But she was struck by the fact that almost a quarter of Playfair’s summary had been blacked out. That was a higher proportion than any of the others, five of which were untouched. So, there were plenty of things about him – and she only had Jarvis’s word that they did not directly pertain to the spy inquiry – that SIS did not want anyone to know.

  Still, there was some interesting material left unredacted: Like many men of his class and education, who have been separated from their parents at an early age and forced to fend for themselves, Playfair’s apparently flippant exterior hides a much tougher, colder core.

  Saffron stopped reading. So, they had seen it, too. But then, she could say the same about a lot of the upper-class Englishmen she’d met over the years: all public-school charm on the outside; as icy, selfish and ruthless as paid assassins underneath.

  What followed next intrigued her even more: No evidence has been found that Playfair is spying for the enemy, nor should he be held in any suspicion. But . . .

  The rest of the sentence was lost beneath black ink. ‘Damn it!’ Saffron muttered. She held the paper up to the light to see if the lost words might be discernible, but no luck. ‘But what?’

  She put the summaries back in the envelope and carried it to the bar. ‘Thank you, Mr. Jarvis,’ she said. ‘That was very useful. Clearly no evidence was found against any of the men who were investigated.’

  ‘So, you’ll tell Stephenson that?’ Jarvis asked.

  ‘Do I need to? Has he not seen these summaries?’

  Jarvis looked edgy. He cleared his throat. ‘No, as a matter of fact he hasn’t, although he was informed of the investigation’s general findings.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For the same reason that your CO in London doesn’t go around handing out your personnel file to every Tom, Dick and Harry. That is why I said we were paying you and Mr Stephenson a compliment. The access you have been given is truly exceptional. It required approval at a senior level. It was intended to persuade you that there is nothing to be gained in searching for a man who clearly does not exist. So, I very much hope that you will now assure me that you will desist from any further inquiries.’

  That made the third time in a few hours that Saffron had been told to back off and abandon her mission. She could not decide whether it was just sheer stubbornness on her part – that bloody-minded Courtney determination to prove the world wrong – or a genuine faith in the evidence that Stephenson and the brilliant Miss Keswick had assembled. But whatever it was, she now felt even more determined to press on with her mission.

  ‘There’s only one thing I can assure you of, Mr Jarvis. I will continue to carry out my instructions from the prime minister.’ Saffron looked in turn at the two men who had been sent to warn her off. ‘As I am sure that you both would do, too, if he ever gave any to you.’

  With that, she turned and headed for the exit.

  • • •

  A

  s soon as Saffron returned to the Playfairs’ house, she heard Mavis calling out, ‘How was your date?’

  She followed the sound of the voice into the drawing room. The Playfairs were sitting in armchairs, reading. Mavis put her book down and said, ‘Come on, tell all!’

  ‘Not much to tell,’ Saffron said, knowing that the best cover always has an element of the truth. ‘The poor boy is definitely off games. A peck on the cheek was about all he could manage. But I’m hoping he’ll be feeling better before my stay is out.’ To change the subject, she asked, ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘The latest Agatha Christie.’ Mavis held up a hardback copy of The Moving Finger.

  ‘Such a highbrow, my wife,’ said Playfair, in affectionate mockery. He had risen from his armchair when Saffron entered the room, and was holding a cigarette in one hand and a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in the other.

  ‘Intellectual snob!’ retorted Mavis, throwing a small cushion at her husband and narrowly missing the whisky glass that sat on the table beside his chair.

  Mavis turned her attention back to Saffron. ‘I know it’s not serious literature, but I love a good murder story.’ She smiled. ‘That’s my guilty secret.’

  ‘Mine, too,’ Saffron replied. ‘I think I’ll head up to bed, if that’s all right with you. I hardly slept a wink last night, and I haven’t unpacked, so I’ll do that and turn in. Oh, Mavis, do you have any notepaper and an envelope, by any chance? I’ve got to write something for Lady Halifax.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mavis said, getting up from her chair and walking over to an antique bureau. ‘What’s Lady H got you doing for her?’

  ‘Oh, just an appointments list . . . in case I’m seeing anyone that she knows and can bend their ear on my behalf. Very kind of her, really.’

  ‘I wish she’d bend some ears for me,’ Mavis said with a laugh as she found what Saffron needed. ‘There you are.’

  Saffron went upstairs and started sorting out the contents of her suitcase and putting them away. She enjoyed the process of finding a place for everything, arranging her clothes and shoes, and all the paraphernalia required to wash and beautify herself, in the neatest, most orderly way. Tidying up physical objects also helped her set her mind in perfect order.

  Going over the meeting at the bar and grill, Saffron thought that Jarvis and Goodhouse had succeeded in one respect. Having read the summaries of the nine potential spies, she had to admit that the investigation into them had not been a whitewash. The job had been done properly, and if there had been good reason to suspect any of the men involved, it would have been flagged. But there was no such reason. All nine men had emerged with their reputations intact.

  And yet she kept coming back to the fact that the Gerald letters were real, and that someone, somewhere, had responded to the SIS man’s visit to that apartment in Östersund by ceasing the correspondence. But maybe she was approaching the problem from the wrong angle. Instead of trying to find Gerald, maybe she should make sure that Gerald found her.

  Thanks to that newspaper story, her arrival in the United States had been about as unsubtle as a stampeding herd of elephants. But perhaps there was a way of turning that to her advantage. What if she made her mission as obvious as possible? If there was no spy, then nothing would happen, a few men would say ‘I told you so’, and she could get on with buttering up powerful Americans on Brigadier Gubbins’ behalf. But if the Nazis did have a man inside the embassy, he and his allies in Washington would surely want to stop her from getting in their way. And to do that, they would have to come out into the open, where she could see them and – hopefully – best them.

  Saffron realised that offering herself as a sacrificial lamb, tethered for every passing tiger to see, was a risky strategy. But given the potential threat to the Allies’ war secrets, not to mention the lives of a prime minister, a president and a former king of England, then her life was a small price to pay.

  And in any case, she concluded, she had survived everything that the war had thrown at her so far. So I can bloody well survive this, too.

  With her mind made up firmly, Saffron went to bed and turned out the light. As she lay there, she realised there was one last question she had not properly considered: was Charlie Playfair the spy? He certainly fitted the criteria Donovan had put to her. He had access to classified information. He was known for his left-wing, anti-fascist views, so would never be thought of as a possible Nazi. His highly strung, hard-drinking character suggested a man under stress. And then there was that coldness. It was something Saffron had seen, perhaps to a lesser degree, in other men like him. Products of the boarding school system, as the report had mentioned.

  That, of course, didn’t make them all spies. But it did give them a gift for deception. The Playfairs had invited her to stay with them. That might have been a spontaneous gesture by Mavis, or it might have been Charlie wanting to have Saffron where he could keep an eye on her. But that would mean she could observe him. Most men with something to hide would shy away from that. But not Charlie. He’d think he was so clever that no one could outsmart him.

  As she was drifting off, she heard a scuffling of feet and paws, and the sound of the front door opening and closing as one of the Playfairs took Franco out for a late-night walk. Satisfied that it was nothing to worry about, Saffron made herself comfortable, and within no time was fast asleep.

  • • •

  J

  oe Lewandowski lived in Congress Heights, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, with his wife Magda and their two children, Jake, who was five, and Suzy, who was three: two freckle-faced, golden-haired, all-American kids. Their neighbourhood was white, lower middle class, full of folks like them working hard to give themselves and their children a better life. Most of them lived in low-rise, red-brick apartment blocks, all nearly identical, but the Lewandowskis were in the minority of those who owned their own semi-detached home, with a basement and a yard behind the house.

  Joe had built an aviary in his yard. It was about ten feet high and ran across the Lewandowskis’ back fence, with netting that was held up by a slew of metal poles and wires. Any time the other moms from the children’s kindergarten brought their kids over for a play date, the first thing the children would do, whatever the weather, would be to dash through the house and out the back door to go and look at the birdies. As often as not, their parents would follow them, too.

  Magda was warm, friendly, and got on well with the other mothers, just as her senior officers back home had told her to do, but it was the aviary that made her house such a popular destination. The women could sit and chat, enjoying a slice of Magda’s delicious szarlotka apple pie with their coffee, knowing that their children would be happily occupied outside. Most of Jake’s friends were busy learning to identify every make and model of automobile, but Jake was the only one who could name the brightly coloured lovebirds and budgerigars, the zebra finches with their black and white striped tails, and the speckled quails, scurrying about on the floor of the enclosure.

  If the kids’ dads came over, they’d take a look at the birds, but the biggest attraction for them was Joe’s ham radio setup in the basement. Joe would grab some brews and lead them down.

  On the wall at the bottom of the stairs was a wooden plaque with the metal badge that named Joseph M. Lewandowski as a life member of the American Radio Relay League, call sign K4MRQ. Right next to it was his framed amateur radio licence from the Federal Communications Commission. Immediately, the other guys knew that Joe was serious about this stuff. And that was no surprise, because anyone who knew him knew that Joe Lewandowski was a guy who believed in doing things well or not at all. As he liked to say: ‘“Good enough” is never good enough.’

  Joe’s equipment was on the workbench against the far wall. ‘Okay, let’s start with this,’ he would say. ‘We got a professional quality microphone and headphones, good as you’ll get in any radio station. This here is my Morse code key and Allied Radio Corporation deluxe oscillator, turns the keystrokes into signals.’

  The guys would be impressed. ‘Man, you can write Morse code?’

  ‘Sure thing, one-twenty words a minute. If you ever have any emergencies, just come round here and I’ll send out the SOS!’

  Lewandowski saved his best gear till last: a grey metal box with a black fascia, dotted with knobs and switches, with two big, round, silver tuning dials. ‘That right there is a military specification Abbott Instrument TR-4 ultra short wave transmitter-receiver, just as good as our guys on the battlefield get.’

  One of Joe’s neighbours, Bobby Muller, was a radio ham, like Joe. ‘How did you get hold of a thing like that?’ he asked, the first time he saw the transceiver, a note of suspicion in his voice. ‘I thought all radios were going to the war effort. Was this black market or something?’

  Joe laughed. ‘Hell, no!’ There was a pile of back numbers of QST, the radio ham’s bible, on the workbench. Joe rifled through it, found the one he wanted and handed it to Muller.

  ‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘December ’41 edition.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’ Muller sighed, looking at a full-page ad for the Abbott TR-4.

  ‘The magazine arrives mid-November, right? I see the ad. I think, “Damn, that’s a beauty,” and then I figure I’d better buy it right away before the missus starts taking all my dough to pay for Christmas, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Oh, I hear you, brother!’

  ‘So, I send away for it right away and coupla weeks later, Friday December fifth, it arrives. Two days later the Japs bomb Pearl Harbor. Guess I got in just in time, huh?’

  ‘You sure did.’ Muller sighed. ‘Man, I wish I’d done the exact same thing.’

  With guys who weren’t already experts, Joe would explain how with a set-up like this, you could send signals right around the world, bouncing them off a layer of the upper atmosphere called the ionosphere. ‘Night-time’s the best. Don’t ask me why, but the signals go way further.’

  Another time, his buddy Frankie Trentino had said, ‘Wait, you could send a message to Berlin? Like, “Screw you, Adolf!”’

  Joe had laughed. ‘Sure . . . “Surrender now, you dumb Nazi bastard!”’

  The way he saw it, this was another way of hiding in plain sight. As he’d tell Magda, if everyone knew he was a radio ham, then no one would be surprised to see the basement light glowing in the middle of the night. The aviary, though, was more like the kind of distraction a magician uses, so the audience doesn’t see what he’s really up to. Everyone was so busy cooing at the cute little birdies, even the other hams didn’t notice that all the horizontal wires and the vertical poles added up to the ten-by-thirty-foot curtain array antenna Joe needed to get his signals across the Atlantic.

  What amazed both Joe and Magda, however, was the simple fact that the state was happy to let Joe have a radio transceiver at all. The Constitution itself ensured that he could say whatever he liked, to whomever he liked, whenever he liked – and hear back from them, likewise – and the government had no right to stop him. There was not the slightest fear that the secret police would come barging through his door . . . because there were no secret police. What weakness, what decadence! Truly, the Americans were crazy.

  Right now, though, at one in the morning, it was not Joe the contractor, but Jozef Lewandowski, the secret intelligence agent, who was sitting in his basement in his underpants, T-shirt and dressing gown, encoding a message he was sending to his bosses back home. An hour earlier he’d been woken by the phone ringing. He’d kissed Magda on the forehead and told her to go back to sleep, then went down to the kitchen where the phone was located.

  ‘I told you not to call here,’ he hissed, when he heard who was on the line. ‘Emergencies only.’

  ‘This is an emergency,’ Foxglove had replied, and Lewandowski had been jolted by hearing a trace of anxiety – even fear – in Foxglove’s voice.

  ‘Tell me what it is and make it snappy.’

  Foxglove had talked, and kept it quick, but now Lewandowski was worried, too. So he was sending a long message, providing a detailed update and assessment of the situation. His report would kick the mechanism of an all-powerful intelligence agency into gear. Meetings would be held. Commands would be sent out to agents in Britain and America, demanding further information, fast. Then, shortly after sundown in Washington – the middle of the night in Europe – Joe would come home from the bar where he had his regular beer after work, keeping that routine normal. He would wait for the message from home, then receive the instructions that he had requested.

  And what the whole process amounted to was the answer to a simple question: ‘Do you want me to kill Saffron Courtney?’

  • • •

  S

  affron woke feeling refreshed, and opened the bedroom curtains to find bright sunlight filling the room. She had work to do today: a morning appointment at the Pentagon with a colonel who worked for General George Marshall, the US Army’s Chief of Staff, then an invitation to speak at a tea party organised by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

  Her briefings with Stephenson and Donovan had told her what to expect. Marshall was in charge of planning the invasion of Europe, so his man would want to know what SOE could do to assist. The message that Saffron intended to hammer home was simple: ‘Every German soldier who fights the resistance is one less soldier fighting American soldiers. Every supply train that’s halted by smashed railway tracks means less fuel for German tanks and ammunition for German guns. Every wire cut is another vital message that doesn’t get through to German HQ, or another order that doesn’t reach the front line.’

  Saffron knew what she would be saying was true. She believed SOE could make a difference. She was confident she could be persuasive. Also, she would be dealing with a straightforward, practical-minded man.

  The Daughters of the American Revolution were another matter. They were an organisation comprised of women who could trace their lineage back to ancestors who had fought in or supported the American War of Independence. Their motto was ‘God, Home and Country’. When Stephenson had told Saffron about them, she had asked, ‘Won’t they dislike me for being British? After all, their ancestors fought a war to kick us out.’

  ‘True, but remember, their ancestors were also the descendants of British immigrants,’ he’d replied. ‘They grew up as subjects of the Crown. So really, they’re as British as Americans get. Just remind them that you’re a colonial, too. Tell them lots of inspiring stories about fighting the wicked Nazis and fascists. Be a warrior princess. You’ll have them eating out of your hand.’

  Saffron was not so sure about that. She imagined the Daughters as hard-boiled middle-aged matrons. Give me a randy old army officer any day. Far easier to twist round my little finger!