Marina, panicked, looked out of the window. The train was tearing through fields filled with hay ricks turned into golden pyramids by the sun.
‘You’ll throw me into a field?’
‘Or you can buy a new ticket,’ he sneered.
‘I can?’ A surge of relief. ‘Oh, thank you.’ Marina had brought all the money she had in the world. How rich she had felt when she had emptied her money box on her bed and counted the coins several times just to be sure of the grand total. ‘Eleven shillings and a ha’penny,’ she’d sighed, happily.
She reached for her purse. How fortunate to be rich. ‘That’s fifteen shillings – as you’re sitting in first class,’ the ticket collector smiled a tight, mean smile. Marina swallowed.
‘Is there a problem, inspector?’ A young woman in a neat blue-and-white striped suit with a white ruffled blouse had appeared in the corridor behind the guard. She wore a small straw hat perched on top of a pile of exuberant auburn hair
He turned and looked at her, his mouth open. ‘There is a problem. And it’s sitting right there. This urchin has got on my train without a ticket!’
The woman’s mouth twitched in amusement. ‘The “problem” seems very well dressed for an urchin, don’t you think, inspector? And on the way to a smart new school, looking at the uniform.’
‘That’s all part of the charade,’ the man sneered. ‘But in all my years on the trains, I’ve never seen an urchin as brazen as this!’
‘I didn’t mean to get on without a ticket,’ Marina said quickly. ‘I just wanted to see my father. Oh, please don’t put me off the train. His boat leaves Portsmouth at three o’clock . . .’
The woman looked concerned. ‘Don’t worry, inspector, I’ll get the child’s ticket.’ She reached into the large leather portmanteau she was carrying and pulled out her purse. ‘How much is a half to Portsmouth?’
‘Tickets are meant to be purchased before boarding the train,’ the man muttered. But he got out a notebook and wrote out the ticket.
‘I’m sure the child won’t make the same mistake again.’ She handed over a pound note. ‘Keep the change. For your trouble.’
The man quickly pocketed the money – a tip so extravagant that he didn’t want the woman to reconsider – and handed over the ticket. Giving Marina a strange look, he stepped aside to let the young woman take her seat.
She sat down opposite Marina, placing the large leather portmanteau carefully on the seat next to her. She smoothed out her skirt and smiled brightly. She looked like an illustration in Ivy’s Society News.
‘Thank you so much,’ Marina said, blushing. ‘I will pay you back, I promise. As soon as I see my father, I’ll ask him for the money.’
‘Perhaps next time you decide to board a train without a ticket and very little money, you should sit in the third-class carriage.’ The woman clipped her consonants when she spoke. Where was she from? Marina wondered. The woman wagged her finger. She was wearing very clean white crocheted gloves. Her skirt was so daringly short that it showed an inch of calf above the top of her neatly laced red boots. She undid her jacket, revealing a bunch of silk pansies tucked into the waistband of her skirt. ‘And what are you doing on this train? Are you going to school? That uniform looks very like the one I used to wear at my dreadful school. Brrr . . .’ She shivered. ‘It didn’t matter how many layers I wore, I was always cold. The matron insisted on keeping the dormitory windows open all day, all night, even in the dead of winter.’ While she was talking, she produced a tin of boiled sweets and offered Marina one. She took two for herself.
‘I was going to school,’ Marina said, pushing the sweet into her cheek while she talked. ‘But when I saw the Portsmouth train, I thought I could go and see my father.’ She swapped the sweet over to the other cheek. ‘Before he leaves for Cadiz.’
‘Cadiz?’ The woman frowned. ‘Is he sailing on the Neptune?’ She pulled off one of her gloves with her small, even teeth.
‘How do you know that?’
She put out her hand. ‘Miss Gaby Smith, secretary to the First Sea Lord. So I know all about the British naval ships. And their sailors. What’s his name?’
‘Commander Patrick Denham.’
‘But he doesn’t have a child . . .’ Miss Smith shook her head emphatically. ‘Unless the details in his file are wrong.’ She pulled a face as if she were making a very hard calculation in her head. And then, without any warning, she laughed, dimpling her cheek. ‘And yet here you are.’
‘Here I am.’
‘He’s a good man, Denham. Signals expert. Worked in Room 40.’ She glanced at the compartment door and leant forward, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘Room40 is where they put the really clever chaps. The ones who can make up codes that bamboozle the enemy.’
‘My father is very good at crosswords,’ Marina offered.
‘And he speaks a lot of languages. That’s always helpful. Do you take after him? Are you good at languages and puzzles?’
‘Oh, no,’ Marina said, hastily. But Miss Smith looked even more interested.
‘You’d be surprised at the information I find in those dusty old files,’ she went on. ‘No one else thinks to read them. Your father is very musical. I found that out by reading his file. A lot of people who are good at mathematics and codes are musical. I suppose because music is just another code, after all. Perhaps you are musical?’ She raised an eyebrow.
Marina’s father had banned her from singing, or indeed any sort of music. He said he found her voice ‘upsetting’. But this she could not admit to the woman sitting opposite.
‘Oh, I am very musical,’ Marina said. The thing to do when telling a lie was to really believe what you were saying. She
