Radio Girls(90)

The fate of Peter Eckersley, like the next installment of The Perils of Pauline, would have to wait another day. It was time for the final broadcast of Questions for Women Voters. Hilda had insisted that a coda on Election Day would be fitting.

“Want to come and help me oversee?” she invited Maisie. “After all, you helped birth it, didn’t you? Fair enough you see it through to its end.”

Maisie looked up at her and started to cry.

“You don’t have to if you’d rather not,” Hilda said.

“It’s been such a superb program, exactly the sort of thing I want to do, and now it’s over. And I’ve been so busy, I never properly appreciated it.”

“This is why I warn the staff about egotism,” Hilda said, passing Maisie a handkerchief. “But you don’t really think that’s your one and only idea that’s going to make a series, do you?”

“I hope not, of course. But it was awfully good, and it mattered.”

“And the next one will be better. Are you going to stop being a little goose now and come do your job?”

Maisie blew her nose loudly and gave Hilda an apologetic smile.

“That was my last little honk.”

“What a relief.”




The next morning, Hilda was almost buried in every newspaper in Britain, all blaring the headlines about Labour’s win and the women who had helped make it happen.

“‘The Flapper Election’? Really? Those silly lads, so prosaic,” Hilda tutted.

Prosaic, but poetic, Maisie thought. And it was something, being touted as having counted for so much.

“The main thing is we brought results,” Hilda said, echoing Maisie’s thoughts. “The sun is even shining, and the world doesn’t appear likely to end.”

“Just beginning,” Phyllida chimed in from her desk.

“Be upstanding,” Fielden muttered, stumping into the office. “Apparently the DG is in a bit of a temper today.”

“How can you tell?” Maisie asked.

Fielden gave her a baleful look. “The old Tory’s displeased about the election results, it seems.”

“Quelle surprise,” Hilda murmured.

“We should be grateful he doesn’t demand to know whom we all voted for,” Fielden said.

“Maybe he’ll add that to the questions he asks potential new employees,” Maisie suggested. “But just the men.”

Even Fielden laughed, which made Maisie wonder if Hilda’s observation that the world wasn’t ending was perhaps a touch premature.

Later, when Hilda was going to lunch, she jerked her head at Maisie to follow her.

They were halfway up Savoy Street when Hilda pulled a lumpy parcel out of her holdall and handed it to Maisie.

“This will help you when you pay your little visit. Don’t open it now.”

Visit. To Siemens. A dozen snakes rose in Maisie’s belly and began to do the cancan.

“So you think I’m ready?”

“As much as anyone can be. Go to Siemens first. Friday is a company meeting day.”

“How do you know?”

Hilda grinned. “I don’t know why I’m encouraging this. I daresay I’ve gone soft.”

Later, Maisie sneaked the parcel into the lavatory and opened it. It was a pocket camera. She turned it over and over in delight.

Oh, Mr. Hoppel, Mr. Grigson. You might have a lot of money and influence. But I have the power to expose and embarrass you. Good luck buying your way out of that.

The offices of Siemens in London were in great behemoths that exemplified the worst taste of the Victorian era, though Maisie admitted she might be slightly biased against any building that housed Siemens.

The nearby restaurants had claimed most of the workers who weren’t engaged in meetings, and the few who remained in the parts of the building where Maisie entered were only of the coffee-and-sandwich hierarchy, and thus too bitter to notice another mere secretary.

Maisie could hear Miss Jenkins’s brittle voice lecturing her on office patterns. Circling the first floor. The second. The third. She found her target on the fourth. A corner office, because it would be, with Hoppel’s name engraved in a rather florid style, very last century.

“Look for locked drawers first,” Hilda had advised.

His secretary’s lair featured files and drawers that opened with nary a creak. But he wouldn’t keep anything I’m looking for in here.

Maisie felt thoroughly businesslike and even blithe as she entered Hoppel’s office and tested the desk drawers until she found the one that was locked.

“An innocent nail file is one of the finest tools of the trade.”

And per Hilda’s instruction, Maisie’s nail file bent the lock to her will with shameful ease.

The first few files were all the usual company documents. Reports, budgets, projections, the daily tedium that would have been her lot to type and file if she hadn’t landed in the Elysium that was Savoy Hill.

Then her hand closed upon a fistful of pamphlets. Smiling the smile of grim triumph, she discovered copies of all the Nazi pamphlets Hilda had been accumulating, covered with annotations on plans for the media and how it would support the cause.

She took a picture, and for extra good measure whipped out her pad and covered it in shorthand. All the best spies should go to secretarial school. Then she found another report, this one indicating funds allocated for the promotion of the Nazi party, “should they prove to be the friend to industry they promise.”