‘On your egg?’ Heatherley put down his soup-spoon and looked completely blank.
‘Yes, yes. Think. Of course it must have been you. This morning I had a boiled egg for breakfast, and written on the shell, in pencil, it had agony 22.’
‘Sophia, now, why would I write on your egg when I could so easily call you, come round and see you, or leave a note for you here?’
Why indeed? Sophia felt that she had been a fool.
‘Well, you said that we must be so careful, that our letters would be opened, and our telephone tapped –’
‘If your telephone can be tapped, so could your egg be. No, Sophia, we need to be very, very careful, but there’s no sense in writing on eggs, no sense at all, when we can meet all we want to both at the Post and in this house.’
‘Anyway, what is our next move? I want to start work,’ said Sophia, to change the painful subject.
‘I was just coming to that.’ Heatherley paused and seemed to consider her. ‘How are your nerves?’ he said. ‘Pretty good? Fine. I have a very delicate job that I wish to entrust to you, delicate, and it may be dangerous. Are you game?’
‘Oh, yes, Heatherley, I think so.’
‘O.K. Well, presently, when you have quite finished your dinner, I want you to go back to the Post.’
Sophia was not pleased. She had spent eight hours in the Post that day, and had left, as she always did, with a feeling of immense thankfulness and relief. The idea of going back there after dinner did not appeal to her at all.
Heatherley went on, ‘You are to make a list of all the nurses there on night duty. Then I want a copy of every word that is written on the notice-board. When you have done that, go to the Regal Cinema and pin an envelope containing the copy to the second stall in the third row on the left-hand side of the centre gangway. You can give me the list of the nurses tomorrow; that is less important. One last word of instruction – on no account take a taxi, that might be fatal. You will be safe enough if you walk it.’
‘Well, really,’ said Sophia, ‘that is far sillier than writing on eggs. Why can’t whoever is going to the third stall in the second row walk into the Post and see for himself what is written on the notice-board?’
‘Sophia.’ Heatherley gave a fish-like look which for a moment, and until she remembered it was only old Heth, quite struck a chill into her heart. ‘Are you, or are you not going to help me in clearing out a nest of dangerous spies? Let me tell you that Florence communicates with the rest of her gang by means of that notice-board. My friend cannot go to the Post himself, it would be as much as his life is worth to venture near it. If I were seen to be in communication with him, I too would have short shrift, but it is of vital importance that he should know what is on the board tonight. I can’t get away from this Brotherhood meeting without arousing Florence’s suspicions, but I thought I had seen a way of fixing things. I thought you would go for me.’
‘Oh, all right, Heth, I will. I only meant it sounded rather silly, but I see now that it has to be done. Have some apple flan.’
11
Now although Sophia supposed herself to be such a keen and enthusiastic spy, she had not really the temperament best suited to the work. It was not in her nature, for instance, to relish being sent out on a cold and foggy evening, after she had had her bath and changed her clothes, in order to do an apparently pointless job for somebody who could quite well do it for himself. Obviously if Heatherley could be closeted for ages in the coal-hole, if he could dine for more than an hour behind a locked door, he could easily escape from the house without Florence or anybody else noticing that he had gone, and do his own dreary work. So she determined that somehow or another she would wriggle out of going, but of course without annoying her Chief as she had not the least intention of being excluded from the delights of counter-espionage, and this might well happen should she be caught out disobeying orders. Sophia was very good at not doing things she disliked, and soon her plans were laid. She remembered that, exasperated by her long and unequal struggle with the overalls, she had herself, that very evening, written out a notice to the effect that those nurses who wanted to have their overalls sorted when they came back from the wash, should write their names clearly both on the overalls themselves and on their pigeonholes so that Sophia should know where to put them. When she had pinned this to the board, there had been no other notice there, and she had been particularly pleased, thinking that more attention would be paid to it on this account. Now a notice written out by Sophia could not, in the nature of things, contain Florence’s secret instructions to her corps of spies. Sophia therefore decided that she would explain to Heatherley that there had been nothing on the notice-board; impossible to make a copy of nothing, so she had done no more about it. That disposed of the notice-board. As for the list of nurses on night duty, she could find that out from Sister Wordsworth’s ledger in the morning. And in order to make perfectly certain of not seeing Heatherley before she arrived at the Post she decided to go immediately after breakfast to Phyllis Earle and have her hair done.
As soon as
