Dori in her hallway, still in her shantung dressing gown. A weak, winter sun casting a slanting light through the frosting of filth on the fanlight.
‘Let yourself out, will you, darling?’ She hadn’t even glanced at the young man hovering behind her. ‘I’ll call.’
The door opening, shutting. Dori sorting through the post.
Bill, bill, bill, squinting against the smoke curling from her cigarette, adding to a pile of unopened brown envelopes. Then Dori Stansfield. German stamp. Postmark Hamburg. That was more like it. She’d left the rest and took the letter down to the basement kitchen.
Atlantic Hotel stationery. Very snazzy. Only just got there and already busy. She had been certain that Edith would come through. Vera had been the tiniest bit sceptical but Dori had no doubts at all.
‘You handle her,’ Vera had told her. ‘She’s your Joe.’
Time to get busy. Dori collected the Radiation Cookery Book and sat at the kitchen table with pad and pencil. Edith had met Drummond on the train. Identified him as being of interest. Well spotted, Edith. And useful. Vera could do a little cross-checking. See what Drummond made of their latest recruit. She’d been rather expecting that encounter. The next one was more of a puzzle. Part code, part crossword. Breakfast Omelette to be found in Egg, Cheese and Vegetarian Dishes, Ham and Eggs in Breakfast Dishes. Dori flipped to the relevant pages. McHale in the British Zone interested in von Stavenow. He must have heard more than they thought.
Dori had known McHale in France, seen him operating. Seen him go down a line of traitors, collaborators and German prisoners and shoot each one in the back of the neck with a gleam in those blue eyes and a glimmer of a smile, as though he was enjoying it.
Edith had added a note. Crêpe Suzette meant Adeline. It was her favourite dish. Edith had invented a memorably disgusting wartime version with marmalade and gin. Danger meant danger. Most unpalatable. A threat to Adeline? Adeline was a big girl. She could look after herself. Dori went back to the McHale message. Americans on the hunt in the British Zone? War Crimes would be interested. She’d pass that on to Vera. It would put the wind up Intelligence. Vera would find a way to pass that on.
She turned to the next menu. Edith had met one Adams (Meat: Roasting). Dori knew him. Of him, anyway. SIS during the war. Now in Germany with Military Intelligence. One of Leo’s men. Good to know who was running Edith.
She’d really taken to the work. Dori knew she would. Dori burned her transcriptions in the Aga and slotted the recipes in her copy of the Radiation Cook Book next to a cutting for Stella Snelling’s 10 Quick and Nourishing Winter Suppers.
Dori smiled. She taken a pride in cultivating Edith’s ‘Stella’ side. It was this that made her different, that had intrigued and attracted, an imago emerging, but it was the real Edith that Dori was putting her faith in now. Practical and dependable, her very ordinariness would be her cover. Something that Leo recognized, too, but he’d reckoned without her high moral sense. He’d lost his a long time before, if he’d ever owned such a thing, which was doubtful. Most people wouldn’t associate Dori with any kind of morality. Slept around, drank like a fish, racketed about generally. She stared into the glowing heart of the Aga. She’d killed and had killings carried out on her orders, but for all her sins, she’d never been a traitor and there had been a traitor at the heart of SOE. Too many agents betrayed, too many circuits blown. Any hopes of finding whom it might be vanishing by the day. Files already disappearing: lost, stolen, strayed, unaccountably mislaid. Dori wouldn’t be surprised to hear of a fire in some distant depot or mothballed air station. Either that, or they would be sealed safely away until everyone even remotely involved was dead, gone and forgotten. Or Hell froze over, whichever was the sooner.
The answer lay in Germany. Vera was back there now with Drummond at War Crimes in Bad Oeynhausen, involved in a desperate race to find out what had happened to the girls and men who had disappeared into the camps and who had not come back. The sands were shifting. Drummond’s outfit had been officially disbanded; SOE wound up months ago, the likes of Dori out on their ear with a ‘wham, bam, thank you, mam’, as the Yanks would have it. The Secret Intelligence Service were taking over, Leo and the boys of MI6. As a woman and of foreign extraction, old Dori was suddenly suspect. Vera was still operative but for how much longer?
Dori was desperate to get out there. She felt the obligation to the missing agents as deeply as Vera and civvy street didn’t suit her. Ever since VE Day, she’d been restless. Once the euphoria was over, she’d found herself seeking excitement elsewhere: drinking too much, mixing in bad company, dabbling in the black market. More than dabbling. She could do with getting out of London for a while. Then there was the guilt. Always there, no matter how much gin she drank, a darkness running under her waking life, surfacing in dreams where she saw the girls’ faces, heard their screams. Last confirmed sighting: Number 84 Avenue Foch.
They both felt duty bound to the missing agents, Dori knew: Vera because she’d sent them over in the first place; Dori because she’d come back. It went beyond finding out what had happened; there was a need to see justice done, to see those responsible brought to book. The ones who’d given the orders were already slipping away.
Dori needed to be in Germany but there was some snafu with her papers. Understandable on the face of it, but all her enquiries were meeting obfuscation or an escalating official impatience. Nothing stated but much implied. If Dori made any more of a fuss, Dori wouldn’t be going at all. Cue for Dori to pipe down and toe the line. It went against her temperament but, all in all, it might be no bad thing. With Edith in the field, she might be more useful here. She looked at her watch. Time to toddle to the Special Forces Club. She’d arranged to meet someone who might know something about the girls they were seeking: rumours of a group of women who had been brought to a small camp called Natzwieler; a Nacht and Nebel place tucked away in the Vosges Mountains, a place where prisoners were made to disappear, where they were vernebelt, ‘transformed into mist’. Her contact had reported it months ago but his report had been lost, buried or ignored. Now he was collecting evidence on his own account.
Who were these women? How did they get there and on whose orders? That’s what she needed to find out.