While she was waiting for her tea, Eva began to type out a story she was working on about 'ghost ships' in the Mediterranean but she was interrupted by Deirdre.
'Hello, sweetness, his lordship wants you upstairs. Don't worry, I'll drink your tea.'
Eva climbed the stairs to Romer's office, trying to analyse the complex smell in the stairwell – a cross between mushrooms and soot, ancient stour and mildew, she decided. Romer's door was open and she went straight in without knocking or coughing politely. He had his back to her and was standing staring out of the window at Holborn Viaduct as if its wrought-iron arches held some encoded meaning for him.
'Morning,' Eva said. They had been back in England for four months now, since leaving Ostend, and she supposed, calculating swiftly, she must have seen Romer for about an hour and a half in all that time. The easy familiarity that had seemed to be building in Belgium had disappeared with the collapse of the Agence and the invariable, daily, bad news about the war. Romer, in England, was formal and closed with her (as he was with everyone, the other staff reminded her when she commented on his froideur). The rumours were growing that all the 'irregulars' were to be closed down by the new head of SIS. Romer's day was all but done, so Morris Devereux claimed.
He turned from the window.
'C wants to meet you,' he said. 'He wants to talk about Prenslo.'
She knew who C was and felt a little flutter of alarm.
'Why me?' she said. 'You know as much as I do.'
Romer explained about the continuing ramifications of the Prenslo 'disaster', as he termed it. Of the two British agents captured one was the station-head of SIS in Holland and the other ran the Dutch 'Z' network, a covert parallel intelligence-gathering system. Between the two of them they knew pretty much everything about Britain's spy networks in western Europe – and now they were in German hands, under stringent and unforgiving interrogation, no doubt.
'Everything's gone, or else exposed or insecure and unusable,' Romer said. 'We have to assume that – and what've we got left? Lisbon, Berne… Madrid's a wash-out.' He looked at her. 'I don't know why they want to see you, to be honest. Maybe they think you saw something, that you'll be able to inadvertently tell them why everything went so spectacularly, magnificently wrong.' His tone of voice made it clear he thought the whole exercise was a waste of time. He looked at his watch. 'We can walk,' he said. 'We're going to the Savoy Hotel.'
Eva and Romer strolled down the Strand towards the Savoy. Apart from the sandbags piled up around certain doorways, and the number of uniforms amongst the pedestrians, the scene looked like any other late-summer morning in London, Eva thought, realising as she formed the observation in her mind that she had never spent a peacetime late-summer morning in London before and therefore there was no valid comparison to be made. Perhaps London before the war was entirely otherwise, for all she knew. She wondered what it would be like to be in Paris. Now that would be different. Romer was untalkative, he seemed ill at ease.
'Just tell them everything – as you told me. Be completely honest.'
'Right, I will. The whole truth, etcetera.'
He looked sharply at her. Then he smiled, weakly, and allowed his shoulders to hang for a second.
'There's a lot at stake,' he said. 'A new operation for AAS. I have a feeling that how you come across this morning may have some bearing on all this.'
'Will it just be C?'
'Oh no, I think they'll all be there. You're the only witness.'
Eva said nothing as she took this in and tried to look unconcerned as they turned into Savoy Court and strolled towards the porte-cochere. The uniformed doorman spun the revolving door to admit them but Eva paused and asked Romer for a cigarette. He gave her one and lit it for her. She inhaled deeply, looking at the men and women going in and out of the Savoy. Women in hats and summer dresses, glossy motor cars with chauffeurs, a boy delivering a vast bouquet of flowers. For some people, she realised, a war hardly changed anything.
'Why are we meeting in a hotel?' she asked.
'They love meeting in hotels. Ninety per cent of intelligence meetings take place in hotels. Let's go.'
She stood on her half-smoked cigarette and they went inside.
They were met at reception by a young man and led up two floors and along a corridor of many corners to a suite of rooms. She and Romer were asked to wait in a kind of hallway with a sofa and offered tea. Then a man came in who knew Romer and they stood together in a corner, talking in low voices. This man wore a grey pin-striped suit, had a small trimmed moustache and sleek gingery hair. When he left Romer rejoined her on the sofa.
'Who was that?' she said.
'A complete arse,' he replied, putting his mouth close to her ear. She felt his warm breath on her cheek and her arm and side erupted in goose pimples.
'Miss Dalton?' The first young man stepped through the door and gestured for her to enter.
The room she entered was large and shadowy and she felt the softness and the richness of its carpet beneath her feet. She sensed Romer entering behind her. Armchairs and sofas had been pushed to the walls and the curtains had been half drawn against the August sun. Three tables had been positioned end to end in the middle of the room and four men sat behind them facing a solitary wooden chair set in the middle of the room. Eva was shown towards it, asked to sit down. She saw two other men standing at the rear, leaning against the wall.
A spry elderly man with a silver moustache spoke. No one was introduced.
'This may look like a tribunal, Miss Dalton, but I want you to think of it as just an informal chat.'
The absurdity of this statement made the other three men relax and chuckle. One was wearing a naval uniform, with many gold bands on his wrists. The other two looked like bankers or lawyers, she thought. One had a stiff collar. She noticed one of the men standing in the rear was wearing a polka-dotted bow tie. She glanced quickly behind her to see that Romer was standing by the door with the 'complete arse'.
Papers were shuffled, glances were exchanged.
'Now, Miss Dalton,' Silver Moustache said. 'Tell us in your own words exactly what happened at Prenslo.'
So she told them, taking them through the day, hour by hour. When she finished they began to ask her questions and more and more, she realised they began to centre on Lieutenant Joos and the failure of the double password.
'Who gave you the details of the double password?' a tall jowly man asked her; his voice was deep with a ragged, heavy quality to it; he spoke very slowly and deliberately. He was standing at the rear beside Polka-Dot Bow Tie.
'Mr Romer.'
'You're certain you had it correctly. You didn't make a mistake.'
'No. We routinely use double passwords.'
'We?' Silver Moustache interrupted.
'In the team – those of us who work with Mr Romer. It's completely normal for us.'
There were glances over at Romer. The naval officer whispered something to the man in a stiff collar. He put on a pair of round tortoiseshell spectacles and stared more closely at Eva.
Silver Moustache leant forward. 'How would you describe Lt Joos's response to your second question; "Where can I buy French cigarettes?"?'
'I don't understand,' Eva said.
The jowly man spoke again from the back of the room. 'Did Lt. Joos's answer seem to you like the response to a password, or was it a casual, natural remark?'
Eva paused, thinking back to that moment in the Cafe Backus. She saw Joos's face in her mind's eye, his slight smile, he knew exactly who she was. He had said 'Amsterdam' instantly, confidently, sure that this was the answer she expected.
'I would say, absolutely, that he thought he was giving me the answer to the second password.'