C H A P T E R 30
CHARLOTTE
Liverpool
July, 1970
I’m sitting at a long boardroom table surrounded by confused people. Theo is beside me, scribbling absentmindedly on a notepad. Dad sits to my right. He’s slurping the coffee I made in Professor Read’s kitchenette. Opposite us, Drusilla Sallow is sitting with the woman from the photos in her hall table.
We haven’t so much as introduced ourselves yet. As soon as we walked into the meeting room, Helen Elwood handed us each a piece of paper and asked us to sign it before we said a word.
“Harry and I have permission to talk to you all about some incredibly sensitive matters today but what you are about to learn should never leave this room. If you’d all be so kind as to sign this agreement to that effect, we can speak a little more freely.” She’s a tall woman, maybe in her sixties, with short silver hair and an imposingly stiff posture. She collects the agreements, checks each signature carefully, then takes a seat at one end of the long table, opposite Professor Read, who is already scribbling notes at the other end. “Now, if you could just introduce yourselves.” We progress around the table, each of us just saying our names. The woman beside Drusilla Sallow introduces herself as “Dru’s roommate, Dr. Quinn Madison.”
“Dr. Sallow,” Helen says suddenly, a depth of emotion in her voice. “Let me say from the outset that I am so sorry for everything you have been put through.”
The whole tone of the room shifts in an instant. To see this brusque, proud woman so close to tears only as the meeting is just beginning makes me nervous. I glance at Dad, and see he’s staring at the table, jaw locked tight. I reach across and put my hand over his.
I threw a cat among the pigeons when I ambushed Professor Read four hours ago. In the time since, I first met with Harry and Helen on my own and the two of them all but interrogated me about how I found Drusilla Sallow. I’ve asked them a million questions about why this is all so shocking but they keep telling me they’ll answer when we’re all together.
I then sat in Harry’s office while Helen made the difficult call to Drusilla to ask her to come in, before Harry handed me the phone and said grimly, “Call your father. And…since it’s clear he’s had a hand in this too, call Theo too.”
And now, I hope, we’re all about to understand exactly what happened to Jocelyn Miller in the last days of her life.
“You said on the telephone that you need to clarify the circumstances around my daughter’s death,” Drusilla says.
“I do. I will,” Helen says firmly. “But first, please let me explain that we have made an effort to contact you over the years. Starting in late 1945, then again as late as the 1950s, I tried very hard indeed to track you down.”
“I moved to Paris to help rebuild in 1946 and I lived there for about fifteen years, until I moved back here to take the teaching position I held until I retired,” Drusilla says. “I was still in London in ’45. I was living at Quinn’s terrace where Josie also lived for a time. It would have been quite simple to find me if you’d bothered to look.”
“As we’ll explain soon, much of Josie’s record was destroyed,” Helen says softly. “That made things exceedingly difficult. I didn’t have her full name or her birth date, let alone any of your details, Dr. Sallow—not a name, not an address, not even an occupation. I spent months looking for a birth certificate for a ‘Josie Miller.’ I even searched birth registrations in Paris, because I distinctly remembered her telling me about growing up there.”
“How on earth could this happen?” Dad asks stiffly. “I know the SOE had extensive files for each of us.”
“We certainly did during the war years. In 1946, there was a fire in our records department at Baker Street—an immense collection of records was lost. At the same time, our secretarial staff was sorting through the mountain of documentation we’d collected during the war. I was in Germany then and unfortunately, the person we left in charge of that process was not as trustworthy as we’d hoped. It’s a tragic aspect to this mess that all of Jocelyn’s records went missing, either through the fire or the records purge or some other human intervention around the same time.”
“We found a single page from her personnel file about four years ago,” Harry interjects, shooting Theo a pointed look. Theo clears his throat and shuffles awkwardly on his chair. “That page detailed scant notes a medical examiner recorded when Jocelyn first attended the student assessment board at Winterfold House. It had been incorrectly filed in behind the equivalent notes for another female candidate, and was a truly unremarkable page of documentation, except that it belonged to an agent who for all intents and purposes disappeared from our records entirely after the war ended.”
“Noah, do you recall the wireless operator who served with you at Montbeliard?” Helen asks Dad, who squints, then grimaces.
“Nice chap. An excellent w/t operator. I don’t recall his cover name.”
“He was known as Adrien. His cover was blown, and we evacuated him.”
“That’s right—” Dad trails off. “Yes. I think that’s right.”
“In his debrief interview, Adrien told us that he suspected your relationship with Jocelyn was closer than it should have been. Romantic in nature.”
“We knew it was against the rules, but it never influenced our work. We achieved incredible things together.”
“I know, Noah,” Helen says reassuringly. “In fact, given the two of you had single-handedly arranged for the safe destruction of an entire munitions complex, something even the entire RAF couldn’t do, I was of half a mind that you should continue to work together.”
“Jocelyn did that?” Drusilla asks.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dad says. “The RAF tried and failed, at a tremendous cost to those in the villages around the factory. Your brilliant daughter found a way to get the job done without it costing a single human life.”
Quinn rests her hand over Drusilla’s on the table.
“One of our senior officers was deeply concerned about your relationship,” Helen tells Dad quietly. “He argued that we should move Josie. The Success circuit in Paris was in a state and we all knew she was an excellent agent, so eventually, we agreed to shift her there.”
“Who was that?” Dad asks.
“That was Gerard, Noah. Gerard Turner.”
Dad nods silently. Helen takes a sip from a glass of water on the table.
“We know that the arrests were continuing around her in Paris, but we didn’t know much more than that. There was a degree of panic from those of us at Baker Street, watching that circuit flounder just as the D-Day invasion seemed to be looming. We had high hopes our troops would eventually reach and reclaim Paris and that milestone would bring an important morale boost to the entire continent. Our circuit there needed to be robust and extensive to support the Allied advance. Gerard convinced us the only way forward was for him to go to Paris to sort the circuit out himself.”
“I trained under him,” Dad tells me. “He was a tough instructor, but a good man.”