Read Chapter 14: A Web of Spies

The reading room of the London Library was quieter than a tomb, and smelled of it too—old paper, dust, and the faint metallic tang of ink. Evelyn had been there since the doors opened, hunched over a stack of Admiralty personnel records that she had no business accessing but had managed to borrow through the good offices of a former tutor who owed her a favour.

Her finger traced a name. Then stopped.

William Parfitt. Senior Liaison, Naval Intelligence Division. Former handler for the Belgium courier network, 1916–1918. And, according to the terse official biography, a man who had "served with distinction" in Brussels and then been promoted rapidly out of the field and into the heart of the Admiralty's strategic planning.

She sat back. The chair creaked. A librarian across the room looked up, then returned to his catalogue.

Three people, Ashworth had said. His dead handler. Thomas. Margot de Vries.

But Ashworth had not counted on the handler having a deputy. A man who signed every dispatch with initials only, but whose name appeared in the margins of the operation files: W.P. Parfitt.

Evelyn copied the relevant pages into her notebook, her handwriting small and tight, the way her mother had taught her when they still had paper to spare. Then she closed the folder and carried it back to the desk, smiling at the clerk, who did not smile back.

---

She found Ashworth at the Charing Cross bookshop just after four, pretending to examine a volume of Tennyson. He did not look up when she approached, but his hand moved to the spine and tapped twice—the signal they had agreed on. She browsed along the shelf, letting her fingers brush a copy of *The Woman in White*.

"Parfitt," she said, low, not looking at him. "Your handler had a deputy. William Parfitt. He's now Senior Liaison. He has access to every troop movement, every convoy schedule, every coded dispatch that passes through the Admiralty's war room."

A pause. Ashworth turned a page.

"That's not possible," he said carefully. "Parfitt was a desk man. He never ran agents in the field."

"He ran the paperwork for the agents you ran. And the records show he was in Brussels for three months in 1917, during the collapse of your network."

Ashworth's jaw tightened. He closed the book and placed it back on the shelf, then moved to a different aisle. Evelyn followed. They were alone among the stacks now, the shop's proprietor busy with a customer at the front counter.

"Margot and I operated under Parfitt's authorisation," Ashworth said slowly, as if testing each word for weight. "He knew the courier routes. The safe houses. The cover names. If he was compromised—"

"If he was compromised, he'd have handed everything to the Germans in 1917, not waited five years."

Ashworth looked at her. In the dim light of the shop, his face was unreadable, but she caught the flicker of calculation behind his eyes. He was doing the same maths she had done, and not liking the answer.

"Unless he wasn't compromised then," she said. "Unless he was recruited later. Promoted. Given access to more. And now he's too valuable to burn, so the Songbird is using him as a shield."

Ashworth was silent for a long moment. Then he nodded once, barely perceptible.

"You said the intercept mentioned an agent in the Admiralty being sacrificed to draw suspicion away from the wider network," she pressed. "What if that agent is Parfitt? What if the network is preparing to feed him to us, knowing we'll chase him and stop looking higher?"

"Higher than a Senior Liaison?" Ashworth's voice was dry. "That's the ceiling, Evelyn. There's no one higher who knows my old identity."

"Your *old* identity. What about new ones?"

He blinked. She watched him connect the same dots she had been connecting since she left the library.

"If Parfitt has access to the current agent lists," she said, "he can burn anyone. Not just you. He can hand over every operative this section has in Germany, France, Belgium. It wouldn't be a single sacrifice—it would be a slaughter."

Ashworth's hand drifted to his coat pocket, where she knew he kept his notebook. The one they had agreed to offer as bait. He did not take it out, but the gesture was telling.

"Then we test him," he said.

---

They agreed on the message within an hour, scribbled on a scrap of paper in the back room of the bookshop while the owner served tea to a customer who seemed in no hurry to leave. Ashworth drafted the wording in a coded shorthand that Evelyn recognised as the same system he had used in Belgium, but with modifications—new key phrases, a different rhythm. She watched him write, and for a moment she saw the man he had been before the war had hollowed him out: deliberate, careful, loyal to something larger than himself.

"Your handwriting's changed," she said.

He glanced up. "So has yours."

She wasn't sure if that was a compliment or a warning. She let it pass.

The message, when finished, read as an update to a fictitious agent in Rotterdam, confirming that a high-value asset would pass through Lady Fenmore's Pimlico refuge on Thursday evening, carrying documents that would "end the Belgian question." It was a lie, a careful one, designed to seem like the sort of operational detail that only a senior officer would know. If Parfitt was the leak, he would pass it upward. If he was not, it would sit unread in a file and they would know they had been wrong.

"Thursday is four days away," Evelyn said. "Long enough for the network to move."

"Long enough for them to stake out the refuge," Ashworth agreed. "If Parfitt is the channel, we'll see his contact within forty-eight hours. If we don't, we find another way."

"And if we do see his contact?"

He looked at her, and for the first time since she had known him, there was something almost like warmth in his gaze. "Then we burn him before he burns us."

---

They arranged to meet again at the bookshop on Wednesday, the day before the false operation was due to run. Evelyn left first, threading her way through the crowded streets toward the boarding house. The fog had rolled in off the Thames, thick and grey, muffling the sounds of traffic and footfall alike. She walked quickly, her collar turned up, her notebook pressed against her ribs.

Halfway down the Strand, she paused at a shop window. Not to look at the display—a modest arrangement of hats and gloves—but to check the reflection behind her.

A figure stood at the corner, partly obscured by a newsboy's cart. Grey hair. Long coat. He was not looking at her directly, but his posture was wrong, the way a man stands when he wants to seem incidental and fails.

Evelyn walked on. She did not look back again until she reached the boarding house door, and when she did, the street was empty.

The grey-haired man had not followed her. Or he had, and he was better at it than she wanted to admit.

She climbed the stairs to her room, locked the door, and sat on the bed with her notebook open. She had written Ashworth's message from memory, and she read it back twice, checking every word.

Then she turned to a fresh page and wrote three names in a column:

*Thomas. Ashworth. Parfitt.*

The trap was set. But she could not shake the feeling that in setting it, she had pulled a thread that would unravel more than just the Songbird's network.

She looked at the names again.

One of them was missing. And in the space where it should have been, she wrote a fourth name, slowly, in pencil:

*Margot.*

If Margot de Vries was alive, she would know who to contact. She would know the old channels. She would know—as Evelyn now knew—that the game had changed.

Evelyn closed the notebook and stared at the ceiling. Thursday was four days away. And somewhere in the fog, the grey-haired man was waiting to see which way she would jump.