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but she would notice if the same injury was following her about.
    “No, it’s not a home-to-Blighty, I’m just filling in at the agency until I can pass my medical boards. I can do without it.” His gaze had returned to the assigned object of his surveillance.
    “Good. You see her?”
    “Tall girl with yellow hair and a brown hat?”
    “That’s right. I’ll catch you up in an hour.”
    The soldier did not ask how, simply heeled out his cigarette and trotted to a parked motor-cycle. As he kicked it into life, a young woman stepped out of the crowd and slid on behind him. The two Irregulars eased into traffic in the wake of the bus.
    I knew where Russell’s optometrist’s was; the ’bus she’d boarded confirmed that her first goal would be to have her spectacles repaired. And since one of her favourite booksellers was just two streets from the shop, she was liable to linger in the vicinity before making her way to her mother’s club, which she used when she had to be in Town overnight. That gave me sufficient time for a more deliberate change of persona than just stuffing the loathsome overcoat (the fur had been poorly cured, and stank) and the blinding lenses into the nearest dust-bin.
    One of the bolt-holes I had retained across London’s great sprawl was concealed as a room in the Grosvenor Hotel, mere steps away. There I flung off the wretched alpaca-and-raccoon, then hurried to ease free the slivers of tinted glass. While a kettle came to the boil over the little room’s gas ring, I held a damp flannel to my swollen eyes, mentally composing a letter to Herr Müller with detailed suggestions as to improvements in the corneal lens. When the tears had abated, I brewed coffee and picked out some alternative garments, gluing onto myself the appropriate tufts of hair.
    Had I been even ten years younger, a military uniform would have rendered me instantly invisible. But thus far, the armed forces were not interested in men past their fifth decade.
    So I became a woman.
    I rinsed the cup and hung the extreme overcoat in the wardrobe, then picked up my handbag and went in search of my apprentice.

10
    I’d had some say in the training of these two Irregulars, and was pleased to find them sufficiently competent to evade the eye of an untutored adolescent. In fact, they were better than competent, they were good: having left Victoria together on a motor-bike, they were now apart and on foot. The soldier had no sling, no cigarette, different badges on his uniform, and was so straight-spined, one could not imagine him lounging against the wall of a train station. The girl was nowhere in sight.
    I paused to buy a newspaper from the vendor near the café by whose door the lad was standing, and murmured his name.
    A slight widening of the eyes betrayed the young man’s reaction to the dowdy school-teacher in the sagging skirt, sensible shoes, and worn gloves. That, and the brief delay before he responded reassured me that my costume might suffice.
    “Mr—that is, sorry. She left the optometrist’s and is in the bookshop.”
    “Your friend is with her?”
    “She took over twelve minutes ago.”
    “Good. Step inside to change your coat, then come back.”
    Russell’s appointment with the solicitor was for tomorrow, June the first. I had to assume that her aunt knew not only the time and place of that appointment, but also where Russell would stay in Town, and even more or less where she would go today. I could not afford to let the child range free and unguarded.
    The War had stolen away my usual source of Irregulars, including the man who employed these two—Billy Mudd, who had learnt his skills from me long ago. Still, reasonably skilled agents were available, and if more of them were women than men, at this point the streets (and the jobs) of London held a higher percentage of women as well. For my purposes today, women were just fine.
    Prolonged surveillance is a task nearly as wearisome to describe as it is to