Code Name Verity. Elizabeth E. Wein

established that Queenie and the gentleman’s wife had been at the same college, albeit nearly 20 years apart, and traded literary quotations in German. They were obviously cut from the same well-read, well-bred, lunatic cloth.

      ‘What’s your poison?’ the civilian with a penchant for Kipling asked Queenie genially. ‘The water of life? Do I detect a Scottish burr? Any other languages besides German?’

      ‘Only coffee just now as I’m on duty later, aye you do, et oui, je suis courante en français aussi. My grandmother and my nanny are from Ormaie, near Poitiers. And I can do a fair parody of Aberdeen Doric and tinkers’ cant, but the natives aren’t fooled.’

      ‘The Doric and tinkers’ cant!’ The poor fellow laughed so hard he had to take off his glasses and give them a wipe with a spotted silk handkerchief. He put them back on and peered at Queenie this time. The lenses made his blue-green irises seem so large they were startling. ‘And – how did you manage to find your way here today, enemy agent mine?’

      ‘It’s Maddie’s story,’ said the enemy agent generously. ‘And I owe her a whisky.’

      So Maddie told, to an appreciative audience, how she had played Watson to her friend’s giddy Sherlock Holmes – of the sabotaged tyre at the entrance to the well-stocked farm, and the assumptions about the dogs and the food and the flowers there. ‘And,’ Maddie finished with a triumphant flourish, ‘the farm woman drew her a map.’

      The so-called enemy agent glanced up at Maddie sharply. Squadron Leader Creighton held out his hand, palm up, a demand.

      ‘I’ve burned it,’ Queenie said in a low voice. ‘I popped it in the fire when we first came in. I won’t tell you which farm, so don’t ask.’

      ‘I shouldn’t have to go to much trouble to deduce it myself,’ said the short-sighted civilian, ‘based on your friend’s description.’

      ‘I am an officer.’ Her voice was still dead quiet. ‘I gave the woman a royal ticking off after she’d done it, and I doubt she’ll need another warning. But I never lied to her either, and she might have been more suspicious in the first place if I had. It would be inappropriate to punish anyone – apart from me of course.’

      ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. I am agog at your initiative.’

      The man glanced at the silent Creighton. ‘I do believe your earlier suggestion is spot on,’ he said, and rather randomly quoted what Maddie reckoned was probably a line from Kipling.

       ‘Only once in a thousand years is a horse born so well fitted for the game as this our colt.’

      ‘Bear in mind,’ said Creighton soberly, holding the other man’s magnified eyes with his own over the top of his steepled fingers, ‘these two work well together.’

      clk/sd & w/op

      Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God.

      I never knew his name. Creighton introduced him by an alias the man sometimes uses. At my interview he jokingly identified himself by a number because that’s what the British Empire spies do in Kim (though we don’t; we are told in training that numbers are too dangerous).

      I liked him – don’t get me wrong – beautiful eyes behind the dreadful specs, and very lithe and powerful beneath the scholarly tweed. It was wonderful flirting with him, all that razor-edge literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test too. But he was playing God. I noticed, I knew it and I didn’t care. It was such a thrill to be one of the archangels, the avengers, the chosen few.

      Von Linden is about the same age as the intelligence officer who recruited me. Has von Linden an educated wife too? (He wears a ring.) Might von Linden’s wife have been at university with my German tutor?

      The sheer stark raving incredible madness of such a very ordinary possibility makes me want to put my head down on this cold table and sob.

      Everything is all so wrong.

      I have no more paper.