“Royalty seems much more glamorous on a TV screen.”
“It was the best week of my life,” he said, his voice cracking. “We visited Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace and got to see the great Hannah Dayne perform in Gone with the Wind.
“My Alice lost her battle with cancer two years later. Mr. Knight pulled me off my job and asked me how I was doing. When I told him I wasn’t doing that great, he asked me what I thought about moving to the San Juan Islands. It was exactly what I needed.”
“I’m sorry,” Quenby said, silently reprimanding herself for her gibe about the royal life. She needed to think before she spoke again.
“It’s been more than forty years, and I still miss her. She would have loved this island.”
“What is Mr. Knight’s business?”
The smile slowly returned to Jack’s face. “Farming.”
She tilted her head. “He must own one big farm.”
“It’s not your typical type of farming.”
Before she could ask another question, Lucas stepped onto the terrace with them, holding out her mobile. “He’s decided to trust you.”
She snatched it from his hand, afraid he might retract the offer. “Does that mean you trust me as well?”
“You’ll have to earn my trust, Miss Vaughn.”
Quenby glanced at Jack, at his shoulders trembling, the hand unsuccessfully covering the corners of his lips. The man was laughing at them. “I’m sorry, Lucas,” she said, “but you’re going to have to earn mine first.”
CHAPTER 9
_____
Early Tuesday morning, Quenby rode the District line west to the village of Kew. Then she walked three blocks through a neighborhood of terrace homes with wrought-iron gates and flowers blooming on their patches of lawn.
Instead of residing among the monuments in central London, the National Archives were housed here, hidden between gardens and houses as if the country’s heritage was embedded in the hearts of its people. A thousand years of history documented and stored in one building, the immense structure reflecting back on itself in a shallow pool below the entrance.
Inside, she stored her leather briefcase and most of her belongings in a locker on the bottom floor. Her iPad and mobile were dumped into a clear plastic bag that, like a school uniform, equalized all stations of researchers who used these archives—those searching for their family’s genealogy, history for a textbook, or information for a news story. Inside these walls everyone was treated alike.
After security searched her plastic bag, she retrieved the stack of files she’d requested, taking them to her reserved seat in the reading room, an octagonal table overlooking a park. The top file on her stack was a faded-green folder, stamped Secret in red and held together with orange yarn and plastic tabs. The type across the top read: German Espionage in the UK.
The file was filled with transcriptions of interviews, memorandums, and correspondence related to men and women suspected of spying for Germany during World War II. As she skimmed through the records, Quenby typed notes into her iPad about a network of British people helping German combatants who parachuted into Kent or snuck over to England via boat.
Germans, she read, recovered the identity cards and wallets from British soldiers they’d killed or imprisoned, then supplied these personal items to spies sent over the channel to retrieve information or sabotage airfields, machine shops, and factories. Many of these spies were incarcerated hours after landing in England, but some managed to infiltrate the country. Then they’d report back to Berlin via wireless about British defenses and military. Or whether they’d been successful in their sabotage work.
If she was going to write this feature, she needed a compelling new angle that would pique interest today. Like an aristocratic American woman who moved to England before turning traitor. Or perhaps she’d relocated to England specifically to assist the Germans.
Her gaze wandered out the window to a boy and girl swinging in the park below. And her thoughts shifted to the boy and girl in Mr. Knight’s story.
Mr. Knight said that Brigitte had been taken from him. Had they made it out of Belgium together? If so, it must have been dreadful living in England as a German during and after the war. No matter their innocence, most Germans were despised in the 1940s. They might have hated Hitler and his regime, but during that decade, they were all considered guilty.
Quenby leaned back in her chair, her eyes heavy from lack of sleep. Mr. Knight’s jet had returned her to London on Sunday afternoon, but it almost seemed like the trip to his island had been part of a dream, like she’d never awakened from watching the girl trying to capture puzzle pieces that floated in the heath.