After a night-time shift at the Park, I cycled home in the early morning sunlight to our cottage and found that it had been burgled. There was no sign of Tally, but every room had been ransacked; the cupboards in the kitchen had been emptied and the paucity of furniture in the sitting room had been thoroughly upended.
Upstairs, my small collection of books had been swept from the shelf, the mattress had been removed from the bed, and the contents of the wardrobe, dressing table and chest of drawers lay strewn about the place. It was when I saw my framed photograph of Kit on the floor, the glass smashed and the back of the frame prised off, that I suspected that this was not a straightforward burglary: somebody had been searching for something specific.
I stared at the mess in bewilderment and dismay. Who could have done this? And why? Worried that whoever had been here might not have found what they were looking for and return, I cycled to the nearest telephone box, some two miles away. I rang Max’s number at the house in Bletchley where he lodged. It was an age before anybody answered. His landlady informed me that Mr Blythe-Jones was asleep, but after I insisted it was imperative I spoke to him, that it was an emergency, she reluctantly went to knock on his door.
‘Who the devil wants me?’ he demanded when he picked up the receiver.
‘It’s me,’ I said, and hurriedly explained the situation.
‘Why haven’t you called the police?’ he asked when he arrived within thirty minutes on his Norton motorbike.
‘Because I don’t think it’s an ordinary burglary. See for yourself,’ I added.
‘You’re right,’ he said when he’d looked around. ‘What do you know about your housemate?’
He had clearly leapt to the conclusion I had. ‘If I’m honest,’ I said, ‘I don’t really know that much about her.’
It seemed so implausible, given that we shared a house, but it was true. I knew her name and her age and that in her free time she loved to be in the garden, but that was about it.
‘What does she do at the Park?’ Max asked.
‘I don’t know. We never talk about work, we’re not supposed to. You know that as well as I do.’
‘But you must have some idea, surely?’
‘I honestly couldn’t tell you.’
‘Has she ever asked you about your work? Or behaved in a manner you thought odd?’
I shook my head. But then I recalled her recently joking about her duties at the Park, how none of her friends would ever guess that she had access to such important information regarding the war effort. Another time I had found her looking through my books. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’m desperate for something to read,’ she’d said, a copy of Murder at Midnight in her hands. At the time I hadn’t thought anything of it, but now I couldn’t help but think she had been snooping. But what had she thought she would find in my bedroom?
I had just shared this with Max when there was a loud hammering at the front door.
‘I suspect you’re about to be interrogated,’ he said.
He was right. When I opened the front door, two sombre-faced men dressed in suits stared back at me. Without introducing themselves, they barged their way into the narrow hallway, then into the sitting room. ‘Are you Miss Evelyn Flowerday?’ one of them asked.
‘Yes,’ I said nervously, glad that Max was standing next to me.
‘We’d like to ask you a few questions about the woman with whom you share this house.’
‘Before Miss Flowerday answers any questions you have,’ Max said, ‘I think it a reasonable request that you show us some identification.’
‘And who would you be, sir?’
‘I asked first,’ he said firmly.
It was then, as I looked at the two men, and the window behind them, that something caught my eye in the back garden. At first I thought it was one of Tally’s dresses drying on the washing line. But then I realised what it really was and let out an ungodly scream. Her neck in a noose, Tally was hanging from a branch of the apple tree.
What happened then, and to this day, was a nightmarish blur. After being taken to London, I was thoroughly interrogated – just as Max had predicted – and on being found to be innocent of any crime, it transpired that unwittingly I had been sharing a house with a spy who had been passing information on to the Germans. In the garden, and hidden in a tin box behind a patch of nettles and brambles, was evidence of ciphers which she had somehow stolen from the Park. A small case containing a radio device was found in an old potato sack in the greenhouse. It had been well hidden beneath an assortment of garden tools and pots.
More disturbing than any of this was that the official line on Tally’s death was that she had killed herself out of remorse for betraying her country. But how could it have been suicide? I asked, when there was nothing beneath her on which she could have climbed to attach the noose to the branch. I was told that she had simply climbed the tree and I was not to ask any more questions; the matter was closed. I had no way of knowing whether it was MI5 or MI6 who had interrogated me, but I was under no illusion that whatever was going on was deadly serious. As to who had killed Tally, I would never know.
When I was released from London and allowed to resume my duties back at the Park, Max insisted that he stayed with me at the cottage. I knew it was a mistake, but frankly I was so unnerved by the whole episode, and a little fearful that whoever had murdered Tally might return, I allowed myself to believe that no harm would come of Max sleeping in what had been Tally’s room.
How naïve I was!
That night, unable to sleep – the slightest noise putting me into a terrible state of alarm – I lay in the dark staring up at the ceiling. Just a few feet away from me, the other side of the wall, was Max. I tried not to imagine what it might feel like to have his reassuring presence with me on this side of the wall. But the more I tried not to think of him, the stronger the urge became to lie within his embrace, to feel what all those other girls had experienced with him.
Don’t be a fool, I told myself. Think of Kit.
But Kit was as far from my thoughts as he could be. For once in my life I wanted to be rash, to forget about the sensible woman everybody took me to be. If I died tomorrow – found hanging from the branch of a tree just like Tally – what did it matter how rational and loyal I’d been?
A faint knock at the door made me start.
‘It’s me, Max. Can I come in?’
God knows I should have said no, but I didn’t. At my affirmative reply, he entered the room. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he murmured in the shadowy darkness.
‘Me neither,’ I replied.
‘I can’t stop thinking about you,’ he said, approaching my bed. ‘I keep thinking how I’d feel if anything happened to you.’