“It’s called the Special Operations Executive, Lulu. SOE. In which I am a mere clerk, a secretary, transcribing documents and making German translations as required. So you see there’s very little I can do, and what little there is depends on what I can manage to turn up today, doesn’t it? In the meantime, do try not to make much noise, if you can help it. If anybody knocks on the door, don’t answer. If they try to break in, you can go out the window in Benedict’s bedroom. I presume you can climb down a drainpipe?”

“If absolutely necessary.”

“Splendid.” She settles her hat on her head. “I’ll be back around six, if all goes well.”

“And if it doesn’t go well?”

“Then you’d better be ready to run. Get some rest, if you can. You look as if you need it.”

After she leaves, I return to the bedroom. It was too dark last night to snoop around properly, and anyway Margaret would have heard me, no matter how softly I opened the drawers and cupboard doors and rummaged through the bookshelf.

Not that Thorpe seems to have left much behind when he departed for Nassau, two and a half years ago. Other than the photograph, nothing remains atop the chest of drawers. The top two drawers are empty, and the bottom contains only a half-dozen mothballs and a couple of knitted sweaters. I pick them up anyway and bury my nose in the wool, but the smell of him is long gone, replaced by wood and camphor.

Better luck in the wardrobe. Thorpe left his winter suits, neatly pressed, and when I stick my hand in the pockets, I retrieve a pair of theater tickets—Apple Sauce, the London Palladium, the fifteenth of August—and a piece of notepaper on which someone’s written a brief message, followed by what seems to be a telephone number. The handwriting doesn’t belong to Thorpe, and it takes me some time to decipher because of the dull light through the window and the small size of the letters. Still, my heart pumps violently in my chest, the way an archaeologist might feel at the discovery of some new artifact, some clue to a lost civilization. I consider it might be a woman, some lover of his, or else a colleague, a source, a contact. Somebody he knew before me, somebody who belonged to his life before I knew he existed. And now, at this very instant, Thorpe sits in a place I don’t know, surrounded by people I don’t know, and the details of his existence are beyond my knowledge, though not my imagination. So we live on faith, he and I. My faith in him, and his in me.