Say YES.

If you don’t, you’ll rot in a madhouse the rest of your life. Osla and Mab testified against you. Your mother testified against you. No one will save you.

Give me what I want.

Beth looked up. “Who gave you this?”

But the driver only snatched the paper back. “Yes or no?”

“Do you even know what you’re asking? It is a traitor who paid you off.”

A snort. “What I heard was you took something that didn’t belong to you, that’s all. You’re on the way to a loony bin, and you’re saying I should believe your story over that?”

“When the others come back with the petrol, I’ll tell them—”

“Go ahead.” The driver held the typed message out the window, set it on fire with his cigarette, and watched it flare up brightly before dropping it into the road. “I’ll deny everything. I’ve driven for them for five years, and you’re a crazy bint with veins full of sedative. So, yes or no? I get another five quid when I give your answer back.”

To the informer. Whoever that was, they’d done a fine job of sewing her up, Beth thought bitterly. It wasn’t hard to seed doubt about a codebreaker cracking up. As far as BP was concerned, she was a potential risk that had been plugged; they’d forget about her and plunge into the chaos of the Normandy landings. Distantly, Beth wondered how that invasion was progressing. Allied soldiers might be battling through waves on those distant beaches already, and she wasn’t at her desk—she’d never sit at that desk again. For an instant, that hurt more than the knowledge she was headed to a madhouse.

You took it from me, she thought to the traitor in a flash of murderous fury. In one day, she’d been stripped of everything: her job, her friends, her oath, her home, her dog, her freedom.

Not everything, Dilly Knox said. You’re the cleverest of my Fillies.

“So?” The driver looked impatient. “Yes or no?”

Beth doubled over with a sudden gasp, clutching at her lower belly. Reaching under her skirt to her soaked sanitary towel, she brought her hand out covered in blood. “My monthly—”

Like most men, the driver went completely to pieces when confronted with a woman’s private functions. He fumbled for a handkerchief, for water, for anything that would get the blood off her fingers. It was the easiest thing in the world for Beth to reach into her knicker pocket with her unbloodied hand, take out the little key to Dilly’s library safe, and slip it into her mouth.

The brass clicked between her teeth, metallic as blood. She took a shuddering breath, and then she swallowed it. It took some doing, forcing the metal edges past her own reflex to gag, but she got it down.

“Look, give me an answer.” The driver eyed her as she cleaned the menstrual blood from her fingers, looking sorry that he’d ever taken that five quid. “Our friends will be back with the petrol soon. Yes or no?”

Beth leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. “No.”

She didn’t say a word when the others returned, or when the car started up again. She didn’t say a word for hours, until the Bentley rolled through the gates of a high, forbidding wall up to a stately gray stone house. Where Beth Finch was escorted through a blaze of summer roses to the front doors of the sanitarium, and heard the whirring gears of a great clock rise to a scream in her ears as the madhouse gates closed behind her.

Chapter 67

German intercepts decrypted at Bletchley Park during Normandy invasion

From: 11th U/B Flotilla

Immediate readiness. There are indications that the invasion has begun.

From: GRUPPE WEST

MOST IMMEDIATE. Off LE HAVRE 6 battleships and about 20 destroyers.

From: Seeko NORMANDY

MOST IMMEDIATE. MARCOUF reports: a great many landing craft approaching, protected by battleships and cruisers.

To: KARL

Endeavor to reach CHERBOURG. Attack enemy formations as long as ammunition lasts.

The prime minister’s voice poured through the telephone into Osla’s ear like weary gravel. “News?” She could imagine him pacing his study, staring at the eastern wall toward Normandy. “Well?”

“In a jiff, sir.” Osla had been at her desk for too many hours to feel a thrill at talking to the prime minister. She handed the telephone off to her superior and went back to translating, mind feeling as if it had been sanded. She read nothing she translated; it flowed into her eyes, through her pencil, and out again without leaving a trace. Thirty hours later she staggered home.

And found that Beth’s half of the room had been cleared out. Her blouses and dresses were missing from the wardrobe; her drawers stood empty. There wasn’t so much as a hairpin to indicate Beth Finch had lived here. Even Boots was gone.

Osla sat down on her bed. She had never in her life been so knackered, too tired even to crawl into bed. A familiar clack of heels sounded on the stairs, and Mab came into the room. “Beth’s gone,” Osla greeted her. “Maybe she went back to her family, or—”

“She’s gone to a sanitarium,” said Mab. “The gate guards told me—she completely crocked up.”

Osla stared. “You’re chaffing me. Beth would never break down like . . .” But right here in this room when they were all last together, Beth had had a fit of hysterics. Laughing and crying on that high-pitched note like a nail gouging slate. Osla rubbed her aching temples. “Did we do this? Land her in the basket—even if she deserved it—when she was exhausted and keyed up for the invasion?”

“I don’t know.” Mab sat down on Beth’s stripped bed, looking as wrung out as Osla. “I shouldn’t have shouted at her. Given the invasion, I should have left it till later.”

“And who told Travis Beth broke her oath?” The timing of all of this . . .

“London intelligence monitors all of us informally, to make sure no one’s talking. I’ve heard them talking about it at the mansion,” said Mab. “Someone must have heard something about Beth, that’s all.”

They sat in silence for a while. Osla’s head ached. “The invasion,” she said eventually. “Did you hear anything at the mansion?”

“The Germans swallowed our Pas-de-Calais deception hook, line, and sinker.”

“Well, isn’t that just topping.”

Another silence as they sat hoping that far away in the bloody sand and surf of Normandy, the death knell of Hitler’s Reich was sounding across the beachheads.

“I’m leaving Bletchley,” Mab said. “Not yet, but soon. They’re sending a few ladies to the Admiralty in London. In the middle of all the fuss today, someone remembered to tell me I’d been chosen. Your friend Sally Norton, too. ‘To facilitate cooperation between Bletchley Park and the naval high-ups’ . . . I think they want us to flash our legs at the admirals so they won’t fuss about how the naval information from BP is obtained.”

No Mab at BP. No Beth, either. Harry already gone, Sally going . . . “Take care, Mab,” Osla said, wondering if maybe they could at least part friends, of a sort anyway. She stretched out a hand.

Mab jerked away, her face hard. “I don’t want your good wishes, Os.”

“Well, I won’t bother you with them.” Osla’s anger flared through the exhaustion. “You East End bitch.”

Mab looked at her, weary and contemptuous. “Crawl back to Mayfair, you stupid deb.”

Osla had never slapped anyone in her life. She slapped Mab now, and walked out of the room.

“Are you all right, dear?” Their landlady again, mounting the stairs with an armload of towels.

“Yes, quite.” Continuing downstairs, insides churning. That contemptuous stupid deb, from Mab of all people . . .

But that’s all you are. Osla halted at the foot of the stairs. She was never going to be anything else, no matter how hard she tried. So why bother trying?

She remembered meeting Mab on the train to Bletchley Park: two bright-eyed girls with their suitcases and questions, wondering what the mysterious Station X had in store. Girls who wanted to serve their country, make friends, read books . . . girls who were, above all, determined. Mab to get a husband, Osla to prove herself.

Be careful what you wish for, Osla wanted to tell those laughing girls in the train compartment. Oh, be careful!