76

I lay on top of the covers, dressed, boots on, wondering where Margaret was sleeping. One in the morning. There’d been lots of movement, stomping along corridors, flushing of toilets, but things had gone quiet. Everyone was trying to sleep, or pretending to.

I got up quietly, and went to the window. The rain had stopped but fat drips fell from the gutters above. I was on the second floor, and my window looked out onto the patio. I could smell honeysuckle, its thick vines covered the back wall of the house.

I had to get word to Bunny. If we went in without advance warning, the whole operation would be over as soon as we met the first sentry, and Howe’s orders about it being a demolition job added even more urgency. I was about to lead a team of saboteurs into a site that Bunny believed was pivotal, a slim chance that we might defeat the coming wave.

I climbed onto the window sill. It was awkward, squatting there. The window was eighteen inches wide, not wide enough to get through comfortably. I grabbed a vine on the outside wall and tested its strength. It was as thick as my wrist, its woody fibres twisted like a rope. I tried to pull it away from the wall but it stuck firm. I hoped it took my weight.

I swung out of the window and clung onto the vine. There was a tearing sound. The thick vines were lined with hun dreds of tiny roots, each thinner than a piece of string and shorter than a fingernail. A whole section pulled out of the old stone wall and I swayed backwards, putting even more pressure on the remaining roots.

I hurried down the vine, and landed on the patio as softly as I could, outside the glass doors to the library.

Standing on the patio, I had the long sweep of Vaughn’s lawns and gardens in front of me, dropping away into the valley that separated his house from the untamed expanse of the Forest. The Forest mirrored the sweep, back up to the far horizon where the clump of trees hid the radio transmitters.

Behind me, a door creaked. I was exposed, on the moonlit patio. Nowhere to turn.

It was Margaret. She looked behind her and pulled the door closed.

‘What if you don’t come back?’ she whispered.

‘Not exactly the confidence boost I was looking for,’ I said, keeping my voice low.

‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst, isn’t that what Blakeney told you?’

She was right.

‘Tell them I ran. Tell them you always suspected I was a traitor but you didn’t want to believe it. You’ll have to help them run the mission. They’re amateurs. They’ll shoot themselves in the foot before they get halfway across the Forest.’

‘Vaughn won’t let me go,’ she said. ‘You heard Howe. I’m the hostage. The princess in the tower.’

‘Vaughn will do anything you tell him,’ I said, giving her a kiss. ‘You’re the kind of woman a man likes taking orders from.’

She checked her wristwatch.

‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ I said. A mile each way. Fifteen minutes brisk walk. Time to find Bunny and brief him. Barely.

She kissed me.

‘Come back in one piece,’ she said. ‘A girl could get used to having you around.’

I checked my own watch. I had an hour, maximum. Everything would have to go as planned.

*

I followed the path through the gardens, past ornamental rhododendrons and azaleas, and great clumps of other bushes I couldn’t name. I reached the fence at the bottom of Vaughn’s lawn, where only days earlier the party had gathered to listen to the German transmission. I bent down to step between the strands of barbed wire, feeling the upper strand catch on my back as I stepped through.

‘You want to watch yourself,’ a voice said. ‘You’ll get a nasty scratch. Get lockjaw.’

I climbed out backwards and straightened up. One of the Blackshirts stood in front of me. The giant. I realised where I’d seen him before. Tommy Torson, East End boy turned boxing champion. He had his rifle slung over his shoulder, and he swung it down, slapping it into his palm. He levelled it at my head.

‘You should have stuck with boxing,’ I said. ‘Leave the politics to the gentlemen.’

It was a test. One that could go one of two ways.

If he was an effective sentry, he’d shoot me. No witty repartee, no back and forth. He’d discovered me trying to sneak out. No innocent explanation. Only one way to deal with it. When I was on the rocky slopes overlooking the Khyber Pass, and an enemy soldier stumbled on my post, I didn’t stop to engage him in polite chitchat. Same in the trenches. Don’t believe what they tell you about playing football at Christmas. When a man’s been sent out to kill you, and you get the chance to pull the trigger first, you pull the trigger.

I was betting on him being an amateur. A sportsman. Queensberry Rules and all that. Clear rules of engagement, based on a Victorian attempt to impose order on man’s baser instincts. If he said anything to me instead of shooting, he was a dead man.