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you can’t get more involved,’ Brinkman said.
    â€˜And that everything takes so long.’
    Brinkman held up his hand. ‘I know. In many ways it’s the nature of the job. Which is why I’m sending you to Cheshire.’
    Sarah stood up, suddenly angry. ‘You’re having me transferred? Just to keep me out of trouble? How dare you!’
    Brinkman suppressed a smile. ‘Sit down. Cheshire is just where you start. I’m not having you transferred. I’m having you trained .’
    Sarah sat down, still wary. ‘Trained? What do you mean, trained?’
    â€˜As a Special Operations Executive agent. They have a, well, a sort of school for agents. I’m putting you through it. If you’re going to get involved properly then I want to make damned sure you’ve got the skills you need to stay alive.’
    â€˜What sort of skills? I can fly planes and shoot, but you can’t train someone for the work we do.’
    â€˜That’s largely true. But there’s a lot you can learn that will be useful. Now, while there’s something of a lull in things as you’ve been at pains to point out to me whenever you can, seems like as good a time as any. You start with parachuting and then I believe it’s sabotage techniques. Just don’t practise them in the office. You report to SOE on Monday.’
    *   *   *
    The first thing that was made clear to Sarah when she reported on the Monday was that no one used their real names. Even the SOE instructors, Sarah suspected, were not who they said they were. She was ‘Sparrow Hawk’, which she thought was actually quite appropriate. There didn’t seem to be any system to the names: a shy mousy brunette girl was ‘Boxer’ and a middle-aged man with thinning hair who seemed to be constantly sweating was ‘Sardine’.
    What surprised Sarah most was the variety of training. She had started at RAF Ringway in Cheshire, parachute training. They moved her on quickly from that when she told them she knew what she was doing, and had parachuted into Germany.
    â€˜Well, not really,’ she confessed to the instructor. ‘Back in 1934 I was working in a flying circus and we did shows all across Europe. My plane crashed, engine failure. I had to bail out. That was in Hamburg.’
    The instructor, whose name like so many of the instructors was apparently ‘Smith’, nodded. ‘That’s good. You’ll have to be convincing where you’re going.’
    Whether he thought she was going into occupied territory or simply meant the rest of the training, she wasn’t sure. It took her several minutes to persuade him she wasn’t making it up.
    Sabotage training at Brickenbury in Hertfordshire was exhausting and Sarah wasn’t sure how useful it might be. She was good at the practical side of things, but the theory she found tough going. It was one thing to set explosives and rig them to go off, quite another to read through pages of notes about which devices to use when, and what different types of explosives, fuses, and detonators were called. But there was a perverse satisfaction in twisting the handle of a detonator, or waiting for a fuse to do the job, and watching a small building or the shell of a vehicle explode into flames and smoke.
    She was more convinced by the Commando combat course – which involved a train journey to Scotland that was almost as much of a test of endurance as the outdoor survival training that was included when she got there. A group of grizzled, experienced men who were obviously itching to get back to some real action taught Sarah and her anonymous colleagues all they needed to know about finding food, locating water, creating a shelter, and how to make a smokeless fire. She also learned the basics of a form of unarmed silent killing which the instructors called ‘Defendu’.
    *   *   *
    Gradually, over the