‘We’d like to ask you a few questions about the woman with whom you share this house.’
‘Before Miss Flowerday answers any questions you have,’ Max said, ‘I think it a reasonable request that you show us some identification.’
‘And who would you be, sir?’
‘I asked first,’ he said firmly.
It was then, as I looked at the two men, and the window behind them, that something caught my eye in the back garden. At first I thought it was one of Tally’s dresses drying on the washing line. But then I realised what it really was and let out an ungodly scream. Her neck in a noose, Tally was hanging from a branch of the apple tree.
What happened then, and to this day, was a nightmarish blur. After being taken to London, I was thoroughly interrogated – just as Max had predicted – and on being found to be innocent of any crime, it transpired that unwittingly I had been sharing a house with a spy who had been passing information on to the Germans. In the garden, and hidden in a tin box behind a patch of nettles and brambles, was evidence of ciphers which she had somehow stolen from the Park. A small case containing a radio device was found in an old potato sack in the greenhouse. It had been well hidden beneath an assortment of garden tools and pots.
More disturbing than any of this was that the official line on Tally’s death was that she had killed herself out of remorse for betraying her country. But how could it have been suicide? I asked, when there was nothing beneath her on which she could have climbed to attach the noose to the branch. I was told that she had simply climbed the tree and I was not to ask any more questions; the matter was closed. I had no way of knowing whether it was MI5 or MI6 who had interrogated me, but I was under no illusion that whatever was going on was deadly serious. As to who had killed Tally, I would never know.
When I was released from London and allowed to resume my duties back at the Park, Max insisted that he stayed with me at the cottage. I knew it was a mistake, but frankly I was so unnerved by the whole episode, and a little fearful that whoever had murdered Tally might return, I allowed myself to believe that no harm would come of Max sleeping in what had been Tally’s room.
How naïve I was!
That night, unable to sleep – the slightest noise putting me into a terrible state of alarm – I lay in the dark staring up at the ceiling. Just a few feet away from me, the other side of the wall, was Max. I tried not to imagine what it might feel like to have his reassuring presence with me on this side of the wall. But the more I tried not to think of him, the stronger the urge became to lie within his embrace, to feel what all those other girls had experienced with him.
Don’t be a fool, I told myself. Think of Kit.
But Kit was as far from my thoughts as he could be. For once in my life I wanted to be rash, to forget about the sensible woman everybody took me to be. If I died tomorrow – found hanging from the branch of a tree just like Tally – what did it matter how rational and loyal I’d been?
A faint knock at the door made me start.
‘It’s me, Max. Can I come in?’
God knows I should have said no, but I didn’t. At my affirmative reply, he entered the room. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he murmured in the shadowy darkness.
‘Me neither,’ I replied.
‘I can’t stop thinking about you,’ he said, approaching my bed. ‘I keep thinking how I’d feel if anything happened to you.’
‘How would you feel?’ I asked. Under any other circumstances, I would have deemed the remark wholly coquettish and beneath me, but holding my breath, I waited for his reply.
By the side of my bed now, he got down on his knees. ‘I’d be devastated,’ he said.
‘Is that what you say to all the women you’ve slept with?’
‘Must you always regard me so sceptically, Evelyn? Why not trust me, just once?’
‘Only once?’ I asked, gripped with the desire to slip my hands around his shoulders and pull him into bed with me.
Leaning in close, he ran a finger along the length of my jaw, then brushed it against my lips. Any restraint that had kept my longing for him in check now deserted me, and I raised myself up so that my mouth touched his. I kissed him in a way I had never kissed Kit, driven by a passion that left Max in no doubt that I wanted him to make love to me.
He must have known that he was my first lover, and he took me to him with a tenderness I would never have expected. Afterwards, and without a trace of shame, I slept in his arms. We both woke some hours later, and with still no shame in me, we made love again, this time he was less cautious.
We slept once more, and after the deepest of sleeps, I woke to the sound of birds singing. The innocence of that dawn chorus made me think of Kit and suddenly, as Max stirred beside me in the narrow bed, shame now made itself known.
Later that day, and mortified at what I had done, I sought out the powers that be at the Park and claimedill-health as a result of Tally’s death. Rarely was such a request granted, there was a war on, after all, but I must have caught the administrative officer in charge in a sympathetic mood. My tearful entreaty was convincing enough for me to be granted a fortnight’s leave.
I left no word of explanation for Max, but packed my case and fled to Bletchley station to catch the first available train to Suffolk.
As luck would have it, Kit was home on leave and, taking me by surprise, he made it clear that he felt we had waited long enough to commit ourselves to each other. I’ll never know what made him decide this, but that night we made love in my old childhood bed at Meadow Lodge. (Thank God my mother was bedridden and her hearing had deteriorated to the extent it had!)
It was the first time I had seen him entirely unclothed and the sight of his badly scarred body filled me with a fiercely protective love for him. Full of remorse for my betrayal of him, I swore to myself there and then that I would be the best wife I could to this man I had known nearly all my life. I would never do anything to hurt him.
We were married within the month, which brought an end to my work at Bletchley Park, and my association with MaxBlythe-Jones. I never saw or heard from him again.
