endured the agony with only sips of vodka and the odd lukewarm watery coffee to act as painkillers. Salt biscuits and stale bread dipped in tea were forced into his mouth, For most of the journey he had wanted to die. Henry had sat with him through this voyage, holding his hand and talking. He had kept him alive. When it suited him, Chainbridge could talk, spinning yarns from dusk till dawn. He’d been an endless stream of tales from his native Belfast, switching to memorised quotations from Chaucer, Shakespeare and W.B Yeats. Bringing him home to Oxford, he had stayed with De Witte through his gradual recuperation.
A linguistics professor before enlisting, De Witte found a part-time position in the classics faculty at the university. There he met and eventually married a fellow Dutch academic, Martha Vermeer. She became his nurse, his lover and his eyes, a steady North Star through his pain and anger. She helped him learn Braille and they moved to Utrecht in the late 1920s where they took lecturing roles at the university there. Their marriage allowed him to rediscover his vocation as a teacher, a vocation he had abandoned once he took up arms and joined the Allied Expeditionary force in response to the Russian Revolution.
But he was restless, longing for the thrill of adventure and exploration, challenging in his own words ‘the limits of his limits’. The couple drifted apart and by the early 1930s De Witte found himself back lecturing in Oxford alone. Martha steadfastly refused to divorce him.
By that time, Chainbridge had been approached by MI5 and B5B to create a cell monitoring Communist sympathisers in the nation’s universities. He asked De Witte to join him. The Dutchman’s aural senses had become acute as compensation for his loss of sight, and he could sit stock still for hours, focusing on conversations picked up on hidden microphones. He was fascinated by linguistics and being a natural polyglot began developing a cipher code based on Braille. Throughout the 1930s the two men built a small operating unit of spies who were discreet and highly effective.
Then De Witte asked MI6 about the possibility of going to Spain just as the country convulsed into civil war. His request was refused and he remained in London, assisting MI6 to monitor communications and code-breaking messages sent by both sides in the civil war, especially the Soviet Union's codes.
He had escorted Eva to Southampton at the start of her first mission and from that journey their relationship had flourished despite their rarely having occasion to meet each other in person. The result of the operation had been that Chainbridge had gained invaluable insights into German, Soviet and Spanish undercover operations.
Chainbridge also knew that later that year, in Barcelona, Eva had killed Locher, one of the key German operatives she was monitoring, after he had confronted her with his discovery that she was spying for Polish and British intelligence, or so she had said. However, Chainbridge's ever-sharp intuition told him that Eva was working another agenda, perhaps on the instructions of her Polish masters. Whatever the true facts, Chainbridge was duly encouraged that this beautiful lady could be as cold-blooded and lethal as any successful operative would have to be to survive in the field. She was also an accomplished translator, fluent in Russian, Polish, German, Dutch and English.
Chainbridge had been unable to uncover much about her life before she visited him in London that first time other than that her grandfather was a celebrated Dutch intellectual. However, since her return from Spain to Poland, she had appeared in a film produced by an avant-garde director in Warsaw, had toured Europe in an experimental theatre group, and then disappeared for a year, reappearing after being screen tested personally by Goebbels who had spotted her at a cabaret in Berlin. Presumably in line with her Polish secret service guidance, she had begun to
A linguistics professor before enlisting, De Witte found a part-time position in the classics faculty at the university. There he met and eventually married a fellow Dutch academic, Martha Vermeer. She became his nurse, his lover and his eyes, a steady North Star through his pain and anger. She helped him learn Braille and they moved to Utrecht in the late 1920s where they took lecturing roles at the university there. Their marriage allowed him to rediscover his vocation as a teacher, a vocation he had abandoned once he took up arms and joined the Allied Expeditionary force in response to the Russian Revolution.
But he was restless, longing for the thrill of adventure and exploration, challenging in his own words ‘the limits of his limits’. The couple drifted apart and by the early 1930s De Witte found himself back lecturing in Oxford alone. Martha steadfastly refused to divorce him.
By that time, Chainbridge had been approached by MI5 and B5B to create a cell monitoring Communist sympathisers in the nation’s universities. He asked De Witte to join him. The Dutchman’s aural senses had become acute as compensation for his loss of sight, and he could sit stock still for hours, focusing on conversations picked up on hidden microphones. He was fascinated by linguistics and being a natural polyglot began developing a cipher code based on Braille. Throughout the 1930s the two men built a small operating unit of spies who were discreet and highly effective.
Then De Witte asked MI6 about the possibility of going to Spain just as the country convulsed into civil war. His request was refused and he remained in London, assisting MI6 to monitor communications and code-breaking messages sent by both sides in the civil war, especially the Soviet Union's codes.
He had escorted Eva to Southampton at the start of her first mission and from that journey their relationship had flourished despite their rarely having occasion to meet each other in person. The result of the operation had been that Chainbridge had gained invaluable insights into German, Soviet and Spanish undercover operations.
Chainbridge also knew that later that year, in Barcelona, Eva had killed Locher, one of the key German operatives she was monitoring, after he had confronted her with his discovery that she was spying for Polish and British intelligence, or so she had said. However, Chainbridge's ever-sharp intuition told him that Eva was working another agenda, perhaps on the instructions of her Polish masters. Whatever the true facts, Chainbridge was duly encouraged that this beautiful lady could be as cold-blooded and lethal as any successful operative would have to be to survive in the field. She was also an accomplished translator, fluent in Russian, Polish, German, Dutch and English.
Chainbridge had been unable to uncover much about her life before she visited him in London that first time other than that her grandfather was a celebrated Dutch intellectual. However, since her return from Spain to Poland, she had appeared in a film produced by an avant-garde director in Warsaw, had toured Europe in an experimental theatre group, and then disappeared for a year, reappearing after being screen tested personally by Goebbels who had spotted her at a cabaret in Berlin. Presumably in line with her Polish secret service guidance, she had begun to
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