He began to spend days sitting in his library, staring out of the long window as the changing light altered the colour and shape of the lawn and the trees bordering it. He became like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner:

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

But around February, he realised he needed to snap out of his torpor. He began to make contact with the remnants of his own organisation, scattered around the country like survivors from a shipwreck. He entrusted his man with letters, giving him strict instructions on how he was to post them from the town he visited on his day off, never using the same postbox. The letters would instruct the recipient to call him at a telephone box at a given time, to hang up if he didn’t answer, to never use their own names and certainly not his. He would slip out of the house at dusk, confident he wasn’t being followed, making his way under the cover of the high hedgerows common in those parts to a telephone box at the crossroads of a country lane and a larger road.

That was how he made contact once more with Myrtle Carter, and with Bourne and Ridgeway. It was how he heard about the murder of Arthur Chapman-Collins, who had been one of the few people he could really rely upon. And it was how he found out about Agent Milton, perhaps his greatest success. He was astonished that Edward Palmer was not only alive but still free and active as an agent. He’d half expected to encounter him on a landing at Brixton prison. Instead, he was operating from the heart of the British War Office.

When he found out about Palmer, he realised that he once again had a purpose. All was not lost. That purpose intensified when one morning his man brought him his breakfast tray and on it was an envelope with his name neatly typed on the front. His man explained he’d found it in the porch when he’d come down that morning. It hadn’t been there when he’d locked up the night before.

The Admiral waited until the man left the bedroom before opening the letter.

Somehow Wolfgang had managed to contact him, which was quite remarkable.

He read the letter three or four times, and once he was sure he’d memorised it, he carefully placed it in the fire and watched it disintegrate.

First Palmer, now Wolfgang.

He most certainly had a purpose now.

He was no longer becalmed.

The man hath penance done,

And penance more will do.

Chapter 8

Paris, September 1945

‘Tom said I’m to help.’

The man on the other side of the table was avoiding looking at them, concentrating instead on sawing through his steak. Much to the horror of the waiter, he’d insisted on it being bien cuit, and it seemed as if the chef had taken revenge for this insult to France.