Susan MacNeal - Princess Elizabeth's Spy

“What?” Marta put a blue-veined hand to her throat. “I write to my Cousin Albie—we play chess! It’s perfectly innocent!”

“We’ll see about that,” the man said. He gestured to his comrades. “Take her.” Without preamble, they clamped a pair of handcuffs on her and began to lead her out of the house.

“Marta!” Alistair called in anguish.

“It’s all right,” his wife said, trying to reassure him. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

They hustled her out the door and into the waiting van.

“I’ll do everything I can!” Alistair called after her. “I’ll go to the King!”

The London police identified the woman who checked into Claridge’s under a false name and was shot in the bathtub as Victoria Keeley, missing from Bletchley Park. An autopsy had revealed that from the angle of the gunshot wound, suicide was an impossibility.

As soon as the word Bletchley was introduced, MI-5 took over the case.

Peter Frain, head of MI-5, immediately called in Edmund Hope, his Bletchley undercover operative. Edmund was a former London School of Economics professor, until he’d been in a car accident that killed his young wife and severely injured him. He’d been recruited as a spy and been at Bletchley since its inception, posing as a brilliant but mentally unstable codebreaker. But his real job was working for MI-5, tracking a suspected traitor in their midst, one that could ruin everything everyone at Bletchley was trying so hard to achieve. Victoria Keeley’s death could possibly be linked to the spy.

The two men met late at night in a small conference room in Bletchley’s main building, the former manor house. It was the first time the two had seen each other since the events of the summer, where, among other things, Maggie discovered her presumed-to-be-dead father alive and well—and working for MI-5 at Bletchley Park. But Edmund and Frain had worked together for years and enjoyed an easy camaraderie.

“Victoria Keeley worked as a teleprinter,” Edmund explained. “She wouldn’t have access to the decrypts themselves. Bletchley’s extremely careful not to let anyone know anything they don’t need to—each hut knows very little about the other parts of the operation. However, Miss Keeley was beautiful,” he said. “She had a lot of beaux. Specifically, some of the code breakers.”

“Anyone in particular?”

Edmund shrugged. “Lately a young code breaker named Benjamin Batey—I saw them together a few times. He would have had access to that sort of decrypt too. Miss Keeley may have gotten her hands on it somehow and passed it on to someone.”

“There was no decrypt found in the room. Worst-case scenario is that whoever killed her took the decrypt as well.” Frain stood up. “Well, then,” he said. “Let’s bring young Mr. Batey in for a chat, shall we?”

“One more thing,” Edmund told him. “I hear you’re going to have Maggie working with an agent named Hugh Thompson.”

“Yes, Thompson’s good,” Frain replied. “Young but promising. I think they’ll make an excellent team.”

“Considering his family history, do you think that’s wise?”

“They’ll never find out,” Frain said. “Never. I promise you, Edmund.” He held up his hand. “I give you my word.”

Chapter Four

The next morning, Maggie picked her way through the rubble outside David’s flat to get to the Sloane Square tube station, her Rayne pumps crunching on shards of broken glass. A sullen sun tried to shine through an overcast sky. The cold air rang with the wails of sirens from emergency vehicles and stank of smoke, ash, and petrol. Fires still smoldered here and there. A charwoman poured a bucket of dirty water over a dark bloodstain on the pavement, as a body, wrapped in a white bedsheet, was being loaded into a rusty Black Maria.

Maggie saw that an entire townhouse had been flattened the night before. As she passed, she noticed a woman in a Jaeger suit, hat, and gloves stumble and nearly fall over as she took in the wreckage. “This—was—my house,” she said to one of the volunteer firefighters still hosing down the charred remains.

“Get her a seat,” one fireman in a tin helmet called to another. They found a chair that must have been blown out of the window from the force of the explosion. It was silk, singed and covered in soot but still functional. The woman sat down and crossed her ankles primly in the middle of the street. “I went to the country—that’s where my children are—I was only gone one night.…”

The fireman motioned to the ARP warden. “Mug o’ tea for the lady here? She’s had a bit of a shock.” Then he went back to hosing down a smoldering fire.

Maggie gritted her teeth and walked on. Some of the bombed-out shops had put up signs: “Back as soon as we beat Hitler,” “Keep Smiling,” and, at a street fruit seller’s cart, “Hitler’s Bombs Can’t Beat Us—Our Oranges Came Through Musso’s Lake.” On the remains of a wall and floor that had the appearance of a gallows was a rope with a noose tied in it and a sign: “Reserved for Hitler.”

Inside the Tube station, Maggie walked down the stopped escalator steps, careful not to disturb those people who were still sleeping, slumped against the wall with only thin wool blankets for warmth. Since they’d lost their homes, a vast number of people had taken shelter down in the Tube stations. They slept on the steps or in makeshift bunks against the walls on subway platforms. The air was rank with the smell of unwashed bodies and human excrement from the covered buckets lining one wall.

A group of old women in ragged dirt-stained clothes were huddled around a coal brazier, making what Maggie guessed was a pot of tea. She made her way through the sea of humanity and finally caught her train.

She was headed to the offices of the Imperial Security Intelligence Service, which everyone called MI-5. Headquartered in a sandbagged building at 58 Saint James Street, MI-5’s mission was national security.

After showing her ID to one of the guards in the lobby, she was permitted access. The building was massive and her steps echoed along the well-polished hallways. “I’m here to see Mr. Frain, please,” Maggie said to the receptionist, an older woman with thick glasses named Mrs. Pipps.

She hung up her gas mask and coat on the hooks by the door and removed her gloves and placed them in her handbag. Then, straightening her hat, she sat down to wait.

Peter Frain, a spy during the Great War and a former professor of Egyptology at Cambridge after that, became head of MI-5 when Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister in May 1940. Maggie had met him over the summer, after she’d discovered hidden Nazi code pointing to three specific attacks, including the assassination of the Prime Minister. When Frain had seen her in action, plus learned of her fluency in both French and German, he’d asked Maggie to leave her job as secretary for the P.M. and come work for him at MI-5, which she’d done, intrigued by the possibility of working undercover. She’d had high hopes of being dropped behind enemy lines on a clandestine mission.

And despite her wretched showing in the physical tasks at Camp Spook, she was still determined to do it.

Finally, she was ushered into the room to find Peter Frain behind a large oak desk, a reproduction of Goya’s Lord Nelson hanging on the wall behind him, next to an official photograph of King George VI.

Frain had the same black, slick-backed hair and cold gray eyes Maggie remembered, and, despite the privations of wartime, yet another impeccably tailored suit. In front of him was a manila folder, thick with papers. Maggie could see her name on a label and then, over it, the heavy red-inked stamp, TOP SECRET.