Agatha was the perfect hostess, and the meal that followed was the best that money could buy. The guests could choose from chicken breast basted with lemon and herbs, herb-rolled loin of pork, or roast sirloin of Richmond beef with Yorkshire pudding. For dessert the choices were French parfait, Manchester tart or summer fruits pudding with lemon cream and raspberry coulis, each one looking more tempting and delicious than the one before. Afterwards they were served coffee with handmade chocolate truffles. When the meal was over, people began to move around again; the women went off to the drawing room and the men to smoke a cigar.

Freddie had many useful conversations. For instance, he found out that the local scoutmaster was vehemently opposed to Hitler, calling him a ‘jumped-up nobody’, and the colonel was already putting in place a scheme to pull down a large estate of bungalows to hinder the invasion in Shoreham. Someone else mentioned a plan to blow up Worthing Pier to prevent alien troop ships from using it to bring their tanks and heavy armour ashore, should war be declared. He’d also been delighted when the leader of the Freemasons hinted that he might be able to secure him a meeting at the local Lodge. People like him had good contacts in the world of business. It was all going well. Who knows what else he might uncover.

As the evening wore on, the local folk club arrived with their instruments. The chairs were pushed back, and those who knew the old dances began with the ‘Bridge of Athlone’ before moving on to the ‘Cumberland Square Eight’ and the ‘Gay Gordons’.

By the time the party ended around three in the morning, everyone agreed that the gathering at Muntham Court had far outshone every other.

Agatha went to her room, tired but contented. She had done them all proud, and everyone had been so appreciative that she couldn’t help feeling smug about it. This was truly her forte, and she had missed being able to host lavish gatherings. It was what she was born to do.

Pearl was already asleep when Freddie finally came to their room. He sat at her dressing table for a while, jotting down a few pointers in his little red book to remind himself of what he had heard and overheard during the evening.

It had been decided that Seebold would return to the Wonderland on Monday. By then he would have spent almost three weeks in the cottage, and was anxious to get back to work. Lena would make sure he had enough food in his caravan larder, while Milly would take the bus over on Wednesday, her half-day, to check that he was managing all right. The pair of them had already spent the previous Sunday giving the caravan a spring clean, so they were confident that they had covered everything, which was why they all decided to make their last Sunday together a little bit special.

Nothing more had been said about Seebold between Milly and Lena, for which Milly was glad. Lena’s revelation had come as a surprise – a nice one, but what could she do about it? A lot of water had gone under the bridge by now. How could she broach the subject? Perhaps she had left it too late and missed her chance.

Lena was a fantastic cook, so she prepared a roast dinner, and Milly made an apple pie. To walk off their meal, the three of them took Nipper along the lane over the hill and towards Long Furlong. It was a beautiful late afternoon and already the days were getting even longer. As they chatted about the Wonderland, Milly realised that Seebold was behaving as if this would be his last season. She sighed. An air of doom and gloom seemed to be hovering everywhere. The girls in Hubbard’s talked about the prospect of war all the time in their tea breaks. Mary from accounts and Sonja from the beauty counter had both brought their wedding days forward. They were concerned that their fiancés might be spirited away by the navy and the army respectively, and who knew when they would see each other again? It was all very unsettling.

‘What will you do if there’s a war?’ Milly asked Lena.

As a matter of fact, Lena had been finding out about what she could do. She didn’t want to be in the battle arena, and she was too squeamish to be a nurse. She would definitely find out about homing pigeons, but she had also toyed with the idea of joining the RSPCA, because some propaganda was already making the British public aware of what bombing raids might do to beloved family pets. Leaflets had also been circulated advising people that ‘in the event of war, a women’s Land Army will be organised’. It went on to say that it would be a mobile force of women who would undertake farm work anywhere in the country. Although they would be employed by individual farmers, the organisation would supervise their accommodation and welfare. As Lena shared her scant knowledge about the scheme, Milly said indignantly, ‘And so they should. I mean who would want some lecherous farmer wanting to share your bed?’

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Lena quipped.

Milly and Seebold laughed.

‘What about you, Milly?’ asked Lena. There was a twinkle in her eye. ‘Are you still seeing Eustace?’

Milly shot her a look. Her sister knew perfectly well that her relationship with Eustace was well and truly over, and she certainly didn’t want to talk about him – especially in front of Seebold.

‘When do we get to meet him?’ Lena continued as she raised her eyebrows.

Milly glared at her. ‘You won’t.’

‘Who is Eustace?’ Seebold wanted to know.

‘Nobody,’ said Milly. She was uncomfortable with this. Why on earth had Lena mentioned him? She knew very well that hell would freeze over long before she would see that creep again. Seebold was staring at her. ‘I told you,’ she said stiffly, ‘nobody important.’

Seebold kicked at a broken branch.

They walked on in silence. The lane went through a small wooded area which was overgrown through lack of use. Just beyond the trees they could see the back of Muntham Court, and Milly felt the old familiar and distressing pang again. Why did her mother hate her so? What on earth had she done to make her feel that way? Even if her mother didn’t want a mother–daughter relationship, they could still have some sort of relationship, couldn’t they?

As the lane veered to the left away from the house, Lena suddenly pointed her finger and said, ‘What on earth is that?’

Milly turned to look at something rather odd in the bank. Someone had cleared the brambles and ivy away from part of a door, but only the huge handle was visible. There didn’t seem to be any brickwork, or perhaps that was behind the brambles, and the door seemed to be built into the hillock. If Lena hadn’t had such a sharp eye, they would have walked past it, none the wiser.

‘It looks to me a bit like an ice house,’ said Milly, as Nipper came back and sniffed around.

‘An ice house,’ Lena repeated.

‘In Victorian times every big house had one,’ said Milly. ‘They used to fill it with huge blocks of ice and store food inside. Funny, I thought I knew every inch of this place like the back of my hand, but I never knew this was here. It can’t have been used for years.’

‘Well, somebody’s been here,’ said Seebold. ‘Look at all the footprints by the door. They’re everywhere.’

‘They’re ours,’ said Lena.

‘That one isn’t,’ Seebold said stoutly, pointing to a large print just ahead of them.

‘I guess somebody else must have come across it,’ Milly suggested. ‘That’s probably why some of the ivy has been pulled away. It’s no big deal. The people in the village sometimes walk across the hill as a shortcut.’ She tried the door but it was locked.

They looked around for a key but couldn’t find one. Milly tried the door again but it wouldn’t yield. Nipper began to bark excitedly.

‘I think we should turn back now,’ said Lena. ‘We don’t want Seebold to get overtired.’

Also concerned that the sound of the dog barking might bring someone from the house, the three of them turned around and headed back to the cottage.

Inside the ice house, Freddie let his breath out slowly. Hell’s bells, that was close. What a good job he’d bolted the door, and how fortuitous also that he’d heard them coming before he’d fired up the radio. If he’d had the earphones on, he might not have done so, and the sound of his voice would have given the game away. He could still hear the people outside, but their voices were becoming faint. He threw the monkey wrench back into the toolbox. As soon as he’d heard voices he’d snatched it up, knowing that if they had come into the ice house he would have had no hesitation in using it as a weapon. He waited a while to calm his breathing before he reached up and slid back the bolt. Opening the door silently, he stepped outside and looked down the lane. There they were. They all had their backs to him but he recognised them at once: his sister-in-law, the man he’d seen off the premises that time and the gypsy girl. He hurriedly pressed himself into the overhanging ivy as he saw one of them begin to turn around. What should he do? They were a danger to his plans and much too close for comfort. He slipped back inside the ice house. From now on he would have to be more vigilant. For the first time in his life, he was doing something very important. Nothing and no one must be allowed to get in the way.

Chapter 36

Worthing was in a state of organised chaos. People were being kept well away from the centre of town because Captain Bailey of the Worthing Home Guard had instigated a full-scale exercise using personnel from Air Raid Precaution Group 2. The exercise area was between George V Avenue and Heene Road, up as far as the railway station at one end and down to the beach at the other. One hundred and sixty men and women gathered at 2.30 p.m. to play-act a major disaster. Imitation mustard gas bombs were set off at regular intervals. Fire engines raced to the scene and special constables patrolled the streets. On Goring Road, the pavement outside the newly built Sainsbury’s food store was littered with ‘corpses’ while, a little further up the street, living ‘casualties’ with realistic-looking injuries were slumped at the bus stop and on the grass verge in various agonising-looking poses.

Along with several other employees from Hubbard’s, Milly had volunteered to be a victim. A girl from Worthing Connaught Theatre had created a terrible ‘open’ wound on her leg and she was supposed to be in shock. Another girl had a ‘broken arm’ with the bone sticking through the skin. It was all cleverly done with nothing more than plasters, plasticine and cochineal, but everybody’s injuries were so horribly realistic that – for the first time – Milly was confronted with the reality of what they all faced. God forbid, but if the Nazis should invade Poland and Britain declared war, she and the other inhabitants of Worthing might experience this for real, and most likely a lot worse.

‘It’s all a bit scary, isn’t it,’ said the girl with the ‘broken arm’. ‘The thought of going to war, I mean.’

Milly nodded grimly. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Hitler could still make peace.’

The girl from the Connaught snapped her make-up box shut. ‘And pigs might fly.’

Just after one o’clock, Milly and her companion were taken to an area near the end of Heene Road where they were told to lie on the edge of the gardens opposite Heene Terrace and wait to be found. ‘A warning will sound.’ The parting words of the officer who dropped them off were vague. Did he mean a warning would sound when the exercise started, or would it come when it ended? And did they still have to wait to be found if no one had come by that time?

As she lay in the shrubbery by an upturned seat, she rehearsed the rhyme which had been issued by the Home Office to help residents to understand what was going on.

Wavering sound – go to ground

Steady blast – raiders past

If rattles you hear – gas you must fear

But if hand bells ring – then all is clear.

But Milly had no idea which one to listen out for. She had the feeling it was going to be a long afternoon. A few passers-by paused to stare, and some people on the top deck of the bus waved but, apart from that, she was alone. The other girl had been left further up the road beside the pavement, next to an upturned pram which, fortunately, had no baby in it. At one point a man on a bicycle, alarmed to see the awful state of her ‘broken arm’, stopped to ask if he could help her to hospital. Milly heard the girl explaining that she was part of an exercise and the man rode off. Sometime later, the same girl was bundled into an ambulance, but still no one noticed Milly.

It was a little while later when Milly saw him. Pearl’s husband. He was strolling along the walkway between the beach huts and the road. There weren’t many people walking about today because there was a stiff offshore breeze which made it chilly. At first, he appeared to be just another visitor to the town, except that every now and then, he stopped to write something in a little notebook and then he’d put it back into his pocket. How strange. What was he doing? She frowned as a vague memory resurfaced. When she’d first met Eustace at Lady Verity’s party, hadn’t he said something about Freddie scribbling things into a notebook? Come to think of it, Eustace had a little rant about the same thing when they were out walking. So what did Freddie do all day? As far as she knew, he didn’t have a job, and he certainly wasn’t part of the exercise, and yet there he was, writing quite a lot into that notebook of his.

In the tranquillity of the garden, Milly started going over a few things in her mind. For a start, there was that business when he was chased by the swan. Eustace thought Freddie might have been photographing butterflies but the more she thought of it, the more Milly was convinced that his interest lay elsewhere. When he emerged from the undergrowth and headed for his bicycle, he had thrown something into the saddle bag. It had to have been a camera. Why else would he be making threatening gestures while she was giving evidence in court? Then there was that ice house. As they had walked away, she’d had a feeling they were being watched, though she hadn’t mentioned anything to the others. The door was locked but somebody could have been inside and as she had glanced back, she thought she’d seen movement. At the time, she convinced herself she had imagined it, but now she felt differently. Milly cast her mind back to the first time she’d met Freddie at that party. She’d been impressed by his physique; even though he was covered by his shirt, she could tell that he exercised regularly. Could that mean that he was a member of some military movement? He was too old to be one of the Hitler Youth, but there were plenty of other Nazi groups. She frowned crossly. There was something else. Something niggling away at the back of her mind but she struggled to remember. What was it? And then it dawned on her. He’d clicked his heels, military style. She shivered. Surely that must make him . . .? No, she was being ridiculous, over-dramatic. He was just a polite German. They all did that, didn’t they?

She forced herself to calm down. Things were bad enough between her and her sister. It would only make things a whole lot worse if she waded in with a half-baked idea that Freddie might not be all that he seemed. Perhaps she should speak to her mother first? She lay perfectly still as her brother-in-law turned from the seafront and walked up Heene Road. Where was he going? Milly was dying to get up and follow him, but she couldn’t, could she? She was supposed to be a casualty.