Restless by William Boyd Page A

solitary.
    Morris dropped her at her flat; she said good-night and climbed the stairs to her landing. There she saw Sylvia's blue square of card protruding just beyond the doorjamb. She slipped her key into the lock and was just about to turn it when it was opened from the inside. Romer stood there, smiling at her somewhat frostily, she thought, and at the same time she noticed Sylvia standing in the hall behind him, making vague panic gestures that Eva couldn't quite decipher.
    'You've been a while,' he said. 'Didn't you take the car?'
    'Yes, we did,' Eva said, moving through to their small sitting-room. 'It was raining on the way back. I thought you were meant to be in London.'
    'I was. And what I learned there has brought me immediately back. Air travel, wonderful invention.' He moved to the window where he had left his bag.
    'He's been here two hours,' Sylvia whispered, making a gruesome face, as Romer crouched down and rummaged in his grip and then belted it closed. He stood up.
    'Pack an overnight bag,' he said. 'You and I are going to Holland.'
     
    Prenslo was a nondescript small village on the frontier between Holland and Germany. Eva and Romer had found the journey there surprisingly tiring and taxing. They took a train from Ostend to Brussels, where they changed and caught another train to The Hague. At the main station in The Hague a man from the British Embassy was waiting with a car. Romer then drove them east towards the German border, except that he lost his way twice when he had to leave the main road to head crosscountry for Prenslo, and they spent half an hour or so doubling back before they found their way. They arrived in Prenslo at 4.00 a.m. to discover that the hotel that Romer had booked – the Hotel Willems – was locked shut and completely dark with no one prepared to respond to their bell-ringing, their shouts or peremptory knocking. So they sat in their car in the car-park until seven when a sleepy lad in a dressing gown unlocked the hotel's front door and they were finally, grumpily, admitted.
    Eva had spoken little during the journey to Prenslo, deliberately, and Romer had seemed more than usually self-absorbed and taciturn. She felt there was something about Romer's attitude that irked her – as if she was being indulged, spoilt, that she should feel unusually privileged to be on this mysterious night journey with the 'boss' – and so she behaved dutifully and uncomplainingly. But the three-hour wait in the Hotel Willems's car-park and their enforced proximity had made Romer more relaxed and he had told her in more detail what they were doing in Prenslo.
    On his brief trip to London Romer had learned that there was an SIS mission due to take place the next day in Prenslo. A senior German general in the Wehrmacht high command wanted to sound out the British position and response in the event of an army-led coup against Hitler. Apparently there was no question of deposing Hitler – he would maintain his role as chancellor – but he would be under the absolute control of the mutinous generals. After several preliminary encounters – to check security, to verify details – a unit of the British Secret Service based in The Hague had set up this first meeting with the general himself in a cafe at Prenslo. Prenslo was chosen because of the ease with which the general and his collaborators could slip to and fro across the border unremarked. The cafe in question was a hundred yards from the frontier.
    Eva listened to all this attentively, with about three dozen questions clustering in her head. She knew she probably shouldn't air them but she didn't really care: she was both tired and mystified.
    'Why do you need me for this?' she asked.
    'Because my face is known to the SIS men. One of them is Head of Station in Holland – I've met him half a dozen times.' Romer stretched, his elbow bumping Eva's shoulder. 'Sorry – you'll be my eyes and ears, Eva. I need to know exactly what's going on.' He