Worrying I’d hang up on her, Mrs. Campbell rushed to give me more information. “My aunt’s what they call ‘category C,’ a low-risk prisoner. She broke her hip last summer, hill-walking at eighty-two, silly woman! She needs help getting about. Not heavy lifting, just minding… and keeping her out of my way, to be honest. I have the pub to manage, and I can’t look after an invalid. Aunt Jane is far too old to be locked up like a criminal anyway, though that’s her own fault for lying about her age—she told the policemen who arrested her that she was sixty! And how she pulled off such a devilish falsehood, I can’t tell you. I’ve a mind she wanted to be arrested—attention-seeking Jezebel! But the government’s releasing quite a few folk they detained earlier this year. Most of them are Jewish and not Nazis at all, and people aren’t happy about imprisoning folk the way the Germans do.”

Mrs. Campbell paused for breath.

“Why did they arrest her?” I asked cautiously. “Besides her being German?”

“She was a telegraphist. She worked five years in a wireless exchange in Berlin when she was a girl, sending Morse code, before she became an opera singer.” Mrs. Campbell added hastily, “But that was more than sixty years ago, in the 1870s. Before the telephone—plenty of young ladies did the same! It’s not as if she was Mata Hari, taking messages and spying in the Great War!”

A telegraphist and an opera singer! Morse code! I thought the old woman might turn out to be quite interesting. And I wasn’t scared of an old woman, even if she was German. I liked old women. I liked our landladies, who were kind to me when Mummy and Daddy were killed. I liked Granny Adair.

Mrs. Campbell elaborated, “Aunt Jane’s no blood relation, you understand. She’s my father’s brother’s wife. They lived a wicked bohemian life, Uncle John and Aunt Jane, in the last century—Berlin, Vienna, Paris. She was famous the world over, to hear her tell it. Her real name is Johanna von Arnim, though she’s Jane Warner now.”

“How is she? Can she walk?” I tried to think of any information I needed before the money for the phone call ran out. “Did she live alone before she broke her hip?”