Wilde nodded. He rather doubted he would be working with Heck by the day’s end, but this wasn’t the time for that conversation.

‘And keep me in the loop. I won’t tolerate mavericks in my command area. I don’t want a repeat of the Collingham and Harper debacle. If, God forbid, something happens to either of you, I need to know what track you were on. Capisce?’

Wilde smiled half-heartedly. He wasn’t here to be told what to do by this colonel. Appache was here to help him, not order him about. He had accepted a mission from Dulles, chief of the OSS in Germany, and he would do things his own way. Or not at all.

Appache nodded to the doctor. ‘Don’t forget, stitch up the Nazi and ship him out.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You heard me.’ Appache saluted sharply, then he was gone.

The doctor watched him marching away with a perplexed expression, then turned her attention to Wilde. ‘Perhaps you have a civil tongue in your head. Your friend was rather abrupt. Are you going to tell me what this is all about?’

‘I can’t, and it’s not really my place to apologise for the colonel. But I am sorry.’

‘Well, that’s something.’ Suddenly she softened. ‘Look, why don’t you come into my office and have a cup of proper English tea. You look as if you need one. And do you know what, you look rather familiar.’

Chapter 9

Wilde spent an hour chatting with Angie Gray. In her little office, she had an electric kettle and all the other accoutrements of tea-making. He was happy to sit down on an old bench and relax for a while; the journey here from England by USAF transport and then jeep had been gruelling.

When he told her that he taught at Cambridge, her eyes lit up. ‘I studied history there myself, before transferring to a medical degree at Edinburgh.’

‘Perhaps that was before my time?’

‘No, I was in Newnham for a year – and I now realise who you are,’ she said, beaming. ‘I attended one of your lectures. Elizabethan sea power, as I recall. But then I changed my mind and turned to medicine.’

‘Oh dear, that sounds as though I put you off.’

‘Not at all. Your talk was marvellous. But the die had already been cast. I loved Cambridge, but I wanted to be a doctor even more.’

She wanted to know everything about him, about the town – how it had fared during the war and whether it was going to be up and running again as a university in the coming Michaelmas term. She talked fondly about her three terms there, the dances at Dorothy’s, the May balls she gatecrashed, her growing realisation that she had to swap to medicine.

Wilde told her about Lydia’s plan, and Angie Gray was encouraging. ‘Tell her she has to do it, Professor. She won’t regret it.’

He changed the subject to her work at Apfelwald.