‘So where do I come into it?’ Saffron asked.

  ‘You are going to be the front line of our propaganda offensive. You will travel to New York, and then Washington. You will be given introductions to various powerful and influential gentlemen and use your considerable charms . . .’

  Saffron flinched. Brigadier Gubbins was not the kind of man who made complimentary remarks about his female agents. For him to even imply that she might be remotely attractive was unprecedented.

  ‘. . . to persuade them of our merits.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Saffron said, praying that none of her astonishment was evident in her voice.

  ‘Not, I might add, that I am asking for some sort of Mata Hari act.’

  ‘Of course not, sir,’ Saffron said.

  ‘Just make it clear that we do work that may be unusual, but it is vital for the war effort and will bear fruit when the moment comes to invade Nazi Europe. And take your gong. It’ll impress the Yanks.’

  Many SOE staff, particularly the women, dressed for work in civilian clothing. But Saffron preferred the uniform of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the female branch of the army, if only because it saved time not having to think about what to wear in the morning. She glanced down at the band of red silk, crossed by four vertical blue stripes, above the left breast pocket of her uniform blouson. This was the ribbon of the George Medal, awarded for conspicuous acts of gallantry by civilians. The bronze oak-leaf badge beside it indicated that she’d been mentioned in dispatches. This was an honour reserved for military servicemen. Hers had been a complicated war.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Saffron said. ‘But should I wear uniform or civilian dress when I get to America?’

  ‘Use your discretion. I imagine uniform for formal daytime meetings and civilian for social events in the evening would be the general idea.’

  ‘So how do you think I should set up these meetings and social events in America?’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s why I want you to go to New York first. There’s a chap there by the name of William Stephenson. Runs an outfit called British Security Coordination from an office in the Rockefeller Center. The name on the door, however, is the British Passport Control Office, and that is what you should always call it in public.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I understand. What do I need to know about Stephenson, sir?’

  ‘That he’s a man to be taken seriously. Has the ear of everyone who matters in Downing Street.’

  ‘Including the PM?’

  ‘Particularly him. They listen to him in Washington, too. Stephenson came from nothing. Born in Canada, was adopted after his parents had to give him up. Too poor. He went to France in the last show with the Canadian Army, got himself transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, shot down almost twenty Hun planes, won the Military Cross, got shot down himself, taken prisoner, and then escaped from his POW camp.’

  ‘Goodness, that’s quite a record.’

  ‘That’s not the half of it. He was a Forces boxing champion – middleweight, if I recall. After the war he invented some kind of gadget that lets you send photographs by wire to anywhere in the world. Made him a fortune. Owns factories, a film studio.’

  ‘So, he’s rich.’

  ‘As Croesus. And he’s got a nose for politics, too. Back in ’34 or so, he was telling anyone who’d listen that the Nazis were rearming and planning to take over Europe. Churchill believed him – that’s what brought them together. The good thing is, Stephenson has a soft spot for our outfit, so he’ll set you up with contacts in Washington. He’ll even bankroll your trip. No room for it on our budget, but Stephenson pays for BSC himself, so he won’t notice one more name on the payroll.’

  ‘There’s no need, sir. I’m . . . well . . . I’m not without means.’

  Gubbins made a movement with his lips that might have passed for a smile. ‘I’m aware of that, Courtney. But we are operating exchange controls, and you can’t take any significant sum of money out of the country.’

  ‘No, sir, but . . .’ Saffron stopped. My father would be furious if he thought a Courtney was sponging off someone.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  Gubbins turned his blue eyes on hers. For a moment, unless Saffron was imagining it, they seemed a fraction less icy than usual. ‘Well, I’ll let you and Stephenson argue over the money.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘In any event, you’ll be going over to America on the Queen Mary. She sails from Gourock in three days’ time.’

  Saffron frowned. ‘Gourock?’

  ‘Port on the Clyde, outside Glasgow. It’s the main entry and exit point for American personnel.’

  ‘I’d better get moving, then. You know what the trains are like these days.’

  ‘Indeed I do. Your friend Miss Jackson has booked you a berth on tonight’s sleeper from Euston.’

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ Saffron gasped. ‘I really will have to get going. Do you mind if I dash off, sir?’

  ‘Why? Is there some sort of a problem? Damn train’s not leaving for five hours. Can’t possibly take that long to pack.’

  ‘For a man, no, sir. But for a woman who has been ordered to take evening wear, that means sorting out shoes, and bags, and jewellery . . .’

  Gubbins grunted. ‘One more thing before you go. Stephenson is doing a favour for me, so he asked whether you could do one for him.’

  ‘What kind of favour, sir?’

  ‘Not sure, exactly. He said he needed someone capable of what he terms “sleuthing”. I told him you had shown yourself eminently capable of uncovering information. Before you ask, no, he did not say what it was, other than it’s a private, hush-hush project. In my view, Stephenson’s got a bee in his bonnet about something, but he doesn’t want to go public until he’s sure of his facts.’

  ‘That sounds interesting.’

  ‘Yes, but let me tell you what I told him, very firmly. You, Miss Courtney, are on a mission that is of extreme importance to me personally, and to our unit as a whole. But it is not intended to be physically or psychologically taxing. Think of this as a working holiday.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  How ironic it was to hear talk of holidays from Gubbins, Saffron thought. As everyone at Baker Street knew, their CO never left his office before ten at night, and had not been known to take a day off since the beginning of the war.

  ‘Bearing all that in mind,’ Gubbins continued, ‘both for your sake and mine, I do not – repeat, not – want you getting mixed up in any rough stuff. The last thing we need is for the Americans to find you causing trouble in their own country. That would hardly make them warm to us.’

  ‘Quite, sir.’ Saffron could not help adding, ‘What if Mr Stephenson needs me to do something important?’

  ‘By which, I take it, you mean something that involves active service?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  Gubbins leaned forward in his chair. ‘Listen to me, Courtney. Your fighting spirit does you great credit. But sometimes the politics of war are as important as any military campaign. Our outfit’s continued existence hangs in the balance, and if we go under, the brave men and women resisting the German occupation of Europe will lose their best, most committed ally. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how much the Nazis would welcome that.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You did a damn fine job in the Low Countries. But you’ll be doing an even better one if you can win over influential Americans and make them understand how vital it will be to the success of any invasion of Occupied Europe to have well-trained, well-equipped resistance forces harrying the Nazis behind their lines.’

  ‘I understand, sir.’

  ‘Good. Now go and get packing.’

  • • •

  B

  efore the war, Saffron’s father, Leon Courtney, had bought a flat in a Victorian mansion in Belgravia which had been converted into modern apartments. It was one of the smartest parts of London, halfway between Sloane Square and Knightsbridge. Leon had intended it to be a pied-à-terre for himself and his second wife, Harriet, Saffron’s stepmother. But they were now at home in Kenya for the duration of the war, so Saffron had taken it over for herself.

  She was standing in her bedroom, a woman of twenty-three years of age, packing for a trip of indeterminate length that would require her to look good in front of very powerful people and, quite possibly, their high society wives, in a country she had never visited before, whose climate she did not know. Even her capacity for calm, cold-blooded reasoning was coming under strain. The bed itself had disappeared beneath a mass of strewn clothes, and her two large, monogrammed Louis Vuitton suitcases were still half-empty. Saffron looked at her watch. It was 18.55, and the train left Euston at 20.00.

  From the hall, she heard the telephone ringing. Saffron ignored it as long as she could, but whoever wanted to talk to her wasn’t taking no for an answer. ‘Dammit!’ she muttered, then tiptoed her way across a carpet strewn with shoes and bags, and picked it up.

  ‘There’s someone at the front door with a parcel for you, miss,’ said the doorman. ‘Says it’s compliments of Brigadier Gubbins’ office.’

  ‘Thank you, Hollins. Please send him up.’

  Saffron opened her front door, stepped on to the landing and watched as a young man wearing khaki fatigues and a motor-cycle helmet ran up the stairs, two at a time. ‘Quicker than the lift,’ he said with a grin, and handed over a foolscap envelope.

  ‘Do you need me to sign for it?’ Saffron asked.

  ‘No need, miss,’ the messenger replied. ‘Righto then, better be on my way.’

  Saffron walked back into the flat, examining the envelope. The address was in Margaret Jackson’s handwriting. They had spoken on the phone just after Saffron arrived home. Margaret had promised to send a telex message direct from their office to Leon’s, letting him know where Saffron was going and, since she could not get money out of England, politely inquiring whether he had means of providing her with the necessary resources.

  ‘It’s very nice of this Stephenson chap to offer to help,’ Saffron had said. ‘But I don’t want to go cap in hand to a total stranger.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry, darling,’ Margaret had replied. ‘The entire country’s going cap in hand to Uncle Sam.’

  ‘Maybe, but my father wouldn’t like it, I can tell you.’

  ‘Good point. Fathers usually don’t take kindly to their daughters being given money by strangers.’

  Saffron opened the envelope to find a typed note, to which two military travel passes were paper-clipped: by train to Glasgow, and by sea to New York.

  Darling Saffy,

  Here are your tickets. I have booked you a room at the Central Hotel in Glasgow. And I have a message from Sir Charles himself. He says, when you get to the ship, enter via Gangway A and say you are travelling with Colonel Warden’s party. No, I don’t have any idea what that means, either! But he was most insistent: say you’re with Colonel Warden. Have a wonderful time. I am so jealous! Lots of love, M xx

  There was one more line to Margaret’s letter:

  PS. Telegram sent to Pater. Instant reply received! ‘Send Saffron my regards and tell her the matter is in hand.’ What a useful father!

  It was now 19.05. Saffron had to be in a taxi on the way to Euston by 19.30. Now, at last, the ruthless side of her nature kicked in. She threw one of her cases to the far side of the room. In the one that remained, she packed two evening gowns, both black, so that she only had to add a single pair of black silk gloves and evening shoes. Two daytime outfits followed: one dress, one pair of trousers with two different blouses, two cardigans for cool days, and two pairs of shoes – pretty sandals and practical flats. Add to that her underwear, nighties, two spare uniform shirts, jewellery, evening bag, makeup and washbag . . . She had to sit on the case to close it, and buckle leather straps around it to prevent the contents bursting out, but the job was done.

  Unfortunately, that still left Saffron’s black evening coat, trimmed with mink at the collar and cuffs. There was nothing to do but wear it over her uniform – hardly regulation, and a strange match for the battered khaki canvas shoulder bag that had been her constant companion on all her wartime adventures, but by this point she was past caring about how she looked. She was in the taxi by 19.35, and on the train with two minutes to spare. Her mission was underway.

  • • •

  S

  affron stood on the quayside at Gourock, in the damp grey chill, breathing in the cool air. There had been no porters at the local station, so she’d had to carry her heavy case herself. Around her, a sea of human chaos surged and eddied. Jeeps, trucks and ambulances were revving their engines and tooting their horns, trying to force a path through the thousands of men crowding the docks. And though they were on the west coast of Scotland, it felt more like New York.

  The vehicles had white stars stencilled on their bonnets and side panels, and most of the men around her were wearing various forms of US Army Air Forces uniform – from formal, collar-and-tie service dress, to motley get-ups topped with fur-lined leather flight jackets and caps. And the accents of the men, who were barking orders or exchanging foul-mouthed curses, would have been more readily found in the Irish bars of Boston or the stockyards of Chicago than on the banks of the Clyde.

  Everyone had come for the same reason as Saffron: to get aboard the vessel that loomed over them. Saffron gazed up at RMS Queen Mary. She had never seen – let alone stepped aboard – a vessel that could possibly compare with her.

  She heard her father’s voice calling across the drawing room of their Kenyan home from his big armchair. He’d wanted to show her a cutaway drawing of the newly commissioned Queen Mary in the Illustrated London News. ‘Look at that, Saffy!’ he’d exclaimed. ‘She’ll weigh eighty thousand tons when she’s finished!’

  Saffron smiled at the memory. She must have been nine or ten. ‘Golly,’ she’d said, wanting to share Leon’s excitement, but unable to see what was so thrilling about all those numbers.

  ‘Maybe you and I can sail on her one day, eh? Cross the Atlantic from England to America. They say there’ll be a telephone in every room, a splendid restaurant, and even a cinema. Then we’ll cruise into New York past the Statue of Liberty. Wouldn’t that be grand?’

  ‘Yes, Daddy,’ Saffron had said, a little more enthusiastically, because she knew what America was. But she didn’t love it the way she loved her pony, so the next words she spoke were: ‘Can I go riding now?’

  Leon had sighed, exasperated, as if he was thinking, ‘A son would have understood what I was talking about.’ But she knew now, looking back, that it also meant, ‘And a mother would have known what to say to her daughter.’

  Saffron had reached up on tiptoe, wrapped her arms around her father, and rested her head against his chest, knowing that he would bend his head and kiss her hair. ‘Run along, then,’ he’d said, and then, ‘But we’ll sail on the Queen Mary one day – that’s a promise.’

  ‘Well, here I am, Daddy,’ she said to herself. ‘And you were right. She’s as big as you said she would be. But look what they’ve done to her.’

  The black hull, white upper decks and red and black funnels of the Cunard-White Star Line’s livery had vanished. Instead, the great ship almost merged into the cloudy sky beyond her, vanishing into the rain and sea spray being whipped into Saffron’s face by the wind coming off the water. The Queen Mary had been converted for use as a troopship, and every inch of her hull and superstructure had been covered in the dull, dove-coloured paint that had inspired the nickname she had recently acquired: the ‘Grey Ghost’.

  Saffron cast a professional eye – the eye of an SOE agent – over the superstructure of the great liner. She spotted a four-inch naval gun and half-a-dozen Oerlikon cannons, which fired 20mm explosive shells at a rate not much slower than the Vickers machine guns that were mounted in batteries of four, so that they could be fired by a single gunner, along the topmost deck.

  Well, I hope they have better luck than I did, she thought, casting her mind back to that perfect spring afternoon, almost two years before to the day, when the blissful calm of the Aegean had been torn asunder by the screaming bombers dropping from a cloudless sky. The only plane I even hit was . . . ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘Don’t.’

  Saffron looked at her leather suitcase, then back at the ship. There were less than a couple of hundred more yards to go, but it might as well have been a mile, given the time it would take to fight her way to the gangway. She was about to pick up the case when she heard the toot of a horn. She turned, ready to give the insolent brute behind the wheel a piece of her mind, but stopped, entirely disarmed by the sight that confronted her.

  The noise had come from an open Jeep. A red cross on a white background was painted on its bonnet. There were two men in the vehicle. The one behind the wheel looked unremarkable – no sooner seen than forgotten. His passenger, however, was another matter altogether.

  He was leaning back in his seat with one foot up on the dashboard, wearing a khaki greatcoat, unbuttoned, bearing a lieutenant’s insignia, a peaked US Army Air Forces cap, pushed back on his head, and a pair of tinted Aviator glasses for which there was no conceivable need on this grey northern day. A lazy smile spread across his chiselled, absurdly handsome face. He pulled down his glasses and looked over the top of them, with velvety brown eyes. ‘Well, howdy, ma’am,’ he called over to Saffron, in an exaggerated cowboy drawl. ‘Looks to me like you could use a ride.’

  The only thing worse than a man who thought he was God’s gift to women, was a man who was right to think it. Saffron immediately found the lieutenant wildly attractive and absolutely infuriating in equal measure. She wondered how to take him down a peg or two. ‘I could use a porter,’ she replied. ‘Are you available?’

  ‘Any time, for a passenger like you.’ The lieutenant sprang out of the car and walked over. He was, Saffron noted, at least six feet tall. He paused a couple of steps away from her and took a second to admire her. The normal ATS uniform was not designed to flatter the female form, but Saffron’s fitted her like a piece of elegant haute couture daywear – which, indeed, it was. Her immediate superior at SOE was Major Hardy Amies, head of the Low Countries section. He was also one of London’s leading couturiers, and before the war he had made several evening gowns for Saffron. As a special favour to her, since she was a loyal customer and a valued subordinate, Amies and his seamstresses had created two identical uniforms which were correct in every regulation detail, but made of the finest worsted fabric and cut to emphasise her figure. As Amies had told her: ‘Any self-respecting Guards officer would have his dress uniform tailor-made. Why shouldn’t you do the same thing?’