‘How about a nightcap,’ he said.

For a moment she was tempted. It was a long time since she had touched a man’s hard body. But she did not really want Charlie. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie, but I love someone else.’

‘We don’t have to go to bed together,’ he whispered. ‘But if we could just, you know, smooch a while . . .’

She opened the door and stepped out. She felt like a heel. He was risking his life for her every day, and she would not even give him a cheap thrill. ‘Goodnight, Charlie, and good luck,’ she said. Before she could change her mind, she slammed the car door and went into her house.

She went straight upstairs. A few minutes later, alone in bed, she felt wretched. She had betrayed two men: Lloyd, because she had kissed Charlie; and Charlie, because she had sent him away dissatisfied.

She spent most of Sunday in bed with a hangover.

On Monday evening she got a phone call. ‘I’m Hank Bartlett,’ said a young American voice. ‘Friend of Charlie Farquharson, at Duxford. He talked to me about you, and I found your number in his book.’

Her heart stopped. ‘Why are you calling me?’

‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Charlie died today, shot down over Abbeville.’

‘No!’

‘It was his first mission in his new Spitfire.’

‘He talked about that,’ she said dazedly.

‘I thought you might like to know.’

‘Thank you, yes,’ she whispered.

‘He just thought you were the bee’s knees.’

‘Did he?’

‘You should have heard him go on about how great you are.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Then she could no longer speak, and she hung up the phone.

(ii)

Chuck Dewar looked over the shoulder of Lieutenant Bob Strong, one of the cryptanalysts. Some of them were chaotic but Strong was the tidy kind, and he had nothing on his desk but a single sheet of paper on which he had written:

YO—LO—KU—TA—WA—NA

‘I can’t get it,’ Strong said in frustration. ‘If the decrypt is right, it says they have struck yolokutawana. But it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no such word.’

Chuck stared at the six Japanese syllables. He felt sure they ought to mean something to him, even though he knew only a smattering of the language. But he could not figure it out, and he got on with his work.

The atmosphere in the Old Administration Building was grim.

For weeks after the raid, Chuck and Eddie saw bloated bodies from sunk ships floating on the oily surface of Pearl Harbor. At the same time, the intelligence they were handling reported more devastating attacks by the Japanese. Only three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes hit the American base at Luzon in the Philippines and destroyed the Pacific Fleet’s entire stock of torpedoes. The same day in the South China Sea they sank two British battleships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, leaving the British helpless in the Far East.