“Jesus.” Percy shook his head in incredulity. “What the hell kind of a team are we putting together, Flick?”
“Dangerous. Which is what it’s supposed to be. That’s not the problem. Besides, the way things are going, we may have the luxury of eliminating the least satisfactory one or two during training. My worry is that we don’t have the experts we need. There’s no point taking a team of tough girls into France, then destroying the wrong cables.”
Percy drained his teacup and began to fill his pipe. “I know a woman explosives expert who speaks French.”
Flick was surprised. “But this is great! Why didn’t you say so before?”
“When I first thought of her, I dismissed her out of hand. She’s not at all suitable. But I hadn’t realized how desperate we’d be.”
“How is she unsuitable?”
“She’s about forty. SOE rarely uses anyone so old, especially on a parachute mission.” He struck a match.
Age was not going to be an obstacle at this stage, Flick thought. Excited, she said, “Will she volunteer?”
“I should think there’s a good chance, especially if I ask her.”
“You’re friends.”
He nodded.
“How did she become an explosives expert?”
Percy looked embarrassed. Still holding the burning match, he said, “She’s a safebreaker. I met her years ago, when I was doing political work in the East End.” The match burned down, and he struck another.
“Percy, I had no idea your past was so raffish. Where is she now?”
Percy looked at his watch. “It’s six o’clock. At this time of the evening, she’ll be in the private bar of the Mucky Duck.”
“A pub.”
“Yes.”
“Then get that damn pipe alight and let’s go there now.”
In the car, Flick said, “How do you know she’s a safebreaker?”
Percy shrugged. “Everyone knows.”
“Everyone? Even the police?”
“Yes. In the East End, police and villains grow up together, go to the same schools, live in the same streets. They all know one another.”
“But if they know who the criminals are, why don’t they put them in jail? I suppose they can’t prove anything.”
“This is the way it works,” Percy said. “When they need a conviction, they arrest someone who is in that line of business. If it’s a burglary, they arrest a burglar. It doesn’t matter whether he was responsible for that particular crime, because they can always manufacture a case: suborn witnesses, counterfeit confessions, manufacture forensic evidence. Of course, they sometimes make mistakes, and jail innocent people, and they often use the system to pay off personal grudges, and so on; but nothing in life is perfect, is it?”
“So you’re saying the whole rigmarole of courts and juries is a farce?”
“A highly successful, long-running farce that provides lucrative employment for otherwise useless citizens who act the parts of detectives, solicitors, banisters, and judges.”
“Has your friend the safebreaker been to jail?”
“No. You can escape prosecution if you’re willing to pay hefty bribes, and you’re careful to cultivate warm friendships with detectives. Let’s say you live in the same street as Detective-Inspector Callahan’s dear old mum. You drop in once a week, ask her if she needs any shopping done, look at photos of her grandchildren makes it hard for D.I. Callahan to put you in jail.”
Flick thought of the story Ruby had told a few hours ago. For some people, life in London was almost as bad as being under the Gestapo. Could things really be so different from what she had imagined? “I can’t tell if you’re serious,” she said to Percy. “I don’t know what to believe.”
“Oh, I’m serious,” he said with a smile. “But I don’t expect you to believe me.”
They were in Stepney, not far from the docks. The bomb damage here was the worst Flick had seen. Whole streets were flattened. Percy turned into a narrow cul-de-sac and parked outside a pub.
“Mucky Duck” was a humorous sobriquet: the pub was called The White Swan. The private bar was not private, but was so called to distinguish it from the public bar, where there was sawdust on the floor and the beer was a penny a pint cheaper. Flick found herself thinking about explaining these idiosyncrasies to Paul. He would be amused.