Free The Spy Game by Georgina Harding

on to the floor from the plate she was holding.
    'My diary. It's secret.'
    'You two and your secrets. It's no good for you to be alone all day.'
    'I think it's fine.'
    'When I was your age there was five of us kids about, and the house not half the size of yours.'
    'We like it how it is.' I didn't see that Margaret had much ground to stand on. Everybody knew that Margaret's youngest sister
     was having a baby even though she wasn't married. Susan said that at least Joyce had had a boyfriend. Joyce was pretty. Margaret
     was plain and her acne would put any man off kissing her.
    When the washing up was done Margaret took the gloves off and draped them over the taps.
    'Are you still there then? What are you waiting for?'
    'Nothing. I'm just sitting. Writing my diary.'
    'Well, you'll have to be off now out of here as I'm cleaning the floor.'
    'But you did it yesterday.'
    'And I'll do it again long as it keeps raining and it's muddy outside and you two traipse in and out without so much as wiping
     your feet let alone changing your shoes.
    That's what I mean, there's nobody here telling you what you should and shouldn't do.'
    And she pushed the sponge-headed mop right up to my feet, and I lifted them up so that it could pass beneath.
    'Come on, you know I need to go under the chair as well.'
    I took up the diary and locked it, and walked out where the floor was still dry.
    Peter was in the sitting room.
    'Has she gone?'
    'Not yet.'
    'I wish she'd get a move on.'
    He had a screwdriver.
    'What's the screwdriver for?'
    He hid it behind a cushion when Margaret came in at last and said she was going, and we both went to the door and watched
     her leave, putting on her raincoat and leaving her footprints in a pale track across the wet lino.
    'Here, you've got to help.'
    The radiogram ran across half the length of the wall behind the sofa. It was a piece of furniture almost like a sideboard,
     of some yellowish lacquered wood veneer and angularly modern, a block on tapered brass-tipped legs; ugly, which was why it
     lived behind the sofa, but our parents had chosen it not for its looks but for the quality of its sound. To move it out we
     had to move everything else first: the sofa itself, the chairs to make space for the sofa; then take the lamp from it, the
     books and records, the ashtray, lay them out on the carpet just how they'd been so that we could put them back right.
    'What are you going to do?'
    Peter began to unscrew the back panel. He took each screw and laid it neatly in the ashtray.
    'But it's still plugged in.' I pulled the plug from its socket.
    'It wasn't on, silly. I won't get electrocuted if it's not on.'
    He had all the screws out now, laid the back panel on the floor. There was more space inside than I had thought. There wasn't
     much there really, just the speakers, one on each side, and a kind of board with knobs and wires of different colours and
     blobs of silver solder. He poked around like he knew what he was doing, only of course he didn't.
    'The Krogers used a radiogram. They had it connected to a transmitter, and to an aerial in the roof. They had direct radio
     communication with Moscow. Their radio-gram was just an ordinary one, like ours, like anybody's, but it had a high frequency
     band so that it could get reception from anywhere in the world, and it was fitted for headphones, so they could listen just
     with headphones, and these were hidden in the back of it.'
    'Well, there's nothing hidden in this one.'
    'The Krogers did the communications for the spy ring, see. Lonsdale was liaison. He ran the spies, did the recruiting and
     made the contacts, fixed the rendezvous and the dead-letter drops and everything, and the Krogers did the communication with
     Russia. They made messages and documents into microdots and stuck them into the books that they sent abroad. They were second-hand
     book dealers, that was their cover. They sent books to Holland and Switzerland and places, places no one would suspect