Free The Company of Strangers by Robert Wilson

on the outskirts of the city. SS Colonel Reinhardt Wolters had been expecting him two days earlier but welcomed him all the same.
    On 13th February the Chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, was escorted out of the Maibach II complex by officers sent from the Reich’s Main Security Office by Kaltenbrunner. He was taken to the house within the grounds where he packed and was then driven to his own home in Schlachtensee. On 18th February the Abwehr was dissolved and brought under Kaltenbrunner’s direct control. The rain was clattering against the windows of the German Legation in Lapa when Wolters came into Voss’s office to deliver the good news. As the SS man left the room, Voss was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness, a man out on a limb at the westernmost tip of Europe with only the enemy to talk to.

Chapter 6
    10th July 1944, Orlando Road, Clapham, London.
    Andrea Aspinall collapsed on her bed in her room with the windows open, just back from another trip to the air-raid shelter – the doodlebugs a menace, flying over at all times of day, not like the good old predictable nights of endless bombing raids in the Blitz. Sometimes she toyed with the idea of not going to the shelter – listen for the low drone of the diesel-powered rocket, wait for its engine to cut out, take pot luck under its silent falling, test her boredom threshold.
    She went to sit on the window ledge, her room at the top, old servants’ quarters. She looked over the back garden through the lime trees to Macaulay Road, four houses along, direct hit from a doodlebug, not much left, blackened beams, piled rubble but nobody home at the time. She caught sight of herself, only her head in the bottom corner of the mirror on the dressing table across the room. Long black hair, dark, nearly olive skin, twenty-year-old brown eyes wanting to be older.
    She opened a packet of Woodbines, rested the filterless cigarette on her lower lip, let it stick. She struck a match on the outside wall, warm brick. Her hand came into the frame, she turned her face and accepted the light. She flicked her head back, unstuck the cigarette, let out a long stream of smoke and came back to herself in the mirror with her tongue on her top lip – being sophisticated. She shook her head at herself, looked out of the window – stilla silly girl playing romantic games in the mirror. Not a spy.
    She’d spent most of her life at the Sacred Heart Convent in Devizes where she’d been sent at seven years old when her great aunt had died and there’d been no one to look after her while her mother worked. That was why the piano teacher and his wife, who’d been bombed in their home during the Blitz, had been so important to her, they’d become family, looking after her through school holidays. The piano teacher was her father. She’d never known her own, the one who’d died of cholera before she was born.
    They knew about discipline and religion at the Sacred Heart and not much else, but it hadn’t prevented her from getting a place at St Anne’s, Oxford to read maths. She’d done nearly two years of her degree when her tutor invited her to a party at St John’s. At the party a large quantity of drink was served and consumed by dons, undergraduates and other people not directly associated with the university. These people floated around the room and occasionally moored themselves to some young person or other and engaged them in short intense conversations about politics and history. She went to more parties like this and met a man who took a particular interest in her, who was called simply – Rawlinson.
    Rawlinson was very tall. He wore a three-piece suit, charcoal grey, a starched collar attached with studs to his shirt and a school tie which, if she’d known more, would have said Wellington and the military. He was in his fifties with all his hair, which was black on top, grey at the sides and combed through with tonic. He had only one leg and his prosthesis was stiff so