The C-G’s mouth twitched. ‘You loved him?’
The truth was bitter, and this time it demanded a voice. He deserved at least that much.
‘I only knew him for a few days. With more time? Maybe. I liked him, and I respected him, and that’s a good start. But he was my responsibility, at least while he was with me, and I let him down.’
‘How so?’
‘I couldn’t save him.’
‘I rather think he made his own decision, Miss de Mornay. There wasn’t much you could do the moment he confronted the Nazis.’ He looked away and drained his glass. ‘Where are you staying?’
‘I’ve taken a hotel room in the city,’ I lied.
‘Where?’
‘Close enough that I can be here by 10 a.m. That should give you enough time to contact Baker Street and decide what to do with me.’
‘You know I can’t let you go.’
I moved back to the window.
‘You’ll stay here, a guest of Dona Araceli Ortega.’
‘Guest?’
‘She has a town house nearby and will see to you until your Major Buckmaster tells us what to do with you.’
The C-G opened the door and talked in soft tones to a porter. The man was stout and swarthy, bowing to me before ushering me out. He called for a car and driver. Closed the door for me and stood back as I was driven away.
‘The Hotel Orfila, please.’
It was the hotel I’d stayed at five years and a lifetime ago. On my honeymoon. I wasn’t sure why I said it; the C-G wouldn’t risk letting me disappear.
The driver smiled in the rear-view mirror, showing kind eyes and yellow teeth. He ignored my directions, driving to a private house, four storeys high, in a fashionable part of town.
‘Safe,’ he said, as if such a place still existed on Earth, and opened the door for me.
I stayed in Dona Araceli’s house for two days. Elegant women and smartly dressed men bustled in and out, asking questions, offering sympathy and Spanish brandy. They spoke to me in kind tones, and of me in hushed whispers.
Finally, a man came to the house with thin hair slicked back over his head and the smell of someone who ate too much garlic. He presented a small valise to me with a flourish.
‘What is it?’ I asked, without any real interest in the answer.
‘Clothing. Beautiful things.’ He flashed his teeth in what could almost pass for a smile.
‘Why?’
‘For you,’ he said, confusion clouding his expression. ‘What pretty woman does not like such things?’
After waiting around in Dona Araceli’s cast-offs while the ruddy C-G decided what to do with me, I was in no mood to contemplate what this meant. I retraced my steps into the parlour. He followed me, and pushed the case into my hands.
‘Please, señora. It is a gift.’
‘Gifts rarely come without a price.’
In the end, I acquiesced. He waited outside my bedroom door as I changed into a new dress. I glanced out of the window. Would they give chase if I climbed down the trellis and slipped from their grasp? Pity I couldn’t be bothered. But wherever they were taking me, I wasn’t about to go unarmed. My guns had been taken into ‘safekeeping’, but I still had Alex’s little dagger. Whether they believed my story that I wanted to personally return it to Alex’s family, or whether they thought it was harmless enough, leaving the sgian dubh in my custody was considered a safe compromise.
I secured it to my thigh using a silk scarf, clipping the ends to minimise any bulk and leaving them where they fell. Let the C-G and bloody Dona Araceli wonder about that. I closed the door behind me and brushed past the man in the hallway.
‘How beautiful you are, señora,’ he said.
His eyes lingered on me as he reached for the case and escorted me to a limousine with diplomatic tags and darkened windows. He stored the valise in the boot and slid into the passenger seat beside the chauffeur.
Instead of driving east to the city and the consulate, we drove west. There was a plan afoot, but for the life of me, I couldn’t muster the energy to care.
*
The heat increased my lethargy. Hazy sunshine burned off by midday, turning the sky a shade of blue that hurt my eyes. I prayed for rain and an end to the cloud that had insulated me since Alex’s death.
The men had stopped trying to make conversation, leaving me to stare out the windows of the limousine at the passing countryside, arid and red.
On the fourth day we reached a checkpoint. It was bigger than the ones we’d passed, and I roused from my stupor as we stopped at the barricade. The C-G’s man, still sitting beside the chauffeur, handed over three sets of papers.
One of the men riffled through our documents, holding each up to the light and comparing our faces to the photographs. He leant around the chauffeur to have a closer look at me. I stared back, uninterested.
Finally, he grunted and returned the papers.
‘Welcome to Portugal,’ he said.
As if that should mean something special.
Part 2
Lisbon, June 1943
Chapter Nine
We passed through three towns connected by long stretches of barren before pulling to the side of the road. A dusty motor car with a Portuguese licence disc was already parked there. Heat emanated from it, surrounding it in a wavering halo, and a short round man with slicked back hair leant against the bonnet, smoking and fanning himself with a newspaper. He tossed the paper into the passenger seat.
‘Good trip?’ he said, exhaling a cloud of bitter smoke.
The C-G’s man shook his hand while the other transferred my case to the other vehicle. He opened the door for me.
‘End of the line, beautiful.’
It should have sounded ominous and I should have been terrified. Being driven across a border and handed over to a man who looked like a tuskless boar wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but if they wanted to kill me, they would have done that
