‘I’m sorry, chaps, but until we find out why these attacks on the shipping convoys keep happening, all leave is suspended,’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson said, and a collective groan rippled around the NAAFI. There were about thirty of us jammed in here: everyone on the station except the men currently on watch over at the ops site. The previous watch, who’d been on overnight, hadn’t even had time to go back to their huts and were slumped in their seats, grey-faced with fatigue. ‘I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this,’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson continued, ‘but we’re beginning to suspect that not only is information about the convoys being leaked to the enemy somehow, but that it’s someone here in Fiskersay who’s doing it.’
The groans turned to exclamations. We all turned to look at each other. ‘Are you saying we’ve got a spy lurking about somewhere?’ Len Kane said, sounding incredulous.
‘I’m afraid so, yes.’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson took a sheet of paper from his breast pocket, unfolded it and crossed the NAAFI to pin it to the wall. ‘Sergeant Black and I have been asked to interview each of you – a nasty business, and we feel as uncomfortable about it as you do, but those are the orders, I’m afraid. Everyone’s names are on this list and when it’s your time, you must come over to the Manor. We’re starting straight away.’
‘Well, when you find out who it is, let us know, and we’ll all line up to help you wring his bloody neck,’ Len said, scowling, as we made our way over to look at the list. As I searched for my name – it was near the top, and I was expected over at the Manor in an hour’s time – I wondered if Jackson was right and there was a spy somewhere. It would certainly explain the sudden increase in raids. But surely it couldn’t be anyone at the station. How would they be getting hold of the information in the first place? We weren’t told about shipping movements near Shetland; like everything else to do with the war, information was given out on a strictly need-to-know basis; a whole fleet of submarines could have sneaked past Svarta Ness and we’d have been none the wiser.
Damn. What was I going to tell Rose? Leave from the station was hard enough to come by at the best of times, but I’d finally managed to secure fourteen days – which, what with having to take the ship to Lerwick, then another to the Scottish mainland where I’d wait at a rest camp for God knows how long before catching a train, and the train journey itself, then all that again in reverse, would be more like nine or ten – and I’d been planning to spend it in London with a quick visit to an old family friend near York en route.
As I headed back to Hut 1 to wait, I thought about the body Hedda and I had found nine days ago. The man had been identified as Ruben Clarke, a warrant officer with the Royal Navy, and he’d been part of a crew taking a convoy across to Iceland from Scotland that was ambushed by the Germans. Clarke was the only man who’d been found; the rest of the crew were still missing, presumed dead.
When the time came for my interview, I made my way to the Manor, really just an ordinary, two-storey house in need of a new coat of whitewash and desperate for a lick of paint on the window frames and front door. The interviews were taking place in the dining room, which had been turned into an office. Flight Lieutenant Jackson looked more uncomfortable than ever as he and Sergeant Black, his deputy, questioned me about what I’d been doing and who I was with when I wasn’t on duty.
‘You’ve been spending time with that Norwegian woman, haven’t you?’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson said.
I frowned. ‘Hedda? Yes – we see each other at dances sometimes, and we go for walks. That’s all there is to it, though – we’re just friends.’ For some reason, as I said that, I felt my face warm up, remembering those moments where something – I still wasn’t sure what the hell it had been – had passed between us.
‘What she is to you is none of our business, Sergeant,’ Flight Lieutenant Jackson said. ‘We need to find out what’s going on, that’s all. And, well…’ He cleared his throat. ‘She has come from a country occupied by the Nazis.’
The truth of what he was saying suddenly dawned on me. ‘But didn’t you interview her when she first came here?’ I said. ‘Surely if she was a spy, you would have found out then?’
‘I’m sure we would have,’ Jackson said. ‘All the same, I ask that you do not talk to her about any of this.’
I nodded. ‘I understand, Sir.’ I wouldn’t have told Hedda anything anyway; we all knew the consequences of talking about the work we did here. I was certain, though, that the spy wasn’t Hedda. It couldn’t be.
After that, the questioning moved on. When he was satisfied that I knew nothing about how the shipping information might be reaching German ears, Flight Lieutenant Jackson let me go. ‘And remember, none of this leaves the station,’ he repeated in a warning tone as I went to the door.
‘Of course not, Sir.’
‘Very good, Sergeant. Dismissed.’
Outside, I passed a hand over my eyes. Christ, I needed a cup of tea. My head was a jumble as I thought about Hedda, the spy, and how I was going to break the news to Rose that I couldn’t get to London after all.
*
I ended up getting permission to telephone Rose’s flat in London later that morning from the clerk’s office. A letter would’ve taken too long to reach her, if it even reached her at all. But Rose wasn’t there. ‘She’s off travelling with that group of hers,’ the woman who’d answered – her landlady – told me.
‘Did she say where she was going? And how long she’d be?’ I said, frowning. Rose hadn’t said anything in her last letter about going away with her unit again before I came to London. Perhaps it had been a last-minute thing.
‘Oh, no, she never tells me anything. Here one minute and gone the next, that’s her, though I expect she’ll be back in a few days – she usually is.’ The landlady sounded sour. I remembered what Rose had told me about her in one of her letters a few months ago: Mrs Cooke is an absolute dragon, you’re not allowed to run taps or have the gramophone or the radio on after 10 p.m., and if you go out for the evening and she catches you on the stairs when you come back, she looks at you as if you’ve been out walking the streets. My goodness, I will be so glad when this awful war is over and we’re married and have a place to call our own!
‘Well, if you see her, could you please pass on a message from Bill Gauthier?’ I said.
Mrs Cooke sighed heavily; I’d never met her, and Rose hadn’t described her to me, but in my mind’s eye I saw a thin, middle-aged woman wearing a hairnet, thick stockings and sturdy shoes, her mouth twisted in a perpetual scowl. ‘Go on, then,’ she said, the if I really must unspoken but clear as a bell.
‘Can you tell her my leave next week has been cancelled, please? And if you don’t mind, perhaps I can give you the number of my station so you can pass it on to her when she comes back?’
Mrs Cooke let out another long breath. I added a cigarette, permanently dangling from her lower lip, to my mental picture of her.
‘Right,’ she said, and repeated the number back to me. ‘That it?’
‘It’s a two at the end, not a three,’ I said.
‘Two not a three. Got it,’ she said in a tone that left me feeling rather unsure if she had. ‘Anything else?’
‘No, that’s all. Thank you.’ I hung up, feeling more deflated than ever.