‘A message like that doesn’t hold out much hope, does it, Stephens?’

‘I’m afraid it doesn’t, sir.’

‘Does her husband know?’

‘Of course not, Major.’

‘Shouldn’t he be told?’ Even though he was the younger man’s superior officer, Major Lean had recently found himself deferring to him. He’d noticed that as the war went on, older men such as himself – those in their mid-forties and beyond – seemed permanently exhausted. The younger ones like Christopher Stephens seemed to have picked up a second wind from somewhere. Perhaps the course of the war invigorated them. And Stephens was so bright: a double first from Cambridge, Lord knows how many languages, and three missions into occupied France to his name. Lean was convinced Stephens would one day end up as his superior. A commission in a Guards regiment and being distantly related to Churchill’s wife wasn’t doing him any harm either.

‘I don’t see why we should tell him, sir; after all, we don’t know what’s happened yet, do we?’

‘Surely we have a reasonable idea. I knew we shouldn’t have sent a woman.’

Stephens finally opened his eyes and sat up, looking disapprovingly at the major. ‘She’s the best man for the job, sir. If it wasn’t for our female agents, the SOE would struggle to get enough half-decent people to send over. Her French is excellent and she’s as brave as a lion.’

Lean sighed. ‘She’s going to need to be. The thought of what the Germans will be doing to her absolutely terrifies me.’

There were a number of things that bothered Christine Butler, or Thérèse as she was now known. ‘Annoyances’, her mother had called them; dérangements in her native French. Her mother’s life was accompanied by a considerable number of annoyances. Thérèse knew she shouldn’t let these things bother her, because they were proving to be a distraction, and the very last thing a British agent in occupied France needed was a distraction. There was enough to worry about as it was.

The first annoyance was an extremely petty one – it was more of a superstition than anything else. Really it ought to have been the opposite of an annoyance, because it was to do with her journey to France and how well it had gone. They’d left RAF Tangmere in Sussex just before midnight, and it was a perfect flight over the Channel in the Lysander. It hadn’t been nearly as uncomfortable as she’d been warned it would be, the landing in a field near Chaumont had been incident-free, and within half an hour of her climbing down from the plane she was safe in a farmhouse, surrounded by the members of the resistance cell she’d be working with. But from an early age her father had instilled in her an irrational notion that the easier the journey, the more things were likely to go wrong upon arrival. During her three weeks in France, she hadn’t been able to get that out of her mind. Something’s bound to go wrong.