53

I followed them along the hall, towards the stairs. Presumably they had the transmitter in a bedroom, or even the attic. Probably the best place to send a clear signal.

The woman paused before we got to the stairs. She looked back at me, and at Bunny, who nodded approvingly. She pressed one of the panels on the side of the staircase, and a door opened.

‘Keep up,’ she said. ‘We’re late.’

*

I followed them through the door under the stairs. There was another staircase, this one leading downwards, as if to a cellar. But it went deeper than a cellar. Before I even started down the stairs, I could hear the woman’s footsteps far below, still descending.

I counted the steps. Twelve steps in my house from the ground floor to the cellar. Here we took forty down, more than three storeys. At the bottom, we found ourselves in a narrow passageway, like a miniature version of the London Underground. It had curved walls, painted white, with electric lights on the ceiling. Everything smelt new.

The woman was already thirty yards ahead, her partner hurrying to keep up.

We hurried along for five minutes. Quarter of a mile, give or take. The tunnel was perfectly circular, like the Tube, apart from one point where we passed what looked like an escape hatch above us. All the while, we were on a slight slope upwards. I tried to calculate our heading based on the alignment of the house, and the direction we’d taken, but it was impossible to be sure.

‘Quite a feat of engineering,’ I said. ‘Must have been tricky doing it all without anyone noticing.’

‘Six months’ construction,’ Bunny said. ‘Three months digging, three months outfitting. A whole division of -Canadian troops working around the clock.’

After ten minutes we reached a vestibule, two doors leading from it, one on each side. To our left, a grey, metal door with a terse sign:

High voltage.

No entry.

The other door was like something from a submarine. A metal oval, set into a solid metal plate, sealed tight with a circular mechanism that looked like a steering-wheel. The door had a small glass window, and the woman peered through it. She looked back at Bunny.

‘We’re late,’ she said.

‘You go ahead,’ Bunny replied. ‘I’ll give our man the grand tour.’

Bunny gestured to the door with the sign. High Voltage. No Entry.

*

‘This is the power plant!’ Bunny had to yell over the noise of the large diesel generator, easily the size of a London bus. Ductwork criss-crossed the concrete ceiling, presumably carrying away the exhaust, and cables as thick as my wrist disappeared into the darkness.

‘How far down are we?’ I shouted.

‘Four storeys! Over sixty feet, each storey constructed from blast-proof concrete reinforced with steel.’

The heat in the room was incredible.

‘Don’t touch it!’ he said.

The warning was unnecessary. I could feel the power -radiating off the machine. It was like being trapped in a stall with a bull.

*

The submarine door held even more of a surprise.

‘We call this the cinema,’ Bunny said, as we stepped through into a plush lobby that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Leicester Square.

Adams pulled the submarine door shut behind us, as Bunny let me take in our surroundings.

‘If you’re going to spend your days underground, no -reason why it has to feel like a bunker, eh?’ Bunny said.

I looked at Adams, curious to know if he shared the -sentiment. He shrugged.

In the middle of the foyer, exactly where the entrance to the theatre would be, double doors beckoned us.

‘You’ll like this,’ Bunny said, as he led the way. Adams caught my eye. ‘Humour him,’ the look said.

*

Two technicians sat at a desk, monitoring a bank of what I assumed was broadcasting equipment. A large window -separated the booth from the next room – the studio – where the Germans took their places at two chromium microphones.

In the booth, a third technician was rifling through a wall of records.

There was a speaker on the wall, and the room was filled with opera music.

‘It’s Wagner,’ one of the technicians said. He was in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, his jacket over the back of his chair. He tapped his cigarette into a mug as he watched his colleague searching the records.

‘I know it’s bloody Wagner,’ his colleague said.

‘ G?tterd?mmerung ,’ the other engineer said, leafing furiously through a well-worn reference book. ‘New recording.’

‘We haven’t got a new recording,’ Shirtsleeves said.

‘We have, it came in last week from the Foreign Office,’ the man searching the records said, as he pulled an album from the wall with a flourish. ‘Gentlemen, I give you Wagner’s G?tterd?mmerung , Berlin Symphony Orchestra, April 1940.’

Bunny nodded at the speaker.

‘That’s Radio Berlin. It’s their equivalent of the BBC evening concert, broadcast across the entirety of the Reich. From Warsaw to Paris.

‘Hitler’s an absolute radio nut,’ Bunny continued. ‘He’s got speakers on every street corner in every major town and city across his empire. Can you imagine, wherever you walk, there’s a bloody radio announcer telling you what to think about how fantastic the leader is, and how quickly the war will be over once the English are subdued.’

The song finished, and a German voice started talking urgently.

‘He’s saying he hopes all the troops enjoyed the music, and that they should stay tuned for a special bulletin coming in a minute.’ Bunny looked at his watch then caught the eye of the engineer in shirtsleeves.

‘How are we doing? Ready?’

A woman’s voice came on. Whatever she was saying, it sounded soothing. Her voice sounded familiar.

Bunny saw me listening.

‘They’re a double act. He gives the hard news and she makes you forget how worried you should be. She’s very good.’

‘Quiet!’ Shirtsleeves snapped. He listened to the woman on the radio.

‘They’re going to play one more piece of the opera before the news,’ he said.

His colleague was fumbling with the record he’d pulled from the stacks. He got it on a turntable and squinted at it, counting to himself.

‘They’re going to play the immolation scene,’ Shirtsleeves said.

The third technician scoured the sleeve notes.

‘Track three, side one,’ he said.

The man at the turntable picked up the stylus arm with trembling hands and counted in.

‘Track three?’ he asked.

‘Track three,’ the technician confirmed.

‘Wait for it,’ Shirtsleeves said. Let them play five seconds, let’s make sure.’

The woman stopped talking, and there was a brief pause. Opera music filled the booth again.

‘Is that it?’ the man holding the stylus asked.

‘I don’t know, you’re the bloody Wagner expert,’ Shirtsleeves snapped. ‘Do it.’

The technician lowered the stylus onto the record, and a smaller speaker on his side of the booth started to play music. It was the same track, slightly out of sync with the version being broadcast from Germany.

The three technicians looked at each other with wide grins. They looked like schoolboys about to play a prank on the master.

‘Do it,’ Bunny said.

Shirtsleeves reached across the control board to a large control knob. Two strips of paper, with neat type, were stuck onto the control board. The knob currently pointed to THEM. The other available setting was US.

Shirtsleeves looked at Bunny, who nodded, then he turned the knob.

There was a moment of static from the large speaker, and the music returned. Now it was perfectly in sync with the smaller speaker.

The piece of music finished, and Shirtsleeves moved a slider on his equipment, fading it out. He held up a hand to the man and woman the other side of the glass. He counted down with his fingers. Five, four, three, two, one, then he pointed at them.

‘ Guten Abend ,’ the man said, leaning into the microphone. He sounded exactly like the newsreader from Berlin we’d been listening to only minutes before. He continued talking in German. The woman joined in, a soothing conversation for the listeners, late in the evening as they listened to their wireless, all across the Reich, in quiet farming towns no different from mine, in big cities, with people hurrying home after a late shift at the office. Loudspeakers broadcasting, part of the wallpaper of sound that people heard but didn’t think about.

Bunny motioned to me to follow him out of the booth. I joined him in the lobby he’d called the cinema.

‘Surely the German broadcasters know you’ve taken over as soon as you do it,’ I said to Bunny.

‘Oh they hate it,’ Bunny said. ‘I’ve got it on good authority that Hitler had a tantrum about it last week. Smashed a nice Etruscan vase and had the man responsible for their radio network thrown into prison. The man formerly responsible for their radio network, I should say.’

‘Why don’t they stop you?’

‘They can’t!’ Bunny was gleeful. ‘This facility’s the most powerful radio transmitter in the world. Five hundred -megawatts! It was built for a station in America that wanted to drown out its competition but they got cold feet, so we snapped it up. We call it Aspidistra. Like the song.’

I wasn’t a devotee of music on the wireless, and I certainly didn’t visit the dance halls, but even I had heard of the song. It had been difficult to escape. A breezy tune with nonsense lyrics about the biggest aspidistra in the world.

Besides the song, it wasn’t the first time I’d heard about Aspidistra. Washington, the butler, had mentioned it. He’d been testing me. Was he working with Bunny? I thought about telling Bunny I’d met one of his men, but I stopped myself. I was out of my depth, and it wasn’t my secret to give up.

‘You’re hijacking the Germans’ airwaves from a top-secret facility,’ I said, ‘but you send your agents out to local pubs to look suspicious. You identify the local fifth columnist and you lure him in. You give me the guided tour. Hitler’s on the French coast and the invasion’s probably weeks, if not days away. I’m assuming there’s some kind of a plan?’

‘I’ve got one more thing to show you,’ Bunny said.

I expected him to turn back to the submarine door, but instead he led me to the far corner of the cinema lobby. A metal ladder was fixed to the wall, leading up to a hatch in the ceiling. It looked precarious, but Bunny took to it like a rat to a drainpipe.

‘Hitler’s ready to invade,’ Bunny shouted down to me, as I climbed after him. ‘He’s been commandeering every barge and fishing boat he can lay his hands on. He’s got an -armada, ready to bring his troops across. There’s only one problem.’

‘Air power,’ I shouted. ‘As long as we’ve got fighters aloft, his boats will be sitting ducks.’

‘Precisely,’ Bunny said. ‘Phase one of his invasion will be to take out our air force. He’ll start with a massive wave of bombing our airfields. All those bombs we thought would be dropped on London back on day one, he’s been saving them all up for a rainy day. Well, it’s about to get very rainy. He’s got his bombers lined up. Even got a code name. Eagle Day. Adler Tag in German. The day the glorious Luftwaffe -destroy our ability to defend this little island.’

Having reached the top of his climb, he took one hand off the ladder to open a hatch above him. It swung up and out, letting in a waft of pine-scented air.

‘Come on!’ he shouted.