‘Are you all right, dear?’ A middle-aged woman in a headscarf at the next basin was looking at her in the mirror with concern.
‘Yes, fine, sorry.’ She turned on the tap, ducked and splashed her face with cold water, watched it turn black and swirl away, keeping her head down until she had recovered. She found an empty cubicle and locked the door, put her suitcase on the toilet seat, pulled her dress over her head and took out a pale blue shirt and black tie. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons. She did them up wrongly and had to start again. She tugged the heavy blue skirt over her hips and fastened it, shook out the matching blue jacket with its single braided band on the sleeves and tried to smooth away the creases. She buttoned it up and tightened the belt.
Back at the sink, hairgrips in her mouth, she put up her hair. Her fingers came away covered in dust. There was nothing she could do. Her cap would cover the worst of it. She applied the make-up she had bought for the weekend, as advertised by Merle Oberon in that month’s Vogue (‘Just a few seconds with Max Factor “Pan-Cake” and you’re glamorous!’), dabbing it thickly over the cut. It stung like hell. She added some lipstick, adjusted her cap and tucked away a few stray hairs. She stuck out her chin and peered into the mirror, and a formidable woman who seemed a complete stranger – Section Officer A. V. Caton-Walsh of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force – stared back. Only her startled eyes, red-rimmed and raw, betrayed her. She picked up her case and went out onto the station concourse.
In the café, she took her usual seat, where she could keep an eye on the clock, cradling a cup of tea between her hands. She let her gaze wander over the crowds at the platform gates: the profusion of different uniforms – dark blue, light blue, khaki – a lot of Americans, their kitbags piled on a trolley, a party of noisy schoolchildren meeting their parents. High above their heads, the smoke-stained glass and wrought-iron roof was filled like an aviary with fluttering pigeons. Her eyes kept going back up to it. She pictured a missile crashing through it, then reproached herself. Absurd to imagine she could witness a third V2 in the same day. Nevertheless, she finished her tea and went in search of her train, and the needle whine of anxiety in the back of her mind was only quietened when her carriage began to pull out of Paddington, carrying her beyond the range of the V2.
The journey from London to Marlow took an hour – a pretty route along the Thames Valley, via Maidenhead, Cookham and Bourne End. She sat by the window and brooded on the green water meadows, the placid brown cows, the rivers and duck ponds and small grey stone churches. As part of her duties, she sometimes went to an RAF hangar in rural Oxfordshire to debrief pilots immediately on their return from reconnaissance missions over Germany. Young men, barely out of school, flirtatious, still in their flying jackets, dismissive of the dangers they had just faced – ‘Piece of cake, ma’am’ – with only the occasional shaking hand as they lit a cigarette to indicate their jauntiness was an act. Occasionally a plane failed to appear. The hours would pass, she would wait around, then it would be discreetly suggested she leave. She had often wondered whether she would have the courage to do what they did. Now she had her answer. For the first time in the war, she had faced death, and her instinct had been to get out of London as fast as possible.
Of course, she could excuse it. Mike’s injuries did not seem life-threatening. He had told her not to come to the hospital. Without him she had nowhere to go and nothing to do. But that begged the question of what she had been doing in Warwick Court in the first place. To have an affair with a married man was bad enough. To make love with that married man in the bed he shared with his wife…
The flat is empty all weekend. We can take our time…
He had made it sound like nothing. But it had added an unnecessary extra layer of deceit, of cruelty really, whereas if they had simply gone to a hotel as they usually did, they would still be together. It was absurd to think it – she had long since lost her faith – but she couldn’t help seeing the V2 as a punishment from God. The notion nagged at her, went round and round in her head.
At Bourne End, a trio of giggling young WAAFs came into her compartment – aircraftwomen, second class. They saluted when they saw the braid on her sleeves and went quiet. Their deference made her feel even more uncomfortable. She took down her suitcase from the overhead rack and went into the corridor. At the carriage door, she pulled down the window. The Thames flowed beside the track, high and wide from the recent rain, a pair of swans in the middle, motionless in the current.
She put her face into the wind and breathed in deeply until she could no longer taste the dust and coal gas.
At Marlow, she let the WAAFs leave first and waited until the platform was empty before she made her way through the station to the lane. An army lorry was waiting. The aircraftwomen were in the back.
‘Do you want a lift, ma’am?’
‘No thanks, girls. I’ll walk.’
Past the brick-and-flint cottages and into the broad Georgian high street: ivy-covered coaching inns and tea rooms, little shops with bow windows made of small-paned glass, timbered whitewashed houses, thatched roofs – the whole thing was absurdly picturesque, a Hollywood image of England, like a scene from Mrs Miniver. A football match was being played somewhere. She could hear a whistle, men shouting, a cheer. She left the town and walked along the Henley road, between fields and high hedges, occasionally glimpsing the river to her left. It was only after a mile or so that the war began to reassert itself. An anti-aircraft battery became visible in the woods. A squad of sweating, red-faced soldiers in PT kit ran past her. A camouflaged lorry emerged from a drive ahead. There was a guard post.
She showed her pass at the barrier.
‘Do you want a ride to the house, ma’am?’
‘I’m fine, Corporal, thanks. The walk will do me good.’
A lot of Britain’s secret war was fought at the end of long, sweeping drives like this one, running through neglected parks, between overgrown rhododendrons and dripping elms, to hidden country houses where codes were broken, special operations planned, the conversations of captured Nazi generals bugged, spies interrogated, agents trained. Kay had walked this drive for the past two years – always with an unwanted memory of school – and at the end of it stood Danesfield House, a mock-Elizabethan mansion, built at the turn of the century, as sparkling white as the icing on a wedding cake, with crenellated walls, steep red roofs and tall red-brick chimneys. Its ornamental gardens ran down to the Thames. When she had first arrived, the grounds had provided a pleasant place to stroll between shifts. Now they were disfigured by dozens of long, low temporary wooden office blocks and ugly semicircular corrugated-steel Nissen huts that served as barracks, in one of which she lived with eleven other officers, four to a room.
She stood on the threshold of her hut for a moment and offered up a prayer that no one would be in, then braced her shoulders, opened the metal door and clumped in her heavy WAAF shoes along the wooden floor. Four doors led off to the right of the corridor – the toilet and shower room was closest to the entrance – with a coal-burning stove in the centre of the hut that had been allowed to go out. Her dormitory was at the far end. The shutters were closed, the room in darkness, the air permeated by a strong smell of Vicks VapoRub. It seemed to be empty, but then the blankets on the bed in the furthest corner stirred and the shape of a head turned to look at her.
‘I thought you were in London for the weekend.’
Kay stepped over the threshold. It was too late to turn around. ‘Change of plan.’
‘Hold on.’ A shadow moved. A clatter as the shutters were opened. Shirley Locke, an economics graduate from University College, London, who seemed to have had the same streaming cold for the past two years, only in the summer she called it hay fever, secured the shutters and clambered back into bed. She was wearing a flannelette nightdress with a pattern of pink roses buttoned up to her sharp chin. She put on her glasses an
d raised her hand to her mouth. ‘My God, Kay, what have you done to your face?’
‘Car accident.’ It was the first lie that came into her mind. She had already decided not to mention the V2. The questions would have been endless.
‘Oh no, you poor thing! Whose car was it?’
‘Just a stupid taxi.’ She opened her cupboard and put away her case. ‘Had a blowout on the Embankment and hit a lamp post.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘This morning.’
‘But why are you back? Couldn’t your chap have looked after you?’
‘Who said anything about a chap?’ She made for the door. ‘Sorry – got to dash. See you later.’
Shirley called after her, ‘You do know you’ll have to tell us about him one day, don’t you? Your mystery man?’ And then, when Kay was halfway down the corridor, the nasal voice came again: ‘You should get that cut looked at!’
Danesfield House had lost its gracious character. Renamed RAF Medmenham after the nearest village, it had acquired instead a stuffy bureaucratic smell, a compound of dust and pencil shavings, cardboard files and rubber bands, like the inside of a desk drawer rarely opened. The chandeliers had been taken down, the plasterwork boarded over, linoleum laid and printed signs put up everywhere. The ballroom, for example, had become ‘Z Section/Central Interpretation Unit’, and it was here that Kay headed that Saturday afternoon.
By this time it was after half past three. The winter light was fading. Beyond the terrace, a low sun glinted on the Thames. Inside the huge ballroom, twenty Phase Two interpreters, mostly female, seated at three rows of desks, had turned on their Anglepoise lamps and were bent over their work. The atmosphere was quiet, the air heavy with concentration, like an examination hall. From time to time someone crossed to the bookshelves and took down a box file or a manual, or stood in front of one of the charts that showed the enemy’s equipment from every conceivable angle: armoured cars and self-propelled howitzers, fighters and bombers, submarines, warships, tanks. On a long trestle table, wire baskets were piled with black-and-white photographs, marked by sector: ‘Ruhr’, ‘Saar’, ‘Baltic’. A WAAF sergeant sat behind it, filling out a record sheet.
Kay said, ‘Anything in from Holland?’
The sergeant pointed to an empty basket. ‘Weather’s bad, ma’am. No coverage for forty-eight hours.’
Kay went out to the hall and started to climb the stairs. Phase One was ‘current/operational’ and was responsible for debriefing the pilots at RAF Benson as soon as they landed from their sorties. Phase Two, in the ballroom, analysed all the photographs taken over the past twenty-four hours that might be of immediate use on the battlefield. Everything longer-term was passed upstairs to Phase Three. This was where she worked, in what had once been the main bedroom suites and bathrooms. She walked along the corridor to the registry and asked for the past week’s coverage of the Dutch coastal sector, from the Hook of Holland to Leiden. ‘Actually, make that two weeks.’
While the duty clerk went off to fetch the file, she rested her elbows on the counter and leaned forward. She closed her eyes. She was starting to feel faint again. People passed by in the corridor behind her. A telephone rang briefly somewhere. A man sneezed twice. The sounds reached her oddly muffled, as if she were underwater. Behind her, a woman’s voice said softly but precisely, ‘Kay, dear, are you all right?’
She took a breath, forced her mouth into a smile and turned to confront the thin and serious face of Dorothy Garrod – so slight a woman, barely more than five feet tall, it had proved impossible to find a uniform that did not look too large on her. She was in her early fifties, much older than the rest of them. Before the war, she had been Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge. Now her academic discipline was the photographic analysis of bomb-damaged German cities, to which she applied the same painstaking scholarship she had once devoted to the ruined settlements of the Palaeolithic era. Bomber Command might insist a target had been destroyed; she knew otherwise, and stood her ground. Air Marshal Harris was said to loathe her.
‘A slight bump on the head, Dorothy, otherwise fine.’ It was Professor Garrod, her supervisor at Newnham, who had recommended Kay for the Central Interpretation Unit in the first place. She still found it hard to call her by her Christian name.
‘You’re very pale. Are you sure you’re not overdoing it?’
‘I’m perfectly well, honestly.’
The clerk returned with her file. She signed for it, clutched it to her chest, smiled a quick goodbye and escaped from the registry.
She slipped into her usual place at a desk beside the window. The rest of her section were too absorbed to notice her arrival. She took off her cap, switched on her lamp and set out her equipment – a stereoscope viewer, a magnifier, mathematical tables, a slide rule – then opened the file.
The black-and-white photographs, flecked with wisps of cloud, showed a clear image of the long, straight, flat coast, the wide beach, the streets and buildings of The Hague and its suburbs, including Scheveningen to the north, and great sweeps of woodland interspersed with dunes and lakes. That the V2s were being launched from here was certain: it was the only German toehold left in Europe that was close enough to strike London, two hundred miles away. Patrolling Spitfire pilots had occasionally observed the rockets streaking through the sky above them. But where exactly were they coming from? That was the mystery.
Kay did not expect to solve it. They had been searching the area for weeks. But one never knew. Babs Babington-Smith had been asked if she could locate an object at Peenemünde that might be the Germans’ prototype jet fighter, the Messerschmitt-262. She had spent weeks going back over the old coverage with a jeweller’s Leitz magnifying glass until she discovered at the side of the airfield a cruciform less than a millimetre wide, which equated to a wingspan of twenty feet. Kay remembered the exact moment of discovery, Babs’s quiet excitement: ‘I say, Kay, come and take a look at this.’
And even if she did find something – so what? The launchers were mobile. They would almost certainly have been moved by now. But it was preferable to doing nothing; preferable to going back to the barracks and listening to Shirley Locke blowing her nose; preferable to lying on her bed and remembering that awful fraction of a second before the rocket hit, and afterwards Mike strapped to the stretcher saying Better not.
She laid two of the photographs side by side. One had been taken fractionally after the other, creating a sixty per cent overlap; when she placed her stereoscope on its folding stand above them, the two images magically fused to give her a three-dimensional image. Nevertheless, all she could see was a canopy of monochrome trees so tightly packed and tiny it was impossible to distinguish one from another. But that did not deter her. She would go on all night if she had to, as the sun sank over the Thames and the lights came on in the township of huts beyond the window, searching for what lay hidden in the forest.
5
IN SCHEVENINGEN, BY CANDLELIGHT, IN a corner of the mirrored dining room of the Hotel Schmitt – a large shabby-grand establishment that served as staff headquarters and officers’ mess – Colonel Huber was hosting a small dinner to welcome Biwack to the regiment.
The guest of honour was seated to his right. To his left, also in the midnight-black uniform of the SS, was Obersturmbannführer Karlheinz Drexler, chief of security. He was equivalent in rank to Huber – bespectacled, balding, plump: an unlikely representative of the Master Race, Graf always thought. Facing them were the three lieutenants in command of the firing battalions: Seidel, the chess-playing Berliner; Klein, a taciturn and skilful engineer who had risen through the ranks; and Stock, who had a reputation for being highly strung and who relaxed in the evenings by reading westerns. At the end of the table sat Graf.
A couple of white-gloved orderlies served the food on the hotel’s monogrammed pre-war china: a watery cabbage soup and the final, obscure re
mains of an ancient boar that had been shot in the forest by the SS guards the previous week. There was bread but no potatoes: the bulk of Germany’s potato crop that year had been requisitioned to be distilled into alcohol for use as rocket fuel. Like pampered children, the V2s took food from the adults’ plates.
Although Huber had produced two bottles of schnapps to celebrate the occasion and had told a couple of his risqué jokes, the atmosphere remained subdued.
The intimate patch of candlelight flickering in the tall mirrors emphasised the emptiness of the chilly dining room and the darkness of the surrounding tables.
Graf was only half listening to the conversations going on around him. Seidel was telling the other battalion commanders about the overheated transformer. Drexler was talking to Biwack about some action on the Eastern Front (‘We had to burn down the village…’). What he really wanted to do was get drunk. He had finished his schnapps and was just eyeing the nearest bottle and wondering if it would be impolite to reach for it when Huber tapped his glass with his knife and stood.
‘Gentlemen, as you know, a consignment of rockets is due to arrive at midnight, and therefore we need to finish early so that we can all get some rest in preparation. But before we disperse for the evening, I would like to welcome Sturmscharführer Biwack to the regiment. In the heat of battle, it’s all too easy to forget the reason why we’re fighting. The purpose of the National Socialist Leadership Officer in the German army is to remind us of our cause. I want you to make sure he has the chance to talk to all your men before the week is out.’ He bowed slightly to Biwack. ‘We are pleased to have you with us, Sturmscharführer.’ Biwack smiled up at him and nodded. ‘Today we launched six missiles,’ continued Huber. ‘An excellent tally! But let us make sure tomorrow is even better. I would like to set us a new objective.’ He glanced around the table. ‘Let us show our new comrade what we can do. Tomorrow we shall launch twelve!’
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