Code Name Verity: Part 2, Section 24 Summary & Analysis

Maddie is writing from England—but in her head, Ormaie is still on fire. Maybe she’ll be court-martialed or tried for murder, but all she feels is relief. However, she isn’t free; she’s under house arrest at the Cottage at the Moon Squadron Aerodrome. It doesn’t matter that there’s a guard outside. Even if Maddie does die, it’ll be a fast, humane death, and Granddad will know what happened. The Bloody Machiavellian Intelligence Officer is coming to interview Maddie (presumably without burning Maddie or sticking her with pins). Maddie feels very safe.

Now, Maddie turns to writing an incident report of the “successful sabotage and destruction” of the Ormaie Gestapo headquarters. On Saturday night, Maddie and the Resistance rode bicycles into Ormaie. They carried bombs. Once it was dark, they blew the back gate open. Mitraillette took care of the dogs, and everyone efficiently got the prisoners out, set the bombs, and got away.

Maddie decided she’d free whoever was in Julie’s cell. She had to walk through the interrogation room to get there. It smelled of vomit, ammonia, rotten meat, and burnt hair. It’s only now that Maddie has even thought about Julie having to live with that for eight weeks. In any case, Maddie and her partner rescued the man in Julie’s cell, who turned out to be a Jamaican rear gunner in the RAF. The Jamaican man was lovely; he hadn’t eaten in a week but still carried a boy with broken knees out of the hotel. They had an hour to get away from the hotel before it blew up. When it exploded, Maddie was standing on the back of a bike while the Jamaican man pedaled.

The force of the explosion knocked them over. Maddie laughed in the road until the rear gunner picked her up and they set off again. Maddie shared with him that she’s a shot-down airman too, and they agreed that “It’s a white man’s world.” He asked why she was crying, and Maddie shared that Julie was in the rear gunner’s cell for two months, but now she’s dead. The gunner said that his best friend is dead too; he was a pilot and flew the plane straight into the ground so everyone else could bail out. Now that Maddie writes it down, she realizes she did the exact same thing. It seemed heroic when the rear gunner told her about it, but Maddie doesn’t think of herself as heroic.

Returning to the story, Maddie and the rear gunner said goodbye to the Thibauts after two nights. They had to go get the Rosalie out of the rose-grower’s garage. While they were at the villa, the old woman led Maddie through her garden to a huge pile of damask roses. She explained that they were finally allowed to bury the bodies. The men were buried up by the bridge, but the girls are buried here. Julie is buried in her great-aunt’s rose garden. Her body is wrapped in her grandmother’s first communion veil, and her grave is covered in roses. Maddie only realized at that point that this old woman was certainly Julie’s great-aunt, since Julie’s family was from Ormaie and this woman carries a “great burden” (she shot her husband). Maddie couldn’t tell her that she’d buried her own grandniece in her garden.

Maddie hears a car pull up as she writes, but first, she wants to write the account of how she got out of France. It’ll make her cry. She cried most of the way through—as soon as she heard the radio message, “After a while, all children tell the truth,” it made her think of Julie. The message was in French, so the final word was “verité.” Eventually, the plane landed perfectly. Jamie leapt out and asked Maddie if she was going to fly them home. He insisted on trading places, which again made Maddie bawl. She was afraid she’d get in trouble, but she took his seat and then told him she shot Julie. Jamie said and did nothing, and then told her she had to fly home so he could think. He kept his hand on her shoulder the whole way home, just like Julie did.