The house was no more than five minutes away, reached by a narrow country lane along which she drove expertly at considerable speed. It stood in about an acre of well-tended garden surrounded by beech trees through which one could see the bay far below. It was Victorian from the look of it, with long narrow windows and green shutters at the front and a portico at the entrance. The door was opened instantly as we went up the steps by a tall, somber-looking man in a black alpaca jacket. He had silver hair and wore steel-rimmed glasses.
“Ah, Vito,” she said as he took her coat. “This is Professor Stacey.”
“Professore.” He bowed slightly!
“We’ll have coffee in the library later,” she said. “I’ll see to the drinks.”
“Of course, Contessa.”
He turned away and paused and spoke to her in Italian. She shook her head and answered fluently in the same language. He went through a door at the rear of the hall.
“Contessa?” I asked.
“Oh, don’t listen to Vito.” She dismissed my query politely, but firmly. “He’s a terrible snob. This way.”
The hall was cool and pleasant. Black and white tiled floor, a curving staircase and two or three oil paintings on the wall. Eighteenth-century seascapes. She opened a double mahogany door and led the way into a large library. The walls were lined with books, and French windows looked out to the garden. There was an Adam fireplace with a fire burning brightly in the basket grate and a grand piano, the top crammed with photos, mostly in silver frames.
“Scotch all right for you?” she asked.
“Fine.”
She crossed to a sideboard and busied herself at the drinks tray. “How did you know who I was?” I asked. “Canon Cullen?”
“I Ve known about you since you started work on Harry.” She handed me a glass.
“Who told you?”
“Oh, friends,” she said. “From the old days. The kind who get to know things.”
It made me think of Tony Bianco, my CIA contact at the embassy, and I was immediately excited. “Nobody seems to want to answer any of my questions at the Ministry of Defence.”
“I don’t suppose they would.”
“And yet they release the body to you. You must have influence?”
“You could say that.” She took a cigarette from a silver box, lit it and sat in a wing chair by the fire, crossing slim legs. “Have you ever heard of SOE, Professor?”
“Of course,” I said. “Special Operations Executive. Set up by British Intelligence in 1940 on Churchill’s instructions to coordinate resistance and the underground movement in Europe.”
” ‘Set Europe ablaze,’ that’s what the old man ordered.” Sarah Drayton flicked ash in the flre. “I worked for them.”
I was astonished. “But you can’t have been more than a child.”
“Nineteen,” she said. “In 1944.”
“And Martineau?”
“Look on the piano,” she said. “The end photo in the silver frame.”
I crossed to the piano and picked the photo up and her face jumped out at me, strangely unchanged except in one respect. Her hair was startlingly blond and marcelled- that’s the term I think they used to use. She wore a little black hat and one of those coats from the wartime period with big shoulders and tight at the waist. She also wore silk stockings and high-heeled shoes and clutched a black patent-leather bag.
The man standing next to her was of medium height and wore a leather military trenchcoat over a tweed suit, hands thrust deep into the pockets. His face was shadowed by a dark slouch hat and a cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. The eyes were dark, no expression to them at all, and his smile had a kind of ruthless charm. He looked a thoroughly dangerous man.
Sarah Drayton got up and joined me. “Not much like the Croxley Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford there, is he?”
“Where was it taken?” I asked.
“In Jersey. Not too far from here. May nineteen forty-four. The tenth, I think.”
“But IVe been in Jersey long enough to know that it was occupied by the Germans at that time,” I said.