CHAPTER ONE
LONDON
31 AUGUST 1940
It’s often a man’s mouth that breaks his nose, my uncle Mick was fond of saying, and the bloke in front of me was doing his best to test the theory. His mouth was just about thirty seconds from earning him a fist to the conk.
“War or no war,” he was saying, “I don’t want a woman mucking things up.”
I was trying hard to keep my temper down. After all, I was here on behalf of my uncle, a well-respected locksmith. He was out of town on another job, and he wouldn’t be best pleased to return home and find that I’d walloped a paying customer. Though, in my defense, this fellow didn’t seem at all likely to pay.
Things had seemed simple enough when I took the telephone call that morning. It was an unchallenging task—changing a few locks on the doors at Atkinson’s Automobile Garage—and with the war on, we needed all the work we could get. I’d accepted the job, but when I’d turned up, tool kit in hand, Atkinson, the burly bounder in stained coveralls standing before me, had bridled at leaving his precious locks in the hands of a woman. We’d been going round in circles for ten minutes at this point, and my patience was wearing thin.
“Do you want these locks changed or don’t you?” I asked tersely.
“Not by a bit of skirt, love,” he said, gesturing toward the door to the office and the storage room that adjoined it. “I’ve got confidential records and expensive, hard-to-get parts in there that need to be kept safe. I can’t take a chance on an improperly installed lock.”
He was already taking a chance; the locks on both the office door and the storage room were flimsy pin-tumbler locks. For a moment I allowed myself the luxury of imagining returning to this garage in the dead of night. It wouldn’t take more than a pick, a tension tool, and thirty seconds to open these doors. I could be in and out in a few minutes with his precious hard-to-get parts …
“You won’t find better locksmiths in London than the McDonnells,” I said, repressing my criminal instincts. Though, to tell the truth, a perfectly mediocre locksmith could have done just as well. It would be a simple task to remove the old locks and replace them with more secure Yale locks. I could have had a good start on the job by now if he hadn’t been giving me a lot of poppycock.
Atkinson crossed his brawny arms over his chest. “I asked for Mick McDonnell, and I’ll have Mick McDonnell or take my business elsewhere.”
A lesser locksmith, a locksmith who didn’t have stubborn McDonnell blood coursing through the veins, might have given up at this point. But if Uncle Mick had taught me anything it was that sometimes a fist was the answer, but, more often than not, charm, wits, and skill worked better.
I smoothed my expression and made my voice calm and reasonable. “Well, you’ve got Ellie McDonnell, and I’m perfectly capable of doing this job. I know as much about locks as you do about that Phantom.” I nodded toward the Rolls-Royce parked inside one of the open garage doors.
He glanced over his shoulder. “So you think you know cars, then, too, do you?”
“A bit.” My cousin Colm had always tinkered with machines growing up. He was a mechanic for the RAF now, but, in the years before the war, many was the hour I’d sat by his side as he mended and rebuilt various engines. I’d absorbed quite a bit of information in those sessions.
Atkinson snorted, and my ire rose once again.
I couldn’t stop myself from giving him a haughty glare. “Contrary to what you believe, it is possible for women to know about things outside of the kitchen.”
His eyes narrowed at my sarcasm. “Right. Tell you what, girlie. If you can name me even one part inside that engine, I’ll let you change my locks.”
“Do I have your word on that?”
“Sure,” he said with a smirk, clearly not considering it much of a risk.
I looked at the car, recalling the things Colm had gone on about as he’d discussed the mechanics of luxury cars we’d never be able to afford.
“It’s a Phantom III?” I asked.
I saw the surprise flash across his face before he covered it and gave a short nod. “A ’thirty-eight.”
Luckily for me, the Phantom III was one of the cars Colm had talked about endlessly. It was that recognition that had drawn my attention to the beauty in the garage in the first place. Even more luckily, I had a memory like a sponge.
“Then it has a V-12, pushrod engine,” I said. “A dual ignition system, and coil spring front suspension.”
Atkinson was staring at me, his mouth hanging open just a bit.
“And there’s an overdrive gearbox in the ’thirty-eight,” I added for good measure.
His face went dark red, and I wondered if he was going to renege on his promise to give me the job and send me off with a few choice words. Then, to my surprise, he laughed, a deep, chortling laugh, straight from his stomach.
“You didn’t learn that in a kitchen,” he said at last, pulling an oil-stained handkerchief from his pocket and rubbing it across his face.
“No, and I didn’t learn locksmithing there either. I know what I’m doing.”
He scratched his blond head and gave a short nod. “You can start on the office door,” he said, jerking his thumb in that direction.
I gave an equally short nod in return and moved past him to get to work.
He’d made two miscalculations this morning. The first thing to know about the McDonnells was that there was always more to us than met the eye; the second was that you should never bet against us.
* * *
I arrived home a few hours later, disheveled and dirty. I’d pinned my black hair up atop my head, a kerchief tied around it to keep stray strands out of my face, but a few of my natural curls had begun to escape and spring out in places. I was dusty and oily from the garage. There were dark streaks on my clothes, my hands, and, I was sure, my face.
So I was not at what you might call peak appearance as I entered my uncle’s house.
“Nacy!” I called. “I’m back.”
Nacy Dean, the woman who had raised me and looked over the McDonnell brood like a mother hen since we were children, was still a live-in housekeeper to my uncle. While I now had a small flat of my own behind the house, I usually gave her an account of my comings and goings, as I had since I was an adolescent.
I was especially eager to tell her how I’d put the mechanic in his place. By the time I’d left the garage, Atkinson had been as pleased as punch with the new locks, and there had been no more mention of how a woman couldn’t do a proper locksmithing job. I’d even been given a firm handshake at the close of the deal.
It had been almost as satisfying as walloping him on the nose might have been.
There was no answering call from Nacy, and I thought she might be in the kitchen. I went in that direction, through the sitting room off the small entrance hall, and stopped short when I saw the figure standing there.
“Good afternoon, Miss McDonnell,” he said.
“Major Ramsey,” I replied. My hand moved automatically to push a stray curl behind my ear in a completely useless attempt to tidy myself up a bit.
The major, who worked in the intelligence service in a capacity that had yet to be fully explained, had recruited my uncle and me, so to speak, earlier that month. We had been caught breaking into a safe, and the major had given us the choice between jail or doing a bit of safecracking for king and country. The decision had been an easy one, and it had led to an adventure that had been on my mind constantly over the past few weeks, one I would be unlikely to forget for the rest of my life.
Though the major had said he might be in need of our services in the future, I hadn’t really expected to see him again so soon. And I certainly had not expected him to show up in the parlor unannounced when I was covered in grime from a job. Then again, the major had the charming habit of catching me at my worst.
He, meanwhile, was standing there, formal and elegant in his spotless uniform, his service cap tucked under one arm. It seemed to me that he had grown even more starched in the weeks since I had seen him; his general bearing would not have been amiss in the King’s Guard. Which made my disheveled appearance all the more marked in contrast.
“I’ve come looking for your uncle,” he said, politely ignoring my general disarray. “Mrs. Dean told me he was out but that I might wait here to speak to you.”
I noticed the empty teacup on the table beside the chair the major had obviously just vacated.
Nacy had a sweet spot for the major. I was sure she had been only too glad to see him show up on her doorstep and to provide him with a cup of tea and a bit of company while he waited for me to return.
“Where is Nacy?” I asked, half expecting her to suddenly appear with a plateful of fresh scones.
“I believe she went to the market.”
Of course. The local grocer put out fresh deliveries this time of day, and Nacy was always sure to make the most of our ration coupons.
Not only that, she’d have wanted me to find the major here alone. She had the ridiculous notion that I might be romantically interested in him. Which I certainly was not. Pretty is as pretty does, and the major never did things prettily.
I pushed these thoughts from my mind and focused on trying not to smooth out my clothes or check the mirror on the wall across the room to see how dirty my face was.
Instead, I gave him a polite smile. “What can I do for you, Major?”
“I have a matter I wish to discuss with you. Do you have a moment?”
“Of course.”
There was no special warmth in his tone, no hint of fond remembrance of the adventure we had been through together. He was as cool and formal as if we hadn’t just worked together to save the country from Nazi spies.
Well, what had I expected? The major wasn’t the sentimental sort. He certainly hadn’t sought me out because he missed me. If there was one thing I knew about Major Ramsey, it was that he was a man who was very devoted to his work. It was this superior devotion that made him such an asset to his country.
He was, in fact, annoyingly superior in so many ways. Superior intelligence, superior skills, superior good looks. It was a trial, at times, to put up with the man.
“Please, sit down,” I said, motioning to the seat behind him.
He hesitated. I realized he didn’t know if I would sit in my dirty clothes, and he was far too gently bred to take a seat while I stood.
To ease his mind, I lowered myself onto the edge of a wooden chair that would be easy enough to clean. I crossed the cleaner of my trousered legs over the dirtier one and folded my hands on my lap in such a way that the oil-stained nails weren’t as noticeable.
I studied him while he resumed his seat. He looked well, though I had seen firsthand that he worked at rather a breakneck pace and often seemed to forgo rest. Perhaps things had been less hectic since the time we had worked together, but I very much doubted it.
The tan he’d had when I’d last seen him, a remnant from his time stationed in North Africa before our adventure, had faded. Other than that, there was little difference. He was very tall and solidly built, filling out his uniform with the sort of straight-backed perfection that a tin soldier might aspire to. His blond hair was cut short, and his eyes, an unusual shade of twilight blue, were cool and assessing as they settled on me.
“You’ve been staying out of trouble.” It wasn’t a question. The major hadn’t been above having me watched before, so I wouldn’t be surprised to know he’d had someone checking up on me. Of course, I couldn’t really blame him. I didn’t suppose his superiors would look kindly on us running amok after we’d aligned ourselves with their operation.
“We’ve been trying to keep ourselves busy.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, then promptly brought the subject back around to the purpose of his visit. “As I said, I came here looking for your uncle.”
“Yes, he’s gone up to Yorkshire,” I said lightly. “He had a job there, converting some uppity lord’s country house cellar into a place to safely stash the goods he evacuated from Mayfair.”
I remembered halfway through the sentence that Major Ramsey’s uncle was an earl, but it didn’t stop me from finishing the thought.
Major Ramsey chose to ignore my slight on the nobility. “Is there any way you might get in touch with him?”
Copyright © 2022 by Ashley Weaver
