36

Margaret took my hand as we walked back down the steep hill into Dittisham. It was late afternoon and the sky was deep blue.

Gooch had given us a list of names and addresses. People he knew who’d left the Forest in the same time frame as him.

With my free hand I loosened my tie. It was as hot as any day I remembered on the North-West Frontier, albeit the company was more pleasant.

There was a whistle in the distance, echoing along the valley.

‘We’ll miss the train,’ Margaret said. She fumbled in her purse and came up with something. It was a ring.

‘I think Mr and Mrs Cook deserve a honeymoon,’ Margaret said. ‘Don’t you think?’ She grinned as she slipped the plain gold band onto her ring finger.

‘Who gave you that?’ I asked, trying to sound nonchalant. I’d only known Margaret for a month, and I realised I hardly knew anything about her past.

‘It was Mummy’s,’ she said.

Booking into a small bed and breakfast, or getting a room at a pub, would be a lot less complicated with that bit of metal on her finger. The country may have been in its last week of freedom before annihilation, but certain social codes weren’t ready to be broken.

‘Mr and Mrs Cook,’ she said. ‘How does it sound?’ She took my hand. I felt the ring on her finger.

‘Sounds like it would take a bit of getting used to,’ I said.

*

There was an inn by the river. We took a room, no eyebrows raised by our checking in as man and wife. The landlady was glad of the business, especially when I asked if she could arrange a couple of rounds of sandwiches.

The room was stuffy, but when I opened the window fresh air flooded in, cooled by the river, directly below us. On the far bank, azaleas swept down to the water’s edge, and higher up I could see glimpses of a grand house.

Margaret joined me at the window.

‘That’s Greenway,’ she said, looking across the river to the roofline of the imposing white house. ‘Agatha Christie lives there. I went to a house party once.’

‘I didn’t know you moved in that set,’ I said.

‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me,’ Margaret said.

‘Evidently.’

‘I wonder if she gets any of her story ideas from spying on this window,’ Margaret said.

‘Let’s hope not.’

‘Maybe we should give her something to put in one of her books,’ she said, as she undid my tie and set to work unbuttoning my shirt.

‘I didn’t know she wrote those kind of books.’

*

It was dark when we made our way down to the quiet bar. Our entrance caused a couple of glances, but nothing more. People had their own things to worry about without getting too concerned about a couple of day trippers.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Margaret said as I brought two pints from the bar. She’d found a quiet table in the corner where we could talk without being overheard.

‘Somebody’s been encouraging tenants around the Forest to leave their homes,’ she said. ‘That must mean they’ve got another purpose for those homes, assuming they don’t want them empty.’

‘The Forest’s in the middle of the invasion zone,’ I said. ‘A good place to land your parachutists. Send them south, hitting the rear of our defences. Cut supply lines between the coast and the rest of the country.’

‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘But you don’t need to buy up properties and threaten people into leaving for that. When the invasion starts, they’ll drop their people where they want to drop them. Whether Mr Gooch or the Leckies are sitting in their air-raid shelters or not isn’t going to change Goering’s plans for his parachute regiments.’

‘Maybe you want to bring together a group of like-minded people,’ I said. ‘Somewhere convenient for London, but -remote enough to be private.’

I sipped my pint and kept quiet as the barmaid brought over a plate of cheese sandwiches. The perfect meal. A few pints, a few sandwiches, me and Margaret, somewhere -nobody knew us. Maybe we should stay. Make friends with the writer across the river. Go to dinner parties.

‘Multiple houses suggests multiple people,’ she said.

‘Could be. Like that Bloomsbury lot, buying up properties around Lewes. Some kind of artists’ colony.’

The sandwiches were terrible. The bread was stale and the cheese thinly sliced. Margarine instead of butter.

‘Maybe you’re right about wanting them empty. Somebody’s buying privacy.’

‘It would have to be someone rich,’ she said. ‘That’s a lot of income you’re choosing to forego if you leave houses empty. How many names on Gooch’s list?’

I pulled the paper from my shirt pocket.

‘Six, plus Gooch.’

‘Let’s say they’re being rented out at a pound a month,’ she said. ‘That’s twelve pounds a year per house. Multiply that by seven, that’s over eighty pounds a year. Make it a hundred, because there must be one or two more that Gooch doesn’t know about. A hundred a year, that’s a small -fortune.’

‘We need to find out who’s been buying up the properties,’ I said.

I finished my pint. The beer wasn’t much better than the sandwiches. It was cloudy, from the bottom of the barrel, and overpriced.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

‘I’m thinking we should go back upstairs.’

She took her pint glass, three-quarters full, and downed it, holding my eye.

‘I think you’re right,’ she said.