Read Spies (2002) for Free Online Page B

McAfees’ son. The general state of civilian morale in the Close, as revealed in Mrs Sheldon’s complaints about the quality of the meat at Hucknalls and Auntie Dee’s carelessness with her blackout. She has her eye on all of us.
    It even begins to make sense of a number of things (and this is surely the real test of a new insight) that I hadn’t realised didn’t make sense before. Why did the Germans drop an incendiary bomb on the Close, out of all the streets around? And why on Miss Durrant’s house, out of all the houses in the Close? But if Miss Durrant had found out the truth about Keith’s mother, and was about to unmask her … And if Keith’s mother had realised, and had gone out in the blackout and signalled to them with a torch, to guide them to the target …
    There’s a torch on the table in the Haywards’ hall.
    I believe another uneasy thought occurs to me, too: that it might help to explain all her incomprehensible niceness to me, all that lemon barley and chocolate spread. It’s simply part of her false identity, to conceal her true nature.
    Already, within moments of Keith’s announcement, while I’m still gaping and long before I’ve begun to take in the consequences, we’ve abandoned the transcontinental railway and begun to shadow her. We watch over the banisters as she goes between sitting room and kitchen, talking to Mrs Elmsley about the polishing of the silver and the ailments of Mrs Elmsley’s mother. In the stationery cupboard in the playroom we find the exercise book we were going to use to record our observations of birds, until we gave up observing birds for tracking down the ape-like creature on the golf course. Keith crosses out birds and writes logbook – secrit. I have private reservations about the spelling, but keep them to myself, as I do all the other small occasional reservations I have about his authority.
    He begins to make a record of our observations. ‘1053 hrs,’ he writes, as we crouch at the top of the stairs, listening to his mother in the hall below. ‘Phones. Asks for 8087. Mr Hucknall. 3 muten chops. Not to much fat. By noon.’ We flee into the playroom as she comes upstairs … halt our investigations and think about something else while she’s in the lavatory … emerge and follow her downstairs to the kitchen … out into the garden to watch her from behind the shed as she takes the familiar steaming, sour-smelling enamel bowl into the chicken run … She does far more different things in the course of the morning, now we’re taking note of them, than I’d ever realised, with not a single pause to rest or write letters. It’s easy to miss how active she is because she does it all in such a smooth, unhurried way – because she does it all so … inconspicuously .
    Yes, there’s a sinister unnoticeability about the whole performance, now that we know the truth behind it. There’s something clearly wrong about her, if you really look at her and listen to her as we now are. You can hear a false note in the specially graceful, specially impersonal way she talks to Mrs Elmsley, to Keith’s father, even to the chickens. ‘You did remember to dust behind the dining-room clock this time, didn’t you, Mrs Elmsley …? Ted, darling, do you want anything from the shops? I’ve got to get a few things for Dee. Awfully good job you’re doing with those lettuce seedlings, by the way … Now, come on, ladies. No pushing and shoving. A nice orderly queue, please. Ration books ready …’
    I detect the same falsity in the specially amused tone she uses to Keith and me, when she turns round, on her way back to the house with the empty bowl, and sees us running from cover to cover, from behind the garden shed to behind the pergola, to keep up with her. ‘Bang bang!’ she says humorously, pointing an imaginary gun at us, as if we were children. ‘Got you, the pair of you!’ She’s pretending to be part of some innocent children’s game. And all the time