Mr. Steptoe chuckled richly. “Nothing so sinister, Miss Seeton. They tell me”—he was careful not to identify the source of his information—“you’ve been sketching around the place on and off?”
“In my free time, yes,” said Miss Seeton with a guilty blush. “Such as it is—and perhaps it has been something of a self-indulgence, but I had supposed—with all my work at the forces canteen, and the various excursions with the children, and the lessons ...”
“I’m sure you’ve been doing a splendid job,” said Steptoe quickly. “Everyone deserves a spot of relaxation, if they can get it, when they’re under pressure, and wartime—well, let’s agree it’s not exactly a picnic. But talking of picnics—you’ve been up on the Heath, I gather.”
Miss Seeton’s eyes glowed. “Yes, indeed, although not, of course, for a picnic. Such a wonderful view right across London—like a huge outdoor aquarium with the great flying fish of the barrage balloons, changing colour at different times of day with the sun and the passing clouds—and the excavations, where the different colours are—are real, not caused by the varying qualities of light. Red and brown, orange and ochre—just as one has seen the Grand Canyon in cinema features, only smaller, of course.” She came suddenly, sadly, to herself. “And artificial, not natural. And of entirely different purpose.”
“I’m glad you’ve said that, Miss Seeton.” Mr. Steptoe sat up straight and fixed her with a cool, efficient gaze. “You’ve been sketching the excavations, and you know all too well what they were—are—for. Well, I’d like to look at your sketches, with a view to using them in Ministry of Information leaflets about air-raid precautions.”
“Oh,” said Alice faintly.
Her daughter said nothing.
“Perhaps I could borrow your sketching block, Miss Seeton,” said Mr. Steptoe. “Or blocks, plural, if you’ve visited the Heath as often as I infer that you have. I take it you date your sketches?”
Miss Seeton, with a wary nod, indicated that she did.
Mr. Steptoe smiled. “That’s excellent,” he told her. “We might like to try something along the lines of before and after, you see—it all depends on what we’ve got. On what you’ve drawn. I’ll give you a receipt, of course.”
He was so calm and self-assured as he drew a gold pen and a notebook from his inside pocket that Miss Seeton found herself hurrying upstairs to her room almost before she had fully grasped what she had, by her silence, evidently agreed to contribute to Britain’s war effort. Her cartoons and sketches of sandbags being filled—of plunging depths and soaring heights of richly coloured soil, Cheddar Gorge in miniature, the rabbit-nibbled turf of Hampstead Heath scored and slashed and lacerated by a thousand desperate delvings from rich, restful green into a more grim and gory hue ...
Miss Seeton reached her bedroom door, went inside, and found that she was shivering. The Ministry of Information. Publicity and fact sheets. Before and after—peace and war—bombs and gas, death and destruction—
Miss Seeton frowned and then took a deep breath. “‘We must,’” she reminded herself, “ ‘brace ourselves to our duties.’ ” She found her spine stiffening even as she spoke the words. “ ‘And so bear ourselves that, if ...’ ”
But, inspired though she was by Churchill’s oratory, she could not finish the sentence. Who dared now to say, in all honesty, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth would last for a thousand hours, never mind a thousand years?
Miss Seeton shook her head. “It is up to all of us to ensure that it does,” she told herself firmly. “Or to try our best, at the very least,” she added as she crossed the room to stare into the looking glass at her pale, resolute face. Rather too pale. She must not upset her mother by letting her guess how worried she might be. She patted a little colour into her cheeks, and then pulled out the bottom drawer of the tallboy in search of the few sketchbooks she had left.
“But I cannot help wondering,” she murmured as, having shut the bedroom door, she hesitated on the landing, “if Mr. Steptoe has been entirely frank about his reason for wanting these? Yet he is, in a way, a neighbour—I cannot believe there is anything wrong ...
“I am afraid these three are all I could find,” said Miss Seeton as she returned to the drawing room, where her mother and Mr. Steptoe were conversing amicably together, the stewing tea abandoned. “One of them is not yet full, and I should be pleased to have it back in due course—but I had quite forgotten,” said the owner of the sketchbooks as she handed them over, “about the children, you see.”
“The children again,” said Mr. Steptoe, achieving a smile as he accepted the books with a hand Miss Seeton might (had she been less preoccupied) have noticed shook a little.
But Miss Seeton did not notice. She was too busy trying to explain to the government’s representative her apparent lack of cooperation. “It is,” she began, “my habit to sketch on only one side of the paper—which in times like these may seem extravagant—unpatriotic, indeed, when the money saved could be put into one of the national schemes, which is what I try to do by making economies in other areas. But as long as I still have some of the blocks I bought before the war, I confess that I prefer it—although once they are full I shall buy only enough for teaching purposes, and none at all for private use—if, that is, any shops will stock artists’ materials by then. Which is why I have made such detailed notes on those of my later sketches I hope to turn in—in happier times into coloured works, because once my paints and crayons were exhausted, I hardly cared to buy any more. And it is not,” Miss Seeton struggled to make clear, “as if the paper is put out for salvage right away, although naturally we save all our bones and tins and so forth as we have been asked to do—but when young people are short of pocket money, as so many are, I feel it does no harm if they are encouraged to use the empty backs for their self-expression, which is so very important ...”
“It’s what we’re fighting this war for,” agreed Steptoe as she paused for breath. “The right to be ourselves, not some Fascist lunatic’s mindless puppets.”
Miss Seeton nodded. “Freedom is worth a sacrifice,” she said quietly. “And so I tell the children, hoping to set an example even in the smallest things. One of my used blocks may be shared between half a dozen youngsters on the strict understanding that, should they be unhappy with what they have drawn, they are to put it out for salvage rather than tear it up or burn it without thinking. Which they tell me they do,” she concluded, ambiguously but with pride.
“I’m delighted to hear it,” said Mr. Steptoe as she subsided. He had done no more than receive the sketchbooks as she offered them, and put them thankfully to one side while she talked. Now he opened his notebook, uncapped his pen, and wrote out in an elegant copperplate the promised receipt for three quarto sketchbooks, property of Miss E. D. Seeton, 13th July 1940. This he signed with a flourish, blotted the ink with a piece of blotting paper produced from the back of his notebook, and passed to Miss Seeton ...
Who observed only after his departure—and did not care to mention to her mother—that Mr. Steptoe of the Ministry of Information, Subsection P(F/S), had left no telephone number or address at which he could be reached.
chapter
~ 4 ~
MR. STEPTOE, RECOGNISED by Miss Seeton as a neighbour passed occasionally in the street, in truth lived no more than a mile from Alice and Emily. On his long legs it took the MI5 man under ten minutes to reach home: where, the minute he was inside, he tore off the string and brown paper with which the sketchbooks’ owner had insisted on making a neat parcel—a gentleman does not normally carry a parcel, but in time of war such a solecism was surely permissible—and began leafing through the first of his three prizes.
Halfway through he closed the book with a slam and passed a hand over his steaming brow. He opened the second book at random, turned half a dozen pages, and felt himself grow cold. He breathed deeply, and hurried to the telephone.
The operator had no idea that the number to which she put
him through had its own private link to another number—a number so secret it was never written down. After a quick exchange of password and countersign, followed by what seemed an eternity of connecting clicks, Steptoe was pouring out his tale to Chandler in the Tower of London.
“I was right about her,” was the gist of his frantic babble once his superior had managed to soothe him to a more normal rate of delivery. “That woman wants more than watching, I tell you—she needs talking to. Fast!”
“Then bring the books here now,” he was told. “Faster than fast. Any chance of finding a taxi?”
A hollow laugh was all the answer he received. “Faster than fast,” reiterated Chandler, and banged the telephone into its cradle. His hand hovered by the scrambler button, but he decided against talking to anyone else in the group until he had seen and judged the evidence for himself. It was not that he couldn’t trust Steptoe—it had, after all, been Steptoe who first alerted them to the possible dangers posed by Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton—but as Steptoe’s line superior he would like to make up his own mind. An hour’s delay, even when the Huns were expected any minute, couldn’t make that much difference—could it? The girl had had time enough to tell the enemy what she knew. There was nothing he and his kind could now do about the past. It was the future that was their concern ...
Making sure that Britain had one.
“Great heavens,” said Chandler weakly, as Steptoe opened one of the sketchbooks and stabbed with an urgent finger at the date on the bottom of the page.
“And what about this?” demanded his subordinate, turning to another paper marking slip and once more emphasising the date noted carefully by Miss Seeton in an out-of-the-way corner of the drawing. He heard his superior draw in his breath with a hiss, and nodded. “And this?”
Before he could find the next page, Chandler had snatched the sketchbook from his hands. “You’ve marked them all, I take it?” he demanded.
“Just the worst of them. I was in a hurry,” came Steptoe’s reply as he dropped into an armchair and left Chandler to get on with it. “And believe me, it wasn’t easy on the tube, with everyone giving me funny looks and obviously watching out for spies. I’m amazed nobody warned a guard and set the Transport Police on my trail.”
“Spies,” muttered Chandler as he turned a page. “How I dislike the use of—good grief!”
Steptoe nodded in satisfaction. “Thought you’d appreciate that one,” he said.
“Are they all ... as bad as this?” Chandler asked after an unhappy pause.
“Yes,” he was told. “All those I’ve marked, that is.”
“And when you think what else must have been going on in other departments that we know nothing about ...”
“Yes,” said Steptoe grimly. “I told you so.”
Chandler wasted no more time. He seized the telephone, pressed the scrambler button, and when informed (in a tone of some reproach) that Captain Grange had gone home for the night, cursed the informant roundly and gave instructions that the captain should report to the Tower for nine sharp the next morning. Yes, he knew very well it was a Sunday. Hadn’t Grange’s crowd (the military man sneered) realised yet there was a war going on?
The Royal Navy always works five minutes ahead of everyone else. Ask a sailor to rendezvous at seven, and he will be there at six fifty-five.
Captain Grange was at the Tower of London by half-past eight on Sunday morning, and even then he was not the first to arrive. Chandler’s urgent message of the previous evening had rung warning bells in all who had received it. Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton might or might not be a traitor, a fifth columnist, in league with the enemy; they had to make up their minds about her, and they had no time to spare for giving her any benefit of the doubt.
“This drawing here, for God’s sake.” Captain Grange could hardly bring himself to look a second time at the sketch dated, in Miss Seeton’s clear hand, 22nd May 1940. “I ask you—how did the bloody woman know about it all days before anything happened? While it was still being planned? She must have a contact at the Admiralty, and that can only mean ...”
“ ‘It’ being Operation Dynamo,” said Chandler for the benefit of his less quick-witted colleagues, as the horrified sailor subsided with a groan and closed his eyes.
“It certainly looks like some sort of electrical thingummy,” said Cox of Subsection R, a group of innovative boffins whose job was to produce those items essential to effective espionage that other people said were, if not impossible, then luxuries. Fountain pens that could also squirt tear gas, miniature compasses and gyroscopes that fitted in uniform buttons, fuses and timers and switches that looked like anything but what they really were—these were the province of Cox and his colleagues.
“Yes,” he went on, judiciously squinting at the sketch he held at arm’s length. “It looks like a dynamo, all right—a female’s idea of a dynamo, that is,” he added sourly. Cox (it was whispered) had been disappointed of a wealthy young widow early in his courting days, and seemed unlikely to amend his misogynist habits for the duration.
“Operation Dynamo,” snarled Captain Grange, opening his eyes and glaring at the assembled group of military and airforce intelligence men as if he held them personally to blame. “Just tell me, if you can—how in the devil’s name did that girl know?”
The sudden collapse in mid-May of neutral Holland and Belgium, overwhelmed by the Nazi invader, coupled with the surprise German breakthrough of France’s supposedly impregnable Maginot Line, had led to the perilous entrapment by enemy troops of the entire British Expeditionary Force. So sudden, indeed, had been that collapse of the Low Countries that many spoke of treachery within, of spies and fifth columnists aiding the parachute troops who fell from the skies in a terrifying, invincible, deadly rain. Small wonder that the British now watched the heavens more anxiously than ever they had done before ...
The BEF, dispatched across the Channel in answer to the desperate pleas of Britain’s smaller neighbours on the European mainland, had been forced to retreat before the brutally efficient, ever-closing pincers of the conquering Nazi armour until the beachhead of Dunkirk was reached. The BEF had been pushed back to the sea; there was nowhere else for them to go; they were encircled—and the circle was pulled tighter hour by hour.
In his chalk tunnel fortress beneath the castle that was the glory of the white cliffs of Dover—Hitler was said to boast that his first meal on British soil would be eaten in Dover Castle—Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay and his staff had worked around the clock to prepare the evacuation plan that was, in its incredible success, to thrill the whole free world. With less than a week’s notice, so sudden had been that Low Countries collapse, Ramsay arranged for ships of both the Royal and Merchant Navies—corvettes, destroyers, mine-sweepers, trawlers, cargo vessels, ferries—to carry the beleaguered troops from Dunkirk harbour. It was hoped that, with luck, some forty-five thousand men of the BEF might be rescued before the port was at last overrun.
Little Dunkirk, upon which the whole fury and might of the Nazi enemy was then turned, held out courageously for longer—far, far longer—than the anticipated forty-eight hours. The navies of Great Britain steamed to and fro, to and fro across the minefields of the Channel, being bombed and shelled and strafed by German artillery on land and by Nazi aircraft that swooped in roaring triumph for the saltwater kill when they had wearied of raking the French sands with bombs and bullets and bloody death for the unprotected soldiers looking in vain for shelter among the crowded dunes—soldiers who, when a friendly vessel was able to draw near, waded up to their necks in water and stood for hours waiting to be hauled on board the rescue ship, and who returned to the shore to wait another day if their turn for rescue had not yet come.
After three gruelling days the exhausted navies were joined by the most gallant armada in history: the proud Little Ships of Dunkirk, some no more than thirty feet long but with skippers all boasting their seaworthiness when many had never before put out to sea. In respons
e to an earlier broadcast appeal had come the soon-to-be world-famous river craft and pleasure boats, the fishing smacks, the tugs, the private tenders, the lifeboats, the drifters, and the paddle steamers. For nine days the Miracle of Dunkirk endured as not forty-five, but three hundred and thirty-eight thousand men were saved from the blazing hell that was now Dunkirk, brought back to Britain, where they were to regroup and rearm themselves to fight another day.
The code name for that momentous evacuation plan, graded Most Secret, begun on 26th May, had been Operation Dynamo.
“And Emily Seeton knew all about it on May the twenty-second,” said Captain Grange as Cox passed the sketchbook to the man beside him. “How?”
“Coincidence?” offered Cox’s neighbour Aylwin ... but then he saw the sketch. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes, I do see what you mean. A dynamo, certainly—and wouldn’t you say this looks a lot like a circuit board she’s doodled here? This sort of trapezoid scribble with lines crossed out and arrows in all directions ...”
“I thought the girl was supposed to be an art teacher,” said Captain Grange to Steptoe, in pardonable annoyance. “You never told us she was a—a blasted radio ham in her spare time. It explains how she gets her messages out, of course, and—”
“What for?” broke in Major Haynes, who until then had been a silent observer, none of the sketchbooks having yet made their way to his place at the table.
“What for?” Every eye was turned on him in amazement. “What for? You must be mad,” spluttered Captain Grange. “Or an idiot,” he added. “Or worse.”
“Or perhaps somewhat less inclined to overreaction,” Haynes returned calmly, ignoring the implied slur against his patriotism. “If you will excuse the term. In the circumstances, of course—”
Miss Seeton's Finest Hour (A Miss Seeton Mystery) Page 3