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'Right here,' came a voice behind her. She turned to see him leaning against the door jamb. Sergeant Adam Faulkner, military police, in command of the Leeds squad of the SIB, a cigarette dangling between his fingers. 'How did you manage to winkle him out?'

'A tip from a woman I know.'

He nodded his approval. 'Good job. Smithy, Terry, you go and round him up. Shake everything he knows out of his brain. Maybe we can finally break this damned thing and arrest Connor.'

 

A flurry of movement as they pulled on gabardine mackintoshes and hats and slipped out. Faulkner sat down at his desk.

From the corner of her eye, Cathy caught sight of someone else entering the room. Her eyes widened in disbelief. He wasn't anyone she'd ever expected to see in this place. She folded her arms and glared at him.

'What the hell are you doing here?'

CHAPTER TWO

Daniel Marsden was five years older than her, the clever boy who won the scholarship to grammar school. The one who passed everything without seeming to do a stroke of work while she studied deep into the night, struggling with her lessons and failing half her exams.

He was the boy people noticed. They remembered him, asked after him, always full of praise, with Cathy a poor second. When Dan landed a Civil Service job and moved down to London, she'd said nothing, but deep inside she'd been glad to see the back of him. After so many years she had the chance to move out of her brother's shadow. Even now, his Christmas visits each year felt like more than enough time together, watching everyone gather round him. She'd been quietly relieved when he'd said there was too much going on at the ministry last December to be able to come.

Now he was standing in the office where she worked.

He smiled. 'I like the way you've had your hair done. It suits you.'

Cathy felt herself bristle. At twenty-six, she'd spent four years as a woman police constable, then two more as a sergeant, before her secondment to SIB and a move into plain clothes. She'd had to fight for respect every step of the way. It had been the same when she started here. She'd needed to work hard to make the squad accept her. To understand that a woman could do this job. Cathy wasn't going to let her brother dismiss all that with a flippant comment. Just the sight of him here, where she'd built a place for herself, made the excitement and pride at finding Dobson wither away.

'I'm so very glad you approve.'

Dan shifted his glance away.

'He's been sent,' Faulkner told her. 'We're working with him.'

She turned, fire in her eyes. Like the other men in SIB, Adam Faulkner had been a police detective before the war. He'd been in London, a member of the Flying Squad. They were famous, the best Scotland Yard had; everybody in the country had heard of them. He'd joined the army, eager to defend his country, only to find himself shuffled into the military police. Recruited for the Special Investigation Branch when it was formed the year before, last July he'd been posted to Leeds to set up this new squad. A sergeant, like her, but his was an army rank. A good, fair boss.

'Sent?' Cathy asked. 'What do you mean, sent?'

Faulkner closed his eyes for a second. 'Your brother is with the Security Service,' he said.

She was silent for a moment, eyes moving back to study her brother's face. Dan? He was bright but... It had to be some kind of practical joke. He was a civil servant; that was what he'd always said. This? Never in a million years. It couldn't be. The Security Service? That meant MI5, secret agents, not a place a boy who'd been raised in a Leeds slum could end up.

'You didn't know?'

'Not a clue.' She shook her head. Her mind was reeling. Dan? How could it be true? She tried to scrape an ounce of sense from what she'd just heard. It just didn't seem possible. 'He always just told us he worked for the government.'

Faulkner gave a short bark of a laugh. 'I suppose that's true enough. These days he's with something called the Twenty Committee.'

'Twenty?' Cathy turned on her brother. 'Twenty what?'

'Twenty. XX in Roman numerals,' Dan replied. 'Double cross. Espionage.'

So bloody clever-clever, she thought. Like a bunch of overgrown schoolboys, making a game of everything.