The Queen's Accomplice Read online

  Praise for Susan Elia MacNeal’s New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Maggie Hope Mysteries

  Susan Elia MacNeal’s Maggie Hope novels have been awarded:

  • The International Thriller Writers Award

  • The Booky Award

  • The Barry Award

  and have been nominated for:

  The Edgar Award • The Dilys Award • The Sue Feder Historical Memorial Award • The Silver Falchion Award • The Bruce Alexander Memorial Historical Mystery Award • The Macavity Award • The Agatha Award

  —

  “Addictive…The author continues to tackle heady issues while giving us a beloved heroine to root for. Wrought with peril and tension and extraordinarily rich in detail and research, Hope’s latest adventure will not disappoint fans of the series.”

  —Fredricksburg Free Lance-Star

  “MacNeal’s Maggie Hope mysteries are as addictive as a BBC miniseries, with the added attraction of a well-paced thriller. It’s not just an action-packed mystery; it’s also the story of a family and lovers caught in WWII and one woman’s struggle to find her place in a mixed-up world.”

  —RT Book Reviews (TOP PICK, 4½ stars)

  “Enthralling.”

  —Mystery Scene Magazine

  “Compulsively readable…The true accomplishment of this book is the wonderfully complex Maggie….With deft, empathic prose, author MacNeal creates a wholly engrossing portrait of a coming-of-age woman under fire….She’ll draw you in from the first page….You’ll be [Maggie Hope’s] loyal subject, ready to follow her wherever she goes.”

  —Oprah.com

  “A charming book with an entertaining premise…a fast page-turner with several interesting plot lines keeping you on the edge using humor and playfulness to keep the story moving.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Brave, clever Maggie’s debut is an enjoyable mix of mystery, thriller and romance that captures the harrowing experiences of life in war-torn London.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “MacNeal layers the story with plenty of atmospheric, Blitz-era details and an appealing working-girl frame story as Maggie and her roommates juggle the demands of rationing and air raids with more mundane worries about boyfriends….The period ambience will win the day for fans.”

  —Booklist

  “Maggie, a cerebral redhead, makes a smart plucky heroine.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A captivating, post-feminist picture of England during its finest hour.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Delightful…as sweet as it is intriguing.”

  —USA Today

  “With a smart, code-breaking mathematician heroine, abundant World War II spy intrigue, and a whiff of romance, this series has real luster. The author leaves readers with a mind-boggling conclusion that hints at Maggie’s next assignment.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  The Queen’s Accomplice is a work of historical fiction, using well-known historical and public figures. All incidents and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Susan Elia

  Excerpt from The Paris Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal copyright © 2016 by Susan Elia

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Paris Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: MacNeal, Susan Elia, author.

  Title: The queen’s accomplice: a Maggie Hope mystery / Susan Elia MacNeal.

  Description: New York: Bantam Books, 2016. | Series: A Maggie Hope mystery

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016009035 (print) | LCCN 2016015739 (ebook) | ISBN 9780804178723 (softcover) | ISBN 9780804178730 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women spies—Fiction. | Cryptographers—Fiction. | Americans—England—London—Fiction. | Serial murder investigation—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—England—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Traditional British. | FICTION / Historical. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Mystery fiction. | Spy stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A2774 Q44 2016 (print) | LCC PS3613.A2774 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016009035

  ebook ISBN 9780804178730

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette, adapted for ebook

  Title-page image: © iStockphoto.com

  Cover design: Victoria Allen

  Cover illustration: Mick Wiggins

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Excerpt from The Paris Spy

  By Susan Elia MacNeal

  About the Author

  Little girls, this seems to say,

  Never stop upon your way,

  Never trust a stranger-friend;

  No one knows how it will end.

  —CHARLES PERRAULT,

  “LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD”

  AS A WARNING TO FEMALE VIRTUE,

  This Monument

  Is erected over the remains of

  MARY ASHFORD,

  a young Woman, chaste as she was beautiful,

  Who, in the 20th year of her age,

  having incautiously repaired to a Scene of Amusement,

  without proper Protection,

  was brutally violated and murdered

  on the 27th of May, 1817,

  in the Parish of Aston.

  —PROPOSED EPITAPH FROM A MORAL REVIEW OF THE CONDUCT AND CASE OF MARY ASHFORD

  The historian can peg the point where a society begins its sharpest decline at the instant when women begin to take part, on an equal footing with men.

  —ADOLF HITLER,

  MEIN KAMPF

  Prologue

  The winds were changing.

  They were blowing in from the east now, Vera Baines noted, from the East End. Even though the air raids had stopped for the moment in London—as Hitler turned his attentions toward Russia—the docks, railroads, and factories were still burning.

  Through her open bedroom window, she could smell cold wind scented with smoke and destruction. She watched as it ruffled the bare black branches of the trees of Regent’s Park, rustling dead ivy.
Since the war had begun, the park had become a desolate expanse of meandering walkways, overgrown shrubbery, and long air-raid trenches—an ideal location for crime. But not on her watch.

  As an ARP warden for her section in Marylebone, Vera Baines knew not only the winds but the intricacies of light and dark. Sunset in London in late March 1942 arrived after six, but the violet shadows began to lengthen at least an hour earlier. This evening’s sunset was extraordinary—bright red, with crepuscular rays piercing wispy clouds.

  Despite barely clearing the five-foot mark and a slight figure, at eighty-three, Vera was a redoubtable woman. She was more wiry than frail, her energy giving the impression of her being much taller than she actually was. She had impeccable posture and moved with a force and confidence her friends and family hadn’t seen since her husband had died ten years ago. And her face, with its high cheekbones and clear blue eyes that missed nothing, radiated strength.

  Vera hated the war, hated the loss of innocent lives—but she couldn’t deny it had brought a certain clarity to her existence. As an ARP warden, she now felt she had a purpose: She would protect her own. As she surveyed the park’s deepening shadows from the window of her bone-colored Georgian terraced house, Vera felt responsibility, plus a fierce sense of love and pride. This was her London. These were her people. Nothing would happen to them on her sentry.

  It was time to begin her shift. Vera took one last look at the fading light, listening to the forlorn cries of the birds, then picked her way downstairs, leaning on the railing. At her door, she put on her ARP tin hat, dark blue wool overcoat, and gloves, and reached for her walking stick—with a silver British bulldog on the handle. Then she went down the outside stairs and onto the icy flagstone pavement, bracing herself against the wind. She paced the street with her usual vigor, the pale symmetrical Nash architecture reflecting the last light of the dying sunset. The temperature was dropping and the air smelled of imminent storms.

  A passing white-haired man tipped his black bowler hat, and she nodded in return. “Oh, Mr. Saunders—” she called after him, her breath making clouds in the chill air.

  The man stopped and turned. “Yes, Mrs. Baines?”

  “I noticed a chink in your blackout curtain on the second floor last night. Please see to it no light is visible from now on.”

  He took a few steps forward and frowned down at her. “We haven’t had an air raid in months, dearie.”

  Vera was not deterred by his bulk, his height, or his condescending tone. “And the Luftwaffe might be choosing tonight for a return visit, Mr. Saunders. Let’s not give them any light to guide them to us, shall we?”

  She strode on, chin high, taking her usual route past the charred remains of Regent’s Park’s brick wall. The last of the sun’s light melted away, but Vera didn’t mind the dark; she liked being out alone at night. Without electric lights to pierce the darkness, the nighttime took on a new beauty in the icy bright moonlight. Her shuttered flashlight illuminated the strips of white paint on the curbs and tree trunks, giving off a ghostly glow.

  In the distance, she could hear the sounds of the city: the faint rumble of motor traffic, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on cobblestones, the screeches and flaps of bats off to their night’s hunt. The wind picked up once again, causing the ancient tree branches to sway and creak, the dead leaves and lipstick-stained cigarette butts in the gutters to dance.

  Without artificial light, Regent’s Park at night could have been any era in London—from the time when ancient Britons painted themselves blue, to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, to the period of Victoria and Albert. Even the clocks obliged: When the Nazi bombs exploded, all nearby timepieces ceased to function, paralyzed at whatever time they were at the instant of impact. These comatose clocks were another reason Vera could imagine time telescoping—the suspended present creating an atmosphere where time travel seemed no mere fantasy. Really, anything seemed possible, especially in the shadows of night. It even smelled as it could have hundreds of years ago—the same stink of urine against the crumbling brick walls as there would have been in Pepys’s day.

  In the darkness, Vera tripped and nearly fell, saved only by her trusty walking stick. “What the—?” she muttered, her grip in leather gloves tight on the silver handle. She righted herself, glad Mr. Saunders hadn’t been there to see.

  She looked down at a long blanket-wrapped bundle. Leaning over, flashlight in one hand, she lifted and pulled back the wool covering with the tip of her cane.

  Vera gave a sharp inhale, but didn’t cry out when she saw the butchered body of a young woman. The corpse looked to have belonged to a girl in her early twenties—healthy and athletic, hair curled. Her throat had been slashed so savagely her head was nearly severed from her body. Her belly had been slit through her ATS uniform, which was soaked through with blood.

  Vera felt as if she’d been struck dumb. But she swallowed and braced her shoulders, gathering her strength. “Murder!” she managed to croak. “Murder!” she cried, louder this time. “Someone—someone fetch the police!”

  A blond boy in a tweed cap walking past stopped and stared. “What the devil’s going on? Are you all right, ma’am?”

  Vera lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, and deployed the stiff upper lip she’d perfected over a lifetime of practice. “Yes, yes, of course I am,” she reassured him. “But I’m afraid she isn’t,” she added, pointing to the woman’s mutilated body with the silver tip of her walking stick.

  The boy squinted in the darkness, eyes following the flashlight’s beam. When he realized what he was seeing, he tore off his cap and crossed himself, whispering, “Bloody hell.” He looked from the body back to Vera. “She’s been ripped, ma’am.” He shook his head, his hands worrying at his hat. “Looks like she’s been done in by Jack the Bloody Ripper himself.”

  “What are you going on about, young man?” Despite her occasional daydreams—or night dreams—Vera had no patience for macabre nonsense. But the boy was looking past her to the park’s brick wall, gaping at the lettering.

  With a shaking hand, Vera raised her flashlight. The words scrawled across the wall were in the same ghostly, glowing white paint as the curbs.

  They read, JACK IS BACK.

  Chapter One

  Something was wrong. Maggie Hope was sure, but she couldn’t yet put her finger on it. What could it be? Frowning, she went over the encoded document yet again.

  Maggie was working as a girl Friday in a dim reception room at 64 Baker Street, at the Special Operations Executive’s offices. It was in an anonymous gray limestone building down the street from Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address and Regent’s Park, only one of the many unremarkable SOE offices scattered around the Marylebone area of central London. Because of lack of space in Whitehall, Baker Street and its surrounding area had become home for SOE, and several buildings had been fitted with discreet plaques reading INTER-SERVICES RESEARCH BUREAU. The staff and those in the know called it the Firm, the Org, or the Racket, and its employees were known as the Baker Street Irregulars, in honor of Holmes’s young informants.

  The atmosphere in the shabby third-floor offices of 64 Baker Street was informal, with almost everyone sipping mugs of hot tea and smoking Gauloises, men and women passing through speaking perfect French. The icy reception room was small and narrow, with only one window and a low ceiling. A fire extinguisher and a notice pointing out the direction of the air-raid shelter decorated one wall, while a tacked-up postcard of the Arc de Triomphe covered the cracks of another.

  Maggie wore an old skirt, a white blouse, and a thick navy-blue wool cardigan patched at the elbows. She was never without her pearl stud earrings, a graduation gift from her Aunt Edith, and her long coppery hair was up in a bun that had begun the day tidy but was now slipping, tendrils springing free around her face and neck. She sat at a dented metal desk with a Remington typewriter, behind a line of telephones in assorted colors, and an overflowing wooden inbox.

  Only twenty-s
even, Maggie had already performed any number of missions as an agent for SOE, but had taken a desk job in London while she was waiting for the arrival of her German half sister, Elise Hess, a Resistance worker in Berlin. Her rescue to London, ordered by Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself, was taking longer than expected—but Maggie knew all too well these missions never went exactly as planned.

  And so she waited, and while she did, she made herself useful at the SOE offices. When she wasn’t greeting prospective agents arriving for their various interviews, she was checking coded messages transmitted by F-Section agents. After all, she’d been secretary to the P.M. himself—as well as saving the life of the Princess Elizabeth, parachuting into Nazi Berlin, teaching at a paramilitary camp, and keeping the First Lady of the United States of America safe from scandal. How hard could managing an office be? And it was only temporary, until her half sister arrived in London and settled in.

  On this Saturday afternoon, as the light from the grimy window began to fade, Maggie was performing a task known as “code check,” going over an agent’s transmission from the field, making sure all was in order. Maggie—a mathematics prodigy who’d graduated summa cum laude from Wellesley College, with a special aptitude for codes and ciphers—liked to try her hand at transposing the worst of the garbled messages. As she worked, she rubbed absently at an ink stain on her blouse’s cuff and then buttoned up her sweater against the office’s chill.

  Maggie knew the Morse coding systems intimately, knew how to “unscramble the indecipherable.” What looked to be problems in a given message might occur simply because an agent had transposed two letters, or misspelled a word. Each agent had a characteristic set of mistakes, and Maggie had quickly come to learn each one’s unique style of communication. For example, some agents routinely misspelled certain words—bad habits from childhood. Then there were the trademark sign-offs; a few liked to end with a simple Goodbye, while others sent Lots of Love, and yet another’s was Tallyho!