“I envy you, a little, my dear,” she went on. “I’m doing it the other way round. I started out my life with all doors open to me, and the world’s events of the past ten years have held nothing but sorrows and disappointments as those doors, and more, slammed closed. My nation has poisoned itself. I will never go home. I will never belong anywhere again. I have no people.”

My heart gave an anxious little skip that was becoming familiar. “Oh, Jane,” I scolded her. “When the war ends—”

She cut me off. “If the war ends tomorrow, I will already be eighty-two years old! My future is rather more predictable than yours.”

She started tottering across the road.

“But you, girl,” she added to me over her shoulder, with the warmth coming back into her voice, “you might be able to change things.”

Ellen:

I was the courier now.

It made me nervous. I admit it, I was scared of Cromwell finding out. I hadn’t crossed paths with him much, except to drive him to Deeside. But I knew how Jamie hated him, and that made it worth the risk. Anything, now that Jamie had a whiff of his old self back. Pimms were the heroes of the day after that last op. The lads said Jamie never got so much as a Well done out of Cromwell, but that was his own fault for striding in for debriefing and boasting, Guess what happens when we’re armed properly!

I stopped at the airfield gate on my way out to Stonehaven to collect a crate of administrative bumf from the rail station, and waited for Nobby Fergusson to raise the barrier. He sidled up to the Tilly looking important.

I cranked down the window. “What now, Nobby?”

“Watch out for that bus stop when you get to the crossroads, Volunteer McEwen,” he said. “We have reason to believe it’s the center of a dangerous spy network.”

My belly lurched. What had he seen? Had he noticed my back and forth carrying on between Jamie and Louisa? But I’d not gone at all out of my way!

Nobby’s mate Jack Hinton put in, “I never liked that telephone box much, either.”

“What are you lads gassing about?” I said through my teeth.

“Didn’t they tell you at operations?” asked Nobby, pleased to be the bearer of bad news. “A German bomber flew over last night, dropped a load of TNT up on the main road, and scarpered off back to Norway. Flattened the bus shelter and knocked over the telephone kiosk!”

“They missed a very suspicious post box,” Jack added with a wink. “It sits all by itself in a field wall. Perfect place to get rid of a secret message. Maybe the Jerries know something we don’t know!”

“I’m sure they know all sorts you don’t know,” I told them as they raised the barrier.