LITMIR.BIZ

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part of the building. ‘They’re in a meeting at the moment. You can wait, but I’ve got no idea how long they’ll be.’

      ‘If they’re busy I’ll catch them another time,’ said Sloane as he moved towards the door.

      The Goth shrugged her shoulders and Sloane saw her return to a work station and commenced to assemble another computer.

      Sloane was relieved to escape the girl’s piercing gaze and gladly made his way back to his car. He was unaware that his photo was being taken by one of the watchers.

      Over the next few days he tried to make contact with the Browns by phone without success. He left numerous messages on their answering machine, but they were not returned. Either they had no intention of speaking to him or they had too many other things to worry about. The presence of the watchers had him believe that the latter was probably the case, so he tried harder to meet them in person.

      Despite his failures in this regard he had been making progress in other directions.

      Sloane had decided to trace Jade Green from her very beginnings and hoped to make a breakthrough along the way.

      Here too he had come across many obstructions. He was initially unable to locate Jade Green’s birth certificate and it was not until he finally tracked down her wedding certificate that Sloane learned that Janice Patricia Green had been born in Shanghai and not England as he had assumed.

      But it had been the wedding certificate itself that had given Sloane his first real breakthrough. The amount of information it contained had been small, but each clue had been vital.

      Listed on the certificate were the witnesses Captain Daniel Clarke and a Dr Rani Smith. A female doctor? thought Sloane. If so, she should be easy to trace.

      The marriage had taken place during the early years of World War II, so Sloane was not anticipating that any of these people would still be alive. However, he knew that he would be able to find out a great deal of information from military records about Green’s husband. Also Green’s witness was a female doctor and there would not have been a large number of those in London at that time.

      The staff at military records had numerous listings for both Robert Symes and Daniel Clarke, but luckily Sloane was able to supply Robert Symes’s date of birth from the wedding certificate and acted upon the assumption that both men might have served in the same unit to narrow down the listings for Daniel Clarke.

      It took some time for the research assistant to return and Sloane was beginning to wonder if he had struck yet another brick wall.

      Finally she emerged. ‘You’re very lucky. The records of both these men had been placed under a secrecy blackout. The blackout period only ended a couple of years ago. If you had come before then their files would have been unavailable to you.’

      ‘Why the secrecy?’

      ‘You’ll be able to read it all for yourself. Both men were in military intelligence and their activities before and during the war have been classified,’ she explained, handing over to him two very thick files.

      ‘Can I make copies of these?’

      ‘You can now, but you would have been shot for attempting it a couple of years ago,’ she replied with a grin.

      After photocopying the files Sloane spent all his spare time immersing himself in them and making extensive notes. At last he sat back with a very pleased look upon his face.

      If he had thought the idea of a book on the life of Jade Green would make good reading then the true life adventures of these two men would be a blockbuster, especially that of the late Robert Symes, right up to and including his untimely death while blowing up a bridge in occupied France.

      As much as he would have liked to have gone back to do further research on these brave men, it was not his main objective. That could wait till the current project was complete. Instead, he concentrated on what little information was available on Robert Symes’s life at home.

      Ignoring the spectacular, he concentrated on the mundane.

      He noted that Symes changed his home address just after his marriage to Janice Green, as well as making her his next of kin. However, after his death she had never bothered to apply for any of the privileges accorded war widows. True, she was wealthy enough not to need them, but she had not even applied for his medals.

      One curious item that Sloane did uncover was that Symes had requisitioned the use of a tank and its crew for a period of one day whilst he was supposedly on leave. Sloane wondered what that was about.

      There was also correspondence between himself and his superiors concerning the establishment of a secure facility to be set up outside the normal military precincts. His reason for doing so, he wrote, was so that he could interview escapees from Hitler’s wrath without them being compromised. He also had applied to set up a radio communications network to send messages to agents in occupied Europe. The date of the establishment of the secret base meant nothing to Sloane, but its address in the centre of London did.

      Searching through old records, Sloane was amazed to discover that the address supplied was none other than the location of Jade Green’s Garden of Eros and the dates even coincided! The two of them had been working from the same establishment, at the very same time!

      Shocked, Sloane began to consider the meaning of this information.

      The military had known, and actually granted permission, for Symes to establish a secret base for intelligence gathering to be operated from a brothel.

      Was the brothel also part of Symes’s intelligence gathering network?

      Sloane’s mind was abuzz with the possibilities. He had to find out more about the early life of Jade Green.

      Sloane decided that Daniel Clarke was the most obvious person to answer his questions, but he was disappointed to discover that Clarke had died some ten years before. He did, however, manage to track down Clarke’s only child, a son, and paid him a visit.

      The man explained that his father had never spoken about his wartime activities even though he had asked him on many occasions.

      ‘He refused to talk about anything that took place during the war. I know he was an officer in the army, but that’s all. I think having to keep it all bottled up affected him deeply. He was always a very withdrawn person and shunned most personal contact.’

      Sloane nodded. ‘I think you should get a copy of his military record.

      It will explain a lot.’

      ‘Thank you. I will.’

      As Sloane was about to leave, Clarke’s son had a sudden recollection. ‘The only time I heard my father mention anything to do with the war period was when he saw a woman on the television. I remember he sort of smiled and pointed her out to me. He said he knew her and that they had met during the war. It was as though it was one of the few happy memories he had of the period.’

      ‘Who was the woman?’ asked Sloane excitedly. ‘Was it a person named Jade Green?’

      ‘No. That name doesn’t ring any bells with me. If I can recall, I think it was something to do with a charity event. I remember thinking it was unusual that Dad would know someone like that. What I mean was that the woman was wearing a sari and I didn’t think Dad would ever associate himself with an Indian person. If you know what I mean.’

      Sloane’s mind raced. A woman wearing a sari? ‘Could this woman have been a doctor? Possibly a doctor named Rani Smith?’

      ‘I’m sorry. It was so long ago I couldn’t possibly remember the name.’

      Sloane could though. Clarke and Dr Rani Smith were both on Jade Green’s marriage certificate. It had to be her.

      ‘How long ago did this take place?’

      ‘He was here, living here with us. So it couldn’t have been too long before his death. After Mum died he lived alone for years, but

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