Eye Of The Needle

Chapter 2

  David was the tallest of the lot. He had broken high-jump records last year at Cambridge University. He was rather too good-looking for a man-his face would have been feminine were it not for the dark, ineradicable shadow of a heavy beard. He shaved twice a day. He had long eyelashes, and he looked intelligent, which he was, and sensitive.

  The whole thing was idyllic: two happy, handsome people, children of solid, comfortably off, backbone-of-England-type families getting married in a country church in the finest summer weather Britain can offer.

  When they were pronounced man and wife both the mothers were dry-eyed, and both the fathers cried.

  Kissing the bride was a barbarous custom, Lucy thought, as yet another middle-aged pair of champagne-wet lips smeared her cheek. It was probably descended from even more barbarous customs in the Dark Ages, when every man in the tribe was allowed to-well, anyway, it was time we got properly civilised and dropped the whole business. She had known she would not like this part of the wedding. She liked champagne, but she was not crazy about chicken drumsticks or dollops of caviar on squares of cold toast, and as for the speeches and the photographs and the honeymoon jokes, well. . . But it could have been worse. If it had been peacetime, father would have hired the Albert Hall.

  So far nine people had said, "May all your troubles be little ones," and one person, with scarcely more originality, had said, "I want to see more than a fence running around your garden. "

  Lucy had shaken countless hands and pretended not to hear remarks like "I wouldn't mind being in David's pyjamas tonight. " David had made a speech in which he thanked Lucy's parents for giving him their daughter, and Lucy's father actually said that he was not losing a daughter but gaining a son. It was all hopelessly gaga, but one did it for one's parents. A distant uncle loomed up from the direction of the bar, swaying slightly, and Lucy repressed a shudder. She introduced him to her husband.

  "David, this is Uncle Norman. "

  Uncle Norman pumped David's bony hand. "well, m'boy, when do you take up your commission?"

  "Tomorrow, sir. "

  "What, no honeymoon?"

  "Just twenty-four hours. "

  "But you've only just fished your training, so I gather. "

  "Yes, but I could fly before, you know. I learned at Cambridge. Besides, with an this going on they can't spare pilots. I expect I shall be in the air tomorrow. "

  Lucy said quietly, "David, don't," but Uncle Norman persevered.

  "What'll you fly?" Uncle Norman asked with schoolboy enthusiasm.

  "Spitfire. I saw her yesterday. She's a lovely kite. " David had already fallen into the RAF slang: kites and crates and the drink and bandits at two o'clock. "She's got eight guns, she does three hundred and fifty knots, and she'll turn around in a shoebox. "

  "Marvellous, marvellous. You boys are certainly knocking the stuffing out of the Luftwaffe, what?"

  "We got sixty yesterday for eleven of our own," David said, as proudly as if he had shot them all down himself. "The day before, when they had a go at Yorkshire, we sent the lot back to Norway with their tails between their legs and we didn't lose a single kite. "

  Uncle Norman gripped David's shoulder with tipsy fervour. "Never," he quoted pompously, "was so much owed by so many to so few. Churchill said that the other day. "

  David tried a modest grin. "He must have been talking about the mess bills. "

  Lucy hated the way they trivialised bloodshed and destruction. She said: "David, we should go and change now. "

  They went in separate cars to Lucy's home. Her mother helped her out of the wedding dress and said: "Now, my dear, I don't quite know what you're expecting tonight, but you ought to know. "

  "Oh, mother, this is 1940, you know!"

  Her mother coloured slightly. "Very well, dear," she said mildly. "But if there is anything you want to talk about, later on. . . "

  It occurred to Lucy that to say things like this cost her mother considerable effort, and she regretted her sharp reply.

  "Thank you," she said. She touched her mother's hand. "I will. "

  "I'll leave you to it, then. Call me if you want anything. " She kissed Lucy's cheek and went out.

  Lucy sat at the dressing table in her slip and began to brush her hair. She knew exactly what to expect tonight. She felt a faint glow of pleasure as she remembered.

  It happened in June, a year after they had met at the Glad Rag Ball. They were seeing each other every week by this time, and David had spent part of the Easter vacation with Lucy's people. Mother and Father approved of him he was handsome, clever and gentlemanly, and he came from precisely the same stratum of society as they did. Father thought he was a shade too opinionated, but Mother said the landed gentry had been saying that about undergraduates for six hundred years, and she thought David would be kind to his wife, which was the most important thing in the long run. So in June Lucy went to David's family home for a weekend.

  The place was a Victorian copy of an eighteenth-century grange, a square-shaped house with nine bedrooms and a terrace with a vista. What impressed Lucy about it was the realisation that the people who planted the garden must have known they would be long dead before it reached maturity. The atmosphere was very easy, and the two of them drank beer on the terrace in the afternoon sunshine. That was when David told her that he had been accepted for officer training in the RAF, along with four pals from the university flying club. He wanted to be a fighter pilot.

  "I can fly all right," he said, "and they'll need people once this war gets going-they say it'll be won and lost in the air, this time. "

  "Aren't you afraid?" she said quietly.

  "Not a bit," he said. Then he looked at her and said, "Yes, I am. " She thought he was very brave, and held his hand.

  A little later they put on swimming suits and went down to the lake. The water was clear and cool, but the sun was still strong and the air was warm as they splashed about gleefully. "Are you a good swimmer?" he asked her.

  "Better than you!"

  "All right. Race you to the island. "

  She shaded her eyes to look into the sun. She held the pose for a minute, pretending she did not know how desirable she was in her wet swimsuit with her arms raised and her shoulders back. The island was a small patch of bushes and trees about three hundred yards away, in the centre of the lake.

  She dropped her hands, shouted, "Go!" and struck out in a fast crawl. David won, of course, with his enormously long arms and legs. Lucy found herself in difficulty when she was still fifty yards from the island. She switched to breaststroke, but she was too exhausted even for that, and she had to roll over on to her back and float. David, who was already sitting on the bank blowing like a walrus, slipped back into the water and swam to meet her. He got behind her, held her beneath the arms in the correct lifesaving position, and pulled her slowly to shore. His hands were just below her breasts.

  "I'm enjoying this," he said, and she giggled despite her breathlessness.

  A few moments later he said, "I suppose I might as well tell you. "

  "What?" she panted.

  "The lake is only four feet deep. "

  "You. . . !" She wriggled out of his arms, spluttering and laughing, and found her footing.

  He took her hand and led her out of the water and through the trees. He pointed to an old wooden rowing boat rotting upside-down beneath a hawthorn. "When I was a boy I used to row out here in that, with one of Papa's pipes, a box of matches and a pinch of St. Bruno in a twist of paper. This is where I used to smoke it. "

  They were in a clearing, completely surrounded by bushes. The turf underfoot was clean and springy. Lucy flopped on the ground. "We'd swim back slowly," David said.

  "Let's not even talk about it just yet," she replied.

  He sat beside her and kissed her, then pushed her gently backwards until she was lying down. He stroked her hip and kissed her throat, and soon she stopped
shivering. When he laid his hand gently, nervously, on the soft mound between her legs, she arched upwards, willing him to press harder. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him open-mouthed and wetly. His hands went to the straps of her swimsuit, and he pulled them down over her shoulders.

  She said, "No. "

  He buried his face between her breasts. "Lucy, please. "

  "No. "

  He looked at her. "It might be my last chance. "

  She rolled away from him and stood up. Then, because of the war, and because of the pleading look on his flushed young face, and because of the glow inside her which would not go away, she took off her costume with one swift movement and removed her bathing cap so that her dark-red hair shook out over her shoulders. She knelt in front of him, taking his face in her hands and guiding his lips to her breast.

  She lost her virginity painlessly, enthusiastically, and only a little too quickly.

  The spice of guilt made the memory more pleasant, not less. Even if it had been a well-planned seduction then she had been a willing, not to say eager, victim, especially at the end.

  She began to dress in her going-away outfit. She had startled him a couple of times that afternoon on the island once when she wanted him to kiss her breasts, and again when she had guided him inside her with her hands. Apparently such things did not happen in the books he read. Like most of her friends, Lucy read D. H. Lawrence for information about sex. She believed in his choreography and mistrusted the sound effects-the things his people did to one another sounded nice, but not that nice; she was not expecting trumpets and thunderstorms and the clash of cymbals at her sexual awakening.

  David was a little more ignorant than she, but he was gentle, and he took pleasure in her pleasure, and she was sure that was the important thing.

  They had done it only once since the first time. Exactly a week before their wedding they had made love again, and it caused their first row.

  This time it was at her parents' house, in the morning after everyone else had left. He came to her room in his robe and got into bed with her. She almost changed her mind about Lawrence's trumpets and cymbals. David got out of bed immediately afterward. "Don't go," she said.

  "Somebody might come in. "

  "I'll chance it. Come back to bed. " She was warm and drowsy and comfortable, and she wanted him beside her.

  He put on his robe. "It makes me nervous. "

  "You weren't nervous five minutes ago. " She reached for him. "Lie with me. I want to get to know your body. " Her directness obviously embarrassed him, and he turned away.

  She flounced out of bed, her lovely breasts heaving. "You're making me feel cheap!" She sat on the edge of the bed and burst into tears.

  David put his arms around her and said: "I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. You're the first for me, too, and I don't know what to expect, and I feel confused. . . I mean, nobody tells you anything about this, do they?"

  She snuffled and shook her head in agreement, and it occurred to her that what was really unnerving him was the knowledge that in eight days time he had to take off in a flimsy aircraft and fight for his life above the clouds; so she forgave him, and he dried her tears, and they got back into bed. He was very sweet after that. . .

  She was just about ready. She examined herself in a full-length mirror. Her suit was faintly military. with square shoulders and epaulettes, but the blouse beneath it was feminine, for balance. Her hair fell in sausage curls beneath a natty pill-box hat. It would not have been right to go away gorgeously dressed, not this year; but she felt she had achieved the kind of briskly practical, yet attractive, look that was rapidly becoming fashionable.

  David was waiting for her in the hall. He kissed her and said, "You look wonderful, Mrs Rose. "

  They were driven back to the reception to say good-bye to everyone. They were going to spend the night in London, at Claridge's, then David would drive on to Biggin Hill and Lucy would come home again. She was going to live with her parents; she had the use of a cottage for when David was on leave.

  There was another half-hour of handshakes and kisses, then they went out to the car. Some of David's cousins had got at his open-top MG. There were tin cans and an old boot tied to the bumpers with string. the running-boards were awash with confetti, and "Just Married" was scrawled all over the paintwork in bright red lipstick.

  They drove away, smiling and waving, the guests filling the street behind them. A mile down the road they stopped and cleaned up the car. It was dusk when they got going again. David's headlights were fitted with blackout masks, but he drove very fast just the same. Lucy felt very happy.

  David said, "There's a bottle of bubbly in the glove compartment. "

  Lucy opened the compartment and found the champagne and two glasses carefully wrapped in tissue paper. It was still quite cold. The cork came out with a loud pop and shot off into the night. David lit a cigarette while Lucy poured the wine. "We're going to be late for supper. " he said.

  "Who cares. " She handed him a glass.

  She was too tired to drink really. She became sleepy. The car seemed to be going terribly fast. She let David have most of the champagne. He began to whistle St Louis Blues.

  Driving through England in the blackout was a weird experience. One missed lights that one hadn't realised were there before the war: lights in cottage porches and farmhouse windows; lights on cathedral spires and inn signs and most of all the luminous glow, low in the distant sky, of the thousand lights of a nearby town. Even if one had been able to see, there were no signposts to look at: they had been removed to confuse the German parachutists who were expected any day (Just a few days ago in the Midlands, farmers had found parachutes, radios and maps, but since there were no footprints leading away from the objects, it had been concluded that no men had landed and the whole thing was a feeble Nazi attempt to panic the population. ) Anyway, David knew the way to London.

  They climbed a long hill. The little sports car took it nimbly. Lucy gazed through half-closed eyes at the blackness ahead. The downside of the hill was steep and winding. Lucy heard the distant roar of an approaching lorry.

  The MG's tires squealed as David raced around the bends. "I think you're going too fast," Lucy said mildly.

  The back of the car skidded on a left curve. David changed down, afraid to brake in case he skidded again. On either side the hedgerows were dimly picked out by the shaded headlights. There was a sharp right-hand curve, and David lost the back again. The curve seemed to go on and on forever. The little car slid sideways and turned through 180 degrees, so that it was going backwards, then continued to turn in the same direction. "David!" Lucy screamed.

  The moon came out suddenly, and they saw the lorry. It was struggling up the hill at a snail's pace, with thick smoke, made silvery by the moonlight, pouring from its snout-shaped bonnet. Lucy glimpsed the driver's face, even his cloth cap and his moustache; his mouth was open as he stood on his brakes. The car was travelling forward again now. There was just room to pass the lorry if David could regain control of the car. He heaved the steering wheel over and touched the accelerator. It was a mistake.

  The car and the lorry collided head-on.

  Foreigners have spies; Britain has Military Intelligence. As if that were not euphemism enough, it is abbreviated to MI. In 1940, MI was part of the War Offlce. It was spreading like crab grass at the time-not surprisingly-and its different sections were known by numbers: MI9 ran the escape routes from prisoner-of-war camps through Occupied Europe to neutral countries; MI8 monitored enemy wireless traffic, and was of more value than six regiments; MI6 sent agents into France.

  It was MI5 that Professor Percival Godliman joined in the autumn of 1940. He turned up at the War Office in Whitehall on a cold September morning after a night spent putting out fires all over the East End; the blitz was at its height and he was an auxiliary Fireman.

  Military Intelligence was run by soldiers in peacet
ime, when in Godliman's opinion espionage made no difference to anything anyhow; but now, he found, it was populated by amateurs, and he was delighted to discover that he knew half the people in MI5. On his first day he met a barrister who was a member of his club, an art historian with whom he had been to college, an archivist from his own university, and his favourite writer of detective stories. He was shown into Colonel Terry's office at 10 A. M.

  Terry had been there for several hours; there were two empty cigarette packets in the wastepaper basket. Godliman said, "Should I call you 'Sir' now?"

  "There's not much bull around here, Percy. 'Uncle Andrew' will do Fine. Sit down. "

  All the same, there was a briskness about Terry that had not been present when they had lunch at the Savoy. Godliman noticed that he did not smile, and his attention kept wandering to a pile of unread messages on the desk.

  Terry looked at his watch and said, "I'm aching to put you in the picture, briefly finish the lecture I started over lunch. "

  Godliman smiled. "This time I won't get up on my high horse. "

  Terry lit another cigarette.

  Canaris' spies in Britain were useless people (Terry resumed, as if their conversation had been interrupted five minutes rather than three months ago). Dorothy O'Grady was typical: we caught her cutting military telephone wire on the Isle of Wight. She was writing letters to Portugal in the kind of secret ink you buy in joke shops.

  A new wave of spies began in September. Their task was to reconnoitre Britain in preparation for the invasion to map beaches suitable for landings; fields and roads that could be used by troop-carrying gliders; tank traps and road blocks and barbed-wire obstacles.

  They seem to have been badly selected, hastily mustered, inadequately trained, and poorly equipped. Typical were the four who came over on the night of 23 September: Meier, Kieboom, Pons, and Waldberg. Kieboom and Pons landed at dawn near Hythe, and were arrested by Private Tollervey of the Somerset Light Infantry, who came upon them in the sand dunes hacking away at a dirty great wurst.

  Waldberg actually managed to send a signal to Hamburg: ARRIVED SAFELY. DOCUMENT DESTROYED. ENGLISH PATROL 200 METRES PROM COAST. BEACH WITH BROWN NETS AND RAILWAY SLEEPERS AT A DISTANCE OP 50 METRES. NO MINES. FEW SOLDIERS. UNFINISHED BLOCKHOUSE. NEW ROAD. WALDBERG.

  Clearly he did not know where he was, nor did he even have a code name. The quality of his briefing is indicated by the fact that he knew nothing of English licencing laws: he went into a pub at nine o'clock in the morning and asked for a quart of cider.

  (Godliman laughed at this, and Terry said: "Wait: it gets funnier. ")

  The landlord told Waldberg to come back at ten. He could spend the hour looking at the village church, he suggested. Amazingly, Waldberg was back at ten sharp, whereupon two policemen on bicycles arrested him.

  ("It's like a script for 'It's That Man Again'," said Godliman. )

  Meier was found a few hours later. Eleven more agents were picked up over the next few weeks, most of them within hours of landing on British soil. Almost all of them were destined for the scaffold.

  ("Almost all?" said Godliman.

  Terry said: "Yes. A couple have been handed over to our section B-l(a). I'll come back to that in a minute. ")

  Others landed in Eire. One was Ernst Weber-Drohl, a well-known acrobat who had two illegitimate children in Ireland. He had toured music houses there as 'The World's Strongest Man. ' He was arrested by the Garde Siochana, fined three pounds, and turned over to B-1 (a).

  Another was Hermann Goetz, who parachuted into Ulster instead of Eire by mistake, was robbed by the IRA, swam the Boyne in his fur underwear and eventually swallowed his suicide pill. He had a flashlight marked "Made in Dresden. "

  ("If it's so easy to pick these bunglers up," Terry said, "why are we taking on brainy types like yourself to catch them? Two reasons. One: we've got no way of knowing how many we haven't picked up. Two: it's what we do with the ones we don't hang that matters. This is where B-l(a) comes in. But to explain that I have to go back to 1936. ")

  Alfred George Owens was an electrical engineer with a company that had a few government contracts. He visited Germany several times during the '30s, and voluntarily gave to the Admiralty odd bits of technical information he picked up there.

  Eventually Naval Intelligence passed him on to MI6 who began to develop him as an agent. The Abwehr recruited him at about the same time, as MI6 discovered when they intercepted a letter from him to a known German cover address. Clearly he was a man totally without loyalty; he just wanted to be a spy. We called him "Snow"; the Germans called him "Johnny. " In January 1939 Snow got a letter containing (1) instructions for the use of a wireless transmitter and (2) a ticket from the checkroom at Victoria Station.

  He was arrested the day after war broke out, and he and his transmitter (which he had picked up, in a suitcase, when be presented the checkroom ticket) were locked up in Wandsworth Prison. He continued to communicate with Hamburg, but now all the messages were written by section B-l(a) of MI5. The Abwehr put him in touch with two more German agents in England, whom we immediately nabbed. They also gave him a code and detailed wireless procedure, all of which was invaluable.

  Snow was followed by Charlie, Rainbow, Summer, Biscuit, and eventually a small army of enemy spies, all in regular contact with Canaris, an apparently trusted by him, and all totally controlled by the British counterintelligence apparatus.

  At that point MI5 began dimly to glimpse an awesome and tantalising prospect: with a bit of luck, they could control and manipulate the entire German espionage network in Britain.

  "Turning agents into double agents instead of hanging them has two crucial advantages," Terry wound up. "Since the enemy thinks his spies are still active, he doesn't try to replace them with others who may not get caught. And, since we are supplying the information the spies tell their controllers, we can deceive the enemy and mislead his strategists. "

  "It can't be that easy," said Godliman.

  "Certainly not. " Terry opened a window to let out the fug of cigarette and pipe smoke. "To work, the system has to be very near total. If there is any substantial number of genuine agents here, their information will contradict that of the double agents and the Abwehr will smell a rat. "

  "It sounds exciting," Godliman said. His pipe had gone out. Terry smiled for the first time that morning. "The people here will tell you it's hard work: long hours, high tension, frustration, but yes, of course it's exciting. " He looked at his watch. "Now I want you to meet a very bright young member of my staff. Let me walk you to his offlce. "

  They went out of the room, up some stairs, and along several corridors. "His name is Frederick Bloggs, and he gets annoyed if you make jokes about it," Terry continued. "We pinched him from Scotland Yard-he was an inspector with Special Branch. If you need arms and legs, use him. You'll rank above him, of course, but I shouldn't make too much of that; we don't, here. I suppose I hardly need to say that to you. "

  They entered a small, bare room that looked out on to a blank wall. There was no carpet. A photograph of a pretty girl hung on the wall, and there was a pair of handcuffs on the hat-stand.

  Terry said, "Frederick Bloggs, Percival Godliman. I'll leave you to it. "

  The man behind the desk was blond, stocky and short; he must have been only just tall enough to get into the police force, Godliman thought. His tie was an eyesore, but he had a pleasant, open face and an attractive grin.

  His handshake was firm.

  "Tell you what, Percy, I was just going to nip home for lunch," he said. "Why don't you come along? The wife makes a lovely sausage and chips. " He had a broad cockney accent.

  Sausage and chips was not Godliman's favourite meal, but he went along. They walked to Trafalgar Square and caught a bus to Brixton. Bloggs said, "I married a wonderful girl, but she can't cook for nuts. I have sausage and chips every day. "

  East London was still smoking
from the previous night's air raid. They passed groups of firemen and volunteers digging through rubble, playing hoses over dying fires and clearing debris from the streets. They saw an old man carry a precious radio out of a half-ruined house.

  Godliman made conversation. "So we're to catch spies together. "

  "We'll have a go, Perce. "

  Bloggs' home was a three-bedroom semi-detached house in a street of exactly similar houses. The tiny front gardens were all being used to grow vegetables. Mrs Bloggs was the pretty girl in the photograph on the office wall. She looked tired. "She drives an ambulance during the raids, don't you, love?" Bloggs said. He was proud of her. Her name was Christine.

  She said. "Every morning when I come home I wonder if the house will still he here. "

  "Notice it's the house she's worried about, not me," Bloggs said.

  Godliman picked up a medal in a presentation case from the mantelpiece. "How did you get this?"

  Christine answered. "He took a shotgun off a villain who was robbing a post offlce. "

  "You're quite a pair. " Godliman said.

  "You married. Percy?" Bloggs asked.

  "I'm a widower. "

  "Sorry. "

  "My wife died of tuberculosis in 1930. We never had any children. "

  "We're not having any yet," Bloggs said. "Not while the world's in this state. "

  Christine said: "Oh, Fred, he's not interested in that!" Shs went out to the kitchen.

  They sat around a square table in the canter of the room to eat. Godliman was touched by this couple and the domestic scene, and found himself thinking of his Eleanor. That was unusual; he had been immune to sentiment for some years. Perhaps the nerves were coming alive again, at last. War did funny things.

  Christine's cooking was truly awful. The sausages were burned. Bloggs drowned his meal in tomato ketchup and Godliman cheerfully followed suit.

  When they got back to Whitehall Bloggs showed Godliman the file on unidentified enemy agents thought still to be operating in Britain.

  There were three sources of information about such people. The first was the immigration records of the Home Office. Passport control had long been an arm of Military Intelligence, and there was a list going back to the last war of aliens who had entered the country but had not left or been accounted for in other ways, such as death or naturalisation. At the outbreak of war they had all gone before tribunals that classified them in three groups. At first only "A" class aliens were interned; but by July of 1940, after some scaremongering by Fleet Street, the "B" and "C" classes were taken out of circulation. There was a small number of immigrants who could not be located, and it was a fair amgumption that some of them were spies. Their papers were in Bloggs' file.

  The second source was wireless transmissions. Section C of MI8 patrolled the airwaves nightly, recorded everything they did not know for certain to be theirs, and passed it to the Government Code and Cipher School. This outfit, which had recently been moved from London's Berkeley Street to a country house at Bletchley Park, was not a school at all but a collection of chess champions, musicians, mathematicians, and crossword puzzle enthusiasts dedicated to the belief that if a man could invent a code a man could crack it. Signals originating in the British Isles that could not be accounted for by any of the Services were assumed to be messages from spies. The decoded messages were in Bloggs' file.

  Finally there were the double agents, but their value was largely hoped-for rather than actual. Messages to them from the Abwehr had warned of several incoming agents, and had given away one resident spy-Mrs Matilda Krafft of Bournemouth. who had sent money to Snow by post and was subsequently incarcerated in Holloway prison. But the doubles had not been able to reveal the identity or locations of the kind of quietly effective professional spies most valuable to a secret intelligence service. No one doubted that there were such people. There were clues someone, for example, had brought Snow's transmitter over from Germany and deposited it in the cloakroom at Victoria Station for him to collect. But either the Abwehr or the spies themselves were too cautious to be caught by the doubles. However the clues were in Bloggs' file.

  Other sources were being developed: the experts were working to improve methods of triangulation (the directional pin-pointing of radio transmitters); and MI6 were trying to rebuild the networks of agents in Europe that had sunk beneath the tidal wave of Hitler's armies. What little information there was was in Bloggs' file. "It can be infuriating at times," he told Godliman. "Look at this. "

  He took from the file a long radio intercept about British plans for an expeditionary force for Finland. "This was picked up early in the year. The information is impeccable. They were trying to get a fix on him when he broke off in the middle, for no apparent reason. Perhaps he was interrupted. He resumed a few minutes later, but he was off the air again before our people had a chance to plug in. "

  Godliman said, "What's this 'Regards to Willi'?"

  "Now, that's important," said Bloggs. He was getting enthusiastic. "Here's a scrap of another message, quite recent. Look: 'Regards to Willi. ' This time there was a reply. He's addressed as 'Die Nadel'. "

  "The Needle. "

  "This one's a pro. Look at his message: terse, economical, but detailed and completely unambiguous. "

  Godliman studied the fragment of the second message. "It appears to be about the effects of the bombing. "

  "He's obviously toured the East End. A pro, a pro. "

  "What else do we know about Die Nadel?"

  Bloggs' expression of youthful eagerness collapsed. "That's it, I'm afraid. "

  "His code name is Die Nadel, he signs off 'Regards to Willi,' and he has good information and that's it?"

  "'Fraid so. "