Cover

ALSO BY FRANCES LIARDET

We Must Be Brave

Dedication

To Pippa and her loving family

Map of the Parish of Upton and Barrow End

PROLOGUE

April 1943, Tunisia

Sunrise, and the encampment is awake. Pans rattle in the cookhouse, grunts and murmurs issue from the rows of tents. Close by, boots crunch over gravel. None of these sounds impinge on the vast silence of the desert.

Two long shadows are flung across the ground. The first is my Hurricane fighter aircraft, motionless and hawklike. The second, approaching with a lanky stride, is myself. A harnessed and helmeted human, twenty-four years old, in love.

—

The cockpit of a Hurricane is a wooden kennel situated directly behind a fuel tank. There is a firewall, but it lies between fuel tank and engine, not between fuel tank and pilot. On account of this and many other perils, I say a daily prayer before I press the ignition. “Dear Lord, please spare me, James Acton, so that I may return to Egypt and marry Yvette Haddad.”

I always use our full names to God, so that He is absolutely clear, through the blizzard of prayers He must receive every morning of this war, exactly who it is I’m talking about.

Yvette is small, lively, Alexandrian. Loyal. Beautiful. Brave. I don’t know if I’ll live to see her again.

But what a life we will have if I do.

“Amen,” I say, as my heart is shaken in my chest by the engine’s splattering roar.

ONE

July 1974, England

There’s only one remaining question, Mr. Acton.”

The man who has been interrogating me leans forward with his heavy arms on his knees, big boxer’s knuckles on fingers strictly interlinked. As if each hand has been detailed to keep the other out of mischief.

“Which is?”

“Whether you’ll go out of your mind.”

His tongue appears too large for his mouth; it lumbers from side to side as he speaks, getting in the way of, rather than forming, his words. A man trying to articulate through a mouthful of flannel. When he finishes, the tongue hangs over his bottom teeth, just inside a slack lower lip. His name is Frobisher.

“Go out of my mind? Why?”

I’m slow on the uptake, having been rather mesmerized by Frobisher, his way of speaking, the bulkiness of his limbs. It comes to me that this man, despite his somewhat distracting appearance, has had years of training in winkling out harbored information. He can probably, like a police dog at Customs, simply smell it.

“Why do you think?” Frobisher chortles. “Boredom, man! Look at you, you were an RAF pilot. A prisoner of war.”

“That was thirty-odd years ago!” I can’t disguise my astonishment. “It’s hardly relevant now.”