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“I know, head of MI6.” Lucas felt frozen in place. He forced himself to get to his feet and leave the pile of books exactly where it was. Not that it was proof of anything. There was nothing to show that Stoney had left them there, or that they meant anything at all, except that they were out of place. “Jo, we must leave. Take the photographs; we’ll work on them at home.”
“Are you going to tell the police?”
“No use at all. We have no proof, and even if they know it was MI6, they still think we are a couple of old duffers looking for something to do to make ourselves important again. No, I don’t know who I’ll tell. I’ll have to think about this very hard. Surely, Peter first.”
“But he’s not here,” said Josephine. “He’s flown to Trieste.”
“Elena,” he said softly, and saw the shadows change in her face.
“Lucas, she doesn’t know anything about Stoney,” she argued.
“She knows about the Fatherland Front and Aiden Strother, who is our man in Trieste,” Lucas answered. “Strother is on our side. He was a deliberate deep plant in the Nazi side. She’s gone to rescue him.” He saw from Jo’s face that she only half believed that. “At least that’s what Peter thinks,” he added.
“Then why has he gone to Trieste, too?” she asked.
“To get Elena out, and possibly Strother as well. I think the net is tightening. The Front is going to move sooner than we thought.”
When Josephine spoke, her voice had a slight tremor that she could not hide. “And what are we going to do?”
“We are going home.” He took her by the arm and, putting the photographs in his inside pocket, guided her to the back door, locking it behind him and walking toward the car. “And we’re going to study those numbers until we know what they mean,” he went on, as he started the engine and drove the car back into the road.
He thought about it all the way home, almost oblivious to the great sweep of clouds towering white into the blue of the sky. The avenue of beech trees burned bronze and gold with dying leaves. Three times Josephine had to tell him to watch the road, mind the corners. The road held a beauty that usually seized his imagination and his senses, but today all he could think of was Stoney, knowing that he had minutes to live and leaving him the only clue he could: a pile of books on the floor that offered names that spelled out Bradley, and old photographs that almost certainly had no meaning to anyone else, taken over half a century ago, when the slaughter and ruin of the war was unimaginable. How impossibly young they were then. “We must find the places these references indicate,” he said, as he stopped the car at their house, “and what happened there, on those dates. That will tell us something.”
* * *
—
But it told them nothing. The dates covered almost two years leading up to the present day, and the places were cities in France, England, Spain, Italy, and the United States of America.
“I keep feeling it should be about money,” Josephine said, her voice tired and a little hoarse. She rose to her feet stiffly. “I’ll get us a cup of tea, and perhaps a couple of sandwiches. We forgot lunch.”
He smiled at her bleakly. “I’m sorry, I…” But he did not know what else to say. “I feel as if it should be about money, too, but who donates odd amounts like 15,522 pounds four shillings and three pence? There isn’t a round figure among them.”
Suddenly, as if a dark cloud had been pushed aside, Josephine said, “Tea can wait, unless you want to make it. You’ll find cold lamb in the pantry, and you know where the bread and butter are.”
Lucas was suddenly alert. He knew that voice, the controlled excitement. “What?”
“And don’t make the slices too thick.”
“Jo! Tell me!”
She flashed him an almost mischievous smile. “Not the lamb, Lucas, the bread. Don’t make doorsteps of the bread. Go on!”
It took him a quarter of an hour to boil a kettle, make the tea properly—heating the pot first, letting the tea steep—then cut the sandwiches by buttering the loaf and then slicing it so it did not fall apart, finally placing the meat carefully. He did not care in the least about making the sandwiches nicely, but he knew she did. And she needed time to follow through on her idea, without him breathing down her neck.
When he finally walked back into the sitting room carrying the tray, setting it down on the table, he found her scribbling lines of figures all over sheets of paper and smiling.
“Tea’s up,” he said, half expecting her not to hear him.
She looked up at him, her face shining with victory. “Thank you, my dear. And I know what it is! These are amounts of money from different places, the dates on which they were transferred in rounded amounts, and in the original currency.” Her smile widened. “But when you exchange them into German marks, they come out odd numbers, of course, and slightly different amounts from day to day…as the exact exchange values go up and down. But they always start as round numbers. Here, look at this.” She indicated the first one she had done. “This is thirty thousand pounds on the twentieth of January 1932. It’s an odd number changed to this amount exactly, but it tallies precisely with the exchange rate that day, plus the cost of the transaction.” She pointed to another set of figures. “This one is fifty thousand American dollars. It works out on this date, the fourth of February 1932, at this amount of money.” She indicated another set of seemingly erratic numbers. “Lucas, they all work out to the penny, or whatever it is, when you know what you’re looking at. It’s exactly right, it’s proof. There’s no way on earth this could be coincidental, and it’s an enormous amount. I am over halfway through, but the amounts are getting larger, and there is more than seven million here. Look.” She turned the page round so he could see.
And he could. Once you knew what you were looking at, it was crystal clear. “I’ll write down a copy of it,” he said, “after we’ve had a cup of tea. And then, when it’s all finished, I’ll take it to Churchill, just to cover myself. We can’t be the only people who know this, for our own safety as well as the
survival of the truth. Then I’ll take it to the home secretary.”
He must be careful to whom he spoke, but he knew the home secretary, Sir John Gilmour, was trustworthy. Those who wanted to avoid another war at any price were easy enough to understand, even to sympathize with. The difference lay in what they believed the alternative would be. Lucas believed it would be a slow corruption, with people ultimately being consumed by violence and hysteria. He had no wish to die on any battlefield, but he preferred that to slowly giving in again and again, until you become so like the enemy you cannot tell yourself apart.
* * *
