‘Round here you are,’ the other woman said, thrusting out her hand for Bennett to shake. ‘I’m Eloise, ma’am, Eloise Harpel, and I think you’re amazing.’

‘Sorry?’ Bennett replied, cautiously reaching her hand out.

‘Abey Bennett, the clerk who became a field agent.’ Eloise adjusted her glasses as she enthusiastically shook Bennett’s hand. ‘You’re an inspiration to just about all of us down here. I have to go get the other girls so they can meet you.’

‘No,’ Bennett said, a little more urgently than she’d intended.

As much as her ego might enjoy the boost of meeting the other clerks, she needed to be discreet, which meant as few people as possible knowing she’d been anywhere near the archives.

‘Sorry, I’m in a rush right now,’ she said. ‘But I’d sure appreciate a little help if you’ve got a few minutes.’

‘For you,’ Eloise replied, ‘anything.’

‘Great,’ Bennett said. ‘I need to see any files we have on Jack Williams, an MI5 agent listed as MIA in 1959.’

‘They’ll be down the back,’ Eloise said. ‘The back’ was slang for dead local records that were kept in the deepest depths of the archives.

‘And any mission reports from the last seven years that included an unidentified enemy agent or external actor.’

This was a double gamble by Bennett—that she could trust Eloise, and that she was the type of clerk who spent her downtime poring over old files looking for things other people missed, just like Bennett used to when she first started believing in the Wolf.

‘I think I can find a few,’ Eloise replied, her smile turning conspiratorial. ‘Give me twenty minutes.’

Bennett watched Eloise set off into the stacks, smiling herself as the other woman paused at the end of a row and cautiously peered round the corner before disappearing down it. Then she set to her own work, finding the set of file drawers that covered current serving members of MI5 so she could refamiliarise herself with her old friend Richard Knox.

She wasn’t entirely comfortable with what was effectively prying into Knox’s recent past. She told herself she was only doing it to help him, and Williams, but she knew that was only partly true. She was also doing it to help herself. Knox was the closest person to Williams, and Bennett couldn’t shake the feeling that Williams’s escape from Regent’s Park wasn’t as much of a surprise to Knox as it had looked.