The Prisoner - Robert Muchamore Page 0,1

other. Sometimes Marc would score fruit, bread, or even cake left over after a meeting in the admin offices. His cabin mates who worked in the dockyard or train depot occasionally got their mitts into cargos of food.

The mouse resurfaced, scuttling along a bed frame and out the door as Marc climbed on to his bunk. It was on the third tier of four. With half a metre to the next bunk, it was impossible to sit up.

After sweeping some dead bugs off his blanket, Marc unlaced his wrecked boots. His feet had grown and his only pair of socks was stained dark red where his heels and toes rubbed raw. But the itching under Marc’s shirt bothered him more than his bloody feet.

The straw mattress rustled as he unbuttoned his shirt. Marc was naturally stocky, but prisoner rations had been poor – particularly during the cold months between December and February – and he’d lost all the fat over his rib cage. He scratched at a couple of new flea bites as he aligned his hairy armpit with the light coming through the porthole.

Marc combed his fingertips through the mass of sweaty hairs. Sometimes you had to hunt the louse making you itch, but today a whole family had hatched in one go. He squinted as he picked half-a-dozen sesame-seed-sized body lice out of his armpit, squishing each one against the wall for a satisfying crunchy sound.

The next phase of battle was a hunt for nits – trying to pick out sticky eggs before they hatched. With so many bodies packed on the boat, with most prisoners only having one set of clothes and no proper washing facilities, body lice, fleas and bed bugs were inescapable.

Picking out bugs always depressed Marc. It was hard being far from everyone he knew, being hungry and being forced to work, but the bugs and filth were worst because they meant he didn’t even control the most intimate parts of his own body.

When Marc had done his best with the lice, he turned on to his back and stared at the mildewing wooden slats of the top bunk, less than an elbow’s length from the tip of his nose. He was fiercely hungry and his mind drifted, but his hand slipped under his straw mattress and he smiled warily as he felt a piece of green card in his grubby hand.

Just touching it scared him. He’d been trying to escape since arriving in Frankfurt ten months earlier, and removing it from the administration office was a risk. If everything worked out, a card like this would be his ticket out of Germany. But if he got caught, it could just as easily become his death warrant.

*

Marc was no ordinary prisoner. Reich Labour Administration records said he was Marc Hortefeux, a fifteen-year-old French citizen from Lorient, sentenced for smuggling black-market food, who’d volunteered for agricultural labour in Germany.

In reality he was Marc Kilgour, a fourteen-year-old from Beauvais near Paris. Orphaned shortly after birth, Marc had escaped to Britain after the German invasion of France two years earlier. He’d then been among the first batch of young agents trained to work undercover for an espionage group known as CHERUB.

Imprisoned by the Gestapo during a sabotage mission, Marc had been forced to kill a fellow inmate who’d bullied him. He’d faced a death sentence for murder, but a French prison commandant took pity and agreed to commute Marc’s sentence, provided he volunteered for five years’ labour service in Germany.

To qualify for this programme Marc needed to be fifteen years old. The commandant ensured that Marc’s prison records were lost, and a replacement set drawn up with a false age and giving him a longer sentence. The next afternoon Marc had boarded a train to Frankfurt and he’d been here ever since.

*

‘Sleep, eh?’ sixteen-year-old Laurent shouted, as he slapped Marc gently across the chest. ‘Lazy bastard.’

Marc’s eyes opened as he shot up, almost thumping his head on the bunk above. More than two hundred inmates had finished a shift, and as well as the sound and smell of his roommates, the Oper’s cabins and passageways had come alive with shouts and clomping boots.

‘Just resting my eyes,’ Marc said, as his mouth stretched into a yawn. ‘Reading documents is a strain.’

Laurent shook his head wryly as he unbuttoned a shirt coated in grey dust. ‘Poor little eyeballs,’ he laughed. ‘All we had to do today was haul bags of cement.’

Laurent had been on German rations long enough to