Chapter 66

Beth had no idea how long it took to pull herself together. When she stopped hiccupping and laughing and weeping, she lifted her swollen face from Boots’s neck and looked at Dilly Knox standing in the corner. He wasn’t really there, but it soothed her to pretend he was. “I know, ” she said. “I have to go. ” No time to go to pieces, no time to grieve for her broken friendships, no time for anything.

She scrubbed her eyes, fixed herself up with a sanitary towel, then put Boots on his lead and took him with her—who knew how long the invasion would keep her chained to her desk at ISK. Dear God, how was she going to work a double shift breaking Abwehr intercepts, knowing someone she trusted—maybe someone in the room—was selling information?

Put that away, she told herself, heading out under a dark, rain-lowering sky. Lock it in its own separate iron safe behind a wall panel, like the one in Dilly’s library.

She hoped to flag a ride to Bletchley Park, but no cars passed by. Beth was nearly howling with frustration by the time the transport bus arrived, full of codebreakers she didn’t know. How much had changed since she’d been recruited! The sleek triple-shifted operation of thousands merging seamlessly in and out of the new concrete blocks was nothing like the cheerful, frantic, slapdash days of the green huts. She climbed off the transport bus at the gates, determined to make her report to Commander Travis before losing herself in Abwehr until the invasion was over. Right now, the knots and byways of Abwehr looked like a haven. Beth hurried forward, fumbling for her pass.

“This is her. ” A big jowly man in a checked suit stepped forward, gripping her shoulder in a massive hand. “The Finch girl. ” He nodded at a shorter fellow in pinstripes smoking a Pall Mall by the guard station.

“What do you want? ” Beth tried to tug away but it was like trying to move out from under a boulder. At her feet, Boots was whining. “I don’t know you—”

“We know you, missy. ” The man in pinstripes sauntered over. “You’ve been talking about things you shouldn’t. Or maybe you’re just not right in the head. That’s for other people to figure out, fortunately. ” He clipped her pass out of her hand and tossed it to the gate guard. “This pass is revoked, orders of Commander Travis. Bethan Finch is not to be allowed back inside Bletchley Park’s grounds. ”

“What? ” Beth’s voice scaled up. “No, I have to see Commander Travis—”

“Afraid that’s not possible, missy. He’s a very busy man right now. ”

“It’s important. I have documents—” She remembered to whisper, aware of the passing flood of codebreakers making their way through the gates. Showing their passes, slipping through, looking sideways at the little knot of disturbance. “There is information being passed out of the Park. It’s very important—”

“Oh, I see. An informant? A spy? ” The pin-striped man chuckled. “That’s what they said you’d say. ”

“Who said? ” What in God’s name had been happening over the last few hours? It had still been daylight when she left ISK with her Rose decrypts, no one giving her a second look—now she was being escorted from the premises?

A gesture to the jowly man gripping Beth’s shoulder. “Take her. ”

Boots barked wildly, towed by the lead around Beth’s wrist as she was frog-marched toward a long black Bentley. “Just ten minutes with Commander Travis—”

They ignored her completely. Pinstripes leaned in to the driver. “You have the address for Clockwell Sanitarium? ”

“Yes, not the first time I’ve driven a cracked-up boffin to the loony bin. ”

Beth heard the word sanitarium and went mad. She clawed the jowly man’s hand off her shoulder, drawing blood from his knuckles, and turned to sprint for the gates. But Boots was still barking and wheeling on his lead, and she stumbled over him, going down hard on the road. The jowly man was on her then, picking her up bodily and carrying her to the car. The lead fell off her wrist as she thrashed and shouted. Every Bletchley Park codebreaker within fifty yards was staring.

“Don’t mind her, ” Pinstripes called briskly. “She’s had a bit of a crack-up, and now she’s going for a rest. ” Beth realized with a splinter’s clarity how it looked: the shiny, official car; the shiny, official men; the wild-haired woman with her swollen eyes, her crumpled clothes, her snarls and howls.

She threw herself at Jowls again as he slid into the car after her, but he captured her wrists, muttering, “So you’re one of those. . . ”

“Please, ” Beth babbled to the driver, “you can’t take me to a sanitarium, I haven’t had a crack-up, I have evidence of an informer—”

But the driver didn’t respond, and Beth’s eyes were drawn to the flash of silver as Jowls drew something out of his coat. She twisted frantically as the car started up, staring out the back window, gulping in a breath to shriek—and then she felt the prick of a needle through her sleeve.

The last thing she saw before everything went dark was the woolly gray shape of her dog, blundering up and down the shadowed road, dragging his lead behind him, as the Bentley pulled away.

SHE WOKE SLOWLY, to the smell of cigarettes and rain. Her entire body felt heavy, her skull stuffed with wool, her mouth dry.

The backseat was shadowed with gray light, empty besides herself. It was barely dawn, the Bentley parked on a barren hillside clouded with morning mist and spiky gorse. She couldn’t see Jowls or Pinstripes—just the driver in the front seat. He’d cracked one window open enough to tap his cigarette outside.

“You’re awake. ” He looked around: a blocky man, nondescript, middle-aged. A complete stranger. “We’re out of petrol, if you’re wondering where the other blokes are. They hoofed it to the station a few miles ahead to get a jerry can. MI-5 gets all the petrol coupons they need, you know. I said I’d sit with you. ”

Beth glanced groggily at the door handle, wondering if she could make a run for it.

“Don’t try, ” he said, seeing her glance. “The needle stick you’ve had, you’ll be moving like you’re dipped in treacle. Besides, we’re in the middle of the Yorkshire moors; nothing about but gorse and the odd sheep. ”

Yorkshire. They must have been driving all night. What was the place they had mentioned—Clockwell Sanitarium? What is that? Where’s my dog? Her senses still felt dulled; the terror wasn’t slicing her to pieces the way it had at Bletchley Park’s gates. “Who are you? ”

“Just the driver. ” He took another drag off his cigarette. “Driving for these London fellows doesn’t pay as much as it should, so I’m not averse to making the odd shilling on the side. . . and before we left BP, someone paid me five quid to give you something, assuming I could get you alone. ”

“Who? ”

“Not saying is part of the five quid. ”

“I’ll pay you, ” Beth said desperately. “If you let me out, I’ll—”

“No chance, duck. Five quid to pass on a message no one else will ever see is one thing. Letting you go is trouble I don’t need. You want the message or not? ”

Beth swallowed. “Yes. ”

He poked a folded sheet of paper across the seat divider. Beth shook as she read the terse, typewritten words.

I saw the report you broke in ISK. I want to know what you did with it, and the others. Tell the driver yes and I’ll find a way for you to send word from Clockwell. Once I’ve had a bonfire in the grate, I’ll see you’re released.

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.

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