Code Name Verity(43)

Maddie has a rule about passing on favours which she calls the ‘Aerodrome Drop-Off Principle’. It is very simple. If someone needs to get to an airfield and you can get them there, by taxi Anson or motorbike or pony trap or pig-aback, you should always take them. Because someday you will need a ride to an airfield too. Someone different will have to take you, so the favour gets passed on instead of paid back.

Now, talking to Jamie, Maddie thought of all the little things Dympna Wythenshawe had done or said on Maddie’s behalf, things which had cost Dympna nothing, but which had changed Maddie’s life. Maddie knew she could never repay Dympna; but now, according to the Aerodrome Drop-Off Principle, Maddie had a chance to pass the life-changing favours on.

‘You should ask your C.O. about Special Duties flying,’ Maddie said to Jamie. ‘I think you’d have a good chance of getting in with them.’

‘Special Duties?’ Jamie echoed, just as Maddie had echoed Theo Lyons a few months back.

‘They fly dead hush-hush missions,’ Maddie said. ‘Short-field operations, night landings. Lysanders and sometimes Hudsons. It’s not a big squadron. Volunteer for RAF Special Duties, and if you need a reference ask to talk to –’

The name she gave Jamie was the alias of the intelligence officer who recruited me.

It was probably the most daring thing she’d ever done. Maddie could only guess at what he was. But she’d remembered his name – or rather, the name he’d used when he bought her a whisky in The Green Man – and she’d seen him more than once on the secret airfield (and he thought he was so clever too). Plenty of odd civilians came and went from that airfield, but Maddie didn’t see many of them, and when she recognised the one she did see, it stuck in her head as a most peculiar coincidence.

(Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God.)

Jamie repeated the name aloud to fix it in his head, and leaned forward to peer at Maddie more closely in the firelight from the library grate.

‘Where the devil have you come by that sort of information?’

‘“Careless talk costs lives,”’ Maddie answered sternly, and The Pobble Who Has No Toes laughed because it sounded so like his little sister. I mean his younger sister. (I mean me.)

How I would love to stay in the library at Craig Castle with them all night. Later Maddie slept in my bed (Mother always keeps our beds made up, just in case). It was cold with the window open but, like Mother and Mrs Darling, Maddie left the window as she found it, also just in case. I wish I could indulge in writing about my bedroom, but I must stop early today so von Linden can prep me for this radio interview tomorrow. Anyway my bedroom at home in Craig Castle, Castle Craig, has nothing to do with the War.

This bloody radio interview. All lies, lies and damned lies.





Ormaie 20.XI.43 JB-S

I’m supposed to use this time to make my own notes on the radio interview yesterday – as a kind of backstop in case the actual broadcast doesn’t match up with what v.L. remembers of it. I would have written about it anyway, but BUCKETS OF BLOOD, WHEN DO I GET TO FINISH MY GREAT DISSERTATION OF TREASON?

They really made an effort to make me presentable, as though I were a débutante to be presented to the King of England all over again. It was decided (not by me) that my beloved pullover makes me look too thin and pale, and is also getting a wee bit ragged, so they washed and pressed my blouse and temporarily gave me back my grey silk scarf. I was flabbergasted to find they still had it – I suppose it must be part of my file and they are still hunting for unrevealed code in the paisley.

They let me put my hair up, but made a lot of fuss over how to fix it because no one trusts me with hairpins. In the end I was allowed to use PENCIL STUBS. MY GOD they are petty. I was also allowed to do it myself because A) Engel could not make it stay, B) she could not hide the pencils as well as I did. And even after soaking my fingertips in kerosene for an hour (who suspected kerosene has so many uses?) they have failed to get rid of the ink stains beneath my fingernails. But that just adds credibility to the stenographer story, I think. Also, because afterwards my hands positively reeked of kerosene, I was then allowed to scrub myself all over with a lovely creamy little bar of curious American soap which floated in the basin when you let go of it. Where in the world did that come from? (Apart from the obvious, ‘America’.) It looked like hotel soap, but the wrapper was in English and it couldn’t have been from this hotel.

C d M, le Chateau des Mystères