The Spies of Shilling Lane, page 15
By the time Katharina was taken into custody, Betty had directed MI5 to fourteen connected spies, all of whom were sent to POW camps or “turned double.”
“Good work, Braithwaite,” Mr. Cummerbatch told her after the mission. He smiled, but his small eyes scrutinized her in case she had notions of becoming complacent on the back of her success. “I’ll have to find something a little more challenging for you next time.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said rather recklessly, regretting it as soon as she’d said it.
“You’re only as good as your last job, Braithwaite.”
Her next assignment was to befriend a possible female fifth columnist. There was a room available to rent in the house where she lived in Wandsworth, an ideal situation if ever there was one.
Betty thought she was careful, her disguise and cover flawless.
But then she was caught.
As she stood outside Mr. Cummerbatch’s office that evening, she closed her eyes with annoyance. How stupid she’d been to underestimate the enemy.
She knocked on the door.
There was a pause, some small movements, and then a man’s voice said, “Come in!”
Utter relief mixed with wary trepidation as she walked into the office.
“Young Braithwaite,” he said measuredly. “You live!”
“Well, only just, sir.”
“We were a little worried about you for a moment there, Braithwaite. Thinking of sending someone in for you. But evidently you’re more than able to get yourself out of these difficulties.”
“I have to confess, it was my mother, sir.”
“Your mother?” he remarked.
“She came to save me.”
He let out a chuckle. “Are you pulling my leg, Braithwaite? I thought you said that she hardly spoke to you.”
“Well, yes, sir. It was a little out of character for her. She worked out where I was and came to rescue me. Only then she became trapped with me. But they took me away soon after. I escaped from a delivery van.”
“And where, pray tell, is your mother now?”
“That’s half the problem, sir. They’ve moved her to another location.”
He looked at her ponderously. “I think you’d better tell me everything from the very beginning.”
“It was last Friday evening, at twenty past nine. I was trailing the suspect as she went home. Instead of catching the bus, she descended into the Leicester Square underground station. We took a Northern Line train to Elephant and Castle, and as I followed her up out of the station, a couple of thugs were waiting for me.
“It was a trap. They bundled me into the backseat of a car—I think it was a black Morris, or something like that. The large one—he’s called Briggs—held me in the backseat, while the other one drove—he’s a vicious shrew of a man, named Marty—so I had no means of escape. Briggs thrust a black balaclava over my head the wrong way around so I couldn’t see where I was being taken.
“Once there—I now know that it was the basement beneath that butcher in Clapham—I was dragged from the car, taken down some stairs, and thrown into a dark, empty room, where Briggs tied me tightly to a chair and began to torture me for information.”
“What did they want to know?”
She let out a short laugh. “He was such an amateur that he gave it all away. They suspect there’s another mole in the group—a more senior one—but have no idea who it is.”
Mr. Cummerbatch wrote a few notes in a book in front of him. “What else were they after?”
“They weren’t precisely sure who had sent us. I didn’t give away a thing.”
“Very good. Who did they suspect?”
“Either the police, MI5, or an inside job—a rival fascist group or even the Nazis themselves keeping tabs on how things were progressing. They thought I might have been brought in to investigate Fox, regardless of which organization was behind me.”
“That’s interesting.” He took some more notes.
“Sir, the funny thing is that I can’t work out when I was spotted, or by whom. I’ve started to think it might have been an insider.”
“One of us? I don’t think so, Braithwaite. Not many people even know that you’re on this operation. Unless it’s Baxter.”
“No, it can’t be him,” she said more resolutely than she felt.
“Can’t it?” Cummerbatch raised an eyebrow. Nothing escaped him.
But Betty insisted. “Baxter would have to be impossibly cunning to keep that from me. No, it couldn’t be him.”
He looked back at his notebook. “You realize that you’ll have to go underground for a while, until we get this cleared up. You’ll be recognized. On their hit list. We don’t want to risk operatives on unnecessary rescue missions.”
Her heart sank. Going underground meant keeping away from her home—or at least her small room on Shilling Lane—and staying away from any places where the gang might be looking for her. It would also mean coming off the case.
“I should really stay on the case, sir, because now I know all the members, how they act, what they do—”
“You’ve blown your cover.” Mr. Cummerbatch wasn’t smiling. “Go to the countryside for a hill-walking break. I’ll give you a train pass to the Cotswolds—or would you prefer the Devonshire coast?”
“But what about my mother? She’s trapped, sir.”
“I’ll send someone else in.” He sat up straight and wrote something down. “She will be fine. After all, she was only taken this afternoon, and they won’t do anything drastic for at least a few days, hoping that you’ll come in search of her.” He glanced up from his writing. “Perhaps Baxter knows where they’ll have taken her.”
“I could go to see him,” she said, perhaps a little too quickly.
He looked at her severely from beneath his brow. “Braithwaite, I know that you and Baxter are romantically attached, and that, my dear, is a big MI5 no-no.”
“I understand,” she replied quietly, feeling herself flush from top to bottom.
“I would ask that you stop. Immediately.”
“Yes, of course.”
“This is a very serious matter, Braithwaite. I won’t take it to a higher level. If I did, the pair of you would be thrown out of MI5 and I’d be left without two of my best agents.” He sighed heavily, and she suddenly realized how much pressure he must be under. “Don’t mess this up, Braithwaite. Not for you, MI5, or the country. We need Baxter, and we can’t risk you tarnishing him with your own errors. Your cover is broken; don’t break his.”
Taking a big gulp, she tried her utmost not to cry, but tears were welling up regardless. “I didn’t mean to break my cover—I thought I had been flawless.”
Mr. Cummerbatch looked over at her, calmly measured.
“Mistakes happen to us all. But it’s how you pull yourself back up that defines you, Braithwaite.”
She dried her eyes quickly. “I’ll do the best I can, sir.”
“Now, I want you to vanish for at least a week, after which report to me back here. I have a potential mission for you in Scotland, which will get you safely away from London for a while.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, trying not to betray her frustration. Scotland was five hundred miles away. “Although, sir, I would prefer to stay here in London, where the action is.”
He shook his head slowly. “You have to realize that it isn’t possible for a while.”
“I can wear a disguise.”
“It’s standard procedure to change locations, Braithwaite. You know that. Or have you forgotten all the protocol?” he added ironically.
“No,” she stammered. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“In any case, you need some sleep. Stay in the Bloomsbury boardinghouse tonight, and then take yourself off for a long rest in Devon. A lack of proper sleep leads to—”
“Poor decisions,” she mumbled. That fact had been drummed into them at training.
He drew his lips together in a smile of sorts. “Well, that’ll do, Braithwaite. Pick up what you need from Supplies. I’ll make sure you get that ticket to Devon, and I will see you back in a week.” He got up and walked to the door with her, opening it.
“Good-bye, Braithwaite.”
“Good-bye, sir.”
“Be careful out there,” he said as she stepped into the corridor. “Remember: they know your face.”
27.
Mr. Norris hadn’t known anything about the girls until they’d arrived. The jovial billeting officer, notorious for her ability to persuade people to house war workers, had assured him that they were decent, quiet types who wouldn’t put him to any trouble.
Well, that was wishful thinking, he reflected as he and Mrs. Braithwaite crept carefully through the front door into the hallway. The three of them had put him to trouble, even before this sudden foray into fascism.
Florrie, although friendly, was always coming and going, ruffling Mr. Norris’s calm routine in her wake, her countless colored scarves continually knocking over his elephants and throwing pictures off balance. Her bedroom could only be likened to the exploded wardrobe of a circus performer, brightly colored hats and shoes and coats and skirts strewn everywhere. He’d tried to explain to her how he liked the household to run, and she’d nodded enthusiastically, yet seemed completely unable to reform herself.
Mr. Norris had thought of Betty as the serious one. She was always in the sitting room, listening to the news intently, as if absorbing the information would keep her alive. She was far from a child, quite adult in many ways, and even though she went to parties and so forth, he could see there was something more inside of her, as if she were analyzing everything and everyone, in a perpetual search for truth.
He’d enjoyed her company and had wondered what kind of childhood she’d had, whether she’d been ignored, chastised in the way he was. Meeting Mrs. Braithwaite and hearing about Aunt Augusta had begun to answer those questions. One thing was for sure, though. Mrs. Braithwaite, despite her overbearing, scolding nature, would never be cruel. He could see that, at least. Perhaps once Betty was found—once he saw them together—his outstanding queries would fall into place.
Meanwhile, Cassandra was disconcertingly aloof, cold to the point of arctic. Although, one night soon after her arrival, he was certain he’d heard the muffled sound of sobs coming from her room. He couldn’t help but wonder what had upset her, but he worried about asking. With all the bad news from the war, people were being encouraged to keep cheery, the notion being that an unstoppable flow of weeping would turn the fighting spirit of the country into a spiral of turmoil and surrender. But that night, as he crept downstairs from his attic room and hovered outside her door, he wondered if it might be better if she talked about it. Pent-up sadness and horrors could, he felt, rapidly turn a person from good to bad. He knew only too well how contagious anger could be: his father’s rage had besieged his family, each of them, in turn, converting it into a horror of their own: his mother’s despair, his sister’s spite, and his own abject fear. And some of that fear had then kept him from intruding on Cassandra’s sadness.
In the hallway, right there on the hat stand, was the black hooded cloak, still wet from the rain.
That meant, with Betty missing, the mysterious woman who took the passport from the telephone box was either Florrie or Cassandra.
Mrs. Braithwaite threw Mr. Norris a knowing look and indicated with wide mouthing and profuse hand movements that she would check downstairs while Mr. Norris should go upstairs.
Tiptoeing up, Mr. Norris could definitely hear noises, and a tuneless voice was singing “Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major.”
Naturally, he went to Cassandra’s door first. His long-held suspicions that she wasn’t all that she seemed were coming to a head: all her late nights out, the thick makeup almost like a disguise, the very insularity of her.
Listening at her door, he heard nothing, and just as he lowered his eye to the keyhole, the door swung open and there she was, frowning at him indignantly.
“I didn’t realize that taking a room here would involve being spied upon by the landlord,” she sniped tersely.
“Oh, I’m most awfully sorry,” Mr. Norris said, standing upright and brushing himself down with nervousness.
What was he to say?
“My newspaper is missing, and I wondered if you’d borrowed it,” he stammered anxiously.
“No, of course not.” She frowned at him as if deliberating about whether he was deranged. “I’ve only just got in.”
“Oh, that must be your cloak beside the door then, the one wet with rain? I wonder if I could ask you to move it to your bedroom as it’s making the rest of the coats damp.”
Cassandra rolled her eyes and swiftly moved past him, briskly trotting down the stairs in her high heels.
“Well, this isn’t mine,” she said, picking the cloak up in her hand. “It must belong to Florrie.” With that, she turned and stalked back upstairs, shutting the door hard behind her.
Florrie was equally unhelpful.
“It is mine, but I wasn’t wearing it.” She let out a little laugh. “Cassandra must be your culprit. She’s always borrowing my things without asking.”
“So, where’s the coat that you were wearing?” Mrs. Braithwaite had been lurking by the sitting room door and came stalking out to challenge her.
“It’s under here,” she said, briskly lifting the cloak to reveal a smaller dark blue coat that had been tucked underneath.
Mr. Norris felt the material. It, too, was damp.
“Oh well, it must have been Cassandra then,” he said, making his way back up the stairs.
He was stalling outside her door when the slow wail of the air-raid siren started up, and he stepped away just in time for Cassandra to swing out of her room and head downstairs.
As she went, she pulled on a tan raincoat, still dark across the shoulders from an earlier excursion. Without a word, she hurried out into the gloom, the front door slamming behind her.
Mr. Norris motioned to Mrs. Braithwaite to go to the kitchen for a conference, carefully closing the door behind him.
“They both have wet coats, neither of which is the cloak,” he whispered as they stood beside the table. “Short of searching their rooms to find the passport, I don’t know how we can find out.”
“And the culprit would either keep the passport on her person or quickly pass it on to someone else.” She plumped down onto a chair. “How confounding!”
“We should get underground. If we hurry, we’ll get a space in the church crypt—it’s a lot more civilized than the public shelter,” Mr. Norris suggested. “Maybe one of the girls went there, too; I’ve seen both of them there from time to time. You get your things, and I’ll get some blankets.”
And with that, they both went into action, readying themselves for a night in the crypt.
28.
After her meeting with Cummerbatch, Betty had gone to Supplies, a maze of a room in the basement. Cupboards and boxes spilled over with used clothes. Shelves housed books, maps, foreign dictionaries. Chests were labeled CAMERAS AND BINOCULARS, HIDDEN WEAPONS—SMALL, or BUGS. There was no one around apart from a young man with spectacles checking inventory against a list at the main desk, so Betty took her time.
Sorting through the array of secondhand clothes, she picked out a raincoat and some dresses and then focused on items that might disguise her well: hats and scarves, a pair of glasses, a dark blue uniform that looked as if it might have belonged to a member of the Women’s Royal Navy Service. Then she gathered up maps and torches, as well as a number of other useful items: a brooch with a small compass hidden inside, a slim four-inch dagger that could be concealed in the lapel of a coat, and a handy little device for picking locks.
On her way out, the man at the desk passed her a rail ticket for Devon along with some money “from Cummerbatch.” She took it uneasily and slipped it into her bag.
Was she truly prepared to go to Devon?
She walked wearily to the boardinghouse. It was the same one she’d stayed in when she’d first arrived in London, an MI5 women’s hostel in a large Tavistock Square Georgian terrace. Inside, winding staircases and passages led to small single and double rooms with enough wardrobe and drawer space for girls who packed sparingly.
The room she’d been assigned was a single one, and the memory of her first week in MI5 made her laugh at her utterly naive enthusiasm. How meticulously she’d tidied her belongings as if being watched at all times. How carefully she’d set two alarm clocks so as not to be late. How restlessly she’d lain awake, worrying that she’d make a small mistake and be sent home, humiliation and failure crushing her.
She’d known the clerical job could be the beginning of something else. She’d felt it in her bones. This was her one opportunity. She couldn’t blow it.
Two years later, and here she was, a hardened MI5 agent, half starved and exhausted from being captured and tortured. The unseemly innards of a country at war were far, far worse than she’d ever imagined back then.
And yet she was filled with a wave of pride that she’d made it this far, quickly followed by a surge of conviction that she was capable of anything they put in front of her.
