‘I think Wilde might have a point, Cashbone. Far be it from me to tell the COI how to manage their affairs, but I would suggest this business requires a little subtlety.’

Cashbone remained unabashed. ‘To hell with that. If she doesn’t know already, she’s gonna find out soon enough. Might as well break it to her now. We’ve got a war to fight – nothing subtle about Hitler’s damned bombs falling on your cities or sinking our ships, is there?’

‘No, she’s not going to find out,’ Wilde insisted. Again, he appealed to the MI6 man. ‘Is she, Eaton?’

Eaton’s lips remained firmly sealed.

Wilde turned towards the table. He picked up the calipers that had fallen out of Bromley’s briefcase.

‘And what are these designed to do, for pity’s sake?’

He had a horrible idea that he knew exactly what they were for. He picked up the papers and flicked through photographs – all were of Adolf Hitler or Geli Raubal, from various different angles.

‘I take cranial measurements,’ Bromley said, with a certain amount of professional pride, ‘and from them I will ascertain the child’s parentage with ninety-nine per cent certainty.’

‘And why exactly would you want to do that, Professor Bromley?’

He added a contemptuous stress to the word ‘professor’, telling the man exactly where he stood in his estimation.

‘Wilde, you’re not a fool,’ Eaton said. ‘You must have worked out what this was all about, surely?’

‘Well, Eaton, I confess I was a fool. I had my doubts, but I never thought for a moment that England or America would stoop so low as to use a child in the front line of propaganda warfare. You know, Eaton, I was beginning to revise my first impression of you. But the truth’s out, isn’t it? You’re planning to turn the child into a freak show exhibit!’

Chapter 27

CHAPTER 27

Charlie Jung barely recognised his parents. He sat in a stiff-backed chair in their parlour, a room stuffed with the usual detritus of empire: the tiger-skin rug, its teeth bared, its eyes dead; the finely carved juggernaut panel; the faded photographs of men with solar topis sitting atop elephants; silver salvers and cigarette boxes donated at the end of a posting by colleagues at the club or regiment; ivory ornaments and gold trinkets bought for a song in Indian bazaars.

If his parents were looking at him with bemusement, he was looking at them with corresponding amusement. They hadn’t seen each other since 1911, when he was seven years old. His father wore an ancient blazer with a soup-stained tie. He looked eighty and doddery, but Jung knew he could not be more than sixty-five and his mother fifty-nine. She was dumpy and frumpy with two strings of pearls and a tweed skirt, looking rather like Queen Victoria.