You have to breathe quite a bit of coal gas before it kills you. It makes you sleepy—people who die of it usually die in their sleep. I didn’t feel like I was going to fall over in a dead faint, but I didn’t know how much gas was in the passage, or how much I’d already breathed, or how much more I might have to breathe before I managed to open the window in our room, turn off the gas tap, and get out again. Or what I would do if Dietrich Althammer was perfectly all right and ready for a battle.

The only thing I was sure of was that I had to stop any more gas leaking into the Limehouse.

I crept to the closed door of Room Number Five and listened to the terrible stillness on the other side. I thought of my gas mask, chucked under the bed out of the way after the journey from Liverpool. It couldn’t help me now, and the German navigator would not have known it was there.

I went in.

He’d worked hard before the fumes overcame him. He tipped the mattress off the bed and up against the wall, and threw aside Jane’s chair and the lamp and table to get to the gramophone in its shining wooden case.

He didn’t even open it. He used my flute case to pound the gramophone into a mangled wreck of beaten metal and splintered wood. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it out of fury, just because it wasn’t what he was looking for, or if Dietrich Althammer really thought, at least before he started, that its polished lid hid the stolen Enigma machine.

Dietrich Althammer also lay in a crumpled heap next to the hearth, his mouth open and his eyelids half-shut. I didn’t think he was breathing, but I didn’t want to get close enough to make sure.

I had to step over his body to reach the gas tap.

Biting back sobs, I climbed over the fallen standing lamp to throw open a window. The radio sprang suddenly to life, right in the middle of a tune, as the electricity came back on.

It was “The Spitfire Song” again.

I wrenched open the wardrobe. The other glowing box sat there nestled safe and sound among the furs and tropical silks. I grabbed the rotors and snatched up the wooden case in both arms as if I were rescuing a baby from a burning building, and fled from the room.

Elisabeth Lind volunteered to move into a smaller room and give Mrs. Campbell’s best double to me and Jane, so we didn’t have to sleep in Room Five that night.

This makes no sense at all, but after I crawled into bed next to Jane as usual, I no longer felt safe.