Stafford’s reaction was predictably one of shock. Lockhart had first explained how the code worked, and together they decrypted the letter to reveal its message.

“What is this…this sarin gas, then?” Stafford had asked.

Lockhart had told him all he had learned from the tapping in the cell.

“And what do you intend to do about it?”

“Well,” said Lockhart, “I can’t just wait for London to get back to me. ‘Mitt’ could be anything—a town, a camp, a factory, even the name of a company. That’s going to be hard to find out, because it’s bound to be a secret. In which case, I’ll need to establish which department in the German bureaucratic behemoth—”

“What?”

“Sorry—it’s a sort of enormous beast—I’ll need to find out which department would be responsible for it. And then I’ll need to get access to that department.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Lockhart replied matter-of-factly. “But the fact that I’m now a fully fledged SS officer might help me.”

Stafford breathed out with a “Jeezus Christ.”

“Quite,” said Lockhart. “However, something I can do is to get a good body of men together. I need a team, Stafford, a bunch of decent blokes who can help me if and when I manage to find out where the sarin is, let alone how to deal with it. That’s the real reason why I’m recruiting. At the moment, I’m not sure that I have enough men I can rely on. Some of the ones we’ve got are a real bunch of sods, although a few of them are all right—either in trouble like you, or some who’ve just wanted to get out of their camp.”

Stafford was silent for a moment.

“An’ what do you want me to do?”

Lockhart smiled. It looked as though he had won him over.

“You can be my eyes and ears, as well as my link man. You’ll be getting lots of letters from ‘Hattie’ soon, I hope.”

Stafford looked chuffed.

“She sounds dead classy to me, sir.”

Lockhart laughed.

“I assure you she’s not. The last time I met her she had grown a moustache.”

His lung healed quickly, quicker than the doctors had predicted.

“You’re in good shape,” he was told. “Most men would have needed another week.”

Such was the legacy of his daily running and his SOE training. Before the stabbing, Lockhart could hold his breath for up to four minutes, an ability that had won him many drinks in the bar at Arisaig. Nevertheless, even though the drain had been removed after ten days, it still hurt when he breathed in sharply, and he knew that he would have to take it easy.

On the afternoon of the eleventh day, Stafford had arrived in his room, his expression anxious.

“What’s the matter, Stafford?”

The corporal handed Lockhart a folded piece of paper. Lockhart opened it. It was a telegram from Strasser.

URGENT

FOR IMMEDIATE DISPATCH

From Hpt. Strasser, St. Michael, Hildesheim