no mercy.

But then, there was no mercy anywhere in the tale she told, so perhaps it was right that she herself had none for him.

"They begin with starvation," she said, precise, academic, as if she spoke of a university experiment carried out on rats.

Weeks of it, gnawing hunger in an unending darkness punctuated only by the screams of other prisoners, to weaken the body and the will, to let imagination and anticipation do their worst. Food, sometimes, a gruel of slimy potato peelings, a heel of moldy bread.

"The prisoner must remain alive until the interrogation begins," Jen told the river running invisible before them. "And, of course, it is useful that the prisoner is now in a state to be grateful for even small gifts from her interrogator. The interrogations themselves are in a way such a gift. They are carried out, after all, in a lighted room, not in the dark. There are people there, faces for the prisoner to look at, voices for her to hear. When the prisoner is taken to an interrogation session, at least she knows she has not been forgotten, left to accidentally starve to death in the dark." She stretched out a hand to touch the grass beside her. The slight movement stirred the fog around her. "These tricks are not unknown to the prisoner. She expects them." Her hand fell back to her side. The fog was still. "They are, however, effective."

Foyle listened. Carefully, attentively, although she would have had no way of telling if he had deliberately let his mind wander, if he had let her words wash over him like a splash of scalding water that could leave no lasting burn. He listened to every word she said as she went on to talk of soldering irons, of pins and fingernails and carbolic acid, committing them to memory as if they were a witness statement, as if he would later have to repeat them in court.

If necessary, I will one day repeat them in court. If Jeanne Valois - Jennifer Marcus - Jen Pawley did not have the chance.

If there is a court for these crimes.

And if there isn't, then what are we fighting for, after all?

"The prisoner comes to understand," Jen said quietly, "that the purpose of the interrogation is not information. She is not a wireless operator. She does not have any useful codes that can be used to feed false information. She knows only a few faces among her network, knows them only by their nom de guerre. By the time her interrogation begins, anyone whose identity she could betray has long since quietly disappeared, to reappear far away with a new name, new papers. And the prisoner begins to realize that her interrogators know that very well. No, the purpose of the interrogation is confession. There is a strange adherence to certain legalities, even as the prisoner watches her interrogator heat the knife blade which will, he tells her, slice open her eye." Her hand went to the scar on her cheek, and then fell away. "The prisoner has been arrested on suspicion; she is being interrogated on suspicion; but she cannot be executed on suspicion. No, they cannot execute her until she confesses."

She paused. "It occurs to the prisoner that it is entirely appropriate that her interrogators come from the same country as the novelist Franz Kafka. It occurs to the prisoner that this would make an excellent play. There are only four actors and one set, minimal costume changes - although West End audiences might not appreciate the stench of excrement needed to add verisimilitude after the prisoner has been tied to her chair for four days. It could be a comedy of manners if such comedies routinely included lit cigarettes held to the skin. The prisoner is lying - the interrogator is lying - they both know the other is lying and they both know the other knows that they are lying. The interrogator will win if the prisoner, even for a moment, tells the truth." She was silent a moment. "There is of course no way for the prisoner to win. Her only goal can be to keep the game going."

"To stay alive," Foyle said.

"To stay alive," Jen agreed. "The prisoner must, of course, defeat not only her interrogator's determination but also her own growing conviction that to lose the game would not be such a bad thing. It would, after all, mean the end of the soldering iron, the ice water, the knives and pliers and cigarettes."

"But you did," Foyle said gently.

"The prisoner is stubborn, which is one reason she was chosen for her job. The prisoner is also competitive, and in the end this is what makes the difference. She speaks French. She speaks only French, with the few German words anyone living in occupied France picks up. She screams in French. She sobs in French. She pleads and begs in French. She even vomits in French. Eventually - the prisoner will later learn it has been six weeks although at time she will no longer know if it has been six days or six years - eventually the interrogator will … give up? Grow bored, perhaps?"

"So he released her?" Foyle asked. "You?"

"Ah, non. There is no release for the prisoners of night and fog, Mr Foyle. Once they swallow you, you are a memory and nothing more. Non, the prisoner is to be transfered. Drancy - although she does not think that is where the journey will end." She paused. "Many people have been sent there. None have come back, and yet there are no rumors of the camp becoming larger."

"Executions?"

"Peut etre," she said. "Mais … I think something would have been heard, if there were bodies. Nothing is heard. There is nothing but silence from the night and the fog." She plucked the grass beside her, shredding the new spring growth. "This prisoner, she is loaded onto a truck with a number of others also Nacht und Nebel. Most of them can't stand unaided but the truck is so crowded that no-one could fall if they tried to. Not very far along the way, the truck is forced to stop by a tree fallen across the road. The driver and the two guards get out of the truck. The prisoner hears gunshots. The rear door of the truck is opened. A man calls her name."

"Axel Brink."

"Axel Brink," Jen agreed. "Agent Infirmier. He leaves the other prisoners to the care of the maquisards with him. Jeanne Valois, he props on the handlebars of his bicycle - he has provided a second cycle for her to ride but it is clear she is unable - and rides with her under the full moon to a field they both know. It is a long way. It is a hard ride, to make it in time. She hears him sobbing behind her, with pain, with exhaustion, but there is not enough left of her to encourage him, to tell him how grateful she is." She was silent a long moment. "There is not enough left of her to be grateful."

Foyle could imagine it: the broken woman, the desperate man, the bicycle, the moonlit road.

And, he knew, he could not imagine it, not in any way that approached the truth, any more than Jen, if he had said the mud was deep enough for men to drown in, could have really understood what it was like to watch a man you knew slip sideways off the duckboards and be sucked down to his death.

"He reaches the field in time," Jen said. "The plane that lands there is not for Jeanne Valois, but for a certain object, one which you perhaps may guess."

"Yes," Foyle acknowledged.

"The plane is not for Jeanne, but there is room for her on the return trip. The woman who has made her way through a dozen German checkpoints with this object hidden in plain sight, who is there to meet the plane, gives it to Jeanne for safekeeping. The plane takes off. Jeanne is free. By the next day, she will be safe. By the next day, twenty five men whose homes lie closest to the place Axel Brink organized the ambush will be shot in the street."

"I see," Foyle said, and he did. "Not your fault. Not his, either."

"I know," she said. "He didn't." She shivered, and wrapped her arms more tightly around her knees. "He blamed himself, he blamed me, he blamed the whole idea of what we do."

The anger, against the instructors and the students, against Miss Pierce and Lieutenant Colonel Wintringham … all based in guilt.

But there was something else, something that carried a more personal edge. What had Anne Overton said? He called us whores. He called Lieutenant Colonel Wintringham a pimp.

"You were lovers," Foyle said, certain of it. "You and Axel Brink."

"Yes," Jen said. "I am, Mr Foyle, a 'loose woman', as our illustrious leader so kindly reminds me. Guilty as charged."

"Wouldn't have put it quite that way myself," he said mildly. "Given the circumstances. No doubt you both ... needed a certain comfort."

"Axel did," Jen said.

"And you?" Foyle asked.

"I needed Axel to continue to do his job. His nerve went, Mr Foyle, quite quickly. I suppose it's something that they can't really test us for, in advance. If they could, Axel would have failed. It made him …"

"Useless?" Foyle suggested.

"Dangerous," Jen corrected. "Nervous men look guilty. Nervous men arouse suspicion. Nervous men get picked up for questioning. And Axel knew … a great many names. So yes, I seduced him. Deliberately, with calculation. What is that legal term? Mens rea." She paused. "Or do I mean mea culpa?"

"Did it work?" Foyle asked.

"Yes. Axel had certain views, you could say they were old-fashioned except I suspect there are more than a few men of all ages who share them." She shrugged. "I knew he would force himself to be braver and bolder than the woman who shared his bed, and he did. His pride was a more powerful motivation than his patriotism."

"But," Foyle said, watching her, "he fell in love with you."

She paused, and then, on the gust of a sigh "Yes."

"And so he rescued you. Not the others from Network Jardinier. You."

Her voice was little more than a breath stirring the fog. "Yes."

"And people died," Foyle said. "And then he returned, and discovered that ... you were perhaps not quite as much in love with him as he was with you."

"Yes," Jen said. "He saw it as a betrayal."

"I dare say he did," Foyle said .

She folded her arms tightly around her stomach. "You do, too, don't you? You think I betrayed him."

"I think you … used him," Foyle said judiciously .

"Yes," she admitted. "I did."

He could barely see her now through the night mist. "But not more harshly than you used yourself." She was only the faintest outline, a shadow, a slight darkness in the murk.

Disappeared in the night and the fog.

"Jen." It came out more sharply than he'd intended.

She moved a little, solidified out of the fog, like a ghost drifting closer. "Oui, c'est moi."

"Jen," he said again. Not Jeanne. Not Jean. Not any of your ghosts. "Did you kill him?"

"Yes," she said, and in her voice was the ring of utterly exhausted truth. "A year and a half ago, in France, I killed him. It just took this long for someone else to pull the trigger."

She began to weep then, soundlessly, almost motionless.

Foyle wondered how often she must have wept so, alone in some night's darkness where any escaping sound could betray her, to have learned to shed her tears in such utter silence. C'est la guerre.

Then he thought of a young widow with three small children sleeping in some small house on the Cornish coast, and thought perhaps her lessons in noiseless grief had been learned earlier than France.

If she had been a man, Foyle would have found something to study intently on the opposite bank of the stream until her composure was recovered; if she had been almost any other woman, he would have held her. The first was inadequate, the second an intrusion on the dignity with which she struggled with her anguish.

He put his hand on her back, feeling the hitch and shudder of her breath, and simply sat, so she would know that at least for this one moment she was not alone.

When she grew still, he let his hand fall. "If you didn't set that grenade, someone else did," he said. "Possibly someone else who thought that you would open that door. Are you safe at Hill House?"

Jen lifted her head and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "What is safe?"

"We-ell," Foyle said, "for the moment let's agree that it's 'not in imminent danger of being murdered in your bed'."

"I don't know what that would feel like anymore," she said flatly.

He got to his feet, wincing at the stiffness in his injured leg, and held out his hand to help her up. "No, I suppose you don't."

Jen rose without his assistance. "There are many empty rooms at Hill House," she said. "I can sleep in one of those tonight."

"I have a better idea," Foyle said, starting back toward the car, "although it will mean facing a danger greater than you've ever known."

She followed. "And what is that?"

"Uncle Aubrey's greengage wine," Foyle said.

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A/N:

The Gestapo decree, Nacht und Nebel, means "Night and Fog". This policy, enforced in the occupied countries, meant that whenever someone was arrested, the family would learn nothing about their fate. The persons arrested, sometimes only suspected resistors, were secretly sent to Germany, often to a concentration camp. Whether they lived or died, the Germans would give out no information to the families of the suspects. This was done to keep the populations quiet out of an atmosphere of mysterious terror and fear. Nacht und Nebel deportations began in 1941, although the full implications of the policy were not understood in either the occupied territories or in England until much later.

At the Nuremburg trials (according to some present) many observers removed the headphones conveying translations of the testimony of survivors because they could not bear to listen any more. I did not mean to imply any weakness of character in Foyle's reluctance to hear Jen's account: only the innate human resistance to accepting the reality of horrific events.

Treatment of captured SOE agents in France varied somewhat, an initial period of interrogation, followed by deportation to Germany to a concentration camp was a very common outcome. Lilian Rolfe Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, and Violette Szabo were executed at Ravensbrück. Eliseé Allard, Robert Benoist, Jean Bouguennec, Angehand Defendini, Julien Detal, Emile-Henri Garry, Frank Pickersgill, Pierre Geelen, Marcel Leccia, John Macalister, James Mayer, Charles Rechenmann, Roméo Sabourin, Arthur Steele, Denis Barrett, Henri Frager, Pierre Mulsant and George Wilkinson were executed at Buchenwald . Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Noor Inayat Khan, and Eliane Plewman were executed at Dachau.

While the Nazis employed (with considerable success) sophisticated, non-coercive interrogation techniques against many captured Allied soldiers and airmen, captured spies were frequently subjected to brutal torture intended simply to elicit confessions which could justify execution. A small handful of agents successfully stuck to their cover stories in these circumstances, their only hope of survival. This was not without psychological price and some required extensive psychological help after the war to resume their 'real' identities.

Agents from overseas were not the only ones to face this fate: the French Resistance's casualties were, at the lowest estimate, 8,000 dead in action, 25,000 shot, and 27,000 killed in concentration or extermination camps.

One of the 'staging camps' in France for deportation to concentration camps was located at Drancy.

Maquisards - members of the Maquis, the rural French Resistance

"Collective punishment", the massacre of innocent civilians in retaliation for Resistance, Partisan, and espionage activities was a feature of Nazi-occupied Europe, although by no means unique to the Third Reich.

"Mens rea" - Latin for 'guilty mind', in law (roughly) the intent to commit a crime.

"Mea Culpa" - Latin for 'through my fault', a religious phrase that is part of the Catholic mass but which has passed into common parlance.