The men looked from Martha to Jess, and Jess knew they were trying to decide which one they’d have the most chance of bedding later if this went the way they thought it would. It won’t, Jess wanted to say, but she and Martha needed information and if that meant trading on the fact that they were women, then that’s what they’d do; it was the mere fact of being women that meant they had to resort to it in the first place.

“Did you know,” Martha said flirtatiously, smiling her beautiful smile, her pale blonde hair curling sweetly around her face, “that the powers that be have just ordered eight gross of rubbers for the correspondents?”

“Only for the photographers,” Jess said, turning on her magazine smile and trying not to laugh. It was true; more than one thousand rubbers had been ordered for the press, but it was to protect the films they would take in France, rather than their nether regions. “Perhaps you should learn to take pictures, Marty, so you’ll be as well equipped as me.”

“Perhaps I should,” Martha said. “I don’t suppose either of you gentlemen are photographers?”

The men replied in the negative, clearly regretful and also titillated by the conversation.

Martha sighed dramatically. “Too bad. But perhaps you have some other interesting stories to share. How about I buy everyone a whiskey and you tell us a little more about parachute school.”

Marty and Jess had seated themselves strategically. The correspondents they’d chosen were as callow as children on their first day at school, having arrived in London the previous week. They still thought free whiskey and two women were prizes worth having and had no idea the prize came with a price. And they’d probably heard Warren’s stories about Jess and hoped that a bedroom digestif might be the outcome of this cozy chat.

One of the men leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially. “The public relations guys are in a jam. There are more correspondents wanting to go with the invasion fleet than there are places. So they thought they could drop some of the men in by parachute. You need to do five training jumps, so they’re sending any man who’s interested to parachute school in a village called Chilton Foliat.”

“So that’s where Joe Dearing vanished to,” Martha mused, the Collier’s photographer having been missing for a couple of days on sanctioned business.

“You haven’t heard the best part,” the other man jumped in, eyeing Jess, and she let him sit closer than was comfortable because she was as keen as Martha to hear the rest. “Bob Capa had a party on the weekend and he and Bill Landry and Larry LeSueur got themselves as full as bedbugs on champagne,” he said. “They signed a contract with one of the PROs at the party, saying they’d go with him at eleven the next morning to do their training jumps. Only the press guy turns up to collect them and there’s no sign of Bob or Bill or Larry. He phones Bill who says he sprained his ankle. He phones Larry who says the same. He can’t find Bob anywhere. So—”