Read Spies (2002) for Free Online Page A

slightly open, as I’ve done so many times before, waiting to find out what comes next. Am I surprised? Of course I’m surprised – but then I’m often surprised by Keith’s announcements. I was surprised when he first told me that Mr Gort, who lives alone at No. 11, was a murderer. But then, when we investigated, we found some of the bones of his victims in the waste ground just beyond the top of his garden.
    So I’m surprised, certainly, but not as surprised as I should be now. And of course I’m immediately excited, because I can see all kinds of interesting new possibilities opening up, for hiding and watching in the gloaming, for sending and receiving messages in invisible ink, for wearing the moustaches and beards in Keith’s disguises kit, for examining things through Keith’s microscope.
    I think I feel a brief pang of admiring jealousy for yet another demonstration of his unending good fortune. A father in the Secret Service and a mother who’s a German spy – when the rest of us can’t muster even one parent of any interest!
    Does it occur to me to wonder whether his father knows about his mother’s activities – or his mother about his father’s? Or to reflect on the delicate situation that this clash of loyalties must create in the household? I don’t think it does. They’re plainly both skilled at concealing their real selves from the world, and they’ve presumably managed to keep their respective secrets from each other. In any case, how adults behave among themselves is a mystery about which I haven’t yet learnt to have any curiosity.
    I’m slightly regretful, though. I think of all the lemon barley and chocolate spread I’ve had from her, all the tolerance, all the intimations of grace and composure. Pleased as I am to have a German spy to investigate, I should much rather it had turned out to be Mrs Sheldon or Mrs Stott. Or even Keith’s father. I could easily believe that Keith’s father is a German. Or could have, if I hadn’t known about his Secret Service work and his notable attempts to reduce the German population during the Great War.
    No, on second thoughts I’m relieved that it’s not Keith’s father. The idea of keeping watch on him is too frightening to contemplate. I see his lips drawn back in the little smile: ‘Anyone give you permission to interfere with my secret transmitter, old bean …?’
    Do I ask Keith the first and most obvious question – how he knows that she’s a spy? Of course not, any more than I’ve ever asked him how he knows that she’s his mother, or that his father’s his father. She just is his mother, in the same way that Mrs Sheldon’s Mrs Sheldon, and Barbara Berrill’s beneath our notice, and my family’s slightly disgraceful. Everyone knows that these things are so. They don’t have to be explained or justified.
    In fact, as I get used to the idea in the days that follow, it begins to make sense of a lot of things. All those letters that his mother writes, for instance. Who are they to? The only human beings the Haywards know, apart from me, are Auntie Dee and Uncle Peter. I suppose they must have other aunts and uncles somewhere – everyone has aunts and uncles somewhere. But mothers write to aunts and uncles a couple of times a year, not every day! You don’t need to go out to catch the post twice in one afternoon! If she were sending off reports to the Germans, though … Reports on what? Whatever she goes to spy on when she makes all those trips to the shops. The local anti-aircraft defences, probably – the air-raid wardens’ post on the corner of the lane to Paradise and the static water tank behind the library. The secret munitions factory on the main road where Mr Pincher pinches his aluminium trims and sheets of plywood.
    Mr Pincher himself, for that matter, and all the assistance his activities are giving to the enemy. The strange goings-on at Trewinnick. Careless talk about the whereabouts of Mr Berrill and the