We sat in the van in the dark, and I stared at Ellen without being able to see her.

I unfolded the paper and flattened it against my leg. Ellen lit a match and held it over a page torn from an ordinary school jotter, just long enough for me to see the writing: printed lines of clear English, beneath recognizable German, beneath unrecognizable code.

I didn’t have time to read anything before Ellen shook the match out.

She spoke quietly, hesitating. It was a long time since we’d seen each other, and she knew I’d lost most of my squadron a couple of weeks ago, and it made us awkward.

“Yorkie—is that what you call him?” she began. “Bill Yorke, the English bloke with the mustache. He wrote the code on his cigarette papers. I saw it when he tossed them away at Mrs. Campbell’s before. And I picked ’em up—”

“Traveller habit,” I scolded her. “You’ll get caught.”

“Shut yer gob, Jamie Stuart.” The familiar teasing made her less uneasy. “Well, I didn’t get a keek before I’d dropped one of the papers myself, and then Louisa, that West Indian lass who looks after Nan’s old auntie, picked it up next. She’s that canny, Louisa is, sharpest eyes I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something.”

“Fair do’s.”

We both know the Beaufort-Stuarts have a reputation that way.

“Louisa took it and worked out what it meant,” Ellen said.

“How the devil did she do that?”

“Och, well…” Ellen hesitated. “This is the mad bit.”

“Hurry up!”

“Windyedge had an unexpected visitor.…”

Ellen told me about the German pilot. She told me about “Odysseus,” and how Louisa discovered the gift he’d left.

I knew it was true, because it fit. Even without the code name Odysseus, which I’d overheard, the jigsaw pieces fit. Odysseus flew the missing Messerschmitt, the one we never saw. The other Messerschmitt, the one we tangled with, was trying to stop him from completing his mission.

And his mission was to deliver this cipher machine.

“So he hid the machine and Louisa found it, and she made it work,” Ellen finished. “She couldn’t have done it without his list of settings, but she found that too.”

“Does she read German?”

“No,” Ellen said softly. “She got the old woman to translate. So they both know.”

I whistled.

Foes’ gifts are no gifts, warned my classical education. The real Odysseus’s gift had been a trap.

“Did he bring it for us?” I asked. “For 648 Squadron?”

“I don’t know. I never heard of anything like it.”

“Neither did I,” I breathed.

Ellen held another match over the page.

“See. It’s an alert to their pilots about the U-boat you met, telling them where to find our ships. If you’d known that when the message came in, you could have warned the navy. Or done something about it.”