“This is really for me?” he asked Abdul.

“Oh yes, Mr. Lockhart, this is smallest room.”

“Where are the others?”

“Drinks.”

“Excellent! Where are drinks?”

“In the drawing room, of course! You come down now?”

“You bet, Abdul. Lead on!”

The drawing room was grand, but it was a grandeur that had withered, the rugs a little threadbare, the chairs and sofas faded and tatty. The Persian wall hangings were in good shape, although those nearest to the large windows that overlooked the garden were almost bleached. The room’s six occupants, Lockhart’s fellow agents, looked for all the world as though they were taking cocktails in a drawing room in Wiltshire.

“Aha! It’s the new boy! Come in, come in!”

They stood up as Lockhart walked in, with Pixie reappearing from under a table, yapping away excitedly.

“Don’t worry about Pixie, she’s an excitable little rogue. Hello, I’m Dickie—you must be the legendary Lockhart. We’ve heard about your power station in France; you must tell us about it over dinner—we’re all a little jealous.”

“Thanks,” said Lockhart, somewhat embarrassed. “You’ve got a bit of a reputation yourself.”

Aged twenty-five, Dickie was already an SOE old-timer, having spent at least a year in Crete. He exploded with charm, his toothy smile always present under a rakish moustache.

“Christ, not that type of reputation, I hope! Anyway, some introductions. We’ve got two Billys—Billy Mackintosh and Billy Farson—and one Alex and one David, which leaves us with one very delectable Natasha, who you must call Countess. Got it?”

Lockhart shook each of their hands in turn. They were friendly and gregarious, like a large happy family, the sort of family that Lockhart had always wished for, right down to the idiotic and lovable canine.

Lockhart found that the days dragged, with interminable meetings down at SOE headquarters at Rustum Buildings—“the Spy House” as the taxi drivers called it—but the evenings were a different matter. Lockhart found himself amassing a huge bar bill at Shepheards, and even a quiet night at Tara would involve some drunken use of the ballroom.

Apart from briefings down at headquarters, the inhabitants of Tara got most of their news about the war from The Egyptian Gazette. It described itself as “as complete and well informed a newspaper as it has ever been,” which led Lockhart to surmise that it had last appeared on papyrus. Nevertheless, it was from that paper that they learned about the Allied bombing of Europe and the Russian successes on the Eastern Front. The liberation of Sicily also provided much cheer, along with the German evacuation of Sardinia and Corsica. Plainly the war was going the Allies’ way, and there was much talk in Tara about the nature of the Second Front, which was predicted to be only a few months away.