They had worked long days and nights, slept at first in temporary lodgings the locals provided, and then in hastily erected barracks. In the rare moments when the relentless pace of typing, translation and filing slackened briefly, they all trailed to the King Harry, a squat Victorian pub with low-hanging beams that they usually filled to the brim.
Rachel found herself there again now, on a Thursday night. This time, the crowd was farmers and local workmen in felt caps and muddy boots, but the smell of spilled beer and burned wood was the same. While waiting at the bar for the pink gin she had ordered, she could almost close her eyes, smell the hoppy air and feel seventeen again, remember Marjorie and Elizabeth and Wendy and John and Dilly waiting for her at the battered corner table, all ready to fight the Hun with their razor wit and the joyous idiocy that belongs to the young.
But when the gin arrived and she turned around carrying the small tray it was served on, only old Colonel Bill Woodfield sat there, waving at her unsteadily, his face already beetroot-red; and her mission was to steal one of the colonel’s jealously guarded files for a Soviet spy.
‘It is good to see you, Rachel,’ Woodfield said, after they had toasted and Rachel had told the barman to keep the gin coming. ‘Glad you thought to swing by while visiting Felix Cowgill’s boys.’
The Winter Court’s Iberian Section was also located in St Albans, although it was now considered to be something of a retirement home for rotten apples. As such, it had made perfect sense for Rachel to drop in for lunch and entertain the notion of working for the Section’s chief Cowgill, formerly in charge of Section V. He also belonged to Harker’s informal club of ex-Colonial officers.
‘Well, Colonel, I am very glad you still remember me.’
‘How could I forget? You had such bright eyes. Still do. I knew you would go far.’
Rachel sighed. ‘I am not entirely sure you were on the money, Colonel.’ She briefly related what she considered the official version of her story—a policy disagreement with Harker and an unfair demotion.
‘That is rotten luck, that is,’ Woodfield said. ‘But your star will rise yet, mark my words. You are not going end up an old drunk like me, only good for arranging old paperwork. Sure, every now and then, someone comes here from the city and I help them find things, and sometimes those things are even important. I am starting to look forward to passing over and have done my best to speed things up, but the old liver just keeps ticking.’ He poked his generous paunch.
‘Would you mind if we popped in to see the old place, after a few more?’ Rachel asked. ‘When things are uncertain, well, it is sometimes nice to come back to where things started.’
If Woodfield’s old habits had not changed, a few more gins would take him to near-unconsciousness, and Rachel would be able to go through the old files while he slept blissfully in his office. As plans went, it was not the most sophisticated, but for some time now, the most stringent security measures had been reserved for the Summer Court.
Woodfield looked at her sharply. ‘You are after something now, Rachel, aren’t you? I played the fool around you girls, you know, just for fun, but that does not mean I am one, and you are all grown up. What’s this about, then?’
Rachel sighed. She felt ashamed for trying to get the old man in trouble. Yet her mind was automatically compiling strategies. She could blackmail him: there had been rumours about Woodfield and the girls, back in the day. She could threaten to get him fired by claiming that he felt her up while they were having a drink for old time’s sake. But looking at the clear blue eyes in the dark, gnarled face, the words stuck in her throat.
She sipped her gin and put it down.
‘You are absolutely right, Colonel,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I am looking for an old file that I don’t have the classification to access. A joint Army and Military Intelligence file, from ten years or so ago.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? What do you need it for?’
Rachel hesitated. ‘It’s better if you don’t know the details. It has to do with Spain. But I don’t want to get you in trouble—I will sign the book and everything.’
Woodfield chuckled. ‘Rachel, you can see what I’ve become. Do I look like I care?’ He leaned forward and the golden fillings in his teeth glinted in the light from the pub’s fireplace. ‘I have three brothers in the afterlife, good lads, all went in the war. I never had much of a chance to be brave myself. But you have the look of a person doing something that scares her and is doing it anyway. So if I can help you by digging up some old file, that means more to me than whether you have clearance. Is that understood?’
He smelled of an old man’s sweat and minty toothpaste, but at that moment Rachel could have kissed him.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, and ordered another round of gin.
* * *
Rachel accompanied Colonel Woodfield to the old, shuttered manor house that now archived the papers of every SIS agent, countless files on Service-funded research programmes and cross-referenced research materials going back to the Service’s founding in 1908. She expected to see rooms overflowing with stacked paperwork, but instead, the place was spotless: rows upon rows of neatly organised filing cabinets.
‘I may be a sloppy drunk,’ the colonel said, ‘but I take being a librarian very seriously.’
Still, it took them half an hour to locate the CAMLANN file, a thick brown folder tied shut with a cord. Rachel opened it and glanced at the contents. Apart from the summary and budget pages, the rest was in cipher—neat groups of meaningless letters, pages and pages of it. At the end, there were a few photographs. She was not quite sure what they were, maybe copies of nyctoscope images, but they looked like X-rays, with indistinct black and white shapes.
‘Thank you,’ she told Woodfield.
Woodfield smiled. ‘I hope it is of some use to you, my dear. I look forward to seeing you at the King Harry again when you bring it back.’
* * *
It was long past midnight when Rachel made it home to St John’s Wood. The house was cold and dark.
She had a sleepless night ahead with the CAMLANN file: she would do her utmost to find out if it qualified as chickenfeed, and if possible, censor it before surrendering it to Bloom.
She holed up in her study, wrapped in a blanket with a cup of steaming tea, and fought both the fatigue and the drowsy numbness of the pink gin. The finches were asleep in their cage, curled up into tight feathery balls right next to each other. Rachel felt jealous, thinking of Joe and cold winter nights, lying cocooned under the sheets with a hot water bottle radiating at her feet and Joe’s warm, solid curve against her chest and belly.
He would ship out to Spain in a few days. During the Great War, she was too young to really fear for her friends who were sent to the front, and they tended to view it as a jolly adventure when they headed overseas. Now, death itself held far fewer terrors than back then—but she was more concerned about the danger to Joe’s soul. It would almost be better if he met an early end at the hands of the Republicans rather than be consumed by the thing that the RAF had turned him into.
But there was still a way for her to help him by catching Bloom. Maybe she could request a transfer to the Iberian Section, if things worked out.
She shook her head and tried to concentrate, spread the pages out on the floor and kneeled amongst them, trying to look for patterns. The ciphertext was obviously gibberish without the key—although Bloom might be able to crack it, having spent time at the Government Aetheric Codes and Ciphers School earlier in his career. There were schematics for some kind of deep-kata nyctoscope, an aetheric observatory built in the Summer City. Presumably it had been used to take the X-ray like images, although what they showed she had no idea. There were black branching lines against grey, and countless tiny white patches that could have been luz stones.