As she put her foot on the first tread, Juliet suddenly remembered her handbag, sitting where she had left it in plain sight on the carpet next to the salmon sofa. Not Iris’s handbag, but Juliet’s. What would Mrs Scaife make of the materialization of a strange handbag in her drawing room?
Mrs Scaife was very observant and the handbag was quite distinctive – red leather with a shoulder strap and a clasp that looked like a buckle – she would surely recognize it as the one that Iris was carrying when she met her in the jeweller’s. If she looked inside it she would find it contained not Iris’s but Juliet’s identity card and ration book. Not to mention her security pass! At least the Mauser wasn’t in there, Iris had that, and Juliet always kept the keys to Dolphin Square in her coat pocket for convenience. Nonetheless, it would hardly take a genius to realize that ‘Iris’ was actually someone called Juliet Armstrong and that she had been sent into the lion’s den to spy.
She could hear Mrs Scaife getting nearer. She might as well have been singing Fee-fi-fo-fum for the terror she was inducing. ‘Dodds, bring me some tea, will you? Where are you?’
Juliet grabbed Beatrice’s hand as the girl turned to go (she felt her quivering with fear) and hissed, ‘My handbag – in the living room.’
Beatrice grimaced and nodded her understanding, before whispering urgently, ‘Go,’ and pushing Juliet up the stairs. The girl looked as if she was going to disintegrate from terror.
It was like a nasty game of hide-and-seek, Juliet thought as she ran up the stairs. She dived into the first room she came to – Mrs Scaife’s bedroom, by the look of it – a large and rather gloomy nest, thanks to the thick net curtains that shrouded the French windows. The room smelt of face powder and something faintly medicinal, mixed with the scent of lilies, although there were no flowers in the room.
Juliet could hear the sound of Mrs Scaife’s heavy tread on the stairs and her strident tones calling on Dodds. ‘Dodds, can you hear me? Has the cat got your tongue?’ (What an awful idea, Juliet thought. And how would the cat get it – by accident or by design?) ‘Bring the tea up to my bedroom, Dodds. I’m going up to have a little lie-down.’
Oh, for heaven’s sake, Juliet thought. What an exasperating woman. What on earth was she going to do now?
‘What’s this? Been acquiring new gew-gaws, have you?’
‘Oh, that,’ Juliet said, regarding the little yellow-and-gold coffee cup with its pretty cherubs that Perry was examining on her desk. ‘Found it in a junk shop,’ she said. ‘I think it might be genuine Sèvres. I got it for sixpence. Quite a bargain.’
Spoils of war, Juliet had thought, as the little orphaned cup nestled like a precious egg in her pocket all the way down the Virginia creeper outside Mrs Scaife’s bedroom. She was sorry she hadn’t been able to manage the saucer as well. Perhaps she could filch it the next time she was there and reunite the pair. Perhaps she could pilfer the whole collection, piece by pretty piece. The coffee pot would be awkward, especially if she had to exit via Mrs Scaife’s bedroom window again.
She had managed to escape by fighting her way through the heavy nets at the French windows, like a fly trying to disentangle itself from a web, and stepping out on to what proved to be a perilously small wrought-iron balcony just in time to hear Mrs Scaife saying, ‘Just put the tray down on the ottoman, Dodds.’
The bedroom overlooked the back garden and a tough old Virginia creeper ran past the balcony. It seemed an awfully long way down from the second floor and Juliet wondered what Mrs Scaife would make of it if she found Juliet laying in her garden with a broken neck.
Iris was the plucky sort, she reminded herself as she reached out and grabbed the creeper and then climbed awkwardly over the little balcony. Wiggins, Mrs Scaife’s ancient factotum, chose that moment to totter into view, holding a pair of long-handled pruning shears that looked too heavy for him. Juliet held her breath. What would he do if he glanced up and saw her hanging like a monkey? Luckily his eyes remained firmly on the garden. He looked around for a bit and then, as if giving up on the idea of work, he doddered away again. Juliet breathed.
She proceeded to shin gingerly down the creeper to the garden below. They had done rope climbing in the gymnasium in her school, although she had never expected it to be a skill she would need in later life. It seemed to Juliet that between her school and Guides she had received as good a training for the Security Service as anything. It was rather thrilling, this espionage lark, like an adventure in the Girl’s Own.
‘I bumped into Mrs Scaife in town and she invited me back for coffee, in Pelham Place,’ she reported eagerly to Perry on her return to Dolphin Square. ‘And the Red Book is there, according to Mrs Scaife’s maid – her name’s Beatrice, I think she could be useful to us. I had to escape through an upstairs window,’ she added breathlessly.
‘Goodness,’ Perry said. ‘Look what happens when you’re let off the leash, Miss Armstrong.’ And this, Juliet thought crossly, was when she should be pulled into a strong pair of tweedy arms and her would-be lover would gaze deeply into her eyes and say—
‘You look rather dishevelled, Miss Armstrong. Do you need to borrow a comb?’
‘I have one in my handbag, thank you, sir.’ Or at any rate, Iris did. Juliet didn’t like to spoil her moment of heroism by confessing that she had left her own handbag in Pelham Place. Surely she could retrieve it without Perry needing ever to know what a careless idiot she was? He had warned her of a spate of bag-snatching in the vicinity of Victoria station. If the worst came to the worst, she could always blame it on some random robber in the street.
But what of Mrs Scaife – had she already discovered it? Did the handbag have a big sign on it saying, Open me and find a clue to Iris’s real identity? Let’s hope not, she thought. Beatrice Dodds seemed a resourceful sort of girl and it was in her interests, too, to remove all signs of an intruder.
Juliet returned to Pelham Place the following morning, as invited by Mrs Scaife in the jeweller’s.
The door was opened by a new girl, tall and pale and rather sickly-looking, as if she’d been raised in the dark, like a mushroom.
‘Where’s Dodds?’ Juliet asked.
‘Who?’
‘Dodds. Mrs Scaife’s maid.’
‘I’m Mrs Scaife’s maid.’
‘But where’s Beatrice? Beatrice Dodds?’
‘Never heard of her, miss.’
‘Iris, is that you?’ Mrs Scaife called down from upstairs. ‘Do come up, dear.’
Mrs Scaife sent the sunless stalk of a girl to make coffee. She returned, staggering beneath the weight of the tea tray.
‘Put it down, Nightingale, before you drop it,’ Mrs Scaife said.
‘Where’s Dodds?’ Juliet asked lightly, feigning an indifference that she was not feeling.
‘Dodds?’ Mrs Scaife said. ‘She took off, can you believe, without a by-your-leave. One minute she’s here, the next she’s gone.’
‘She disappeared?’
‘Into thin air. She took a piece of the Sèvres though as a souvenir of her time with me – a little coffee cup. It turns out she was a common thief and yet you would have thought butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.’
‘What about her belongings – did she take them with her?’ Juliet asked. ‘Her clothes and … so on?’
‘No, she left everything behind in her room. Nothing of value. I’ve had the trouble of clearing it all out.’
Nightingale, in the act of pouring coffee, glanced at Mrs Scaife. It was she, Juliet suspected, who had had the trouble. Poor girl, she thought. She couldn’t have looked less like her avian namesake.
Mrs Scaife handed Juliet a cup. ‘Do have a scone. Nightingale made them. She has a very light pastry hand. Cook had better watch out when she comes back.’
The tray, Juliet noticed, was set for three, and she asked, ‘Is Mrs Ambrose coming?’
‘No, a new friend, she is a little late.’
On cue, the doorbell rang and Juliet listened as Nightingale
herded someone upstairs. Juliet was curious as to the identity of this new friend as Mrs Scaife usually kept very close to her familiar circle of 18b widows. Juliet almost spilt her coffee when she heard the familiar querulous Scandinavian tones. Trude! Juliet’s two worlds colliding unexpectedly right there in the sea of salmon damask. These people aren’t your Bettys and Dollys, Perry had said about the Right Club, and yet here was Trude, a bridge between the worlds. It suddenly made the informants seem more powerful, more insidious.
‘Ah,’ Mrs Scaife said to Trude, ‘there you are. I was worried that perhaps you couldn’t come.’
‘I got lost,’ Trude said. ‘The streets all look the same.’ She was fractious, as though Mrs Scaife might be to blame for the topography of SW7. In the flesh she was surprising. Juliet had imagined her to be thin, scrawny even, given the sharp, scratchy character that came across in the recordings, but in the flesh she was quite large and well cushioned. ‘Big-boned’, as Juliet’s mother would say kindly to her ‘larger ladies’.
‘Well, you’re here now,’ Mrs Scaife placated. ‘Do let me introduce you to Iris Carter-Jenkins, one of our loyal young friends. Iris, this is Miss Trude Hedstrom.’
They shook hands. Trude’s hand felt like a limp fillet of wet fish.
In a confidential voice, as though someone might be listening (me, Juliet thought), Mrs Scaife said, ‘Miss Hedstrom is doing sterling work. She is the head of a network of German spies, all across the country. They are bringing valuable information to the German government.’
‘Oh, how fascinating,’ Juliet said. ‘Do you report directly to Berlin?’
‘To a Gestapo agent here. But I can’t talk about it. It’s highly secret and extremely dangerous work.’
‘Well, good for you,’ Juliet said. ‘Keep it up.’ What self-importance, Juliet thought. Imagine how awful Trude would be if she were given real power, a female Gauleiter, throwing her (considerable) weight around.
Juliet couldn’t wait to get back to Dolphin Square and tell Perry about Mrs Scaife’s visitor, but had to endure a good deal of prattling about the imminence of German victory in Europe and how lovely the Bavarian countryside was at this time of year (Mrs Scaife, like Trude, had spent several summer holidays in Germany). At one point Trude suddenly declared vehemently, ‘Let’s hope the Germans bomb us the way they bombed Rotterdam.’
‘Goodness, why?’ Mrs Scaife asked, rather taken aback by the savagery of this outburst.
‘Because then the cowards in government will capitulate and make peace with the Third Reich.’
‘Do have a scone,’ Mrs Scaife said appeasingly.
Who was to say that in a few weeks’ time the lovely drawing room of Pelham Place wouldn’t be full of Wehrmacht officers perching on the salmon damask and helping themselves to Mrs Scaife’s baked goods? The Germans had crossed the Meuse. What Churchill had called the ‘monstrous tyranny’ was about to cover the whole of the continent, a delta of blood on the floodplain of Europe.
‘And what do you do?’ Trude asked, suddenly turning her full, rather frightening attention on Juliet.
‘Oh, you know … this and that.’
Nightingale saw Juliet to the door. She wasn’t quite as fond of curtseying as Dodds had been. She had retrieved Lily for her. The dog was always relegated to the servants’ quarters when Juliet visited Pelham Place. Mrs Scaife found animals ‘unpredictable’. (As if people were not!)
‘Nightingale,’ Juliet said, dropping her voice, ‘was there a handbag amongst Dodds’s things?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Red leather, shoulder strap, clasp that looks like a buckle?’
‘No, miss, nothing like that.’
Deception Game
THE BATTLE FOR France was underway. German Panzer divisions were tearing their way through the Ardennes. Amiens was under siege and Arras was surrounded, but in London summer had begun and on a Saturday afternoon it was still a pleasure to take a dog for a walk in a park. Juliet was doing just that in Kensington Gardens.
Lily was easily distracted and had alarmed Juliet by suddenly running off in the – vain – pursuit of a lurcher. Juliet trotted obediently after her and just as she managed to retrieve the dog and wrangle it back on to the lead she spotted the unremarkable yet unmistakeable figure of Godfrey Toby. He was walking slowly yet purposefully near the Round Pond.
She decided to follow him, even if Godfrey was doing nothing more doubtful than taking a saunter in the park. She had been charged with keeping an eye on him, so keep an eye on him she would. Two, even. Four, if you counted the dog.
They trailed him for a long time, past the Albert Hall and the back of the Science Museum, on to Exhibition Road and finally turning left on to Brompton Road. He swung his silver-topped cane or occasionally tapped it on the pavement as if in time to something. At one point Juliet had boldly moved so close to him that she could hear him whistling ‘You Are My Sunshine’, if she wasn’t mistaken. She hadn’t thought of him as a whistling man. Or even a tuneful one.
If he turned round suddenly and caught her – like a game of statues – she could say she was going to Harrods. She rehearsed an attitude of casual surprise – Oh hello, Mr Toby, fancy bumping into you! She hardly needed an excuse, this was her neighbourhood, after all. Perhaps it was Godfrey who was going to Harrods. Perhaps it was the mysterious Mrs Toby’s birthday and Godfrey was going to buy her a little spousal token – perfume or embroidered handkerchiefs. Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Miss Armstrong.
He didn’t turn round once, however, and to her surprise, his path swerved abruptly and led him into the Brompton Oratory. Was he a Catholic? If anything, she would have guessed Low Anglican.
Rather warily, Juliet followed him in. There were a few people scattered around the pews, most kneeling in silent prayer.
She quietly pulled the dog into one of the pews at the back. From here she could see Godfrey, hat in hand now, strolling along one of the side aisles in the direction of the altar, more like a flâneur than a man intending worship. Tap-tap-tap went his cane on the stone floor.
And then, with only the slightest pause and an admirable sleight of hand, he removed a piece of paper from his overcoat pocket and seemed to tuck it into what Juliet presumed must be a gap between a pilaster and one of the many elaborate memorials on the wall.
He continued his leisurely progress, crossing in front of the chancel to return down the opposite aisle.
Juliet bobbed down hastily and pretended to be at prayer. Lily thought this was a great game and kept pawing at her until Juliet grabbed her round her solid middle and held on to her tightly. She could feel the tremor of excitement in Lily’s body. She hardly dared glance in Godfrey’s direction in case she caught his eye. (Dreadful idea!) She imagined him suddenly looming over her (Why, Miss Armstrong, what a surprise, fancy encountering you here, I didn’t take you for a churchgoer), but when she eventually mustered the courage to look up she found that there was no sign of him.
She clambered to her feet and was about to investigate Godfrey’s little act of legerdemain when the man in the astrakhan-collared coat made another appearance. Juliet ducked down again; she was beginning to feel almost religious. The man walked briskly up to the memorial and, without any hesitation, removed whatever it was that Godfrey had concealed there, before turning on his heel and making for the exit at the same brisk pace. The astrakhan-collared man left the Oratory as rapidly as he had entered it and if he had seen her he made no sign of it.
Juliet thought about his warning to her at Mrs Scaife’s party. Be careful, Miss Armstrong. He frightened her in a way that the war didn’t.
-11-
RECORD 7.
G. What is the 236 battery? Is it Royal Artillery?
D. I think infantry of some kind. First Infantry division maybe.
G. Aren’t they in France?
D. Well, I don’t know. Maybe a Highland Division.
(Two minutes lost due to a technical hitch.)
G. Does he want a bone (??)
E. The envelopes.
G. Yes, good, the envelopes.
D. Oh, yes, the envelopes, of course. I can’t find out their telephone numbers. I’ll keep trying but I have had no success yet. I haven’t been there to answer the telephone when they’ve called me.
‘The Nazis are knocking on our door now, miss, aren’t they?’ Cyril said. A statement that was followed – rather unnervingly – by a rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat-TAT on their own front door that made them both jump.
‘Godfrey,’ Cyril said.
Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat-TAT again.
‘He must want to talk to us,’ Cyril said.
‘I’ll get it,’ Juliet said.
It was indeed Godfrey. ‘Miss Armstrong,’ he said, tipping his hat when she opened the door.
‘Why don’t you come in, Mr Toby?’
‘I won’t, if you don’t mind. I’ll just hover here. Our friends will be arriving any minute – we don’t want them to catch us hob-nobbing. You are the enemy, after all, Miss Armstrong.’ He smiled at her.
Had he seen her in the Brompton Oratory? Did he know that she had witnessed his strange assignation and odd jiggery-pokery with the piece of paper? It was a difficult topic to drop into a conversation. (I suspect you might be a double agent, Mr Toby.) And perhaps it had not been something underhand, but a necessary act of war. He was a spy, after all, and it was Perry who was his taskmaster, not Alleyne.
‘A penny for them?’ Godfrey said. He was a man who wasn’t above a cliché if necessary.
‘Sorry, Mr Toby.’
‘I find myself without paper and pencil,’ he said. ‘I wonder if I could borrow some from you? I imagine you are always well supplied.’
‘Yes, of course, I’ll just get you something.’
‘Oh, and some of the invisible ink, if you have it.’
‘I do.’ She gathered the required items and gave them to Godfrey.
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