moved steadily onwards, towards the row of station cabs. Behind her, the grey man dodged a delivery boy on a bicycle with an angry yell. She had stopped beside a cab; she had nodded to the driver; the door was open; she was stepping up inside –
The grey man leaped forward and just as she was about to clamber into the cab, he grabbed her by the arm and wrenched her back. His fingers bit into her skin.
She stared up at him, widening her eyes. She knew exactly what he was seeing: a young lady, daintily dressed, with white gloves and a parasol and a straw hat decorated with forget-me-nots. She let out a little gasp of alarm. ‘Sir, I beg you, let go of me at once!’ she cried out in a faint voice.
The cab driver had seen what was happening. ‘Here, what d’you think you’re playing at?’ he demanded angrily. ‘D’you know this fellow, miss? Leave go of her at once or I’ll yell for the constable.’
But the grey man ignored him completely. ‘The package . . . give me the package,’ he hissed.
‘The . . . the package?’ she gaped back at him.
‘Give it to me now! Or it will be the worse for you!’
‘But . . . but I don’t have a package,’ she said with a confused gasp, making her eyes wide and fearful. ‘I only have this.’
She thrust forward the object she was holding and the grey man gawped at it for a moment. It was not a brown-paper parcel at all, but a large blue-and-gold hat-box, marked with the name of London’s most fashionable department store. Startled, he let go of her, and she took the opportunity to scramble up into the cab, taking the hat-box with her.
‘You want to watch yourself, mate,’ the cab driver was admonishing him. ‘You can’t go round accosting young ladies like that!’
But the grey man wasn’t listening. She could see that he was furious with himself for chasing after a perfectly ordinary girl – a young English miss, collecting something as innocent as a new hat – whilst somehow the enemy had tricked him, swiping his precious parcel from under his nose. His face darkened with anger. He had lost the parcel he had worked so hard to obtain. He had failed Ziegler. He cursed aloud.
‘That’s enough of that kind of language,’ the cab driver told him. He looked down at the girl: ‘Don’t you worry, miss. You’re safe now. Just you sit tight and I’ll see you home.’
He shook his head one last time as he drove away at a smart pace, leaving the grey man standing empty-handed, glaring furiously after them.
London
Inside the cab, the girl settled herself back comfortably against the seat.
‘So . . . where to?’ asked the driver, a young, good-looking fellow, with curly hair showing from beneath his cap.
‘The Inns of Court,’ she said, pulling the hat-box on to her knee and taking off the lid. ‘I expect the Bureau will want to see this straight away.’
‘All right, but let’s go the long way round,’ said the driver, reflectively. ‘You never know. That fellow might have some pals around who could still be watching us.’
‘Good scheme,’ agreed his passenger. Beneath some filmy tissue paper, she had unearthed from the hat-box a small, rectangular parcel, wrapped in brown paper. She weighed it in her hands.
‘What d’you reckon it is?’ asked the driver.
‘Probably Navy weapons manuals or signal books. Something highly confidential, at any rate.’
‘Something our old friend Ziegler would very much want to get his sticky hands on?’
‘Absolutely. That fellow was one of his agents. He’d paid someone in the Navy to steal these for him.’
‘And I s’pose he had to give him a tidy sum to get him to do that? No wonder he looked like he’d lost a shilling and found a sixpence.’ The driver grinned. ‘Unlucky for him – and old Ziegler too – that we just happened to be passing through the station, Soph.’
‘Oh, jolly unlucky,’ she agreed, smiling cheerfully back.
Sophie Taylor knew she had plenty to be cheerful about. Their assignment had gone like clockwork; the stolen package was safe; and it was very pleasant to be driving through town with Joe on a beautiful summer morning. The London Season was in full swing and, although it was still early, the day already had an air of gaiety about it. The long period of court mourning after the sad death of King Edward VII the previous year had come to an end, and now the city had cast off its sombre greys and mauves, and burst into summer colour, just like the new Queen Mary, who had been seen strolling in Richmond Park wearing a yellow hat with blue feathers. Clerks were strolling to work in their shirt-sleeves; flower-sellers were offering baskets of summer blooms on the street corners; and even London’s hansom cabs had been arrayed in brightly coloured tassels. As they drove through the park, she saw that people were reclining in the green-and-white sixpenny deckchairs, and that children had taken off their shoes and stockings to paddle in the lake.
Out on to the busy streets beyond, already thronged with buses and bicycles, the air was hot and shimmering, thick with the smell of horses and hay and motor-car fumes. Some people might have found it too hot, or too loud, or too crowded, but this was Sophie’s London, and she loved every buzzing, electric inch of it.
Now, she gazed out of the window as they rumbled along Piccadilly, past the Royal Academy, past the Ritz Hotel, and past the magnificent Sinclair’s department store, where doors were opening to the morning’s shoppers, and the uniformed doorman recognised them and tipped his hat.
Sophie knew that inside, on the first floor of the great building, the Taylor & Rose team – her team – would already be hard at work. Since their detective agency had first opened its doors two years ago, they had gained an excellent reputation, and were rarely short of clients. Now that they had expanded their offices and taken on more staff, Sophie could leave the others to deal with the day-to-day cases, whilst she concentrated her efforts on their most unusual client.
She had been working for this particular client for six months now, and she felt that she was getting rather good at intercepting telegrams, retrieving parcels and monitoring suspicious characters on their behalf. Working on assignments like this one, she felt a little thrill knowing that the people around her on London’s crowded streets couldn’t possibly have guessed that she was not an ordinary girl, but a government agent, doing vital work for the Secret Service Bureau.
Of course, most people didn’t know that the Secret Service Bureau existed. It had been set up by senior government officials to conduct highly confidential intelligence work. It was terribly mysterious: even Sophie herself wasn’t quite sure what all of the Bureau’s official work involved. What she did know was that a lot of it was concerned with what she had learned to call espionage – in other words, spies.
Although everyone seemed to be talking about the growing threat from Germany, and the Kaiser’s new warships, what the ordinary people around her on the streets of London didn’t know was that a network of enemy agents had already been established in Britain. The brilliant German spymaster, Ziegler, had been recruiting spies whose job it was to collect secret information to pass back to the German government. It was part of
