The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson

colonies, mainly Angola. He is also Irish, a Catholic and not a lover of Great Britain. We have intelligence that he was selling wolfram, from his Portuguese wife’s family’s mining concessions in the north, exclusively to the Germans, as well as cork and olive oil from family estates in the Alentejo. He has offered Cardew a room in his considerable house for a lodger. He specified a female lodger.’

      Sutherland looked to see the effect of this on his new agent. Her blood now felt as thin and cold as ether.

      ‘What is expected of me?’ she asked, clipping each word off.

      ‘To listen.’

      ‘You just said that he specified a female lodger.’

      ‘He prefers female company,’ said Rose, as if it was something he himself couldn’t understand.

      ‘What about his wife? Doesn’t his wife live in the same house?’

      ‘I understand that the relationship with his wife has…broken down somewhat.’

      Anne began to breathe deep, slow breaths. Her thighs were sticking together under the cotton of her dress. Sweat seemed to be pricking out all over. Sutherland shifted in his chair. His first bodily movement.

      ‘Cardew thinks she’s suffered some kind of breakdown,’ he said.

      ‘You mean she’s mad, too?’ asked Anne, the scenario burgeoning in her mind.

      ‘Not howling at the moon, exactly,’ said Rose. ‘More nerves, we think.’

      ‘What’s her name?’ she asked.

      ‘Mafalda. She’s very well connected. Excellent family. Hugely wealthy. The spread they’ve got in Estoril…magnificent. Small palace. Own grounds. Marvellous,’ said Sutherland, selling it hard.

      ‘Do you mind if I smoke, sir?’ she asked.

      Sutherland broke out of his chair and offered her a cigarette from a silver box on the table. He lit it with a weighty Georgian silver lighter with a green baize bottom. Anne drew in heavily, saw Sutherland brightening in her vision.

      ‘Tell me more about Wilshere,’ she said, and as an afterthought, ‘please, sir.’

      ‘He’s a drinking man. Likes to…’

      ‘Does that mean he’s a drunk?’

      ‘He likes a drink,’ said Rose. ‘You do too, from the accounts of the Oxford do’s. Quite a strong head on you, they said.’

      ‘That’s different from being a drunk.’

      ‘Well, while we’re about it, he’s a gambler as well,’ said Sutherland. ‘The casino’s practically at the bottom of their garden. Do you…?’

      ‘I’ve never had that sort of liquidity.’

      ‘But you probably know something about probability, what with your maths…’

      ‘It’s not a particular interest of mine.’

      ‘What is?’ asked Rose.

      ‘Numbers.’

      ‘Ah, pure maths,’ he said, as if he might know something. ‘What drew you to that?’

      ‘A sense of completeness,’ she said, hoping that would do the trick.

      ‘A sense or the illusion?’ asked Rose.

      ‘We might be talking about a lot of abstractions but what links them, the logic, is very real, very strict and irrefutable.’

      ‘I’m a crossword man myself,’ said Rose. ‘I like to see into people’s minds. How they work.’

      Anne smoked some more.

      ‘Crosswords have their own kind of completeness, too,’ she said, ‘if you’re any good at them.’

      Things were digging into her. Her bra felt tight. Her waistband knotty. She wasn’t getting on with these two men and she didn’t know how it had happened. Maybe that first exchange and the last one really had been too cheeky. Perhaps they’d seen one thing, imagined and extended their idea of her and she’d revealed something completely different. Was she this difficult?

      ‘The thing about intelligence is that the picture is always incomplete. We deal in fragments. You, in the field, even more so. You might not always know what you’re doing, you might not always appreciate the importance of what you hear. There are no solutions and, even if there were, you wouldn’t have known the question in the first place. You listen and report,’ said Sutherland.

      ‘Something else for you to listen for in the Wilshere household, apart from people’s names, has some relevance to the endgame we were talking about earlier,’ said Rose. ‘To make the doodlebugs, or any rocket for that matter, the Germans need precision tools. To make those tools requires precision cutting instruments. They need diamonds. Industrial diamonds. Those diamonds are finding their way in here on ships from Central Africa. We have tried searching those ships when they put in at our ports, like Freetown in Sierra Leone, but a handful of diamonds is not so easy to find on a 7,000-ton ship. We think, but we have no proof, that Wilshere is bringing in diamonds from Angola and getting them into the German Legation, where they are sent by diplomatic bag to Berlin. We don’t know how he does it or how he gets paid for doing it. So anything you hear about diamonds and payment for them in the Wilshere household must be communicated, via Cardew, to us at once.’

      ‘How do you want me to do that?’

      ‘Wallis will look after that. You’ll see him and arrange things with him.’

      He glanced at his watch.

      ‘Cardew had better take you up to the house now. It’s getting late. I’ve told him to brief you on Wilshere and his wife, but I’ve also instructed him to exclude certain details which, for the safety of your cover, it would be better for you to find out yourself. I don’t want you going in there knowing too much about the situation and not reacting correctly to…developments. You’re supposed to be a secretary. First time abroad and all that. I want you to be curious about everything and everybody.’

      ‘That doesn’t sound as if it’s going to be too difficult, sir.’

      Sutherland grimaced. The brown column of teeth appeared again and shut down just as fast. He went to the door and called for Cardew.

       Chapter 8

       Saturday, 15th July 1944, Estoril, near Lisbon.

      Meredith Cardew drove Anne west past empty beaches. The sun was still high and the air crammed with heat, the sea in a flat calm, the Atlantic Ocean just licking at the sand. She didn’t speak, still overwhelmed by that first meeting with Rose and Sutherland. Across the estuary Cardew pointed out the beaches of Caparica and further into the haze, discernible only as a smudge, the headland of Cabo Espichel. He was trying to loosen her up.

      The saltine air that came through the windows brought back weekends by the sea before the war with her mother fully clothed and scarfed against the sun and wind, while her own young body went hazelnut brown in a day. It was easy to love this place, she thought, after London with its bombed-out, blackened houses, the drab grey streets piled with rubble. Here, by the sea, under the big sky, the palms and the bougainvillea flashing past, it should be easy to forget five years of destruction.

      Cardew drove one-handed, clawing tobacco into his pipe with the other. He even managed to get the pipe going without sending them off down the rocks and into the sea. He was mid thirties, with thinning, reddish blond hair which had been razor cut up the back. He was tall, very long legs, and slim with a long nose and a facile smile working on the corners of his mouth. His baggy trousers flapped as his knees seemed to be conducting an unseen orchestra; the turn-ups were halfway up his shins, which were covered by thick