Restless (15 page)

'Just tell them everything – as you told me. Be completely honest.'

'Right, I will. The whole truth, etcetera.'

He looked sharply at her. Then he smiled, weakly, and allowed his shoulders to hang for a second.

'There's a lot at stake,' he said. 'A new operation for AAS. I have a feeling that how you come across this morning may have some bearing on all this.'

'Will it just be C?'

'Oh no, I think they'll all be there. You're the only witness.'

Eva said nothing as she took this in and tried to look unconcerned as they turned into Savoy Court and strolled towards the
porte-cochere.
The uniformed doorman spun the revolving door to admit them but Eva paused and asked Romer for a cigarette. He gave her one and lit it for her. She inhaled deeply, looking at the men and women going in and out of the Savoy. Women in hats and summer dresses, glossy motor cars with chauffeurs, a boy delivering a vast bouquet of flowers. For some people, she realised, a war hardly changed anything.

'Why are we meeting in a hotel?' she asked.

'They love meeting in hotels. Ninety per cent of intelligence meetings take place in hotels. Let's go.'

She stood on her half-smoked cigarette and they went inside.

They were met at reception by a young man and led up two floors and along a corridor of many corners to a suite of rooms. She and Romer were asked to wait in a kind of hallway with a sofa and offered tea. Then a man came in who knew Romer and they stood together in a corner, talking in low voices. This man wore a grey pin-striped suit, had a small trimmed moustache and sleek gingery hair. When he left Romer rejoined her on the sofa.

'Who was that?' she said.

'A complete arse,' he replied, putting his mouth close to her ear. She felt his warm breath on her cheek and her arm and side erupted in goose pimples.

'Miss Dalton?' The first young man stepped through the door and gestured for her to enter.

The room she entered was large and shadowy and she felt the softness and the richness of its carpet beneath her feet. She sensed Romer entering behind her. Armchairs and sofas had been pushed to the walls and the curtains had been half drawn against the August sun. Three tables had been positioned end to end in the middle of the room and four men sat behind them facing a solitary wooden chair set in the middle of the room. Eva was shown towards it, asked to sit down. She saw two other men standing at the rear, leaning against the wall.

A spry elderly man with a silver moustache spoke. No one was introduced.

'This may look like a tribunal, Miss Dalton, but I want you to think of it as just an informal chat.'

The absurdity of this statement made the other three men relax and chuckle. One was wearing a naval uniform, with many gold bands on his wrists. The other two looked like bankers or lawyers, she thought. One had a stiff collar. She noticed one of the men standing in the rear was wearing a polka-dotted bow tie. She glanced quickly behind her to see that Romer was standing by the door with the 'complete arse'.

Papers were shuffled, glances were exchanged.

'Now, Miss Dalton,' Silver Moustache said. 'Tell us in your own words exactly what happened at Prenslo.'

So she told them, taking them through the day, hour by hour. When she finished they began to ask her questions and more and more, she realised they began to centre on Lieutenant Joos and the failure of the double password.

'Who gave you the details of the double password?' a tall jowly man asked her; his voice was deep with a ragged, heavy quality to it; he spoke very slowly and deliberately. He was standing at the rear beside Polka-Dot Bow Tie.

'Mr Romer.'

'You're certain you had it correctly. You didn't make a mistake.'

'No. We routinely use double passwords.'

'We?' Silver Moustache interrupted.

'In the team – those of us who work with Mr Romer. It's completely normal for us.'

There were glances over at Romer. The naval officer whispered something to the man in a stiff collar. He put on a pair of round tortoiseshell spectacles and stared more closely at Eva.

Silver Moustache leant forward. 'How would you describe Lt Joos's response to your second question; "Where can I buy French cigarettes?"?'

'I don't understand,' Eva said.

The jowly man spoke again from the back of the room. 'Did Lt. Joos's answer seem to you like the response to a password, or was it a casual, natural remark?'

Eva paused, thinking back to that moment in the Cafe Backus. She saw Joos's face in her mind's eye, his slight smile, he knew exactly who she was. He had said 'Amsterdam' instantly, confidently, sure that this was the answer she expected.

'I would say, absolutely, that he thought he was giving me the answer to the second password.'

For the briefest instant she sensed all the men in the room relax, infinitesimally. She couldn't tell how or why or what indicated this, but something she had said, the answer she had given, had clearly resolved a complex issue, had put their minds at rest on a contentious matter.

The jowly man stepped forward, putting his hands in his pockets. She wondered if this was C.

'What would you have done,' he asked, 'if Lt. Joos had given the correct password?'

'I would have told him that I was suspicious of the two Germans who were in the rear room.'

'You
were
suspicious of them?'

'Yes. Remember I had been there all day in the cafe, breakfast and lunch, in and out. They had no reason to suspect that I was anything to do with the meeting. I thought they were edgy, ill at ease. Now, with hindsight, I realise why.'

The man with the round spectacles raised a finger.

'I'm not quite clear about this, Miss Dalton, but how was it you came to be in the Cafe Backus during that day?'

'It was Mr Romer's idea. He told me to go there in the morning and observe what happened, as discreetly as possible.'

'It was Mr Romer's idea.'

'Yes.'

'Thank you very much.'

They asked her a few more questions, for form's sake, about the behaviour of the two British agents, but it was obvious that they had the information they needed. Then she was asked to wait outside.

She sat down in the ante-room and accepted the offer of a cup of tea. It was brought and when she took it from the young man she was pleased to note her hands were hardly shaking at all. She drank it and then, after about twenty minutes, Romer appeared. He was happy, she saw at once – everything about his bearing, his knowing look, his absolute refusal to smile, confirmed his deep and enormous good mood.

They walked out of the Savoy together and stood on the Strand, the traffic buzzing by them.

'Take the rest of the day off,' he said. 'You deserve it.'

'Do I? What've I done?'

'I know – what about supper this evening? There's a place in Soho – Don Luigi's – Frith Street. I'll see you there at eight.'

'I'm busy this evening, I'm afraid.'

'Nonsense. We're celebrating. See you at eight. Taxi!'

He ran off to claim his hailed taxi. Eva thought: Don Luigi's, Frith Street, eight o'clock. What was going on here?

'Hello Miss Fitzroy. Long time no see.'

Mrs Dangerfield stepped back from the front door to let Eva in. She was a plump blonde woman who wore thick and farinaceous make-up, almost as if she were about to go on stage.

'Just passing through, Mrs Dangerfield. Come to pick up some things.'

'I've got some post for you here.' She took a small bundle of letters from the hall table. 'Everything's nice and ready. Do you want me to make up the bed?'

'No, no, just here for a couple of hours. Then back up north.'

'Better off out of London, dear, I tell you.' Mrs Dangerfield listed London's wartime disadvantages as she led Eva up to her attic bedroom in number 312 Winchester Street, Battersea.

Eva closed the door behind her and turned the key in the lock. She looked round her room, reacquainting herself with it – she hadn't been here for five weeks or so. She checked her snares: sure enough Mrs Dangerfield had had a good poke around the desk and the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. She sat down on the single bed and laid out her half-dozen letters on the quilt, opening them one at a time. She threw three into the wastepaper basket and filed the rest in her desk drawer. All of them had been sent by herself. She propped the postcard on the mantelpiece above the gas fire; it was from King's Lynn – she had travelled there the previous weekend precisely to send this card. She turned it over and read it again:

Dearest Lily,

Hope all's well in rainy old Perthshire. We popped up to the coast for a couple of days. Young Tom Dawlish got married last Wednesday. Back to Norwich Monday evening.

Love from Mum and Dad

She placed the card back on the mantelpiece, thinking suddenly of her own father and his flight from Paris. The latest news she had was that he was in Bordeaux – somehow Irene had managed to post a letter to her in London. 'In reasonable health in these unreasonable times,' she had written.

As she sat there thinking, she realised she was smiling to herself – a baffled smile – contemplating the bizarre reality of her situation, sitting in her safe house in Battersea, passing herself off as Lily Fitzroy. What would her father think of this work she was doing for the 'British government'? What would Kolia have thought?…

Mrs Dangerfield knew only that Lily Fitzroy was 'in signals', worked for the War Office and had to travel a lot, spending more and more time in Scotland and northern England. She was paid three months in advance and was perfectly happy with the arrangement. In her four months in London Eva had slept only six times at Winchester Road.

She pulled back the corner of the carpet on the floor and, taking a small screwdriver from her bag, prised up the loose nails on a short section of floorboard. Beneath the floor, wrapped in oilcloth, was a small bundle containing her Lily Fitzroy passport, a quarter bottle of whisky and three five-pound notes. She added another five-pound note and closed everything up again. Then she lay on her bed and snoozed for an hour, dreaming that Kolia came into the room and laid his hand on her shoulder. It made her wake with a jolt and she saw that a wand of afternoon sun had squeezed through the curtains and warmed her neck. She looked in the wardrobe, picked out a couple of dresses and folded them into a paper carrier bag she had brought with her.

At the door she paused, wondering about the wisdom or even the necessity of this 'safe' house. This was her training; this was how she had been taught to set up and maintain a safe house without raising suspicion. The secret safe house – one of Romer's rules. She gave a wry smile and unlocked the door: Romer's rules – more and more her life was being governed by these particular regulations. She switched out the light and stepped on to the landing – perhaps she'd learn a few more this evening.

'Bye, Mrs Dangerfield,' she called out gaily. 'That's me leaving now: see you in a week or two.'

That evening Eva dressed with more diligence and thought than usual. She washed her hair and curled its ends, deciding to surprise Romer by leaving it down. She teased a lock over her eye, Veronica Lake-style, but decided that was going too far: she wasn't trying to seduce the man, after all. No, she just wanted him to notice her more, be more aware of her in a different way. He may be thinking that all he was doing was taking an employee out for a treat but she wanted him to realise that not many of his employees looked like her. It was a matter of self-esteem in the pure sense – nothing to do with Romer at all.

She put on her lipstick – a new one, called Tahiti Nights – powdered her face and dabbed rose-water on her wrists and behind her ears. She was wearing a light woollen navy dress, with gathered maize-yellow panels on the front, with a sash belt that accentuated her slim waist. Her eyebrows were plucked into perfect arches and were perfectly black. She put her cigarettes, her lighter and her purse in a cane handbag studded with seashells, had a final check in the mirror, and decided, definitely, finally, against ear-rings.

As she walked down the stairs of the hostel, a few of the girls were queuing for the telephone in the lobby. She bowed as they wolf-whistled and mockingly marvelled.

'Who's the lucky man, Eve?'

She laughed. Romer was the lucky man: he had no idea how lucky he was.

The lucky man showed up, late, at 8.35. Eva had arrived and had been shown to Don Luigi's best table, set in a bow window looking out over Frith Street. Eva drank two gin-and-tonics while she waited and passed much of the time listening in to a French couple two tables away having an indiscreet, not so
sotto voce
argument mainly to do with the man's bitch of a mother. Romer duly arrived, made no apology, made no comment on how she was looking and immediately ordered a bottle of Chianti – 'The best Chianti in London. I only come here for the Chianti.' He was still animated and excited, his mood post-Savoy having grown more intense, if anything, and as they ordered and ate their starters he spoke fluently and contemptuously about 'head office'. She half listened, preferring instead to look at him as he drank and smoked and ate. She heard him say that head office was stuffed with the stupidest elite in London, that the people he had to deal with were either idle Pall Mall clubmen or superannuated officials from the Indian Colonial Service. The first lot looked down on the second as petit-bourgeois careerists while the second regarded the first as washed-up remittance-men who only had a job because they had gone to Eton with the boss.

He pointed his fork at her – he was eating what purported to be Veal Milanese; she had ordered salted cod with tomatoes.

'How are we meant to run a successful company if the board of directors are so third rate?'