'Tell you what?'
'Are you with SAVAK?'
He closed his eyes and, keeping them closed, said: 'My brother was killed by SAVAK.'
I tried to vomit by the wheelie bins at the back of the pub, but failed, managing only to hawk and spit. You always think you'll feel better if you vomit but actually you feel much worse – and yet still you try to empty your stomach. I walked with due care to my car and methodically checked it was locked and that I hadn't left anything temptingly thievable on any seat and then set off on the long walk home back to Summertown. Friday night in Oxford – I'd never find a taxi. I should just walk home and, perhaps, it might sober me up. And tomorrow Hamid was flying off to Indonesia.
London . 1942
EVA DELECTORSKAYA WATCHED ALFIE Blytheswood leave the side entrance of Electra House and duck into a small pub off the Victoria Embankment called the Cooper's Arms. She gave him five minutes and then went in herself. Blytheswood stood with a couple of friends at the bar of the snug, drinking a pint of beer. Eva was wearing spectacles and a beret and she approached the bar herself and ordered a dry sherry. If Blytheswood glanced up from his conversation he would easily spot her, though she was confident he wouldn't recognise her, the new length and colour of her hair seeming to alter her appearance significantly. However, she had put on the spectacles at the last moment, suddenly a little unsure. But she had to test her disguise, her new persona. She took her sherry to a table by the door, where she read her newspaper. When Blytheswood left, walking past her table, he didn't even glance at her. She followed him to his bus stop and waited with the others in the queue for his bus to arrive. Blytheswood had a long journey ahead of him, north to Barnet, where he lived with his wife and three children. Eva knew all this because she had been shadowing him for three days. At Hampstead a seat behind him was vacated and Eva slipped quietly into it.
Blytheswood was dozing, his head repeatedly nodding forward then abruptly jerking up as he regained consciousness. Eva leant forward and placed her hand on his shoulder.
'Don't turn round, Alfie,' she said, softly in his ear. 'You know who it is.'
Blytheswood was completely rigid and completely awake.
'Eve,' he said. 'Bloody hell. I can't believe it.' He moved to turn his head reflexively but she stopped him with her palm on his cheek.
'If you don't turn round, then you can honestly say you haven't seen me.'
He nodded. 'Right, yes, yes, that would be best.'
'What do you know about me?'
'They said you'd flown. Morris killed himself and you flew away.'
'That's right. Did they tell you why?'
'They said you and Morris were ghosts.'
'It's all lies, Alfie. If I was a ghost do you think I'd be sitting on this bus, talking to you?'
'No… No, I suppose not.'
'Morris was killed because he'd found something out. I was meant to be killed too. I'd be dead now if I hadn't flown.'
She could see him struggling with his desire to turn and look at her. She was fully aware of the risks involved in this contact but there were certain things she had to find out and Blytheswood was the only person she could ask.
'Have you heard from Angus or Sylvia?' she asked.
Blytheswood tried to swivel his head again but she stopped him with her fingertips.
'You don't know?'
'Know what?'
'That they're dead.'
She jolted visibly at this news, as if the bus had braked suddenly. She felt suddenly sick, saliva flowing into her mouth as if she were about to gag or vomit.
'My God,' she said, trying to take this in. 'How? What happened?'
'They were in a flying boat, a Sunderland, shot down between Lisbon and Poole Harbour. They were flying back from the States. Everyone on the plane was killed. Sixteen, eighteen people, I think.'
'When did this happen?'
'Early January. Some general was on board. Didn't you read about it?'
She remembered something, vaguely – but of course Angus Woolf and Sylvia Rhys-Meyer wouldn't have been mentioned among the casualties.
'Jerries were waiting for them. Bay of Biscay, somewhere.'
She was thinking: Morris, Angus, Sylvia. And there should have been me too. AAS Ltd was being rolled up. She had flown and disappeared; that left only Blytheswood.
'You should be all right, Alfie,' she said. 'You left early.'
'What do you mean?'
'We're being rolled up, aren't we? It's only because I flew that I'm still here. There's only you and me left.'
'There's still Mr Romer. No, no, I can't believe that, Eve. Us being rolled up? Just bad luck, surely.'
He was wishful-thinking. She knew he could read the signs as well as she could.
'Have you heard from Mr Romer?' she said.
'No, actually, as a matter of fact I haven't.'
'Be very careful, Alfie, if you hear that Mr Romer wants to meet you.' She said this without thinking and she immediately regretted it as she could see Blytheswood's head instantly shaking slightly as he ran through the implications of her remark. For all that he had been part of AAS Ltd for several years, Blytheswood was essentially an immensely skilled radio operator, an electrical engineer of some genius; these kind of complexities – dark nuances, sudden contradictions in the established order of things – disturbed him, made no sense, Eva could tell.
'I've got a lot of time for Mr Romer,' he said finally, with a bit of petulance in his voice, as if he were a loyal estate worker being asked to pass judgement on the lord of the manor.
Eva realised she couldn't leave it like this. 'Just…' she paused, thinking fast, 'just don't ever tell him we've had this conversation or you'll be as dead as the others,' she said, her voice harsh.
He took this in, his head slightly bowed now, his shoulders slumped, not wanting this information at all, and Eva saw her opportunity and was out of her seat and down the stairs before he had time to turn round to see her go. The bus was slowing for some traffic lights and she jumped off and ran into a newsagent's. Blytheswood, had he looked, would have seen the back of a woman in a beret, nothing more. She watched the bus pull away from the lights but he didn't get off. Let's hope he took me seriously, she thought, wondering all the same if she'd made a bad mistake. The worst, the very worst, that could happen was that Romer would know for sure that she was now back in England, but that was all, and in any event he was probably working with that possibility in mind – nothing had really changed – except that she knew now about Angus and Sylvia. And she thought about them both, and the times they had shared, and she remembered, with bitterness, the vow she had made to herself in Canada and how it hardened her resolve. She bought an evening paper to discover the latest news of the air raids and the casualty figures.
The convoy had left St John, New Brunswick, on 18 January 1942, as planned. It was a stormy crossing but, apart from the bad weather, uneventful. There were twenty passengers on their ex-Belgian cargo ship – the SS Brazzaville – carrying aero-engines and steel girders: five government secretaries from Ottawa transferring to the London embassy, half a dozen officers from the Royal Regiment of Canada and an assortment of diplomatic staff. The heaving ocean kept most of the passengers to their cabins. Eva shared hers with an inordinately tall girl from the Department of Mines, called Cecily Fontaine, who needed to vomit every half-hour, as it turned out. By day Eva spent her time in the cramped 'staterooms' trying to read, and for three nights managed to claim one of the two empty beds in the Brazzaville's sick bay before a stoker with a grumbling appendix drove her back to Cecily. From time to time Eva would venture on deck to gaze at the grey sky, the grey turbulent water and the grey ships with their belching smokestacks butting and smashing onward through the waves and jagged swells – disappearing in explosions of wintry spume from time to time – gamely making for the British Isles.