The 9 by Madalyn Morgan (tools of titans ebook .txt) 📕

you won’t have to work at all. You’ll be able to stay home all day, visit friends, go shopping.’ Ben pulled Ena to him and kissed her. ‘My kid sister’s gonna love you,’ he whispered, burying his face in her hair and rocking her gently, ‘and I know you’ll love her.’

Marriage, America, his sister? Ben had presumed too much. How could he think she would want to leave her job, her family, her friends, and go off with him to the other side of the world when her country was at war? He may not know how important the work she did for Bletchley was, or even care, but he must think her very shallow to want to up and leave while her friends and family were risking their lives fighting.

Ena heard the train rattle into the station. ‘I must go.’ Grabbing her handbag and gasmask, she flew out of the buffet with Ben at her heels.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, opening the train door, ‘I didn’t mean to pressure you.’

‘You didn’t,’ she lied.

‘That’s great. So you’ll think about it?’ Ena mounted the steps. ‘Ena?’ Ben called.

‘What? Yes,’ she called back, and shut the door.

‘I’ll write you as soon as I get back to my billet!’ Ben shouted as the train clunked off its brakes and began to chug north.

On the journey home, Ena thought about her relationship with Ben. She liked him very much, but marriage? Going to live in America? Ben’s feelings for her were greater than hers were for him – and his plans were moving at a far greater speed. He said he wasn’t rushing her, but he was. He was suffocating her.

Thinking now about what Ben had said, what he had presumed, it struck Ena that the man she had been seeing for the last several months didn’t know her at all. And by the time the train pulled into Rugby station, Ena’s feelings for Ben had begun to change.

Ena wasn’t able to see Ben when she went to Bletchley with Freda, which wasn’t a bad thing. She needed to put some time and space between them. She still wrote to him several times a week, which she had done since they had first met, but the letters were less intimate. She now signed off with Yours, Ena, instead of Love, Ena.

Going to Bletchley with Freda was always fun. They had recently got into the habit of having a sherry in the Station Hotel before catching the train back to Rugby. Or they would walk up to the Market Tavern on Station Road and have a port and lemon, until it was time to catch the bus to Lowarth.

Ena liked Freda, and had told the commander at the beginning of the investigation that she wouldn’t spy on her colleague and friend. He’d said she had no choice, that it was an order. He reminded her that not only had she agreed to find out if there was a mole at Silcott’s Engineering, or at Bletchley Park, but she had wanted to – and more importantly, it had been sanctioned by Mr Silcott. Ena was watching Freda closely, not because she thought she was a spy, but to find evidence that she wasn’t, so Ena could prove Commander Dalton wrong.

She hated spying on her friend, going through her desk, reading her private letters, eavesdropping on her telephone calls, which Ena thought was the worst thing she had to do. She didn’t mind watching people at Bletchley, listening in on their conversations. It was what she had to do if she was ever going to find out who had sabotaged her work. Commander Dalton didn’t believe it was anyone from Bletchley Park. But Ena needed to find out – and crossing people off the extensive list of suspects was as important as adding them to it.

Ena leaned back in her seat and gazed out of the window at the Buckinghamshire countryside. Of the detective books she’d read, she mused, which of the amateur sleuths would she most like to be. She wouldn’t want to be Agatha Christie’s Marple. Clever, always worked out who had done it, but Miss Marple was too old. She could be Tuppence Beresford. She was more Tuppence’s age. And Tuppence had a handsome husband called Tommy. Tuppence and Tommy Beresford. She racked her brain, trying to remember what the name Tuppence was short for. Prudence, she remembered. No, she didn’t want to be a Tuppence or a Prudence. They were both silly names for a detective.

Ena, like her sisters, had been encouraged to read books from an early age by their father. Her favourites were Dorothy L Sayers’ mystery stories. But Sayers’ detective was a man, Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey was as whimsical a name as Tuppence. But there was a female in some of the books called Harriet Vane. Sayers described her as a detective novelist with a husky voice and dark eyes. That’s who I shall be like, Ena decided, dismissing Tuppence Beresford from her mind. Besides, she thought, Harriet Vane ends up with a lord. Tuppence’s husband was a crook, a blackmailer, before becoming an amateur detective.

Ena sighed at her own silliness, brought her attention back to the carriage and looked across the aisle at Freda. Her friend enjoyed reading out snippets of interest from her Woman’s Own magazine: today they had been how to make rayon nylons last longer, a knitting pattern for the gayest girl in town, and how a jacket can turn an ordinary day-dress into a dressy outfit. Ena would have liked the chance to put all three ideas to the test. She hadn’t been out for ages. All work and no play, her dad had warned.

She was about to suggest to Freda that they went to the flicks at the weekend when her friend said, ‘Next stop Bletchley. Want the magazine?’

Ena shook her head. ‘I’ll read the short