MISS GRAHAM’S COLD WAR COOKBOOK
Celia Rees

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Celia Rees 2020

Jacket design by Claire Ward @HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Jacket photographs © Werner Bischof/Magnum Photos (Brandenburg Gate), Magdalena Russocka/Trevillion Images (woman)

Celia Rees asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008347116

Ebook Edition © May 2020 ISBN: 9780008347130

Version: 2020-03-25

Dedication

To Nancy Elizabeth Marguerite Goodway

(1 January 1900–4 January 1984)

My ‘Lion Aunt’

Epigraph

What country, friends, is this?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, TWELFTH NIGHT,

ACT 1, SCENE 2

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Dining Room, the Grand Hotel Mirabeau, Lausanne

London: 1945/6

1. Government Offices, Marylebone

2. 34 Cromwell Square, Paddington

3. Cromwell Square, Paddington

4. Savoy Grill, London

5. Cromwell Square, Paddington; Service Women’s Club, Lower Sloane St

Germany: 1946

6. Blue Train, Hook of Holland—Hamburg

7. Hotel Atlantic, Hamburg

8. British Officers’ Club, Hamburg

9. Außenalster Café, Hamburg

Dori: 34 Cromwell Square, Paddington, W2

10. CCG Mess, Lübeck

11. CCG Billet, Lübeck

12. CCG Mess, Lübeck

13. CCG Billet, Lübeck

14. Mietshaus Moltkestrasse, Lübeck; British Hospital, Hamburg

15. CCG Billet, Lübeck

Dori: 34 Cromwell Square, Paddington, W2

16. Landestrasse Schule, Lübeck

17. CCG Billet, Lübeck, Travemünde

18. CCG Billet, Lübeck

Dori: Paddington, W2

19. CCG Mess, Lübeck

20. Billet, Lübeck

21. CCG Mess, Lübeck

22. 44 Möllnstrasse, Lübeck

23. 44 Möllnstrasse, Lübeck

24. Atlantic Hotel, Hamburg

25. Langerhorn Sanatorium, Hamburg

26. Fischhaus Restaurant, Blankense, Hamburg

27. Officers’ Club, Hamburg

Dori: Paddington W2

28. Lübeck Billet/Atlantic Hotel, Lübeck/Hamburg

29. Billet, Lübeck

30. Apartment 2a Schillerstrasse, Lübeck

31. Apartment 2a Schillerstrasse, Lübeck

32. Hotel am Zoo, Berlin

33. Russian Sector, Berlin

34. Bauhaus Apartment, Wannsee, Berlin

35. Alte Küche, Berlin

36. Apartment 2a Schillerstrasse, Lübeck

Italy: 1946

37. American military train

38. Hotel Aquila Nera–Schwarzer Adler, Vipiteno Sterzing

39. Hotel Aquila Nera-Schwarzer Adler, Vipitino Sterzing

40. Pensione Sterzberg, Vipiteno Sterzing

41. Verona

42. Grand Hotel Savoia, Genoa

The Grand Hotel Mirabeau, Lausanne

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Celia Rees

About the Publisher

Dining Room, the Grand Hotel Mirabeau, Lausanne
10th November 1989

Fried Fillet of Perch

Perch fillets dipped in egg, then flour, salted and peppered with a hint of paprika, fried in butter … Speciality of the place. A finicky fish – hardly worth eating – bones like needles. Tastes of the riverbed.

She put down her pen and pushed her plate away. She wasn’t here to eat the food or drink the wine. She had no appetite anyway. She’d come by way of Natzweiler-Struthof, a Nazi camp two hundred miles north of here. A Nacht und Nebel place, Night and Fog. Apt name. Four British girls had died there, forgotten by almost everybody, tucked away in the back pocket of a secret war.

She’d laid four red roses in the black maw of the rusting oven. A pilgrimage of sorts.

If these do not die well, it will be a black matter …

They had not died well.

A ragged cheer burst from the kitchen. Through the flapping doors, she could see white-coated backs in front of a portable television. From the foyer, tinny, muffled commentary, crowd noise, clinking and chanting, mixed with the excited chatter of guests and staff clustered round a larger screen, drawn by the need to witness the drama taking place in Berlin, history erupting into the present, breaking through the muted formality of this grand hotel. An ending? A beginning? Both? Impossible to tell.

Not that it mattered. Very little mattered anymore.

‘Are you finished, Madame?’ The elderly waiter hesitated before taking her plate. ‘The dish not to your liking?’

‘I’m not hungry.’ She capped her pen and lit a cigarette.

‘You have been here before?’ He asked as he refilled her glass. A Chasselas. Swiss wine, none the worse for that.

‘Once. A long time ago.’

Just after the war. She doubted he would remember. How many people did he encounter? She’d been here under another name. A different person. A different time. She remembered him, though. His name was Joseph. She had a good memory for faces. She’d needed it in her line of business. A slender, solemn, graceful young man then, dark, thin-faced, with a pencil moustache. His hair silver now, the moustache still there – a thin line sketched in graphite. French, she recalled, and Jewish. He’d found safety here in Switzerland. She wondered if his family had been as lucky.

‘Anything else for you, madame? A little dessert, perhaps? Coffee?’

‘No, thank you.’ She knocked the glass, her hand suddenly as useless as a bat. Wine spilled across the table. Joseph sprang forward to repair the damage. ‘No need.’ She shook her head. ‘Clumsy of me.’

She held her hands on her lap and looked around at the immaculately laid tables, the stiff, starched linen, the gleam of the heavy silver cutlery, the glittering glassware, her fellow diners. Some of them frail, in wheelchairs, she noted, the staff must be used to different degrees of infirmity. She pushed herself back from the table. Anticipating that she was about to leave, Joseph was immediately at her side, whisking her chair away, offering her his arm.

She declined his help and made her way slowly, Joseph hurrying in front of her, nodding to two young waiters to open the double doors. He bowed as she left. She smiled her thanks and wished him farewell. This was the last time she would be eating here, or anywhere. In a little less than twenty-four hours, Stella Snelling, restaurant critic and cookery writer, acclaimed and feared in equal measure, would be no more.

She’d taken a suite with a view of the lake. The Art Deco furnishings were just shabby enough to be authentic. She’d had the black lacquer writing desk reversed, so that it faced away from the fussy, fluted fan-shaped mirror. She found her appearance disconcerting. She had never expected to get this old, to live this long. Even with ten years knocked off Stella’s passport, she was looking her true age now. She wore no makeup, her black hair an untidy grey mane; the dark eyes, deep and hooded, had seen too much; the grooved lines etched on the forehead, by the sides of the mouth, carried too much pain. She hardly recognized this person she had become. In her dreams, she was always young.

She opened the overnight bag that she’d brought with her, taking out a small green medical case. She removed the top tray holding the plasters, scissors, antiseptic cream, paracetamol and tablets that any traveller might carry, to reveal a number of disposable hypodermic syringes, ampoules of diamorphine, and more of the drug in capsule form. She placed the drugs in the small refrigerator and took out the Koskenkorva vodka. She poured a glass, lit a cigarette and went out onto the balcony.

The light had almost gone. The lake was a dark pewterish-purple, the mountains opposite lost in a cold, bluish haze. A mist had risen, diffusing the last of the sunset, layering the lake with bloodied gauze.

She sipped her drink, savouring the sharp, clear spirit. There were clinics here in Switzerland that offered a discreet service for the end of life. Such facilities were not openly advertised. She was wealthy, with no living relatives, and believed strongly in a person’s right to choose how he or she wanted to die. Arrangements had been made, monies forwarded (for certain services, the clinic demanded prepayment). Tomorrow at 10.30, she had an appointment. A substantial further donation had guaranteed the director’s personal attention. Nothing would be left to chance. Hence the diamorphine. The lake had turned to glittering blackness, the coloured lights of the quay dancing on its restless surface. Time to go back inside.

She opened a leather attaché case and began to lay out the contents on the desk. A brochure for the Endymion Clinic: situated on the beautiful shores of Lake Geneva, offering proven anti-ageing treatments and unrivalled levels of expertise in the areas of fertility and sexual health. The name of the director had been circled, Other services available on application, doubly underlined. The brochure had arrived at her Paris flat with an accompanying note from Adeline in New York. This is what we’ve been waiting for! in Adeline’s arthritic scrawl, with instructions to go ahead and make arrangements. They would do it together, Adeline had said, but she was doing it alone. Within days, it seemed, she was reading Adeline’s obituary.

ADELINE CURTIS CROFT PARNELL the celebrated female war correspondent, who covered every major conflict from World War II to San Salvador, died on Sunday in her New York West Village apartment aged 79.

Adeline Parnell was one of the first journalists to enter Germany with Allied Forces. She reported honestly and fearlessly about events as they were happening, including the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. She went on to report on the Nuremburg trials and won a Pulitzer for her reporting from Korea. She covered the war in Vietnam and the conflict in San Salvador until ill health forced her retirement. She continued to photograph her home city of New York, which she described as ‘her war zone’.

Born Adeline Curtis Croft in 1910, in Poughkeepsie, New York State, she was educated at Bryn Mawr and Columbia University. She went on to work for various newspapers, including the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, as well as Life magazine. In 1942, she married fellow journalist Sam Parnell who was killed in 1944. She never remarried and leaves no close relatives. Her estate and considerable archive are bequeathed to Columbia University.

It was no surprise. She had last seen Adeline in her New York apartment a month or so before. She had tried not to show her shock at finding her old friend so diminished; slumped and twisted into her wheelchair, so thin that her blue shirt and fawn cord trousers seemed empty, like clothes on a puppet, her thick, blonde curly hair reduced to white wisps, her rings loose on the bird-claw fingers that twisted round the controls of her power chair.

‘Look a state, don’t I?’ Adeline looked up; her blue eyes, once so sharp, milky with cataracts. They both knew that this could be their last meeting. She’d turned away to hide the tears in her own eyes.

‘’s OK.’ Adeline gave a ghost of her old smile. ‘As long as this still works,’ she tapped her temple, ‘I don’t mind. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” and all that yadayada. Come, come over here where there’s more light.’ She manoeuvred herself through her ‘archive’. Piles of newspapers, files and clippings stretched from floor to ceiling. She halted in front of the brownstone’s tall window that looked out onto the West Village. ‘Something I want you to see.’

In the bay, the heavy wooden table was free of clutter. A Tiffany lamp, balanced by a gold and ivory Favrile vase of canna lilies, stood on a faded green-and-purple velvet runner. In the centre of the table lay a book; the brown cloth cover blotched and stained, the title in faded gilt.

The Radiation

Cookery Book

For use with the ‘New World’

Regulo Controlled Gas Cookers

The inside cover was flecked and rust spotted, there was a name written along with a place and date:

Lübeck, British Zone of Occupation, Germany, January 1946.

The name almost illegible. Time erased.

‘It was on top of a pile of other stuff, as though someone had just put it down. It wasn’t there the day before, I swear … Then I found these,’ Adeline pointed to a folder of photographs. ‘Just spilled across the floor. After all these years. Gotta mean something …’

She opened the folder and felt the same frisson. They both knew that coincidence, synchronicity, serendipity, whatever you wanted to call it, was not to be undervalued, that intuition counted for more than cold logic. In her experience, it could be the difference between life and death.

‘I took another look, into what happened, you know?’ Adeline spoke into the gathered silence. ‘I think I’m onto something.’ Her eyes showed a little of their old spark. ‘I’m waiting for confirmation. Now pour us a drink. There’s bourbon over there. Here’s to it!’ Adeline lifted the glass between her two hands. ‘If I’m right, we’ll do it together!’

Adeline hadn’t made it. It was all on her now. She placed the Radiation Cookery Book on the black lacquered desk and opened the brown cloth cover. Such a nondescript exterior blotched and stained with water damage, still smelling faintly of smoke. There were handwritten recipes, clippings from magazines – Stella Snelling’s dozen delicious ways with canapés – menu cards slipped like memories between pages still grainy and pilled with ancient flour. Each one perfectly innocent-seeming but so freighted with other meanings that they might have been scribed in blood. Everything lay between these covers, not least the reason why she was here.

She put the book down, dark drops spotting the cover. Tears came more easily now than they ever had in the past.

Blinking to clear her sight, she shook photographs from a manila envelope, fanning them across the desk, sorting them like a pack of cards.

What she’d found in Germany, how it had unwound, was here to see.

Images of a ruined city: acres upon acres of devastation; tumbled bricks under a dusting of snow; a few distant buildings showing black, fretted against the sky; a house number – 24 – painted on a chunk of fallen masonry. A man stared at tangled twisted steel girders that reached towards him like the arms of some toppled metal monster. Capsized ships lay in a harbour, half-submerged, funnels flush with the water. Snapshots of some terrifying dystopia taken in Germany 1946. A Caspar David Friedrich frozen sea, the Baltic presumably, frost-foamed waves looking uncannily like the snow-covered masonry piled in jagged heaps. Niflheim, the realm of ice and cold.

The photograph of Adeline herself was the one that had accompanied her obituary. Taken by somebody else on some moving battlefield. Adeline with her combat-jacket collar turned up, most of her face obscured by her Leica, blonde curls stuffed under a forage cap, a tank in the background.

Adeline was never without her camera. She had an eye for a picture, was famous for it, but it was more than that with her. It was as though she felt compelled to catch memories in the net of time. Here they all were. Snap. She’d caught them all.

There she was smiling, happy, sitting at a table in a sunlit square, the photograph taken in three-quarter profile, blue-grey eyes looking off to the right, the dappled light catching the planes and shadows of her face and the sun glinting on her golden hair. It was a good picture. The last one taken of her.

And a younger self, looking glamorous in a low cut Schiaparelli she’d bought for a song from a Parisian countess living in a cold-water flat in Maida Vale. New Year’s Eve, 1945.

There was handsome Harry Hirsch at the same New Year’s party. Jewish Brigade and later Mossad, looking boyish, if slightly sunken-eyed, a bit dishevelled, black hair flopping in his eyes, tie loose and shirt sleeves rolled. He had been acting as bartender, dispensing hooch to the spivs, émigrés, service types and general ne’er-do-wells there assembled. Next, the American, Tom McHale, in need of a shave and hungover, the photograph taken the morning after, no less boyish but looking altogether more slippery and deceitful which, of course, he was. Then Leo Chase. Came to a bad end. Dying in some ghastly Moscow flat, liver turned to foie gras. She smiled slightly, proud of the part she’d played in his demise. Adeline was lucky to get him. Leo didn’t like being photographed, now everyone knew why, but here he was, eventual disgrace far in the future, his collar turned up against the New Year’s Eve drizzle, rain drops glistening on his bowler and overcoat collar, photographed coming in to the party, pale eyes shifty, peering sideways behind his glasses, weak mouth caught between a grimace and a smile.

Next, the von Stavenows. Elisabeth in evening dress, head tilted to one side, large eyes gazing off somewhere, as lovely as a Nordic film star. She placed her next to the first photograph and looked from one to the other. Take away Elisabeth’s gloss and glamour and they could have been sisters. Apart from the eyes. Hers were icy; the other’s kind. Below them, came Kurt as Sturmbannführer, handsome as a viper in his black and silver. Underneath this, a much younger Kurt von Stavenow, looking very fetching in a cricket sweater, all blond hair and chiselled cheekbones. No wonder she’d fallen for him. The photo was passport size and had been paperclipped at some time: a long hook of reddish-brown spots marred his white shoulder. Rubbing with a thumb made no difference. Some stains are impossible to erase.

She’d laid out the photographs in a pyramid, like a Tarot Spread. She placed the smiling woman in the sunlit square at the apex, the others ranged below. A reading would be impossible. There were no good cards here.

Oh, my dear girl, what did we do to you?

There was a reckoning to be made. A debt to be paid.

LONDON

1
Government Offices, Marylebone
31st December 1945

‘Do you know this man?’

Edith Graham looked back at the implacable black eyes staring into hers, then down at the photograph. A Greek kouros in a cricket sweater. A young man caught in the full beauty of his youth, or so she’d thought when she fell in love with him that very afternoon. She remembered the photo being taken. 1932. The Parks in Oxford. He was standing at the edge of the pitch, hands in pockets, face in profile, fair hair waving back from a high forehead. Shadows showed beneath his brows and defined his high cheekbones. He was frowning slightly, his mouth a straight line.

‘Why yes, I do know him. That’s Kurt von Stavenow.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Oh, yes. Quite certain.’

‘And your relationship?’

‘We – we were lovers for a while …’

The woman made a note with her green marbled Schaeffer. Edith left it at that. She wasn’t about to confide in this austere stranger with her cold, appraising eyes.

‘For how long?’ she asked with the air of someone who knew anyway.

‘Not long. A year, if that,’ Edith replied. He’d been her first love, only real love, come to that. Strange to think their time together had been so short. It took a far greater space in her recollected life.

The woman made another note, put down her pen and looked back at Edith, head on one side. She was strikingly good-looking, black hair swept back from a porcelain-pale face, large, dark eyes, slanted and slightly hooded. She wore red lipstick, the sort of shade that Edith’s sister, Louisa, favoured; other than that, very little makeup. The set of her mouth suggested that she rarely smiled. Her dark-grey costume was cut with the severity of a well-tailored uniform. Any suggestion of mannishness was offset by the ivory silk blouse, the Peter Pan collar pinned with a small pearl brooch. Edith admired the subtlety. I’m a woman in a man’s world, the outfit said, in a position of some seniority. The woman put a hand to her throat, an unconscious defence against Edith’s scrutiny.

‘I say,’ Edith broke the silence. ‘What is this all about?’

‘You’re here to answer questions not ask them.’

Edith shifted in her seat. This was beginning to feel less like an interview, more like an interrogation. She had no idea why she was here, or even where ‘here’ was.

She’d been brought from Control Commission, Germany Headquarters in Kensington, pulled out of the final briefing without explanation, and delivered without a word by a young man in a double-breasted suit and a Guards tie. He’d just pointed to a porticoed entrance.

‘First floor. Corridor on the left.’

They were government offices of some type, although the proportions were all wrong for offices: the corridor too wide, the ceilings too high. The room they were in might once have been a grand sitting room. A small gas fire stood dwarfed in a wide fireplace, any heat swallowed by the yawning, cavernous chimney, and the muffled clatter of a typewriter filtered through thin partitioning plywood. No nameplate for the offices, no numbers on the doors. Something to do with cousin Leo. Edith would put money on it. They were second cousins, really, several times removed, but had grown up together, their mothers close. Leo was always vague about his work in the government but everyone knew it was hush-hush.

Edith sat facing a large, plain desk, clear apart from a single pad, fountain pen beside it and two manila files. The woman behind it opened the second folder and Edith caught a glimpse of her own passport photograph.

‘You are due to leave for Germany soon to take up a position with the Control Commission, Education Branch,’ the woman read from her file. ‘That is correct?’

She spoke in German now. Edith replied in the same language. The interview was taking a different tack.

‘Before that you were working in a girls’ grammar school, teaching Modern Languages?’

Edith agreed again.

‘For how long?’

Edith answered her questions, going through her education: her degree in German from Bedford College, London. Time spent in Germany, dates and places. Finally returning to her application to join Control Commission, Germany.

‘Why?’ the woman asked.

‘Why what?’

‘Why did you apply? It’s a simple question, Miss Graham.’

‘Those are often the hardest to answer,’ she said. Her smile was not returned. ‘I spent the war at home. This is a chance for me to do something. Make a contribution.’

Even to her own ears, her words sounded trite, banal. How could this woman with her important job, involved in goodness knows what, possibly understand the tedium of life as Senior Mistress in a provincial girls’ grammar, with responsibility for Languages, Ancient and Modern, and the lower school? And when she wasn’t doing that, she was looking after her mother while everyone else, it seemed, was off somewhere doing something. Dangerous, maybe, even deadly, but exciting, even so.

Looking back, that time, wartime, seemed melded into one big mass, like the congealed blobs of metal and glass one found after a raid, impossible to see where one thing begins and another ends. So it was with the succession of days. Even raids had a tedious sameness. The dismal wail of the siren, getting Mother up and down to the shelter, listening for the drone of the bombers with that nerve-shredding mix of dread and boredom that came from not knowing when they would come, how long it would last, when it would be over. Then an hour or two of fitful sleep before the exhausting journey across town to work, on foot or by bicycle, with the plaster and brick dust hanging in the air, depositing a fine film everywhere, rendering pointless Mother’s constant dusting and cleaning. Some nights, she would get Mother settled in the shelter and then return to bed, not caring if she was blown to smithereens, in some ways wishing for it. The only relief had been rare escapes to London and Leo.

‘And how did you find out about the Control Commission?’

‘A colleague. Frank Hitchin.’

‘Who is he?’

‘My opposite number in the Languages Department at the boys’ grammar school.’

‘They’re looking for teachers,’ Frank had told her, ‘German speakers, to go there after it’s all over, help sort out the mess it’s bound to be in. I’m going to give it a go. They’ll probably be taking women, too. Spinsters, you know. No ties and nothing to keep ’em. Fancy free.’ He’d winked. ‘Why don’t you apply?’

Fancy free? If only he knew.

She’d pedalled home that evening, parked her bike in the garage with Mother waiting for the click of the garden gate. Tea on the table. Then cocoa and the six o’clock news on the radio. More V2 bombs in London but the Allies were crossing the Rhine; the Russians had reached the Oder. Surely the war was nearly over? ‘Then we can get back to normal’ her mother had announced with some satisfaction as she turned a row in her knitting. By that she meant, how things were before. To Edith, the prospect of peace felt like a closing trap. The Control Commission offered an escape. For a spinster teacher in her thirties, such opportunities did not come often. She was as well-qualified as Frank Hitchin and she’d spent time in Germany before the war, which was more than he had.

She’d said nothing to the family. They’d only try to stop her.

She’d had a reply almost by return, forms to fill, an interview. Nobody at home had the least idea. She didn’t tell them until it was too late and she’d given in her notice.

‘And what will your job entail?’ her interrogator enquired. ‘Teaching?’

‘The teaching will be done by the Germans,’ Edith replied, referring back to that day’s briefing. ‘We are there as administrators. Inspectors. Our job will be to set up schools where there are none, get them up and running. Vet staff. Get the children in.’

‘I see.’ The woman glanced back at the file. ‘And a high position. Senior Officer, equivalent to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.’ She sat back, fingertips together, assessing. Then she smiled. ‘You speak German very well,’ she said in English. ‘Very fluent with a good accent.’

Edith nodded in acceptance of the compliment. She had a good ear for languages and accents. Something in this woman’s speech said she was not British. There had been a lecturer at college who could have been her brother.

‘I could say the same thing. I’ve been trying to place your accent. Romanian perhaps?’

A lucky guess. The woman coloured slightly. There was a pause. Then she gave a slight nod, as though she had decided something.

‘I would like you to read this and sign.’ She took a form from the top-right desk drawer and pushed it towards Edith.

‘What is it?’ Edith asked, taking it from her.

‘It’s the Official Secrets Act.’

Edith glanced down the page of regulations. ‘What is this all about?’ she asked again.

The woman allowed herself a thin smile. ‘We can go no further until you have signed.’ She offered her pen. ‘Here. And again here, if you would. And your name, clearly printed. Thank you.’ She took the document and slipped it into a file. ‘I am Vera Atkins.’ The name meant nothing to Edith although it was clearly meant to command recognition and respect. ‘From now on, all proceedings are covered by the Act and cannot be repeated, now or at any time in the future. You understand? Perhaps you need more time to consider …’

Edith shook her head, impatient to know what was going on.

‘Now, back to Kurt von Stavenow. Or should I call him Graf von Stavenow. A man of many titles, it seems.’ Miss Atkins pushed his file across the desk towards Edith. ‘Do you recognize him here?’

Edith wanted to think that she didn’t recognize him, didn’t want to recognize him. His extreme good looks were heightened to a sinister glamour by the black SS uniform: the silver epaulettes, the lightning rune on the right collar, and the four silver pips on the left to show his rank. But of course she did. His blond hair looked darker and was dressed differently, combed to the side and cut shorter. His face had filled out, but still retained a certain boyishness; those high cheekbones, that cleft in the wide, square chin. He was not looking straight at the camera but off to the right, a look of resolute aloofness, his deep-set eyes pale under dark sweeping brows.

‘Did you know that he was a high-ranking member of the SS?’ the woman asked with a crimson slash of a smile.

‘No, of course not.’

Edith felt her cheeks grow hot. She was close to losing her temper with the testing, teasing nature of the interview but it wasn’t that which was bringing the blood to her face. Her grip on the photograph tightened, denting the corners. She’d known him. Known him well. They had been lovers. Whatever had happened between them, she’d thought him fundamentally good. She’d often wondered what he might be doing but she could never have imagined this. The glossy paper creased further under her fingers. An officer in the SS? The opposite, if anything. She’d worried he’d get mixed up in something. End up in a concentration camp. She would never have thought this of him. Never have dreamt it. How could he? How could this be? Her stare intensified as though the image might speak to her. She glanced away and back again. Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps it wasn’t him. But that was even more foolish. She felt some of her certainty about the world and her place in it shift. It was him all right.

‘When was the last time you were in contact with Sturmbannführer Kurt von Stavenhow?’

‘I didn’t know him as Sturmbannführer von Stavenhow.’

The woman sighed in obvious frustration, but Edith felt she needed to make the point.

‘Very well, when did you last see Kurt von Stavenhow?’

Edith thought for a moment. ‘It would have been 1938.’

‘You don’t seem too sure.’

‘It was 1938. In the summer.’

‘Not since then?’

‘Of course not!’ Edith snapped. ‘We’ve been at war!’

Perhaps he hadn’t done anything terrible, part of her mind continued to reason as she answered questions. Perhaps he had been involved in some form of resistance, a plot against Hitler. Perhaps that was the reason for this current interest. Yet there was something in those slanting black eyes, a slight twisting of the lip that spoke of a deep contempt, even hatred, for anyone who had even been associated with this man, who might ever have called him a friend. Such loathing was not aroused by innocence. What had he done?

‘Ah, here you are!’

The connecting door to the next office opened and there was Leo, coming through in a bustling hurry. Edith had the feeling that he had been there all the time.

‘Sorry I’m late! Meeting ran on and on. How are you two getting along? Like a house on fire, I shouldn’t doubt.’

He rubbed his hands together, choosing to ignore the frigid atmosphere, or failing to notice it.

‘I think we’ve finished.’ Vera capped her pen.

‘Everything satisfactory? Edith pass with flying colours?’

‘Perfectly.’ She stood up. ‘And yes.’

‘In that case, thank you, Vera,’ Leo at his most avuncular. ‘Now, don’t let us keep you. I’m sure you have plenty to do, gathering your bits and pieces and so on.’

Vera looked around the empty room. ‘I’ve already done so. As you can see.’

‘Hmm, yes, well …’ Leo rubbed his hands again. ‘Don’t let us keep you, as I say …’

Vera held Leo’s eyes in her level black stare before slowly fitting her pen into her briefcase. It was unclear who was dismissing whom.

‘Oh, and leave those files on the desk, would you?’ Leo added.

‘I had every intention of doing so,’ Vera said as she put on her coat, ‘since they no longer have anything to do with me.’ Quite unexpectedly, she turned as she moved to the door and proffered her hand to Edith. ‘Auf wiedersehen, Miss Graham.’ Her handshake was firm and strong. ‘You have a formidable task in front of you with the Control Commission. A great responsibility.’ Her grip became more emphatic. ‘May I wish you good luck.’

‘You mustn’t mind our Miss Atkins,’ Leo said as the door closed behind her. ‘She’s got a good eye, old Vera. Good instincts.’ He collected the files from the desk. ‘Particularly good with the girls. None better. If you pass the Vera test, you’re on your way.’

‘On my way to where?’ Edith asked as she followed Leo out into the corridor. She caught his arm, slightly disoriented, still shocked by what she’d heard about Kurt. ‘What am I doing here, Leo? What’s this all about?’

‘When you said you were off to Germany, I had an idea, that’s all. It’s a frightful mess over there. Chaos doesn’t begin to describe it. Our zone is full to bursting, God knows how many from God knows where – the unfortunate residents of the bombed-out cities, demobbed soldiers, ex-slave workers, refugees from all regions east who’ve fled from Uncle Joe’s forces and who can blame them for that?’ He frowned. ‘Among them are some bad hats, some very bad hats, taking advantage of all the chaos and confusion. Hiding in plain sight. Nothing suits them better. Our job, or part of it, is to winkle them out. Simple as that. We need all the help we can get, quite frankly.’ He looked at her, blue eyes magnified by his glasses. ‘Since you’re going there, I thought you might do us a little favour.’

‘Is Kurt one of these bad hats?’

‘Most emphatically, I’m afraid.’

‘But what has he done?’ She held onto his arm, wanting, needing an answer. How could this possibly be? The Kurt she knew transformed into Sturmbannführer von Stavenhow?

Leo glanced round. ‘Not here. I’ll explain later.’

Edith looked down the deserted corridor, the parquet dulled and scored, marked with cigarette burns. The tall windows filmed with grime, still criss-crossed with peeling tape.

‘What is this place, Leo?’

‘It’s a place that’s never existed officially and is about to cease to be entirely.’ He nodded to a pile of boxes stacked by the door.

‘Secret, you mean? Hush-hush?’

He nodded.

‘What am I doing here? What do you want me to do, exactly?’ Edith asked, a sudden, cold realization dawning. ‘Be some kind of spy?’

‘I wouldn’t go as far as that. Not in the accepted sense.’

‘The Official Secrets Act?’

‘Oh,’ Leo waved a dismissive hand. ‘Everyone signs that. People get the wrong end of the stick about intelligence work. Most of it’s done by perfectly unexceptional types: businessmen, travel agents, teachers, clerks, typists, shop assistants, anybody really. Ordinary men – and women. It’s mostly a matter of keeping eyes and ears open, passing on information. Women are excellent at it. Superior intuition.’

Edith frowned. ‘How do you know I’d be suited?’

‘Oh, you’d be perfect.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Better get the old skates on. You’ll find the driver waiting.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’ll pick you up from Dori’s at eightish. Wear something nice. I’ve booked a table at The Savoy.’

Edith sat in the back of the car. The driver seemed to know where he was going without her instruction. What was this about? She’d done favours for Leo before. Attended meetings at university, dropped off a parcel or two, collected ditto. Sat on a certain park bench until a man walked by with a dog. Another park, another town. Wait by the floral clock. Same man. Different dog. What did Leo want? The Official Secrets Act suggested something serious. In Edith’s experience, the swankier the place, the bigger the favour and it didn’t get swankier than The Savoy on New Year’s Eve.

2
34 Cromwell Square, Paddington
31st December 1945

Ration Book Canapés

Quickly made from readily available ingredients, serve these delicious savouries to your guests with drinks or before dinner. Hand round fried cubes of spam, speared on toothpicks; triangles of thinly cut hot toast, crusts removed, spread with fried corned beef or tinned snoek mashed with pepper and vinegar. Keep the crusts to make breadcrumbs.

Stella Snelling’s A Dozen Delicious Ways with Canap é s

Women’s Journal, week ending 23rd January 1943

Dori’s square was close to Paddington Station. One side was a great yawning cavity, the buildings flanking the gap shored up with beams wedged against the walls. Dori’s row was more or less intact, although some of the houses were boarded, either unsafe or waiting for their owners to return. Dori’s was second from the end, the cream frontage in need of repainting with chunks of stucco missing. All the result of the bomb that had brought Edith here in the first place.

Edith thanked the driver and went down the basement area steps to the kitchen. She didn’t feel ready yet to join the party going on upstairs. Dori’s parties started early and went on late.

Easter time, 1941, she’d stumbled down these very steps with bells clanging, wardens shouting, half the square smoking rubble and the trees on fire. After a weekend in Leo’s flat, she’d been trying to get home when she’d been caught in a raid and been diverted, herded into the shelter of the tube at Paddington. Adeline had been on the platform, taking photographs. An unmistakable figure, her flying jacket hung about with cameras, her white-blonde hair jammed under a soft peaked cap. Edith had first met the American journalist through Leo and they’d hit it off immediately, meeting up when their paths crossed in London. Edith waved, relieved to see a friendly face among so many strangers. Adeline smiled, equally as pleased to see Edith. Adeline shared her small silver flask of bourbon and they’d settled down together to sit out the raid, talking about who they’d seen, where they’d been and everything in between.

After the all clear sounded, they’d emerged to fires raging. Then, guided by some kind of premonition, Adeline had hauled Edith into a deep doorway just as another bomb went off, very near. A delayed fuse, a tail ender dropping the last of his load. The explosion had sucked all the air. They had clung to each other, the vacuum pressing them together like giant hands, while bricks flew, bouncing past like children’s toys. Adeline had taken her by the hand and they’d stumbled through fallen masonry and abandoned cars towards the entrance to the square. A warden shouted: ‘You can’t go no further!’ and Edith had baulked but Adeline had just gripped her hand tighter, pulling her down steps with the warden still yelling.

Half the square were in Dori’s basement. ‘Waifs and strays, orphans from the storm!’ Dori had waved a bottle of gin in greeting. ‘Come and have a drink, darlings. It’s the only thing to do!’

Adeline had gone straight back out. She had to capture what she’d just seen: the destruction of the square, the flames in the trees, the faces of firemen and ambulance crews strained and white in the flashlights’ glare, even the irate ARP warden, would appear on American breakfast tables in the pages of News Illustrated. Edith was just relieved to be out of it, glad of the shelter and enjoying the impromptu party. So much better than being at a freezing station, waiting for the trains to start running; so much more fun than sitting in the air-raid shelter at home.

By the time the trains were running, Dori had taken to Edith: ‘You can cook! Come any time!’ she’d said and meant it. Edith was equally taken with Dori; ebullient and flamboyant, she was fascinatingly different from anyone else Edith knew. She took to dropping in whenever she was in London and needing to find somewhere to stay when she was in the city, she joined the ever-changing group of people who periodically lodged with Dori. It was never for long: a day or two, a weekend here and there, a week at the most, but it became her lifeline.

Edith let herself into the kitchen and found a couple of young things standing by the kitchen table looking bewildered.

‘Is that you, Edith?’ Dori came from upstairs. ‘I thought I saw you sneaking in.’ Her voice was slightly slurred, as though she’d started the party early, but when she appeared in the kitchen doorway, she looked lovely. Her green silk dress cut low, her black hair falling in deep, soft, sloping waves. A light dust of powder gave a hint of colour to her pale, ivory skin; eyebrows defined to accentuate the tilt of eyes made to look even darker and larger by a sweep of liner and liberal use of mascara. ‘Meet Pam and Frankie.’ The two girls bobbed their heads slightly, as though Dori was royalty. ‘You couldn’t help them rustle up some of those delicious canapés, could you, darling?’ She gave Edith her best red lipstick smile. ‘I’ll pop the geyser on and run your bath.’ She disappeared up the stairs again. ‘And check on my goulash!’

The girls turned to her expectantly. FANYs most probably. Dori had lots of friends in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Whatever their duties might have been, they did not appear to have included catering.

Edith went to the Aga and lifted a lid. ‘Good God! What is this?’

‘The goulash?’ The taller girl volunteered.

Edith inspected the thin stew, feebly bubbling on the Aga. Dori was proud of her national dish, but she was no cook.

‘What do you want us to do?’ The other girl asked plaintively. Edith directed them to the larder to fetch corned beef and spam. She’d prepared something similar that first night to pay back the generosity of her hostess. She’d been surprised and delighted by Dori’s genuine pleasure in her skill at making something from nothing – canapés, a flattering term for titbits on toast.

‘Ooh, Stella Snelling’s canapés.’ The girl smiled. ‘My mum did those at Christmas. She collects all her recipes.’

‘You’ll know what to do, then.’ Edith smiled back.

Edith went to her own shelves in the pantry for OXO cubes, Bovril and her precious bottle of Worcestershire sauce. She raided Dori’s cupboard for the fiercely guarded tin of paprika pepper. A couple of teaspoons more wouldn’t hurt.

‘Go upstairs, would you?’ she asked the tall one. Frankie, was it? ‘See if you can find me Angostura bitters.’ Just a drop works wonders! (Stella Snelling: Tips to Cheer Up Tired Dishes.) Pam was ready with the titbits. ‘Under the grill. Not the Aga. The gas cooker.’

A recent addition to Dori’s kitchen. The Aga had become increasingly temperamental and there was the shortage of fuel.

Pam opened the oven door. ‘There’s a book in here!’

‘Well, take it out! When you’ve done that put some potatoes in to bake.’

Hanging above the Aga were herbs Edith had scavenged from a bombed-out garden. She broke off thyme, sage, rosemary, bay. The scent reminded her of home. She put that out of her mind. Mother would be round at Edith’s sister Louisa’s by now sipping a festive sherry, already getting on her younger daughter’s nerves, complaining about Edith’s imminent departure for Germany. She would not feel guilty. Their problem now.

Edith took the narrow stairs up to the Bolt Hole, the tiny attic room she rented at the top of Dori’s house. It was her refuge. It offered a place to stay on her trips to see Leo or when she needed to escape the suffocation of home. It was paid for by the money she made from her recipes: she’d said nothing to the girl in the kitchen, but she’d been writing cookery tips as Stella Snelling for years now.

The great thing about Stella was that she had been a real person in Edith’s life – a friend from college who then became a fictitious, handy pal in London and holiday companion. The family had met Stella, so they never questioned Edith going to see her in London or their holidays abroad: cover for her trips with Leo. Even though he was family and they’d been in prams together, jaunting off with him would have caused more than a few frowns. Edith discovered that having a phantom female companion freed her, for a while anyway, from the dull routine of work and the constraints of the family.

The real Stella had married and emigrated to New Zealand but Edith conjured her again when she began to submit wartime recipes, in answer to an invitation in Woman’s Journal. Edith enjoyed cooking and liked to think of ways to make the ration go further. There was no dearth of tips. Every woman she knew had their hints and tricks: her mother, sister Louisa, Mother’s friends in the W.I. and the Townswomen’s Guild. The magazine accepted her writing and wanted more. She sent her recipes as Stella Snelling, hiding behind the pseudonym’s anonymity. She didn’t want anyone at home to know and she liked the idea of Stella as much as she disliked the way people made judgements about her based on her job and her unmarried status.

She stripped off Edith’s tweed costume and sensible blouse, balled her lisle stockings and wrapped herself in the burnt-orange shantung robe she’d come to think of as Stella’s. The tips and recipes didn’t interest Dori but she’d immediately loved the idea of Stella, intrigued by this hidden aspect of Edith and happy to help find what Edith increasingly identified as her ‘Stella side’. They had gone shopping for ‘Stella’. Dori knew all sorts of unfortunates ready to sell the most wonderful clothes for next to nothing. Any qualms were firmly squashed with a ‘Nonsense, darling, you’ll be doing them a favour’. Dori had taught her about labels and fashion houses, shown her how to wear her new wardrobe, put on makeup, do her hair. Become a very different version of herself.

Dori seemed to have a talent for this chameleon-like change from one personality to another. Nothing was certain about her: who she was, where she came from, how she had tipped up in London, what she did exactly, even her age was a matter for conjecture. The stories changed depending on who was doing the telling. She was a Hungarian countess who had been married to a Polish cavalry officer who had fallen in the last charge. She had fled the Nazis, pursued on skis across the mountains. No, she was Hungarian all right, but Jewish, and had escaped through the Balkans. No, that was wrong. She was Polish, not Hungarian. She’d married a White Russian and had lived in Paris, got out just before the fall of France. The stories fed on themselves, each one more exotic. The only common thread? Dori was a spy.

This was true, Edith knew. Dori had spent time in France during the war. It accounted for her mysterious disappearances and Edith had seen the scars on her body and the ones inside that she strove to hide. Once, she’d come back from one of these absences ill and weak, unable to sleep, dark eyes deep and wide with the horrors she had seen. Edith, down in London for the weekend, had come in to find her gaunt and wasted, hunched and shivering with a rattling cough. Edith had not asked where she’d been, what might have happened to account for the state she was in and Dori hadn’t offered to tell her: Careless talk costs lives. She’d just reached out a thin hand and Edith had answered her unspoken need for a friend. She’d stayed to nurse her, cabling Mother that she was caring for a sick friend. She’d sent Anton out to beg bones from the butcher for broth. When Dori was on the mend, the household had pooled their meat coupons and Edith had found paprika to make the goulash that she craved.

It was the Easter holidays. Edith stayed one week, then another. During this time of illness and convalescence, Dori had begun to reveal more about herself. She was from Hungary but had moved to Poland. She’d fallen in love with a British Flying Officer, Robert Stansfield, who was training Polish pilots. They’d left together when war broke out, made their way through the Balkans to Greece, then Alexandria where they were married before coming back to England.

Bobby had been killed in the Battle of Britain. He’d left her this house in Cromwell Square. That’s where the story, as told by Dori, stopped. A few weeks later, Adeline supplied the rest. With Dori, it was personal. The Germans had robbed her of her adopted homeland and the man she loved. She regarded them with a visceral, implacable hatred. She wanted revenge.

‘She wanted to be able to kill ’em,’ Adeline had told her. ‘So she volunteered for a secret outfit who’d let her do just that.’

Now it was all over, but ever since VE Day, Edith had sensed a restive dissatisfaction, almost despair about Dori, as if life was finished and everything to come would be merely a diminishing echo. Edith knew that others felt this too, but no one exhibited this restless ennui as strongly as Dori.

Edith went down the stairs to the bathroom. She could smell the Et Noir bath oil through the door. All the way from Paris. One of Dori’s sidelines. Got to make a penny somehow, darling! It was more than a sideline and Dori was making more than pennies. Not just bath oil. Perfume, makeup, nylons, silk stockings. But it was a risky business and Dori was in deep and getting deeper. Impossible to stop her. She needed the money, but she needed risk even more.

Back in the Bolt Hole, after her bath, Edith opened the drawer reserved for what she thought of as ‘Stella’s things’, unrolling precious silk stockings and laying out silk underwear. Silk, darling, always silk, Dori insisted. Then she flicked through her rail of clothes to find something nice for Leo: the midnight blue silk, long and tight across the hips with a slight flare in the skirt, the shawl collar dipped to expose her décolletage.

Satisfied with her choice, she moved to her small dressing table to do her hair, brushing out the dark-gold waves, smoothing and pinning up the sides, teasing the front section into rolls. She leaned into the mirror to apply her makeup in the way Dori had shown her: eyebrow pencil for definition, the merest hint of rouge. As a final touch, she uncapped a tube of Marcel Rochas lipstick in a silver tube and applied a shade she never wore in her everyday life. She worked her lips together and smiled at her reflection. The final transformation. This was the moment she relished most. She doubted that many of her colleagues at the Headmistress’ New Year’s reception would even recognize her as they sipped Miss Lambert’s sweet sherry and nibbled on sparsely-filled mince pies and meagre sausage rolls.

3
Cromwell Square, Paddington
31st December 1945

Winter Goulash

A good, filling beef stew is always welcome on a night that might be spent at the Warden Post or in the Air Raid Shelter. This delicious continental dish makes a welcome change to more traditional recipes and can be made with the cheapest cuts of meat. It is simplicity itself to prepare: A pound of onions, a pound and a half of stewing steak (shin or the cheapest cut available – skirt will do) and any amount of root vegetables browned well for colour and flavour. A little flour to thicken, a sprig of thyme if you have it; salt, pepper, paprika if possible. Canned or bottled tomatoes, a dash or two of Worcestershire sauce and (my secret ingredient) a dash of Angostura. Enough stock to cover, made up from those kitchen stalwarts the Bovril bottle or the OXO cube. Simmer on a low heat or in a moderate oven (regulo 2 or 3) for two or three hours.

Warming Suppers by Stella Snelling,

Home Monthly, November 1944, No. 36, Vol. 24

In the basement, the goulash was doing nicely, potatoes baking. The canapé plates had come back empty. Time for a drink.

The screen separating the downstairs rooms was opened up. Jazz issued from the gramophone, a tune Edith almost knew picked up and whirled away by a tenor saxophone. A couple were attempting to dance but there was scarcely room to move. Men in chalk-striped suits with thin moustaches, Dori’s new friends, trailed girls with peroxided hair. Poles stood by the door smoking furiously watched by a tall old man with long white hair, sunken blue eyes and a sardonic smile under his yellowing moustache. Anton lived on the first landing and paid no rent. He supplied the paprika. He bowed to Edith, saluting with his ivory-topped cane.

The rooms were stifling, thick with cigarette smoke, perfume and body odour. Edith drifted through enjoying it all.

‘Canapés went down a treat. Come and have a drink. There are impossibly gorgeous men I want you to meet.’ Dori took her over to the drinks table. ‘This is Edith,’ she said to the young man serving. ‘Perfect genius in the kitchen and one of my best friends in the world. Get her a drink, would you, darling? Not the punch. The Poles have tipped a whole bottle of some dreadful hooch into it.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Edith. I’m Harry Hirsch.’ He reached under the table and brought out a bottle of Gordon’s. ‘Will this do?’

‘Very well.’

‘What would you like in it? Not a lot of choice, I’m afraid.’

‘Lemonade’s fine.’

He gave her a wide smile, which Edith returned. Not tall, quite slightly built, but there was a wiriness about him. Good-looking in a delicate sort of way: very pale with thick, black hair falling across his forehead in a boyish cowlick. He was probably older than he seemed at first glance. It showed in the frown marks arrowing down over his nose; the purple smudges like thumbprints beneath his deep-set brown eyes. Edith watched his hands as he poured, his corded wrists, the way the veins snaked over the sliding muscles of his forearms, the skin burnt brown, as if he had spent time in the sun with his sleeves rolled back.

‘Where were you overseas?’ she asked.

‘Oh, Italy,’ he said, ‘Egypt, before that. And Germany. Just back.’ He added a dash of flat lemonade. ‘I could add bitters to jazz it up, but it’s disappeared.’

She took the proffered drink. ‘What’s it like there? Germany, I mean.’

‘It’s a mess.’ He frowned.

‘Really? I’m due out there in a few days.’

‘Are you?’ His eyebrows quirked up, making him look younger. ‘In what capacity?’

‘To take up a post with the Control Commission. You couldn’t tell me a little more, could you? I really don’t know what to expect.’

‘Of course. Happy to.’

He rolled down his sleeves and slipped on a tweed jacket. Moving out from behind the drinks table, he took her elbow lightly and led her to a quieter spot in the throng. His grey flannels had long lost their crease, if they’d ever had one. His white shirt was open at the neck and he wore no tie. Blueish shadow shaded his jaw and upper lip. He had a slightly raffish, bohemian quality that definitely wasn’t British. His English was faultless but spoken with an accent that Edith couldn’t quite place.

‘What will you be doing in Germany?’

‘D’you know?’ She gave a rueful shrug. ‘I’m not quite sure.’

He laughed. ‘You’ll be in good company. Where will you be based?’

‘In Lübeck. Schleswig-Holstein.’

‘That’s a coincidence. I’m going there myself soon.’

‘You’re stationed there?’ Edith asked casually, hoping he’d answer in the affirmative. He really was rather attractive.

‘B.A.O.R. VIII Corps District.’ He gave a mock salute. ‘I’m a captain. Jewish Brigade. We’re conducting interrogations there. I am originally from Latvia, you see, and Northern Germany is full of DPs, displaced persons, from the Baltic countries. We have to sort them out. Sheep from goats. Good from bad.’

‘That must be difficult.’

He grimaced. ‘Almost impossible. But necessary.’

‘Some of the goats are very bad?’

‘Wolves in goats’ clothing, you could say.’ He folded his arms, suddenly serious, his dark eyes shadowed. ‘When are you off?’

‘Fourth of January.’

‘I’m due out a week later. Belgium first, Keil, then Hamburg.’ His face brightened. ‘I say, perhaps we can meet?’

‘Yes, I’d like that,’ Edith smiled, knowing that she really would.

‘Yoo-hoo! Edith!’ Dori was waving from the other side of the room.

‘Over here!’ Edith waved back. She turned to Harry. ‘I have to go.’

‘I meant it about meeting.’ He held onto her hand to prevent her from leaving. ‘CCG Education Branch. Lübeck?’

‘That’s me.’ He really means it! Edith thought with a catch of her breath. Not only that, but she will be in Germany. In that moment, she felt her life turning. This is really happening and it’s happening to me …

‘I’ll find you.’

Edith hoped he would.

‘If I don’t see you before,’ his grip on her hand tightened, ‘Happy New Year!’

His mouth was warm on hers. The kiss lingered a fraction longer than it should have. The intensity surprised them both.

‘Happy New Year.’ Edith didn’t quite know what else to say. ‘Perhaps I’ll see you in Germany?’

‘You certainly will.’ He kissed her hand. ‘I better get back to being barman.’

‘You’re a quick worker, I must say!’ Dori was at her side. She nodded towards Harry Hirsch. ‘What was all that about?’

‘I’m not quite sure,’ Edith replied. ‘I was a bit startled myself.’

‘I rather had my eye on him. But no need to worry. All’s fair and the night is young! Also, Leo’s here. Cab’s outside. Have a lovely evening, darling.’ She dropped her voice and her grip on Edith’s arm tightened. ‘Tomorrow, we need to talk.’

‘What about?’

‘Not here,’ Dori breathed in her ear. ‘Not now. New guests are arriving.’

Edith turned and nearly collided with a tall, elegant woman in a long black gown and a fur stole. She was with a curly-haired young man in evening dress.

‘Oh, I am sorry. I do apologize.’

‘That’s quite all right. No harm done.’ Vera Atkins peered closer. ‘Miss Graham? I hardly recognized you. What a transformation. Going on somewhere?’

Her eyes turned to Leo as he came through the door, shaking moisture from his hat.

‘Bloody weather! Fog’s turning to horrid drizzle. Edith? Are you ready? I’ve a cab waiting.’ He glanced at the woman by Edith’s side. ‘Vera. And Drummond. Well, well. Everyone knows everyone, hm?’

The two men shook hands.

‘Leo. How unexpected.’ Vera Atkins looked from him to Edith, her dark eyes sparking amusement. ‘How do you two know each other? Remind me.’

‘Sort of cousins. Ready, Edith?’

Leo didn’t elaborate further. Neither did Edith. Childhood friends, cousins at several removes. Sometime lovers. As children, they had been co-conspirators, although Edith had learnt to be a wary one. Leo ultimately owed allegiance to no one and there was a streak of cruelty in him. He’d had a knack of drawing her into trouble. She had a feeling he was about to do so again.

4
Savoy Grill, London
31st December 1945

Menu

Consommé

Steak Diane

Noisettes d’Agneau, Pommes Duchesses,

Carottes Juliennes

Glacés

Tergoule de Normandie

One for Louisa!

‘The steak, I think,’ Leo announced. ‘How about you?’

‘The lamb.’

Leo nodded, engrossed in the wine menu. ‘A Reisling, since you’re going to Germany. Then a Duhart-Milon Rothschild, ’34.’ He snapped the menu shut. ‘Had it the other night. Not bad.’

The Savoy Grill was crowded. Leo acknowledged people on nearby tables. There were people here whose fame gave their faces a vague familiarity. Edith tried not to stare. Leo would introduce her as his cousin, if he introduced her at all.

‘Thin stuff,’ Leo announced after two spoonfuls of consommé. ‘I prefer a proper soup.’

‘I was just thinking how different it was from soup,’ Edith looked up. ‘As different as the names. Soup sounds opaque. Thick.’

‘Hmm. That’s how I like it.’

‘What’s this about, Leo?’ Edith said as she finished her consommé.

Leo put up his hand to silence her as a waiter arrived to clear the table and another approached with a trolley.

‘Ah, the Diane! Best way to eat it. You can see what the buggers are doing.’

Leo sat back to enjoy the drama as the deft young waiter fried the steak in butter, executing the flaming with the flourish of a stage magician before transferring the dish to the plate and completing the sauce with efficiency.

‘How is it?’ Edith asked, once they had been served.

‘Not too bad.’ Leo chewed. ‘Better than the one I had at the Club last week – you could have soled shoes with that. How’s the lamb?’

‘Fine.’

It was still pink. At home, the sight of blood brought on universal shudders.

Leo reloaded his fork. ‘Mash a bit fancy for my liking. Club does it better.’

Edith took a forkful of the duchesse potatoes, smooth and rich under a thin golden crust. Trust Leo to prefer lumps. Enough prevarication.

‘So, are you going to tell me?’

‘Not here!’ Leo looked to the nearby tables. ‘You never know who’s about. Let’s just enjoy this, shall we? It’s a bad business.’ He added, sweeping slivers of carrot aside, he was never one for vegetables. ‘Not something to talk about while one’s eating. It’s all in the file back at the flat.’

By the time they got to the flat, Leo had other things on his mind. His attentions started in the cab and their lovemaking was quick with the ease of long familiarity. They had been lovers, off and on, since fumbling adolescence. They were comfortable with each other and the arrangement suited both of them. Edith enjoyed her escapes to London and Leo liked the diversion. He had his life nicely organized in compartments: Sybil in the country, the boys at boarding school, flat in Marylebone for his week in London, mistress up in Hampstead and Edith when she was in town. Edith knew Sybil, of course. They met at family occasions, weddings and funerals, which diverted Leo even more.

Edith left him snoring, wrapped herself in his dressing gown, poured herself a glass of champagne, then turned on the desk light and opened the file marked ‘Kurt von Stavenow’.

She held the photograph of Kurt in a cricket sweater close to her eyes so that she could study it with an intensity that had been impossible before. She’d gone to Oxford on the train to visit Leo. Kurt had been in the Parks watching cricket. Leo took a photograph. The snap was in black and white but Edith’s memory was in vivid colour: blue sky, green grass, the cream of the sweater, Kurt’s hair shining a soft, deep yellow like old gold. When he turned and smiled, the world seemed to stop and start again. Edith couldn’t quite look at him; it was like staring into the sun.

He had begun studying Anthropology at Heidelberg University, he told her in his careful English, but had changed his course of study to Medicine. ‘I want to find ways to bring the two disciplines together,’ he said, interlacing his fingers. ‘To help people, you know? Make them better.’ He’d smiled again. Perfect teeth and dimples. Edith had never thought that a man could be so beautiful. She was scarcely listening as he went on to explain that he was in Oxford to perfect his English and to study his other love, Anglo-Saxon. He talked excitedly about Old English, Norse myths and his new obsession: Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

‘He wants to find the Holy Grail!’ Leo roared with laughter.

Kurt’s brows furrowed, his answering smile uncertain, as if he couldn’t see the joke.

That was the moment Edith fell in love with him.

‘Leo has promised to show me the important places,’ he said, looking down at her. The focus of his attention melted whatever was left inside her. ‘Perhaps if you are also interested, you might like to come along.’

That’s how it started. In the long vacation, Kurt stayed with Leo at Gorton, Leo’s family home. Edith often stayed overnight. Their excursions demanded an early start. They visited the Rollright Stones, Wayland’s Smithy, the White Horse at Uffington, then further afield to Stonehenge, Avebury, Templar churches in the Marches. Kurt took these expeditions very seriously, delving into his haversack for binoculars, maps, ruler and compass to work out alignments, notebook and camera for sketches and photographs. Leo took less of an interest, installing himself at a local pub, leaving Kurt and Edith to explore by themselves.

They would return to Gorton for supper. The house was enchanting, Kurt announced. Ein nette kleine Haus. The remark stung with Leo. He didn’t think it at all small, although Gorton had gardens rather than grounds; it was large, but not remotely stately; looked old but was relatively new. Leo was annoyed, as if he’d been found out in some way. Kurt belonged to a fearfully aristocratic and ancient Prussian family and talked of house parties and hunting parties in great castles. Leo became increasingly huffy. Kurt wasn’t aware of it, but his remarks struck at deeper insecurities: Leo’s father was a Brummy, a generation away from the bacon counter. Leo had begun to move in circles where such things mattered.

‘I’m letting him have the run of the place,’ he’d muttered to Edith, ‘taking him all over the country and the little blighter insults me! Boasting about his bloody schlosses.’

One particular evening, things got so tense that even Kurt noticed. Later, he came to Edith’s room and sat on her bed. It was a hot night and his pyjama top was open. The moon was full, cutting through gaps in the curtains, casting bars of silver over the smooth skin of his bare chest.

‘I upset Leo in some way,’ he said, frowning. ‘This evening, he was off hand with me. That is the right phrase?’ He looked up for confirmation. Edith nodded. ‘I don’t know why he is angry.’

Edith tried to explain. She didn’t think any slight had been intended, but she feared that he, Kurt, might have given the impression that Leo’s house, the way of life here didn’t quite, well, measure up.

‘Nothing could be further from my thought!’ Kurt looked stricken. ‘It is my English. I only say these things because I’m proud to be Prussian. I would love so much for you to come and visit me there. My two best friends.’ He drew closer, taking her hands in his. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘I thought he was cross with me because of you.’

‘Because of me?’

‘Yes. I thought you and he were, you know, and I’d come between you.’

‘Oh, no!’ Edith had to stop herself from laughing. ‘We were, have been, but …’

She let her words peter out. It was difficult to explain. They’d been very young. It had all been Leo’s idea and she hadn’t liked it very much. Since Leo had gone up to Oxford, he’d been less attentive, pursuing something else Edith suspected, although didn’t really care to ask.

‘But not now?’

‘Not now,’ Edith confirmed. ‘I think he has,’ she hesitated. ‘Other interests.’

Kurt had nodded. ‘I understand. Many of the fellows in the college are, ah …’ it was his turn to pause, ‘of similar inclination. Is that correct?’

‘Completely.’

‘I’m glad Leo is, too,’ he leaned towards her and they were kissing.

‘Let’s go out.’ He took both her hands in his. ‘Let’s go outside.’

They walked barefoot in the moonlight, across the silvered lawn to the lake which lay as still as mercury. ‘Let’s go in,’ he whispered. They kept on walking, the water soft as silk on the skin. The next night they swam to the island. They made love on an old picnic blanket that Kurt had brought out earlier in the day. He was so very different from Leo …

They tried to be discreet but Leo knew right away. He didn’t seem to mind at all. He was glad to have Kurt off his hands. He’s all yours, old girl.

Kurt came to see her in Coventry on an old motorbike that he’d found in the stables. If Gorton had seemed small, Edith’s house must have been sehr klein indeed, but Kurt seemed to enjoy his visits. He’d spend ages working on the bike with her brothers, Ron and Gordon. They were mad about engines. ‘I like your father and brothers,’ he told her. ‘They are workers.’ He held up his hands. ‘They make things.’ He liked talking to them about cars and the motor industry. In a city famous for car manufacture, the boys had followed their father into the works. Gordon to the Standard and then to Whitley. Ron had an engineering apprenticeship with a firm in Rugby making turbines. They were proud of what they did. Keen to show Kurt. He followed with his haversack, making notes, taking photographs, as interested in the factories as he had been in Avebury.

Now she knew why.

There were maps in his file. Coventry and surrounding towns, the factories marked for the Luftwaffe. The Lockheed in Leamington Spa, BTH in Rugby. Her family had liked Kurt, made him welcome. He had a way with him: flirting with Louisa, complimenting her mother on her cooking. He knew how to get along with men and how to please women. They had been kind to him yet her father, her brothers could have been in those factories when the bombs rained down.

How naïve she’d been. How impossibly stupid. It was all here.

von Stavenow, Kurt Wolfgang

1931 – Joined National Socialist German Workers’ Party

1937 – University of Heidelberg – Doctor of Medicine

1936 – Member of the Schutzstaffel (SS)

1937 – SS Ahnenerbe (and a helpful addition in pencil: pseudo-scientific institute founded by Himmler to research the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan Race)

Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (Ausland-SD) (another addition: Foreign Intelligence – see over)

It had been lies from start to finish. For each action, an equal and opposite motivation: Principia Mathematica of the human heart. The shock of it jarred; old fracture lines started to crack open until she was fighting back tears.

At the end of the summer, Kurt had had to go back to Germany, departing with unexplained suddenness and abundant promises. He would write. She would come to see him. They would walk by the Rhine and the Neckar, hike in the Odenwald. He would recite eddic poems, heroic lays, stories from the Nibelung. They would sleep in little lodges smelling of pine and resin. They would go to the Black Forest and the Harz Mountains, camp on the Brocken, climb to greet the May Day dawn.

Before he left, they agreed she was to go out the following year. She remembered the fierce excitement she’d felt anticipating their meeting. They would be able to spend all the time they wanted together. The rest of their lives.

It didn’t work out like that. What in life ever did?

She blinked to clear her sight and focused on the next file, hardly noticing the peal of nearby church bells, silenced by long years of war, ringing out the old year, ringing in the new.

She detached the photograph of Kurt as an SS officer and read through his war career.

1939-45 – Sturmbannführer Kurt Wolfgang von Stavenow

What rank was Sturmbannführer? She had no idea.

1939-40 – Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin. Psychiatry/Neurology

1939-41 – SS Special Purpose Corps. Aktion T4

1941-43 – Medical Officer with Special Responsibilities

1943-45 – Assistant Director to the Medical Superintendent. Charité Hospital, Berlin.

April 1945 – Last seen Berlin, present whereabouts unknown.

Underneath lay closely typed papers, some stamped with the Reichsadler, spread eagle and swastika, the lower half of some of the pages discoloured, rucked and crisp, as though the paper had been in contact with water then dried, rendering the typing even harder to read. Supporting evidence. She read what she could, the typing blurring still further as she scanned the pages, flipping back and forth.

She rubbed her arms at the bone-deep chill spreading through her. It either made no sense, or it made the most dreadful sense of all …

She didn’t know how long Leo had been standing in the doorway watching her expression changing from puzzled to incredulous, finally settling into frozen horror.

‘Make sense now?’ He poured two whiskies. ‘Here, drink this. You look as though you need it.’

‘You never suspected?’ Her voice sounded thick, distant. ‘That he was a Nazi?’

‘Did you?’

Edith shook her head slowly.

‘He played us for fools, old girl. Pulling the wool. Acting like butter wouldn’t melt. I suppose we should have known. His interest in the occult and Aleister Crowley – well known bad hat. When I look back on that summer – King Arthur, the Templars, Druids – it all fits. Remember the arguments?’ Edith nodded, she and Leo insisting that it was myth and legend, Kurt replying that, on the contrary, it was history, a shared history. The history of the Aryan peoples. ‘He was deadly serious. We couldn’t see it the time, why would we? We didn’t realize the reasons for his interest. He was a member of the Thule Society. Did you know that?’

‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

‘Exactly. He kept it secret. The Study Group for Germanic Antiquity. All those ridiculous theories.’ He paused. ‘Remember those trips he made us go on, haring all over the country …’

Edith closed her eyes. Yes, she remembered, standing at the very top of Glastonbury Tor as Kurt wove a net of romance and mystery around the death of Arthur. With the sweep of his arm and the passion of his words, the world transformed. The land before them became a vast mere spreading from horizon to horizon, still as a mirror. The only sound, the slow, soft, muffled plash of the oars on the dark funeral barge bearing the mortally wounded king. Two heavily veiled queens sitting at prow and stern, motionless as tableaus, while another stepped with bare white feet onto the stony shore to welcome the King to the Lake Isle of Avalon … They’d stood together, hands linked, as the sun fell towards the west. Shafts of light shone through the lens of the clouds and she’d experienced a moment of transcending wonder, caught in the pure magic of the place, the time, and him.

‘… turns out it’s just an excuse to spout theories of Aryan supremacy,’ Leo was saying, ‘and indulge in anti-Semitism of the most unpleasant and virulent kind. Joined the Nazi Party in ’31. Plenty there of similar mind, including Heinrich Himmler. Every one of them firm believers in the Master Race, and all that. Tommyrot, of course, but dangerous tommyrot. Tommyrot that would cause the deaths of millions of people …’

‘But he was training to become a doctor.’ Edith shook her head quickly, denying the thought even as it was forming. Another came instead. Her mother burning herself on a tin from the oven, hiding the injury, making light of it.

‘It’s nothing, really,’ she’d said.

‘Let me see.’ Kurt insisting, high, broad brow creasing with concern as he took her mother’s hand with his slender fingers to see the burn. Edith remembered being proud of his patient skill, his confident, gentle touch as he applied salve and carefully bandaged the hand.

‘You’ll make a wonderful doctor, Kurt,’ her mother had said, as she turned her wrist this way and that to admire his neat work.

‘His chosen vocation had very little to do with the Hippocratic Oath.’ Leo was pointing at the notes in front of her. ‘The clue is in his specialism.’

Edith glanced down, frowning. ‘Psychiatry? I don’t follow …’

‘Why would you? No right-minded person would make sense of it. Kurt was involved in something called Aktion T4, before the war and during.’

‘I saw that in the notes.’ Her frown deepened. ‘What does it stand for?’

‘It’s an address in Berlin: Tiergartenstraße 4, sounds innocent, neutral. Headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil und Anstaltspflege.’

‘The Charitable Foundation for Medicinal and Institutional Care?’

‘They were good at that kind of thing, the Nazis, inventing euphemisms to hide their filthy business. They called it the Euthanasia Programme. The taking of life on an industrial scale based on ideas about who should live and who shouldn’t. They had a term for it: Lebensunwertes Leben: Life unworthy of Life. It’s all there in black and white. It all makes sense now. It all fits.’

Life unworthy of life. Edith rubbed at her temples, trying to massage the words away, her eyes closed against the dreadful realization that the words meant exactly what they said.

‘I’ll admit, it beggars belief. It began in the Mental Institutions with the mentally deficient, adults and children with disabilities. Enforced sterilization. All to do with the purity of the race. Doctors have walked some very dark corridors, in the name of research, in pursuit of knowledge, trying to prove some misguided ideology. Our friend Kurt among them.’

‘Medicine and Anthropology, melded together.’ Edith looked up at Leo. ‘He told us the first time I met him.’ A memory, his long fingers folded together. I want to bring the two together. How could she have missed the darkness within him? He’d told her himself.

‘Mixed up with Eugenics. And those other cock-eyed theories.’

‘I suppose that’s all we thought they were …’

‘Indeed. We didn’t think that they were about to put theory into practice. And we were in good company. Nobody did. Although it’s all there, in Mein Kampf. Sterilization and the rest of it. And then even that wasn’t good enough, they might not be able to breed, but they were still a burden on their families and the state. So they decided to kill them.’

‘Who? Who decided this?’

‘Well, Hitler gave the order, but it couldn’t have been carried out without the co-operation of the doctors and nurses in the institutions.’

‘They killed their own patients? How?’

‘Starvation. And if that didn’t work, lethal injection. And gas.’

‘How … how many?’

‘Tens of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands probably, we don’t know, and goodness knows how many in the wider Reich.’

Edith stared at him, incredulous. ‘I didn’t know about any of this.’

‘Few did. They kept it all well hidden, even from their own people. It gets worse.’

Edith looked down, slowly moving her head. How much worse could it get?

‘Easy to see how it spread to other “undesireables”,’ Leo went on. ‘Untermenschen: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs. They moved the whole thing to the east, lock stock and barrel, used the techniques, the equipment, the personnel, to set up Extermination Camps for the Jews.’

Edith leaned forward, forehead in her hands, fingers tugging at the roots of her hair, knowing, dreading, what he was going to say next.

‘And Kurt was involved.’ He tapped the file. ‘We’ve got chapter and verse.’

She knew what Leo was talking about. She’d seen the newsreels. Had been moved to tears by Richard Dimbleby reporting from Bergen-Belsen. Shock, anger and indignation shaking his voice as he described the horrors that he had witnessed.

It wasn’t cold in the room, but Edith could not control her shivering. The evidence was in front of her. There could be no possible doubt. And yet. And yet. To have been responsible, directly, or indirectly, for the deaths of millions, how could she believe that of anyone, let alone the man she had loved? She swallowed hard to keep down the whisky burning up into her throat.

‘Where do I come into this?’ she asked when she could trust her voice.

‘Keep your eyes and ears open when you get to Germany. Put out feelers, see what people know. Softly, softly. You know? Shouldn’t be too difficult. Most of them would sell their own mother for a tin of bully beef.’

‘And if I do find anything?’

‘Adams is your contact. Captain Adams. He’ll be in touch. Oh, and keep a look-out for Elisabeth.’

‘Elisabeth?’ Edith had not been expecting that.

‘His wife. You remember her?’

‘Of course I remember. I just wasn’t expecting her name to come up.’

‘She had a cousin, or something, lived near Lübeck. She could well be in the area, since they’ve all been booted out of East Prussia. That’s if …’

‘She survived?’

‘Well, yes. Obviously. The Fraus are turning out to be quite an asset. Find the Frau, find the Mann.’

‘Do you think she was involved?’

‘Not directly. Lots of the wives preferred to turn a blind eye. She struck me as very much the Juncker. Thought Hitler hopelessly vulgar and nothing existed outside of Prussia. All she cared about was her estate and her horses. She probably stayed up there looking after them until the Red Army arrived at her gates. Can’t know for sure, of course.’ Leo shrugged. ‘When you find her, it’ll be up to you to judge.’ He refilled their glasses. ‘Happy New Year, by the way. And happy birthday.’

5
Cromwell Square, Paddington; Service Women’s Club, Lower Sloane St
1st January 1946

Corned Beef Hash meets Bubble and Squeak

Traditionally made from Sunday lunch leftovers: cabbage, potatoes and cold cuts from the roast, it can be a satisfying supper for any day of the week with the addition of cubed corned beef. Combine together with a liberal sprinkling of salt and pepper, form into a large cake, fry both sides until browned and beginning to squeak.

Stella Snelling, Ideas for Leftovers

When Edith returned the next morning, Dori was sitting at the kitchen table in silk pyjamas and dressing gown absent-mindedly drinking a glass of flat champagne. Even dishabille, her makeup and hair were immaculate. Edith felt tired, drained. She’d spent the rest of the night next to a snoring Leo unable to sleep for the weight of the knowledge laid upon her.

‘How was dinner with Leo? Go anywhere nice?’

‘The Savoy Grill.’

‘Oh, very grand. You couldn’t rustle something up, could you, darling? We’re starving.’ Dori waved her coupe. ‘Happy New Year!’

‘We?’ Edith questioned.

‘Adeline’s here. It’s a wonder you didn’t see her. She’s out in the square taking photographs again.’

Edith went to the pantry and found leftover potatoes, a tired-looking cabbage and the inevitable corned beef. She cut the cabbage fine, put it in a frying pan and added the flesh from the baked potatoes and cubed corned beef.

‘Happy birthday.’

Edith looked up in surprise and smiled to see Adeline coming in from the basement area wearing a uniform jacket, olive slacks, and tennis shoes. She put her camera down on the table.

‘I’m amazed you remembered.’

Adeline put an arm round her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. ‘You know me, I don’t forget much. I got some nice shots. Before and after, you know? Nice to see the trees growing back. I like the fog. Goes well with the folks back home. Foggy London Town. Good thing I had my pack with me. Too cold to go tripping about out there in party clothes.’

‘Is he still asleep?’ Dori pointed at the uniform jacket.

Adeline shrugged. ‘Far as I know.’

‘You must have worn him out, darling.’ She turned back to Edith. ‘You missed a marvellous party. Didn’t she, Adie?’

While Edith found plates and knives and forks, Dori poured two more glasses, emptying the champagne bottle.

‘A toast. To Edith and the New Year!’

They all raised their glasses and Edith dished out the food.

Adeline took a forkful. ‘Umm, not bad. Kinda like hash with beets. Goes well with champagne.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ Dori stirred hers with less enthusiasm. She put down her fork and folded her arms. ‘Now, Edith, time to tell all. Beginning with, who is the handsome Sturmbannführer? And ending with what does Leo want?’

Edith put down her knife and fork. ‘How do you know?’

‘I was in Vera’s office yesterday,’ Dori lit a cigarette. ‘Imagine my surprise when I see a file with your name on it. Imagine my further surprise when I find that it is paperclipped to another file and inside that is the photograph of a high-ranking Nazi officer. Who is he? I wondered. Does Edith know him? What a very dark horse she is.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘I asked first.’

Edith glanced towards Adeline.

‘Don’t worry,’ Dori said impatiently. ‘She won’t tell anyone. Not above a bit of spying herself, isn’t that so, darling?’

Edith had never thought of Adeline as a spy but it was perfectly possible. She could be extraordinarily secretive about herself although she was very good at getting information out of other people. She knew the power of silence and how to flatter by close attention. She was adept at sniffing out a story and single-minded in her pursuit of it. It’s what made her good at her job.

‘So get on with it!’ Dori sat back. ‘We’re both agog.’

Edith sighed. Dori’s flippancy was grating on her and she didn’t want to talk about Kurt and what she’d learnt. She was struggling to make sense of the contradictions it contained, between the man she’d known and what he had apparently become.

‘I don’t know if I should.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act …’

‘Who hasn’t! It’s a bit late to worry about that now. Who is he? Come on, Spill the beans!’

Edith’s sigh deepened. She’d have to give them something. They’d badger until she did. ‘He’s someone I knew before the war.’

‘A friend of Leo’s?’

‘Well, yes. Originally.’

‘And then a friend of yours?’

‘We were lovers for a while.’

‘Leo didn’t mind?’

‘No, not really. He encouraged it, if anything.’

‘Did he? And what does Cousin Leo want now?’

‘Distant cousin,’ Edith corrected. ‘He wants me to look out for him – Kurt von Stavenow, that’s his name – when I’m in Germany.’

‘And any others of his ilk that you might happen upon, I suppose?’

‘Something like that. He calls them “bad hats”. He wants me to find out what I can.’

‘Hmm,’ Dori frowned, suddenly serious. ‘I know he’s your cousin, and everything, but be careful what he gets you into. Leo is a slippery one. You’re an innocent.’ She shook her head. ‘He should never have involved you.’

‘Hold on Dori,’ Adeline spoke. ‘Innocent-looking folk make the best spies, isn’t that one of Dori’s Rules of Espionage? Butter wouldn’t melt types. Who would suspect?’

‘They also get played, turned, sold down the river,’ Dori snapped back.

‘This von Stavenow,’ Adeline turned to Edith. ‘What did he do?’

‘He was a doctor. Involved in something called the Euthanasia Proj—’

Adeline put up a hand for silence. They all looked to the stairs, the subtle rustle of bare feet on wood. Someone there. No telling for how long and sound carried.

‘Well, look who it isn’t!’ Adeline raised her camera.

‘Hey!’

The tall young man put up his hand to hide his face but he was too late. Just like Leo, he didn’t like having his photograph taken but he was captured, caught in that moment, unshaven, in crumpled khakis, reddish-blond hair like stubbled wheat.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, Adie.’ He took a swipe for the camera.

‘Oh, no you don’t!’ Adeline whisked it out of his grasp. ‘It’s going in my archive.’

‘I was looking for my jacket. Then I smelt chow. Any for me?’

He took the chair next to Adeline. She put a protective hand over the Leica.

Edith went to the stove and brought a plate back for him. Tom McHale. She’d met him once or twice before. He was one of those young men, vaguely attached to the American military, who came and went in the war. One didn’t know what they did. One didn’t ask.

‘Got any ketchup?’ He pushed the food round with his fork. ‘Needs ketchup. Or hot sauce. Got any of that?’

‘This is Britain, Tom.’ Adeline shook her head. ‘Of course they haven’t.’

Edith went to the pantry and took out tomato sauce and Tabasco.

‘Well, look at that!’ Tom grinned at Adie through his food.

‘Edith’s going to Germany,’ Adeline said.

‘No kidding!’ Tom looked up from dousing his plate with sauce.

‘Absolutely not,’ Edith stared back. There was something unnerving about him. His pale-blue gaze, made enigmatic by his fair brows and lashes, suggested a blankness that was not just in the eyes. ‘I’ve got a job with the Control Commission. Education Branch.’

‘I might see you there,’ he said between mouthfuls.

‘Might you?’

‘Yeah, heading out there later today.’

‘Me, too,’ Adeline said. ‘On assignment for the Tribune, covering the Nuremburg trials. Among other things.’

‘Things like what?’ Tom McHale asked.

‘Know ’em, when I see ’em.’

‘A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles?’ Edith offered.

‘That’s me.’ Adeline smiled. ‘Kind of like a magpie.’

‘Attracted to bright things and carrion in equal measure?’ McHale laughed.

‘Something like that.’ Her smile widened. ‘Corpses and paperclips.’

A look passed between them. His mouth tightened and he stared hard before pale lashes shuttered down on those ice-blue eyes.

‘Uh, huh.’ He pushed his plate away. ‘Well, seems like the place to be.’ He got up from the table. ‘I need my jacket. You’d better get a move on, Adie, if you want a lift with me.’

‘Do you think he heard?’ Dori asked after he’d gone upstairs.

Adeline shrugged. ‘No knowing. He’s sneaky.’

‘He’s OSS, isn’t he? Still operative?’

‘Yeah. Although it’s not OSS anymore. They’re calling themselves something else now.’

‘Names don’t matter,’ Dori frowned. ‘It’s what they do. He’s heading for Germany. Any idea what he might be up to?’

Adeline signalled for silence. Footsteps retreating, a door closing.

‘He’ll be hunting Nazis but not to bring them to justice. They’re looking for particular individuals who might be useful.’ She spread her hands. ‘To us. The Allies. If Tom’s involved that means to the US and not useful to the Russians and Uncle Joe.’

‘Who are they looking for?’

‘Scientists, mainly. Experts in all kinds of stuff. They’ve already rounded up all those rocket scientists responsible for the V1s and V2s, or as many as they can find. They’re justifying it by saying that they were only involved in designing the things. But these are not innocent guys.’ Adeline’s hazel eyes became hard as agates. ‘They designed rockets that killed thousands indiscriminately, right here in London. Rockets developed and made underground by slave labourers and concentration camp inmates who died in the dark in their tens of thousands? I was at Nordhausen. You should have seen the state of the workers there, half-naked, skeletons, barely alive. Almost impossible to tell the dead from the dying, bodies everywhere, corpses stacked up like so much cordwood. No one is innocent here.’

‘What do they do with these scientists, once they’ve found them?’ Edith asked.

‘They take them to some special interrogation centre, bleach away any taint of Nazism. Once they’ve promised to be good boys and girls, they’re given a new identity and shipped off to the US. They’re looking for others, too. Real thugs who worked for the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence, or the SD – SS Intelligence. The Germans had good penetration of the Soviet Union during the war. We want those networks. The Russians are the enemy now. It’s all about getting one over on them. The whole thing’s called Operation Paperclip on account of the paperclips they use to fix the new IDs to the files, or that’s what I heard, anyway. They’ve bagged most of the big boys. Now they’re going after the smaller fry. Your guys will be doing it, too. It’s a race for who gets there first. It’s not about punishment, or even revenge. They are taking their reparations in people. A kind of human looting.’

‘Adie!’ Tom’s voice came from above. ‘My jacket!’

‘I gotta go,’ stood up. ‘You keep safe now, honey.’ She bent swiftly to plant a kiss on Edith’s cheek.

‘Leo didn’t mention anything about this Paperclip business,’ Edith said after she’d gone.

‘He wouldn’t, would he?’

‘Did you know about it?’

‘It’s some time since I knew about anything, darling.’ Dori frowned. ‘But they will be busying themselves with a similar kind of thing, you can be sure of that.’ She rose from the table. ‘Time to find out. Meet you in the hall in twenty minutes.’

They got off the underground at Sloane Square. Edith thought that they were going shopping but instead of crossing to Peter Jones, Dori turned into Lower Sloane Street. They walked past a terrace of handsome red-brick buildings and stopped in front of a wide porch ornately decorated in terracotta. Two shields on each supporting column announced that they had arrived at the Service Women’s Club.

‘Mrs Stansfield and guest,’ the concierge said. ‘You’re expected. Madam is in the Library.’

They were shown through to a comfortable room, discreetly lit with pearly lights in wall sconces and table lamps. Magazines and newspapers lay on a pale-oak table. The newspapers looked as though they’d been ironed. A large fire burned in the wide grate. The effect was warm, cosy after the rawness of the January day.

The woman in the armchair by the fire rose to greet them. She was dressed in a closely fitting black costume, pale-green silk shirt caught at the throat with the same pearl brooch.

‘Vera!’ Dori embraced her, kissing each white cheek.

‘Dori,’ Vera Atkins returned a merest peck to either side, ‘and Miss Graham. How good to see you again. Do sit.’ She indicated the sofa next to her chair. ‘Drinks?’ She rang a small bell. ‘Gin and tonics,’ she said to the girl who answered the call. No choice was offered. ‘This is a very good place to meet.’ She looked up at the portrait of a handsome woman in WAAF uniform smiling down from above the wide mantelpiece. ‘The drink is cheap. There are no men about and it is very discreet. I won’t beat about the bush,’ she said when the drinks were delivered. ‘I have a proposition to make.’

She turned towards them. As her black gaze fell on both of them, even Dori’s confidence seemed to falter. She was the most elegant and terrifying woman Edith had ever met.

‘I did rather put you through it, Miss Graham. Gave you a bit of a grilling but I had to be sure you were the right sort.’

‘For whom? For Leo?’

‘No. Not for them.’ She gave a thin smile. ‘For me. I no longer have anything to do with his department. Interviewing you was my last service.’ She adjusted the hem of her skirt. ‘I have recently been in Germany and will shortly be returning. I’m due to go out there in a few days, just as you are, Miss Graham. I have been tasked with finding out what happened to the girls who worked for Special Operations Executive, F Section,’ her eyes flickered towards Dori, ‘our branch of the Service.’

She reached for her briefcase and took out photographs, placing each one on the low table: women in uniform and out of it, some smiling, some serious, some quite beautiful, all of them young.

‘These are girls who were sent to France,’ she said, her fingers aligning the photographs more exactly. ‘Girls whom I sent to France,’ she corrected. ‘And who didn’t come back.’

Four pairs of eyes gazed back at Edith. Four women full of courage and pride who had stepped forward to enter Occupied France, that deadliest of arenas. Four lives given to the service of their country. Four families still waiting for news.

‘Do you think any of them might have survived?’ Edith asked.

‘It is possible. Anything is possible. There’s always hope.’ The black eyes became bleak. ‘But I think it unlikely.’ She paused, seeming to collect herself. ‘We have to find out what happened to our women. Where they were taken, on whose orders, what those orders were, who carried them out. It will be my last service.’ Vera’s fingers lightly played over the young faces. ‘I owe it to their families. I owe it to them.’ Her voice had grown husky. ‘I mean to see them honoured. I’ve made a start but new information is coming in all the time. It’s too big a job for one person. I need help.’ She looked at Dori. ‘A person I can trust and I’ve asked that Dori might join me. We will be working with the War Crimes Commission, tasked with bringing the men responsible to justice, while taking part in a wider search for other criminals of the Nazi regime. Men like your von Stavenow.’

Dori perched on the edge of the sofa. She sat very erect, hands clasped tightly, as if to hold in the tension running through her. She stared at Vera, her face paler than ever, hope and expectation contending with fear of disappointment in her intense, dark gaze.

‘I invited Dori to come today for the yay or nay.’ Vera picked up a silver cigarette case and lighter and lit a cigarette. ‘I’m happy to say it is yay. If it had been otherwise, we would not be meeting.’

Edith didn’t take her eyes off Dori. ‘You didn’t say anything about this.’

‘Dori’s good at keeping secrets.’ Vera drew deeply on her cigarette and let out a stream of smoke. ‘As, I believe, you are, Miss Graham, from what Dori tells me. Hidden depths,’ she gave one of her thin smiles. ‘I like that. I’ve worked with far less promising material, it has to be said. That’s why you are here. Now,’ she tapped ash into a cut-glass ashtray. ‘Leo has asked you to to keep an eye out for Nazi criminals, has he not? Like your friend von Stavenow, or any of his ilk that you might come across. Yes?’ Edith assented. ‘All I’m asking is that you tell us what Leo’s interest is.’

‘Why would you want me to do that?’

‘Because I’m not entirely convinced that it completely coincides with our own.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and sat back, hands folded. ‘Leo belongs to a different branch of the service now. A branch that is not interested in bringing these men to justice. Rather the opposite.’

‘It’s what Adeline was talking about,’ Dori said, urgently. ‘The Paperclip business.’

‘You have proof that Leo, his people, are doing the same thing?’ Edith asked.

Vera nodded. ‘They are calling it Haystack, as in needle in.’

‘And if I find something?’

‘You still tell Leo, or whatever minion he sends, the only difference is, you let us know, too.’

‘So I’d be some kind of double agent?’

‘If you want to put it like that.’

‘Oh, I don’t know …’ Edith said, uncertain.

‘Do you want these men to get away with it?’ Dori gripped her arm hard. ‘Do you? Do you think it’s right when so many died, when they have so much blood on their hands? She stared at the photographs on the table. ‘Look at them. Look! Those are our girls, my friends. It could have been me quite easily.’ She gave a deep sigh. ‘In May, ’44, we had a message. From Paris. It was hard to decipher, but some of it said: They’re sending our joes up the chimney. We took it to mean they were being sent to concentration camps. The Nazis were clearing out Gestapo Headquarters on Avenue Foch, where they took agents. I’ve been there, seen the blood they didn’t bother to clean up, the instruments set out in neat order: scalpels, pliers, hammers and chisels, like a cross between an operating theatre and a carpenter’s bench. It wasn’t just our girls held there and tortured but countless others. Countless! It’s not just the cosh and cock boys we need to go after. That’s what they used, didn’t they?’ Her defiant stare challenged Vera’s wincing disapproval. ‘Rape and torture? They are not so hard to catch. I want the ones who gave the orders. They are the ones who will escape us if we are not careful. So much death, so much suffering.’ Her voice was deep with emotion, her accent pronounced. ‘Then these, these monsters are free to go and live some nice life somewhere, with a new identity as if nothing had happened. Do you want that?’

Edith had never seen Dori so angry, so passionate about anything. Her face was as white as Vera’s, her dark eyes glittering, brimming with tears. She was shaking, gripping so hard that Edith’s arm was hurting. Her carefully cultivated insouciance had slipped. Edith could see now that it was just another disguise.

‘Of course not,’ Edith said, putting a hand on hers to calm her down.

‘Then there is no choice that I can see,’ Dori slowly released her grip, her voice full of unspilled tears.

‘Dori feels strongly about this, Miss Graham, as do I, although I might not use the same language or show my emotions so readily.’

‘I’ll do whatever I can.’

Vera acknowledged Edith’s answer with a slight nod and leaned back in her chair, eyes almost closed. The silence stretched.

‘If messages are to pass between us,’ she said finally, ‘we will need some kind of code.’

‘I can’t just write to Dori, I suppose?’

‘No!’ Both women spoke at once.

‘Your letters will come through Forces Mail,’ Dori said. ‘No knowing who might be reading it.’

‘That someone will is certain.’ Vera’s eyes opened. ‘Germany is under Mil Gov and Lübeck is right on the border with the Soviets.’

‘We need a code and a safe delivery system.’ Dori lit a cigarette. ‘Something simple.’

Vera gave Edith a long, appraising stare. ‘Quite so. Something that sounds innocent but isn’t. Something that only means anything to people who know the code.’

‘A word code would do,’ Dori said.

‘Yes,’ Vera thought for a moment. ‘It would.’

‘A word code?’

‘One of the simplest but surprisingly difficult to crack,’ Dori explained. ‘Messages are sent by card, or letter based on some common interest, bird watching, say, or some other type of hobby. The messages appear to be perfectly innocent but the words are freighted with other pre-agreed meanings which convey a completely different message.’

‘A word means just what I choose it to mean …’ Edith smiled.

‘Exactly.’

Edith frowned. ‘Why all this need for secrecy?’

Dori glanced to Vera, who gave a slight nod.

‘In the war, not just individuals but whole networks were betrayed. Men and women sacrificed …’ She glanced at the photographs spread out on the table. ‘Some of the girls were picked up more or less on arrival, which means the circuit was blown, or there was—’

‘A traitor at the heart of SOE,’ Vera finished. ‘Whoever it was might well have moved on to another branch of the Service. That is why we need secrecy. Such an individual will act without scruple, doing whatever is necessary to save his own skin. What we are asking you to do is not without danger.’

‘We can’t risk—’ Dori started.

‘No, quite,’ Vera interrupted. ‘It has to be secure. Between us. We will give it some thought, Miss Graham. Now, could you excuse us for a little while? We have things to discuss.’

‘Of course,’ Edith got up, taken aback. She hadn’t expected to be dismissed like that.

‘Go for a walk, or something,’ Dori smiled, trying to make up for Vera’s abruptness. ‘We won’t be long.’

Edith turned her collar against the chilling dampness coming up from the river and strode off, hardly knowing where she was going, hands thrust deep into her pockets, while she weighed what was being asked of her. She frowned, burying her chin deeper into her scarf. Dori and Vera were telling her one thing while Leo had told her entirely another. She stopped. Or rather, he hadn’t. In typical Leo fashion, he had outlined Kurt’s crimes, shown her absolute, shocking proof that the man she’d loved had been warped and changed, done the most terrible things, been turned into a monster by the regime he’d served. What Leo had not told her was why he wanted him found. Nothing about Haystack, nothing about finding scientists to use them, nothing like that at all. That had been left to Dori and Vera. They wanted to find men like Kurt to bring them to justice, to make them pay for their crimes. Instantly, instinctively she knew which side to take. She walked on. There was no really choice that she could see. Official Secrets Act, or no Official Secrets Act. No choice at all.

She stopped, mind made up, only to find that she’d totally lost her bearings. She suddenly felt nervous, even panicky, her surroundings unfamiliar, fog coming up from the river. The road was lined with antique shops, most of them closed, windows filled with junk mainly, salvaged from bomb-damaged houses. She hurried to one with lights on and peered through chipped china, dusty pieces of sculpture, jumbled bric-a-brac. The man behind the counter looked up as the bell tinged. He was in his overcoat, his expression flickering between wanting to make a sale and getting to the pub.

‘I’m just about to close,’ he said. ‘Half day.’

‘I just want directions.’

‘Where to?’

‘Lower Sloane Street?’

He gave a wheezing laugh. ‘You’re a bit out of your way. Here.’

He unfolded a worn map of the area, tracing the route with a nicotined finger. As Edith leaned forward, she dislodged a pile of books stacked in front of the counter.

‘How clumsy of me.’ She collected as many as she could, then paused, keeping one back. ‘How much for this?’

The bookseller turned the book in his hands as though it was a valuable first edition even though it was water stained, smelt faintly of smoke from someone’s bombed-out kitchen and he knew perfectly well that it was one of those given free with gas cookers.

‘Depends how much you want it, doesn’t it?’

‘Sixpence?’ Edith ventured. It was worth nothing but she did want it. Badly.

‘Ooh,’ he rubbed the side of his purple, pitted nose. ‘I dunno …’

‘Ninepence?’

‘Done.’

Edith handed him a shilling. He reached for brown paper.

‘No need.’ Edith picked up the book and headed for the door.

‘’Ere! You forgot your change!’

He shrugged and dropped the threepenny bit into the till.

Edith held the book cradled inside her coat. They had one just like it at home: the cover stained, like this, marked with spillages, crustings of flour, pages interleaved with pamphlets (Ministry of Food, Dig for Victory), recipes cut from newspapers, torn from magazines (Meals from the Allotment, Ruth Morgan’s Wartime Cookery, Stella Snelling’s Ideas for Leftovers). They spoke of scarcity, turning the garden over to vegetables, the tyranny of the ration. Besides cuttings, the book held menus collected from restaurants, hotels, RAF messes; recipes written out in Mother’s careful copperplate pencilled on lined paper; Louisa’s purple-inked scrawl on deckled stationery; Edith’s neat, small cursive in washable blue on Basildon Bond. Food, recipes, menus told you an awful lot. Taste and preference defined a person; what was on offer provided a wider context. Messages based on some common interest. Messages that appear to be perfectly innocent … Didn’t this fit that?

They were sitting where she’d left them, enjoying a second round of gin and tonics. The concierge tried to stop her, but she burst in, still in her coat, face pink with the cold and excitement.

‘I’ve got it!’ she said, waving the book.

‘Got what?’ Dori looked up.

‘The code. It came to me when I saw this – the Radiation Cookery Book. A code based on recipes. Everyone is obsessed with food, have you noticed? What’s available, what’s not available: on ration, off ration, blackmarket. Rationing and scarcity only sharpens the appetite. If that’s true here, I can’t see it being different over there.’ Edith paused, the better to order and express the ideas that had begun to seethe. ‘The very words we use can be read in two ways, sometimes more than two. We talk about being in hot water, being hot, or cold, going from the frying pan into the fire, putting things on the back burner and, I don’t know, I’m sure we can think of others. Hot and cold, for example. See here,’ Edith turned to the front of the book. ‘Regulos control the temperature. Regulo 7 is very hot. Things cook quickly. Regulo 1 or 2, cool, slow cooking. I’m sure we can work out a whole code based on this book, understood only by us, each message couched in cookery terms, and Dori has the same edition!’

‘I do?’

‘In your larder. It came with the gas cooker. We use it to agree a code. Anything of interest, I send a recipe or menu, with a note, a card, or letter, message embedded. Every woman interested in cooking swaps recipes,’ Edith added. ‘What could be more natural? Or more innocent?’

‘Or more likely to be beneath the attention of possible censors,’ Dori finished, ‘who are bound to be men.’

Vera leaned back, long fingers laced, her face as severe as ever.

‘It might just work.’ She gave one of her rare smiles. ‘How exactly, will be up to you. Keep it simple. That’s my advice.’

After Vera left, Dori ordered more gin and tonics. Keep it simple. Edith would send recipes to Dori and as a fail-safe to her sister, Louisa. The messages didn’t have to be complicated. They could be limited to certain categories. A person of interest. Contact made. Developments in this area, or that area. Defined by the recipe sent, refined by nationality. British, American, German and anyone else who happens along. What could be more natural than collecting recipes, menus, dishes, from different nationalities?

‘A flavour of the place. A flavour of the people.’

‘Taking the temperature, testing the water?’ Dori ventured.

‘Exactly. With reference to recipes found in here,’ Edith patted the book. ‘Just so you know that such a thing is important.’

‘But I can’t cook,’ Dori said suddenly. ‘Does that matter?’

‘Not at all,’ Edith smiled. ‘It’s even better. I’m teaching you …’

‘Oh, that’s good.’ Dori grinned back. ‘We’ll mark pages up when we get back. Decide on prearranged references. Doesn’t have to be precise. More like progress reports. How you’re getting on, that sort of thing. It’s inspired, Edith. I really like it.’ She finished her drink. ‘More than that, I think it could actually work.’

Back at the flat, they went straight to the basement kitchen. Dori retrieved the Radiation Cookery Book from behind the Bird’s Custard Powder.

‘It’s not much of one,’ Dori sat back when they had finished the code. ‘Rather Heath Robinson, truth be told. It certainly wouldn’t pass muster with SOE, or any other intelligence agency for that matter, but that could be all to the better. Enough for tonight.’

The next few days were spent on the mundane: buying clothes and things that might be difficult to obtain: sanitary towels, toothbrushes, toothpowder, talcum powder, decent soap, makeup, perfume and haberdashery: sewing machine needles and bobbins, ordinary needles and sylko. Useful wampum, Dori called it. Then on Edith’s last evening, Dori came to her room, a fur coat over her arm.

‘I want you to take this. It’ll be cold out there. You wouldn’t believe how cold. Come, try it on.’

Edith slipped her arms into the sleeves. Her hands automatically stroked the thick fur, slippery against her cheek and under her fingers. It smelt faintly of powder and Dori’s perfume, Guerlain L’Heure Bleue, and beneath that, a slight, sharp animal smell.

‘Dori, really, I couldn’t possibly,’ Edith began, although she already felt reluctant to part with the warmth of it, the soft, rich beauty of the fur. ‘You might need it.’

‘What for? I’m not going anywhere. Not yet anyway. It is never so cold here. I have boots. Proper boots. Nice leather, fur lined, knee high. I want you to take those, too. Try them on. We’re about the same size.’

Edith pulled on the boots. They fitted perfectly.

‘This is very generous of you,’ Edith slipped her hand into the pocket. ‘What’s this?’

Her fingers closed around cold, smooth metal.

‘It’s a pistol. The bullets are here.’ Dori held out a cardboard box of shells.

Edith turned the weapon over in her hands. ‘I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to use it.’

‘I’ll show you.’

‘But is it really … necessary?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Dori said, ‘Vera agrees. We think you should take it for your protection. It could get dangerous.’

Edith had never held a handgun before, let alone used one. She looked down at the dull, dark metal of the short barrel, ran her fingers over the curved trigger inside its guard, felt the hatched rubber of the grip against her palm.

‘But I can’t possibly take it. What if I’m stopped? Searched?’

‘Wrap it in underwear, preferably worn. They don’t like picking through soiled undies. Or in a box of sanitary towels. They never touch those. And you have a rank. Use it. Act innocent but haughty. Haughty gets you a long way.’

‘But I’ve no idea what to do.’

‘I’ll show you.’

Edith listened to Dori’s instructions, watched as her slim, strong, practised hands handled the weapon. She loaded and reloaded the pistol under Dori’s watchful eye, feeding bullets into the clip, taking it out, squeezing the trigger on the empty chamber, noting how the safety mechanism worked, until her hands were grey, filmed with fine-grade gun oil.

‘That should do it. You don’t have to actually shoot a gun,’ Dori said, ‘just know how it works. Aim at the body. It’s a bigger target. Get close enough and even you can’t miss. Once he’s down, move in for the headshot. That way he won’t get up.’

This woman had seen death and dealt it. Edith looked down at the gun in her hand and hoped she’d never have to act on her advice.

‘That’s enough. Wrap it in your knickers.’ Dori stood back to scrutinize. Edith felt like a knight being armed for his first battle. ‘There’s something else I want you to have.’ Dori unclasped the medallion she wore around her neck and handed it to Edith. ‘It is Our Lady of Częstochowa.’

In Edith’s palm lay a tiny oval icon, executed in jewel-like enamel, encased in gold: a black Madonna, her dark face scored and marked, the Christ child in her thin arms.

‘You can’t give me this!’

‘Take it!’ Dori closed her fingers over the talisman. ‘Your need is greater. She will protect you.’

‘Thank you!’ Edith could feel the tears stinging at her friend’s kindness.

‘Let me fix it.’ Dori reached round Edith’s neck and secured the clasp. She held her close for a moment and whispered, ‘May she keep you safe.’

When Dori released her, there were tears in her eyes, too.

GERMANY

6
Blue Train, Hook of Holland—Hamburg
4th January 1946

Blue Train Picnic

Broodje kroket

Rookwurst (Smoked Sausage)

Mustard

Hard-boiled eggs

Genever

Broodje kroket: Not unlike a rissole, flecked with parsley. Made with leftover meat, minced or chopped, mixed with onion but bound with a béchamel then formed into a fat sausage, crumbed and deep fried. Eaten in a bridge roll with mild Dutch mustard.

More like a rissole than a croquette. Find under Meat (66, 63). Can be baked at Regulo 7 (or 6 depending on the oven) or fried for 9 or 10 minutes (turn after 5).

Hook of Holland station. A blue enamel token gave her a place on the train to Hamburg. The line of carriages stood the length of the platform; at the head of them the huge engine hissed steam. Travel came down to a game of snakes and ladders. Liverpool Street Station to Harwich. Boat to Hook of Holland. Now she was on the train to Hamburg. So far, no snakes.

She stowed her leather Gladstone in the nets and took a window seat, resolutely facing the direction of travel. The window was grimed from the outside but she wiped at it, impatient to get going. The stationary train conjured other platforms on other stations. She felt herself slipping backwards into memories she’d been trying to avoid. The awkward farewells at Coventry. The family assembled to see her off, the parting stilted, still coloured by the row that had blown up when she had announced her intention to go to Germany and work for the Control Commission.

‘Are you out of your mind, Edith? I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous!’

Her sister, Louisa, led the attack since Mother had taken to her bed.

Louisa was the beauty in the family. Even as a child, her looks had gone beyond prettiness. Rich, auburn hair, large dark eyes in a heart-shaped face. Louisa had been her father’s favourite, everybody’s favourite. Spoilt and headstrong, she’d married young. The war had been a godsend to her, allowing her to leave her life in the suburbs and travel with her handsome RAF husband to bases all over the country. But now all that was over. All the glamour had gone. Now this. Just when she was having to adjust to civvy street, normal life again, Edith was planning to swan off. Not only that, but the responsibility of caring for Mother would naturally fall on Louisa. It wasn’t right. It was against the natural order of things and it had put her into a towering rage. She had her own family. Edith was a spinster: it was her job to look after Mother.

She had invited herself and the rest of the family round for a Sunday teatime conflab. Perfectly turned out, as always, in a striped silk shirt and pearl-grey costume, her lustrous hair scrolled back and caught at the nape in a snood, she strode about the small front parlour, full of righteous indignation, gesturing with her cigarette.

‘What on earth are you thinking of? How could you dream of doing such a thing? What about Mother? How will she cope? You know there’s no help to be had these days …’

Brothers, Ronald and Gordon, fell in with her as they always did, adding their chorus: ‘Lou’s got a point there’, ‘Have you thought it through, old thing?’, ‘Aren’t you a bit long in the tooth?’

‘I’m not that old …’

‘Not far off forty!’ Louisa laughed, sneering and harsh.

The sisters-in-law, Trudy and Vi, joined in, bleating protests, shocked that she should dare to break away, duck her responsibilities as the spinster daughter of her elderly mother. Their real fear was that they’d have to take over care of Mother, do the housework, the washing, the shopping, the gardening, keep the lawn mowed and the hedges trim.

Edith tried to explain that she was not doing this out of spite, or to shirk her responsibilities. She wanted to do something. All through the war, she’d seen others leave to join the forces, do useful work. She’d done nothing. She felt wasted, unfulfilled, as though she’d missed an important experience. Others had risked their lives, done things that meant something, that counted. All she’d done was trudge backwards and forwards to school, call registers, teach the girls, come home, do the garden, dig for victory, manage the ration, cook supper, listen to the wireless with Mother. This was her chance to make a real contribution. All this just earned an exasperated stare from Louisa.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Edith! What do you take us for?’ Her carefully drawn brows arched higher and her red-lipsticked mouth curled with contempt. ‘I’ve never heard such claptrap.’ Louisa turned away to light another cigarette, cupping her talloned fingers as if she was standing in a gale.

Only her brother-in-law, Ted, had been sympathetic. He stood by the mantelpiece, hands in his pockets, as handsome and affable as ever, his dark hair sleek and close to his head, brushed back from a prominent widow’s peak. He’d watched the row, a slight smile showing the gap between his perfect white teeth. Louisa had married him for his looks rather than his prospects.

He was the only one Edith could really talk to, the only one with whom she had the least thing in common. He was a teacher, too. He’d volunteered early and got a commission. Louisa didn’t want to see her husband diminished by civilian life but Ted didn’t seem in the least bothered about swapping his RAF uniform for grey slacks and a sweater and returning to his profession. He was looking forward to the part he might play in the changes the new Education Act would bring.

He carried out the tea things with Edith. Barely touched. A precious tin of salmon had gone into the sandwiches; a whole week’s butter ration into the fruitcake. The raspberry buns, Mother’s favourite, had been waved away with a peevish, ‘You know the pips get under my plate.’

‘Never mind,’ Ted grinned. ‘Kids’ll polish that lot off. Let’s go out shall we? See how the garden’s doing.’

He lit his pipe as they stepped outside. They walked down the York-stone path past the flowerbeds and lawn. Children dodged in and out of the shrubbery. Ted’s pipe smoke wreathed up through the cold, damp air like a veil. They stopped at the vegetable patch, brassica stumps still in the ground, a forlorn row of sprouts, the bean sticks showing ghostly in the mist.

‘I really ought to dig it over,’ Edith said. ‘Get the broad beans in.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll see to this.’ Ted knocked out his pipe on the sole of his shoe. ‘What does Leo think? Have you been in touch at all? You were pretty close at one time. His ma’s in a nursing home, Lou tells me. House and land sold to a builder. Plans afoot to develop all round there. Must have made a pretty penny.’

There was no jealousy. It was just an observation that chimed with the family’s perception of Leo; he was the rich one, private school and Oxford. Not like us.

‘Met him a couple of times during the war, in London, you know,’ Ted went on. ‘Always cagey about what he was up to. Got the impression that it was pretty hush-hush.’ He looked over at her. ‘Thought I saw you with him once, on the Strand. You were visiting your pal Stella. Never said anything.’ Ted turned to her with his wide, white smile. ‘You go off and do it, kid. You need to get away from here. You’ve done your turn with your ma. Let the others take over. Lou will grumble, but she’ll manage. They’ll need good people over there. It’s a bit of a mess, from what I hear. You deserve this chance.’

A shrill whistle sounded. Doors slammed. A long blast signalled departure. Edith relaxed into her seat as steam billowed past the window and the wheels began to turn, slow at first then faster. This felt entirely right. The right thing to do. She suddenly knew that she would not be going back. Not ever. She should have made the break a long time ago.

‘Mind if I join you?’ A young army officer stuck his head into her compartment. ‘Not many seats left.’

‘No, please do.’

‘Phew! Only just made it!’ He pulled off his glove with his teeth and held his hand out to her. ‘Alex Drummond. Bulldog, inevitably.’

Edith laughed. ‘I’m Edith. Edith Graham.’

Bulldog. One of those forces sobriquets: Tinker Taylor, Chalky White. Medium build, not very tall, but there was a strength about him, in the squareness of his shoulders and the easy, physical confidence with which he moved and held himself. His pleasant face was just short of handsome, wide across the eyes and forehead with a strong squarish jaw. More bull terrier than bulldog but the nickname suited him.

‘Nice to meet you, Miss Graham.’ He lifted his bag one-handed and boosted it onto the nets. He looked down at her, quizzically. ‘Haven’t I seen you before?’

‘I don’t think so …’

He removed his cap, revealing bronzish hair, tightly curled, like a Greek statue, short at the sides, as though he’d just had a haircut.

‘New Year’s Eve. Dori’s party. As we came in, you were leaving with Leo Chase.’

‘Of course. You were with Vera Atkins.’

He smiled, seemingly delighted by her recognition, the connection made. He took off his greatcoat and sat opposite her. Edith smiled back. She had a suspicion that this was more than a coincidence, probably Dori or Vera keeping an eye on her, not that she minded. It was a relief to be watched over and she’d be glad of the company.

‘I suppose we both look a bit different out of our finery.’ He nodded towards the coat she was wearing. ‘Though that is a rather splendid fur.’

‘Dori’s.’ She pulled the coat closer about her. ‘She insisted I take it against the cold.’

‘Thought it wasn’t Control Commission issue.’ Drummond glanced at the badge on the cap on her lap: CCG, gold interlocked letters. ‘Is that who you’re with?’

Edith nodded.

He opened his cigarette case, automatically offering it to her.

‘I don’t. Thanks.’

‘Sensible woman.’ He snapped the case closed and lit his cigarette. ‘Make sure you take up your ration. Germans would rather be paid in cigarettes than marks. Strictly against regulations but everybody does it. Going far?’

‘Hamburg. Then Lübeck. I’m stationed there. Education Officer.’

‘All the way, then.’ His smile showed a slight gap between his front teeth.

‘You?’

‘Bad Oeyenhausen. I leave the train at Osnabrück.’

They sat in silence. Edith looked out of the window. Drummond finished his cigarette.

The train was taking them through the outskirts of Rotterdam. Evidence of heavy bombing: broken buildings blackened and hollowed, warehouses crumpled as if they were made out of cardboard. In the distance, huge cranes lay, unhinged and twisted, listing into the river.

‘Rotterdam took two doses.’ Drummond stared out at the devastation furling past their window. ‘Germans in ’40 then we had a go – shipyards, docks and the E boat pens.’

‘E boats?’

‘Fast attack craft.’ He folded his arms, his jaw set. ‘Bloody nuisance to our shipping, so it had to be done.’

They lapsed into silence again. Eventually, the train left the urban destruction behind and they were in a flat, geometric landscape, drab greens and browns with dykes and polders and windmills. Everyone’s idea of Holland, culled from geography books and travel guides, but textbooks and Baedeker didn’t show the broken bridges, their metal spars sprawled in the rivers as if pulled from their abutments by some giant fist.

‘Want some of this?’ he took out a flask and two thimble-sized metal cups. ‘Genever. Have a drop. Keep out the cold.’ He poured her a tot of gin. ‘Cheers!’ He threw his back and poured himself another. ‘Wonderful! Not like that London stuff. That just makes you drunk. This is warming, sustaining. A real aqua vita.’

Edith sipped cautiously. She didn’t usually drink neat gin in the middle of the day. The spirit was thick, almost oily, and aromatic with the piney sharpness of the juniper and other flavours she couldn’t name.

‘Just the thing, eh?’ He reached over and poured her another. ‘You missed a good party. Pity you had to leave so early. It was one of Dori’s best ever.’

‘So I hear.’

Edith looked out at the passing villages. Places one might glimpse for a fleeting moment but would never visit. In the middle distance, a man drove a horse-drawn cart, hunched over his reins; in the foreground, a couple of men shod in clogs plodded along a glistening, muddy road. It could be Brueghel. Medieval.

‘I say,’ he began. Edith turned back to find Drummond smiling at her. ‘I was thinking about going along to the dining car, such as it is. Perhaps you would care to join me? Food is pretty poor on these trains.’ He picked up his knapsack. ‘Luckily, I’ve brought provisions. You’re welcome to share.’

The dining car when they reached it was almost full. They slipped into a table. Drummond took out a napkin bundle tied neatly at the top. He undid the knots and unwrapped a series of packages.

‘We have broodje croquetten with mustard – meat croquettes wrapped up in a soft white roll, really delicious – and rookworst – Dutch smoked sausage – and hard-boiled eggs. I’m always starving after the crossing but can’t eat the muck they serve up when we get to the Hook.’ He shuddered. ‘So I breakfast at this little café. Hot rolls, real jam, proper coffee. Just the job. I have them make a little picnic up for me.’

He portioned the food carefully. He had good hands for a man, broad across the backs, but not fat; neat nails with short, strong fingers. Edith always noticed hands. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. The food was delicious. Different. Continental.

‘Are you religious?’ he asked, suddenly.

‘No, not especially. Why do you ask that?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s just that pendant you’re wearing. The Black Madonna of Częstochowa, isn’t it?’

‘Oh,’ Edith’s hand went to the medallion. ‘Dori gave it to me. For protection.’

‘We all carry something.’ Drummond’s hand strayed to his top pocket. ‘She must be a good friend to give you that.’ He looked at her with a strange kind of respect. ‘Let’s hope she doesn’t need it back.’

‘Why should she?’ Something about his tone made her look up sharply.

‘No reason.’ He shrugged. ‘How do you know Dori?’

There was a softening round the eyes, the quirk of a private smile as he said her name, that made Edith think that he might have been one of Dori’s many lovers. Maybe still was.

‘Through Adeline Croft.’

‘The American journalist?’

‘Yes, do you know her?’

‘Met her a couple of times.’

They were having that kind of conversation. People of brief acquaintance, trying to discover people they might have in common.

‘And Vera?’ Edith ventured. ‘How do you know her?’

‘How do you?’ he countered.

‘I don’t. I’ve only met her once.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, twice if you count Dori’s party. I know her hardly at all.’

She omitted to mention the third time at the Service Women’s Club. He looked at her again, as though he knew she was leaving something out but respected her for doing so. His smile widened as if she’d passed some kind of test.

‘You must have made quite an impression.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘At the party. She spoke to you. She cuts people she’s known for years. Claims short sight. She can’t be bothered, is closer to it.’

‘You know her well, then?’

‘Well enough.’ It was his turn to be evasive. ‘People in common, you might say.’ He stared out of the window, his face suddenly closed and distant as if they had wandered away from safe ground. Then he looked back, as if he’d decided something. ‘Vera and I will be working together. War Crimes Commission.’ He looked down at the badge on his cap. ‘Find out what happened to our chaps. Hunt down murdering Nazi bastards. Bring them to justice.’

He turned away again, as if that was all he had to say about it. Within moments, he was asleep. The scene outside had turned wintery, dykes and rivers covered with the dull-grey, green gleam of ice, the fields dusted with snow. Like Johannes Janson’s Winter Landscape but without the skaters. Edith took out her pen and notebook, casting her eye over the debris on the table, selecting the croquette: a meat mixture, good way to use up leftovers. Basically a rissole … She wrote quickly, creating the recipe, looking up every now and then as she gathered the ingredients.

Sprawled in the seat opposite, head against the window, mouth slightly open, Drummond looked younger, his body loose, the tension erased from his face. He reminded her a bit of her brother-in-law Ted: the contained strength, the straight eyebrows over greeny-grey eyes, even the slight gap between the teeth.

The train jolted and Drummond was suddenly awake. Edith looked away quickly, not wanting him to think she was staring. The pen jerked in her hand, stabbing the paper, blotting the page.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I— I’m,’ she looked at the pen in her hand, the notebook on her lap. ‘You know, just jotting down a few things. I collect recipes. Foods I encounter – menus, and so on.’

‘Our picnic?’ He seemed amused by it.

‘Well, yes.’ She glanced down at the notes she’d been making. ‘Food tells you a lot about a person. Allows you to see beneath the surface display.’

‘What does this,’ he motioned towards the debris, ‘tell you about me?’

‘Oh, you’re sophisticated, well-travelled, cosmopolitan. You’re a bit of a maverick, willing to improvise, cut corners, break rules. Well-educated, good at languages, intelligent. You are charming, especially to women, but men like you too—’

‘Spare my blushes!’ He laughed. ‘You can tell all that? No need for palms?’

‘Yes. Food reveals a great deal. It also serves to fix the memory. Better than a diary. Even years later, the recall is instant. Diaries can be dull. Trite.’

‘And not allowed.’ His look was frank and level. ‘I see,’ he settled back into his own memory. ‘I do see.’

‘So?’ she asked. ‘What do you see?’

He leaned forward again, hands clasped. ‘The desert. Been out all day with Long Range Desert Group. Infernally hot. Stopped when the sun went down.’ His eyes went distant. ‘I can see this long dune, like a knife against a violet sky. We were starving. All we’d got were hard biscuits and bully beef. This Kiwi chopped the tops off the tins with his bayonet. I can see him now, the tattoo on his bare arm. Corned beef had melted to slurry. We scooped it up with biscuits, ate it from the tin. Out there under the stars, it tasted better than foie gras.’ The train jerked violently then slowed in a series of juddering halts. ‘What’s wrong with this damned train? We’ll never get there at this rate.’

He rubbed at the glass but removing the condensation made no difference. The world outside had gone a misty, pearl grey. A horde of children appeared like ghosts out of the fog, running alongside the halting train, shouting, ‘Hagen Sie Brot?’ Some of the occupants of the dining car ignored them but others opened the windows and from all along the train came a shower of sandwiches, cigarettes, loose and in packets, chocolate bars.

‘It was bad here,’ Drummond said as the children swarmed towards the tracks. ‘They were more or less starving by the end of the war. The winter will be making it hard again. It’ll be the same thing from now on. Wherever the train stops or slows, crowds of children come from God knows where shouting: “Chockie Tommee! Fags Tommee! Butties Tommee!” The chaps throw them what they don’t want, or what they can spare just to watch them scrabbling and fighting over it. Or maybe they feel sorry for the poor little sods.’ Drummond threw what was left of the sausage and a couple of children dived for it. ‘You’ll see plenty like these where you’re going.’

One child did not move, just stared up at them. A little girl in a thin cardigan over a summer dress and what looked like sandals. She was just standing there in the enveloping mist, on ground grey with frost. Edith recalled a Control Commission briefing: a tall, sharp-featured woman in battledress tunic and navy skirt, an Education Officer who had just come back. She’d shown slide after slide of urban devastation, interspersed with grubby-looking children, playing in mountains of bricks and fallen masonry. ‘You won’t know what it is like until you get out there,’ she’d said, white faced and solemn, as if she had scarcely believed it herself. Edith had noted down statistics: Cologne 92 per cent of buildings unusable, only 162 primary schools in the whole of Schleswig-Holstein, but it was the children sitting on the rubble, their faces pinched and sullen, who had stayed with her. Whatever else she might be doing, she was there to make a difference to the lives of children. She must never lose sight of that.

The train gained speed. Drummond glanced out of the window. ‘Border soon. Papers at the ready.’ Edith suddenly remembered the dratted gun. Her concern must have shown. ‘No need to look so worried.’ He leaned forward. ‘They never search or anything. Well,’ he grinned, ‘almost never.’

The checks were cursory, papers and passports only. Formalities over, the groups around them became more relaxed, passing round bottles of brandy and schnapps.

‘It’s strange,’ Drummond said, nodded towards the window. ‘Some places hardly touched, as if there had never been a war.’ They were passing Bad Bentheim. It looked just like a postcard, or something from a fairy tale, a great castle standing on a bluff; the red roofs of the town spread out below it, dusted with snow. ‘Others,’ he shrugged, ‘almost utterly destroyed. It’s the same all over Germany.’

The next town of any size was Rheine. Here, the marshalling yards had been bombed extensively, the devastation spread out to the surrounding town, the houses and buildings bordering the line reduced to burnt-out, blackened shells. The sidings were filled with the remains of goods trucks and wagons, sides splintered, burnt down to the wheels, derailed engines lay rusting on their sides. Some recovery work was going on. Men cutting up a tender, the falling arc of yellow and red sparks the only colour anywhere.

‘Good to see someone trying to do something, even if it’s only righting an engine.’ A burst of raucous laughter from the people sitting on the other side of the aisle caught his attention for a moment. ‘That’s what we do here while we’re supposed to be sorting out the mess we’ve created. Get drunk. Dream of other lives.’

Drummond looked away to the men working in the growing darkness.

The devastation grew greater as they approached Osnabrück. The train seemed to slow so that they could get a better look. As far as the eye could see, on either side of the line, only the odd church spire was left standing. In the distance, the jagged outline of what had once been blocks of tenements stood black against the last of the day.

‘Serves them right, that’s what I say!’ A girl’s voice, sharp and high, broke the silence that had spread through the carriage. She followed her remark with a fluting note of nervous laughter and there was a subdued rumble of agreement. The light was going, night coming on. The window turned into a reflecting mirror and Edith studied the girl against the scrolling phantasmagoria: smoke curling from her cigarette holder, her vivid lipsticked bow of a mouth frozen in laughter, her eyes dark below thin, pencilled brows, short blonde hair set in sculpted waves.

Drummond watched the group, his mouth set in a straight line.

‘The train divides here.’ He stood up. ‘This is where I leave you.’

He retrieved his belongings and shrugged on his greatcoat. They stood in the corridor, Drummond lit a cigarette.

‘You’ll be a while. Engine change. The damage here is immense. It gets worse the further north you get.’ He nodded towards the dining car. ‘Not sure how much help they’re going to be. Good war types, shy of civvy street, wanting to prolong the party. Can’t blame them, really, I suppose. Pretty dreary back home, what with rationing and all that. Here you can have anything you want.’ He stared into the darkness outside. ‘And I do mean anything.’ He looked back at her, his grey-green eyes hardened to serpentine. ‘Don’t get me wrong – I’m not soft on them. The Germans. I’ve seen Belsen, which is more than that lot has. Believe me, everything you’ve heard about that place is true, and it’s not even the worst, not by a long chalk, but this “give them a dose of their own medicine” …’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t go along with it. We need civilians. I’m not saying we don’t. Military has enough to do. I’m just not sure we’re getting the right sort. I don’t mean you, of course. You’re not like them at all, or the other kind, for that matter.’

‘The other kind?’

‘Bureaucrats, pen pushers with briefcases full of red tape. Either that, or Colonel Chinstraps.’ He smiled down at her. ‘Don’t let them tie you up in it, Edith. They’ll find a hundred reasons to do nothing. Find your own way. Get things done.’ A whistle blew. ‘I’d better be off.’ He pulled down the window and gripped the outside handle to open the carriage door. ‘Thank you for making the journey such a pleasant one.’ He gave her a mock salute. ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’

He shouldered his bag and turned to wave before he set off down the long platform. Edith was sorry to see him go. She’d liked Drummond. He was intriguing. Easy, amusing company, although he’d been reluctant to talk over-much about what he was actually doing here, or what he’d done in the war. ‘Oh, you know, this and that in the usual places.’ Some men’s reticence came from a desire to forget, get on with life in civvy street. He wasn’t like that, the opposite in fact. Still in uniform. Very much the soldier. It was not what was said, but what wasn’t that mattered. The words unspoken.

Edith went back to her compartment. The blinds were drawn now, blue lights in operation. Most of the carriage was asleep. It was warm enough in there, even stuffy, but cold outside, very cold, she could feel it through the window. She arranged Dori’s coat like a blanket, turning her face into the corner. The worn moquette, the smell of dust and smoke, reminded her of another journey she’d taken.

Easter 1933. Going to see Kurt for their long-anticipated reunion after that wonderful summer. It had been cold then but not as cold as this. She’d booked a couchette but had found it taken. Too shy to oust the large Germany lady who occupied it, she had slunk back to her place in the ordinary carriage and sat huddled into the corner, unable to sleep. She hadn’t eaten all day. The sandwiches she’d brought had turned rancid. Fish paste. Not a wise choice. But it was not hunger that had kept her awake. It had been nearly a whole year since she’d seen him but now she was on her way, now it was finally happening, her anticipation, her excitement were rapidly evaporating, distilling into fear. She’d wanted to halt the inexorable forward motion of the train, stop the wheels from turning, send them into reverse to take her back to everything that was safe, to the world she knew.

She shifted in her seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. It wasn’t just the smell of the moquette, in the cold, early morning, eerie blue-lit darkness, fear was seeping into her like the chill through the seal round the glass. Had she done the right thing? Was she really cut out for this? Was she mad to do it? That’s what they thought at home. Should she have stayed there? Done what was expected? She’d had a job, a family, security. Chucking it all could turn out to be the very height of folly. She was already feeling at a disadvantage, as though everyone else knew the ropes. They probably didn’t, but that was little comfort. There had been a hectic quality about that group in the dining car that she’d found disconcerting, as though they were using brandy and bravado to allay their own insecurities.

What if this journey turned out as badly as that last one?

Gradually, the rhythm of the rattling carriage, the turning of the wheels on the tracks, lulled her into a fitful sleep broken by sudden jolts and starts, voices shouting, whistles shrilling, steam shunting, the hiss and shriek of the engine as it rolled into stations and out again taking her on, deeper into Germany, into the dark unknown.

7
Hotel Atlantic, Hamburg
5th January 1946

Breakfast Menu

Mushroom Omelette

Oeufs au Jambon

Rolls & Comfiture

Coffee

I chose the Omelette over the *Ham and Eggs. A good choice – made with real eggs, flecked with tarragon and scattered with champignons. Everything about it ‘continental’, from the deep-yellow yolks to the strongly scented tarragon to the tiny wild mushrooms.

See recipe for Savoury Omelette in Cheese, Eggs and Vegetarian p.178. Add 5 or 6 mushrooms (sliced). *Breakfast dishes p.229.

For sweet version see p.180. Simple dish but needs great care. One has to be as watchful as when preparing something more complex, like crêpes suzette, or there is a danger of ruining it – most unpalatable.

Edith woke stiff and cold as the train pulled into Hamburg Hauptbahnhof. End of the line, she was practically the last person on the train. She collected her suitcase and stepped down to the platform. There was no glass between the vast, curved girders of the great arching roof. The clouds of smoke and steam from the engine billowed up into the blackness. A few snowflakes sifted down, starring the sleeve of her coat.

At the end of the platform, the Rail Transport Officer came out of his small makeshift booth, not at all happy about leaving the comforting warmth of his paraffin heater for the biting cold of the open station.

He barely glanced at Edith’s travel documents, just jerked his head towards the barrier. Edith picked up her suitcase and walked on through the cavernous station. She was to break her journey in Hamburg before going on to Lübeck. It was 05.55 by the huge station clock. She looked round the deserted station, at the signs and notices, the heavy gothic lettering, and the doubts and fears of the night journey faded. She took a firmer grip of her suitcase, heard her own heels echoing as she made her way to the main entrance. She was here. In Germany. She had arrived.

She halted. The orders hadn’t specified exactly where in Hamburg, just she’d be ‘met’. There was no sign of anybody and she had been travelling for almost two days. She was cold, tired, in need of a hot bath and coffee and not at all certain what was going to happen next.

‘Miss Graham?’

Edith turned at her name. A man in uniform was running after her. She was nearly at the entrance to the station. What she had taken to be a pile of rubbish stirred, a bundle of rags wriggled and burrowed deeper into a filthy corner. There were people here, sheltering from the cold.

‘You don’t half go at a clip. Thought I’d missed you.’ The man touched the peak of his cap. ‘Jack Hunter, ma’am. Your driver. I was in the RTO’s hut getting warm.’ He shepherded her out of the station, skirting round a frozen mound of rubble that had once been one of the towers at the main entrance. ‘Car’s over here.’

A driver. She hadn’t been expecting that. Very grand. She could hear the chorus at home, Edith getting above herself. He conducted her to a black Humber parked by the side of the station. He was tall, well over average height, bulky in his overcoat. Dark hair curled from under the edge of his cap.

He opened the boot and stowed her case and travelling bag. ‘You travel light.’

‘I’m having the rest sent over.’

‘Very wise.’

He held the rear door open for her.

‘I’d prefer to sit up in the front, if you don’t mind.’

‘Suit yourself.’ He got in next to her and started the car.

‘Would you mind telling me where we are going?’

‘Atlantic Hotel. Regional Headquarters. You aren’t due in Lübeck ’til Monday. Office is shut. Weekend, see? Miss Esterhazy booked you in here. Recover from your journey, like.’

‘Who’s Miss Esterhazy?’

‘In charge of the Lübeck office. Useful little body. You’ll be fine in the Atlantic,’ he added. ‘All the brass stay there.’

She looked out of the window. It was six o’clock in the morning, still dark, but already a few people were moving about; impossible to tell if they were men or women, just shapeless bundles, wrapped against the cold, one or two pulling little trolleys.

‘Trying to stop themselves freezing to death,’ the driver commented. They slowed at a halt sign. A hunched figure shambled past them, head swathed, shoulders white with frost. ‘Looking for work, grub, coal, firewood, anything they can sell or barter. Early birds, like. You see ’em going about everywhere lugging them little carts.’

‘Are you from the Black Country?’ Edith asked.

‘Arr,’ he grinned, broadening his accent. ‘Where you from, then?’

‘Coventry.’ Edith smiled. She liked his accent. Something familiar.

‘Got a cousin down there. Works in the Standard. Had it bad, didn’t you? Not as bad as Brum, mind. Or these poor buggers.’ He turned one corner, then another. ‘Some of it looks quite normal, especially in the dark, but them rows is just facades, nowt behind ’em. Other places? Just nowt.’ He wove down a narrow path zigzagging between hills of bricks, the headlights picking out the glitter of glass. ‘I can give you a bit of tour later, if you’d like.’

‘I’ve seen ruined cities.’

‘Not like this one.’ The car turned another corner. ‘Here we are.’

They drew up in front of a tall porticoed entrance, doorman already coming down the wide steps. There was no damage here. The Atlantic stood just as it had always done, an imposing presence. Its white stuccoed façade swept the length of a city block, banks of balconied windows faced a wide expanse of water, the Außenalster.

‘You look done in. I’d get some kip and some grub, if I was you,’ Hunter said as he got her case from the boot. ‘I got orders to pick you up at 1100 hours.’

‘Oh, from whom?’

‘Captain Adams. Intelligence. Your company is requested. Lunch at the Club.’ He touched his cap in salute and turned back to the car.

Her contact. It had started. She felt an uncomfortable flutter at the name but she was too tired to think about any of that now.

Edith was checked in by a charming German girl. An elderly porter conducted her to a pleasant room overlooking the Außenalster. She hung Dori’s coat in the wardrobe, kicked off her shoes, ran a bath. The water was hot, scented soap provided. She filled the tub and let herself float, soaking off the grime of the journey. She wrapped herself in a towelling robe and lay down on the bed.

She woke suddenly with no idea of the time or place. It took moments for the high-ceilinged room, the whiteness of the light, the thick quilt she lay under to make sense.

She ordered breakfast. Omelette. Rolls and coffee. The waiter set the tray down on the low table in front of the windows. The omelette (real eggs) lapped the sides of the plate. Edith buttered a warm white roll and poured coffee from the silver pot. Outside, the frozen Außenalster showed black through the bare lindens. The scene was monochrome, veiled by steady snowfall, it was like viewing an early film.

She was just thinking about dressing when there was a knock at the door.

‘Adeline!’

Edith stood back to let her into the room. Melted snow spangled Adie’s woollen hat and bulky, padded jacket. She smelt of cold air and smoke.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m doing a piece on the destruction of the German cities. Thought I’d better take a look at Hamburg. I just arrived on the sleeper from Nuremberg. Saw you’d checked in but thought you could do with a sleep.’

‘How did you know? I’d be here, I mean.’

‘Lucky guess,’ Adeline grinned. ‘No, not really. I called your office. Spoke to a Miss Esterhazy? She said you were booked in for the weekend. I was coming up anyway, so thought I’d look you up.’ She shrugged off her coat and took one of the chairs set by the window. ‘Nice view. I could use some coffee.’

Edith poured a cup while Adeline told her about the trials in Nuremberg, the judges and lawyers, the prisoners in the dock, her fellow pressmen and women.

‘But they might as well be show trials, given this Paperclip business. Your guys must be doing the same kind of thing?’

‘Yes. They are. They call it Haystack.’

‘Very appropriate. This from Leo?’

‘No. He hasn’t said more than he said before. Just keep an eye out for Kurt and his wife, Elisabeth, and anyone else I might happen upon.’

‘And if you do find anything?’

‘I report to a Captain Adams. I’m meeting him for lunch. I’m being picked up at eleven.’ She looked at her travel alarm. ‘I better get a move on. It’s half past ten now.’

‘So, who told you about Haystack?’ Adeline asked as Edith began to dress.

‘Will this do for lunch?’ Edith took a light-grey costume and peach silk blouse out of her suitcase.

‘Very smart. So, if not Leo …’ Adeline prompted.

‘Dori and Vera Atkins.’ Edith wriggled into the skirt. ‘Is this too tight, d’you think?’

‘No, looks fine. I don’t understand where Dori and Vera Atkins come into this.’

‘They will be working together, for War Crimes,’ Edith buttoned her blouse. ‘Hunting down Nazis to bring them to justice. Didn’t Dori tell you?’

‘Uh uh,’ Adeline shook her head and lit a cigarette.

‘Oh …’ Edith faltered. Maybe she shouldn’t be telling Adeline this either, but it wasn’t exactly a secret. Was it? ‘They’ve asked me to help them.’

‘OK.’ Adeline sat back in her chair. ‘Let me get this straight. You will be working for Leo, presumably through Adams, who is not interested in bringing these men to justice. In fact, the opposite. While at the same time helping Vera Atkins and Dori who are working for an entirely different outfit and who want them brought to account.’ She looked up at Edith, enquiring. ‘How are you going to stop Leo and co. from knowing what you are really doing? There must be some kind of censorship going on here.’

‘We’ve developed a code based on a cookery book,’ Edith said, as she went to the mirror to put on her makeup.

‘And how does that work?’

Adeline never made notes. She didn’t need to. She could recall conversations verbatim, like some kind of recording machine. She never forgot anything, slotting it all away to be checked, cross-referenced and followed up later. When she was listening like that, she had a certain look: hazel eyes wide and expectant, head on one side, curly locks twirling between her fingers. She was looking that way now.

Edith broke off from applying her makeup. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m interested, that’s all. And concerned.’ She spread her hands. ‘It’s good you have a system. You never know who else might be taking a look.’

‘Like who?’ Edith resumed applying mascara.

‘Us for a start. Russians, even.’

‘Russians!’ Edith stopped, mascara brush poised. She looked at herself, startled in the mirror, one eye larger than the other.

‘Well, yeah. If we’re setting up networks in their zone, and you can bet we are, they will be doing the same and Lübeck is practically on the border.’

‘No one said anything about Russians.’

‘That’s because they don’t want you to know …’

Adeline stood up suddenly and went to the window. For a long moment, she stared out at the Außenalster, the graphite surface scarred with whorls and scribbled scorings although there were no skaters out today.

‘I can’t do this,’ she said as if to herself.

‘What can’t you do?’

Edith finished her mascara while Adeline continued to stare at skaters who weren’t there. She appeared to be weighing something in her mind.

‘You know what?’ she said finally. ‘Fuck it.’ She turned back to Edith. ‘He can send me back. I don’t care.’

‘Who? Send you back to where?’

‘Tom. McHale. To Poughkeepsie. To the Women’s Interest pages of the Eagle. He can do it, too.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Just like that.’

‘What? But why would he want to do that?’

‘He’s not going to. He’s threatening to. Unless …’

‘Unless … What?’

Adeline sighed. ‘Unless I find things out from you.’

In the depth of her sigh, Edith sensed that she was caught between the relief of telling and disgust at her own vulnerability.

‘Things like what? What does he want to know?’ Edith asked again.

Adeline laughed. ‘Anything. Everything. Knowledge is power. Who said that?’ Adeline didn’t wait for an answer. ‘He must have heard more than we thought at Dori’s and what you were saying chimed with his new baby. His new area of interest, or one of them. He collared me after court yesterday, said if I don’t find out what you are up to for the Brits, he’ll have me back in the States before I can sneeze.’

‘Oh Adie.’ Edith made a move towards her, but Adeline gave a brisk shake of the head. Edith hesitated, then asked, ‘So what is his new area of interest?’

‘Scientists. Doctors. Involved in all kinds of nasty stuff – poison gas, biological weapons and the effects thereof. Up to now, these guys haven’t been a priority. FDR didn’t like that kind of warfare but he’s not there anymore. They sure as hell don’t want the Russians getting their hands on them,’ she paused, ‘or the British, for that matter.’

‘So they might want Kurt?’

Adeline nodded slowly.

‘What will you tell him?’

‘I’ll stall him.’ She shrugged, hands in pockets. ‘Say you don’t know anything.’

‘Well, it’s the truth isn’t it?’ Edith’s laugh had a nervous edge to it. What would happen if, and when, she did?

Adeline caught her sudden apprehension. ‘This is a dangerous game, Edith, but you don’t have to get mixed up in it. You don’t want to be caught in the middle. You can walk away from Leo. Dori. Me. Go to Lübeck, get the schools going. That’s enough.’

‘Well, I am, aren’t I?’ Edith said quietly. ‘Caught up in it, I mean. I can’t see how I can back out of it now.’

No suitable job for a woman, isn’t that what they said? Adeline had taken no notice; she’d fought them all. Now, all she’d worked so hard for, all she’d achieved, could be undone in an instant, tossed aside as if it had no worth and she’d be packed back to where she belonged, reporting on fashion and flower shows. Edith couldn’t be responsible for that. Besides, Adeline’s reports gave a voice to those who would otherwise have no voice at all. She’d added names and faces to the bald, bloody statistics of war. She would do the same to the aftermath. Expose the venal weakness, cowardice and culpability of the men in the dock at Nuremberg. Tell the stories of the vanquished Germans and how they lived now.

‘We’ll work something out,’ Edith took Adeline’s arm. ‘Throw him a bone, every now and again, like Dori says.’

They laughed. Nevertheless, the sudden shrilling of the telephone made them both jump. Edith picked up the receiver, half expecting some sinister voice, British, American, even Russian.

‘Frau Graham?’ The voice was German, light and female – the receptionist. ‘Your driver is here.’

8
British Officers’ Club, Hamburg
5th January 1946

Officers’ Club Lunch

Windsor Soup

Roast Beef

Roast Potatoes

Red Cabbage

Albemarle Pudding

Cheese and Biscuits

Coffee

British but not. Roasted potatoes sprinkled with salt and caraway seed. Braised red cabbage. A small jug of mahogany gravy, the juice from the meat, augmented with red wine, reduced, made shiny with butter and horseradish, but not as we know it. My Officer companion enjoyed his beef ‘bloody’.

Under Meat – Roasting. For RARE – Regulo 8 for 12 minutes to the lb, then Regulo 9 for 12 minutes then rest for 25 minutes.

Jack Hunter was waiting for them in the foyer. He’d swapped his uniform for a double-breasted grey suit with wide lapels, a blue shirt and regimental tie. He looked quite imposing, very tall, with a big, fine head, high, broad cheekbones and strong features. His black hair was cut short at the sides, a few waves already escaping the brylcreem into oily curls. His mouth turned up slightly and his bright-blue eyes crinkled at the corners as if he was enjoying some private joke, very probably at your expense.

‘Sergeant? This is Adeline.’

Adeline sketched a wave.

Jack nodded, ‘How do?’

‘Adeline is an American journalist. She’s writing about German cities. Maybe you can give us that tour you mentioned. If it’s not too out of our way?’

Adeline was the only person she knew here. Edith didn’t want to say goodbye to her just yet.

‘I’m here to serve.’ He gave a mock bow. His look of vague amusement turned into a genuine grin. ‘Be glad to. Snow’s stopped. Clearing from the North. Nippy, mind. You’ll need your coats.’

He escorted them to the car and drove down to the river. He stopped at various places so Adeline might take photographs: a ship half-submerged in the docks, another, lying on its side, water lapping into the funnels, yet more, or perhaps they were submarines, in dry dock, their sides open, the metal peeled back, as if by an enormous can opener. Everywhere an incomprehensible tangle of rusting metal: fallen cranes, toppled and crushed like discarded Meccano; splayed steel beams reaching out like fingers spread in warning, or to ward off a blow.

‘We did that lot,’ Hunter commented. ‘And I don’t mean in the war. Blew it all up, useful or not. Crying shame. Perfectly good gear.’

He turned away from the Elbe into a vast wasteland. The roads were clear. Straight lines in a gridded pattern divided the flattened landscape. It went on for what seemed to be miles on either side of them, the perimeter defined by a serrated curtain wall of ruined apartment blocks.

‘See that there,’ he pointed out crosses painted on toppled pillars, lumps of masonry. ‘That means bodies.’ Further along the road a withered wreath lay on the low, fretted remains of a smoke-blackened wall. Everything was frozen, snow lay in the hollows of the uneven surfaces. ‘God knows how many are still underneath it. Good thing it’s cold,’ he added. ‘It’ll be ponging to high heaven come summer. See that?’ A trickle of yellowish grey smoke seeped out from a mound of rubble. ‘That’s how they’re living. In the cellars.’

More stops. More photographs.

They went on. Tall ruins of apartments loomed nearer, gaining dimensions. All the roofs were missing. From above, it would look like a honeycomb with the protective wax sliced away to reveal the naked, vulnerable cells of the hive. Rubble rose either side of the road to the height of at least two storeys. It spread away in peaks and troughs. Edith was reminded of something, not natural, but not human built either. Trümmerfrauen, rubble women, stood in lines that followed the contours, passing pieces of broken masonry hand over hand with ant-like industry. In some final, ratcheted twist of irony, they looked like people passing buckets to put out a fire.

‘3,000 planes, over eight days and nights,’ Hunter continued his commentary. ‘Our boys and the Yanks. I’ve got a pal who was on the raids. Said he’d never seen anything like it. Like flying over a volcano. Great column of smoke rising up to about 20,000 feet and the ground just a sea of fire. Horizon to horizon. Heat that great, they could feel it, smell the burning in the plane. 40,000 dead, so they reckon. Probably more’n that. No one rightly knows. There was this great firestorm, that’s what did for most of them. Swept through the city like a hurricane. Winds up to 170 m.p.h.; temperatures hot enough to heat a furnace. I met this chap. Been a P.O.W. in Dresden. Lived through the same thing there. Had to help clear up after. Sights he saw …’

He went on with a tour guide’s practised ease, recounting the facts and figures, death and destruction: an inventory of horror alternating between gruesome anecdote and the bald statistics of a debriefing session. Adeline was paying close attention but Edith was no longer listening. She had walked to work the day after the bombing of Coventry to find out how many pupils she had left. She had picked her way through the centre of the city, a basin filled with bricks and mortar with the smoke still rising, the ruins hissing in the falling drizzle. She’d seen the temporary mortuary filled edge to edge with bodies. She remembered the scorched wool, charred wood, burnt meat stink of it. She knew what fire did to people, rendering them unrecognizable as people at all, turning them into something naked and desiccated, like disrobed mummies, not human, shrunken and distorted, like fetish dolls fashioned from tufts of hair, wood and rag. Strange what the flames consumed and what they left. The sleeve of a green woollen blazer, barely singed, the embroidered badge still intact. The raid had begun early that evening, catching children out playing, some still in their uniforms. From one moment to the next, it must have seemed, their city had been turned into a cauldron of fire. A second’s hesitation, a moment’s disorientation was all that lay between death and safety. How many had died on that night in November? 500, 600? It had seemed an unbearable number. But this? This was of an entirely different order.

He swung round towards the lake. As they drove through what was left of the centre, they passed an ugly, modern building that took up a whole city block. The lights blazed out, although all the buildings around were unlit.

‘Victory Club. Glorified NAAFI. You can get anything in there. They got plans to make it even bigger by pulling that lot down.’ He indicated the buildings around it.

‘But those look perfectly sound,’ Adeline frowned.

‘You got it exact. Welcome to the British Zone.’

They left the ruined city behind them. The destruction had not been absolute. The random patterning of the bombing had left pockets of the city relatively undamaged. They returned to Außenalster, driving around the western edge. The road was broad and tree lined. Jack nodded to the left-hand side. Grand houses in their own grounds studded the rising slope.

‘CCG, or Military Government, every one of them,’ Jack said. ‘Living like kings, they are.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s where we’re heading.’ He indicated a house above the bend of the lake. Bright, freshly-painted, the pillared portico, window frames and stonework carefully picked out in white against primrose-yellow stucco. The grounds ran uninterrupted down to the shore. ‘Belonged to some rich industrialist, requisitioned for the use of British personnel. Officers’ Club. Too busy arsing about choosing the paint to find homes for them poor bastards’ back there, ’scuse my French. Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t soft on them, I seen what they’ve done, but when you see little kiddies with no shoes, clammed with cold, babbies living in cellars. That’s not right.’

Jack was making no secret of where his sympathies and politics lay. Adeline sat in the back taking it all in to write up later, no doubt.

Jack drew up outside the club and opened the door for Edith. A slender army officer was coming down the steps towards them, his uniform immaculately tailored. Jack stood by the car and saluted. The officer barely touched a finger to his cap.

‘Miss Graham? I’m Bill Adams.’ He stood very erect, a head shorter than Hunter and slightly built. Small hands and feet. Dapper would be the word for it. His head tilted back so he looked down his snubbed nose. ‘And this is?’

‘My friend, Adeline Croft.’

‘Hi,’ Adeline extended a hand to him.

‘American?’

Adeline nodded. ‘I’m a journalist.’

‘Ahh.’ Captain Adams smoothed his fair moustache.

‘I’m covering the trials in Nuremberg.’

Adams gave a yelping laugh. ‘Rather a distance, isn’t it?’

‘The court doesn’t sit at the weekends,’ Adeline replied coolly. ‘I’m doing a piece on the destruction of German cities. Thought I’d see what the RAF had done up here.’

‘Righto. Good show.’ Adams turned away from Adeline. ‘Going somewhere Hunter?’

‘Yes, sir. I …’

‘Not now you’re not. Take Miss Croft back to wherever she wants to go and then come back here and wait for Miss Graham.’ He turned away. ‘Shall we?’

Edith stayed to say a quick goodbye to Adeline. They hugged tightly.

‘You stay safe, honey,’ Adeline whispered as she kissed her cheek. ‘Look after yourself.’

Edith went to join Adams, who was waiting impatiently at the top of the steps.

‘Keep an eye on your driver.’ He nodded towards the departing Humber. ‘Not a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad but not far off it. A bit of a maverick. Useful man in a tight spot but give him an inch and he’ll take a mile.’

‘You speak as if you know him well.’

‘Oh, Jack and I go way back.’

A German attendant sprang forward to open the door for them; another relieved Adams of his cap. A female attendant came to take Edith’s coat. Adams stopped in front of an Art Deco mirror and smoothed his neatly parted creamy-blond hair. He ushered Edith into a long sitting room, taking a table by the window.

‘Let’s make ourselves comfortable shall we?’ He twitched his sleeve to expose a thin gold watch. ‘Drink before lunch? What’ll you have?’

‘A whisky and soda.’

‘Make that two.’ He didn’t look at the waiter who had arrived to serve them. ‘Nice view from here,’ he said as they sipped their drinks. ‘Very nice spot. Skating in the winter. Sailing in the summer. One of my favourite clubs.’ He glanced at the menu card. ‘Not much choice but they do a good roast beef. I hope you’re hungry.’

The dining room was crowded.

‘Sunday lunch bit of an institution,’ Adams said as they were shown to their table. A waiter brought up a cart. A domed silver dish revealed a roast forerib of beef. ‘I like mine bloody and plenty of it. The Yorkshires are hopeless and they will mess about with the potatoes.’

Despite his complaining, he accepted large helpings of everything. For a slender man, he had a good appetite.

‘What’s that?’ Adams recoiled as the waiter prepared to spoon a thick, pale sauce on to his slices of beef.

‘Semmelkren,’ the waiter answered.

‘Horseradish,’ Edith supplied.

‘No thank you.’ Adams put his hand out to protect his beef. ‘Not in my book it isn’t. Looks all bready. Ugh!’

The waiter offered the sauceboat to Edith.

‘Ich danke Ihnen sehr, es sieht köstlich.’

‘German speaker, then.’ Adams looked up. ‘You were a schoolteacher, I hear. Now with the Education Branch?’

Edith nodded.

‘Did Leo tell you much?’

‘Not really,’ Edith said. ‘Just to look out for bad hats.’

‘That’s old Leo.’ He cut into his bloody beef. ‘Nail on the head. That’s all it is, essentially.’ Adams chewed and swallowed. ‘The men we’re looking for have been devilishly difficult to spot, right from the off.’ He sawed off another portion. ‘Ditched their uniforms pretty sharpish. Found Himmler disguised as a sergeant with a patch over one eye. Minus the moustache, of course. Spotted by a sharp-eyed squaddie. That’s what you need, Miss Graham. A sharp eye.’ He put down his knife and rested his forefinger lightly on one high cheekbone. ‘As time goes on, it becomes harder to spot ’em. Melting back into the population. We have too few dedicated officers. There’s only so much territory they can cover. So much they can do. That’s why we need people like you from different branches of the Occupation: Education, Housing, Displaced Persons, interacting with the German population, keeping an eye out, an ear open. Like listening stations, if you like, each one a single beacon. Together, they create a web that covers the entire zone. Clever, what?’

Edith agreed. It was clever.

‘Some of our best pickups have come from people like yourself.’ He mopped up gravy and bloody juices with a piece of bread. ‘Close to the ground, meeting all sorts – Germans, displaced persons, expellees – they’ve all got children. They’ve also got wives. Leo’s Find the Fraus is already bearing fruit.’ He looked up from his plate. ‘Spot something, hear anything, tell us. We do the rest.’

‘What is “the rest”?’

‘Get ’em in, sweat ’em. See what they know.’ He picked up his glass, swirling and tasting. ‘Not a bad red. We’re having difficulty, quite frankly. This business depends on informers. They should be coming forward in droves, the Germans, shopping their own mothers for a packet of Players, but they’re not. We need to know why that is.’ He leaned back as the waiter cleared their plates.

‘Any ideas?’

‘Albemarle pudding, I think. How about you?’

‘I meant any ideas as to why the Germans aren’t coming forward in droves.’

‘Oh, got you. It could be they don’t trust us, which is understandable, given everything, but it could be something else.’

‘Oh? Like what?’

‘Like they’re afraid of something.’ He frowned. ‘It’s as though the people we are looking for, the Nazi bigwigs, the SS, still have influence, power over them.’ He glanced towards the German waiter gliding over to take their order. ‘I wouldn’t trust any of them as far as I could throw them.’

‘That far?’

Adams laughed. ‘Pudding?’

Edith shook her head.

‘You work for me. Find anything, this is the number.’ He put his card on the table then addressed his pudding. A light, lemony steamed sponge, studded with raisins, served with a pale sauce. ‘You’re missing a treat. This really is delicious. At least someone in the kitchen knows what he’s doing.’ He ate in large bites, scraping together the last crumbs and custard. He let his spoon clatter into his dish. He stood up, straightening his uniform. ‘Due in Herford. Time to love you and leave you. Welcome aboard, Miss Graham.’ He shook her hand as if to seal the deal. ‘Hunter will take you back to your hotel. Oh, and word to the wise,’ he leaned in closer. ‘We have to be careful who we talk to about this, who our friends are. Careless talk and all that.’

The last delivered with almost a purr. He stepped back, smiling slightly, passing a hand over his thick, pale hair. His high, wide cheekbones and narrow jaw, blunt nose and smoky, slanted blue eyes reminded her of Miss Lambert’s blue-point Siamese. Edith had a feeling he had just shown his claws.

Hunter was waiting outside on the drive. He scowled after Adams folding himself into a Mercedes roadster.

‘Gave me a rocket for not wearing uniform. Arsehole!’

Edith stared out of the window as they drove back to the Atlantic. The evening yawned. She half thought of asking the sergeant in for a drink but it probably wasn’t the done thing.

He must have seen her look in the rear-view mirror. He shook his big head.

‘Other ranks not allowed past the foyer. You can come with me if you like. I’m off to meet my wench, Kate. She’s a nurse with the Alexandra’s. Teaching me to lindyhop.’

‘Thank you, sergeant,’ Edith smiled, ‘but I think I’ll have an early night.’

‘Probably wise. I’ll be along to pick you up Monday morning, ma’am. 0800 hours.’

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