‘I’m afraid it’s rather foggy,’ he said, peering out with his pale eyes into a solid curtain of fog.
‘All the better. I am less likely to be followed,’ said Sophia.
‘And cold.’
‘Ssh. Think of our cause, dear Heatherley.’
‘You understand that on no account must you take a taxi,’ he reminded her. A more competent spy, she thought, would have seen the impossibility of walking more than two steps in her high-heeled velvet sandals. Anyhow, what did the man think she was, for heaven’s sake, a marathon walker?
‘No taxi, no indeed.’ She stepped gaily into the fog.
‘Sophia, you’re wonderful.’
‘No! No! Good-bye! Good-bye!’
Heatherley shut the front door. Sophia waited a moment and then she went down the area steps, let herself in at the back door and took off her shoes. The servants were in the servants’ hall with the wireless blazing away, the back-stairs were pitch dark, and Sophia, using her torch, crept up them and hoped that she would not fall over Heatherley and his girl friend, quiet-timing. They could hardly have got there yet, she thought. On the first floor a door led from the back-stairs into the ballroom, a room which was used about twice a year for parties, and otherwise kept shut up, with dust sheets. She was rather surprised to notice, through the cracks of the door, that the lights were on. Wonderful how the quiet-timers seep into everything. She crept to the door and looked through the keyhole. What she saw turned her to stone.
In a group quite near the door stood Florence, Heatherley, Winthrop, a microphone, and Sir Ivor King, the Lieder König.
‘I reckon,’ Heatherley was saying, ‘that she will be gone an hour at the very least, in this fog. Five minutes to the Post, ten minutes to copy out the notices, three-quarters of an hour to the Regal and back. And this is a very conservative estimate, I may add, for the fog is thick outside, and I have not allowed for her stopping to talk to anybody at the Post. So you see there is no danger, and we have ample time for everything. If the servants should happen to hear us, they will only think we have switched on the radio and old Ivor is coming over the air better than usual. But they will surely be listening to him themselves downstairs.’
Florence was looking cross. ‘I still think it was perfectly stupid of you to tell her anything at all.’
‘Say, we’ve talked all this over before, haven’t we? She was wise to everything already, and it was a choice between making her think she was in on the racket, or taking her for a ride. If we had adopted the latter course, the police would have been rubbering round this house and the First Aid Post, and we should have been in a regular spot. Another thing, how would I have got her away this evening if she hadn’t been told the works, or some of them – as it is she’s just eating out of my hand, will do anything I order her to.’
‘Yes, there’s something in that,’ said Florence grudgingly.
‘I tell you,’ Heth continued, ‘I shall be glad when this business is over and we can do a bunk. I’m not so wild about the inspection of the drain tonight; it may mean they are on to something, or it may be just a routine affair. Either way, I don’t like it.’
‘In one minute it will be a quarter of,’ said Winthrop. He took up a position in front of the microphone, gazing at his wrist-watch. The others fell silent.
‘Germany calling, Germany calling,’ Winthrop said, with a very slight German accent and in an entirely different voice from his usual one. ‘Here is the Lieder König who is going to give you one of his inimitable programmes of Song Propaganda, so popular with lovers of song and also with lovers of propaganda the world over. The Lieder König.’
Sir Ivor stepped smartly to the microphone. Sophia saw that, out of deference no doubt to the taste of his employers, he was wearing an Aryan wig of metallic brilliance; each curl was like a little golden spring. He raised his voice in song, ‘Kathleen Mavourneen the Grey Dawn is breaking,’ then he gave a short news bulletin, during the course of which he exactly described that evening’s Low cartoon, and also reminded his listeners that Sir Kingsley Wood was due to visit three aerodromes in Yorkshire the following day.
Then Winthrop spoke. ‘The Lieder König thinks you would like to know certain facts which have come our way recently. In your great, free, British Empire, in the colony of Kenya, to be exact, there are two honest, thrifty, industrious German farmers, Herr Bad and Herr Wangel. These worthy men have been dragged away from their homes, for no better reason than that they were German-born, and put into the local prison. The prison is a wretched hut, the beds in it are unbearably hard, and the central heating hardly works at all. The prisoners are only allowed baths twice a week. But the worst scandal is the food which is offered to these Germans. Let me read out the bill of fare, considered by your Government as being sufficient for two grown men.
‘Breakfast. A liquid supposed to be coffee, some milk substitute, two lumps of beet sugar, pseudo-eggs and a loaf of brackish
