“Whisht, Elisabeth?” I repeated. “Just like the Queen!”

That was the name I’d given her myself—Queenie.

“Sergeant Lind, if you don’t mind,” she said quietly.

I’d seen her playacting a thousand times before, and I wasn’t going to give away her secrets any more than she’d give away mine. I didn’t know what her game was, but if she’d found a way to playact and win the war—well, I was glad to see her having a good time. I liked my job, too, or at least as long as Cromwell wasn’t poking his neb in.

I said, “Sergeant Lind it is, then.”

She took her overnight case from the lad at her shoulder and unlatched it and tipped every single thing in it over the curb next to the Tilly. She made it look like an accident.

Shaness! I didn’t know whether to laugh or to howl.

It was all lipsticks and face creams and kohl pots and unmentionable other female items, and the young men all scooted back in horror as if they’d tumbled into a snake pit.

“Don’t worry, Volunteer McEwen will help me,” she called over her shoulder to the lads, and most of them slunk away whilst only a couple of the hardiest, the ones holding her things, kept an eye on the queen bee from a safe distance.

We knelt on the cobbles with our heads together, and in a flash she muttered at my ear, “Please warn Jamie—I’m sorry about the surprise! My commanding officer feels that German prisoners are more at ease with a native speaker translating, and as he isn’t here and I am good at being Swiss, they simply wouldn’t send anyone else—”

“You do it very well and all,” I whispered.

“Don’t speak as if you know me,” she warned.

Phyllis got herself out of the Tilly and now came bounding over to help pick things up.

“I’m Flight Officer Pennyworth,” she said breathlessly, sweeping bits and pieces back into the case. “Or Phyllis, when we’re off duty. Hello and welcome! How very embarrassing—we’ll have this tidied in no time—”

Phyllis shooed away the last of the admirers. “Is this her handbag? Follow Volunteer McEwen with the other case, thank you—Ellen, open the back, I’ll finish here.”

In no time the show was over and I’d not said anything I shouldn’t have.

“Sergeant Lind” sat herself in the passenger seat of the Tilly. Phyllis climbed in back so that we shouldn’t have to squeeze up together in the front. But as I headed out to the Aberdeen road, even from the back Phyllis managed to keep the chitchat going.