“Can we go somewhere?”

Harry smiled. He still looked exhausted, but the smile lightened him all over, as if he were hovering over the grass and not sunk into it like a boulder. He reached out, linking his fingers through Beth’s. “D’you like music?”

THE SIGN OVER the door read Scopelli’s Music Shop. The premises were closed and shuttered—it was Sunday morning, Beth realized; everyone was at church or at home. She could have been in chapel right now, ignoring her mother’s reproachful stares—instead she was hand-in-hand with a married man, thinking . . .

Well, things that weren’t suitable for chapel.

“I had a job here my last year at King’s College.” Harry let them into the shop and began turning on lights. “Old Mr. Scopelli let me keep a key so I can come on my afternoons off and listen to music.”

Most of the shop was in shadow, but Beth saw booths with chairs and headphones. “What do you listen to?” She’d heard so little music, only what was on the radio that Mrs. Finch thought appropriate. At Aspley Guise, they didn’t have a radio at all.

Harry went to the wall of records, running his fingers along the top shelf. “Since the U-boat blackout, Bach.”

“You said once it was splendidly foursquare,” Beth remembered. “Patterns for days.”

“Maybe that’s why I’ve been burying myself in it. Trying to find U-boat keys in The Well-Tempered Clavier—at least it’s something we haven’t tried at work.” His face darkened briefly, then he gave his head a fierce shake as if to shove Hut 8 and everything about it back into the hole it came from. He pulled a record down. “There . . .” Nodding to the booth at the back. Beth took a seat and Harry dropped into the chair beside her, putting the record on and fiddling with various dials. He shrugged out of his jacket and pushed back his sleeves. “We’ll both hear it this way,” he said, picking up two pairs of headphones and slipping one over Beth’s ears. The world sealed away with a suddenness that surprised her, and she wished she had a pair of these at ISK—then she’d really be able to focus, no distractions of Phyllida’s throat-clearing or Jean’s slight humming . . .

In the artificial silence she looked at Harry, then looped her fingers round his wrist and tugged. His big hand rose to the nape of her neck, then his other hand moved to her hair, tangling slowly through it, and the silence filled up as he kissed her. Not with sound, Beth thought, gripping his loosened collar and pulling him closer, with color. Honey yellow, sunshine yellow, flooded her to the bone in the utter stillness.

He pulled back, hand still warm at the side of her throat. He looked a question at her. She smiled.

He lowered his head, kissed the space between her collarbones, then drew back and pulled the record from its sleeve. Beth saw the label: Bach’s Partita Number 2 in C Minor. He dropped the needle, and a piano began.

Patterns—Beth could hear them unspooling, golden horizontal lines, more melodies adding in, undergirding the first. Patterns mingling, left hand and right. Patterns she didn’t have to solve, just admire. Harry kissed her again. Beth closed her eyes, following the left-hand pattern as it surged, following the pulse in Harry’s neck as it surged under her fingertips. She followed the strong lines of his throat down into his collar, listening, moving her lips to his neck. She felt him swallow, felt his hand make a fist in her hair, and it hurt wonderfully. She had never liked to be touched, but now she couldn’t get close enough. Normally Harry hunkered down in chairs as if to keep his vast size from intimidating anyone, but now she had the feeling of being pulled into the unyielding granite loom of a mountain. He could have broken her between his huge hands like a toothpick and it didn’t frighten her at all—if anything Beth had a fierce thrum of pleasure, because he was nearly shaking with the effort to hold all that strength back, let her be the one to move first.

The world jolted as he tugged her earphones away. “—should stop,” he was saying.

“Why?” Everything was too loud. Beth was curled in his lap, her blouse and brassiere on the floor, Harry’s shirt unbuttoned; they were both breathing hard. Music came tinnily from the discarded earphones.

“I’m not going to get you in trouble.” Harry went through his pockets with a muttered curse. “I didn’t bring anything—didn’t think the day had anything like this in store.”

Beth reached over to her handbag and showed him what she’d swiped from Giles. “I did.”

Harry burst out laughing. “Don’t tell me you marched into a shop and asked for—”

“As if anyone would sell them to me!” She felt the blush come. “Nicked from Giles.”

“Christ, Beth.” Harry put his forehead against hers and laughed in huge, gusting waves. He sounded like he hadn’t laughed in months.

“Does this make me a . . .” Beth hesitated. “I thought I should be prepared. Just in case.”

“You’re a bloody genius.” He swiped the two small packets from her hand. “Mr. Scopelli turned his back room into a bomb shelter—there’s a camp cot and blankets . . .” Harry paused, giving her a look up and down that scoured like coal fire. “Christ, even your nipples blush.”

“Shut up.” Beth reached for the earphones. “I want to hear the end of the partita—”

He swung her off his lap, holding her off the ground close against him, eyes black and ravenous. “Bugger. The partita.”

Chapter 42

Letter from Osla to her Café de Paris Good Samaritan, posted to his London landlady

I don’t know why I’m writing you—my first letter after our meeting at the Café de Paris had no reply. Are you still overseas? Are you even still alive? I hope you are. You provided comfort in one of the worst moments of my life, and somehow you’ve become important to me. Perhaps that’s silly . . . I suppose I’m also writing you because I can’t write to my boyfriend anymore (let’s not get into why) and sometimes I need a page to scream into. This is such a bloody awful war, and I’m so tired of making everyone laugh . . .

“Nothing missing.” Miss Senyard lowered the lid on the last box file. “Will you give it a rest now, Osla?”

Osla nibbled a nail. Months and months it had taken to go through those boxes she thought might have been rifled. She’d told Miss Senyard she was worried about possible missing files, and the older woman had been dubious, but no one could say she wasn’t careful: she and her girls (and Osla, too, pitching in at least an hour after every shift) had gone through every single box and cupboard where signals, reports, and copies were stored. The stacks took up whole walls now that German naval section was consolidated. “Goddamn,” a visiting American colonel had whistled last week. “If this were the Pentagon, there would be rows and rows of shiny filing cabinets with nothing in them, and you do it all in goddamn shoeboxes.”

Well, Osla had seen every one checked and cross-correlated, and she was floored at all points: nothing appeared to be missing. Maybe whoever rifled through just copied down what they wanted before scarpering, she thought. But if there was a way to check for that, she didn’t know what it was.

“Thanks awfully, ma’am,” she told Miss Senyard. “I know you’re glad to call this project a dead end.” She’d made inquiries about the missing Hut 3 files too (the ones Travis wouldn’t admit to) and met a wall of You dinnae need to know. There was no uproar or further investigation from the mansion, and no one had been sacked from BP for carelessness—that sort of news made itself known all over the Park—so perhaps the missing files had turned up without fuss. Perhaps they’d simply been mislaid. With thousands of reports flowing through BP, surely the odd stack of paper ended up in the wrong drawer from time to time.

So let it go, her common sense advised as she headed back to Aspley Guise, but Osla didn’t entirely want to let it go. At least the mystery had kept her occupied, and there hadn’t been much in the way of bright spots lately. No more Hut 4 now that they’d moved to the big, anonymous new block; fewer jokes and more strange faces all around. No Philip to bring a jolt of sunshine into her veins; he was out at sea. No escape from tragedy when Osla translated gleeful Nazi reports in July about tracking Convoy PQ17 and sinking twenty-four of thirty ships . . .

And certainly no cessation of nightmares when she closed her eyes at night. Osla wrote her Good Samaritan about that, mainly because she couldn’t think who else to tell, wrapped up in his old overcoat, which still smelled like heather and smoke. Sometimes she slept in it. It smelled like a man, even if it wasn’t Philip, and then she could pretend she had her head on his shoulder and wasn’t just lying in the dark in her narrow bed, dying of loneliness.